>>717435517
One of the best points I've seen someone here note is that shipfags don't even really like romance per se, the majority of them are in it for the pseudo-powerlevelfagging: the love triangles, the will they or won't they, the ambiguity, and especially have one ship "win" purely (specifically) at the expense of some other character they don't like.
To put it in another way, if Kris and Susie got together in Chapter 3 and you COMPLETELY removed all the Noelle romance elements a very large chunk of these people - not all of them, but at bare minimum a non-insignificant amount - wouldn't care anymore, they're invested in the metafagging fandom drama more than anything.