ship name order discourse
couple weeks back there was some discourse about ship order and ship names and i don't care enough to find out what that was all about but i'm sharing my opinion anyway. TLDR: i'm all for top/bottom preferences but i hate when ship name order reflects that.
for those not in the know, asian fandoms will signify who tops and bottoms in a fictional relationship by the order in the pairing name. for example, A/B = top! A and B/A = top! B. this shit is serious business for asian fujoshi and people will often refuse to interact with anyone who ships the opposite ship order. there are also people who may enjoy A/B/A = switch! A/B or just like bottom! A regardless of the pairing.
i have no issue with people having top or bottom preferences in pairings when it's labelled as something like "top! A" or "bottom! B". i pretty much exclusively draw bottom van zieks myself.
but while i know it's convenient and i even use it myself, i really hate when top/bottom preference is inherently linked to the ship name!
my primary issue is that ship name order inherently sexualizes a pairing. it's like a neon sign that says "i think A is the top in this relationship!" even when it's just A/B holding hands or cuddling or some other non-sexual activity.
i've experienced it myself where fans of A/B won't interact with my posts tagged as B/A, even though there's nothing sexual about the artwork.
because in addition to using ship order to signify who tops/bottoms, it's also used to signify who's the dominant/submissive one in the relationship, and so oftentimes even the relationship dynamic changes depending on if you're looking at A/B or B/A.
this is a benefit to many people, but i honestly find it kinda strange and uncomfortable depending on the characters. there are some cases where characters in pairings are obviously 'dominant' i guess, but in many instances that isn't really true, so it feels absurd to look at A/B and B/A art and find two wildly different interpretations.
different interpretations are all part of the fun of creating fanworks, but i don't want to have my artwork be associated with a whole other interpretation of a character simply because i chose to write B/A over A/B on a completely non-sexual piece of artwork. and i don't want to write A/B/A either, because that just sexualizes the ship name even further when:
- it's not a sexual piece of artwork.
- i really don't care about sex positions or sexual content for 99% of pairings.
- 'dom' shouldn't be equivalent to 'top' to begin with.
where the inherent top/bottom sexualization of ship names bothers me the most is with pairings involving underage characters.
as a teen, i liked the pairing of genbu kurono and suzaku akai (idolmaster sideM). they're teenage idols with pretty equal amount of gensu and sugen fans, but i didn't have a preference so i used either ship name whenever i felt like it.
as an adult, i still like the pairing but i stay far away from referring to them with a ship name in posts to avoid implying i prefer either character on top/bottom. 1 they're teens, idgaf about the pairing sexually, and i don't want to alienate half of their japanese fanbase for no reason.
again, it's annoying that the only way to express you don't care about ship order is to use an A/B/A ship name that sexualizes it even further. this is why we need to go back to using yugioh-styled ___shipping ship names.
on a related note, ship name order is part of why i think pairing interpretations of dai gyakuten saiban english fandom seem more sexual than with mainline ace attorney.
saying "i love wrightworth" means just that— you love phoenix and miles as a pairing without implying whether you prefer top phoenix or miles.
in contrast, "i love asoryu" means that you love asogi and ryunosuke as a pairing with asogi on top.
i'm sure many english fans say DGS ship names without taking ship order into account (i also just say whatever sounds better), but there's definitely a lot of DGS fans who utilize ship name order to imply top/bottom way more than mainline fans do. of course, this is because the ship names we use as english fans are the same as what japanese fans use and you can pretty clearly see the difference in how japanese fans interpret asoryu and ryuaso.
the only exception to this is vanlock, which seems to primarily be an english fandom name. i find it amusing because vanlock is one of those pairings that's best as switch/verse!
i never use the ship names with kanji, but if it's in english i refer to them as kuroaka because i think it sounds the coolest. no one does that except for me though! in JP fandom, kuroaka is equivalent to gensu but there's no akakuro equivalent. i wonder why?↩