Rare Pair Shorts

To me, the issue is not so much "what is rare?" (since clearly there are several legitimate definitions), but "what do we want this community do to for its members?" Do we want it primarily to provide a place to encourage people to invent pairings that almost completely original and unknown and that are unlikely to be "shipped" even by a small number of people (Goal 1)? Or do we want to provide a home for unusual (though not necessarily unique or un-shipped) pairings and to encourage people to add more fics to those pairings (Goal 2)? Or both? And if both, can (or should) both goals be addressed by one group?

Both goals are legitmate. In terms of Goal 1, it can be fun to go for the oddest, rarest pairs possible. Once in the Star Trek: Voyager fandom, I was in a comm for a one-ep character named Kashyk. We challenged each other to pair Kashyk with literally anyone/thing we could think of, which resulted in sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-poignant stories featuring Kashyk/biogel pack and Kashyk/prehensile plant, among others. None of these pairings resulted in shippers, of course, and weren't intended to. But they were fun to write/read. So there's probably room for a comm where people write Ollivander/Dobby or Draco/Devil's Snare. If that's our goal -- encouraging odd or unique pairings for the sake/fun of it -- then perhaps we can define "rare" as "as far as we know, fewer than five [or ten] stories exist for this pairing."

But if our goal is Goal 2 (to provide a home and encourgement for "rare" pairs in the sense of "exists and may have shippers but occupies only a small space in the fandom as a whole relative to other pairings"), then we can allow things like Albus/Gellert and McGonagall/Hooch, even though both ships have fans and (very low traffic) communities. I suppose you can argue that this sense isn't really "rare," and you could make a case for this view. But speaking for myself, I'm less interested in rare pairs for the sake of rare pairs and more interested in encouraging people (myself included) to write more stories about less-common characters and ships. (For instance, my OTC, Minerva, isn't exactly "rare," but she's definitely not common. In most fests, rarely if ever do you get any stories featuring Minerva, and this is true even in fests where you might reasonably expect to see her, such as hp_rarities (none so far) or femmefest (two, incl. the one I requested). So I'm happy to have as many communities as possible where she (and the other less-popular characters I like) might show up. Sure, there are a couple of pages of (mostly bad) McHooch stories on ff.net, and I personally know ten people who ship them. But it's not common enough that I'd want to rule out the pairing here.

Bottom line: I don't see any reason why we can't meet both Goals 1 and 2 with one LJ community, so I'd like to keep some of the less-common "iffy" pairings. But I understand that others may not agree.