Objective? (Crowner Change (9/15/11): Ho Yay

The descrption of Ho Yay says:

"Those moments of plot, dialogue, acting, etc., that could be interpreted as overtly homoerotic, but not as much if you know the real context."

This basic description seems to suggest that Ho Yay is YMMV as it requires an interpretation of a moment that probably isn't homoerotic in context.

I'm not following. The description says that an interpretation is required. Does that mean there has to be a Show Within a Show for this to be invoked so that one of the characters can interpret something?

edited 5th Aug '11 10:18:38 PM by asbjfalfkj

No. It just means that it's when a work deliberately and/or accidentally invokes the idea of toying with homosexuality.

That is, when there is fairly clear subtext between two characters of the same sex/gender.

It may need a subjective banner though.

If we make this subjective on the basis of you might not notice it happening or not, many other tropes will have to made subjective as well. Just saying.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:25:23 PM by nuclearneo577

There is often deliberate homosexual subtext. The first example I think of is that of Issei and Shirou from Fate Stay Night. Issei blushes around Shirou, seems to get jealous when rivals for attention appear, has a lot of respect for him (enough to be kind of weird) doesn't like girls much, eats Shirou's lunches (which is pretty indicative for the medium and culture) and even seems to take him on a date. Couple things like that. It's actually strong enough to really make him Ambiguously Gay, but the point is the subtext is all over the place when those two are together.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:27:36 PM by Arha

The problem here is that the description says that an interpretation is required. None of the other tropes you pointed out nuclearneo 577 say that an interpretation is required and all of them are objective. Not one of them requires an interpretation. I don't need to interpret a moment to say that the fourth wall is being broken. I may not notice it, but that doesn't mean it's not being broken. Same with lampshading, shout-out, take that, and easter egg. I may not notice it or know what trope/show is being referenced, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. None of that requires an interpretation on the part of the viewer.

And Cygan Angel, if it is accidental than it definitely is YMMV as Word of God never intended it.

Also the description says that it probably isn't homoerotic if viewed in context, so again, Word of God didn't intend it.

At the very least, this trope needs a description rewrite if it is to remain objective.

edited 5th Aug '11 11:10:50 PM by asbjfalfkj

Yeah, there is often deliberate homosexual context, but there are also plenty of works where we have no reason at all to think that the author intended homosexual context, and sometimes every reason to believe otherwise. It is just that some people can't seem to wrap their heads around a close friendship that doesn't involve sex and sexuality. The whole Frodo-Sam thing from Tolkien's works is a good example. They were written by a conservative Christian with very 19th century values, and people expect us to think that he had sex in mind when portraying the relationships between male characters? Yet we have a whole Ho Yay subsection for The Lord Of The Rings. This is entirely different from, say, Harry Potter where we have a novel written series written by a contemporary socially liberal author who explicitly told us one of the main characters is gay, and even then we have all the Yaoi Fangirls reading sex into every time that male characters exchange three words. Heck, we have the fact that the narrator (third person and written by an openly heterosexual female author) describes male characters as good looking (and "good looking" doesn't even necessarily mean sexually arousing) as evidence that Harry Potter himself is homosexual.

At minimum, the page should be split between explicit homoeroticism page and and a YMMV where the slash goggle crowd can write up all their fervid imaginings. The page as written says that it is about "about a narrative device that is used to toy with the idea of homosexuality" yet I'm simply not convinced that many of the examples given are anything other than fans applying their own fetishes to works that were never intended to toy with the idea of homosexuality.

edited 6th Aug '11 4:18:15 AM by Auxdarastrix

And if you read the page closely, you would notice that there is a subjective page called Ho Yay Shipping that exists for just that purpose. It was split off a couple months back.

For what it's worth, whenever I see this trope on the wiki (and I see it a lot), it usually means "this work has two male characters in it that some troper finds sexy".

It may be intended as objective, but I seriously doubt it's used objectively.

Exactly why Ho Yay Shipping was made. Because Ho Yay was used entirely for squeeing fangirls, and it had lost all value as a trope.

