Disclaimer: Includes Yuri on Ice spoilers. ":D"
I'm gonna talk a little about fujoshi pandering/fujoshi baiting (to me, they're the one and the same). First to clear some terms: fujoshi is Japanese for "rotten girl", not a very nice term, but it means girls who are into reading/watching series that have gay guys or implied gay guys in them. Or just guys but the fujoshi want to see them together anyway. This term is used when talking about Japanese animation or Japanese comics mostly, I don't really know a word for a person who likes gay guys in Western media. Maybe "fujoshi" applies to them too.
Fujoshi baiting is pretty much the same thing as queer baiting. Let me quote Wikipedia: The term refers to what happens "when people in the media (usually television/movies) add homoerotic tension between two characters to attract more liberal and queer viewers with the indication of them not ever getting together for real in the show/book/movie". So, baiting is purely a marketing gimmick.
Fujoshi baiting has been a hot topic for the past years because a lot of the sports anime is about guys so the creators add little hints of "these characters might or might not have something going on" to attract fujoshis. Why do this? Because if a fujoshi likes what she sees, that means more money. It's like baking a cake: most of the eaters (=non-fujoshi) like it as it is and are willing to buy your cake but if you add one little cherry on the top you get a whole bunch of new potential cake-eaters (=fujoshi). This is why fujoshi baiting exists, at least in my opinion.
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| Case in point: Free! Iwatobi Swim Club. Totally not full of fujoshi baiting moments. |
...and these are just a small portion of everything that's going on between them. The whole plot develops and moves forward because these two interact with each other. The writers basically write this huge tension between them and everyone's hooked. There's a lot of discussion whether these two actually will end up together or will this series just end up being a massive bait. I'm positive this will be a bait but that will make the series badly written in my opinion. The whole plot up to the middle of the first season is about the main character's sexual awakening which is all thanks to this silver-haired man appearing into his life. So if that's just brushed off as something that never happened, I'm gonna judge the writer pretty badly.
I wish the fujoshi baiting would stop actually. I only become sad because of it. Give me actual romance, not just hints that are never confirmed to be true. I've been longing for an anime that has a romance between two guys that develops just as normally as any other romantic relationship. Such thing just doesn't exist. Now some of you might raise their voices and ask "What about BL and shonen-ai?" (BL = boy's love, shonen-ai = romance between boys, both are genres). Well, BL or shonen-ai anime is not what I'm looking for. I've yet to find a shonen-ai anime that has this sort of slowly developing normal romance setting. In shonen-ai there's always somebody kissing someone else against their will or rape attempts or just otherwise stupid plots. I just want to see a normal romantic story. There's actually one movie I have my eyes on that seems promising, but can't say for sure yet because I haven't watched it .
I don't actually know what gay people think about fujoshis and fujoshi baiting. Do they see it as fetishization? This would also be an interesting topic to make research on.
Happy thoughts,
Oona
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