Why do we ship?

Man I have been Tumblring too much.

And by tumblring I mean not updating here as often, considering my amount of actual posting there is minuscule compared to the average there...probably. So I've decided to rant on a very general topic, that being pairings. I'm not going to discuss specific pairings either, just the general Yaoi and Yuri or shounen-ai and shoujo-ai or BL or schoolgirl lesbians or even the oft-overlooked het. 

But then I wonder if I could even discuss those two topics with their many names properly because even if I have shipped both sides before, I've never really shipped say, the classic pairings or been in a particular large fanbase supporting a couple with a large following. (Unless MokouKeine counts, but even then!) By which I mean the amount of experience I've had being involved among other screaming fangirls for two characters to be fanatically hooked up with one another is not as extensive as it might be. Oh well, a blog's a blog and its purpose is to rant about anything even if you're not as knowledgeable as the topic you are ranting of! So without further ado....

It all began long ago when I had just turned thirteen. I was one of those tweens surfing on the age of the early internet, when taskbars were grey and resolutions were only occasionally higher than 800 by 600. (I even recall complaining why people make their websites optimized for 1024 by 768 because I thought it made everything too small! Oh naive Spotto) I had recently fell into the Beyblade fandom...and not because I liked spinning tops or anything like that, even though I had a (male) friend who gave me a beyblade for a birthday or something. The first time I caught of the program I thought  it was mindbogglingly stupid. It's still mindbogglingly stupid because the episode I watched was of the Dark Bladers and those characters are probably the most forgettable (and stupid) of any character in the show anyway...

Digressing here, so anyway the reason I fell into said fandom was an episode that would be pretty good ship fuel for the pairing MaxMariam because it was the episode where the building collapsed and this absolutely adorable boy with a deep voice (that kind of added to it. I was like "wow he has such a deep voice despite looking like a ten-year-old!) was being all majestic and honourable helping out his enemy, a girl who was taller than the boy and acted not-at-all super-girly like I was used to in media. It was so different. Also Max was adorable. 

So somehow that translated to me looking for fanfiction on the series. I did somehow end up reading grimdark fic of the Powerpuff Girls before that (which might be why grimdark doesn't bother me as much as Rule 34 since I read about graphic tales of GORE and DESPAIR when I was twelve...) so I already knew of fanfiction. Anyway one fic I ended up following began without any romantic plots at all. The author had never planned a pairing within the story but at some point through the story the author actually asked her reviewers if it was okay she turned it into a KaiRei fic. Practically every single reviewer said it was fine or was even overjoyed at that aspect which made me go ???. I was a reviewer also and simply said "if you want to do it, do it. It's your story anyway."

Despite the story becoming one of romantic drama after it was initially a gimmick (body-swapping!) I actually ended up liking the story in the end. I cannot attest liking it to quality because when I revisit that story now it's full of grammatical errors and is frankly a sub-par work of fiction anyway, but my young adolescent self found some sort of joy to reading about two men, or boys I suppose at that point, having feelings beyond that of platonic love. 

But what is it that makes people enjoy that type of thing? I think it helps that a lot of girls (I'm not going to discuss yuri till later) were likely around their stage of puberty or sexual maturity around the time they start liking yaoi. But obviously that story I read was at the most PG and anything carnal in nature would never or barely be mentioned. So why? There's the idea that a lot of females like males who aren't afraid to show their "vulnerable" side, which I guess is their more emotional side. People probably want their potential partner to be able to understand their own feelings after all, and not marry a robot. But then I am baffled again because a lot of girls like that emotionless bad boy type of stereotype of certain people or characters as well. That can be attested to not every female being a yaoi fan sadly and of course every single individual having their own preference for what male they might like. And obviously there's the whole "well he may be cold on the outside but he's secretly a very sweet and insecure boy underneath!" and then they squeal like a fangirl at how the rarity of his feelings showing up is the charm of the certain character...and that other certain character is excellent in drawing such undertones of their personality out.

