Complementary Ships

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Tropes and genres
Synonym(s)Complementary pairing, Compatible pairing, Ship mates, sister ship
Related tropes/genresSide pairing, Pair the spares, OBHWF
See alsoShipping, Migratory Slash Fandom, Multishipping, Ship Dynamics, The Dynamic, Adjacent Ship, Derivative Ship
Related articles on Fanlore.

Complementary Ships are ships that are considered complementary or compatible with one another. The inverse is rival ships, which are often pitted against one another in fandom ship wars.

Page Name

Fandom does not have a consistent term to describe this phenomenon. TV Tropes, known for inventing trope names and sometimes the tropes themselves, has a page on Ship Mates and a former page named Sister Ship.

Complementary configurations

Some fans favor a ship set that neatly pairs up a group of characters--e.g. for a group of four characters A, B, C, and D, a fan might be a die-hard A/B and C/D shipper.

Complementary ships are related to pairing the spares; however, pairing the spares generally refers to shipping characters in a side pairing simply because they are otherwise unattached leftovers rather than for genuine enthusiasm for that particular relationship, while complementary ships may have dedicated followings.

Examples

Tagging Problems

Sometimes complementary ships cause cases of Bruce Banner Syndrome, in which a large volume of fan works tagged with "C/D" only feature that ship as a background pairing to a more popular ship "A/B". In this case, the less popular pairing may be a case of pair the spares more than an enthusiastically supported ship in its own right.

Examples

Other Types of "Complementary Ships"

A number of unrelated shipping patterns could be described as "complementary ships" and are listed here for convenience.

Same flavor

Some fans favor ships with similar Ship Dynamics (e.g. the Sweaterboy and the Absolute Nightmare, Big Guy Little Guy, etc).

See also: Migratory Slash Fandom

Examples

Same actors

See also Actor-based crossover pairings.

Fans of one pairing may support another pairing of characters played by the same actors.

Those who support a pairing of fictional characters may also be the ones most likely support the RPF pairing of those characters' real-life actors, or vice versa.

See: Production Posse and Relationship Voice Actor

Examples

External links