/ffs/ - Fujo Fandom Sperging

same as OP, i never got into l/light but i might need to give death note another go. i believe in it.

>>4269
nonna, sokka/zuko is an older ship than klance, lol. it's not a rehashing because voltron is from… like the 2010s, and avatar was 2005-ish.

>>4341
>sokka/zuko is an older ship than klance
Lol I meant how there was a random popularity surge around Covid.

>>4334
>do you build a personality based more around their appearance
Mostly this, also who they get paired up with in pokemas.

>>4334
Nona you replied to, a bit of both. The games have small amounts of flavor text when other characters speak to you, you can make shit up based on the setting circumstances (eg. the protagonist of XY's mom is a former sports star and your friends are all way louder and more lively than you, so I assumed X/Calem's outward behavior can seem cold or rigid, part of why he doesn't pursue the same career as his mom, but not to the point people can't understand that he's a good person.), but a huge amount of appearance. Characters whose default clothing is sporty are going to be more active, there's some with seriously genki expressions. I do take liberties that PokeMas doesn't, since all the protags are on friendly terms there and it can be overly nice which just leads people to call characters bland. Like Gold is a nice guy as expected of Silver's counterpart, most PokeMas players seem to hate him for being nothing, but I like to throw in some brattiness when he interacts with Red. He can't be devoid of competitiveness given what happens in GSC - you keep fighting back at Silver, you do the gyms and the league and still doggedly trudge up a mountain to fight Red, and you even go beat the shit out of Kanto's gyms and use your phone to ask for constant rematches. Gold has to have a scrappy side to him. Between the cycling and the fishing he is raring to go. And then Red, his greatest challenge, doesn't give him a straight answer he can understand. Doesn't look fired up in kind but still brings a sledgehammer down on him when he does get a fight out of him. It's a fun dynamic.

I literally wrote too much hang on.

>>4336
True, there's some things I can't tell if I got it from games or from miring in Pixiv many years ago, because there's so much fanworks you can't help being influenced by a few here and there.

I have a monsterboy AU where I used "Red is a mute" and gave him a reason for it, personally I really like and reuse the idea over and over of a character that can only talk to certain people or in certain circumstances. To me game Red is just the kind of stoic people typically call "autism moe". Watches people like a cat, silently but with his emotions blatant. Masters might have been joking around with it, but I liked how they addressed it by confirming he communicates well with his pokemon and isn't devoid of thoughts and feelings, he just doesn't use words much. It'd be nice to have a reason for that though.

I think of the Origins Red as being the Fire Red protagonist. Even though he's probably the design they used for the SunMoon aged up Red, I keep them separate because of that difference in personality. I'm kind of just piling younger hotblooded guys around poor Red. Red by the way swings between "I fucking love fighting" and "I want to chill out and do nothing". The latter is one part all the fanart of Red in the cave with his pokemon (he ran away from the league and people for a while, didn't he? Training or not he wanted some isolation) and two parts nostalgia for just leaving the game open to listen to the music somewhere. I think having a switch to flip like that is cute for him too. Blue having to settle him down when he gets antsy for a battle in the wrong place. SunMoon Red has cooled off a bit, he's still headstrong but more sensible with age.

>>4349
>Watches people like a cat, silently but with his emotions blatant. Masters might have been joking around with it, but I liked how they addressed it by confirming he communicates well with his pokemon and isn't devoid of thoughts and feelings, he just doesn't use words much. It'd be nice to have a reason for that though.

I LOVE this interpretation and I appreciate you laying out some of your thought process on Pokemon protag ships. I really respect people who can pull every shred of personality out of smaller encounters. This also made me think I need to check out Masters and see what they've done with everyone.

>>4290
>>4282
I don't ship them either but I don't get how it's "jarring". both of them are among the most conventional looking characters in Dungeon Meshi, both easily fall into cliched tropes and picrel helped

>>4282
>>4290
It's honestly wild, I'm in the exact opposite boat. Kabru/Mithrun did not register for me like… at all while reading the manga and it took seeing comments from anons after reading to really go "oh hah. yeah sure I see it now". And I quite like them both as characters, but as a pair it just never clicked.

