FanChats💬submit your prompts!It's trope discussion Monday! What do you think about Crack Ships/Rarepairs? What makes them work for you? Can you recommend a fic that makes an unexpected pairing work well? 
Katriina (at Bluesky 🦋)@FandomChats At leadt so far tjis has not been my thing at all
tei@FandomChats I prefer it when out-there premises are taken seriously-- one of my favourites is this series, where Hannibal Lecter treats Angelica Pickles from the Rugrats for an eating disorder: https://archiveofourown.org/series/50540
villainous friend
whim 𓆗@bloodripelives this sounds incredible 👀 not a crossover id ever expect
⚜️Samifer@FandomChats not me realizing i now have 3k characters to write a novel with in response to those... help
anyway i'd consider crack ships a subgroup of rarepairs because not all rarepairs are crack ships! for me a crack ship needs to be a ship that doesn't make sense. i'd even say there are layers of crack ships. like for example there are circumstances where two characters who have never interacted is a crack ship... but there are also plenty of ships with two characters who have never interacted that make total sense (maybe they're in/from the same canonical group, maybe they have an acquaintance in common...) i feel like a lot of people have been using "crack ship" to mean "ship that isn't canon" lately and i find it very strange and tbh kind of off-putting! but anyway...
i haven't shipped a lot of crack ships. the quintessential crack ship i've cared about a lot was me shipping my fave and my friend's fave from a completely different canon and getting way overinvested lmao. i also tend to ship my fave with any male characters, including very obscure one, but imo as long as it can be rationalized it stops being super cracky...
as for rarepairs i have a ton and i love them all! rarepairs in big fandoms can be kinda lonely but i'm used to feeding myself so it's fine. plus it makes finding someone else who's into it that much more precious! rarepairs that are rarepairs because they're from obscure fandoms i'm mostly like, man, i wish i could convince people to get into this with me, lol. anybody wants to get into dystopian rock operas loosely based on old video game series... anybody...
don't have any rec in mind rn but i'll think on it 
Marine 
@samifer @FandomChats legit, crack ships aren't in the same realm to me. I remember crack ships that were character and an inanimate object. Crossover ships are typically crack ships and oncest is a crack ship that was extremely popular. Conflating the two terms feels inaccurate to how fandom actually plays with these ships
@MarineHaddock @FandomChats oh yeah definitely!! for me crack ships layers would be like...
1) very unlikely ship pairing off unrelated characters in the same canon that have never interacted and have no reason to interact just because you seem they'd be cool together. first example that comes to mind is MANY ships in pokémon lmao, but for example i've seen people ship arven and volo which is highly unlikely but also imo you can come up with ways to justify it pretty easily. not to mention stuff like pokémas has given fuel to a lot of crossregional ships that seemed impossible before lol.
2) crossover ships. imo crossover ships are kind of a subset of 1) honestly but some are crackier than others. i also feel like the more removed the two canons are from each other the crackier it is. like crossing over idk, two US police procedurals isn't that weird in the grand scheme of things. but having naruto show up in supernatural would be way out there.
3) ships that are technically impossible in a realistic sense, like selfcest and the likes. this is one that is going to depend on the canon as well tho. like in something like US comics it's not as weird as it would be in, idk, a historical canon. any canon that has canonical parallel universes i'd also argue makes that sort of ship less cracky.
4) actually fully out there shit, like shipping a character with an apple or something like that. honestly there are also arguments that can be made for some of those!!! like idk if shipping dean winchester with the impala is that cracky tbqh. but i'd still probably consider this the highest tier of crackiness, unless we allow ourselves to go into truly transcendental planes of crack.
and ofc that's not even getting into the fact that there's also degrees of taking the crack ship seriously. like a lot of people treated oncest as a joke but a lot of people also took it Very Seriously and shipped it in earnest. i think crack ships deserve our respect tbh. i had a lot of fun with mine and i still think back on it fondly even tho i'm not in contact with that friend anymore. (i was definitely in the "taking it way too seriously" camp lmao...)
@FandomChats I love rarepairs! I think they are my favourite thing about transformative fandom. I really enjoy the challenge of figuring out what characters who barely know each other, or don’t even meet in canon, would have in common and see in each other; there’s also the question of how they might meet and what it might take for them to be open to getting to know each other.
It’s a both a chance to be creative and an opportunity to really think about their personalities and circumstances!
