Hey, I wanna talk about how we do fandom! I’ve come to realize that I, personally, tend to differ from many others in that I highly prefer to only engage with a text as it’s written, so I don’t tend to really like fanon/extremely ooc characterizations and I find it hard to get invested in ships that aren’t canon. My way of doing fandom isn’t better or worse than anyone else’s, but I am curious about how much of a minority I’m in! So:
What’s the highest degree of separation from canon that you, personally*, can tolerate to find a ship compelling?
They must be canon
They must have a real potential to become canon
They must have on-screen chemistry and an important, believable connection
I’m okay with having to bend canon and their characterizations to make it work
They must at least be on screen together at least once
They must be in the same show and have at least one spoken line each
I’m shipping those guys in the background who have zero dialogue
They don’t need to be from the same media
Some other infinitely nuanced answer
See Results*We’ve all seen ships of characters not from the same media and stuff like shipping the concept of ennui with the color blue, okay, I’m asking what you, personally, find compelling!
they don’t need to have ever met in canon or even be from the same media, BUT there has to be some little spark of connection that makes me think of them together for some reason.
(this is not a high bar. my Pattern Recognizer can cross over Tron with the Minneapolis public transit system.)