Citations:rarepair

Noun: "(fandom slang) a ship that generally receives little attention from fans and has few associated fanworks"

 * 2010, Nele Noppe, "James loves Severus, but only in Japan: Harry Potter in Japanese and English-language fanwork", thesis submitted to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, page 6:
 * The ship/kappuringu of James Potter and Severus Snape appears to be relatively common in dôjinshi, while it occurs only very infrequently (a “rarepair”) in fanfic.
 * 2011, Nina Kaipia, "Drarry, Snarry and Snape: The Queerest of the Queer - Heteronormativity and Queer Theory in Harry Potter Slash Fan Fiction", thesis submitted to the University of Helsinki, page 61:
 * Rare pairs might also slash together people or creatures that are considered unnatural, such as a human character with a magical creature such as a centaur or a house elf, or Dumbledore with any young student from Hogwarts.
 * 2017, CB Mako, "Shipping, Fanart, and the Woman of Colour", Koru Mag, Issue 2 (2017), page 33:
 * It's a "het" ship and recently labeled as a "rare pair" by the new online fans of Dreamworks Netflix's 2016 animation, Voltron Legendary Defender.
 * 2018, Anne Jamison, "Kant/Squid (The Fanfiction Assemblage)", in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (ed. Paul Booth), page 534:
 * If a Yuletide reader requested a rare pair (Silver Surfer/Aunt May?) in The Marvel Cinematic Universe Avengers, that story will now assemble with its more popular Hulk/Iron Man and Captain America/Bucky Barnes fanfic colleagues in the Avengers tag.
 * 2019, "Thefudge", "The Marvelously Crafted", Lemon, 1 February 2019, page 49:
 * With rarepairs and crackships, it's the unlikeliness or even impossibility of their coming together that gets you going.
 * 2019, Brittany Larsen, "Gatekeeping Remix: Fandom Spaces And Identity Politics", thesis submitted to Illinois State University, page 65:
 * For one thing, many fans, particularly those who ship rarepairs or crackships (pairings that hold little to no chance of becoming canon, or ones that only a small portion of fandom supports), often express no hope or even interest in their ship becoming canon, instead preferring to just explore different interesting character dynamics.
 * 2020, Luciana, quoted in Adrienne E. Raw, "Fandom Discussion: Knowledge, Intersections, and Tensions of Self, Community, and Social Justice", dissertation submitted to The University of Michigan, page 189:
 * almost anything that doesn't contain my NOTPs. Because I love my fandoms and most of them are dead, I tend to ship rarepairs so any piece of content is valuable even if I don't like it after I've seen it [o]r read
 * 2021, "Houseofmalfoy", quoted in Eva Eeftens, "Online fan communities en beweegredenen voor actieve participatie: Gericht op de individuele fan, of het collectief?", thesis submitted to Utrecht University, page 60:
 * According to some friends, forums like this one are usually easier for finding people with the same rarepair ships and favourite characters as you, so here I am!
 * 2021, Alyse Marie Allred & Colin M. Gray, "'Be Gay, Do Crimes': The Co-Production and Activist Potential of Contemporary Fanzines", Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 5, Issue CSCW2, page 376:
 * According to conventional fandom wisdom, when faced with a rarepair you either resign yourself to the very limited amount of content (usually a handful of fanfiction works and the occasional fanart, usually created by one of the same five fans and quickly buried under content for more popular ships). . . or you make new content yourself.