[HPforGrownups] Re: This Ship stuff sounds like shojo (semi-OT)

[Firebolt]

No: HPFGUIDX 11617

Charmian wrote:

> --- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Jim Ferer" <jferer at y...> wrote:
> > I'm curious about the slash pairings we talk about here --
> Ron/Harry,
> > Harry/Draco (!) and so on.
>
> Hmmm. I'm not a slash fan myself, but I'm an anime fan as well as a
> HP fan, so I'll try to help you answer these questions. In Japan,
> slash is known as "yaoi" or "shounen-ai" (literally boy-love). This
> can take the form of same-sex relationships in the canon of shoujo
> (literally girl, vs. "shounen" or boy anime/manga) manga/anime, or as
> doujinshi (fanproduced comics) depicting non-canon shounen-ai
> relationships between characters. (The companies, for some reason,
> allow this copyright violation). There are, as they come out of
> different cultures with different takes on sexuality, some
> differences between yaoi and slash, but it's confusing. Some yaoi has
> lots of emotional exploration or angst, other yaoi is plot-what-plot
> sex. Most Western fans like the emotional aspects of it, though,
> IMHO.

Being an anime otaku (obsessee) in training, here's my understanding.
Doujinshi are fan-produced, and the companies allow them because they're
essentially free advertising for the
company. The difference between yaoi and shounen-ai is that yaoi tends
to be much more sex-oriented than shounen-ai, which is more
emotion-oriented - although there are of course
yaoi which are emotional as well. Shoujo manga/anime tend to have
shounen-ai couples because most yaoi/shounen-ai fans are female. The
equivalent of yaoi/shounen-ai for female
characters is yuri/shoujo-ai. The difference between yaoi/shounen-ai and
Western slash is that in yaoi (I'll just refer to both shounen-ai and
yaoi as yaoi from now on, it's
simpler), the roles of the couple are more rigid. There is always one
'seme', the dominant partner, and one 'uke', the submissive partner. In
pairing notation, the seme character
goes first. This is why slash fans who are also anime fans may write
'Ron/Harry' at the top of one fic and 'Harry/Ron' on another - in the
first fic, Ron is the agressive initiator,
and in the second, it's Harry. I hope this clarifies.

- Firebolt