There are but a few works where homosexual feelings can be stated as canon (aside the BL genre). Instead, we often have to make do with subtext and ambiguous sentences, situations, or facial expressions.
The height of frustration, that is.
Not being able to ship two male characters without receiving the fatal “That’s just your yaoist imagination” argument is considerably irritating, and comes from the fact that you just have the subtext on your side, whereas the text will rather be on the side of your adversary.
(Note that your adversary may have already eaten his/her hat on Killua’s case in Hunter X Hunter, where the amount of subtext may have exceeded the amount of text.)
Let’s take the example of Hikaru no Go. The two main reasons that are opposed when shipping Akira and Hikaru to people who can’t even consider the idea are the following :
1. Hikaru is interested in Akari.
2. There are not romantic feelings between Akira and Hikaru; they merely see each other as Go rivals.
The first reason is not even worth lingering over. When does Hikaru ever think of Akari, except when he randomly bumps into her at school ?
The second reason is more interesting, and it may concern many other works than Hikaru no Go: that so-called lack of romantic feelings between true rivals.
(Who are so much rivals that they think of each other each hour of the day.)
But what are we exactly saying when waving that “romantic feelings” argument ? Are we speaking about some shojoish sentimental effusion ? Or about unexpressed, bubbling feelings ?
For those who may not know, romanticism is not exactly what the word means to most people nowadays – some insipid, mushy romance that movies, books, animes, and bad shôjo are filled with.
Romanticism, basically, is an artistic movement that aimed at revolting against classicism and rationalization by letting intense emotions run wild out of aristocratic norms. These emotions being multifarious and (fortunately) not limited to love. Romanticism, hence, may be expressed through violence, desperation, morbidity, passion, obsession.
(That is not to say that the romantic movement was free from insipid and mushy romances.)
If we were to take musical exemples : Thais’ Meditation, which everyone of you has at least heard once (and which may have, hence, led you to think that classical music is fundamentally insipid, mushy, and boring) could easily fit in the failures of romanticism, which explains quite well why it now invades the worst tear-jerker works of our time.
WhereasLiszt’s Sonata could, in return, give a perfect example of the masterpieces that romanticism is able to create.
Let’s go back to Akira and Hikaru, now. We all agree there is no confession whatsoever. Actually, their interaction is extremely limited all through the manga, whereas we all have the impression that it constitutes the majority of the book.
That is precisely because both Akira and Hikaru share the same obsessional passion towards each other. They are constantly worried about their own progress in Go, but not only.
Can you remember Akira, panicking as Hikaru, depressed from what happened to Sai, thought of stopping Go ?
Can you remember how easily both of them, and especially the well-mannered Akira, lose their temper when interacting with each other ?
Can you remember the intensity of their long awaited match, for which Akira counted the exact amount of time they had to wait ?
Can you remember how Akira guesses right about Sai, saying he is the one that “understands Hikaru the most”, and how Hikaru reacted as if these were words of confession ?
(That was, actually, more than a confession. That was the irrefutable proof that Akira has cracked the most intimate, and rationally unbelievable, secret of Hikaru.)
Advancing individually on a common path to an upcoming and awaited reunion, yet worrying about the other and thinking obsessively about him to the point of fully understanding him without almost any direct communication ?
Could there really be a more fundamentally romantic background between two characters ?
Might I add, though gay-ship-deniers may have missed it, that the entire character of Akari is an afterthought. She was probably thrown in there because someone in the editing department or somewhere higher up in the publisher wasn’t comfortable with putting out a series aimed at the Shonen Jump audience without the token girl love-interest (remember, this was back in the 2000s, when being gay was still a pretty big sin and executives thought people cared about fake Twilight-type “romance”). I will ignore for now the wholly sexist and misogynistic implication of that decision, but it is clear to me that she was malicious compliance on the part of the writer, who was only kind enough to give her some form of redemption towards the end of the story, and not write her into a total bitch. It’s more than evident that the entire story of Hikago could stand on its own without her altogether, however.
I like to think that the primary concern of the storyline, the relationship between Hikaru and Akira, is subtly reminiscent of the practice in ancient Greece of using soldiers engaged in homosexual/homoerotic comradeship for an elite force (the modern form of such comradeship among soldiers in the two World Wars is further explored by J. Glenn Gray in this book). The army is strong because of the romantic bond the soldiers share with each other. Though Hikaru and Akira’s relationship is presented as rival in nature throughout most of the story, the last abovesaid scene is the pivot point that pushes their relationship beyond that of purely hostile rivalry into entrusted comradeship.
One only has to consider: if only homosexuality isn’t such a taboo in the 21st century (and people like to think we’re more open-minded than our ancestors, LOL bitch please), this ship would’ve been sailing far sooner, Akari wouldn’t even exist and we won’t be here having this argument at all. I love Japan, but man do I sometimes really hate the homophobia and heteronormativity that pervades their society (which is not even homegrown but brought in by Westerners).
(Which is not to say that romantic heterosexual relationships are less valid, but only if the characters themselves are just as solid with an equally solid storyline to back up their relationship. At the very least there is no fucking way someone can hope to convince me that the writer meant for Hikaru to be with Akari as if that wasn’t already damn obvious with them going their separate ways in canon.)