It's like magic.

Of course there are other explanations. If you ship that boy you like so much with a girl, then he's taken by a RIVAL LOVER and at least with another guy it's still very attractive and the feelings of jealousy of a fictional character is not there. There's also how the show itself, which may not be romantic in any nature at all, deals with couples. Case in point Beyblade, which is a show aimed at young boys. Young boys do not care about feelings or love. They spew sounds of disgust at the image of a couple kissing! Despite that, it was apparently important for the mangaka of the Beyblade manga to have Rei married to Mariah in the epilogue. Even when the manga itself is less-character oriented than the Anime and so it makes it even less sense to tell us he married her. Rei could've married any random lady and there wouldn't be any difference, yet he chose to make him marry a known female character. Mariah probably had a total of two lines in the manga. (Any character beyond LEADER of some team barely spoke at all in the manga. Only in the Anime were they fleshed out to be more than pylons) This leads me to my next point.

People ship what they have.

It's far more interesting to see what happens when two characters, well-established in canon, end up falling in love than introducing a character for the sole purpose of being the love interest. I'm going to use a ridiculous example for this. Lola Bunny was introduced in Space Jam for Bugs to fall head over heels half the time in the movie. Lola Bunny had zero personality. She just had a curvy body and for some reason boobs as a rabbit. She came out of nowhere. Now I get it, she's meant to instigate a joke where all the men can't really focus when a sex object is waved in front of their faces but that's really an exaggerated example of how so, so, so many times a love interest is just that random attractive guy or girl at school or whatever. We know nothing about them and they might as well be well-dressed pylons wearing make-up or cologne for all I care. In terms of yaoi and yuri? If you pair a character with the same-sex it's also far less predictable. Even if there are characters who are hooked up that do have fleshed-out personalities the fact that one is a girl and the other is a guy makes all the lolly-gagging of will-they or won't-they rather predictable and thus, droll. Heck, even if it has nothing to do with a person's sexuality! The nerd character is always hooked up with another nerd character of the other gender, for example. I suppose that's less of a problem considering people tend to fall in-love with people who have similar interests but it's still pretty boring and predictable to see.

So with the Beyblade example, Mariah was the first female (or at least notable) character introduced. She also happens to be Rei's childhood friend. So if love were ever to be mentioned in this Anime that has absolutely nothing to do with love, it would quite obviously be those two. I guess looking for depth of a different genre in an Anime about spinning tops is a bit unfair to Beyblade, but it happens to a lot in so many other places too. For the fangirls, the interaction between Kai and Rei or the rivalry between Kai and Takao or if you're deranged like me, the amount of times Rei and Max were in the same shot in G-Revolution, they see other opportunities for happiness for their favourite characters. I mean, to a lot of girls happiness is indeed finding your true love, so why can't their favourite characters find the same happiness too? It's not like Kai winning a Beyblade championship against Takao is going to make him happy or anything. Clearly he just needs someone to drown out his angst with! Clearly!

And the reason I'm only talking about Beyblade is because I don't really know how to explain the mainstream pairings in Hetalia, considering my big pairing there is KoreaHK which makes no sense. (Okay, ReiMax doesn't either! England and America is pretty obviously a common-type of pairing in yaoi and yuri, but still) So, moving on...

For yuri I am flabbergasted. Despite loving several girlxgirl pairings, especially recently, I can't explain it quite as well. Perhaps it really is just as simple as guys liking two girls together because it's hot. I've only really explained why girls might like any pairing at all, but due to yuri (I presume) having far more fanboys than fangirls, it could be a whole different explanation entirely. There are many guys who find the interaction and social exchanges between their pairing of choice rather adorable or cute and just like females it's not all due to some sexual or instinctual nature. Perhaps in that way girls and guys aren't as different as one might think? At least in terms of fans of pairings. I guess in the end, guys want to see their favourite characters happy as well and would prefer them with another well-established character to some random person introduced just to be their love-interest. in that way, shipping is actually very heartwarming, isn't it? Whether it be between a guy and a girl or of two characters of the same sex, in the end no matter how carnal a person might see the pairing, in the end they just want their favourite characters to be happy, just like they wish themselves to be happy in real life too! 

