Yumesupernova

yumesupernova

Shipping, Yaoi, and Why My Opinion About Both has Totally Changed

Okay, so you might remember that EONS AGO, I made this post about shipping .

I had my head totally up my ass then, and my trials and travails on Tumblr in the past year and several months has made me realize it.

As far as the shipping of canon characters in anime, games, TV shows, etc. my opinion is relatively the same, but with slight alterations.  I don’t really care who anybody decides to ship with whom as long as said characters are not turned totally OOC.  For instance, Naruto and Sasuke or Sakura and Ino are more likely to do something along the lines of hatefucking than being absolutely lovey-dovey, googly-eyed for each other.  Same with Ichigo and Grimmjow (for all you Bleach fans).

One thing that has changed in a huge way for me, however, is yaoi as a genre.

When I first got into the world of yaoi fiction, I pretty much thought “yaoi” was just a Japanese term for stories about gay men.  I had absolutely no problem with it, and I often sought those stories more than I did anything to do with hetero romance (and I still do).  I’ve just always found stories about gay men to be really attractive.

But just recently, I read some articles about yaoi fandom that really disturbed me.  Just the way yaoi/BL/shounen-ai is written and how the characters behave (the concepts of seme and uke, in particular) makes it seem like it’s a really controlling man and a very submissive woman, just in the bodies of two pretty, young boys.  The more I look at it, it kinda conjures the image of Edward and Bella in Twilight .  In what way is that an accurate depiction of gay men?  Doesn’t seem like a really healthy relationship to me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if real gay men were offended by it.  Oh, and don’t even get me started on how prevalent rape is in yaoi… yeah, force yourself on the other guy.  He’ll love you for it.  Really.  I once saw this one yaoi OVA called Enzai . and it seemed as though every sex scene in that show involved a bunch of assholes taking their turns having their brutal way with the main character.  And Boku no Sexual Harassment .  Exactly what it says on the tin.  All I will say is, I’ll never look at corn-on-the-cob the same way again.

To bring things back to the seme/uke concept, to say that one person is always the top and the other is always the bottom is not an accurate view of gay couples.  It only feeds into the idea that yaoi is by women, for women, and geared toward appealing to what women supposedly want in relationships.  The only time I’ve ever seen anything to do with yaoi stray from this concept was in a How to Draw Manga book about yaoi by Botan Yamada.  There was one image where one of the guys was suggesting they draw straws to see who was on top, and the other guy said “Doesn’t the mood generally determine this?”  Now THAT’S realistic.  Both the guys in the image were still unrealistically pretty, but at least it was heading in the right direction.  Real gay men switch it up, try new things, do things differently every once in a while.  That’s why I wrote my TF2 OC, Damien. the way I did… I wanted him to reflect a more realistic image of gay or mainly-homo bisexual men.  He’s not always the aggressor, he’s not always the macho man, he’s not always on top in his relationship.

That, and being a fan of yaoi is not the same thing as being for gay rights (and I must say that I was guilty of this back in the day, y’know… before I educated myself more about these sort of things, and I still have a ways to go, mind you – learning is a lifelong pursuit).  I believe in gay rights because really . it is nobody’s business with whom someone falls in love, and everybody should be able to love the person they love no matter the physiological structure.  If you’re supporting gay rights just to have some sort of justification for your fantasy ships, then I have nothing to say to you.