I hadn't thought of that before, but I think you're right that there's a trend away from the random what-if, which was always something I really enjoyed about fandom...
I think it still exists if you get an active small fandom - it seems to be that in larger fandoms, where you find things via the tag, everyone breaks up by character and ship, and casually considering random other ships in that context gets taken as something like heresy. But there always were people who would do the virtual equivalent of look at you as if you were a strange object for even discussing a random pairing - it was just so much easier to also find communities to hang out in where the random and the what if were a fun game to play, and everyone had multishipping comms for the fandom and its own random pairing generator.
And, yeah, I miss that. The people must still be there, but the means of gathering us and protecting us from the monoshipping hordes is not quite there, other than Discord. But if someone's doing it on a Discord, you can't find them.
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I think it still exists if you get an active small fandom - it seems to be that in larger fandoms, where you find things via the tag, everyone breaks up by character and ship, and casually considering random other ships in that context gets taken as something like heresy. But there always were people who would do the virtual equivalent of look at you as if you were a strange object for even discussing a random pairing - it was just so much easier to also find communities to hang out in where the random and the what if were a fun game to play, and everyone had multishipping comms for the fandom and its own random pairing generator.
And, yeah, I miss that. The people must still be there, but the means of gathering us and protecting us from the monoshipping hordes is not quite there, other than Discord. But if someone's doing it on a Discord, you can't find them.