This ship is seperate from the Joseph/Eli ship due to the characters and the skins having very differet personalities. Usually skins and original characters have a lot of similarites but with Truth & Inference this is not always the case. Because of the nature of the setting and it being an official au, they are considered a seprate ship.
This ship is specific as Saphir has two identites: Noir and White. As they are the same character with the same name, the ship can be split into two types: DMNoir and DMWhite. Saying right away, I am a bit biased towards DMNoir as I have yet to make something for DMWhite, but I do enjoy both of them. For now, this shrine will mostly focus on DMNoir.
The orgin of this ship for me is kind of funny. It came to me while writing ma petite fleur. I was looking for a way to involve Noir more in the fic beyound 'ew how could you' and the backstory of them and their relationship came to mind, which was the reason I started considering this ship more. It evolved from a simple background thing to a whole fic 'christmas kids' that went more into their relationship. Eventually I started writing more of them outside of that setting, solitifying the ship as something I like outsite of that au.
At the time I started liking them, there was only one other fic about them in the overall Joseph/Eli tag (as the dmsaphir is still considered a skin ship, it does not go into the make ship tag but you have to mark it in additional tags) so I was mostly doing stuff on my own when I had the time. Nowdays, there is more of them, but most are written in chinese, as the ship is mostly popular with chinese and japanese fans, much less with western ones.
They're fun to write as they are inherently toxic, you cannot look at it any other way in canon. It is an iteresting look, as in the game canon, Joseph's resoning for doing everything is his obsession with his dead brother Claude. It is very clear that he loves and cared deeply about him, so seeing an opposite situation with D.M. and Noir here is quite interesting. Even if the characters in canon and the Truth & Inference cannon are not the same ones, there are some similarities, and I like how so far, D.M. is also shown to have a brother, but the behaviour is much different.
You cannot look at their relationship in canon and think it's anything 'healhy', which to me, is the beauty of writing them as a ship. It can be angsty, filled with hurt/comfor (even if the comfort part can be very questionable due to their personalities), the inherent obsession between them is what makes them fun.
Some fun facts about the ship and my experience with it.