A character in a story actively ships two other characters in the story, trying to make them realize their true feelings while they're both still claiming that She Is Not My Girlfriend.
This character could be someone in love with one of the characters in the pairing who wants their beloved to be happy, or they could be a very good friend, or maybe they're just someone who likes playing matchmaker. If everyone in the cast is shipping the same pairing it becomes a case of Everyone Can See It. May overlap with Love Informant.
The Matchmaker is a Sub-Trope of this which takes shipping one step further. Often the Shipper On Deck will be a secondary character and often doesn't go out of their way to actually get them together. The Matchmaker on the other hand will often be a major character that actively and repeatedly tries to get other characters together and the characters they ship are often the protagonists of the story, and likely to be the Official Couple. Also contrast with Relationship Sabotage, where someone is trying to undermine a relationship that already exists (although the two can be part of the same plot quite easily, if the idea is to get someone out of one relationship and into another). Also contrasts with Shipping Torpedo, in which a character is against a pairing but may or may not go so far as to act on it, or Matchmaker Crush, when a character starts out trying to help one character hook up with another, but ends up falling in love with the person they were helping.
If the shipper has reasons beyond thinking they're a cute couple, they're a Shipper with an Agenda. If it's an actor that ships two characters in a work they star in, you have a Shipper on Set.
Beware a Creator's Pet if this is the writer trying to reinforce a disliked pairing.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Comic Strips
- Fan Works
- Films — Animated
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Roleplay
- Theatre
- Video Games
- Visual Novels
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
- Real Life
Other examples:
- In "How Jack Sought The Golden Apples", the King is quite happy to see Jack and the Princess of Melvales getting together.
- In Homestar Runner, an... unusual example happens in the Sbemail "fan fiction." It's revealed that Strong Sad has written fanfic about his brother Strong Bad and Homestar Runner, with Strong Bad "putting on a bonnet and giving Homestar a deep tissue massage." It's clearly a parody of shipping fanfics, though it's left ambiguous if Strong Sad ships them purely in fanfic, or if he ships them in real life, too. Homestar has occasionally seemed to harbor a crush on Strong Bad (and upon hearing about Strong Sad's fic, was excited about the prospect of a massage from SB).
