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(This transcript was created from the original script uploaded as closed captioning. Differences where James skipped overdiverged from the script are highlighted.)

I never knew I was into shipping as much as I apparently am until I, well, found out what shipping was. My whole life I’d been shipping characters with one another because, as a gay kid, how the hell else was I supposed to have gay characters in anything? The Ryan Murphy-verse was a good two decades away so gay characters in movies and YV were pretty damn rare. Unless they were dying of AIDS or a coded serial killer.

So instead, my innocent little brain turned elsewhere for gay relationships. Funnily enough, as someone who’s said multiple times over the past couple of years that I was never that big a fan of anime, my first big ships came from... anime. Namely Gohan and Trunks from DragonBall Z (yes, I know there’s a problematic age difference but there’s also time travel so leave me alone), as well as Heero and Duo, and Trowa and Qautre from Gundam Wing. And who can forget my first rivals to boyfriends pairing, Matt and Tai from Digimon.

Never once in any of these series are any of these characters even hinted at being gay. But did I care? Hell no. They were in love, and you were not going to tell my prepubescent brain otherwise. Especially Matt and Tai. That was a ship that could weather any storm.

It got a lot easier when Queer as Folk came on TV and the gay pairings were made obvious. Around the time Queer as Folk started airing I also started watching more “adult” media. Deciding wholeheartedly that I was going to go to film school, I started watching the classics. Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Whose^{[sic: Who's]} Afraid of Viginia Woolf, The Boys in the Sand. You know, real proper cinema. Not those silly cartoons from Japan. And then after finishing film school I spent another decade married to the idea that I was too good for anything but the best of cinema (becoming a huge David Fincher stan in the process).

And then, accidentally, I was exposed to the torid^{[sic: torrid]} world of shipping once again. When I, despite not having seen any other MCU movies, went to see Captain America on opening night. Because, you know, Chris Evans.

And I left that theatre absolutely, utterly, convinced that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were in love. It was so clear! Steve flew a plane into an arctic ice-cap instead of being with a woman, but tried everything to save Bucky. It had to be true! It was so obvious. There must be other people on the internet seeingwho felt the same way that I was feeling. And there was. And they’d even seen gay relationships in media I hadn’t read into!

Oh my god, you’re right! Sherlock is totally queer! Remus and Sirius? Of course! Sirius, The confirmed bachelor, and Remus, the guy who didnt^{[sic: didn't]} even contemplate being with a girl until Sirius was dead.

Xena and Gabrielle. How the hell had I never seen that before?! Was I blind?! There were so many examples, and whole mythologies worth of fan fiction, or slash fiction, describing how these couples worked. I even spotted some Matt and Tai stuff.

So yeah, I found out that shipping was a thing. Never been the same since.

One thing that they will not, under any circumstances, teach you in college is that we owe the bulk of humanity’s literature to plagiarism. Heracles was a pan-hellenic^{[sic: Hellenic]} hero who was the focus and topic of plays and poems for the duration of ancient Greece, but also throughout Rome. And then kind of moved into being this point of reference for heroic stories in the Middle Ages of Europe and Byzantium.

It’s unlikely that whoever was the first to write about Heracles was the only one developing content about the character in their own lifetime. But in ancient cultures, they also didn’t hold the same values about intellectual property as we do now. Because there was no central institution about owning copyright, they did not really believe that one could own a character. Especially when a core component of Heracles is that he is the son of Zeus. Zeus, who was the chief deity of a religion. It would be like Disney making a story about Jesus’s bumbling younger brother, Bob. And then trying to copyright “Jesus” as a character.

Keep in mind, Disney is the same company that tried to file copyright claims on ‘Odin,’ ‘Loki’ and ‘Thor.’ Because, yes, they have several movies featuring characters of those names who draw influence from the Norse pantheon. However, in copyright law, there would not be a clear way to distinguish the ‘Odin’ in Disney movies from the ‘Odin’ of mythology. In writing, at least. Because Marvel’s Odin has a look.

But when copyrighting the name itself, that could get messy. Because… Odin is still openly revered in parts of the world — namely Iceland. Norse beliefs are still openly practised, and what happens when you pay homage to a god whose likeness is owned by an American media monopoly? To say nothing of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and other prominent media about Norse Mythology. Would Disney own copyright on those characters?

Also the fact that Marvel’s Odin is based on a comic book character which was created in the 1960s by Stan Lee, —

[Correction on screen]: "*& Jack Kirby"

— who passed away recently. Indicating that… ownership of the comic book Thor… is not necessarily ownership of the Movie Thor… Which brings to me a question of… when — or how — movie Thor could ever pass into public domain? Will he enter public domain at the same time as Comic book Thor? And like… given that they’re all based on characters who were already in public domain… [blows out cheeks in frustration.]

See — Jack Kirby got around this problem by making all the Eternals’ names slightly different than their modern spellings.

But in the antiquated world, they didn’t even bother with these hang-ups. Using another creator’s creations was seen as a kind of reverence to the original poet, playwright, or bard. In fact, even writing under their name was seen as an homage — for instance, there’s some scholarly debate if the Odyssey was written by Homer, or if it was written after his death.

But the fact that we, in our modern society, do have copyright laws should automatically signal just how natural it seems to us to simply appropriate existing fiction into new fiction. Though the phrase is mistakenly associated with Picasso, the phrase ‘Good artists create; Great artists steal’ seems to be the lynchpin that literary traditions have been built off of. Every great Greek and Roman play was constructed on a mythological cycle that had existed for centuries prior. The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, were both built off of Christian myth and folklore.

So yes… as most of literature exists because it was, as it would be considered now, a kind of fan-fiction — shipping, by extension, is also a valid method of narrative creation. Half of Greek myth is shipping. Pairing off different Gods, Kings, Heroes, and Deities together is the backbone of the mythological cycle. It’s how Gods like Pan, Zagreus, and even Aphrodite have uncertain or conflicting parentage.

