your ship is not canon

[fanbeatsman]

ETA: just for clarification, because the essay doesn't really make this clear: I actually wouldn't say that the kind of "ship wars" described below are particularly common within this fandom, but these are some thoughts on why they might be happening in such corners of the fandom as they are (principally, on the Court Records forums).It seems to me

Comments

Icon shows which "side" I'm on, no?

[mullenkamp]

...Mostly what I'm thinking upon reading this is, "there's a backlash against slash in this fandom?" I've never before been in a fandom this large (or basically any fandom at all that had an English fandom of more than about ten people) that was so completely laid-back about pairings and slash vs. het. I keep waiting for things to spawn flamewars, but they just don't ignite - people in this fandom seem amazingly willing to ship and let ship. ;) Occasionally on the kink meme discussion post there's a complaint about the level of slash, but unlike basically every other fandom I've ever witnessed, you basically never see "you stupid slash fans, can't you see X is straight?" comments directed at individuals who are stating a preference for X/Y. In fact, usually the complaints about X/Y are not so much due to it being slash, or not being X/Z, but because there is so much X/Y out there already and maybe someone could try writing some X/F or Y/G or who knows what else instead of the same old thing

Re: Icon shows which "side" I'm on, no?

[fanbeatsman]

To be honest, on the livejournal side of the fandom, I completely agree with you - that what little complaining there is is usually due to the dominance of a particular pairing, and not related to whether or not that pairing is an m/m, m/f, or f/f ship. What I've seen on the livejournal side of fandom is, like you said, unusually slash-friendly, and I love that about it.

Court Records, though, is a different story. When I first got into this fandom, I spent a lot of time lurking around the Court Records forums, and there there's an awful lot of a) ship debates, and b) ship debates that turn into, essentially, slash vs. het arguments - I'm talking thread after thread after thread, some of which can get quite heated. It actually surprised me, because I thought one of the best things about this series was that it was so open to all kinds of shipping

Re: Icon shows which "side" I'm on, no?

[mullenkamp]

Ahh, okay. Yeah, I don't really go to Court Records' forums (except to lurk the cosplay forum and see if people with con photos post pics of me that I haven't seen, heh), so I hadn't seen that. ...I guess I'll take this as a warning to stay away, because I hate ship wars and slash vs. het.

(And I'm not really much of a slasher. Before I played the games, I knew there was a bunch of slash fandom out there, and said "Yeah, I'll play it and then I'll write het! Just to make up for the idiot slash fangirls who slash everything regardless of whether or not it makes sense!" ...uhmmmm, oops.)

I wouldn't say the LJ side of fandom is unusually slash-friendly, though. I mod the main community for another fandom, and was a little baffled when someone made another community specifically for slash in said fandom, because uhm. At least 90% of the stuff posted in the main community was slash. Which was to be expected, because the primary overarcing plot (it's not even a subplot, it's the plot) is the enduring partnership between the two male

Re: Icon shows which "side" I'm on, no?

[fanbeatsman]

Haha, it's strange, isn't it, the different make-up of different fandoms and how it colours your impressions. The fandom I was in before this one was Harry Potter, which means my mental model of fandom is "epic het ship wars shored up by plenty of meta + vast corpus of slashers who knew their ships were never going to be canon and didn't care + single vaguely plausible m/m ship that everyone got overinvested in and which inevitably got sunk".

I try not to be too much of a slasher, tbh (I'll freely admit that if we're talking smutfic, then m/f usually leaves me completely cold, but I'd like to think I'm equal opportunities in terms of seeing pairings that work), but it actually distresses me just how rarely I feel like I see chemistry in heterosexual couples that I'm actually convinced by. It's got to the point where I actually notice when there's a canon het couple I really like, or a non-canon het couple that I wish was canon. Given that that's also a problem I have with f/f couples (which frustrates me, as a queer woman), I wonder

[sarahofcroydon]

...representations of heterosexual relationships that fall fairly flat compared to the depths of emotion and psychological complexity presented in said male homosocial relationships. More to the point, there is a constant reinforcement (whether consciously or unconsciously a product of social heteronormativity and homophobia) of the idea that the homo is social and the hetero is sexual.
...The problem with the Ace Attorney series is that the heterosexual "correction" of the text doesn't ever happen....that is so eloquent and beautiful it puts the 850 words on hegemonic masculinity I managed to churn out today to shame

Holy crap 1/2

[fanbeatsman]

I would be very excited to see an essay from you on masculinity! It's a topic that deserves much more attention than it gets, both in fandom contexts and in the wider context of feminism. And I'm looking forward to hearing more thoughts on this from you. For now, though

2/2. Not that I'm overinvested or anything

[fanbeatsman]

Thank you so much for the insights into the Japanese fandom; it's not something I know anything about, but it's very interesting to me. And actually touches on something related I'd been thinking about - the idea of fanservice. If, for example, you assume that Capcom are aware of their yaoi fandom, and that they alter their texts accordingly (by deciding not to pair off Phoenix and Edgeworth with anyone else, for example) - does that not confer upon the idea of a potentially queer Phoenix and/or Edgeworth some degree of canonicity? Or does the fact that it's "fanservice" invalidate it somehow? I personally can't see the logic behind such an argument - I find it kind of baffling that some facts about canon are more or less valid than other facts about canon depending on whom they were intended to please - but I've seen it trotted out.

Heh, sorry I've left you so much tl;dr to wake up to!

Sorry, just had to throw in my 2 cents...

[quadrifons]

Phoenix/Thalassa I say I don't like because I don't think there's enough canon evidence - but I can't deny that a relationship between them might work. So are there, I wonder, reasons and biases I have that I'm not acknowledging?

