it’s fiction so it’s subjective, EVERY SINGLE ASPECT. if someone tells you that fiction is objective they want you to become easily manipulatable and stop thinking
Ship being canon means characters are being canonically shipped together. It can be coworkers, brotherhood, friendship—up to any interaction, which largely depends on one’s interpretation of the fictional, therefore subjective, source material. It means these characters are interlinked in canon, which means their ship is presented in canon, meaning the ship is canon. The popularity of a ship and the opinion of a fandom majority play a huge role in how canon ships are generally viewed and what ships are perceived canon.
On the other hand, pairing being canon means the characters are paired in some way; usually it refers to queer platonic, romantic, or sexual relationships. Whether a pairing is canonical or not is by 90 percent decided by a fandom majority, since by the subjective nature of fiction it is impossible to objectively deduce the nature of relationships characters have.
