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? 
Marine 
@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
whim 𓆗@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