Needs Help: Ho Yay

There's a whole family of tropes here that needs a lot of help.

Ho Yay/Les Yay, Foe Yay Shipping, and Incest Yay Shipping are supposed to be fans spotting shippy moments between characters that are not canon. Homoerotic Subtext, Foe Romance Subtext, Incest Subtext, and Ship Tease are supposed to be for "canon" teasing—maybe they won't go anywhere, but the teasing is intentional.

That's what these are supposed to be. But we are having a lot of trouble telling the difference between the Yay tropes and the Subtext tropes, not helped by multiple conflicting cleanup efforts. Foe Yay Shipping was renamed from just Foe Yay around the launch of Foe Romance Subtext (but is still used a lot), while Incest Yay Shipping was renamed from just Incest Yay because Fast Eddie felt like it was endorsing incest.

I don't know what we need to do here, but I do know we need to talk about it. Here are the stats, for context:

Opened; this is a pervasive problem that we need to address. There's a part of me that kinda wants to do example cuts on all the Yay pages and be done with them.

To get the ball rolling, I'm going to address a very important issue with these "Tropes".

While they're different in definition, in practice, they can be completely indistinguishable.

Take Ho Yay, Ship Tease, and Homoerotic Subtext. There was a whole ATT debate about whether or not LGBT works can even have Ho Yay, as the entire point of Ho Yay is that it's just shippers picking up on unintentional subtext. The question became about how we can even identify if a moment between two same-sex characters is intentional teasing, or just something that viewers noticed, when the characters involved are explicitly gay- as at that point, the odds for the teasing being intentional is more likely, but there's still a chance of it being unintentional.

What it boils down to is, if the only difference is that one is fan interpretation and the other is fans noticing intentional subtext, we have to do a lot of guesswork to decide whether or not a specific moment isn't intentional, which leads to a lot of shoehorned examples and complications.

TL;DR: Some of these are intentional, others are unintentional, and there's very little way to actually know what examples fall into what category.

IIRC, one reason why Accidental Nightmare Fuel was combined with High Octane Nightmare Fuel into the regular Nightmare Fuel we have today was because it was often very hard to tell whether or not something was intentionally scary. The same issue seems to be happening here. It can be hard to tell whether a moment is meant to hint at romance or if fans are just looking too hard into it.

Although it might not be practical, a similar approach could work here; merging the intentional tropes with the accidental ones (though I'm not sure whether it would be better to merge the "yay" into the subtext, or the other way around).

Alternatively, I would not be totally opposed to making the "yay" pages (or at least Ho Yay, since it's the most problematic one) into definition-only Fan Speak pages (as Willbyr seems to be suggesting), since some fans will interpret literally any interaction between two characters as romantic.

Edited by Zuxtron on Nov 23rd 2019 at 11:00:31 AM

I know a while back we started declaring Ho Yay between actual gay characters to simply be Ship Tease. I believe it started with The Legend of Korra; Korra/Asami had a big folder on the Ho Yay page, but when the finale confirmed it as canon we eventually decided to move it to the Ship Tease page. Likewise, RWBY has a big Ho Yay page but Yang/Blake got moved to Ship Tease because while it's not official yet it's been confirmed as possible instead of just wishful thinking. And She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has no Ho Yay page, just a Ship Tease page filled with gay pairings.

I still don't know what to do with all that. I'm just trying to provide more context.

EDIT: I'm not completely sure about those suggestions, but at the very least it's a good point about the evolution Nightmare Fuel went through.

Edited by Discar on Nov 23rd 2019 at 8:01:07 AM

In principle there is a big difference between a work that heavily implies two characters are attracted to each other in order to advance some theme in the work, and the phenomenon where fans imagine literally any interaction between two characters is romantic.

I can see how that could be sometimes be difficult to distinguish in practice .

I think it's worth noting that Foe Yay is a disambiguation page and not a trope or Audience Reaction (as previously noted on Ask The Tropers and Image Pickin), so those wicks should go under one of the pages listed on the main Foe Yay page.

Cutting or giving an Example Sectionectomy to any of them seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially since Ho Yay already has a cleanup thread. According to Renamed Tropes, Incest Yay was actually named to Incest Subtext, even though a lot of examples on there, such as the Folger's coffee commercial, seem to be accidental. I'm still not entirely sure about the difference between Homoerotic Subtext and gay Ship Tease.

I touched on that a bit in the OP, but the TRS thread that renamed Foe Yay was seven years ago, and cleanup has still gone precisely nowhere. As you can see from the stats, people like the Yay names; understandable, as they were existing fanspeak terms before we got a hold of them.

