“Most mlm ships in shonen are romantic-coded and would be canon if they were straight” I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here. Most of them are not romantic-coded, not at all. A lot of female shippers just don’t understand male friendship. And sorry to say, but a lot of straight and bisexual women also don’t want to accept that for most straight men, romance isn’t important to them. This is why they don’t write their romantic endgames as that interesting most of the time. In their mind, they just think their hero eventually needs a girlfriend when he grows up, because eventually he needs to have sex and breed. There might be some men who ship Naruto and Hinata because they relate to Naruto and want a big-breasted tradwife but Hinata’s personality (or lack there of) or compatibility with Naruto doesn’t matter to them.
Most of these shonen authors aren’t writing romantic-coded mlm relationships. They write basic male friendships where men admire each other and help each other out. Mangakas like Toriyama, Oda, Kubo, Horikoshi and Fujimoto like tits and fanservice. They’re as straight as they can be. Obviously, there is gay subtext in SOME shonen series other than Naruto, but it is not most of them.
And then female shippers come up with the idea that the most developed and best relationship in the story = it must be romantic. Which is obviously a flawed argument. Do they think Edward and Alphonse in Fullmetal Alchemist are incestous? Because their relationship is the core of the story in both anime versions and the manga.
Sure, most of these mangakas don’t write women that well, and are sexist. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with whether the men seem gay. Goku/Chichi is written as a gag, and Chichi isn’t greatly written, do people think Goku is gay? No. Keiko was Togashi’s least favourite character in YYH, because she was too typical and thus boring to him. But people could still tell that Yusuke was attracted to and liked Keiko. Azula is considered a good and memorable female character, does she have a deep romantic relationship with a male character? No. Because that has nothing to do with whether a female character is good!!! Do people understand how dumb their arguments are?
So Oda, Kubo, etc. are straight as a ruler. Kishimoto on the other hand is so deep in the closet he’s close to finding Narnia. It’s pretty obvious if you just read his manga and compare it to the above mangakas works. I know some people don’t like me saying this because we need to defend Kishi’s honor or something but I think he’ll live. But Kishi unlike many of his collegues is very into the romance, gay romance to be exact. And this has been said countless times but the fact so many people outside of shipping circles can pick up on Naruto and Sasuke’s romance is telling that it’s not like other shonen friendships. The gay stuff made people uncomfortable back in the days when the manga was running. The gay stuff regarding them easily gets viral these days even without yaoi fangirls. And the posts mocking Sasuke and Sakura’s miserable relationship also get viral. Videos that joke about how Naruto forgets Hinata exists if Sasuke just shows off his chest, or more like breaths in Naruto’s direction get viral. That’s another thing. In Naruto the het endgames aren’t just lacking, they are written as so terrible by Kishi it’s clearly out of pettiness and hostility. Kishi didn’t need to stress so much during the war arc that Sasuke only cares about Naruto, while knowing he is going to end up with Sakura, but he did. He didn’t need to make Sakura yell “I can’t do the things (lists things Naruto canonically does for Sasuke)”, he didn’t need to write Gaiden where Sasuke looks uncomfortable after seeing Sakura after 12 years, he didn’t need to imply twice Sasuke doesn’t kiss Sakura, but he did. This is very different from “shonen couple is kinda boring and kinda lacks in development”.
Then we have mangakas like Togashi and Isayama, who seem to genuinely like and adore their wives, so it’s likely they indeed like women. But they also seem to find gay subtext at least a bit interesting, maybe because it’s a bit of a taboo. From both of their interviews you can gather they aren’t offended at people shipping their male characters. Isayama even said he knew fujoshi would like Levi’s character, and that he knew Levi’s design was good based on this. He also dropped some ship tease, for example with Armin and Eren (fake preview and Q&A). It’s not very common. Togashi too talked about how maybe he should have made Hiei and Kurama a couple after hearing people shipped them. But the gay subtext doesn’t dominate their manga like it does in Naruto.
These mangakas aren’t a monolith, but many of them are indeed straight and care more about basic shonen tropes than exploring homosexuality or heterosexual romance. The issue is that many people need to find a ship in everything they watch, which is why they apply the romantic lenses to the dynamic they think is best written or most interesting. But that doesn’t make it true or that the writers are intentionally or accidentally writing gay subtext.
At the end of the day, what people refuse to understand is that misogyny plays a part for both kind of ships : mlm or mlf.
Everybody understand that the popular mlm ships are more developped because the 2 male characters get more attention from the authors but they also fail to understand that mlf ships are purposedly underwritten because men dont give a fuck about all that feelings bullshit and just want a pretty girl to fuck and fawn over them.
I often see people calling fujoshis out for loving ships who are built on misogyny but so are straight ships but their shippers act like they are being feminists for shipping them because there is a female character involved.
