Adjacent Ship
| Tropes and genres | |
|---|---|
| Synonym(s) | Adjacent Pairing, Derivative Ship, Actor-Based Crossover Pairing |
| Related tropes/genres | Same-Actor Crossover |
| Related articles on Fanlore. | |
This article or section needs expansion. |
An Adjacent Ship takes the actors who portray the characters in a popular ship, and pairs other characters played by those same actors. The characters paired in an adjacent ship are very rarely from the same source material/fandom and are therefore a crossover ship.
This term arose in the Star Wars sequel trilogy fandom, where characters in the popular (and controversial) ship Kylux were portrayed by Domhnall Gleeson and Adam Driver. Following Adam Driver's appearance on SNL as Matt the Radar Technician, fanfiction featuring Matt appeared and began pairing him with Clan Techie, Gleeson's character from Dredd. This ship was only the first Kylux adjacent pairing. Clyde Logan/Stensland is another very popular Kylux adjacent ship, but there are many others.
On Ao3 Kylux writers tagged their works with all fandoms involved, including the original Star Wars fandom. They also commonly added relationship tags for Kylux and the adjacent ship, and refer to these works as Kylux Adjacent in freeform tags. The term "adjacent" has spread to at least a few other fandoms, where writers are tagging their works in the same way. For example, see DinCobb Adjacent (The Mandalorian), Supernatural adjacent (Supernatural), and Immortal Husbands Adjacent and Joe x Nicky adjacent (The Old Guard). Ao3 tag wranglers canonize adjacent ship tags as Character Combinations.
The same or similar phenomena exist in many other fandoms, but the terminology varies. See Actor-based crossover pairings.
Example Pairings
This is a list of pairings where adjacent ships appear (and that fandom uses the term adjacent pairings/ships):
- Kylo Ren/Hux, a very popular slash pairing from Star Wars sequel trilogy (This fandom uses the term Kylux Adjacent)
- Joe/Nicky, the dominant pairing in The Old Guard fandom and another slash pairing (See The Great Kenzarelli Multiverse)
- Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham, the dominant pairing in Hannibal fandom (See Hannibal Extended Universe)
Example Fanworks
| Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples. |
Fan Comments
Archives, Links & Resources
- Kylux Adjacents Map by Marie
- Adam Driver/Domhnall Gleeson Character Combinations works on Ao3 (Kylux Adjacent is synned to this tag)
- Marwan Kenzari/Luca Marinelli Character Combinations works on Ao3