@FandomChats here’s something I wrote a little while ago about A-Qing/Nie Huaisang/Ouyang Zizhen from #MDZS: https://federatedfandom.net/@villainousfriend/112083633278728426
villainous friend (@[email protected])
@[email protected] well, I ship both legs (?) of the V separately, and I like that each puts OYZZ into quite a different position—there’s absolutely space for evolution in both, but I think things with AQ would start out with him seeing things through a very romantic light, honestly rather stereotypical with himself as the gentleman scholar and her as the beauty from a humble background. Meanwhile, I see AQ as starting off quite mercenary but realising faster than him that she’s interested in OYZZ as a person, and *always* teasing him and pushing against him in a playful way. Meanwhile, with NHS he’s starting off as an ingenu in relation to a mysterious, experienced older man—but I think NHS here, postcanon, is in a much more vulnerable place emotionally than he’s been able to allow himself to be in for most of a decade, barely starting to feel out what he might actually want in a relationship rather than what he has to take in order to play his role. This could go in a number of directions!
Dr. Neon, PhD in Tragedy@villainousfriend oh that's an interesting combination!
@FandomChats sometimes you find a ‘rarepair’ relationship that works better for you platonic than romantic/sexual, and that’s cool too! I could write Jiang Cheng/Xiao Xingchen or Wen Qing/Xiao Xingchen, but in both cases I feel like I’d be forcing it a little bit, whereas digging into either JC&XXC or WQ&XXC would reveal a lot.
Forestofglory
Griselda Gimpel@FandomChats I'd definitely distinguish between the two, as a lover of both. There are some perfectly plausible - and in some cases out and out canon - rarepairs.
Anyway, I'm the self-appointed president of the Rarepairs Association, and I love writing them. Sometimes I'll get into writing a popular ship, but if a bunch of people have already written for the ship, there's a good chance that the fic I want already exists.
But with rarepairs, I'm creating what I want to see in the world. It doesn't exist. Ergo, I must make it myself.
For crack ships, it's about answering the question, "What would make this ship work?"
And now for some shameless self-promotion.
For rarepairs, I did an animatic for the John Gaius/Admiral Sarpedon (canon!) ship from The Locked Tomb.
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/TLT_Vids/works/51816238
For crack ships, I wrote a Greed/Jaeha crossover between Fullmetal Alchemist and Yona of the Dawn.
@FandomChats I feel like rareairs covers a really wide spectrum of things form like minor characters who are married in the source material to two people who never met in cannon an have two minutes of screen time each to two emperors who lived more than a 1000 years apart but have similar issues in how they are depicted today (Yes, I do have to mention Li Shimin/Napoleon here, I'm contractually obligated)
@FandomChats I'm generally a fan of imaging fuller lives for minor characters (epecailly women) so I tend to like those kind of fics!
I also think it can be a lot fun to image relationships between people who haven't met. It's fun when a friend says 'so-and-so" x "so-and-so" and I'm like "I never would have though about it but yes! I see it"
So I guess I am a fan of rairpairs
understandable armpit holding@FandomChats absolutely love rarepairs and being convinced by an author that it would work! in some ways rarepairs are the epitome of fanfiction - seeing something where it was not necessarily intended in canon, and exploring its fullest potential!!
@FandomChats back in the days, crossover crack ships used to be a lot more common.
Crack ships and rare pairs are definitely different types of ships to me. Rare pair has some canon basis. I enjoy them all, as long as the fic builds the relationship in a way that is still in character for all the characters involved.
Crack ships and rare pairs are definitely different types of ships to me. Rare pair has some canon basis. I enjoy them all, as long as the fic builds the relationship in a way that is still in character for all the characters involved.
@FandomChats
Sometimes I still think of the power of a friend who enjoys the rare pair Reuenthal/Yang (at least in EN spaces but look, they have NEVER MET) wrote it, commissioned art and fic so much that people unfamiliar with the canon actually thought it's the main pair
Sometimes I still think of the power of a friend who enjoys the rare pair Reuenthal/Yang (at least in EN spaces but look, they have NEVER MET) wrote it, commissioned art and fic so much that people unfamiliar with the canon actually thought it's the main pair
@FandomChats I went into the tag and okay, this is funny
https://archiveofourown.org/works/21955588
Worst A/B/O sex. Yang is bored, needs a heat partner but he's finding the sex boring.
(Tbh yeah, Yang probably prefers to read a history book than have sex... Is my impression of him from the series xD)
Book canon which is rare in this space. This is also an AU, and it doesn't really go far into the whys and the hows but I find it enjoyable knowing the characters involved
https://archiveofourown.org/works/21955588
Worst A/B/O sex. Yang is bored, needs a heat partner but he's finding the sex boring.