Mokou and Keine for example is a pretty big pairing in Touhou. Mokou is probably one of the most (and one of the only) angsty characters of Touhou. Keine is her only friend. We put them together so they can have maximum happiness with the time they have. Isn't that what love is? The maximum happiness two people could have with one another? On the other hand, there's Mokou and Kaguya, a pairing also very popular, except the two canonically hate each other and kill each other regularly. But even then, when we go beyond all the complications of the fact that they have an eternal grudge, the pairing ends up being our desire to see them end that grudge, so they can live happily together forever and their fate of immortality isn't as cruel. Sure you could probably attain that without pairing them up at all, and there could just be friendship (I do love my friendship) but friendship isn't the same kind of happiness that is a consensual loving couple. It is the ultimate achievement so many people want to reach. 

And that is why people ship. Just like anything else, it can be done poorly as well. Those who dislike shipping have probably seen too many examples of their favourite characters getting their personalities butchered just so their character can be shoe-horned in some pairing, but every shipper means well in the end. They just want their characters to be happy and their journey must be as interesting as possible. To me, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. 

Teeheehee, cupid-me!

Look at that judgemental glare! LOOK AT IT.

And those eyes are the reason this next topic is rarely ever brought up. People reading this will stare and then glare and then think in their minds "what is wrong with Spotto!?". My image will be forever tainted in their eyes and our friendship never the same again.

Okay, perhaps I am overreacting. Insecurity is a terrible thing. I always wonder how many people are staring when I have, for the nth time, dropped a bunch of coins from my wallet accidentally. This isn't even a thing to be embarrassed about, but people will notice and perhaps even judge. Such as "what a clumsy and uncouth girl" and yet, these feelings are silly. If I see another person drop a bunch of their coins I do not think that way and if I'm not thinking that way why would other people? In five minutes the coin-dropper will be utterly forgotten and a complete moot point. 

And with that in mind I hope this lovely post too will be a moot point for I will now discuss the instinctual desire of all animals, including us humans.

You may be wondering why lately the pony posts have pretty much dropped off the planet. My explanation has simply been "the season is over" which I think is rather reasonable and believable. It is true to an extent. But if you recall I posted something else here in frustration about a certain favourite artist turning over to the dark side and inserting their style in the wheel of porn. Well, that is the other reason. The funny thing is (I follow them on Tumblr) a few days after that the artist posted on Tumblr, a response if you will, in how the fandom as a whole is rather lax about gore and violence but super uptight about, well, Rule 34. After all, the infamous Cupcakes can be found at Equestria Daily, a site supposedly for everyone. I found it an odd coincidence. (OR EVERYONE IN THE COMMUNITY SECRETLY READS THIS BLOG AND JUDGES MEEEEE, nah)

See the thing is, the Pony Tumblr community is very lax about anything not safe for work, either Rule 34 or gory violent stuff. I actually have no idea how to filter tags there, so if I end up finding anything NSFW I'm going to see the full brunt of it right away. (And it's not like I want to filter out the NSFW tag entirely. If I do that I won't see Kirami's amusing reposts of food shaped like dongs! I mean really, how can you sacrifice that!?) In fact, it feels so lax a blog NOT being NSFW seems to be out of the norm, if you can believe that. So that somehow makes me feel like the odd-person out for not actually enjoying the pictures of ponies with uncensored details on them or are within the act of intercourse.

