How to Write a Good Fanfic

9.1 What is an OTP?

Emma found herself excited, having found a fanfic contest to enter. In particular, the contest called for a particular prompt with her OTP, making her squeal in delight. Her favorite pairing involved pairing up a particular canon character with her OC, so she dropped a line in the comment section of the forum to which the contest was posted, letting everyone know her plan.

"Sorry, but an OC pairing isn't an OTP," someone wrote. "Thus, you can't use said pairing for this contest."

The young female felt her cheeks heat up, upset that someone would tell her that her favorite pairing wasn't allowed, miffed that the person had something against favorite pairings with OCs. "My pairing is an OTP. It is after all my favorite pairing."

"OTP doesn't mean favorite pairing, it means 'one true pairing'. If you can't argue the pairing as true based on the canon material, it is not an OTP."

"Who are you to decide what an OTP is or isn't?" Emma swallowed, wondering how someone could slap the label of "not true" on her OTP. For her, the pairing was true.

...

I realized I could not continue some of my other essays without delving into what an OTP is. Now, this is something I've actually written about for another one of my essay collections, but I won't copy and paste the essay.

I'll start off by saying truth is not argued on feeling alone.

Of course, when I first wrote my essay collection, I found myself forgetting about spiritual beliefs, which a few people will note is argued based on feeling rather than solid facts a person can prove. However, spiritual beliefs actually don't rely on feeling alone, but a concept called faith, the belief that what one believes is true. This faith, in turn, is built upon personal experience, and personal experience is a form of fact. That said, a personal anecdote of seeing a ghost isn't as strong of evidence as actual physical evidence.

Shipping, however, is not a spiritual belief, although a few people do treat shipping as such. One person's individual experience with romantic relationships is in no way a picture of romantic relationships. This treatment of shipping as a spiritual belief, however, led to some avoidance during the 2000's in fandom in regards to identifying one's OTP, which further led to some of the misunderstandings regarding what an OTP is. The other reason for the misunderstanding arises from people not knowing what an OTP is trying to define the word for the rest of the fandom in essays during the 2010's.

The term, however, originated during the 1990's on a LiveJournal, where the person defined an OTP as a pairing between two canon characters for which the person will argue as being most true based on the canon material. This definition is very different than what some people think OTP means, which is a favorite pairing. The dynamics of an OTP is actually quite complex. The most important element in regards to an OTP is whether a person is able to argue the pairing is true, or in the case of a writer, present within their story the pairing as true. Here is how the dynamics work.

First, not all OTP are actually favorite pairings. This concept may likely shock a few people, but what I've said is true. The OTP type most likely to not be favorite pairings are parental pairings, where the truth for which the pairing is argued lies in the characters already being together, but having produced through this relationship a child who is one of the main characters in a series. For example, one of my OTP for How to Train Your Dragon series, the movies, is Hiccup's parents. If I were to eventually write for the fandom, I likely wouldn't ever create a story focused on their relationship, but they would show up in the background. I also wouldn't find myself able to easily put either character with another person unless the plot warranted such a thing. I am though able to argue this pairing as the truest pairing for these two characters.

Second, some people believe one may only have one OTP, or in the same regard, they may have only one OTP per fandom. In reality, though, a writer may have an OTP for every single character in a fandom. Sometimes the OTP will overlap should one character serve as the truest pairing for more than one character, but in this regard some people argue the character who is most likely to be paired with the one is the OTP, and for the character who isn't most likely to be paired said character, the OTP ends up being the next on the list for said character,

Here is how it works.

Character A is the truest pairing choice for both Character B and Character C. However, since only one of these characters can be the OTP, one goes with Character A and Character B because Character B is the truest pairing choice for Character A. Thus for Character C, we go to the second choice, Character D.

As for OC pairings, and crossover pairings, the reason they can not be OTP comes down to the fact OTP need to be argued based on the canon material. Since neither the OC or crossover character exists within the fandom naturally, they can not be argued as true. This also said, a pairing is not an OTP if one can not argue the pairing as true, particularly if there is canon evidence against said pairing.

ٿM