Ho Yay/Headscratchers

• This troper has no qualms with Ho Yay and Les Yay being merged, but only wonders why A) Ho Yay appears so much more often, and B) why whenever Les Yay does get mentioned it just seems a bit...put upon- perhaps because Girl-On-Girl Is Hot. IRL especially.
  • Mostly because yaoi fan girls seem to like Ho Yay shipping more out of "cuteness" and fun rather than sexiness. The general appeal Les Yay usually has seems to be because, well, Girl-On-Girl Is Hot.
    • ....dude, have you ever read a slashfic in your life? It's porn. Yes there's lots of fluff too, but the meat and the drive and the main point of the genre is porn. Fangirls write slash and see Ho Yay because Guy On Guy Is Really Really Really Fucking Hot. I should know, being a big slash fangirl and participant in slash communities myself. Allow me to give an example. If you're a male, think about just how much Girl-On-Girl Is Hot. Really. Sit back and let your mind linger on just how insanely hot the idea of two girls having sex is. Now imagine all that Girl On Girl hotness without any of the myriad social/societal pitfalls and contradictions and headaches and roadblocks that plague female sexuality. Now imagine having way, way more numerous and (on average) way more complex and cool/badass/likable characters to pair up. Now do you have an idea just how fucking hot Guy On Guy is for us girls?
    • I ship mainly because of attractiveness/sensuality/chemistry but that's because I am "asexual." I think most yaoi fan girls are into it for the same reasons I described and there is also a STRONG sexual element because most women are "sexual." The sexual element is so strong that it has even influenced how I look at fictional relationships and it's one of the reasons I enjoy some "adult" fan-fiction and fan-art. I don't understand why it's so hard for some people to understand that women can (and often do) find guy-on-guy just as sexy as many men find girl-on-girl. LOL.
    • I think a lot of guys, at least among nerd culture, do understand that girls find guy on guy hot. What's less understood is why girls have to put up with less backlash and eye-rolling about it than guys do. In general, even on this website, there's an automatic assumption that lesbians = shallow fanservice, yaoi guys = pure sparkling romance. Personally, I have no problem with either group, and I read and watch yuri mostly for the romantic fluff (not that I mind sex scenes at all -- physical affection comes from emotional affection, after all). If I had to hazard a guess as to why it's "safer" to be a girl who likes reading about guys than it is to be a guy reading about girls, I'd say it's something to do with society's predominant view that All Men Are Perverts and All Women Are Prudes.
    • I actually disagree here. I have yet to see Yuri Fanboys being bashed, flamed or insulted for liking yuri, unless it's something like Furry Fandom or My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, and even then, they don't get as much flack, at least not in their own circle. Yaoi Fangirls, however, get a lot of bashing and the Guy-On-Guy Is Hot trope seems to be kind of...how should I put this...dead, in western media. Heck, I've seen art accusing yaoi fangirls as "objectifying homosexuals", not even bringing up that some (I said "some" not "all") yuri fanboys ARE into yuri for the girl-on-girl action. I'm into both shonen-ai and shojo-ai myself and I don't see any problems with liking either. But I've noticed that some people seem to like attacking people who do; search up "yaoi fangirl stamp" on deviantart if you don't believe me. You'll see a ton of stamps saying either "I hate yaoi fangirls" or "Not all yaoi fangirls are stupid". There are absolutely zero stamps under "yuri fanboy stamp" that say "I hate yuri fanboys" or "Not all yuri fanboys are perverts". Just shows that yuri fanboys and Girl-On-Girl Is Hot are generally more accepted than yaoi fangirls and Guy-On-Guy Is Hot.
  • The Bechdel Test. There just aren't that many works with two female leads who interact.
  • One could suggest it's a matter of how intentional it is -- that a female couple with good chemistry is more likely to get official subtext, which is therefore exempt from Les Yay (being its own trope), or even becoming an out-and-out couple. Of course, "one" could suggest that's total bollocks, but that's the price of theories. There's also the fact that the imbalance seems to come from the greater number of shipping fangirls than shipping fanboys.

• Do lesbian relationships have a Seme and an Uke?
  • Yes, they're called "Tachi" and "Neko", respectively.
  • Or Butch and Chapstick in America.
  • Hard Gay, Camp Gay, Invisible to Gaydar and Camp Straight are almost Always Male. I suppose you can connect "butch lesbian" with Hard Gay, but what of the other three? Do they have female counterparts? Does Lipstick Lesbian fall under Invisible to Gaydar or Camp Gay?
    • Okay, I've got it! Lipstick Lesbian could be a Gender Flip of Camp Gay, "Chapstick Lesbian" (a term coined by Ellen DeGeneres) could match with Invisible to Gaydar, and Camp Straight...um...hmm.
    • No, the male versions come from the degree to which the man fulfills stereotypically male characteristics. An effeminate gay man is Camp Gay for being "womanly," so the female equivalent would be Butch Lesbian. Invisible to Gaydar (man acts as stereotypes say a man tends to act, yet is gay) coincides with Lipstick Lesbian (woman acts as stereotypes say a woman tends to act, yet is a lesbian). Hard Gay (uber-masculine gay man) would therefore coincide with a highly feminine lesbian (for which we don't have a trope). Camp Straight Gender Flipped would be a woman who acted butch but was straight.
    • That would be a Tomboy.