(Tbh yeah, Yang probably prefers to read a history book than have sex... Is my impression of him from the series xD)
Book canon which is rare in this space. This is also an AU, and it doesn't really go far into the whys and the hows but I find it enjoyable knowing the characters involved
Soph (they/them)@FandomChats I love it when a creator puts in the work to make a ship work even when the very thought of it seems initially like a joke! I also love when a creator decides to shine a loving light on a rare ship that's very canon-plausible but just doesn't get a lot of fandom attention.
for svsss rarepair recs:
- Not in All Possible Worlds, But in These Few, by violent_entertainment is a series of unconnected fics, each shipping sqh with a different one of the can qiong peak lords, and it's SO much fun! https://archiveofourown.org/series/2717113
and a bunch of cql/mdzs rarepair recs:
- Disrupt, Corrupt, and Interrupt Me by hansbekhart is a rare delight as a fic that takes su minshan seriously as a character while sto;; displaying him in all his petty awfulness! ft. lwj/sms https://archiveofourown.org/works/26068588
- Fruit Wine from Grave Dust by villainousfriend gave me so many feelings about fourth uncle/wei wuxian! https://archiveofourown.org/works/48670459
- bourbon, vermouth, bitters, cherry, by newredshoes... jiang yanli/song lan? SURE. it was so interesting! https://archiveofourown.org/works/27623837
- Who Doesn’t Cry At Weddings? by wayofcloudbrain is such a great look at nie huaisang/qin su! https://archiveofourown.org/works/29744430
- Tricks of the Trade, by nirejseki is a delightful lan qiren/jin guangyao fic where jgy discovers a different source of affirmation to aim for https://archiveofourown.org/works/40558518
- Come and Hold My Hand, by locketofyourhair is a totally unexpected ouyang zizhen/wen ning fic and it's great https://archiveofourown.org/works/33363229
more cql/mdzs rarepair recs because I had too many for one toot:
- the beauty of maturity, by hisevilforest has such fun dynamics with lan jingyi/xue yang https://archiveofourown.org/works/27662581
- a compromising position, by verity is the lan jingyi/jiang cheng fic that opened my eyes to how great a ship it is (and has surprisingly decent mdzs canon support!) https://archiveofourown.org/works/24621349
and to end with something a bit different, a tortall rarepair rec:
- in the perfection of conduct and virtues, by rain_sleet_snow is a fic I adored about maura of dunlath/princess kalasin and what they value and prioritize https://archiveofourown.org/works/38064010
@soph_sol have you read that jiang yanli/xue yang fic? it lives rent free in my brain 👀
Cole Minor@FandomChats Rarepairs are fun until you have to create fanworks yourself because you saw everything the fandom has to offer. 😔
I'm not too big on crackships, usually... I like crossover fanart but not in a shipping way, that's it
I'm not too big on crackships, usually... I like crossover fanart but not in a shipping way, that's it
shipThose are two very different things. I mean, a crackship like Farcy (MCU Fury/Darcy) makes zero sense except that it sort of does and that makes it so funny.
Then again, rare pairs are interesting because of why/why not they would happen, and often they make so much sense in certain settings (CQL Lan Qiren/Wen Qing or Madam Yu/Wen Zhuliu).
emilies to lovers@FandomChats what I'm looking for out of transformative fandom is to explore angles on a canon story and its setting, characters etc that you don't get in the actual text, so rarepairs can be a really fun and fruitful way to do that! Plus lots of popular ships in fandom aren't based in a whole lot canon wise so sometimes a rarepair is fully set up in canon, just not a lot of fans have taken it up.
That said I tend to be less interested if a rarepair fic seems to have set aside or totally disregarded relationships of high canon significance, unless it's an AU where those characters never met/it didn't happen. Like, if a character who is super obsessed with another one or is their constant companion just suddenly doesn't really care in favour of being paired with someone else, I'll need some filling in of the gaps, lol. I love it when the relationships can contrast each other!
Julia@FandomChats I would be interested in stories about minor characters' non-romantic relationships or about non-canon relationships that aren't romantic, as a way to flesh out characters more, think about what drives them, how they interact with others, even in negative ways.
But I'm not interested in shippy fics with (almost) zero basis in canon, I'm usually not invested (can read if there's other stuff going on in the fic), often baffled, sometimes even repulsed, depending on the combination.
But I'm not interested in shippy fics with (almost) zero basis in canon, I'm usually not invested (can read if there's other stuff going on in the fic), often baffled, sometimes even repulsed, depending on the combination.
@FandomChats An excellent story that explores side characters and their relationships in this manner is the cql fic On a long journey by twigofwillow, a post-canon fic about lsz's travels with wn that deals with his discoveries of his identity and past and resulting feelings about his family (biological and adoptive) and friends.
