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Hey everyone, welcome to another installment of Harry Potter Theory. Many, in fact, most corners of the Harry Potter fandom are wholesome, creative, and endlessly imaginative. But there's one corner, a slightly strange,

often bewildering corner, that sometimes even longtime fans tiptoe around. It's a world where canon,

logic, ethics, age gaps, timelines, and in some cases, basic human decency are seemingly

out the window.

Well, there are a simple pairing can ignite 100-page debates and some truly unhinged works

of fan fiction. And at the very center of this storm lies one pairing so infamous, so controversial,

so chronically discussed, that even mentioning it makes long-time fans flinch.

Today we're diving into the strange, hilarious, and occasionally downright unhinged world

of Harry Potter shipping.

Why fans make these pairings, how they catch on, and what they reveal about the fandom.

I won't reveal the truly cursed ship just yet, the headliner of this whole circus,

but it's far from the only bizarre pairing lurking in the fandom.

Today we'll be making our way through a whole selection of them,

ranked from the most plausible to the least plausible.

But first, we need to answer a deceptively simple question. What is

shipping exactly? Shipping is short for relationshiping. The act of pairing two characters

together romantically, whether or not that relationship exists in canon. It started as

niche internet slang back in early fan fiction communities, but in the Harry Potter

fandom, it practically became a sport. Vans would take two characters, sometimes obvious pairings,

sometimes much less obvious ones, and imagine what a relationship between them might look like.

...