Pairings

Here's some characters I like to see interacting together in some sort of relationship, whether it's romantic, platonic, enemies, or otherwise or all of the above.

I personally prefer the term “pairing” over “shipping”, because “shipping” often connotates romance in current usage. Though the term “pairing” is imperfect because I like trios of characters as well…

I am a multishipper, so in the interest of saving space, the main table will contain the pairings that occupy more space in my mind. Tertiary pairings will be noted elsewhere.

Pairings are fixed name order unless otherwise noted. I will get diarheaa if you show me a reversed pairing.

Image	Pairing	Notes
	Scout x Spy	TF2, Turned into senspai
	Terry Mcginnis x Bruce Wayne	Batman Beyond.
	Marik Ishtar x Rishid	YGO, aka Ruseshipping
	Yugi x Yami Yugi	YGO, aka Puzzleshipping
	Green Goblin x Norman Osborn	Spider-Man, aka Goblincest
	Harry Osborn x Norman Osborn	Spider-Man, aka HarryNorman
	He-Man x Skeletor	Masters of The Universe
	Dean Venture x Hank Venture x Brock Samson	Venture Bros
	Nightwing x Slade	Teen Titans, aka NightSlade
	Brock Lesnar x Paul Heyman	Pro Wrestling, aka Bork n Pwual
	Shawn Michaels x Triple H	Pro Wrestling, aka Shawnter
	Misa x Rem	Death Note
	Light x Ryuk	Death Note
	Neji x Hinata	Rock Lee and His Ninja Pals, aka NejiHina

Add these to the table later:

Inspired by spillingdown, and merged with my “GET TO KNOW MY SHIPPING PREFERENCES & SHIPS” answers.
These are not hard rules, but I do look back and observe my unconscious patterns.

🐍Snake fujoshi. I can multi-ship, but I do have one favorite pairing. I like seeing my favorite as the bottom in the BDSM sense – in that they recieve many things, good or bad or horrible. So I like exploring many different pairings with the same character, to see how this visual novel route would differ.

My favorite pairing for my favorite character is often the one I project the most on. So it's often a stupid younger person pursuing an older authority figure, in a one-sided attraction.

Although I am a multishipper – that is, I like to smush various characters together, or the same character with lots of people – most of my relationship ideas revolve around a very intense one-on-one relationship. Think two guys in a room, like SAW. The more characters there are, the harder it is for me to focus my attention

I do enjoy threesome or moresome pairings when I have the brain power to balance the dynamics! A couple I can think of:

• Malik/(Yami) Bakura/Rishid (YGO)
• Scout/Scout/Spy (TF2, my ocs lmao)
• My Angelraper boys, Ricky/Alexi/Tommy
• Dean/Hank/Brock (Venture Bros)

Another evil third option: I enjoy third-wheeling A→B/C. Character A likes character B, while character B is in a monogamous relationship with character C. A loves B a lot, they might be sad but they're mostly happy to see B/C happy. I like to focus on the intensity of emotion between A/B, and and I often neglect to explore B/C. Some examples:

• Tomoyo/Sakura and (??)
• Scout/Spy and (??)
• Rem/Misa and Light

I also enjoy a fourth evil option: “Date someone more appropriate”, A/B+A/C. A likes B, but B encourages A to date C instead. All while A still likes B, but knows it's more societally acceptable (whether it's hetero, or less of a age/power gap) for them to date C. Some examples:

• Scout/Spy and Scout/Pauling.
• Deku/All Might and (? Uraraka?)
• Hank/Brock + Dean/Brock and Brock telling them to date literally anyone else.

Love is love, I see no difference 😜👍

Yaoi:

A large portion of my pairings are male/male from the start. A lot of popular media features a sausage-fest of a cast with 90% male characters and one token girl. I also think it's funny to delve into the mind of a dude who's been told his whole life to behave like a dude, and think about performing masculinity for an expectant joker society. There is also some element of escapism in making dudes do other dudes - especially when a LOT of my pairings involve very bad no good things like violence/abuse/death happening to the characters. I usually prefer these very bad things NOT happen to girl characters, that makes me feel bad 😔 so I make M/M pairings to rotate in the Hellraiser lament cube.

Yuri:

I do love me some got dang lesbians.

A lot of my favorite pairings and stories are of the doomed, tragic, or one-sided F/F variety. Rule of Rose, Heavenly Creatures, Tomoyo/Sakura, Rem/Misa, hell T.A.T.U! There's a little bit of childhood friends sprinkled in, with perhaps lesbian longing for a unaware mostly-hetero pal, and often societal expectations for them to grow out of it.