>>4288
This is why I can't give a shit about haikaveh either. Most of the ships are too bland since most characters don't do much in the story or aren't lore relevant, so instead of developing over time a character will exist just to be shipped and that's the most boring type of bait. The traveler is too much of a blank slate for me to care about any yaoi with them. I know Xiao is super pushed but it's hard for me to care when the traveler is a very dull self insert.

>>4288
>I don't like haikaveh all that much either, even though I do like kaveh…but he deserves better than just be "the guy who gets shipped with alhaitham"
I don't get this, Alhaitham practically pays for his life after taking him in to live with him after Kaveh got into massive debt over his obsession with creating his magnum opus. He cares so much for Kaveh but his rigid personality makes him question Kaveh's way of life because he wants him to stop causing so much heartache and trouble for himself (and the people around him) since Kaveh's trauma about his parents practically abandoning him (his father dying at a young age, his mother becoming depressed over it and simply leaving to start a new life in Fontaine) causes him to act up constantly, and Alhaitham genuinely wants to help him unlearn the self-sacrificing behavior but is too unironically autistic to do it with tact. He got mad when Kaveh sacrificed his food portions to the desert foxes during the Sumeru festival event to the point they had a huge fight because he was so worried about Kaveh's reckless behavior nearly killing him, and in the end it was revealed that Alhaitham had been conducting his own investigation during the festival to find out what happened to Kaveh's father so he could ease his guilt about his death when he did in the end, and immediately tried cheering Kaveh up when he noticed the topic was hurting him way too deep. I could go on and on because the person writing their scenes absolutely knows what they're doing. I get not liking a ship and it's fine, but to be honest every time I see people saying they "can't stand" or "hate" HaiKaveh it's due to being exposed to a gross misrepresentation of either their relationship or Alhaitham's personality or becoming a contrarian out of annoyance for the ship's popularity.

>>4377
I see the same contrarianism with Kaeluc too and people act like there is literally nothing in the story to support a modicum of romantic potential. Zhonchi can go jump in a fire. That ship is Klance tier of reaching

>>4378
Yeah Zhongchi is a garbage ship, a literal bait and switch that I'm still seething about because it was so clear Mihoyo was planning to make it the next big fujobait couple but instead retconned Childe into husbandobait obsessed with the traveler. But I'll fight anyone who ever says HaiKaveh has "nothing there" because it's mindboggling how they got past the higher-ups with the gay shit to the point they pissed off Chinese Alhaitham yumes so bad they tried reporting Kaveh to the Chinese authorities for cucking crimes KEK. Even Alhaitham's Japanese seiyuu said that "Kaveh brings out the humanity in Alhaitham". They're the first ship I've obsessed over in literally years, they're just that fascinating. I totally get it if their dynamic isn't everyone's thing but I feel like a lot of people don't give them a fair judgment since their popularity has left a sour taste in their mouths.

>>4382
>retconned Childe into husbandobait obsessed with the traveler.
Wasn't he always kinda this though? The only things he does in the Liyue story is just follow the Traveler around. You only know him and zhongli were in cahoots right at the end where Zhong says he made a 'contract' with him too. They were pushing them as a ship very slightly (but you had to be extremely fucking delusional to see it. I mean, the chopsticks? really?) but I never saw either of them being close in any way other than simply having fulfilled a goal in the story and later fucked off from one another and that was about it.

Unrelated somewhat but Arknights also had a problem like this when it was first starting that there were barely any men, let alone fujobaits to ship, so the most popular ship for a while were these two.
They have never interacted ever, it's been 5 years and they STILL have never interacted. People wanted to have their angel/devil ship so bad but it never happened and honestly most people only cared for it because there was nothing else (it was this or silver ash/doctor).
Now you have thorns/elysium which is like the default arknights fujoship so everyone forgot about these two. But I'll never forget that pattern of "I desperately need to ship any guy whatsoever that is around right now" that happened in Arknights, and it happened to early Genshin too

>>4406
>Wasn't he always kinda this though?
I don't know, I feel like they really amped the pandering up only afterwards, but maybe it's just me. In the beginning they featured Childe and Zhongli together in a lot of artworks during 1.1 (The version splash art featuring them together, livestream and web event appearances always having them appear side by side, their collab chibis wearing each others shoes, the chopstick gift etc) which made it feel like they were testing the waters, but abandoned the idea because they haven't interacted in literally years by now and Childe's subsequent appearances have all been solo or only with his little brother since his yumes went insane with jealousy when he talked to Yoimiya during that one Inazuma event kek. But that said I don't have a horse in this race, I don't really care about the ship either way.

