Misused: Ho Yay.Axis Powers Hetalia

So, on the main Ho Yay page, it says: This trope does not include genuine ship teases or scenes of intentional Homoerotic Subtext between straight characters.

Why does Axis P Owers Hetalia, part of the Boys' Love Genre, have a page then? Seems like an excuse for fangirls to squee.

Wait... APH is BL? Sez who? õ_õ All I can think of is some sort of "cute boys doing cute things with occasional Ship Tease" o_õ

While I'd just as soon delete all examples of the Ho Yay Audience Reaction, on the grounds that it has been clearly demonstrated that everything in the world is a possible example, and taking time to list examples for anything is little more than troper tales about people's own personal slash/yaoi fangirl/boy wankery, I don't buy the argument that Axis Powers Hetalia is Boys' Love Genre.

Wikipedia calls it Yaoi. Isn't that often focused on homoerotic subtext?

As seen in Content Violations, wikipedia is not always a credible source for anime-related things. From what I have seen, while there is a significant amount of Yaoi here (it's a more than just subtext), the main focus of the work is more one of edutainment.

edited 5th Jul '12 4:10:03 AM by jkbeta

It's a comedy, not boys love. The fanbase writes all the slash, not the author.

What?

Hetalia is not Boys' Love. It's just filled with lots of Ho Yay.

The only "official" couple I can think of in Hetalia is Hungry and Austria which is mixed gender.

Excellent example of Wikipedia not knowing its ass from the keyboard.

/ahem

APH. Is. Most DEFINITELY. NOT. YAOI.

It has no *Focus* whatsoever in m/m romance or m/m sexual relations.

What it Does have is an, eh, lively fanbase that simply loves to pick the work (and world history) apart for Ho Yay to fuel their shipping. (I would know, I'm one of them... :P) A fanbase that wears huge lavender glasses and simply refuses to take them off.

What it ALSO has is a modest number of actual hints at, and gags of, m/m romance/sexiness and (especially in the online-only content) some blatant BL-tinted fanservice (varying degrees of undress, such things).

What it ALSO has is France. Whose established character as a die-hard womaniser doesn't stop him from, canonically, flirting with a male country or two. On occasion. For laughs? For real? Just unable to stop the flirt machine? Nobody knows. (Fandom likes to think him as something of a sexual predator/champion.)

What it ALSO has is loads of completely platonic m/m interaction, the type of which is normally seen, you guessed it, more or less exclusively in BL/yaoi. It's kind of hard to explain, but I would describe it as something you would expect from *female* characters in a moe work. Or gender-neutral perhaps.

And yet the defining parts of BL/yaoi are missing.

Agh, did I have a point in here? Ah yes. There it flies.

So my point is, APH does some things that are pretty much associated with BL only, yet the central definitive parts (m/m romance and/or sexiness) are missing. Thus, not BL. Especially not yaoi.

edited 5th Jul '12 6:26:47 AM by peccantis

[1] is not Boys' Love Genre. Think: besides Chibitalia/Holy Rome and possibly Ger Ita (and even that we don't know), do you actually see any slash in the series itself? No, there isn't any, discounting the Ho Yay itself. The fandom's just overrun with shippers.

Yeah, Chibitalia stays in the realms of childhood crush and the "main couple" of the series (Germany and Italy) are even not a couple; there is no hard evidence, only a lot of ship tease that can be either read as non-sexual friendship (this doesn't have much support due to the fandom being, yes, overrun by shippers) or puppy love.

All the other "establishing" BL moments are one-off 4-panel gags, such as Sweden insisting Finland is (still) his wife (Finland disagrees and is uncomfortable with the idea), random characters sleeping next to each other (including the (running?) gag or Germany finding out carefree not-quite-self-conscious Italy has fallen asleep in Germany's bed, naked... again... it falls on the reader to decide whether Germany secretly likes it or just feels awkward), Grandpa Rome having the idea that Germany and Italy are together, one-off gag which implied that Japan and Greece had had sex... And possibly France being France but my memory fails on this one. He likes to be naked though. For laughs.

Soooo anyways, I think my point is, this series has a bunch of intended Ho Yay. Quite a bunch. I don't know girly moe series at all but I can imagine they tend to have similar levels of intended Les Yay going on.

As for the concerns of OP, I say "no, not misuse" (in the sense of a BL series having a Ho Yay page). And there were no accusations of other types of misuse or abuse?

edited 24th Aug '12 4:37:40 AM by peccantis

Without intense shipping goggles on, the only two people who even remotely seem like they could conceivably be a couple are Germany/Italy.

Also, the Ho Yay misuse problem extends to just about every show ever made, for the purposes of this site. If we try to fix Hetalia, we should start combing through everything else, too.

EDIT: I've only seen the anime of Hetalia - I didn't realize there were omakes with Ho Yay in them. Apologies.

edited 7th Jul '12 4:51:59 PM by LargoQuagmire

Clocking due to lack of activity.

I always thought of Axis Powers Hetalia (all canonical versions in any media) as being one long Historical In-Joke written by a creator inordinately fond of ship teasing who is not going to let the near-absence of female characters get in the way of either one. The fanbase just takes things Up To Eleven, as always.

Locking.