In any case...the real problem with Ho Yay is that we'd have to do a massive clean-up to get it to really work. And a name change. Like Deliberate Ho Yay or something. Intentional Ho Yay. As it stands now, not enough was converted to Ho Yay Shipping and people are still liable to add their sexy man-on-man fantasies to Ho Yay.

Yeah, a problem I've noticed for a while is that only bare-minimum clean-up was done from the Ho Yay section into Ho Yay Shipping, though it's obviously because it'd need huge re-hauling and maybe a clean-up of Ho Yay's description (since the very section of Ho Yay Shipping needs to be pointed out), and like the above poster said, probably the name itself.

And I was going to talk about the problem between the clear-cut example of Lord Of The Rings being largely Ho Yay Shipping versus deliberate Ho Yay as illustrated by Auxdarastrix, versus the ambiguity you CAN find in modern day series, especially in the anime and manga (that I've watched and read), which has artists and/or writers who DO pander towards fangirls and fanboys without ever really giving particular romantic or sexual signs, but I'll save that for tomorrow when I'm more awake.

The LARGEST issue I'm finding while browsing through the Anime section right now, though, is that a lot of people are just listing names. For example, underneath "In Blah Blah Blah, there's Les Yay between Blah and Blah2, with Blah dreams about dancing with Blah2 a lot in her dreams while surrounded by pink bubbles and hearts and people shouting 'You two waltz wonderfully together!'" someone will simply write "Hinoe towards Yuka." Since Ho Yay isn't a descriptive trope, that doesn't really say anything to me if I don't know the characters. Does Hinoe blush a lot around Yuka but not other girls? Does Hinoe call Yuka her "bride" or something? Does Hinoe also dream about dancing with another girl, i.e. Yuka, surrounded by the aforementioned things? My main point: How do I know there's deliberate Ho Yay between two characters if there's no indication of such in the examples listed?

edited 14th Aug '11 11:37:44 PM by HopelessOsakaD

Ho Yay is a tough one. What is objective evidence standard for Ho Yay that people want while remaining subtext? Top Gun is the obvious example- laden with Ho Yay but each individual scene or piece of dialogue probably doesn't count in itself.

There's definitely plenty of cases of deliberate homoerotic subtext (Scrubs, Narita's dicking around with the Durarara slash fans, Ivy and Julie's "sleeping together" in Echo, Harley and Ivy's habitual Sexy Shirt Switch, Scrubs, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold's bromance, Scrubs, and, lest we forget, Scrubs). The problem is that there's not always any confirmation that, yes, that scene was intended to be homoerotic, and there's a sort of sliding scale of homoeroticism that ranges from "They are about two seconds away from fucking" to "Your slash goggles are on way too tight."

I think the biggest problem is deciding whether or not there needs to be explicit Word of God or in-series confirmation for it to be listed as deliberate/obvious Ho Yay.

Oh this debate again.

The problem with relying on Word of God that Ho Yay is intentional is that TPTB have been known to put in intentional Ho Yay and then never even mention it, for fear of the the reaction (There's a book called The Celluloid Closet which is all about old movies that did this).

And then you get stuff like the anime Ho Yay fanservice, since Yaoi Fangirls apparently have a whole lot of disposable income and so people try to hook the fanbase, or stuff like the new Sherlock Holmes movies of X-Men First Class, where the actors and people involved spend a whole lot of time playing around with the Ho Yay between the leads with no intention of ever actually making them a canon couple.

I think the description is contributing to the problem, it's not very descriptive. The only requirement is the possible interpretation of subtext. I think it should have a line that says something along to lines of:

Ho Yay occurs when two characters of the same sex share an intensely intimate relationship with one another to the point that it could be construed as romantic subtext, rather than simply a very close friendship. Or similarly if a character reacts towards another of the same gender in a way that is more characteristic of a crush or romantic interest than anything else.

