Why Yaoi?
From: Tyr <tyr0@yahoo.com>
To: <Tontoteen@aol.com>
Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 11:19 PM
Subject: Re: GW Addiction page- qus. about the site>Hi!
> I am an avid fan of gw. But I was quite disturbed when I wore my
> gw shirt to school and a group of people told me they were gay.
>
> I said bring in pictures- they did. The pictures had an adress on
> it and I went there and found them. I also noticed that their code
> name had yaoi in front of it. I looked it up in some search pages
> and I came to your site.
>
> I read it for a while and saw that it hops between the original
> story and fanfics.
>
> So my question for you is- if any characters were actually gay in
> the original story line, and if so- who? As much info. as possible.
>
> Thank You Very Much,
> DanielHi Daniel:
No, the GW characters are not gay or if they are, it is not explicitly stated in the show itself. And remember the Gundam pilots are only 15, a bit too young to have a sex life... The GW anime is really centered on war and political infighting, not romance.
What you have run into is a weird phenomenon I will try to explain quickly, though I am not a specialist and I am sure that others could explain it better.
See, in Japan, there are 2 types of anime (and manga is divided in the same fashion): shonen anime, anime for boys and shoujo anime, anime for girls. All the other Gundam series were straightforward shonen anime series: directed at young boys, they featured a lot of mecha action and adventure.
One of the most recent Gundam series, Gundam Wing was designed to attract some of the shoujo market as well, which is probably why all the GW pilots are so good-looking, and it included a psychologically complex storyline and ambiguous, sympathetic characters as well as lots of mechas, space battles and political intrigue. Note that official GW sources stated that GW is not about romance -not even of the Heero and Relena type- and that no pairing (hetero- or homosexual) was meant to be implied by the storyline. However, the producers also left the fans free to imagine and make up what they would about everything the show did not cover explicitly.
Now here is where my explanation becomes more complex: in the same fashion that a lot of straight men are very interested and excited by the idea of two beautiful women together, a lot of women like imagining two beautiful boys (or men) together. This is why yaoi started in Japan and slash in the Western world. It's just one of those facts of life... You probably know that the yaoi fandom is 95% female, just like slash fandom, right?
Therefore, by attracting a lot of girl fans, Gundam Wing fell prey to yaoi fandom, and it ended up being not only one of the most successful animes in Japan, but also became the basis for one of the largest yaoi fandoms ever: the GW yaoi doujinshis (unofficial mangas drawn by amateurs) and fanfics (stories written by fans) number in the thousands... and it does not seem to slow down that much 5 years after it was first aired on Japanese TV in 1995... That is probably why the people you ran into started saying that stuff: by now, some people who have not even seen the GW anime, associate it indelibly with yaoi because the GW yaoi fandom is so large and so active...
But all those yaoi fanfics are only fantasies which yaoi fans enjoy. They do not have that much to do with the show, except inasmuch as the most popular pairings (like 1+2) are universally attractive to yaoi fans because there is a definite electricity between the characters in the anime itself. Which does not really say anything about the pilots' sexual orientation as I don't think there is any clear indication in any episode... Mind you, Quatre and Trowa are very chummy... but I digress...
As is fairly obvious, I am a yaoi fan myself, but I would have trouble explaining why... I just love the idea of Heero and Duo together: there is so much chemistry between them! That is not to say that I suspect the show of depicting them as gay or bisexual. And remember that yaoi and homosexuality have nearly nothing to do with each other; moreover most yaoi fans -including myself- are totally straight, in about the same proportion as any other statistical sample (several studies show this clearly).
In fact, weirdly enough, if the GW characters were the feminine type or supposed to be gay in the show itself, the idea of them getting it on would probably not excite me as much, if at all.
If you are interested in understanding the attraction of yaoi, read Joyce K. Wakabayashi's 'Thoughts about yaoi' which will give you her very astute insights into most anime fangirls' reasons for liking yaoi. I also recommend the following two essays written by famous slash writers: MacGeorge's 'Why slash?' essay and Melina Clark's 'Slash -- another view'. Both essays refer to 'Highlander The Series' slash but the same ideas apply to yaoi...
And I should mention that all official GW illustrations have no yaoi content whatsoever -there is only one exception, which probably doesn't count as it was done for the cover of a magazine to promote Endless Waltz at a time when the Gundam Wing yaoi fandom was already a major force and well known about in Japan-, so the pics you refer to were from doujinshis (ie, fanart, not official pictures). And if you wonder why even one official yaoi pic was published, the answer is that the Japanese producers are very open-minded about the idea of yaoi and some fans even speculate that they were consciously aiming for the yaoi market when designing the GW characters. What other rational explanation can you think of for making all the Gboys so young and so handsome? Not to mention the OZ bishonen...
Here is the magazine cover in question: Cute, isn't it? But not really conclusive since it was a publicity stunt, just as the famous X-Files 'bed' photograph does not really mean anything regarding the X-Files' main characters romantic relationship or lack thereof.
Does that help answer your question? You can also take a look in my FAQs section at the 'What is a hentai and how did we get to be that way?' page (it's a joke, but it may give you another insight about the whole phenomenon). But please skip the rest of the archive which contains some pretty graphic stuff destined only for adult yaoi fans.
This reply was posted with Daniel's permission, hoping that it may help answer others' questions too. Now, if you are underage or a newcomer to yaoi, I have to ask you to leave until you are of age or until you know what yaoi is about as GW Addiction is not intended to introduce anyone to yaoi or slash: I have enough trouble keeping up my updating schedule without having to deal with outraged parents or flames.
Thank you for your cooperation and thank you Daniel for asking your question so politely: since it was the first time I got asked so nicely, it was the first time my answer was so complete, which is why I decided to post it here. (© 2000 Tyr).