In our society, perhaps more so out of a need to categorise everything and less out of respect, we consider the creator to be the authority on a creation, even after they’re long dead and their creations are used by the masses. As an example: it doesn’t really matter which version of Sherlock Holmes we’re observing, we generally default to Sir Aurther Conan Doyle as the authority on the figure, in a way we do not generally attribute creative licences made by Stephen Moffat as ‘canonical.’

So in a classical context, there was little to no friction when using other writers’ characters. In part, because most of the characters worth referencing had been created hundreds if not thousands of years before. But in a modern context, you know. Copyright — for better and for worse.

I mean, I think there’s a lot of ways that copyright does protect creators, but there are ways that corporations and well-known, fabulously wealthy creators abuse it.

[Previous sentence said over the Toei Animation logo zooming in to fill the whole screen.]

Given that media awareness has shifted from the classics to contemporary characters, if you want to write about characters that already exist, as the vast majority of writers in history have, these days, you are probably writing about characters that are protected by copyright. Which even though all that usually means is that you can’t make money off of what you’re writing,that really doesn’t seem to deter people. Popular fanfiction websites like Archive of Our Own get a dizzying amount of content every day. If ever there was an argument against people acting exclusively for profit it would be fanfiction.

One of the most popular forms of which is taking central characters and putting them in romantic entanglements with either characters in the plot with whom they shared good chemistry, or inventing entirely new characters. This is what is referred to as ‘shipping.’ As per a relation-ship. These are non-canonical relationships that make up the bulk of fanfiction now, and throughout literature. It can be argued that all fanfiction is, in some way ‘shipping.’ Because fanfiction changes the way in which characters interact with each-other.

And even though there’s a kind of literary stigma against fanfiction in general, though specifically shipping, there are elements of society that can find a use for it. YOU may not be able to get paid for your ships and fan fiction, but that shouldn’t suggest that there isn’t money to be made off of it somehowsomewhere. It’s just a question of who gets thatthe money and how.

Though shipping has its roots in antiquity, there is a somewhat concrete instance for when it shifted into the modern world. And it was actually earlier than most people would expect — Kirk and Spock from the original Star Trek series.

This was a unique instance of shipping for several reasons, though namely the fact that it was not a ship that was done with characters in public domain. This was based around contemporary characters whose personalities and plots were unfolding over three seasons. Fans had something new and tangible to cling on to, with promises of new material to come that would further enrich the fictional romance. And, for those in the 60s and even today, the romantic and/or sexual tension between Kirk and Spock was palpable.

It may not be right to say that it was the first ship in a given fandom. There may have been local book clubs which chose to read into the companionship between Sam and Frodo, for instance. However, Star Trek was one of the first fictional properties to host significantly large conventions for the fandom at large. The open-venue atmosphere generated a place to find like-minded niches within the fandom, which, itself, was niche. Finding queer or queer-friendly fans who openly read into latent, perhaps unintentional queerness was easier than it had ever been.

So in an era before the internet, developing these physical spaces was necessary for developing fan theories and having head-cannon^{[sic: headcanon]} spread throughout the entire fanbase. Head-cannon^{[sic: Headcanon]}, for reference, is an element of the story that, while not confirmed or able to be confirmed by the creator, is a theory, or a story that the majority of a fanbase has accepted. For more on the Star Trek shipping phenomen ^{[sic: phenomenon]} check out Jessie Gender’s video linked below.

So how do we go from fans filling in the blanks in a fictitious social-utopia — to me having very conflicting gay thoughts about a popular anime about skateboarding? One that leans on a shonan^{[sic: shōnen]} aesthetic for extra flavour, but owing most of it’s^{[sic: its]} popularity to multiple ambiguously obvious queer relationships. And a cat boy. This is the future progressives are giving you.

Sk8 The Infinity is a 2021 Anime directed by Hikoro^{[sic: Hiroko]} Utsumi, the director of similarly queer baited and shipped anime Free! and Banana Fish. Sk8 tells the story of Reki, a Japanese teenager obsessed with skateboarding, and Langa, a Japanese Canadian who used to be a championship snowboarder —

[James accidentally says "skateboarder," the correction is shown on screen.]

— until the death of his father. The pair meet up and Langa discovers that skateboarding isn’t that different from snowboarding! (It actually is but let’s just go with it.) Together they start attending underground skateboarding tournaments called S, organised by Adam, an embezzling businessman in Digimon villain drag.

In an oddly generous offering of gay ships, Sk8 serves up not one bybut three potential gay pairings for fans to write and create art about. First up we’ve got the main pair Reki and Langa. While it all began at least sort of casually - they were classmates before becoming friends – their relationship eventually grew into some more… close. Something more close — let’s go with close.

However, fans immediately started seeing a lot of the hints that Reki and Langa might wind up as more than just friends, but this never officially happened, of course, leaving the fans no choice but to ship them.

Next up we’ve got Joe and Cherry, or as they’re fondly known online: Cherry Blossom, or matchablossom. These two appear to be a real couple in every way, yet they refuse to admit it.

Speaking of Adam. He’s a part of the third ship in the series along with his personal assistant, Tadashi. A pairing the internet has named… [closes eyes] LoveDog. If you’ve seen the show you know why.

This is… [mouth pop] a problematic yet obvious ship. It’s clear that these two have some kind of relationship beyond official duties, but goddamn it’s abusive! I’ve already made three videos about abusive gay relationships in media so I’m not going to go into the gritty details on this one. But there is some hardcore gaslighting going on here.

But let’s focus on our main pair. Reki and Langa. Since they’re the whole reason I’m making this video. Throughout the series these two are given multiple moments scientifically designed to urge on the potential shippers. Whether it’s Reki teaching Langa how to skateboard in a really cute montage, or Langa’s now notorious “Reki, my love (of skateboarding)” line. [brief fade in to Langa saying the line.]

As the series progresses Reki becomes more and more a cheerleader of Langa, ever more enthusiastic, even though Langa is much more reserved and shy. Until the final episode when he excitedly jumps into Reki’s arms after winning a race.