• What bugs me is why there has to be ANY sort of 'yay' in work. Why does romance have to factor into a good story when it can do fine without it? I don't know about you guys/girls, but I watch works for the plot, and I fast forward any sort of romantic bits.
  • There doesn't have to be, but sometimes there just is. Good romance is supposed to enhance the story, not distract from it. And fyi, not everyone is like you. Some people focus only on the romantic bits. YMMV, preference, what makes for better enterainment - it's all subjective.
  • Because people enjoy it, and producers like to try and get as many people interested in their work as possible. There are probably people who fast-forward all the bits you sit and watch so they can get to the romance stuff; they're entitled to have the bits they like, just as much as you're entitled to have the bits you like.

• As nervous as I am to suggest another Great Reorganizing, shouldn't Ho Yay (unless its blatantly obvious) be filed under YMMV? As the trope page itself says, most of it is wishful thinking, and thus extremely subjective. YMMV usually turns on what the viewer infers from the work in question, which would seem to encapsulate Ho Yay and related shipping tropes entirely.
  • Is there really an epidemic of Whatever Yay in the main page? Mostly in my experience it's used in potholes (if possibly a little too often), but not in works pages. Unless it's deliberate.

• Is it possible to have two characters (either gender) be friends without invoking this trope?
  • No.
  • Sadly.
  • It's 100% possible. In fact, with the couples I ship romantically, I also ship them as platonic friends. Either "relationship status" is fine with me. LOL.
  • It can but it usually doesn't.
  • Presumably there's a variant case of Rule 34 in the works here: given any two characters who have interacted for any length of time, someone, somewhere, is going to think they have chemistry.
    • Or if some pairs (such as Sasu Hina) are anything to go by, they don't even have to interact to get fans. Not bashing Crack Ships here, it's just the truth. :|
  • Really hard. One example could be Turk and JD from Scrubs who're usually viewed as friends despite being incredible close. That Turk maintains a great, believable and stable relationship with Carla is no doubt a factor as well as the fact that both are unashamed and frank about their connection.

• How about changing the title to Gay Subtext? It would make things ten times easier...
  • Because subtext is usually meant to be there. Ho Yay is a subjective trope and where someone might see UST between say, the Doctor and the Master, someone else might not.

• Why isn't there such a thing as Straight Yay? (Aside from the awkward title.)
  • There is such thing as Straight Yay (or Het Yay as some shipping fans call it). It's been around for so long and it's so common that most people don't have a name for it. In fact, a lot of people consider it more "acceptable" and "normal" than Ho Yay and Les Yay. Het Yay has appeared in so many works of art that it would probably take many lifetimes to name all of the examples.
  • Try Ship Tease.

• Does it count as Ho Yay if one of the parties actually is gay?
  • Yes. And if there's no subtext then it's Yaoi Guys.
    • And for Les Yay it's Token Yuri Girls.

• I know this trope is subjective, but why on earth is there always somebody somewhere seeing ho yay where it was NEVER meant to be there. It seems that people cannot grasp the concept that loving (platonic) actually exists.
  • Presumably the people in question either have no friends or are sexually involved with everybody they know, skewing their perspective and expectations.
    • Or, you know, A) People have different opinions and see interactions differently, and B) Since there are so few canon, well-portrayed gay couples in fiction, we have to make our own. And pretty much every yaoi fangirl/guy I've talked to, even if they ship a couple that the creator meant to be "just friends", will have other characters who they just love as bros/parent+child/what have you.
  • Death of the Author: just because something wasn't meant to be there doesn't mean that it's not there anyway.
  • I think most people can grasp the concept of platonic love at a basic level. (And it doesn't say anything about a person if they can't grasp it, either) People ship because it's fun and interesting, basically. I'm asexual and I'm a huge fan of platonic & romantic friendship relationships, but I love romantic relationships, too. I'm not one to argue that a romantic and/or sexual "vibe" exists unless it's canon. I will, however, explain why I ship certain people together if a person wants to understand where I'm coming from. But at the end of the day, all I care about is a beautiful relationship between two (or more) people. And a beautiful relationship doesn't have to be romantic and/or sexual, of course. That beautiful relationship is what draws ho-yay fans in the first place and it's something ho-yay fans and non-ho-yay fans can agree upon.
    • One of the biggest issues here isn't the alleged subtext itself, but that people often times ship characters in this category before the series even starts (this is more pervasive than most other shipping/yay groups). There's "a difference of opinion" but some times they have to admit when they take it pretty far.