>But I'll never forget that pattern of "I desperately need to ship any guy whatsoever that is around right now" that happened in Arknights, and it happened to early Genshin too
It happens in a lot of gacha and I never really got into copeships like that. Fate/Grand Order's most popular m/m ship is Gilgamesh and Ozymandias despite them having absolutely no lore together and never having been featured together in-game, but they used to top doujinshi sales during the game's prime.

This one may be too obscure for this thread but it's the first thing that came to mind. Those who keep up with seasonal anime may remember Buddy daddies from a while back. I've seen it hyped up as "Gay spy x family" because of the premise but I felt absolutely zero chemistry between them. IMO one of the guys was such a manchild that it moreso felt like the blonde one was raising two children.

>>4421
I remember that, it was hyped up but then crashed pretty badly, you were definitely not the only one that didn't see chemistry in it.

>>4421
any normie anime that tries to rope a fujo audience with potential 'yaoi bait' 99.9% of the time are gonna be bland and soulless. if the show is too afraid to go all the way and call it a BL romance with other plot elements as the main focus, its a cash grab trying to get fujo bucks while trying to stay in good grace of FOTM audiences. non-yaoi series are only best served to fujo audiences when the showrunners had no intention to make it gay in the first place (e.g. tiger & bunny)

>>4421
>>4424
I never saw it hyped up, the advertisements before its release were pretty sparse and generally it was moids shitposting it for being "gay" looking due to two men on the one promo image. What I have seen are tons of posts claiming it was hyped and sold to them by someone, which I see for a bunch of series where even PVs didn't show much or alter its appearance. I know I've talked about this before but it really confuses me how people will say something was falsely sold to them and they were told it was "the next big thing" but by who? Where did they get this idea? The only people I see saying it are the ones criticizing these series for not being that.

Anyway, I saw chemistry between them since a very basic dynamic was part of the point. It wasn't much to work with, just serviceable. 91 Days did leaving the mafia for your bro better.

>>4430
Personally I don't think T&B was a total coincidence. I've seen people claim Barnaby was originally conceptualized as a female character in early planning and a number of traits were kept from that, you got Nathan being gay all over the place, and a number of character arcs that discuss forms of love and faithfulness. If it was by accident it was because they purposefully built it around the idea of bonds and didn't rein in certain aspects of the main pair's relationship. Then they went onto do Doubledecker and did the same gay-in-all-but-name act with the MCs and had multiple confirmed gay pairs on the side. When gay is an option generally in the cast it makes it that much more likely the MCs could be than MCs in the average show. There is something intentional there that feeds it as a possibility.

I don't know how to explain it but there's tons of shows that don't confirm a gay pairing outright but have a tone and setting that makes them feel more likely to exist. Buddy Daddies is pretty uninspiring, the mixed bag tone doesn't make it as fun to expand upon the relationship, but it had elements that should have ticked those boxes (other characters for example seem to think there's something the MCs aren't acknowledging, parallels are made between a past relationship with a woman and this one, and the finale involves announcing their eloping to father and risking lives for each other to start a new life). In the end I think the writing was just too weak and functional. You can't see the creative spark in it just a series planner making sure it includes all the concept details. Meanwhile you got shit like RobiHachi where the writing is allowed to be stupid and pandering without trying to veer serious, and I can't even explain why the leads are gay as fuck they just are a shipname already. I will take goofy shit and unintentionally goofy shit any day over paint by numbers comedy drama where the most moe point was sleeping in a bathtub.

>>4435
>I never saw it hyped up, the advertisements before its release were pretty sparse and generally it was moids shitposting it for being "gay" looking due to two men on the one promo image.
People in my fujo circles at the time were excited for it. Some time after it aired I've also had a moment where I praised "My new boss is goofy" for being unexpectedly gay for a non-BL anime and then someone replied to me that Buddy daddies was like that too.

>>4421
Kek never watched it since they made it obvious they weren't actually gay from the trailers.
>>4430
Seconding this.

