If I may step in to add my meagre two cents:
First, I’d like to acknowledge, that, yes, there’s less “safety” for kawoshin than, say, for asushin or other het ships, but there’s even less “safety” for asumari.
That’s due to homophobia, yes, and moreover, due to the lack of safety that female fans experience, fullstop. Female fans are derided wherever they go, except in safer communities such as tumblr; this also affects fans who are perceived as female. However, many of the fans of asumari who do not want it to be sexualised are queer women or woman-aligned nonbinaries ourselves, one of those “most hated audiences”. Obviously not everyone in the kawoshin fandom is straight or a woman; I personally know a lot of queer trans boys and so forth, or those who flocked to kawoshin due to canon queerness, but a majority of fanwork of kawoshin fans is created by straight women, just as the majority of fanwork of (sexualised) asumari is created by straight men. Kawoshin is brushed off as something that those “silly” girls do (and damn do I hate this misogyny) but asumari gets shat on by straight men threatened by it and straight girls repulsed by the idea of queer women and suffering from internalised misogyny. Straight men who like asumari have to asterisk their enjoyment of it with their status as straight men, of liking lesbians as a fetish, because it is literally more okay to
As for the asumari love from older female fans who have kawoshin as their main ship: I would love to see some proof of this. While I’m certain that there are people who ship both kawoshin and asumari, when I talk about those who operate in queer spaces, I’m not referring to people who mainly blog about kawoshin and then throw in a post about asumari here or there with a tag like “WATCH THE QUEEN CONQUER” and a smiley before descending back into kawoshin hell. Before you ask, of course you can use such tags, but it’s the concept of these tags standing in for an actual interest and investment in the characters.
I generally speaking have a rule against reblogging anything I deem sexualised (oftentimes, as an asexual person, I don’t recognise that something is meant to be sexualised until too late) but I’ve reblogged some asumari things I consider sexualised or mischaracterised due to simple desperation of content. In the extreme explosion of kawoshin fanwork you could find so many things that I can guarantee you that you could run a completely sfw non-sexualised kawoshin blog and never run into issues. By contrast asumari has a very small pool of fanwork, the vast majority of which is sexualised. Much like asurei, which is never given a thought beyond sexualised shit and the approx.. two artists on tumblr who draw them, ever. Most people don’t consider their complex relationship or handle it in a non-abusive; 99% of asurei art I see is just Rei and Asuka shoving their breasts and asses into the screen while making out and looking at the audience as though inviting them into the orgy. And it’s the same shit with asumari. Hell, I hardly see any nonsexualised Mari, dammit.
I can think of like two asumari artists who draw non-sexualised asumari, fullstop, and even then they draw nsfw fairly often. Because everyone hates queer women, or they hate queer women but also want to fuck them.
I really wish that people would learn to distinguish between popularity of a female character and popularity of a sexualised mischaracterised waifu-ised version of her. I can promise you that the “real” Asuka isn’t popular at all outside of the “she’s a b*tch but I’d hatefuck her” audience.
We’re not trying to take away your safe spaces. I understand about the queerness of kawo/shin; that’s what drew me to the ship in the first place, from which I started to explore other queer ships in the Evangelion fandom sphere. But do you not see the issue whereby the vast majority of fans on tumblr solely discuss two prominent male characters, and solely the two attractive underage male characters ripe for sexualisation? There’s a reason I avoid the hell out of places like r/Evangelion, EvaGeeks, and 90% of ev/a/, because I’m not going to fuck with the rampant sexualisation of female characters, either in heterosexual self-inserts with Shinji or in “queer relationships” due to the requirement of “keeping purity” (which is sick in so many ways) or as a method of sexualising females without the “threat” of a male involved.
Kaworu and Mari are not positioned similarly in the fandom whatsoever. Yes, Kaworu is misrepresented by homophobic straight men as a creepy stalker, and of course, there’s a lot of sexualisation of Shinji and Kaworu and romanticisation of their relationship that should not occur. I’m not saying that the fandom is perfect. But whereas Kaworu is doted on lovingly, Mari is portrayed as predatory and often sexually experienced coupled with making less experienced characters uncomfortable. Note: I’m not saying that portraying Mari as sexually experienced is inherently a bad thing. I’m talking about the common trend in kawoshin doujin and fanwork where Mari teaches sex ed to a Shinji (and less commonly Kaworu) who very definitely doesn’t want to exist in that space, even if they do eventually “want in” in that noncon-jk-con-but-not-really switch that so much fanwork tends to pull. There’s a lot of abusive shit I could say about karlshaun (manga Kaworu and Shinji), but that’s another story for another time. Asuka and Mari’s relationship is consistently sexualised with its violence intensified. I like them as a battle couples and I like the thought of them physically training with one another or sparring, but there is a complete difference between two people who are equally matched in fighting prowess and Asuka randomly fucking punching Mari. I’m guilty of this sometimes in my attempt to search for asumari stuff but I would never willingly put that into my asumari fanwork, while I see that so god damn often despite its OOCness.
And regarding safety, you know, I, and others I know, have been attacked on this very website for trying to defend female characters such as Asuka from those who consider her more popular or whatever than Shinji despite all of the very real shit that she gets. I’ve received death threats from people telling me to stop putting down Shinji or Kaworu, and been called plenty of slurs. Now, I don’t care about them, because I have thick skin and they’re just random ass anons, but more sensitive fans, especially those struggling with the heavy burden of internalised misogyny and queerphobia—just think about it.
