Genesishipping

Genesishipping is the het ship between Z-ARC and Ray Akaba from the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom.

History
In a once unified world, Z-ARC and Ray were renowned professional duelists, gaining acclaim and recognition from the masses. Ray was also a noted fan of Z-ARC's, often watching his Action Duels alongside her father Leo - who also helped invent the system that allowed Action Duels to exist. This admiration began to diminish when Z-ARC began dueling more violently - after the crowd cheered for him despite severely injuring one of his opponents by accident - in his desire to sate the desires of his fans, and ultimately his quest for power. During one of these duels, Z-ARC finally snapped and declared his intention to prove his strength before summoning his Four Heavenly Dragons and destroying the arena. Ray and her father were to flee among the crowd, during which Ray sensed the rage of both Z-ARC and his dragons at being used by the populace for brutal sport.

As Z-ARC - now merged with his dragons - continued his rampage across the world, Leo developed a set of four Spell Cards that would use the world's natural energy to combat Z-ARC. Ray, not wanting to see her father sacrifice himself, stole the cards the moment they were completed in order to battle Z-ARC on her own. In the ensuing battle, Ray successfully used the Natural Energy Cards to separate Z-ARC, not just from his dragons but also spitting Z-ARC, himself, into four fragments. The backlash from the cards also caused Ray - and the world - to likewise separate into fours. Just before he was split, Z-ARC's desire to remain whole and Ray's desire to keep him apart reacted to each other and resulted in the creation of a new type of Summoning - Pendulum Summoning. The four pieces of the world reincarnated into four separate dimensions, and in each was the reincarnated forms of both Z-ARC and Ray, each pair appearing near each other upon their appearance.

Duel Academy
Leo, in his desire to revive his daughter and completely destroy Z-ARC, gathered all of Ray's fragmentary selves, put them in his ARC-V Reactor, and began the process of unifying them while also dueling Yuya Sakaki - Z-ARC's Standard fragment and currently merged with his Xyz fragment Yuto - to prevent Z-ARC's revival. During this duel, Ray's spirit gained form and contacted Reira Akaba - her adopted half-sister - to inform her that she must revive before Z-ARC. An encounter with their (half)-brother Reiji, however, stalled the two long enough for Leo to activate the Reactor, only for the process to fail and leave Ray's soul stuck in the machine. In the meantime, Z-ARC - in control of Yuya - defeated and merged with his Fusion fragment, Yuri (who had the Synchro fragment Yugo already within him), finally completing his revival. The revival, however, jarred Ray's soul out of the reactor as she reunited with Reira and the two proceeded towards Z-ARC's location. As they ran to Z-ARC, Reira agreed to let Ray take control of her for the battle against Z-ARC.

Ray, in Reira's body, managed to get to Z-ARC and intrude in the currently going duel just before Reiji was defeated by him. Like in their first duel, Ray used the Natural Energy Cards (previously sent to the shared Graveyard from Leo's deck), to destroy his Supreme King monster form and his four Supreme King Dragons. With Z-ARC weakened, Ray appealed to Yuya to fight Z-ARC's influence from within alongside her own fragments. Yuya ultimately wins back control as he lets Ray use the Natural Energy Cards again to finish him off. Before Z-ARC could be separated by the Natural Energy Cards, again, Reira ejected Ray's soul from her body and absorbed Z-ARC's, causing Ray to disappear and Z-ARC to be sealed away. Ray's spirit would revive within her Standard fragment - Yuzu Hiiragi - following the reincarnated Yuya's victory against Reiji as Z-ARC (in an now infant Reira) finally experienced happiness.

Fanon
is fairly popular in the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom, especially for fans of ARC-V. Despite the fact that the series didn't give any actual hints towards a possible romance between Z-ARC and Ray, the relationships between their respective pairs of fragments seems to indicate they had some kind of deeper relationship. In this regard, fanworks tend to showcase possible moments between the two before Z-ARC's dark turn. Fanworks also tend to use the duality between their attitudes to show the relationship as a union of opposites.

Fanworks for the ship began to appear very quickly after Z-ARC's and Ray's formal debut in Episode 126. Fanart and videos for this ship became rather abundant on respective sites after that, particularly Tumblr. In addition, while far from the most written on AO3 for all of Yu-Gi-Oh!, this ship is the most written for ''Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V'' specifically. Even on that front, however, it currently only slightly edges out the second most-written one for that series (Appleshipping).

Three ZarcRay weeks were held during the following weeks:
 * First: March 11-18, 2017
 * Second: March 19-25, 2018
 * Third: March 18-24, 2019

Fandom
FAN FICTION

ART

TUMBLR