The pair even play out a typical rom-com break up scenario as the show crests into the third act. But don’t worry they get back together. That’s when they create a special fist bump that—, YOU KNOW, if one of them was a girl that damn fist bump woulda been a kiss. It’s their way of kissing. Am I the only one seeing—

This is also when Langa realises how important their friendship is and tells Reki,

So on one hand Sk8 the Infinity has a very simple, if not entirely unremarkable plot. It’s a typical rookie-makes-the-big-leagues narrative. You can pretty much assume the broad strokes and outcomes of almost every set-up. It’s the relationships that make it stand out. Sk8 shines in the grace notes and nuances that build the story. What’s really meant to be entertaining, animation aside, are the colourful characters, sardonic comedy, wild antics, a couple of neurodivergent characters who find a peer group that accepts them (which is one of the more touching elements of the story, actually) and, the adorable boys being boys and doing boy things. Very… heterosexual boy things.

Oh look a catboy.

And, in spite of what issues with the show that I bring up, my opinion of it remains net-positive… Conditionally. The series doesn’t seem entirely sure whether it wants to conform to rookie-narrative tropes or subvert them. A lot of the time the show wants to push an emotional moment for the sake of driving characters' pathos. But then usually will turn right around and break the in-universe rules about how fast skateboards can go. But this is forgivable because when it comes to this anime, actual skateboarding is ironically one of the last things you’re meant to pay attention to.

Another difficulty the show tends to have is saying one thing in spoken dialogue, but completely rebutting that message with visuals and plot beats. While on one hand Reki’s personal narrative is partly about him coming to terms with the fact that he doesn’t need to be the best skateboarder. That he has value on and off of the track. On the other hand Reki is given this pep-talk by a character — the owner of a skate shop — who is… basically not in the plot. And then immediately after that, Reki decides he wants to skateboard-race Adam, who, in a prior race, served him a broken arm and a molestation allegory. Trauma which was there to drive interpersonal drama, but then disappeared when it was no longer convenient to the plot. This has some really dodgy subtext when it comes to the villains.

But this — this isn’t that video. This video is about the subtext you’re meant to read into. The shipping. Turns out the shonen anime’s take on the Japanese skateboarding is that everybody’s gay.

But right, the non-problematic couple.

There’s an entire industry of buzz built around the ways in which these homo-ambiguous teenagers are almost a gay couple. Articles on websites as disparate as CBR.com, Kotoku^{[sic: Kotaku]}, and The Advocate. And the fervour of this community on twitter, reddit, and fan-discords may very well be a pivotal reason why this show has risen to the kind of popularity it has. There’s even a two night stage show for god’s sake. That I really wanna see. COVID, can you go away I really wanna see that.

This media knows you’re going to ship these characters… in fact, it seems to be expected. We, the audience, are expected to read into the suggested ship, to draw fan art, to write fan fiction, to engage in an entire constructed community around how these two characters would interact if the ship was cannon. And how… do we feel about that?

Why couldn’t we just get the gay sk8er boys? Why couldn’t we get the gay sk8er dads? It seems clear that not only does the audience want this, but that the studio knows this and wants to play to that audience. If everyone wants it… why hold back? What’s the rationale? What’s the reason?

It seems that the queerness is being deliberately withheald^{[sic: withheld]} where it would otherwise fit into the plot. And if this is deliberate, then we can gauge the ethical merits of the situation. Really… Sk8 doesn’t seem like the kind of series that would spurr^{[sic: spur]} on an hour long discussion about ethics of representation. But as much as the writing does seem to be on the wall about gay coupling in this show, it is — once again — a big load of ‘almost’ representation.

And the show goes pretty far to ‘almost’ show gay romance. But it’s that last like ten yards that we’re not crossing for some reason. So what’s stopping media like this from making the final step?

My theory is that shipping is a component of audience engagement that is filling in for something that mass media has lost: merchandising. Seeing as how merchandising and boys’ love(or more commonly known as BL because it sounds less creepy) are both things that saw great advancement within Japanese media in the 1990s, it’s probably best to start there. There had been times when Anime had broken into American Airwaves, like Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Simba (i mean Kimba), and Sailor Moon. And anime from the 80s like Akira have been incredibly influential in modern Hollywood.

However, among consumer masses, nothing hit quite like Pokémon. It used to be that cartoons made for kids were created solely as 20 minute commercials to sell you toys. Like with the Transformers series. For a couple years Transformers dominated toy shelves and Television. It was Pokémon before Pokémon.

But Pokémon… has been around for twenty years. So has Transformers — longer, actually — but Pokémon never went away. Pokémon was a game-changer, not only because it was an anime tie-in to a video game that was already popular, but it was incredibly toyetic. And being able to make toys from characters, creatures, and objects in a piece of visual media is something that American companies had proven to be cash cows before. Look at Star Wars. With this merchandising angle, a producer can double or even quintuple income by constructing an ongoing series in a way where the plot is intrinsically tied to something that can very easily be made into a toy. Especially when you have a way to refresh thethat toy line every few years.

But where Pokémon was more successful... is how characters were so simple and so recognizable that you can stick them on a T-shirt and everyone will know its^{[sic: it's]} Pikachu. Whereas, to the layman, Starscream and Megatron might not be so easy to tell apart in robot form. There’s another problematic ship for you.

When it comes to Pokémon, enter the Japanese word and concept — kawaii.

Contrary to popular belief, kawaii does not mean ‘cute.’ It means something much deeper. When something is kawaii, it means that it cannot not be cute. It means that this idol has been reduced to a state of existence where the ONLY opinion that can exist about it is that it’s cute.

Pokémon is a prime example, specifically with mascot characters like Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Eevee — and nearly all first-stage evolutions. But the example that typifies this process is Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty, as a brand, is fascinating, but I won’t get into it here. Hold on, I need my cat ears—

[Sudden cut to James with black and orange cat ears on his head, complete with bells as sort of earrings on them.]

Hello Kitty didn’t even have a piece of media it was attached to right away, but this little cartoon kitty seemed to be like something you would see in a TV special. But it wasn’t until the brand was already a national sensation in Japan that there was any visual media. The process that makes Hello Kitty kawaii is an aesthetic exercise in minimalism and abstractism. You take a cat, and you gradually reduce features until you have a bare minimum amount of details that allow you to recognize that this as a cat. Or Keroppi as a frog. Et cetera. With so little features, this is not just a cat. Your imagination makes you pack-bond with the idea of a cat.

