Yeah Haikaveh really poisoned the well and started the era where it was fine to bully and harass people over not seeing the "obvious canon implied ships" and I'm bitter about that. That's why people now feel they need canon authority to be able to ship anything, because it became acceptable to bully people for not shipping the "canon" ships. This is also the result of homophobia in fandom and where people believe they need ships to be canon in order to enjoy it, like it has to be representation, because if it's not representation then its fetishizing or queerbait. And they locked themselves into this rigid system and literally can't see any other form of enjoyment so you need to be on the "winning team".

Which makes it uniquely bad when they assume because it's Chinese and because censorship exists, they can claim anything without being corrected either. It's almost like some form of exoticism? Most Western people treat Chinese people like zoo animals and even use instances of people suffering to be racist or act like white saviors which is probably where the "I'm defending lgbt in China by talking about Hoyo game ships" attitude comes from. To which I want to say it's more like gacha in Japan. Japanese games will also pander to both bl/gl ships but not confirm anything because they want to please people who ship different ships and they want to please the self shippers. But people refuse to understand that it's because of gacha, and because they have no interest in learning about other CN media to see how writers skirt things around censors. Sorry to go off but I hated how this fandom became and very few people seem to speak up about it - and some of the ones who are loud about no ships being canon are the actual homophobes who I don't want to side with or talk to either.