I have realized that I have a shortlist of ships that I believe wholeheartedly in whole heartedly in canon, though they were never explicit - and it ranges from “the actors played it that way but the network said no” to “I don’t care what your intention was, those two have fucked nasty.”
1 - Tim Drake/Kon-El I think Tim/Bernard is adorable and has canonical support- and I want to study Bernard like a bug- but you cannot deny the World’s Finest Levels of codependency between Tim and Kon. The trust. The Intimacy. Soulmates. (Add in some comphet from Connor who has a complicated and in some cases traumatic sexual history, and a Tim who was not ready to acknowledge that he liked guys too, and you get these two stars Ina binary system)
2 - Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne These two have bitter exes written all over them. They spent their youth high as fuck, fucking nasty, and raising demons. Then Giles ran back to heteronormativity and safety because his queerness was all tied up with his magic and that night, and Ethan never quite forgave him for that. They totally hooked up before the Fyarl demon incident, too.
3 - Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski. This is another of those “if they could have gotten away with it in the 90s they would have” but they did everything but- comparing their partnership to marriage, Maggie-by- proxy, confronting them with all the women that won’t work and having them return to each other each time, “do you find me attractive?”, “I love you Fraser - and I you, Ray, a I mean symbolically or something”, Buddy Breathing- in the grand theory of subtext, they *sledded into the sunset together*
4- Garak/Julian Bashir. They were absolutely playing it that way, it was kinda confirmed in Lower Decks, but that kind of written-foils-with-chemistry is the backbone of a good romance plot- even if I don’t believe they got together to stay until post-canon. They are pining from afar and suffering from missed-opportunities syndrome. But they love and it burns…
There are more, these are just the top few.