I have an idea that is either genius or stupid, not sure yet. Like Nightmare Fuel, maybe we should give up on the distinction. In fact, maybe we should go further, turn all the various Yay tropes to exampleless fanspeak pages, and redirect the examples to Ship Tease. Ship Tease pages can be soft split between Ho Yay and Foe Yay if individual works merit it.

Would that solve anything, or just make more problems?

Edited by Discar on Nov 23rd 2019 at 9:42:55 AM

Here's the thing. The "Fans notice unintended subtext" thing is a phenomenon, and I do believe having a designated area for this sort of thing is helpful to keep it off of the main page. The issue is that the lines are blurry, and people seem to not realize that the Yay tropes aren't intentional.

I'm not sure if merging is a good idea, because then the resulting pages may become overwhelmed with fan speculation. That's if they aren't already, of course... considering we don't have anywhere for them to put their Hetero non-Foe Yay-pairing wonkage AFAIK.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 23rd 2019 at 12:53:23 PM

Shipping Goggles already cover the phenomenon in which "fans see romantic subtext in interactions which there are none" though. The Yay pages are just specific variations of the characters involved in the imagined pair.

Considering the former has gotten an Example Sectionectomy, I don't mind if the Yay pages get the same treatment

Edited by Adept on Nov 24th 2019 at 2:44:15 AM

I forgot Shipping Goggles existed.

Okay, my complaint is withdrawn.

My idea is that we combine all "Yay" tropes into a singular trope focusing on fan interpretations of moments that is obviously just fans over thinking or misinterpreting things due to shipping googles. Ship Tease would be similarly redefined to be about moments where the work is obviously hinting at characters being attracted to each other.

And Homoerotic Subtext?

It being a trope strictly about platonic same-sex characters evoking romantic tropes to emphasize their non-romantic relationship would be more heavily enforced.

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Nov 24th 2019 at 5:16:04 AM

There's also tropes like "Romantic" Two-Girl Friendship.

I agree we should base it upon intention. Ho/Foe/Het Yay(?) could be intended for unintentional subtext, whereas Ship Tease would be for intentional things. Something can progress from Ho Yay to Ship Tease, such as in Atypical, where Casey and Izzie start out as enemies, then become friends with some possibly unintentional subtext (Ho Yay), then outright becomes a Ship Tease, before it becomes an official ship.

To be honest, why even maintain a distinction between gay subtext, foe subtext, hetero subtext, incest subtext, etc. if the examples are about the subtext itself? I thus think examples should be moved to new tropes:

• Unintended or possibly intended romantic subtext.
• Intended romantic subtext that teases nothing in canon.
• Foreshadowing of a future ship.

Of course, I could imagine several edge cases showing up: in particular, aside from the cases mentioned above, what about cases where the author meant no subtext in the first place, but it later becomes Ascended Fanon or something of the sort?

That's what happened with Korra and Asami. It was originally unintentional, but then they ran with it and made it intentional in later episodes.

Do we know for sure it was unintentional? Did they say it was?

I never watched Korra but going by the cleanup thread seasons 1-2 were unintentional and fit Ho Yay, while 3-4 were intentional and went under Ship Tease.

Edited by lalalei2001 on Nov 24th 2019 at 11:36:41 AM

I don't mind rolling with their decision of course, just... as another person who hasn't watched Korra, I'm curious to know how they came to this conclusion, because it'd be helpful for future cleanup efforts to have some sort of guideline.

As far as I know, it was Word of God. Which isn't really something we can rely on for every single example. Combined with the blurriness between Homoerotic Subtext and gay Ship Tease, that's why I'm leaning towards making Ship Tease the trope, and everything else just fanspeak.

Examples played for laughs that are not meant as shipping fuel are Homoerotic Subtext. Such examples may also fall under Queer People Are Funny.

That doesn't cover all examples of Homoerotic Subtext, but it's one of the more obvious differences that came to mind.

The difference is in the intent and presentation. Also, the two tropes can apply simultaneously, when you have Ship Tease via Homoerotic Subtext.

Ship Tease is the intent, Homoerotic Subtext is the thing that's happening. Homoerotic Subtext can be used for reasons other than ship tease, such as comedy^note though note that Ship Tease can be comedic too; I'm referring to pure comedy here or symbolism. And gay Ship Tease can be achieved through things over than Homoerotic Subtext.

I see that Kittie88 deleted Shinji/Kaworu from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Togo/Yuna from Yuki Yuna is a Hero, and Ymir/Krista from Attack on Titan from Homoerotic Subtext with the following edit reason:

The deleted examples mentioned Word of Gay for Togo and Ymir. If Shinji/Kaworu is "too canon", then Pearl's love for Rose Quartz in Steven Universe should also be removed.