But when it comes to using toyetics to sell a given brand… well, Pokémon did it so well that nothing else has managed to come close. Even Disney. And Pokémon has only been around half as long as Hello Kitty. It’s still not clear — even to cultural analysts — why or how Pokémon completely dominated culture to the point of traumatising Burger King employees. Things were ‘cute’ before Pokémon. Things have been ‘cute’ after Pokémon. So it's not really clear why it stands out.

But as Pokémon was first and foremost a video game, it managed to retain its market relevance as a video game when kids began making the christmas-list switch from action figures to games. It’s difficult to make a cartoon or anime with a strong merchandise tie-in because video games occupy so much of the childrens’ market now. Pokémon endured because there was a monopoly. It’s almost not fair for any franchise to assess its success if Pokémon is seen as the standard.

We’re not here to talk about Pokémon — an anime with actually visible queer representation.

[On screen, James shows a few clips of Ash and Goh interacting in the Pokemon anime, with the text "Don't @ me" superimposed.]

We’re here to talk about how Pokémon’s industry dominance has made it difficult for new media to focus their branding strategy around merchandising visually-distinct elements.

So for lack of up-front merchandisable effigies, how can you really make your media stick? Well, that’s where shipping ties in…

I’m sure more than a few marketing directors noticed that there was a pattern of how certain media developed cult followings. Sometimes a TV series or movie will manage to stand the test of time specifically because it has a strong gay or gay-friendly following. And this following is full of shippers. And when your audience is taking to social media to discuss non-canonical relationship dynamics, you can say that they’re pretty engaged.

As online fan communities dedicated themselves to filling in the blanks with fanfiction and fan art, networks across Japan and America realised they didn’t need a line of toys to tie-in to their franchise. An engaged audience is one that keeps tuning in, which means a longer-running show and increased ad revenue. And apparently a stage production.

Branding executives said: “hold on a second… let’s lean into it and see what happens?” Queer… became the new kawaii. And maybe that was even better because there’s a whole lot less commitment involved in putting two young men in suggestively romantic situations than hiring an entire design team to create and focus-group a number of mascot figures in the hopes that just one of them would break through into cultural permeance.

Similar to how kawaii functions by minimalizing and removing features, so does the process of gay-baiting. You take what is ostensibly a romance between two people. Whether it’s a gender-swap straight romance dynamic, or two bros who are too close to function. And then you remove explicitly romantic language until there is plausible deniability. What remains in the plot is a collection of romantic visual cues, a very hot, intense, dedication, and devoted personal investment between two characters.

Now, ships can take many forms — even in Sk8. You’ve got the strong, pining commitment, but you also have the more distant, nobody-else-but-you, friend-to-rivals who rush to each other's side when the other gets physically assaulted in a skateboard race… which everyone seems perfectly fine with, by the way. You also have the abusive relationship with the suggested ‘he can change’ tenderness. And you even have an alluded bitter friends-to-enemies scenario. With a catboy.

It’s hard to really gauge what exact qualities a pairing needs to have to be shippable, because everyone has their preferred ship dynamic and honestly… I think at this point people will ship any two-or-more characters for any reason. Just look at Avatar the Last Airbender and Legend of Kora^{[sic: Korra]}. There really aren’t any limits. What two characters do need to have to get shipped is just literally any kind of chemistry. But this chemistry needs to be BIG.

And of course I’m not saying ‘modern shipping bad.’ There are plenty of examples in media where you have two characters who are meant to be just friends. Believe it or not, there is still a demand for straight romances and creators willing to depict them. I know! I know…

As a result, there are a lot of instances where a creator makes a property with no intended queer reading, for which there is an audience who fully enjoys shipping two men in the plot.

The thing about Sk8 is that there’s a lot in here that’s genuinely entertaining. Great comedic timing, coupled with a carnivalesque approach to mixing skateboard culture, shonen melodrama, and good ol’ camp. That said. Would I have watched it if it wasn’t for people recommending it to me because of the queer references? … No. No… p… probably would not.

When it comes to media I do consume, I just gravitate towards gay stuff. Sorry. I spent the first 25 years of my life being dominated by heterosexual characters. And now that I’m making the decision to consume media about characters with whom I can identity^{[sic: identify]}… …I’m still consuming straight meida^{[sic: media]}.

Because in spite of the fact that Sk8 goes out of it’s^{[sic: its]} way to imply that multiple characters are in queer pairings, it also goes out of it’s^{[sic: its]} way to ‘confirm’ heterosexuality of one half of each couple. Either Reki’s random fawning over the girl in one episode for five minutes, or Joe’s chronic boob’d arm candy.

Funnily — the implicit ship that there isn’t any heterosexuality confirmation is… the villain. The villain who openly admits to ‘loving’ underage skater-boys. Which happens to be a recurring pattern within… media.. in general. For decades! The gay predator: still at large in 2022.

Even if the heroes are implied to be gay, the villain has the most pluasibly^{[sic: plausibly]} confirmed queerness. I’m not willing to say that this is carrying deliberate homophobic subtextual messaging, though there is a role that bigotry has in modern queer baiting. But when it comes to Adam from Sk8 or Gozine from Banana Fish, their queerness, is much more explicit than that of our more understated heroes.

Compare and contrast to Yuri!!! On ICE. We’re already talking about Anime, might as well jump in. And yes, I’ve already talked about it, but that shouldn’t suggest I don’t have evolving feelings on it. I praised Yuri on Ice for it’s^{[sic: its]} subtle representation of queerness, and I thought it was a greater asset than it was a detractor. Could it have used a kiss…? Without thean arm blocking the way? Yes. But Yuri on Ice was also missing a lot of the staples of the other gay-baits. Mainly, that there was no third-wheel heterosexual love intrest. And of characters who could be considered antagonists, Yurio softens as he begins to come into his budding, if only implied, attraction to Otabek. (Though how implied is this REALLY?) And when it comes to JJ. Well, he’s straight, they can have him.

