If you've spent any time on the internet in the last fifteen years, you've probably encountered the concept of "shipping" — the act of wanting two characters to be in a romantic relationship. The word comes from "relationship," and it's one of the foundational pillars of fandom culture. Shipping is how fans take ownership of the stories they love. You watch a show, you read a book, you play a game... and then (naturally) you decide that two characters should kiss about it.

Some ships are canon —meaning they actually happen in the source material. Some ships are popular but unconfirmed, living in the fertile imaginations of fanfic writers and fan artists across Tumblr, AO3, and the deeper corners of the internet. And some ships are ... well they can only be described as the product of drug-fueled delusions.

Crackships are the chaotic evil of the shipping world. Where normal ships are built on things like "these characters have chemistry" or "they share meaningful glances," crackships are built on pure, unhinged audacity.

A crackship is a pairing considered so bizarre, so impossible, so cosmically unlikely that the only explanation for someone coming up with it is that they must be on crack. We're talking characters who have never interacted, characters from completely different franchises, characters from different mediums, and in some legendary cases, a character and an inanimate object.

There's a related concept called crossover shipping, which pairs up characters from different universes — think Elsa and Jack Frost, or Spongebob and Wonder Woman. A crackship CAN be a crossover ship, and often is, but not always. Dean Winchester (from Supernatural) and his car (The Impala) is not a crossover. It's just a man and the vehicle he loves a suspicious amount. Meanwhile, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson x Wolverine was the most popular pairing for The Rock on AO3 for eight consecutive years. The internet is an incredible and terrible place.

Some other highlights from the crackship hall of fame include: Jesus Christ x Larry the Cucumber (Bible x VeggieTales), Hooty from The Owl House x the Duolingo Owl (because they're both owls, and honestly? I get it), and Thomas the Tank Engine x Twilight Sparkle.

I want to be very clear that all of these have fan fiction written about them. Multiple works. With comments. And kudos.

Crackshipping has existed for as long as fandom has, but it really hit its golden age in the early-to-mid 2010s on Tumblr — because of course it did.

The cultural epicenter was the "Rise of the Brave Tangled Frozen Dragons" crossover, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Fans took characters from Rise of the Guardians, Brave, Tangled, Frozen, and How to Train Your Dragon (five completely separate animated movies from different studios) and built an entire shared universe out of them. Jack Frost x Elsa ("Jelsa") was the flagship ship, but the crossover also gave us Hiccup x Merida, Jack Frost x Rapunzel, and Rapunzel x Mavis Dracula. It was a whole self-sustaining fandom that existed entirely outside of any canon, built purely on the collective imagination of thousands of teenagers with Photoshop and a dream. I was going to include more pictures but... I feel like that's something you can just Google at your own discretion.

This was also the era that gave us one of the most recent mainstream crackship moments: Rodrick Heffley x Regina George ("Rodrina"), which went viral from fan art on Instagram and spawned its own wave of edits, fan fiction, and Halloween costumes. Rodrick from Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Regina from Mean Girls. Two characters who exist in completely different tonal universes. And yet somehow... I get it? There's a bad-boy-meets-mean-girl energy that just... works? Which is maybe the whole point of crackshipping. Sometimes the most unexpected combination unlocks something weirdly compelling.

Here's the thing about crackshipping that I think gets lost when people dismiss it as "weird internet stuff": it's actually a deeply creative exercise. You're taking two characters with no established connection and building the argument for why they work. You're finding thematic parallels, personality dynamics, and emotional logic between things that have no business being connected. The possibilities are genuinely limitless — any character, any universe, any medium. It's storytelling as lateral thinking.

And honestly, the best way to understand a cultural phenomenon is to participate in it. So I did what any responsible cultural reporter would do: I crackshipped. From my brain. With my visionary mind.

