Top 10 TV Ships Nominations
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Top TV Ships Nominations



Chuck and Blair - Winners of the 2011/2012 TV Ships Poll

We're doing things a little differently for our sixth annual Top 10 TV ships feature. We're going to let you choose the nominees list!

At the bottom of the page was a form where you could nominate your favorite ship (you can nominate multiple ships but only one at a time). Give us a brief statement on why you love them and think they belong in the top ten. We'll be selecting our favorite quotes to be featured in the final article.

Only three ships per show will contend in our final poll due to some shows having a higher percentage of characters then others. The thirty ships with the most nominations will contend in our final poll.


What are the guidelines for nominees?

People have strong opinions when it comes to their favorite TV Ships and it is our experience that it is impossible to make everyone happy when nominees are chosen. Below are the guidelines we have in place.

We define a ship as a romantic pairing that captures the viewers imagination. Sometimes a ship is currently active in a storyline (pining, dating or breaking up), and sometimes they've been dormant for awhile, leaving fans to hope for a reunion. A ship is that couple people write fan fictions about, make fan art of or create Youtube fan videos for. Sometimes they're something that's happened on a TV show, something that's just been hinted at or something fans are just hoping for (though we don't include the latter in our poll as the possibilities can be infinite).

  • No fan creation ships (ships existing outside of the canon of the tv show).
    We realise in the fan world there are a lot of character pairings fans adore that have yet to occur to a TV writer or creators mind. Since we can't feature every possible pairing on a show, a ship must be a character pairing that has had at least some hint of a romantic spark. It doesn't matter if the ship haven't actually gotten together yet or haven't been together in awhile. If a good spark was there once, then people will still ship them and what we're looking to find is both the actual and possible/probable pairings you're most in love with. After all, couples change weekly on teen TV.
    To Clarify when we say spark we don't simply mean good chemistry. On screen syblings can have good chemistry simply because the actors who play them do. Chemistry isn't always romantic. By spark we mean evidence that at least one character may have romantic feelings toward another.

    Why?
    One of our very first TV Ships features ran shortly after the series 'Heroes' launched. The show was young and the main couple fans shipped with Peter and Claire. So we included them in our nominees list. Fans voted them to a top position and they featured in the final article. A week after the article launched, a new episode of Heroes aired, revealing that Peter and Claire were in fact Uncle and Niece. Visitors to the site ignored the obvious fact that the list was selected and article was written before this revelation and promptly accused the site of promoting incest to young visitors. As soon as we knew of the revelation Peter and Claire were removed from the article leaving an ugly hole in our article.
    Peter and Claire had great potential as a ship and great chemistry, due in part to the actor's burgeoning real life relationship. However, the writers never hinted anything romantic. They always had other plans for the two. Since that point my rule has always been that ships must have been suggested by the writers and not just something loved by the fans. In the fan fiction and fan video world you can take a character, change a few details and place them in your own world. Our poll can’t do that. We have to focus on what is real on the TV show. The show's creators have the right to decide who loves who. They created the characters, they know them and they write them. We can and have gotten more then we bargained for when we didn't have this rule.

  • Time frame
    Our TV Ships poll emcompasses the year in between polls. Voting generally takes place between December and January and the final articles runs in February. So this year's poll is for ships from shows that were on the air between February 2012 and January 2013. Because of this some cancelled shows like "One Tree Hill" are still eligible for one last poll. As long as a new episode of the show aired during that time frame, it qualifies.

  • Age
    Since Portrait is a magazine for teens and twenty-somethings, we're only featuring ships in a similar age range. You won't see Meredith and Derek on the list. Our general guidelines is for characters around the age of 30 and beneath. In some cases we're not sure of a character's exact age and allow a character that may be in their early 30s, especially if the show they belong to is geared toward a younger audience like a show on the CW or ABC Family. Additionally if one half of the ship is in the right age range and the other a little over, we'll allow it.

  • Both characters must be series regulars or frequently recurring characters during the year mentioned earlier. Sometimes there are awesome ships that have a short lifespan, with a guest character (like Anna on the Vampire Diaries) being killed off or written out of the series permanently. Though we acknowledge they're still absolutely awesome and might even make a guest appearance in an episode or two in the future, our Ships feature highlights the characters you love to see week in and week out, throughout the season, if not the entire series. If one or both characters only appears in a couple of episodes before dying/departing, then they can't qualify. It's not fair to pit these kind of ships against others that interact weekly for years.

  • Both characters must be current characters on the show. If one half of the couple was a major character who has officially departed the series in a previous season outside of our timeframe then they can no longer contend. (Brooke/Lucas fans)

  • How long do we have to nominate ships?
    Nominations will remain open until the poll launches in December (after our Top 30 Under 30 poll closes.)

    Finally we ask that you please remember Portrait is a website run entirely by a group of young volunteers. The TV Ships feature is something we run for fun each year because we love TV ships and love to celebrate them as much as you do. Please don't get offended if you feel your ship has been slighted for some reason. We're doing the very best we can with the time we have available (which is very little). Try to have fun with poll but remember not to take it all too seriously. Please don't abuse us over twitter. It's unfair and mean. At the end of the day these are fictional characters from TV shows. Yes, we all love them but please keep things in perspective.


    Nominations are Closed. Vote on the homepage @ www.portraitmagazine.net