dba_afish said:
counterpoint: every cross-ship is a meme, even the decent ones.
actually, every single ship that wasn't part of the original intention of the story is a meme, like-- by definition.

your definition of meme ship is "ship created and popularized on the internet"? that's nice, but most people use the term to mean a ship that is rarely taken seriously, synonymous with joke ship. the same way a funny image on the internet is a meme now, even if it hasn't yet undergone memetic mutation.

ohsecsex said:
your definition of meme ship is "ship created and popularized on the internet"? that's nice, but most people use the term to mean a ship that is rarely taken seriously, synonymous with joke ship. the same way a funny image on the internet is a meme now, even if it hasn't yet undergone memetic mutation.

shipping is a branch of what-iffery, and I think the same rules that are generally used to judge the coherence of a what-if concept applies to shipping. it is a spectrum, but I think pretty much any ship where you have to make rationalizations too numerous or too large that the characters and/or their world are no longer coherent to the source material is a some level of crack ship.

that isn't to say that a story is bad, necessarily. just that the work needs to justify itself pretty hard. and, even then, externally, I think you still ought to recognize the ridiculosity.