And I’m not completely absolving Yuri On Ice for concealing queerness, but it does seem like I’m pointing out that there are many ways that queer-baiting can happen. Bear in mind that there is not as much ‘shipping’ of Yuri and Victor as there is with Reki and Langa. By all means, it’s there. But as someone who is not particularly involved in any shipping communities, there is not nearly as much spill-over for Yuri on Ice as there is for Sk8.

[Dutch angle]:

It’s also interesting that the 2016 Yuri on Ice shippers went over to Killing Stalking, but we won’t talk about that.

And this isn’t to speak of the popularity of either series, because years after the fact… and Yuri on Ice still seems to retain it’s^{[sic: its]} popularity along side Sk8, which came out just this past year. A distinction can be made where Yuri on Ice, while being much more understated, seems to want to imply that these characters ARE in a relationship. Whereas Sk8 is going out of it’s^{[sic: its]} way to imply that it’s^{[sic: its]} characters COULD BE in a relationship.

And if we’re interested in getting into the nuance, there is a difference between an implication and a suggestion. As a matter of fact, I can sort queer-implied character pairings into four groups.

Of the ones I find tolerable… We have Accidental Ships which are when you have a creator who is making no effort to really depict queerness. They’re just making some art, and their audience takes it upon themselves to read into the chemistry between two given characters. Prime example would be Sokka and Zuko from Avatar the Last Air Bender^{[sic: Airbender]}.

Subversive Ships are when a creator actively wants to depict queer characters, but is restricted either by network morality clauses, or national censorship laws. I would include Yuri On Ice, as per the ongoing battle to depict the core pairing openly, but also The Legend of Korra’s Korrasami. As the creators wanted an out, bisexual female couple but had to settle for some hand holding in the very last scene of the very last episode. At least they got to kiss in the comic.

And of the shipping groups that piss me off… Oblivious Ships don’t annoy me so much but they still bother me. This is when you have creators who include a degree of platonic yearning where it’s not clear how they overlooked ‘gay’ as an option. A sub-sect of oblivious shipping is when you have a creative team that is either so misogynistic or so hyper-masculine that they procedurally eliminate all female characters, or make the women in the story so incredibly boring, that there is no one else to ship but the boys. Think of Supernatural.

And then, we have my least-favourite category — Industrial Shipping. This is the one I’ve been raising red flags over. An act of soulless, corporate infringement on the identity-centric needs for visible representation. This is what I would refer to as ‘traditional gay baiting.’ And I’ve made multiple whole videos about this. But, for a prime example, see Teen Wolf. I consider this malicious enough that it’s a pretty serious accusation to bring up — even when it’s about media that I do like. But am I willing to say that this is what’s going on in Sk8?

If it’s a deliberate branding tactic, then we have to consider who they are marketing to. And just like the largest consumer base of BL in television, anime, manga, and manhua are women, we can extrapolate that they would also be the most significant consumers of gay-baited content. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. There are more women than gay men in general, so the fact that they occupy a larger section of the market is... probably something we can just take for granted. And similarly, straight women are also the largest group of creators who choose to depict gay men. But if the suppliers of gay media are straight women… and the audience of gay media are straight women… what about gay men?

This whole topic of shipping is a sticky situation, isn’t it? Not just because it COULD be queer baiting, but because even the intentional ships aren’t meant for a gay audience. In most cases, they’re meant for a straight female audience. Hell, a very good portion of gay media that isn’t baited is really meant for a female audience. And a lot of it is even written by women.

Just going over some of the things I’ve covered in past videos: Killing Stalking, written by a woman. Painter of the Night, written by a woman. Yuri on Ice, written by a woman. Banana Fish, written by a woman. The Untamed, based on the books written by a woman.

I realise all of those examples come from Asian media, but this is not uniquely an Asian phenomenon. Many, in fact most, of the gay media that manages to reach a mainstream audience in the west is also written by women. Brokeback Mountain certainly comes to mind.

Gay Young Adult novels have become pretty popular in recent years, but the biggest crossover hits are almost exclusively written by women. Simon VS The Homosapien^{[sic: Homo Sapiens]} Agenda, also known as Love, Simon by Becki Albertali^{[sic: Becky Albertalli]}.

Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.

The Simon Snow novels by Rainbow Rowell, which are actually high concept Harry Potter fanfiction where Harry and Draco get together in the end. Though in the Simon Snow books the Harry analogue, Simon, has dragon wings, and the Draco analogue, Baz, is a vampire.

Now, I’m not saying that women shouldn’t write gay characters. I’ve read these books and I’ve really enjoyed them. Look. [Holds up stack of physical books.] I’ve got them right here.

But it is… interesting that the biggest gay books to hit it really big these past years have been written by women and not gay men. Including bestsellers like The Song of Achilles, [Holds that up too] which came out a decade ago, when I first read it, but recently became a mega hit when it was discovered by Book-Tock^{[sic: BookTok]}.

With the exception of books by Adam Silvera, you’d be hard pressed to find gay books that have gone mainstream. And it’s not like they don’t exist.

[Panning across a bookshelf of physical books.]

Look at this. Look at this shelf. All of its^{[sic: it's]} gay. I’ve read them all and most of them are really good. Some of them are damn brilliant.

But I ask, again, why is it that the majority of readers, let alone the general public, would probably only recognize the books written by female authors. Even in the olden times, books like The Frontrunner^{[sic: The Front Runner]} by Patricia Nell Warren published in 1974, or The Persian Boy by Mary Renault published in 1972. Gay books, written about gay men, written by women.

So why don’t gay men get to represent themselves in media? At least media that’s widely accepted by the mainstream? Queer women get to represent themselves. At least sometimes. Look at animated hits like Stephen^{[sic: Steven]} Universe, or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

In fact we don’t really see a whole lot of non-canonical shipping among female characters at all. With the aforementioned gigantic exception of Xena and Gabrielle. And the ship that actually became canon, Korrasammi.

But media has been much more accepting of out lesbian characters in recent years. Not always, for sure. Gay men dominated LGBT representation in media for a long time. Specifically white gay men. But in recent years, producers, especially of television, have realized that lesbian characters are the perfect way for them to get points on the annual GLAAD Media List for representation.