Which is ridiculous, there is nothing wrong with not liking pictures of cartoon animals having sex. But in the pony community, especially Tumblr, everyone is very, very accepting. Those who are strictly SFW do not mind seeing their concepts of certain characters put in a NSFW situation by artist friends who DO do NSFW sutff. I ended up (and I hated doing this, but) unfollowing one of my most favourite ask-blogs because while their blog had no speck of NSFW at all except maybe a bit of blood once, they reblogged another artist drawing some pony screwing their ask-blog character. So I'm scrolling down my dashboard one day and BOOM Rule 34. 

Why am I mentioning this at all you ask? 

Just because I do not enjoy carnal images of ponies does not mean I do not enjoy carnal images entirely. It is an awkward topic. Aoi-dono and I have a very super favourite artist/circle of certain doujins portraying MokouKeine. The pairing I completely blame Aoi-dono for getting me into and also blaming for making me like Keine, but I need to stop going off-topic constantly. Until some point last year, absolutely everything the circle did was SFW. Everything was fluffy or romantic or dramatic, but nothing pornographic. Then one day they released a doujinshi that wasn't safe for work. There were several people who were disappointed or even enraged that someone who never delved into the dark side of fandoms finally turned over, but I loved the fact that they did that.

...and so I feel like a hypocrite. One artist who does nothing but cute stuff turns over to the dark side and I hate it. The other artist too does nothing but cute stuff turns over to the dark side, and I love it. What is going on? I could easily just say "well, one is actually comprised of humans" but I figure that's too obvious and not as interesting to point out anyway. No, there are a plethora of reasons. And pointing them all out is going to be a bit more graphic and not safe for work than I usually have posts here be, so beware!

The differences? Well, the pony artist started a new Tumblr away from their main ask-blog with a character that has nothing to do with the characters of the main blog. They never mentioned it either, hid it away to make sure those who wish not to see it, not see it. Unfortunately to me that is a double-edged sword. A somewhat poor analogy would be the difference between an open relationship and a secret affair. With an open relationship you know your partner is experimenting with other people and you are both comfortable about it and it's okay. With an affair you are led to believe your man or woman loves only you and you're in this ultimate committed relationship. Finding this other blog is a sense of betrayal.

It's a bit melodramatic of an analogy, but that's all I can think of. And I'm pretty sure that other blog was deliberately hid away because the artist never used his name or anything like that. A lot of people thought it was a different artist entirely (and at first, the artist tried to change their style for it, but reverted to the style he was comfortable with, which practically everyone recognized immediately) I'm sure the artist had good intentions and again I don't really care what kind of things they want to draw, but on a silly "my love for this is pure and unaltered!" kind of thing, discovering it at first felt rather shocking, especially when I found the number of artists who didn't do NSFW at all were dwindling. I always was able to fall back on "well, at least this artist I love a lot isn't doing it, so it's okay!" and then your final friend strays away. It feels like they tried to preserve the innocence of their main blog by hiding it away. But the moment that recognizable style is applied to such explicit images, it's too far gone to preserve any innocence at all.

And really, the nature of the blog too. It was basically filled with sex toys and a whole bunch of those stereotypical things you see on porn applied to this adorable pony style. It felt jarring, to say the least. I think ultimately, what I dislike is not the act of sex itself, but the context of how it comes to be. I don't like seeing characters I like put in a situation with a random unknown guy with no context of why they're doing what they're doing, It degrades the character and makes them look like...well, a whore. Of course there is this phenomenon called "slut-shaming" and how just because a girl enjoys recreational sex does not mean they are bimbos and that's all they're good for, but it's a stereotype that is very strong in my eyes. I find it very hard to imagine a character could still be who they are and still have casual sex. It's obviously possible, but I guess in my outlook of life doesn't work as well as someone else. (I certainly hope I used this term properly? I asked Akira about slut-shaming but she has yet to respond. I think my spider pictures got her really angry at me, lol)

In complete contrast, we have this doujin of MokouKeine where they, to be direct, get it on. And I find it a complete masterpiece because of how everything was strung together. The doujins released by the circle are in sort of a chronological order, where the first doujin is the confession, the second how the confession is given a response, and so many different little comics that portray everyday life and the complete fluff of the couple as time goes on. It's as if everything the circle has released is simply another tale in the lives of these two being together and after all those doujinshi, images, and comics, it was obvious what the next step could be. Of course, execution has a very, very important role here and if you're going to delve into the "dark side" (maybe I should stop calling it that olololol) it better be done correctly. And it was, in every single way.

