When crack ships crack the superhero mainstream

Once upon a time, there was a teenage girl, the bastion of innocence, who fell in love with an ancient bad boy with an eternal curse. Amid a tumultuous love triangle, a quasi-real breakup and a chapter-long fight over their surprise baby, they fought for their happily ever after and captured the hearts of millions of invested fans.

This is the story of Sukunella, the fan-conjured crack ship between Disney’s Cinderella and Sukuna, the King of Curses from the shonen anime series Jujutsu Kaisen. But I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I was telling the toxic love story of… Twilight‘s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, who shares more than a few elaborate parallels to the Sukunella lore found all over TikTok.

In videos of flirty feuds and ballroom dancing, Sukunella shippers have created a compelling, if absurd, saga, with one artist even going as far as composing. a break-up ballad.

That level of dedication indicates that the crossover is more than just a means for a quick laugh.

Sukunella is one of the more vivid and expansive examples of crackship, the impulse to pair characters who might not otherwise interact romantically or sexually in bizarre-sounding relationships. Normally these characters come from different fandoms, universes, or IPs, but the basic premise is that they should have a near-zero chance of coming into contact. The ethos? Unapologetic chaos.

Superhero, Disney, and anime fandoms are often precursors to this cursed content. Sukunella exploded thanks to TikTok user cloudstrifesimp, who is also responsible for it Elsa (Frozen) x Goj0 (JJK), Tiana (The princess and the frog) x Nanami (JJK)And Toji (JJK) x Buzz Lightyear (Toy story). In August 2023, cloudstrifesimp posted a carousel of Sukuna seeing Cinderella at a ball and later eating her mouse, Gus. The lore now includes one love triangle between Prince Charming, Cinderella and Sukuna. Later videos introduced their son Bagdemagus Ryomenplayed by Bakugo from superhero Shonen My Hero Academia.

What? (‘I wish I could tell you’, confesses cloudstrifesimp under a comment asking the same.)

What do these combinations offer that canon or “normal” fanfiction can’t? First of all, shock value: there is something viscerally traumatizing about Winnie the Pooh moans “You’re making my stomach growl” while I’m inside Final fantasy 7 arms of villain Sephiroth. Alternatively, the tamer is #MordeTwi link of My little pony‘s Twilight Sparkle and Regular show‘s Mordecai, set to “Airplanes” by B.o.B and Hayley Williams, seems to exist so we can throw up our hands and sigh, “Why not?” (My Little Pony: a new generation storyboard artist Kaitrin Snodgrass jokingly stated that the ship is a ‘cannon’, per Comic book review.)

Other crack ships make (some) sense due to similar traits: rogue abilities, powers, or aesthetics, to name a few. Tumblr blog ‘A Crack Ship a Day’, for example, cataloged the ‘forbidden love’ between antagonists Waluigi and Dr. Doofenshmirtz. A user with sense analyses: “Their noses would block them while kissing.”

Then there is timing. In the 2010s, the Marvel Cinematic Universe popularized crossovers The Avengers – and AO3 has collected more than 42,300 works Steve Rogers x Tony Stark. Around the same time, animation fandoms took off Rise of the brave, confused frozen dragons (ROTBTFD), an ambitious Avengers-esque crossover of (albeit all-white) heroes from five CGI films, including The rise of the guards, Frozenand more. It spawned Jack Frost x Elsa, a mega-famous crack ship that still remains continues to exist as an Internet favorite, but fiction historians often overlook its spin-off: Secret of the Incredible Frozen Guardians, which emerged amid Pixar’s The incredible things 2 announcement and gave birth to the Frozone (who is canonically married) x Elsa crack ship – a nod to their powers.

Companies have also resorted to crack ships. As profit-oriented companies, they benefit from fan hype, but that doesn’t necessarily detract from the impact. Take Archie Comics’ Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man crossover, which helped legitimize crack ships as a mainstream method of consumer engagement. Writer Ian Flynn joked on Kotaku that fans could look forward to “(hot) Amy-on-Wily action,” referring to the pink female anthropomorphic hedgehog and (old) Lord Wily from Mega man. The artwork itself powered the MegaSonic ship, resulting in at least one comic where Megaman gave Sonic “bedroom eyes,” according to Tumblr. Archie Comics continued its crack tie-in with Sonic universe issue 72, whose cover featured a “matchmaker” that allowed readers to mix and match Sonic characters as they saw fit.

The marketing potential of crack ships then reached a milestone Animal Crossing: New Horizons And Eternal damnation shared a release date of March 20, 2020. Folks at Bethesda quickly discovered the Isabelle x Doomguy fan art that had swept the internet, with the official Doom Twitter account sharing its excitement about the Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct.

In 2023, Amazon Good omens went one step further and completely canonized fan made crack ship Unspeakable bureaucracythe genderqueer romance between archangel Gabriel and demon Beelzebub. Their kiss made waves in the fandomwhich #IneffableBureaucracy has been shared over 9 million times on TikTok for and after that.

But it would be shortsighted to conclude that crack ships exist solely for the purpose of following or converting trendy capital into trendy capital. Yes, attention is money, and posting something crazy gets more attention than something real. Crack ships, however, offer a dynamic that balances madness of sincerity. A Biden x Trump fanfic author explained it best when he told Slate: “When I’m researching a policy Trump says he’s going to implement and it starts to scare me, all I can think about is the funny things I’ve made him do in my fan fiction.”

People have always used absurd humor as a coping mechanism – crack ships are no exception. Sukunella exploded when the JJK anime returned from hiatus in late August 2023 with the Shibuya Incident arc, a shocking tonal shift that ended with the slaughter of several key players. As TikTok user o2bread muses with their artwork: “What if Cinderella showed up in Shibuya rn to save everyone?”, crack ships embody a form of dissociated commentary amid a bleak reality.

We must then remember the bleakest reality JJK readers: the massive psychotic break after chapter 236, where Sukuna killed fan favorite Gojo. Gojo shrines surfaced internationally, with thousands of fans denying and manifesting his resurrection. In light of Sukuna’s performance of “the anime fandoms princess diana”, Then why is #Sukunella still worshiped to this day?

Perhaps for some Sukunella is not so much dissociation as catharsis. After all, Sukuna’s love for Cinderella argues for redemption I-can-change-him complex that depends on the innocence of a Disney princess. Sure, a joke like the crack ship points out the utter delusion fans felt after Gojo’s demise, but it’s also a genuine reaction to the helplessness they suffered at the hands of an irredeemable canon antagonist.

Did Ryan Reynolds feel the same way with the crack ship at the heart of? Deadpool and Wolverinethe so-called “healing” against superhero fatigue? Between the rising box office numbers in the United States and the cooling reception of superhero multiverses, the most viable Hail Mary for Disney and Marvel to produce fuckable Wolverine popcorn buckets was an anal fisting joke in a Bachelor Nation Adand film a car scene that is probably the closest thing to Marvel gay sex? Frankly, the duo’s goal came to “mocker” the Disney overlords while actually expanding the Marvel brand (“Welcome to the MCU, by the way. You’re coming into it at a bit of a low point,” Deadpool tells Wolverine ) me as the corporate uninspired cannibalization of the chaotic mind of fan-run crack ships. Only $1.09 billion and countless #Poolverine tags later, despite ourselves, I don’t think we can ignore some sincerity behind Marvel Jesus.