Honestly, the entire history of Western art is devoted to promoting male friendship.
Male friendship is held up as the single purest, most epic emotional bond that exists. Our canon (in the non-fandom sense) is rife with this. Most of our most popular modern media is this. We’ve been churning out male buddy movies since movies were a thing. Our great literature is a catalog of men having intense–but definitely no homo! HDU imply otherwise!–feelings.
Male friendship is in no danger.
So why would they be defending something that needs no defending? This behavior should set off warning bells to anyone reblogging a post. The original poster was, according to a bunch of reblogs, someone who had religious anti-gay shit all over their blog.
OP is a homophobe. This is not a surprise.
I know that tumblr falls for the fujocourse easily: “Women oversexualize gay men!” Yadda yadda. A lot of people espousing those views are young queer women who think they’re doing something positive.
The reality is these posts come with a nasty subtext that you learn to spot once you’ve been in fandom for a while.
“Why can’t they just be friends” is the constant refrain of every religious homophobe and uptight straight fanboy any time a character is made canonically gay. Mainstream audiences are horrified when gay coding is pointed out to them and will go to hilarious lengths to deny that it exists. Whenever you see a ‘why can’t they just be friends’ argument about something gay–fanon or canon or anything–you should be suspicious.
Tumblr does like to over-apply the term ‘queerbaiting’ and to see gay coding where none was intended and people outside of tumblr, including queer media scholars, would generally not see any. (It’s possible for coding to be unintentional, such as when villains have stereotypical villain traits that are also stereotypes of gay people.) But it’s still a real thing. Here’s the prototypical Swiss Watch scene from Red River if anyone needs an example of what actual gay coding looks like:
You’ll see old homophobes trying to deny the really obvious gayness of old movies like that. You’ll see young homophobes in denial about Black Sails.
A canon like The X-Files that starts with a male-female buddy pair who TPTB said they would never get together will, with enough installments, end in het romance. Asking “why can’t they just be friends?” about a man and woman is in a context where they usually can’t, by fiat.
Asking “Why can’t they just be friends?” about two men is in a context where thousands of homophobes ask this about every gay thing that ever crosses their path. We are bombarded by this question, inside of fandom and out, for canon ships and ones that only exist in fanworks or in an enthusiastic tumblr post.
It is not a neutral question.
One target of this discussion is fans who ask for their ship to be made canon or their favorite character to be confirmed queer in canon. I agree that demanding things from the canon creators can be rude. However, this has been a thing with straight ships for decades. Fans of straight ships have been far worse about this for far longer, yet tumblr is not full of callout posts for them. There is a double standard that asking for more straight characters and relationships is normal, but asking for more gay characters and relationships is problematic.
This is reason #1 why the post is homophobic.
OP seems to be addressing fans who interact with canon’s writers, but those fans are few compared to all of the fans who make fanworks or just reblog shippy posts on tumblr. The way that OP refers to tumblr collectively and refers to these practices as extremely common makes it clear that they are talking about shipping in general, not just people harassing canon creators.
Thinking that the majority response to anything is “It’s gay!” is only possible if you’re cloistered in a tiny tumblr/AO3 bubble. The majority of people who watch a TV series or a Marvel movie do not think this. Even in fanworks fandom, the majority of works are very likely het. This is because AO3 represents only one part of fanworks fandom, a part that skews very heavily towards m/m content. The venerable fanfiction.net has lots of het and gen compared to AO3. Wattpad, which dwarfs AO3, is overwhelmingly het.
When someone comes to AO3 or Tumblr to whine about m/m, it’s like posting hate in the tags: You’re mad that there’s even one place where that content is popular.
This is reason #2 why this post is homophobic.
OP also suggests that shipping characters is equivalent to assuming things about their canonical orientation. Some parts of fandom are very into their ships and their headcanons being validated by actual canon. Lots of us don’t care. We ship characters who have a strong emotional bond in canon or whom we find attractive or whose dynamic we happen to like.
The idea that shipping is inherently about the canon’s writer or a writer-fan interaction and not about fans having fun in their own way in their own space is nonsense. OP knows this perfectly well.
They are suggesting that any writer would be offended by fans “misinterpreting” a character as gay. Often, that’s true: because many writers are homophobic just like OP, but that doesn’t mean we need to validate such attitudes.
This is reason #3 why this post is homophobic.
Beware, tumblr. I know you guys like to think you’re fighting the good fight and protecting fragile mlm from ravening fujoshi strawomen, but the fact is that posts like OP’s come with nasty baggage attached.
99% of Western culture is about celebrating the nonsexual bonds between men. Again, male friendship is in no danger. M/M shipping does not promote toxic masculinity, but…
Agreeing with this shit promotes homophobia and misogyny too.
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