Let me explain. The doujin does not start off with them already in bed or about to get into foreplay or whatever. It starts off quite normally. Everyday life and the like. Keine needs to go to work and they're embarrassed merely kissing one another. (The inexperience is a key theme here) But the love is there and it is strong. Mokou is beginning to feel exasperated by Keine, wanting to go beyond just kissing (which is already a lot for Keine herself) but she knows just because she's ready doesn't mean Keine is, so it's like all this frustration building up in her. (And my god the expressions this circle can do is brilliant! Their style isn't even complicated either. It's like this simplistic perfection!) Anyway it toys around a bit, the story while Keine is at work and Mokou minding her own business, getting hooked by a book. She was so distracted that when Keine came home, she didn't even notice she was there until the surprise kiss. :D

Mokou took that opportunity to make the kiss a bit more than kiss, as in a french one. Supposedly that was the first time they did that, and so Keine was surprised. Mokou then confesses her lovely desires with the most embarrassed and shameful kind of expression ever, barely was able to squeak it out. And the moment Keine hears this her eyes have become these circular orbs and she simply responds to Mokou yes or no as if she reached some sort of tipping point of embarrassment and can barely use her brain. It's just so adorable and cute and afdfjdskgngffgdfh.

Anyway I'm not going to delve into every single detail here or anything. There were all the good things like "we won't do it until you're ready" and tickling and breaks in between where they talk like "Did that feel good?" "Yeah" "I see." *heartwarming smile of death* and the dialogue was amazing as well. I particularly liked "Let me be the only one to see you like this" and such. And I know, you're probably going "Spotto, ALL doujinshi of yaoi/yuri is like that you dolt!" well frankly I don't read that many so if it's true I am sorry, but this specific doujinshi is brilliant in my eyes and it was not sex for the sake of sex. In fact, I think only four or five of the fifty pages were explicit at all and even then the detail was very toned down. it really looked like what was drawn was for the story, for the love and not for the actions being done. In the end you were just a blubbering mess, grin wide at such a beautiful display of the most genuine love ever witnessed by your eyes, and you're almost wanting to cry at the sheer perfection, the sheer heart-warming bliss, the impeccable combination.

As for the people complaining? Maybe they really don't want any NSFW at all? Maybe they saw the 18+ on the cover and didn't even look inside? Maybe they expected something more hardcore? Well, either way I still think they're missing out because it was an excellent chapter of the pairing's lives. I don't see how another adult doujin is necessary to be released either, as the awesome circle has been releasing other doujins of other hijinks among the two which are fully safe-for-work. But if there is a story to be told that requires it, then so be it! I am fully confident in their artistic and writing abilities anyway. 

So yeah, there's the difference. Quite a colossal difference don't you think? Also what's refreshing about the doujinshi is that so many (yes I know it's for comical purposes, but still) portrayals of the pairing is Keine jumping on Mokou like a crazed yandere "caving" her into submission in a frenzy of unbearable arousal or something. @_@ And Mokou is always the one in a flustered mess with absolutely no experience like she was a virgin for the 1300 years she was alive or something. Really now?

But yes, that is my rant. I have finally be able to discuss that doujinshi properly because I find it of such quality. I would like nothing more than to discuss it with people (Aoi-dono, in particular) but its nature keeps me from doing so. It would be awkward and strange and disastrous, but the doujin is so good. ;_; 

I wonder if this entire post would be ruined if I mentioned my title came from South Park. That episode had me holding my face in fits of giggles.