✨my Shayla...!✨

SASAMIYA 🌱

I see people posting things like, "Why are you some people obsessed with proving your ship is canon? Who even wants their ships to be canon, it's more fun when it's not?"

I get where people are coming from with this sentiment--it is fun to have your own headcanons, your own control of how you're interpreting the characters, not being reliant on what canon gives you, etc. I'm very much in favor of people doing whatever they want in fanworks, canon be damned! Ship what you want, go wild, ignore canon altogether if you want!

But with HxH and especially Gon and Killua, it IS important to me how essentially canon it is for a number of reasons. One of these is that the bond between them is one of the main emotional cores of the series, and to reduce it down to "Haha no homo! They're just bros! If you see it in ways other than that you're delusional!" is a disservice to what Togashi is writing--and it's essentially willfully misreading the source material.

Obviously, no one is obligated to ship it themselves, no one is obligated to like seeing it in a romantic light, but it irks me when people pick apart all the incredible nuance and beautiful details in HxH, all the rich subtext and meaning, and then pretend that the very present subtext and romantic framing between Gon and Killua isn't there at all. Especially as throughout the years I continue to learn more about Togashi and look even more deeply into HxH and it becomes increasingly more and more crystal clear how intentional it seems, how much of this is thoughtfully put in there for people to pick up on.

There's so much shounen out there that puts on a veneer of gayness--essentially giving the audience just enough vaguely gay things for the female audience (as well as gay audience, etc.) to latch on to for marketing/merchandise reasons, while mostly pushing het ships in the canon material officially. (And I'm not saying in all cases it's like that, but I do think that's the trend specifically with shounen series.) With Togashi, it very much seems like he creates it out of his own genuine personal interest and because that's the story he wants to tell--the kind of story he's wanted to tell for a long time and can get away with now because of changing social norms and the fact that he's already incredibly popular and he owns HxH outright.

And as someone who loves Togashi's storytelling--all of it, not just the gay parts, of course--I care about what he's trying to create and intending to convey and it bothers me to see people outright denying it out of their own biases. I feel like people who deny it's there or refuse to see it in that way at all are missing a big chunk of the series, an important and intentional part of the series. (And this extends to other parts of the series that are queer, too, like Alluka for instance. There's so much in HxH that is queer in some way! Denying it all is there is ridiculous!)

And again, it doesn't mean people have to ship it, everyone is allowed to see what's there and ultimately choose to see it in a platonic way if they want, it's more when I see outright denial that this is the author's intent when all signs point to it being so that bothers me.

I think part of this is people just being casual viewers/readers of the series (though some of it is pretty blatant IMHO) and not being aware of all the Deep Lore that points to it being way more than in your average shounen, but a LOT of it is simply homophobia. It's frustrating being in a fandom for years where there are a bunch of people who go about picking apart all the nen powers and the beauty of Chimera Ant Arc in exhaustive detail and then utterly and completely deny that there are sound, well-documented reasons why a large part of the fandom sees it as a gay/queer work.

So hopefully this explains some of why I bother to argue the canon aspect at all, and why I think it matters to a lot of people specifically in HxH fandom.

People go on about good healthy queer rep but I cannot express how much I want unhealthily devoted queer rep. Raise your lover from the dead no matter the cost. Kill to get them to safety. Trade your soul for theirs. Die to reunite with them. I want gothic hyper-devotion codependent lovers

I ship this ship because:

I have eyes

I can see

I am the smartest person in the room

I receive divine revelations about them in the dead of night, alone in my chambers

hunters

Please— don’t go where I can’t follow

Madohomu renders

( <= green bean

sad caitvi

intimidation check