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? 
⚜️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...)