Official Couple

me and these shipping tropes. okay, someone shoot me, but the more i think about this, the more i'm convinced the concept of an Official Couple is very, very vague. help?

it seems to me like the trope title and the description are talking about two different concepts. the title tells me the trope is about, well, a couple that is officially together. on the other hand, the trope description seems to focus more on the "it may not be outright stated but two characters are a little bit more overtly paired off" part. but in some cases, these two things can be very different.

• is any pair that officially gets together an Official Couple? what about pairings that are Strangled by the Red String or gone through a Last-Minute Hookup? they're official, so they should still count, right? but they haven't been "overtly paired off" at all until that moment. the rest of the cast might not have noticed or mentioned anything going on there. do they still count?

• and what happens when you have both a "more overtly paired off" pair and an "officially together" pair for the same character? let's say, if ross and rachel hadn't gotten together in the last episode of Friends, and rachel had gotten married with someone else: that means "someone else"/rachel would be an Official Couple by virtue of them being actually together. but does that mean that ross/rachel wouldn't be an Official Couple? they were more than overtly paired off for ten years, and most of the cast wanted them to be togeher. going by the description, it seems like they should still be an Official Couple, if that had been the case...

• Long-Runners where couples break up and get back together and break up again are especially weird for me, because it seems you have Official Couples "at a certain point" instead of having overall Official Couples. for example, in XMen, cyclops and emma frost would be an Official Couple currently, since they are dating. cyclops and jean grey used to be an Official Couple, as they were married until she died. but it just seems so odd to me not to say that they are an overall Official Couple for the series, as they have been more than overtly paired off over the course of the last fifty or so years and the cast pretty much understands that regardless who they're with (or whether one of them is dead), they're the love of each other's life. sooooo... how does this work?

-sigh- i confuse myself way too easily.

edited 29th Dec '10 7:35:10 AM by carla

Well, it's true that it is rather vague, but Official Couples (I think) are generally couples that are together at the very end of the work, when it's all over- they are official. I mean... I really have no idea how to explain this. xD

Yes, with the case of Friends, they were together, but then whoever got together (sorry, I never watched Friends) it only really matters who ended up together in the end for them to be an Official Couple. And likewise, if you can tell who's supposed to end up together in a work (like Inuyasha and Kagome in Inuyasha or Aang and Katara of Avatar The Last Airbender) then they are an official couple. It's kind of a case of Everyone Can See It within the fandom.

I hope that helped.

edited 24th Jul '11 5:46:57 PM by LadyOfTermina

Excuse me. There is something I like to ask of you. Has Yukinari Sasaki and Miharu Sena Kanaka from Girls Bravo really become an "Official Couple" ? Those two not only do they have a strong relationship. but they also ended up together. Especially for the fact Yukinari and Miharu got married at the end of the manga series.

edited 2nd Jun '18 11:17:20 AM by DaffySquad