@thalassa @FandomChats I love this fic so much!
Laugh Out Loud Lauren@FandomChats oh yeah, I've read a lot of rarepair fanfic, usually when I love the cast from a series so much I don't have specific preferences of how they're arranged shipping wise
...do polyships count as rarepairs? I've gotten into a few of those in the past few years 
it can be so fun to see what people come up with beyond the most popular ships
the last series I can recall recently digging into rarepairs was FREE! (the swimming anime) I'm almost caught up with all the media, rewatched early seasons multiple times, so it's fun for me to see what others have come up with fanfic wise and how they unfold :3
I believe the last rarepair ship I read was Haru/Rei from FREE!🤔
I think I'll find a lot of interesting ship combos as Delicious in Dungeon airs 
@FandomChats i love rarepairs! that's really the majority of what i like when i think about it. I don't know what i like about them that makes them unpopular really...i wonder more about what makes the general fandom disinterested really, especially when it's a situation where they're quite literally best friends interacting all the time!
in my understanding, a crackship is more of a crossover thing, or pairing characters together that have never had a canon interaction. i guess my intrigue with these is more based on the angle the writers coming from rather than the characters themselves
a favorite crackfic is "brunch discount" by DimensionTheDykes. it's a really silly and sweet with #maximillionpegasus treating #velliancrowler to nothing but the best brunch for his new wife (crowler). we love a widower that will belittle the waiter #joeywheeler to make sure she's treated like the queen she is! definitely go read it, it's a fun one 🍳
https://archiveofourown.org/works/27139765/chapters/66276970
✦@FandomChats Crack ships and rare pairs can often cross paths, but as I understand crack ships are pairs of characters that come from unrelated media. A crack ship can be rare of course, but isn't always, and a rare pair is not a crack ship since it just refers to ships from a piece of media that don't get a lot of attention.
I don't really seek crack ships but the honest enthusiasm of their fans can end up luring me in, and I have a couple crack ships I've fallen for hard enough to make my own fan art that I know have thousands (yes plural) of fan works, even going as far as to appear in top polls of popular fan work platforms and have IRL fandom events dedicated to celebrating them. Popular crack ships are IMO the most satisfying way of winning fandom lottery, a treat so unlikely to exist and yet so well-indulged, that's great.
I love a lot of pairs considered rare, though what's rare depends on where you're hanging. I have ships with only one or two fics on AO3 that have hundreds of works in non-English spaces. But... A hundred works seems to be considered rare in EN fandom anyway. I even see people say a thousand fics on an AO3 ship tag is "nothing". Newer fandom mindset is insatiable!
@spillingdown ooh good point about language determining rarity too! ive had conversations with some Japanese fams about this before and it's always interesting how certain characters/pairings are more popular in some cultures than others
new fandom mindset is bonkers...to me having like. idk. 15 fics in a tag is earth shattering
Linky@spillingdown 1000 fics being in a tag seen as "nothing" kills me 
I would do anything for more of my fandoms to have fic at that level lol....
It is interesting how whats rare can depend on what spaces you're in too.
@linky it was a fun thing with rare pair exchange where almost every ship I have from any fandom counted purely because the threshold for what was considered rare was so high
Like Ankh/Eiji is one of the biggest ships on my radar and by number metrics alone people would consider it rare
Like Ankh/Eiji is one of the biggest ships on my radar and by number metrics alone people would consider it rare
@MarineHaddock Same here! All the ships I wanted to sign up with were eligible for that exchange.
Ankh/Eiji was the biggest ship for my sign up, just barely passing the threshold. And while in toku spaces its a juggernaut, toku is still niche over here so outside of toku it would technically be a rare ship (Even though in these spaces its far from rare.)
It's interesting to think about how things are in-niche vs. outside the niche.
misc 🦌@FandomChats i think something being "crack" really depends on fandom context, and is definitely not the same as a rarepair. when i was younger and active in tenipuri fandom, taka/kaidou would have been considered a crack ship even though they're on the same team because we're almost never shown them interacting, they never play doubles together, and it's not immediately obvious they'd get along. now I guess it might be considered more of a rare pair, but at the time it was just "I'm mashing my faves together lolol the ship name is mamsushi lol".
but in yugioh imo something like that would be more properly considered a rare pair, because it's plausible that they'd hook up since they do spend a lot of time in proximity to each other, etc. a yugioh crack ship would be more like honda/yami malik because literally why would they ever interact. why. or a crossover with zero basis in canon, like shingo from arcv with yuugi from dm.