And holy shit will you stop deriding “those sixteen-year-olds”? Because some of the very “sixteen-year-olds” you’re talking about are those queer femme asumari shippers who are just looking for a lil bit of representation in this world, a reminder that it’s okay to exist and be them that isn’t presented in an overtly sexualised way that strips them down and pushes them out as products for the male gaze.
I’m not going to blame women for their internalised misogyny. Yet since you want me to stop talking about sixteen-year-olds and clearly position yourself above them, fine, I’ll assume you’re an adult, so I really do have to ask: Why do you have to focus on two male characters, and specifically underage male characters?
That isn’t a personal attack. I’m asking you to reflect on this for yourself.
I don’t care whether real people give a shit about some “best girl” or favoured character of mine. I’m not talking about that. Real people > fictional people every time. And yet I can’t sit idly by while all of the other characters in Evangelion are ignored or sexualised, many of them (perceived) women. I’m reaching out specifically on tumblr, known for its high presence of female and nonbinary fans, because I trust female characters in the hands of women/femme nb more than I trust them in the hands of men, but the sheer homophobia—
Any time someone points out the lack of safety for fans of asumari, especially underage fans reaching out for scraps of representation, kawoshin fans pop out of the snow like daises to rabidly claim that no no kawoshin and Kaworu are truly the most hated things in this fandom. I know that people get shit for kawoshin and Kaworu all of the time, yet there’s no way to compare. When you removed the sexualised male gaze-y “lesbian fetish” parts of asumari the fandom barely exists.
Even the fucking official art of kawoshin versus asumari—
These are the two image sets commonly paired together on “queer eva” posts on tumblr dot corn. Notice how Kaworu and Shinji, despite being in skintight plugsuits, aren’t sexualised; in front the nice little chest plates there give them form and definition as they face one another in mutual affection.
Now look at how Asuka is wearing that oversexualised plugsuit from 2.0, how uncomfortable she looks as though asking to be protected (how moe), while Mari is positioned in such a way that emphasises her breasts (one of her arms is even moved forward so that you can see that full breast at the front) and her spine somehow bends up so that you can see her “shapely” rear and the line of her ass. And how oddly predatory Mari looks here. It’s like Asuka is pleading for the audience to take her away from Mari. Which isn’t how they interact in canon, either in the 2.0 drafts or in 3.0, where despite their constant banter with one another they depend on and listen to one another.
Do you not realise how fucked this is? When Studio Khara decides to put official art of Kaworu, Studio Khara draws them on the poster sitting next to one another connected by a symbolic string of fate. Meanwhile Asuka and Mari are always drawn in positions that expose and sexualise them. This shit goes all of the way to the top.
This isn’t a cherrypicked example either. If you google asumari official art and kawoshin official art you’ll immediately see what I mean.
“But they were better written!” Mari is so god damn mischaracterised. Kaworu is mischaracterised to some extent too, as in Shinji, but not to the extent that Mari and Asuka face, whether in male- or female-dominated fandom space. Part of this is the fault of the films which appear to be entirely ready to throw away any possible characterisation. Yet we’re talking about a fandom that spins entire five thousand word analyses from two seconds of Kaworu’s animation, and you’re going to tell me that a character who has a compelling story especially given the manga is just brushed aside? Tell me about the Mari who apparently knew Yui in college and had to deal with the internalised homophobia of watching her from afar. Tell me about the Mari who recognised her own inability to pass into adulthood, who went to Stanford and somehow ended up either getting the Curse of Eva or being cryogenically frozen or what have you, who now experiences time-borne culture shock, who works for IPEA and is involved in some sneaky spy business, who (in the drafts) lived with Hikari and engaged with Asuka, who appears to consider the Ayanami series a copy of Yui rather than their own people and likely requires some sort of arc of understanding to that end, who’s over her internalised homophobia by this point and probably sets an example for the others, who has been dealing with this shit longer than Asuka and who would understand Asuka’s suffocating feelings of never being adult enough. There are so many places I could go with this but instead the collective fandom chooses to scream about the latest piece of official art with Kaworu and Shinji anywhere in the same picture and parade it around as “SEE? SEE? IT REALLY IS CANON!” while completely ignoring the canon or heavily implied f/f such as asumari or ritsumaya.
You guys will take apart a storyboard of Kaworu and Shinji in the same room and write fanfictions from here to the moon but you can’t do the same to a character with a compelling arc and backstory, and with arguably just a complex characterisation on screen. Because you’d prefer to come up with literal hundreds of thousands of words of alternative universe for your pretty boy male fans without giving a single shit about anyone else from the universe.
And if you want to do that? Fine. Enjoy yourself. But if people are pointing out the reality of the crapshoot that is queer femme fandom then don’t butt in with your “not all kawoshin shippers” shit.
I apologise if at any point in this I should, ahem, upset. But there was no need for you to take a post about asumari, pointing out very important facts about fandom culture in places that are supposedly safe spaces for femme-aligned and queer fans, and make it about kawoshin. There was no need.
Thank you and have a wonderful day.