Straight men love lesbians, but usually only the ones who are hyper sexualized, straight women, for the most part, are pretty accepting of lesbians, and the assumption is that everyone on the LGBTQIAPA… D… 2S+... spectrum will be accepting of them as well.

Look at this list. This is a pretty comprehensive list of lesbian, or at least women who love women, representation on TV. From shows as diverse as Hannibal, Glee, All My Children, Orange is the New Black, Killing Eve, Nancy Drew, and Doctor Who.

Granted, many of these characters are written by straight male writers, so there is definitely an element of lesbian fetishization to be accounted for. But a whole lot of them are written by lesbian or bisexual women. Which allows the characters to experience a range of storylines, many of which don’t involve their lesbianism at all. Allowing many of them to have some kind of a happy ending. Which explains why there isn’t as much lesbian shipping as there is gay shipping. There doesn’t appear to be as much need for it.

Where as a lot of the highest profile representations of gay men in media (Brokeback Mountain, Philadelphia, Milk) certainly do NOT have happy endings. Nothing of the sort. This is where the Bury your Gays trope came from. Which forces gay people, and people who want to see happy gay relationships (oddly enough, women) to create imaginary ones with characters who are not actually confirmed to be gay.

And so ships are built. Whether they’re pretty understandable, like with Steve and Bucky, Kirk and Spock, Sokka and Zuko, Aang and Zuko… hell, Kitara^{[sic: Katara]} and Zuko, Toph and Zuko. Everyone and Zuko.

Oh, and one lesbian ship that did happen and I was 100% on board for, Yara and Daenerys from Game of Thrones. Should have happened. Should have been canon. Would have been amazing. And maybe if Dany had been banging a ship captain she wouldn't have forgotten about the iron fleet. [clicks tongue] Anyway.

Not all ships are all that obvious though. Many times there’s not a hint of evidence but people want the relationship to be a thing anyway, like my own personal ship of James and Butch from the Pokémon anime. Who are obviously bitter exes. Or Rachel and Quinn from Glee. Magneto and Professor X. Cap and Ironman. Spiderman and Venom. There’s not really any textual, or subtextual evidence that these pairings could ever actually be a thing, but since we need to create ships anyway, why not go the whole way and make some up out of whole cloth?

For instance, in my point of view anyway, there’s a few pairings that I personally ship in the works of J*K R*W*L*I*N*G[bleep]. Sirius Black and Remus Lupin are obvious candidates. As well as Albus Potter and Scorpis Malfoy in the broadway play, Cursed Child. Which, apparently, has kind of been confirmed now that the play has been condensed into a one night thing. I cannot confirm myself, since I havent^{[sic: haven't]} seen it with my own eyes, but my broadway gays have told me this.

And of course the original ship to come out of J*K R*W*L*I*N*G[bleep]’s work, Harry and Draco themselves. Now I never understood this, personally. I never felt any romantic tension between the two of them but apparently everyone else on the internet did. So much so that the fan-fiction fervour that arose online actually sparked a few producers to insert queer baiting into the text of their media on purpose to bring in fans. Such as with Teen Wolf and Sherlock.

Fans have written, literally, billions of words about these ships online. Whole libraries full of stories. All of this work to try and get some gay male couples to have a happy ending. And even this fan fiction, for the most part, is written by women. Gay men, for sure, contribute, but the vast majority of these fan-written works are written by women. Straight women, and lesbians funnily enough.

And some of it goes very mainstream. Like the Blood Right^{[sic: Bloodright]} book series, which started its life as a Finn/Poe fan fiction before being redeveloped and picked up by a publisher.

And again, I don’t want to say women shouldn’t write gay characters. The kawaii version of gayness created by these women has gone a long way to creating more acceptance of queer people, mainly queer men, among straight women. But sometimes it gets kind of… creepy.

After I released the Killing Stalking video you wouldn’t believe the amount of (mostly) straight women who told me they loved Killing Stalking because it let them explore extreme kinks without the associated trauma of a woman being involved. Which is just… no. Don’t do that. Do not use gay men as experiments. In real life or fiction. We’re not marionettes to play with for your amusement. Especially when something like Killing Stalking becomes a huge success and media producers might look and say “Ah. So this is how we should portray the gays.”

Gay readers seem to love messy gay characters. Gay readers even love problematic gay characters. I sure do — I shiplove Hannibal and Will! Where the line is drawn is difficult to nail down though. But if we — gay men, women, lesbians, trans writers, and even straight men — are going to exist in a community of writers and content creators without gatekeepers, we need to be able to recognize how certain identities would like to be respected. And while there aren’t any hard rules about this, the best way to pick up the guidelines are to listen to what these people have to say about themselves.

I realize this is heavily focused around the psychological condition of gay men. Who are, admittedly, probably, definitely the most privileged of the whole community. However — my concern comes from the development of a bunch of baby gays who are coming of age now and in the future. With them in mind, they are going to have to fight against a lot of patriarchal or even toxic masculinity.

(Insert Sean Penn quote)
[Flashed on screen: Fox News headline]: "Sean Penn says American men have become 'feminized,' blames 'cowardly genes'" "'Flag Day' actor doubled down on comments he previous made about American culture"

Ugh. [closes eyes, sighing]

And insofar as queer acceptance is constructed around assimilation into straight values, the modern depiction of gay-baited pseudo-representation, constructed by straight people to feed into a straight industry, is going to perpetuate those straight values. And it is MUCH more difficult to un-indoctronate oneself from internalized homophobia than it is to model oneself after constructive, and realistic archatypes^{[sic: archetypes]} of openly-expressed queerness.

Because make no mistake, a growing trend of gay-baiting DOES communicate to gay audiences that the only way you can be visible in society… is to be straight. And coupled with the instances of visible gayness in awards-bait media where gay characters can only exist if they’re sad — we can only be ‘happy’ if we’re straight. Or at least not confirmed to be gay.

And even in this day and age of tolerance, we exist in a world that is consistently trying to shove us back into the closet, to define the acceptable expressions of our gayness, or to put us in dollhouses for the bemusement of a cis-het audience.

