anonymous mimi · 2mo
I think being their first exposure to Chinese media and their first gacha is why there's so much obsession with seeing coding and fighting over canon ships instead of getting that nothing will be canon. They think because it's Chinese only gov censorship is why ships aren't canon, and not the whole "gacha capitalism" part. It can't be compared to danmei because it's literally not danmei where the writer goes in writing a main couple, it's a gacha about selling multiple characters and therefore trying to please several groups.
But it's also people wanting to control what others can and can't ship, so I noticed this shift in nastiness right around Sumeru where just not shipping the "canon" ship would get people harassed. It wasn't even about the pretense of morality now, people will just get harassed for not shipping whatever is considered canon "implied" based on some twitter user's say so. It's like an entire group of TJLC (if you remember Voltron you probably remember that too, I'm also a tumblr vet)
for sure, people like to make so many comparisons between hoyo ships and danmei, especially with hsr jingrenheng, as they are all from the xianzhou luofu aka space china... but like. danmei just means "boys love" in chinese. it's just a genre of webnovel. it's all inherently, explicitly romantic BECAUSE THATS THE ENTIRE GENRE. hoyoverse games are an entirely different medium and thus are not comparable.
the genshin -> tgcf pipeline has absolutely poisoned the well because people conflate "danmei" with "xianxia" even more so now and also use danmei as like a point of reference for ALL chinese media when... danmei IN CHINA ITSELF is considered niche and weird and honestly illegal/dangerous. authors can and do still get arrested for writing it.
also for sure about the social control aspect too, i mean that's why all the daily/hourly/whatever gimmick accounts are so dogshit. people compete to be the first to make those because they just want to dictate how the character/ship is interpreted. the shift in genshin fandom specifically when sumeru dropped was bc of haikaveh specifically (i love them dearly but also. yeah.) and then it just carried over to hsr bc the same people jumped ship.
ayyy fellow tumblr vet, i wasn't ever actually in voltron fandom but i was in an adjacent one at the time (steven universe) and i was watching all the shit happen from the sidelines, so i'm not actually familiar with the term TJLC but i assume it was the "anti" group
