your ship is not canon
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
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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 how far that's an issue with implicit or explicit sexism in the source texts - a lack of sufficient development in the female love interest's character to give depth to the main canon pairing, for example, or (and this I really think is a common problem in a lot of series) insufficient screentime given to developing female homosocial relationships. Doesn't always hold true, obviously (Fire Emblem 10 recently managed to get me invested in a romantic relationship between Plucky Boy Hero and Mary Sue Heroine, which trust me, takes a LOT of work), but I think it does for some texts.
I find the Court Records forums very disorienting because of the volume of het shipping - nothing like the lj fandom! It puts me off going there, simply because as I admitted, I don't think there's a single het ship for Phoenix that I enjoy reading (not because I don't think he's interested in women, I do, just not in any of the canon women - except Mia, actually, now I come to think of it). One interesting thing I've also noticed there is a greater popularity of ships that come across, almost, as het-for-the-sake-of-het - which is usually something that slashers are (often fairly, tbh) accused of. As an example, I've noticed a lot of people who ship both Phoenix/Maya and Edgeworth/Franziska. There's something about that that feels like het for het's sake to me, tidying up the series into neat heterosexual pairings, idk. That might be unfair of me.
Incidentally, something I forgot to mention in my first comment: I think your view of how a fandom responds to a lack of canon pairings (i.e. assuming that everything is fair game because nothing is canon) is very interesting, and has made me look closer at mine. I wonder if, then, taking your view into account, it's not so much that lack of canon resolution makes some fans think that anything could become canon, but rather that it stops arguments between those who are concerned about canonicity from ever reaching any kind of conclusion - it just keeps things festering. It's another angle, at any rate.
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The possible lack of development in female characters is something I'd thought about. I usually like males in Japanese media much better than females - but in canon that has awesome females (like this)? I like a fair amount of het. (Gumshoe/Maggey is my other OTP.) I can think of a couple other fandoms where everyone was going nuts over the slash, and I was going "But there's no slash in this game! Unless you mean the femslash!", and those are the fandoms where I actually am interested in drawing and writing and cosplaying the awesome women. But on the other hand, when females get development, sometimes it keeps them from working for me as pairing fodder.
Like Maya. I don't want to pair her up with anyone, because she's not developed as a potential love interest at all - just a really good friend. I tried to make myself see Phoenix/Maya the other day, looking at a bunch of shippy fan art... and when I see Phoenix hugging Maya, I think okay, that's cute and in character. Maya rubbing his back, or Phoenix holding her in his arms... Then there's a picture of them kissing, and even with all the buildup, I'm still left going "...Where did that come from?"
Whereas, I went into the first game actively trying not to see slash, and I gave up by the end of 1-4, and 2-4 sold me. Not because there aren't awesome women for Phoenix to be paired with - I really like Mia and Maya, Franziska's fun, and though I'm not as fond of Iris, that could be because we barely got to know her as her own person. She was in exactly one case, and for half of that case we were actually talking to Dahlia. My objection to Phoenix/Iris is basically that their previous relationship was founded on lies, and Dahlia was traumatic for Phoenix. He can't just go "Oh, you're the identical twin and you're nice!" and get back together, as if he hadn't spent the last several years thinking that this seemingly nice person had tried to murder him. (Someday, I will write the fic where he tries that. XD) I would also be potentially willing to pair Phoenix with Mia - except for the bit where she's dead, and also already had a canon boyfriend who doesn't need his life to become any worse. ;)
(Also completely in agreement about the frustration of not seeing many interesting f/f pairings, despite clearly being open to the idea due to my having a girlfriend. Though I noted the other day that my disinterest in most femslash pairings may be because the first time I ever knew that girls could like girls, it was via Sailor Moon S - and Haruka and Michiru set the bar too high, so nearly everything since has been a disappointment. :P I'd probably be shipping Celeste/Adrian, though, except for the bit where Celeste is dead. Sigh. I see a pattern.)
Yes, there's definitely het-for-the-sake-of-het just as much as slash-for-the-sake-of-slash - as someone who is perfectly happy with gen and friendship fic and so on, I find that often an otherwise interesting fic seems cheapened by characters abruptly getting together at the end. It's like a fic isn't any good unless someone's getting laid. :P
Hmmm, in regards to the last paragraph - I didn't mean to seem contradictory or anything in my theory about a lack of canon pairings. That was just the theory I'd come up with, and who knows? I imagine it would keep things festering in some types of fandoms, but I'm admittedly less familiar with fandoms for ongoing things like anime/book series than I am with standalone things like a singular game. Most of my interests have little chance of further insight into the characters once the game's over, and they don't get sequels like these do. So once it's over, it's over, and people have only what's already happened in canon to go on. And when that's the case, people can't hold out any sort of hope for their non-canon ship becoming canon.
Agh, I talk too much.
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I see your point about how developing female characters can actually put you off shipping them. It's kind of a sad reflection on contemporary constructs of heterosexuality, really, that depth in a female character and developed m/f romance quite often seem to be considered by writers to be mutually exclusive. Parallel to what you've said about Maya, my favourite, and the one I find most interesting, of the female characters in the Ace Attorney series is Franziska, and while I have no problem (¬_¬) seeing her in a romantic or sexual light, I actually think the way she's developed in the games, her character, its flaws and complexities, are more interestingly explored outside of the context of a relationship.
You know, I don't think I've ever watched a series or played a game that's made me ship an f/f pairing in the same way that texts have made me ship m/m pairings :/ There's plenty that I like (Franziska/Maya & Mia/Lana, in this fandom), but very few that have ever really grabbed me. Seems to me that's kind of a depressing illustration of the state of representations of female-female relationships (platonic or otherwise) in most media.
Finally, interesting point about the distinction between serialised and standalone texts in this respect. The strategies by which we read a serialised, incomplete text are so very different from the way we read texts seen as coherent wholes, especially with regards to the issue of canonicity and the boundaries of the text - a serialised text you can read not only interpretatively, but also predictively, and that produces different kinds of engagement with and investment in the characters and the narrative. Which I think you're right in saying causes ship wars (which are, in the end, conflicts of interpretation) to manifest themselves differently.
Isn't that what this community's for? :D No need to worry about that with me, anyway - I just signed up for 3-4 years reading for a PhD in this and related topics, so I'm both sympathetic to and interested as much tl;dr as you've got :D
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