Over time the way some people talk about fast travel has made me wonder if fast travel can corrupt the game. Can it corrupt the game in any way?

Define "corrupt". If you mean damage the game data or save files in some way, I've never heard of that happening, at least not in a vanilla or properly modded game.

If by "corrupt" you mean cheapen/casualize/dumb down, then, well, that certainly is the rhetoric a ton of people like to use. Despite the fact that it's completely optional, and the game has tons of "lore-friendly" fast travel options like carriages and boats, as well as random wilderness encounters to keep it interesting, and horses to expedite regular traveling.

"Corrupt", as in not working properly.

With my first characters (overpowered and hurried people) I used fast travel whenever available and I encounterd no problem. I have the three add-ons and a patch, no mods so far.

I've never heard anyone say that fast travel corrupted saves in any of Bethesda's games.

Same here.

Thanks. I must've taken their negative comments the wrong way. It looked like from what they were saying that it corrupted the game.

The only fast travel related problems attributed to the game I've heard about are the vampire attacks after installing Dawnguard. Other than that I believe FT is fine.

If there are any issues with fast traveling it probably has to do with autosaves. The only problems I've ever had with saves and crashing was when I had 'Save on travel' selected in the gameplay options. I suspect the game attempts to save before the area is completely loaded or something, but that's just speculation.

The only time FT has ever broken in my game is when I installed mods which added additional carriages and ferries to Skyrim and Solstheim.

Why did they break your game?

Ive never heard of Fast Travel causing actual damage to the games underlying programming, although your saves can and will corrupt for no reason sometimes, but thats not fast travels fault. I do think that using Fast Travel is selling the game a bit short, but eh, to each his own I guess. Some people don't want to spend a good portion of their Skyrim gameplay following a road, and I can see where they're coming from.

You also don't want to crash half way along that road and be forced to go back to your last save...

In my experience Skyrim doesnt crash nearly as often as some of its Fallout and TES siblings do. Still, its a given that the more mods you have the more unstable it tends to be, so eh.

As I say that though, Skyrim will still crash for no reason when it does feel like it. I don't think we'll ever be free of that, mods or no mods.

Fast travel doesn't cause save game corruption. It does, however, cause fun annoying things to happen like scripted dragon and vampire attacks.