Also sometimes for fun I see a hot (g)MILF character and I'm like damn we should make a pairing with (character) x hot gMILF because that's fucken awesome. Bonus points for divorced or widowed older woman, employee/boss, and other such matronly things.

Genderbends: Inevitably, I make girl versions of my M/M ships, and turn them into F/F with the estrogen ray. This isn't a cis-swap, nor a trans headcanon. This is a forbidden fantasy of “what if society didn't make distinctions in women based on the junk they were rocking when the doctor slapped them out of the mom? What if having an innie or outie belly button didn't change the way people treated you?!” I somewhat rotate “what if society expects them to perform a certain womanhood”, but I mostly like seeing what these characters would look like with different hairstyles or fat distributions!
I feel like I'm more comfortable making OCs that are in yuris, than making yuris from existing characters. Maybe because I like my girl characters more than a lot of goilz in popular media :P

Hetshit:

well, here you go.

Sometimes I genderbend characters into F/M. I don't really make a lot of F/M original characters on my own. I don't often fall for F/M pairings in popular media, sane reason why I like making my own yuri rather than scrounging for something to my taste on TV.

Be nice to girls!

Some F/M dynamics I like:

• Stupid dude x hot MILF
• Hot girls x stupid dude
• Pegging
• Femdom
• Stupid girl x oblivious old dude
• Evil girl x kidnapped dude (aka Misery)
• Girl x pet monster (some reversal?)

I prefer the dude submissive and bottoming in most circustances. Straps and penises be damned. But when MILFs are involved well… Sometimes I am the stupid dude tryna rawdog the mountain.

Sometimes I like big uggo monsters x girls. This is usually a hentai thing in this direction. I feel like if the monster has more of a humanized character, is meant to be handsome, I want the monster to be submissive and breedable. It just depends on the characters!

NO RIBA in age gap pairings. Whether it's physical sexual position, or one-sided attraction, no reversal. I do not not want the older crush character to romantically/sexually reciprocate OR initiate anything 90% of the time, unless it is silly fantasy. There's a heart crushing feeling I want to hold onto with “just friends”, and the impossibility of having a storybook life together. If I ever do reversal, it is cooked under my control and I cannot eat anyone else's food. Even if it's yuri I don't really want the older one stuffing fingers up my butt… Be nice to me 🥺

This is obviously because of projection. I am the creepo student to the innocent teacher! I don't want the teacher to creep on me. I am the yung stud with the olde bitch on my lap! I don't want to be the bitch on some old uggo's lap. I am the Misa that pegs Ryuk! Don't put that dirty ass dildo in MY dirty ass butt! I am the annoying spongebob who accidentally drops anvils on Squidward! I don't want Squidward to be mean to me!!! (I cry everytime Squidward does the April Fools joke…)

Again, it depends though. For stuff without an obvious one-sided power dynamic, like twins or selfcest or same age best friends, it's more likely that I would chill. Especially if it's playful! Me n Shane usually call those kinds of ships “kittening around” lmao. Sometimes you just roll around and go myaaa and uselessly pap each other's foreheads while staring with your tiny bleary Limmy eyes. Especially if they're both stupid jocks. Think Scout/Scout (tf2), Demo/Solly (tf2), Joey/Tristan (ygo).

For a lot of stuff I enjoy, I like it as it is! There is nothing that tickles my brain from rotating character dynamics. Stuff like Binding of Isaac, Diablo, Starcraft, Fallout - I could def nerd out about characters or story beats, but I couldn't fujo out.

Some stuff like New Vegas took a VERY long time to steam up and for me to see a yaoi dynamic to attach to. Like my latest playthrough I was like “but Dog/God/Elijah tho”. But overall I have favorite characters I wanna smash like House, but I am content just smirking 😏 at them as-is. Amd I don't particularly like shipping the player character with existing characters, or making it into an OC, cuz actual self-inserting rather than projection gives me existential dysphoria LMAO.

And then, not all the pairings I acknowledge are romantic or sexial. There are things I KNOW have tension, but I don't have personal investment in. There are some shippy stories I know and acknowledge and enjoy the basically-canon ships, like NBC Hannibal or Breaking Bad, but I am very satisfied with what the story gave me. So I don't make too much art or writing for the pairing.