I've thought a lot on why I have such a kneejerk dislike for this pairing and Phoenix/Iris, and have come to the conclusion that it's often used as a neat and tidy Happily Ever After - I blame Trucy's "When are you going to find me a new mommy?" schtick. I agree that there could be merit in the relationship, but it's just too 'convenient' for my tastes.

...besides, Valant/Thalassa is my AJ OTP, haha.

[valentinite]

Short comment, as I am at work; would like to expand upon this when I have time for coherency

[fanbeatsman]

Phoenix NEVER is homophobicI agree with you that this is a really important thing to note, and I think it's one of the things that helps support a non-heterosexual reading of Phoenix - I don't mean, obviously, that heterosexual people can't be great allies, of course they can, but rather that making homophobic jokes and/or reacting with some measure of disgust or surprise at mentions of homosexuality is an important part within many texts of asserting heterosexual masculinity. I'm glad you mentioned his reaction to flirting, too. That struck me when I was playing as yet another example of how ambiguous, if present at all, the text's indications towards his heterosexuality are. I've heard it said that his reaction to characters like, for example, April May suggests him to be straight, i.e. that his flustered-ness is a function of his attraction to the relevant character, but I think you're spot on in saying that it's more a function of discomfort with being flirted with in general (as I'd imagine he would be after what happened with

[valentinite]

...going back through my inbox now that I'm over this cold and might be able to fake coherent thought...

That makes sense -- I keep seeing all these patterns in the games, but with a lot of them, I can't quite figure out what the overall intention is, if there is one. They're saying *something* about romantic relationships, and a whole lot of things about professional identity, but I'm not sure exactly what.

[sabinelagrande]

Is there really that much support of Phoenix/Thalassa? It always seemed like kind of a crack pairing to me, but that could be because Valant/Thalassa (which I feel like has stronger canon evidence, if only one one side) is one of the only three het pairings I ship in AA.

I think another thing that supports slashers in this fandom is that het isn't just not reinforced as you would expect it to be, m/f relationships and het desire are actually denigrated or refuted in canon (see Larry's girlfriends/hitting on Pearl, Maya and Phoenix's dismissal/awkwardness about Pearl). Unless you count Armstrong (which is a weak case anyway), homosocial/sexual relationships/desire aren't.

I have always thought this fandom was glutted with slash, but I think that's partially because the het fans rarely seem to write my favorite het ships (Larry/Maya, Valant/Thalassa, Franziska/Gumshoe). Oh well.

This is an absolutely great essay. Thanks so much for posting it!

[fanbeatsman]

I ship Valant/Thalassa too, myself (and, er, possibly Zak/Thalassa/Valant, back in the day), and I'd be made up if that became canon. But I actually thought that the games themselves were hinting towards Phoenix/Thalassa - with the comment about Trucy's mother being "beautiful", and all the emphasis on how he's saved her (like Liam says below, there's a slight - not very fully developed - parallel with Edgeworth, in that respect. Nick does seem to have a bit of a saving people thing). And then the fact that they're obviously tied together through the two kids. But I could be wrong, and I'd actually be happy if I was - I'd rather see Thalassa end up with Valant, if anyone (and yes, alright, Nick with Edgeworth ¬_¬).

m/f relationships and het desire are actually denigrated or refuted in canonI think this is really, really important, yes. The Phoenix/Maya relationship is very interesting in that respect - because it's easy to read, throughout, their repeated denial of any kind of romantic feelings as a case of the lawyer (and his

[trenchkamen]

I would say, then, that slash shipping arises from intense and well-justified frustration with this - frustration at the heteronormativity of it, frustration at the unsatisfying representations of heterosexuality, frustration (whether as a queer fan or a straight fan) at being repeatedly told that contigent on the genders involved, deep emotional relationships can't have a sexual dimension, or satisfying sexual relationships can't have an emotional dimension.

This. Agreed.

You see, this is why I wonder sometimes why I bother getting into ship defenses on Court Records. The majority of objections to P/E level down to "THEY'RE NOT GAY OMFG BECAUSE THEY'RE JUST NOT".

[fanbeatsman]

You're a braver woman than I am :s I've only ever lurked on Court Records - mostly because I wouldn't even know where to start commenting on most of the threads. And wouldn't be entirely sure I could manage to get involved without getting somewhat short-tempered.

A lot of the objections seem to take recourse, don't they, to some kind of argument from "realism" or "plausibility" - whether the old favourite, "most people = straight, so in the absence of other evidence default to straight", or the pretty nebulous "it is unlikely that Capcom ever intended them to be gay." It's very frustrating to see people refuse to acknowledge a) that there's no reason to apply "real life" statistics (and a shaky grasp of the rl application of probability, but nm) to fiction, especially not a text that makes no claim at realism, and b) that in a climate where, yes, the majority of representations of relationships are heterosexual, that "absence of other evidence" is itself actually quite telling. It seems like a lot of the arguments that dislikers of

[trenchkamen]

Yeah. If you want to see some of the wankier arguments I ended up getting into (mostly because the objections were so stupid and I succumbed to 'somebody's wrong on the internet' syndrome), you can start scrolling down from right about here and weave about for the next few pages, as Court Records does not have the capacity to link to specific posts. A gentlemen named Szabu is the first to set me off royally. And I'm Trench Kamen on CR too. And then, on the next page, a Herr Blondie is the next one to set me off.

There is similar wank in the Edgeworth-centric threads on the Perfect Prosecutor board, but I'm too lazy to go diving for it right now.