And so… we ship. We ship characters created by straight writers. And indeed, straight writers are more likely to bury their gays. Is their perspective of queerness that it involves suffering insofar that suffering is the direct result of that queerness?

You will find bury your gays’ much more commonly in visual media. This becomes especially true as a particular piece of media is meant to receive awards. Following the critical and awards-success of Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks, this seemed to be what Hollywood really latched on to as far as what it was willing to depict. Didn’t help that Hollywood’s first big gay love story, Brokeback Mountain, which not only featured one dead gay, a surviving gay who had to feel bad about it, and closeted, forbidden love, but it was written... by a woman. And as a piece of media made by a woman, developed into a film made by straight people, featuring straight actors, you naturally miss out on a lot of the nuances of being gay. (Like, I don’t know, being blissfully ignorant to the consequences of bottoming without using lube after eating a plate full of beans.)

But Brokeback Mountain itself is a great instance of the ethics behind writing outside your lived experiences. Writer Annie Proulx actually spoke out against a trend among gay men who shipped her Brokeback Characters Enis^{[sic: Ennis]} and Jack. She did not take kindly to gay men who wrote fan fiction and re-wrote her ending that they both survived and lived happily ever after. Having a dead gay was so important to her that she wrote angry articles about it. She refused to listen to the voices of identities whom she used to expand her platform. Though yes these are her characters, Proulx was writing without the awareness that gay people, go figure, wanted an alternative story where they could be happy. She didn’t seem to understand why gay men would be so interested in re-writing her tragedy into an ending about happy gays.

By all means, it isn’t just women who do this. Call Me By Your Name was written by a straight man. And there were no burried^{[sic: buried]} gays, but there was a closeted romance and sad gays. And because, for a significant amount of time, a dead gay was the only thing we could really expect from major media, as a reaction, we had to ship. The alternative to shipping was a world that believed that gay people’s only role in life was to offer up some saucy fashion advice and then die tragically.

Shipping our way to a world where we could be happy, however, may have snapped in the other direction. Particularly in publishing. Where queer writers are interested in exploring gay characters as they would factor into different genres of fiction, and exploring queer identity itself insofar as it exists in a world that is designed to cater to cis-het people. However straight creators either lean to the melodramatically tragic, or the melodramatically… fluffy. Which is how you get a whole generation of gays who have deblitating FOMO because their life experiences did not match the experiences about gayness set by straight women with a kawaii idea of two gay people.

So there’s this kind of perfect storm of angst as different areas of media interplay off each other and send conflicting messages. You have high-brow fiction telling us to expect tragedy. Which. Thanks for the anxiety. You have mass-consumption media which takes gay emotions and removes gay expiriences^{[sic: experiences]}, leaving a husk of empty gestures and unanswered questions which feels more like a gambling addiction than even implied representation. And then, in response to that, you have publishing. Where gay authors are trying to depict their own experiences with queerness, but where a lot of content being created is either an overly positive response to gay tragedy-media, or as filling in the blanks that media like Sk8 refuses to fill in. And in either case that results in this weird rose-tinted world where the beginning and end of the queer expirience is defined by your ability to have a boyfriend and look cute being gay together.

And sure. Yes I did just make a video about how we need to have more queer representation in media directed at children. But just like there are hordes of queer people who literally always knew that they were queer (myself included), it’s just as valid that some people literally don’t have a clue they were gay until they’re in their twenties, thirties, forties, whenever.

And while I’d like to say that it’s perfectly valid that teenagers like Reki and Langa don’t have their crap together yet, what about the other two heavily implied pairings that the show is counting on the audience shipping the crap out of? To say nothing of how strongly the show sets up Reki and Langa in visually-romantic settings. And I’d like to say that Yuri!!! On Ice has every right to be as understated as it wants to be, because sometimes you do want a relationship drama where the drama does not come from the relationship.

And this would be fine if this was not the (almost) only way we had to consume queer characters. And that understated ‘subtlety’ just starts to feel like a cop-out after a while. It would be nice if this wasn’t the excuse every. Single. Time.

And because these instances are so subtle, either by design or necessity, we, L, G, B, T’s, and Q’s have to endure a barrage of straights trying to beat us down. All we really want is the ability to project our shared experiences to re-enforce our community bonds. But somewhere, there’s a straight person saying that we’re ‘forcing gayness’ into everything. But the only reason we have to read queerness into anything is because it’s been ‘forced OUT’ of society for the last couple hundred years.

Or that we get ‘crazy’ when people refuse to see the obvious coding of clearly gay characters. Because it’s not enough to say ‘hey. This experience really reminds me of some formative moments of my adolescence.’ There’s some straight person who’s never been worried about being rejected by their family saying that Luca is absolutely a cis-het mood. And you’re crazy for thinking otherwise!

And in order for us to consume actual feel-good gay media that is even remotely happy, we have two options. Watch fictional gay people havingwho have expiriences we’re never going to have, or fictional presumed-straight people having pretty gay expiriences that look a whole lot like the ones we have had.

Not to mention that there is a quiet homophobia to the celebration of gay-baiting. Our implicit romances are being framed under the pretence of being something forbidden. And I have to say that there is thisa kind of... insensitivity around the popularity of forbidden romance. Because here in the queer community, forbidden romance is kind of the EXACT OPPOSITE of what we’re trying to accomplish with our fight for rights. That we need to work so damn incrementally to get real representation is so... frustrating. By now we should have gay mainstream movies on the regular, gay TV shows that arent^{[sic: aren't]} just about teaching straight men how to wash their asses. Stories that aren’t just fantasy outcomes, or horrible outcomes.

But no. We’re stuck here arguing about fish boys, and searching for justification that mens’ figureskating JUST MIGHT be stuffed with glorious queers, and fighting people who insist that they’re straight every step of the way. We’re no further ahead than we were when Queer as Folk was on TV and Brokeback Mountain came out in 2005. SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.

Oh god I feel old.

You’d think, especially in the world of anime production, the success of shows like Given, both its animated and live-action adaptation, would light a fire under producers and make them realize theres^{[sic: there's]} a hell of a market out there for non-baited gay content. And I’m not letting Hollywood off the hook either. Half the damn city is gay. Where. Are. My. Gay. Superheroes Marvel!?