If I understand correctly, we made Ho Yay Shipping (which isn't actually a trope in the first place) in order to siphon off abuse of Ho Yay, and it isn't working. So we need a better solution.

Start with a cleanup, like moving the subsections for The Bible, Lord Of The Rings and Sherlock Holmes over to Ho Yay Shipping, in bulk. Granted there is actual homoeroticism mentioned in the Bible. The problem is that it is always paired with such words as "abomination". Cut the Real Life and History sections, as they are almost exclusively filled with "famous people that someone desperatly wants to claim is gay" and if there are actual examples of out gay people, well, I just don't see the point of making a list of Real Life gay people on this page.

edited 15th Aug '11 1:41:24 PM by Auxdarastrix

regarding Real Life: Even when, like Drakyndra said, straight male friends (like the Heroes or the Supernatural guys) tease and climb all over each other in interviews?

The thing about saying "it's not working" is that we didn't really ever apply the effort to make it work. We need a clean-up, and then decide if it's not working.

The trope description itself seems to be way too hopeful about seeing this stuff in fiction. "With the emergence of Yaoi Fans and Yuri Fans, and the more open-minded writers, this changed forever. Nowadays, most Ho Yay moments can be treated as serious implications of a romantic relationship, that the authors must take into account, because even if they didn't intend it in that way, the fans will." It admits that fans will see it anywhere whether the author intended it or not, and at the same time claims that this means that whenever they do, the author was aware that they would and thus didn't do it unintentionally. Or at least it's phrased way too much like it means that.

And that's not the only problem. The definition of the trope changes between the beginning and the end of the description. The first lines make it out to be "when it looks like this but isn't," the last ones say that that's Ho Yay Shipping and this trope is when it's intended (albeit with the above quoted lines implying it's always intended these days).

So we should start by fixing this (I'm not sure exactly how, so I won't do it yet). I suppose we'll see if it works then. But let me join those who doubt it will. Assume the following example was written, as it may well have been, by someone understanding the trope needing to be objective and intended: "The Friendship is Magic series takes the Les Yay to new heights, incorporating it into actual plot points. "Griffon the Brush-Off" plays exactly like Pinkie Pie trying to vie for Rainbow Dash's attention after her old flame shows up. It even starts with something very closely resembling Pepe le Pew chasing Penelope Pussycat, complete with Pinkie doing his little love hop." Well, I have to concede the point that it kind of plays like that, the same way as a cloud might look kind of like a duck. The Pepe le Pew reference is obviously intentional if it really is that clear. But it could be just about chasing someone funnily. And the rest of it? What possible way is there to determine whether something like that is intentional? Only the "always assume it's intentional" rule could have anything to say to that, and it's just not true.

I suppose another option is that all accepted examples have to be way sexier/more quasi-romantic than this so that there's no mistaking them. But it seems that would have to be at a level where even Frodo and Sam (assuming they were in a modern work where it might be intended) would barely count, if at all. In other words, to move away from falling into subjectivity, you might have to raise the bar for how blatant behaviour counts so high that it changes the whole thing from what it was.

I suppose the best we can do at this point is still to clean up the definition and the examples, being pretty harsh about the latter when it comes to ones where there's just no way to tell.

(And yes, I may have a bias against the example I used. If I knew the creators intended it, I'd probably just think it's kind of cute, but what makes me react negatively is that I've been getting the feeling that there are fans of the series who are way too imaginative about things like that.)

edited 16th Aug '11 9:15:33 AM by VVK

No, what it admits is that the fans will see it as proof of a serious relationship even when the authors just put it there as a tease. Not the same thing.

People saying that a particular scene is rather homoerotic (and squeeing over it) is no more claiming that it's True Love Forever than anyone who thinks that every single moment of Ship Tease for every pairing is an indication of canon pairings.

Some people just appreciate moments of Ho Yay.

I'm starting to think this is just one of those utterly unsalvageable tropes.

How, exactly? As has been said, some people go overboard but others just enjoy the male-on-male/girl-on-girl teasing that creators will give them.