>>4421
buddy daddies gave the impression of being one of those series where the writers knew that fujos would be the main audience of the show but didn't want to commit to actual or implicit homo in the fear of alienating any potential non-fujo watchers so they gave the leads zero homo vibes and even made one of them mention woman every three minutes and then hoped that having two male leads and a slightly suspect title would be enough to attain fujobucks

>>4435
I genuinely don't think Buddy Daddies was ever meant for fujos to begin with, it was one of those "two guys taking care of a baby" comedy where you're supposed to as a woman be wooed by their ability to care for a child. I didn't watch it myself because that's how I saw the premise from the beginning but everyone who did watch it was disappointed.

>There is something intentional there that feeds it as a possibility.
I'm a firm believer in that authors add couples that are meant to be read as gay because they can't explicitly state them to be such to avoid being censored. Even in western countries it would be next to impossible to get a gay main couple greenlit. I don't know why people think it's so preposterous for people to do it, I mean, I absolutely would.

i'm probably alone here but Shuichi and Ouma. Although they're both clearly homos I don't really see them together that much, it's odd because they manage to be more "blatant" than komahina (Ouma being a massive homo around Shuichi and their special hotel event making it basically canon) but they lack what makes komahina interesting (the mutual fascination, the way they occupy each others thoughts but cannot understand each other which was attempted here tbh, the desperate pining on Komaeda's half, the way Komaeda is clearly an "enemy" of Hinata specifically whilst Ouma is more of a deterrent to the whole group)
Shuichi clearly has a crush on Momota, even scolding himself for viewing him that way in their final free time and Shuichi even compares him to Akamatsu his het love interest, the tension they had with each other later in the game was really eyebrow raising at times and Momoto kind of reads as a bit of a closet case with how buddy-buddy he is with Shuichi and how intimate his hotel event is and how he randomly calls the incestfag a queer (though that might just be bc he was raised by grandparents) I might just have my fujogoggles on but i think it works better plus I genuinely don't think he returned Harukawa's feelings at all

>>4460
I felt this way about all the ships in Danganronpa v3. It felt like none of the characters had enough conflict and interaction for my brain to ship anyone. I remember being surprised there were people that shipped Ouma with Rantaro. At least Shuichi interacts with the people he’s often shipped with. But they were still pretty meh. Maybe I missed some supplementary reading or something.

>>4461
>>4460
I liked Gonta/Kokichi, but thats about it, I agree with the characters not having as much chemistry, but personally I also just don't like the V3 cast as much so I think thats a contributing factor.

Rantaro ships confuse me, he's an absolute non-character in my opinion and I don't see how you can care about him enough to ship him with anyone.

>>4462
>Rantaro ships confuse me, he's an absolute non-character in my opinion and I don't see how you can care about him enough to ship him
He's hot

>>4463
>>4462
kinda fucked they killed off the hottest character right away, you could make a case for Ouma secretly lusting after him since he stole his statue and placed it in his room but i can't really picture him dating anyone especially after how boring his hotel event is, Shirogane thinking he's gay is kinda funny considering her later role, ngl the amount of homosexuality in DRV3 was kinda crazy (that martial arts girl, Shuichi being bi, Ouma in general, incestfag doing bondage with Shuichi in his hotel event)
>>4461
nah I agree that the dynamics in the first two games were a lot more intense and interesting, at least there's good fanart

>>4464
>kinda fucked they killed off the hottest character right away
It's kinda dangan tradition to have the 'important seeming character' dying first.
>you could make a case for Ouma secretly lusting after him since he stole his statue and placed it in his room
Eh, pretty sure he just stole it at random since he was stealing a bunch of evidence he calls him nii chan in the manga though which is pretty cute.
>especially after how boring his hotel event is
I thought it was really cute…the event that launched a shit ton of phantom thief AU fanart.
>ngl the amount of homosexuality in DRV3 was kinda crazy
And then Kodaka immediately dropped his fujo audience once he left spikechun, you gotta really stretch it to find anything fujo in his post V3 works (like, maybe Yuma with Makoto but that's kinda all I can think of)

>>4461
Agreed. It had a pretty weak cast of characters. I'm not a huge Danganronpa fan, so I'm not involved in the fandom or anything, but I legitimately cannot remember any of the V3 characters except for Ouma, the engineer girl, and the big guy. The characters just didn't stand out to me at all. I think it's hard to ship two characters when they lack any memorable interactions.

