When crack ships crack the superhero mainstream

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

This week on Polygon, we’re exploring how superheroes are dominating not just comics and movies, but all media, in a special issue called Superculture.

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 describing the toxic love story of Twilight’s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, which shares more than a few fleshed-out parallels with the Sukunella lore that’s all over TikTok.

In videos chronicling flirty quarrels and ballroom dances, Sukunella shippers have created a compelling, albeit absurd, saga, with one artist even going as far as composing a breakup ballad.

That level of dedication hints that the crossover is more than just a means to quick laughs.

Sukunella is one of the more vibrant and sprawling examples of a crack ship, the impulse to pair characters who might not otherwise romantically or sexually interact into bizarre-sounding relationships. Typically, these characters hail from different fandoms, universes, or IP, but the core premise is that they must have a near-zero chance of hooking up. The ethos? Unapologetic chaos. 

Superhero, Disney, and anime fandoms are often the harbingers of this cursed content. Sukunella exploded thanks to TikTok user cloudstrifesimp, who is also responsible for 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 spotting Cinderella at a ball and later eating her mouse, Gus. The lore now includes a love triangle between Prince Charming, Cinderella, and Sukuna. Later videos introduced their son Bagdemagus Ryomen, played by Bakugo from superhero shonen My Hero Academia. 

What? (“I wished I could tell you,” confesses cloudstrifesimp under a comment asking the same thing.)

What do these pairings offer that canon or “normal” fanfiction cannot? Primarily, shock value: There is something viscerally traumatizing about Winnie the Pooh moaning “You’re making me rumbly in my tumbly” while in Final Fantasy 7 villain Sephiroth’s arms. Alternatively, the tamer #MordeTwi pairing of My Little Pony’s Twilight Sparkle and Regular Show’s Mordecai, set to “Airplanes” by B.o.B. and Hayley Williams, appears to exist for us to throw up our hands and sigh, “Why not?” (My Little Pony: A New Generation storyboard artist Kaitrin Snodgrass declared in jest that the ship is “canon,” per Comic Book Review.)

Other crack ships make (some) sense because of similar traits: villainy, powers, or aesthetics, to name a few. Tumblr blog “A Crack Ship a Day,” for one, cataloged the “forbidden love” between antagonists Waluigi and Dr. Doofenshmirtz. A user astutely analyzes: “Their noses would block them kissing.”

Then there’s timing. In the 2010s, the Marvel Cinematic Universe popularized crossovers with The Avengers — and AO3 has amassed over 42,300 works about Steve Rogers x Tony Stark. Around the same time, animation fandoms kick-started Rise of the Brave Tangled Frozen Dragons (ROTBTFD), an ambitious Avengers-like crossover of (admittedly, all-white) heroes from five CGI movies, including Rise of the Guardians, Frozen, and more. It spawned Jack Frost x Elsa, a mega-famous crack ship that still persists as an internet favorite, but fic historians often overlook its spinoff: Secret of the Incredible Frozen Guardians, which emerged amid Pixar’s The Incredibles 2 announcement and birthed the Frozone (who is canonically married) x Elsa crack ship — a nod to their powers.

Corporations, too, have leaned into crack ships. As profit-seeking businesses, they capitalize on 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 fueled the MegaSonic ship, which resulted in at least one comic where Megaman gave Sonic “bedroom eyes,” according to Tumblr. Archie Comics continued its crack pairing with Sonic Universe issue 72, whose cover featured a “matchmaker” that allowed readers to mix-and-match Sonic characters at their whim. 

The marketing potential of crack ships saw a milestone when Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal shared a release date of March 20, 2020. Folks at Bethesda quickly caught on to the Isabelle x Doomguy fan art that had swept the internet, with the official Doom Twitter account sharing its excitement over the Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct.

In 2023, Amazon’s Good Omens went a step further and fully canonized fanmade crack ship Ineffable Bureaucracy, the genderqueer romance between archangel Gabriel and demon Beelzebub. Their kiss made waves in the fandom, which has shared #IneffableBureaucracy on TikTok more than 9 million times before and thereafter. 

But concluding that crack ships exist to solely follow or morph into trendy capital would be shortsighted. Yes, attention is currency, and posting something bonkers tends to lure more eyeballs than something genuine. However, crack ships offer a dynamic that balances insanity with sincerity. A Biden x Trump fanfic author explained it best when he told Slate: “If I’m looking into a policy Trump is saying he’s going to implement and it starts to scare me, then I can just think of the funny things that I had him doing in my fan fiction.”

Folks have always used absurd humor as a coping mechanism for distress — crack ships are no exception. Sukunella blew up when the JJK anime returned from hiatus in late August 2023 with the Shibuya Incident arc, a jarring tonal shift that ended with the slaughter of several protagonists. As TikTok user o2bread muses with their artwork, “what if cinderella appeared in shibuya rn to save everyone,” crack ships embody a form of dissociated commentary amid a bleak reality. 

We must then recall the bleakest reality for JJK readers: the mass psychotic break post-chapter 236, in which Sukuna murdered the fan-favorite Gojo. Gojo shrines popped up internationally, with thousands of fans in denial and manifesting his resurrection. In light of Sukuna’s execution of “the anime fandoms princess diana,” then, why is #Sukunella adored to this day? 

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

Did Ryan Reynolds feel similarly with the crack ship at the heart of Deadpool & Wolverine, the so-called “cure” to superhero fatigue? Between tanking box-office numbers in the United States and cooling reception to superhero multiverses, was Disney and Marvel’s most viable Hail Mary to churn out fuckable Wolverine popcorn buckets, throw an anal-fisting joke into a Bachelor Nation ad, and film a car scene that is likely the closest thing we will see to Marvel gay sex? Honestly, the pairing’s aim to “mock” the Disney overlords while actually extending the Marvel brand (“Welcome to the MCU, by the way. You’re joining it at a bit of a low point,” Deadpool tells Wolverine) struck me as corporate’s uninspired cannibalization of the chaotic spirit of fan-led crack ships. But $1.09 billion and countless #Poolverine tags later, I suppose we, in spite of ourselves, can’t discount some sincerity behind Marvel Jesus.