similarly, selfcest/selfcest-adjacent ships wouldn't be considered crack in yugioh at all. or in the TV show the boys. we canonically get selfcest in both. in venture brothers or star trek it's very possible! and in supernatural if you ship an angel with its vessel that wouldn't be considered crack even if they both had the same face. now, if you shipped bobby/lucifer circa season 4 or 5 then that would be a crack ship because there was no way for that to happen in canon unless you got really creative. dean/the impala would be a crack ship because that's just silly, even though he does canonically love his car A Lot.
context is not always for the weak! imo a key difference between crack ships and rare pairs is plausibility, and something being unpopular doesn't mean it's implausible. in that context (lol) calling a rare pair a crack ship is rude because it's implying that it isn't plausible at all.
charisu@FandomChats They're potentials for new character exploration, different dynamics, or just ones catered specifically to [you]. 
They can easily get intense and I see why some people gain an aversion to them. I'm just trying to exist. 
The following are written by MrMissMrsRandom:
Loopholes, FE5, Kempf/Reinhard, one-sided enemies to lovers
https://archiveofourown.org/works/55516237
Relish, FE5, Perne/Troude
https://archiveofourown.org/works/23316682
Wrath and Rage, FE4, Arthur/Hawk, a series I try to nurture and my personal otp 
https://archiveofourown.org/series/1727434
@charisu I love the fic tags on the Kempf/Reinhard xD
@geraineon make him better? worse? give him a reality check? Their potential can easily be all of them, and that makes it fun.
@charisu better and worse at the same time! Why choose when you can have both! #NeonRamblesAboutLoGH #LoGH
@FandomChats To me crack ships can be rarepairs, but not all rarepairs are crack ships.
And to me crack ships are almost always characters from completely different media, since that was the type I really grew up seeing & having the definition associated with.
A lot of my ships are rarepairs, one of my big two ships is one in it's fandom!
Though its canon, and I've seen a lot of people debate if something is truly a "rarepair" if it is canon... I just call this ship one because only me and my one Japanese friend are invested in them, and its a simple term to use. XD Though "rare ship" also works.
Crackships are fun, just having something you can go wild with creatively is just a fun time to me personally. Crack taken seriously is especially something I enjoy seeing.
@FandomChats another thing on talking about rare pairs is the degree of rare pair
Like, throwing specific experiences out here, I applied for a rare pair zine in a fandom I was in once and the mods proceeded to publicly laugh at my ship for essentially not being popular enough
And I think that's interesting in terms of like what the expectation of rare pair is when you are then hosting what is essentially a popularity based event. The rare pairs that were actually wanted were pairings that were either popular but fell out of fashion as other ships got more content or that it was perceived a lot of people did ship but few people made content for
Because, in the end, who is going to buy a zine made exclusively of ships they don't like or have no interest in
@MarineHaddock @FandomChats wow, that really fucking sucks, i'm sorry that happened to you :/
@samifer it's okay, they were those kinds of shitty people that I expected that behaviour from - well I expected them to make fun of me, not the ship which had a lot worse chance of collateral damage (how are people meant to feel comfortable submitting their rare pairs if they might get publicly mocked?)
I just think it's an interesting part of rare pair discussion that there's still that popularity heirarchy
I just think it's an interesting part of rare pair discussion that there's still that popularity heirarchy
@MarineHaddock @FandomChats thats a really shitty experience 😬. the popularity side of it is something ive explicitly tried to avoid with my own rarepair specific event @ygorarepairs . ive had some pushback with my quantified metric of rarity over popularity, and i think it's ultimately harmful for people to think of things in terms of popularity. to me, it does not matter if 1 or 2 people have written like 300 fics for a pairing and no one else is. thats still 300 works that shouldn't be discounted! id rather add to the overall quantity of works for a pairing rather than make someone feel bad because it's not popular and they're the only one doing anything with it
future rosetta jade@FandomChats rarepairs and crackships are my bread and butter, but they're definitely not the same thing. to me, crackships are ships between characters who have never met in canon, while rarepairs are just ships that have little to no canon and not all that many fanworks. they work for me if characters I like look good next to each other, that's all I really need 😂 as for fics that make pairings work well, well, my AO3 is filled with rarepairs? my rarepairs are too small to be written by others
Luo Binghe baculum truther@FandomChats I love a rare pair, and I think one of the things that I love about them is when their interactions get to show some aspect of the characters they don't get to highlight with anyone else.
I think I'm less interested in really shipping them in any MFEO way, so I can love a rare pair even if it's only "these two hooked up once and it was extremely them."