>>4465
ah i don't mean Ouma's hotel event being dull i mean Rantaro's, smh don't remind me how disappointing rain code was hopefully Kodaka's new "danganronpa but not danganronpa" game has something for us
>>4466
there are multiple characters who even with Shuichi i can't really picture having a back and forth with and some I genuinely forgot about since they left no impression on me, a lot of the characters such as the maid, midget robot, the incestfag (his amazing character design being wasted on a siscon will forever annoy me), Rantaro and Shirogane I really can't ship with anyone or even care about their dynamics with other characters even if they themselves had potiental

>>4468
>i mean Rantaro's
Ooooh okay
>hopefully Kodaka's new "danganronpa but not danganronpa" game has something for us
I have really low expectations honestly, Rui's pretty much rushed character design wise for the past few games so he doesn't have time to make good ones anymore so 99% of the characters in it look really bad.

>>4377
No its just boring and some of us do not care how canon a ship is in gachaslop. Especially Hoyo shit. I've seen better and all the shippers have is just listing tropes and saying it's good only because its canon, but that means nothing to me when the canon itself is so boring.

>>4770
So you just hate it because it's "hoyo gachaslop"? Just say so up front so everyone knows you're being a contrarian and won't bother with a reply.

>>4421
Everytime a series that tries to be marketed as fujo content is starting there is always another series airing at the same time that is merely advertised as seinen, shounen, mecha or history series that happens to be five times gayer naturally than anything the alleged fujo series is trying to achieve artificially.
It doesn't help that these series are weirdly focused on appeasing "both sides" so they usually make it (at best) an one-sided love and the other character confirms that he's very hard for women or looking for brothels at least once per episode to make sure that anti-gay fags and husbando fags won't drop it when these people would have never picked the series up to begin with.

>>4774
Yeah no amount of "here's 2 dudes just for you, you dirty fujo!" kind of shilling will ever tear me away from the innate homoeroticism of a basic bitch shounen ship. What's extra insulting is they don't seem to have a fujo anywhere in the production chain to give their notes sniff and tell them if there's anything worth going KYAAA over in there.

>>4774
>>4775
All of those fujobait series have the most boring line-up of men imaginable unless it has enough balls to be a full on yaoi.

The series with ten ikemen with interchangeable body types are the worst ones. It is funny though that actually good series that we think of as "fujobait" like Black Butler or Pretty Boy are shounen series not even shoujo.

>>4775
Yes that part is incredibly weird. I know seinen and shounen where it was women making the adaptions gayer and more fujo. They exist, they work in the industry and homofy series and yet the team that actively want to attract them somehow never get such people on board first.
>>4784
Everytime. And it's such a no brainer again. If you want to attract a big fanbase then add variety. The series I love the the most are those that feature all kinds of men, from shota to 40 year old funny dudes and various body types and amounts of muscles. Plus point if one of them is brown or tanned. And yet all I usually get from fujo targeting series are a bunch of guys that look exactly the same safe for the different hair styles and one single trait that defines them.

Seriously they should just look up shounen and seinen fandoms, look what pairings and characters are popular and get some ideas.

>>4266
Gon and Killua to be honest. I can see where it comes from but I consider neither of them attractive so I was never interested. I am just not into kids and young teens and I can't stand spiky shounen hair characters.

Hannibal, I guess I was never the biggest Silence of the Lambs fan in the first place; but I remember trying really hard to get into this show and ship when it came out and it never clicked for me.

Still love still love all the dark fan art the sweies produces.

>>5068
Same. I can rationally see why it's very good fujobait, but my heart doesn't follow.

>>5068
>>5084
I don't even think they would have sex with each other, just indulge in the mutual corruption fetish by doing heinous things. Spiritually gay at its finest.

I see the angst potential, but it just never clicked.

>>6613
This reminds me that when I watched Bungou stray dogs I never felt anything for Dazai/Chuuya.

>>6617
same, nonna. i can mostly understand what the appeal is, but they set off nothing for me. i never liked chuuya even on his own, though, so there’s a bias here.

