"Essentially" is a word to be avoided when comparing tropes. Too many times one ends up misrepresenting one of the tropes.
Anyway, I've always viewed One True Pairing as some kind of dogma-like stance that any other pairing is wrooong. And Fan-Preferred Couple as a couple that is more popular than the canon couple. I can see a canon couple being OTP, myself, but it can never be FPC.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Fan-Preferred Couple is a consensus reaction like The Scrappy. One True Pairing is a personal opinion.
One True Pairing and Fan-Preferred couple can be vastly differing. This is most evident in Live-Action works that are based off of literature. For example, in Arrow, many fans root for "Olicity", a portmanteau of protagonist Oliver Queen and his Girl Friday, Felicity Smoake. However, Felicity is a cannon foreigner who did not exist prior to the CW series. By cannon, the One True Pairing is Oliver Queen and Laurel Lance (Black Canary). Laurel is on the show and dated Oliver early in the series, but the fans did not respond positively to the pairing.
Another example would be Smallville in which many fans tore their hair out bemoaning that Clark Kent and Chloe Sullivan never got together, but by cannon Clark's childhood sweetheart was Lana Lang (present on the show) and Lois Lane (also present). Clark spent most of the series pining over and sometimes dating Lana. However, fans HATED the pairing and desperately wanted Lana killed off. In both cases the Fan Preferred Couple lost out when show runners deferred to the cannonical One True Pairing.
No, the other one.
What's canonical isn't relevant to OTP.
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Was going to post this in TRS, but I decided it would probably be better to ask here. Are Fan-Preferred Couple and One True Pairing different - or at the very least different enough - to warrant separate tropes?
As far as I can tell, One True Pairing and Fan-Preferred Couple are esstentially the same; they're both about the most popular couple(s) for Shipping purposes. The only major difference I can see here is that the Fan-Preferred Couple is never canon and not likely to ever be canon, which just seems to be The Same But More Specific to me.
edited 27th May '15 1:53:08 AM by Karxrida
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?