User blog comment:MiscellaneousSoup/Romance?/@comment-3984227-20110511224821

Well, comedy can only take a show so far. Besides, you can get some hilarious awkwardness if you do romances right. As for why people obsess over the ships, I think part of it may be that some of the older fans have out grown the humor and find the ships to be far more interesting. Or maybe some of them never liked the humor much and just enjoy the ways their favorite couple interact or how the characters in their ship's personalities bounce off each other. And there's undoubtedly tons of other reasons that I haven't bothered to think of.