My marketing brain tells me they’re missing out on so much money,seeing how the writing is on the wall when it comes to BL fiction. Even here in North America, there’s a consumer base far larger than you would expect for subtitled cute-boy gay-drama from Korea and Tailand^{[sic: Thailand]} and Taiwan and, yes even Japan. Which forces me through a mental obstacle course to reason why they wouldn’t be capitalising on this!

And the conclusion I come to is that they are making a comfortable profit off of our titillation. That this rash of gay-baiting is not only deliberate, calculated, and modeled, but that we are encouraged to do it. We, the audience, are encouraged to fill in the blanks that some… corporation has left empty on purpose.

And the fact that this kind of gay-bait is looped in with visible queer representation isn’t unintentional either. Producers want this to be tied to other actively queer media to lend it validity, and feed into the fanbase which already ships what they are intended to.

Having Reki and Langa doesn’t mean we have more gay representation. Having Hiyori and Ikuya isn’t more gay representation. It’s media gaslighting. It’s malicious. It’s dishonest. It’s fraudulent. It’s telling us we should be satisfied with effigies.

And the worst part is that it’s working. It’s so successful to the point where corporations encourage us to ship real people. Half of BTS is shipped together. And once upon a time One Direction, when they realised that their fanbase shipped them, even played into it by hugging each other aan awful lot. And even kissing sometimes. Which has become a staple of almost all k-pop boy-bands. Boy band personalities are all developed by focus groups so they might as well be fiction right? Why not ship them?

But then there arises the problem of shipping real human beings where; (a) you remove their ability to self-declare identity; (b) if it is something like a boy band, or two television costars, you’re feeding into a corperation^{[sic: corporation]}’s exploitation of sexual identity as a marketing ploy, and; (c) it is a reduction of gayness to an object of fascination, a charicature^{[sic: caricature]} or steryeotype^{[sic: stereotype]}, rather than how some people live their lives because that’s who they are.

So again… is… shipping… bad…? Honestly when it comes to you in your room alone at night I say the sky’s the limit. Ship as much as you want. Ship as much as you need. Even when it comes to making ships that, like the Blood Right^{[sic: Bloodright]} series, go on to have their IP serial numbers filed off and made into their own standing property, by all means. Show Marvel, and Star Wars, and other gay-baiters that there is an audience out there that they’re missing out on.

But when it DOES come to depicting characters that are outside your lived experience, all I ask is that you please be respectful of these communities’ need for self-determination. And if you do reach critical acclaim, please help promote other gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans creators themselves.

And honestly, most authors already do just that. And the favouratism^{[sic: favoritism]} of women when it comes to depicting gay men is more of an ‘industry’ problem. My concerns are primarily directed at the ways these industries use shipping as a way to manipulate fanbases.

So if you are going to ship, I would advise you to be aware of which series ‘want’ you to ship their characters, because you may very well be nothing more than a cog in their marketing machine. And you’re a person. Not a billboard. And I don’t like that some media producers treat their audiences like that.

But how can we separate media that is actively trying to manipulate their audience into shipping, media that is actively trying to subvert conservative values, and media which is full of well-written and flushed^{[sic: fleshed]} out characters who share strong chemistry with each other? The only answer I can offer is that… It… depends? On like… a lot of things. But mostly, it depends on intention. Which sucks because that’s the only thing that you really can't gauge.

Especially that, if we’re gonna get philosophical, people are rarely honest with themselves. I’m making a monetized video about how it’s bad that corporations are using queerness to sell a product without actually either promoting queer identity, or promoting queer creations. Is there really a way to objectively say that I’m not just making this video for the money? Other than the fact that my YouTube ad revenue is NOT impressive. But there’s no way for you, the audience, to verify if I’m being disingenuous or not. If I’m baiting you anymore or any less than these producers I’ve been ranting about.

I’ve spent the last two years on here, on literally every live stream, talking about how my dream is to make movies and series about queer characters that aren’t JUST about being queer. A way to give back to the community, create movies and series, the likes of which I never got to see growing up. Hell, I still don’t get to see them much. But I haven’t actually gone ahead and done that, now have I? You can assume I will actually give back to the community, create works for the community that go above and beyond youtube. But will I?

Just like we assume that creators who encourage shipping, either actively via baiting, or inactively by just supporting fan communities, have the best interest of the queer community at heart. But do they really? Most probably do! But some probably don’t… How the hell are we supposed to know? We used to think that J*K*R*W*I*G[bleep] was the biggest queer ally in the world, and oh boy did that blow up in our faces. Instead, why not put some power in the hands of queer creators? So we don't have to guess if a pairing is supposed to be a couple for real, if we’re being baited by a corporation, or if we really are just reading too much into things.

So shipping is probably fine, as long as we’re dealing with fictional characters. We keep asking for the real thing, we keep begging for it. For years. Decades. We say “please let me see myself on screen without it being about dying, gay bashing, being depressed, or some completely illogical teen fantasy. Please.” But we don’t get it. So we have to play make-believe.

But why play make believe when we can make the real thing ourselves? So I’m starting a production company. Telos Pictures. Which will focus exclusively on queer stories written by queer people for queer audiences. And if the straights wanna watch too, by all means. But I think there’s a pretty sizable audience out there for this kind of thing.

After all, 14% of the United States is African American – and Tyler Perry used that to create an empire of afro-american-centric media produced for black audiences. However… Recent polling shows that 1 in 6 adults born after 1989 identify as LGBT. That’s 16 percent! Let’s see what we can do!

As much as I believe that people outside the LGBT community can and should write about us, I believe the best way to communicate our experience is to create media that they can use to help expand their understanding of gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, and nonbinary expiriences.

Now I’m goinggonna need some help, and I don’t expect to burst onto the scene with some million dollar movies. We’ll start small and build our way up. If you’re interested in supporting this, or just want to find out more, visit the IndieGoGo link in the description of this video. We’ve got a lot in the works, and I’d love to have you on board. This is a team effort. Let’s show those heteros that we mean business.