Talk:Complementary Ships
Hm, I see from Talk:Matt the Radar Technician that the page title is tentative, so I'll just say I think we need a new one, or at least the current scope of the page is confusing me. The infobox and category says this is a fannish term, but it seems to be based on a TV Tropes article of the same name. (TV tropes invents its own names for tropes, but Fanlore doesn't usually do this.) Also the TV tropes article has a specific definition of what a sister ship is, while this page aims to cover several different types of ships. Also the TV Tropes page was discarded because it was a duplicate of Ship Mates.[1] The Ship Mates page says it is the same trope as pair the spares. TV Tropes has separate pages for the same trope, but one is for fanfic and the other is for canon: "See Ship Mates for when the fandom does this in Fan Fic."[2]
I'm not sure the ship types listed here are similar enough to group together, and I'd rather see a few separate glossary pages that link to each other. But if this grouping makes sense to other editors, I'd recommend renaming this to something more generic that isn't the name of a TV Tropes page that means something else.
HOWEVER, I did see a few uses of the term sister ship on tumblr here--did TV Tropes borrow an existing fannish term? Googling turns up a lot of naval content. I see one reference on the Warehouse 13 page.
I also saw a few references on Fanlore to "complementary ships". The complementary configurations section here could be its own page: Complementary Ship or Complementary Pairing?
Is there a term for shipping the RPF counterpart to the popular fictional OTP? Maybe it's just such a common type of RPF ship that it doesn't have a name?--aethel (talk) 03:58, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
- Yeah, I've never encountered either "sister ship" or "complementary ship" in actual discussion. As far as I know, I just made them up. I haven't encountered any organic fan term for related ships, so I've been using "complementary pairing" and "sister ship" across various articles around this wiki for lack of a widely used term. Go ahead and change this here page and split things up as you see fit; I just grouped "related ship" phenomena under one banner. — PictoChatCyberBully (talk) 04:50, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
- I'm wondering if we need this page (yet)? Every section on this page links to an already existing page and I wonder if there's scope to flesh out the Pair the Spares, Side Pairing, Ship Dynamic, RPF and Crossover pages with this information. For what it's worth. the side pairing page could really use some examples! --Auntags (talk) 22:12, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, maybe the contents of this page could be scrapped and salvaged to Adjacent Ship and Derivative Ship at this point. — PictoChatCyberBully (talk) 09:39, 17 June 2022 (UTC)
- There seem to be several independent concepts that are being conflated due to similarly-titled articles. My understanding is that "pair the spares" refers to throwing together whichever popular characters are left after the main endgame (often canon) couples have been matched off. For example, Neville/Luna from Harry Potter, or Joey/Phoebe from Friends. Both are formed from the "spares" leftover in a six-person friend group. "Side pairings" are any ship that features prominently in a fic without being the main focus. In some fandoms certain ships will emerge as a kind of designated side pairing for a juggernaut ship. Mycroft was a popular side pairing in a lot of Johnlock fic. Side pairings can also be "complementary ships"/"sister ships." But I believe the latter is its own distinct phenomenon. Complementary ships often seem to bridge a divide in a ship war. Like, if an X/Y shipper strongly dislikes the rival ship X/Z, but doesn't dislike the "rival" character Z, then pairing Z off with someone else may serve as a way to include them in an X/Y fic without ruffling too many feathers. In GOT fandom, Dany/Jorah and Dany/Yara sometimes function this way for Jonsa writers who like Daenerys, while Jonerys shippers who like Sansa will sometimes pair her off with various other characters.
- There shouldn't need to be an "official" term for Fanlore to document a trope or fannish phenomenon. Sometimes there will be a relevant TV Tropes or Wikipedia page (or even a canon AO3 tag!) that one can reference when selecting an article title. Sometimes you'll be sailing into uncharted waters and will need to pick something that works to start working on an article. I had to invent "Twelfth Night Kiss" because there wasn't a Know Your Meme page for that particular art meme. I also technically invented "Rebellious Royal," "I Can Change Them," and "Mundane-Mage Romance" as more inclusive variants of TV Tropes page names. Night Rain (talk) 03:39, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- It's fine to create a page for a trope that doesn't have a name, but it's very important to make it clear upfront on the page that the name of the page is not a fannish term and is used for convenience. It's also probably a good idea to make the page name as generic as possible and not too catchy so that people won't be fooled into thinking it's a fannish term--they might not actually read the article. Fanlore isn't TV Tropes and shouldn't be naming pages the same way, unless the TV Tropes trope name itself has been adopted by fandom. This page doesn't do that and is even in the glossary category, meaning it's accidentally spreading false information just by showing up on the category page for glossary terms. It also doesn't represent a trope--it's a catchall for several unrelated tropes. Instead of deleting it, we could rename it to something less confusing, like Types of Ships or List of Ship Types, and then list all types of ships, and include more detailed sections on ship types that don't have their own page already.--aethel (talk) 17:02, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Another possibility would be to rename this page to Complementary Ships, which sounds more descriptive than Sister Ship, which sounds like it's meant to be a glossary term. Then acknowledge upfront that there's no generally accepted name for this phenomenon and move the other ship types mentioned on the page to a See Also section, since those already have pages.--aethel (talk) 18:12, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- There doesn't seem to be anything in Help:Naming Conventions, Help:Tropes and Genres, Help:Glossary that aligns with your specific recommendations. They contrast with the one seemingly applicable piece of guidance I could find: "If there's no generally accepted term [for a trope], or it's a broader topic that covers multiple terms, use more generic language that describes the topic. Examples: Animals in Fanworks, Pregnancy, Safe Sex and Fandom." In any case PPOV seems relevant here. I'm fine with borrowing trope names from TV Tropes where necessary. The creator of this page seemingly considered it to be acceptable. How is it "accidentally spreading false information" and "fool[ing] [people] into thinking it's a fannish term?" TV Tropes is a user-generated wiki that documents tropes and fan culture. It isn't set apart from fandom. It is fandom. Its terminology is fannish terminology in the sense it's been crafted and adopted by a community of fans. Specifically the segment of fandom that reads and contributes to the site.
- "Sister ship" might also be considered descriptive given the figurative sense of sister ("sister city" etc.). But I agree "Complementary Ship" is preferable for clarity's sake. "Sister ship" could potentially be read as describing the relationship of the characters. This may lead readers to incorrectly conclude that these ships involve incest. Night Rain (talk) 20:30, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
I renamed the page and reorganized it to clarify the (lack of) relationship between the types of ships mentioned. The page could still use more information about the A/B and C/D type of complementary shipping.--aethel (talk) 16:42, 2 March 2024 (UTC)