But when I do find a spark for drawing dank yaoi… You know that's the only thing I'mma draw for the next year. Most of the fanwork I go out of the way to search for is shippy stuff, to scratch that itch that won't be scratched “in canon”.

I LOVE yaoi sexo and no-yaoi sexo. At the same time 😎

I think it's the coolest if there's the threat of sex lingering but never being touched. I'm into that tantric blue balls yoga 5 dimensional yaoi. I like sex-as-a-metaphor for intense feelings, and the tension as a way to get people to do things too!! It adds a lil chain between characters that is fun for me to play with, and some blocks to build onto so many different things…Sex (and the lack of!) can link to body image, self image, how the view others, how they move through the world, how they present themselves, how society treats their sexuality.

There is no difference between sexual, romantic, or platonic ships 🤓 I say all the time that they all exist at the same time for me, for the same characters, even different universes or timelines.
The only caveat is that I REALLY don't like certain fan insistence that a pairing can ONLY be platonic/family/found family. Doesn't compute with me. Lots of people contain multitudes, even irl. Not just Maury incest sideshows. But people who are “Very good friends”, that others see “like sisters” or “like brothers”. So people can't believe they're actually GAT :p one person's “bickers like siblings” is another's “bickers like an old married couple”.

I am blessed to have a brain that is fully capable of imagining multiple separate universes for fictional characters. I don't stress over one person's dad!spy when the miku I have created in my head is my own 👻

I don't often seek out canonical pairings, or the published romance genre. I think it comes from my disinterest in “established relationships”. I find the build-up or non-existence of a relationship a lot more fun to think up stories for.
I also often enjoy the intimate best-friendships that non-romance stories give me, and find them more relatable to turn into romance in my own head. Whereas I find it very hard to find published romance stories that my brain will accept as a likeable pairing. I don't really do love-at-first-sight, nor do I enjoy most romantic set-ups. Maybe I'm a slow-burning or never-burning fiend with demisexual edging LMAO.

I often gravitate more to fanworks of existing characters to satisfy my need to see two characters smushed together. As such, I am a bit of a fake BL fan because I don't really read or watch stuff published under that umbrella - while almost all my yaoi pairings are very much of the fan parody / fujo-delusional variety.

Still, there are a couple of published genre stories I enjoy! Usually they have very complex relationships, or a REALLY targeted dynamic. Twittering Birds Don't Fly and Ai No Kusabi are moody. Evelogia has the rare tiny top/hungry big bottom dynamic I crave, I gotta cheer them on.

I didn't choose thug life (rarepairs). But almost all the pairings I like have way less than 200 fics on ao3 :p most have like. 3 fics. A lot have NONE. And some of them have a tag that's mostly me talking to myself LMAO like spidergoblin, goblincest, scoutspy… But all of these ships I like are so obvious to me, like they're just the 2 main characters? So i wonder why they're not mainstream. Other than the problematic aspects :P

I will say that a lot of popular pairings turn into fanon versions that I do not feel affinity for. I have some sort of Oppositional Defiant Disorder where I don't want to do what people tell me. So if a large amount of people say a pairing HAS to be a certain way, I probably won't like the whole thing out of my effed up brain psychology. Same reason I go HAW HAW when everyone's played Inscryption or Mouthwashing after I already found it first, and the fandom memes and character intepretations are like… The fandomized versions yknow? 😂 Like slotting characters into “pure cinnamon roll” or “dad” gender roles. Sorry that my gender roles of “spongebob” and “squidward” are objectively correct!!!

It's nice to have the government benefits like being able to visit your spouse in the hospital, and having an excuse to have a party with cake and friends is cool, but I don't believe that the title confers anything particularly special by itself. Wedding Rings are like chastity kink collars…

Oh in yaoi? I have some silly AUs that with marriage and kids. It's another fun thing to play with! But I generally don't seek out stories about established relationships, or think of it as a goal to hit with a relationship. I like more vagueness and ambiguity!

*As for (OC) kids:“ have 'em, love em'. It goes with the silly marriage AUs well! Kids are cute, and it's a neat dynamic to make your characters take care of something… or neglect them. Very Sims behavior. I made Scout and Spy have kids named Jack and Jill because I have kids named Jack and Jill. And it's funny to transpose their personality traits like digging up dirt and picking up cat poo and stealing mommy's panties. My kids are dogs btw.

I haven't done anything like make my oc kids grow up. They stay in stasis like sims, forced to relive their 4th birthday forever… I generally don't care make grand family trees or dynasties in sims OR my pairings.