I present to you three pairings that I firmly believe have untapped potential, and I will hear no arguments to the contrary.

the way to a man's heart is through his stomach (one-shot)

Fandoms: Bob's Burgers | Ratatouille (2007)
‍Rating: General Audiences
‍Relationship: Bob Belcher/Remy (Ratatouille)
‍Characters: Bob Belcher, Remy (Ratatouille), Linda Belcher (oblivious), Louise Belcher (suspicious), Tina Belcher (writing fan fiction about it in real time)

‍Additional Tags: Crack Treated Seriously, Friends to Lovers, Cooking As Foreplay, Food Porn (Literal), Interspecies But Make It Tender, Health Code Violations As Love Language, He's A Rat But He Gets It, Bob Talks To The Burger And Now He's Talking To A Rat, Emotional Seasoning, Rosemary Is Doing A Lot of Heavy Lifting In This Fic, Shared Custody Of A Roux, Kitchen Confidential

Summary: Bob Belcher finds a rat in his walk-in refrigerator and does what any restaurant owner would do: he screams, he grabs a broom, and he calls Linda, who is unhelpful.

But the rat doesn't run. The rat is... sniffing the aged gruyère. Critically. With intent. And when Bob — out of sheer unhinged desperation — slides a plate of that night's failed special across the floor, the rat takes one bite, pushes the plate back, and looks at him with an expression that somehow communicates "needs acid."

The rat is right. It needed acid.

What follows is a culinary partnership that Bob can never, ever tell the health inspector about. They experiment with flavor profiles Bob's been too scared to try, refine dishes he's only ever imagined, and somewhere between a dash of rosemary and a perfectly reduced jus, something shifts. The kitchen smells like garlic and butter and whatever it smells like when two creatures who were never supposed to meet find the one person — or rodent — who understands what food is supposed to feel like.

Municipal Code Violation (Of My Heart)

Fandoms: Phineas and Ferb | Parks and Recreation
‍Rating: Teen and Up
‍Relationship: Heinz Doofenshmirtz/Leslie Knope
‍Characters: Heinz Doofenshmirtz, Leslie Knope, Perry the Platypus (long-suffering), Ron Swanson (disapproving), Ann Perkins (concerned)

‍Additional Tags: Crack Treated Seriously, Enemies to Lovers, There's a Binder and That's When You Know, Cross-Municipal Jurisdiction Issues, Bureaucratic Flirting, She Files An Injunction He Catches Feelings, Competence Kink If Building A New Machine Every Day Counts, He's Never Been Taken This Seriously, She's Never Met Anyone This Dedicated To Failure, -Inator As Love Language, Waffles and Backstory, Tri-State Area/Pawnee Relations, Ann I Think He Might Be Evil But He Has Great Work Ethic

Summary: A series of bizarre atmospheric disturbances — a sky full of tinfoil, one entire Tuesday where gravity reversed in the downtown corridor, an inexplicable surge of pigeon aggression in Ramsett Park — keeps generating paperwork that routes through the Pawnee Parks Department, and Leslie Knope has had enough.

She traces the anomalies to a purple building in the neighboring Tri-State Area, where she meets a divorced pharmacist-turned-evil-scientist with a tragic backstory for every occasion and a platypus nemesis he speaks of with more warmth than most people reserve for their children. She opens a formal investigation. He builds a Make-Her-Go-Away-Inator. But things go awry and they end up stuck together instead!

the gentlest thing in the garage

Fandoms: Rick and Morty | Marvel Cinematic Universe / Marvel Comics
‍Rating: Explicity (NC-17)
‍Relationship: Jerry Smith/Bruce Banner | The Hulk
‍Characters: Jerry Smith, Bruce Banner, The Hulk

‍Additional Tags: Crack Treated Seriously, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Insecurity, Existential Dread, Pacing Back and Forth in the Garage, Emotional Grounding, Soft Giant, Unlikely Comrades, Jerry Needs a Hug, Hulk Needs a Break, Beekeeping Metaphors

Summary: Rick said the green monster in the garage was just collateral from an interdimensional salvage run gone sideways, warning Jerry not to touch anything before portaling off to some godforsaken casino planet.

Left alone with a ten-foot engine of world-ending rage trembling in the dark behind the weed-whacker, Jerry does what he always does: he gets scared, he overshares, and he accidentally finds the only creature in the multiverse who feels just as terrified of being unwanted as he is.

(Excuse the shoddy graphics, I had to photoshop it myself LOL.)