(back to shipping sphere shifts)

so recently, star and her friends came up with this joke term called "the yaoi wars" to describe how the fandom's treatment of ayato and the other characters in his life (esp. by migratory slashers): namely, that ayaka gets completely sidelined, thoma gets reduced to malewife shipping fodder, and ayato himself becomes just another bland yaoiguy.

with enough nagging reminders, i Will ensure that star writes that essay-rant abt the victimization of ayato to the yaoi wars at some point, but the purpose of this page in particular is to more or less clearly explain the phenomena we are observing when we refer to "the yaoi wars" bc i am obsessed with achieving clarity about terms in order to optimize communication.

(i am normal about things! :D)

so— say you're me, and you're in math class. you're supposed to be learning about graphing figures in ℜ ³, but unfortunately, you learned about the cross-product and its properties last week, and now you still haven't stopped making yaoi jokes in your notes about how a × b ≠ b × a.

oh, but speaking of yaoi, you're still thinking about that thing you and your friend talked about last night: the Yaoi Wars. it's kind of got a lot crammed under its umbrella, like—

• the misogyny hydra
• how said misogyny hydra drives people to treat fictional characters based on their gender
• like how female characters close to the men involved in a popular slash ship will be reduced to "mean lesbian", "supportive shipper", or "tired third wheel"
• or how f/f ships will be disproportionately tagged in m/m fics as the bland, inoffensive background lesbians that don't actually show up all that much (or do anything of real importance if they do).
• the migratory slash fandom and "any two guys"
• the character slaughter performed on the male characters as a result of ATG
• how the commodification of fandom as it has grown increasingly mainstream has exacerbated the migratory slash fandom
• the sheer amatonormativity of it all:
• the way fans of both het and slash will often scrabble for someone to ship their faves with
• the disregard for the potential importance or depth of gen relationships between characters of any gender
• questions of how one's own gender ties into things:
• would, for example, a gay trans man who said he doesn't particularly care for female characters for reasons he understands as being somehow related to his gender (though perhaps inarticulable) be doing a misogyny, or would saying that about him be doing a transphobia?
• or would these questions be more relevant to the consequences of the yaoi wars?

there's, um! kind of a lot going on here!

—oh, shit, but your prof is erasing the board!!! uhhh time to quickly copy down all the graphs he made of the various cross-sections of the figures you're trying to graph even though you're pretty sure that everyone knows that a cylinder is just a bunch of uniform circles stacked on top of each other and that a cone is just a bunch of shrinking circles also stacked on top of each other ^[1] , right?

hmm, but the concept of observing something at the intersection of two specific axes seems kind of useful, though. like, considering the number of things feeding into the yaoi wars, maybe it would be nice to isolate some variables about it?

what would the axes be, though? the misogyny hydra gives you at least one very obvious one in misogyny, and then there's the amatonormativity aspect of it… but how would one classify the migratory slash fandom?

like, it obviously has an aspect of misogyny to it in regards to ATG, but… actually, thinking about ATG kind of reminds you of the tail end of your Het™ shipper days. like, remember that one guy who'd maintain a spread­sheet of all his ships and their fankids, but it was like, crazy long and had seemingly every single known character in the series paired off in little boy-girl nuclear families with 2–7 children each, and even after running out of girls (because we all know how shounen series are), they seem to have just… made up ocs for the purposes of having everyone paired off in little heterosexual families?

like. that was weird. you're not sure if you're ever going to get over that experience, tbh. but thinking about it reminds you of that "pair the spares" bullshit you used to do growing up too, and now ATG can feel kind of… similar to that, but in the opposite direction…

ahhh, the final axis is gonna be heteronormativity, isn't it?

so now you have your three axes (misogyny, hetero­norm­ativity, and amato­norm­ativity), but you kind of have to decide where they start and end for your purposes too, huh. since you're well aware of the fact that hardcore misogyny would just execute the female characters (and probably also the women writing them) for laughs, but fandom has, at the very least, more or less moved past the female character bashing days, and the misogyny hydra likes to rear its head as more "female characters just aren't as well-written as the male characters" and "i'm not a misogynist; i love lesbians: look at all the bland inoffensive background lesbians that take up less than 2% of my 250k word m/m fic that i will tag in the relationships category anyway" these days.

like, these things aren't overtly evil or hurtful or anything, but at their existing scale, it becomes obvious that not caring about women in fiction is looking kind of like a misogyny-shaped problem. :/

but anyway, so back to the axes: where do they start, and where do they end for our purposes today?