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main index Narrative
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"The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life!"
Some people are fans of Slash — the Shipping of two same-sex characters from a fandom together. Some people take this is a little further though; they don't just like Slash but also dislike the idea of Shipping two opposite sex people together, even if those doing the shipping are themselves straight.
This is a subculture-within-a-subculture; these people are often both a Yaoi Fan and a Yuri Fan yet reject heterosexual pairings. This can range from people who merely prefer to pair off every character they like with another of the same sex to the more extreme people who appear to argue that writing slash is a politically liberating act. Queer fans, for example, may have an averse reaction to the heteronormativity of the media and respond by augmenting queer representation in a work. Occasionally it can be an unexpected by-product of backlash against the addition of Mary Sue Original Characters just to pair off canonical characters.
The extreme versions are the kind who write hate mail to authors for daring to give their male shipped characters a wife, and impose Die for Our Ship on any female character who so much as has sexual tension with one of "their" guys, often in the most sadistic and humiliating ways. However more often than not, normal fans of Het is Ew are those who are just tired of the ubiquity of het romance plots in all variety of fiction and the tropes that go with them, particularly the stereotyping of everyone involved. Despite this, the intensity of the extremists has been known to scare artists away or make them outright refuse to draw yaoi or yuri (or at least force them to write under a different name).
Counterintuitively, there may be a homophobic element to this trope in some cases; straight people who subscribe to the notion may feel that their own sexuality is threatened if they find a work that includes a member of their own sex arousing. This is one of the reasons for the prevalence of lesbian porn aimed at straight men; viewers don't need to worry about being turned on by another guy. Ironically, most female fans who subscribe to Het is Ew actually enjoy both Yaoi and Yuri, and will celebrate the explicit coupling of two girls as well as two guys (although they do usually prefer one subculture over the other to some extent). Male straight Yuri fans have also been known to enjoy Yaoi as well. The fact that the Yaoi and Yuri subcultures work together quite cooperatively may have something to do with this.
For fanfic writers who are not interested in the extremist hate invested in Die for Our Ship, they instead often Ship the person "in the way" with a different person in the cast who is the same sex as them - i.e. if they Ship Bob and Dave, but Alice is Bob's Canon girlfriend, they write fics about Alice realizing she actually loved her best friend Carol all along, rather than about Alice dying in a house fire. This isn't universally true, but not uncommon either. Basically, when these fans write Fan Fic, Everyone Is Gay.
It's worth noting that this is a fan-reaction Trope, dealing with the preference of a number of slash and yaoi fans to read about only homosexual relationships. It's not about in-universe anti-heterosexual feelings expressed within a work of fiction.
Depending on what circles you run in, this can actually be a joke, usually about why they don't write "gen" ("general") fic.
See also Het. Not at all related to disparaging the Russian word for 'No'.
In-Universe examples only please, and remember, this is about a specific attitude towards heterosexuality, not just homosexual pairings.
— Aunt Ida, Female Trouble
Examples open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
Fan Works
Film
Literature
Live-Action TV
Tabletop Games
Theater
Webcomics
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Western Animation
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