I’ve been watching Teen Wolf and it irks me that if I didn’t know that Derek x Stiles is the most popular ship, it wouldn’t have been on my radar at all. After I finished the first and second season, I decided to look into it because I thought there must be more interesting canon content for them later in the series, but apparently seasons 1-2 were when the ship actually became popular. And the explanation for it was that it was a “pair the spares” ship which makes a lot more sense now that I know. Because the canon het ships from those seasons got in the way of the more interesting (imo) gay ships from those two seasons (Scott x Stiles, Jackson x Stiles, or even Derek x Jackson). Even then, I’d have thought the fans would’ve been interested in Danny being canon gay and Jackson’s only actual friend outside of Lydia or even the fact that Stiles has a few comedic gay moments with Danny, but I guess Danny didn’t have enough screen time for fans to latch on. But I do wonder if archival issues might also be at play because I’m pretty sure livejournal was still being used when Teen Wolf first started airing and then tumblr was where most fans probably conversed. Not saying Derek x Stiles wasn’t the most popular at all times, but that other gay ships might not have gotten much attention or archiving even if there was enough content.

>>6745
>I’ve been watching Teen Wolf and it irks me that if I didn’t know that Derek x Stiles is the most popular ship, it wouldn’t have been on my radar at all
Really? That ship is my only recollection of the show even existing. Are they the two leads and it's just the two popular characters being smashed together or are the other characters you mentioned equally given screentime as well?

>>6750
So Scott is the lead of the show and Stiles is his human best friend while Derek is the nephew of the werewolf that bit Scott. They all get a decent amount of screen time. Danny was just a reoccurring character while Jackson had a lot of screen time during the first two seasons but left the show after season 2. But by then, Derek x Stiles was already the most popular ship. And from looking into it more, the biggest reason was that they were two hot guys with an enemy to lovers dynamic. And according to their shippers, they have a lot of chemistry on the show and it picks up in season 3 (which I’m halfway through and have barely seen much with these two. Even the scenes they reference from the first two seasons aren’t that ship worthy imo). But it seems like they also started teasing the ship in the show itself after season 3, but Derek’s actor was sorta on break after season 4, so he didn’t get much screen time after that. I think the fanfic quality also might be in play. I’ve read a bit of Derek x Stiles fanfic and there’s a lot of pretty good fanfics that make me interested in the ship, but canon-wise, I’d have never been interested in it. Also apparently the creators pulled a proto-Voltron incident where they teased the hell out of Derek x Stiles at cons and on social media, which ended up pissing off a lot of fans when Derek x Stiles didn’t happen. I’m surprised I never heard of the fallout in this fandom so they were really good at keeping their issues insular.

>>6752
Thanks for the run-down nonna, I'm shocked Derek isn't the MC since looking from the outside at the fandom that's the impression. I've gotten. Judging from just the arctypes you've listed it seems like Scott/Derek would have been my guess to be most popular though of course actors
>they teased the hell out of Derek x Stiles at cons and on social media, which ended up pissing off a lot of fans when Derek x Stiles didn’t happen.
Of fucking course, one day TV fans will stopping falling for this, but i wonder if that contributed to the kegacy as people would write post-canon fix its out of spite.

>>6752
I know the Voltron comparison is in regards to con teasing, but the difference between the two series is pretty funny in how TW freely baited Stiles, an adult/minor ship, while Voltron fans assblasted Shiro's VA for years for not denouncing Sheith.

>>6756
>I'm shocked Derek isn't the MC since looking from the outside at the fandom that's the impression
I also didn’t think Scott was the MC from seeing the fanfics I would come across while searching specific tags on ao3, I thought Stiles was the MC before watching. He’s the fandom bicycle from what I can tell. I feel like it’s kinda rare for a male main character to not be the fandom bicycle and even rarer for him to not even be in the top three most popular slash ships. (Those go to Derek x Stiles, Peter x Stiles, and Liam x Theo).
>I wonder if that contributed to the legacy as people would write post-canon fix its out of spite
Oh there’s a lot of fix-it and Canon Divergence fics and I imagine the movie from a few years ago spawned a bunch. From what I know, Derek dies in it.

>>6757
It’s absolutely interesting to see older live action TV shows where the fandom was super chill about shipping adult/minor ships. Like Buffy, Smallville, and Teen Wolf all have adult/minor ships as their most popular ones. I guess it helps that the actors are usually older than the characters they portray, but I can’t imagine some of this stuff sliding in modern fandom spaces even with older actors.