Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 came out two months ago, and Kawoshin is officially not canon. And as a Kawoshin shipper, that is completely okay. I still think that Asuka is toxic, and Shinji is bi, and Kaworu and Shinji are soul mates.
But guess what? I don't need Kawoshin to be canon. I don't even need them to be romantically attracted to each other. I just like that Shinji has his safe space in Kaworu whenever he needed him.
I think more shippers need to be rational in their shipping, stop posing their version of fanon as canon, and stop terrorising everyone who disagrees with them.
So what brought this sudden epiphany was that I was browsing reddit and came across a certain impassioned defense of a ship that, unfortunately, was not canon. However, the shippers decided that somehow they were morally entitled to get their ship recognised by canon, and so took actions to terrorise all the creators and people associated with the fandom until they got what they wanted. (which they ended up not getting. Lol.)
The reddit post was extremely one-sided, very obviously biased, and the reddit comments majority formed an echo chamber to affirm the poster that yes, the creators were queer-baiting, everyone could see the blatant subtext, the cancelling of the ship was homophobic.
Now I've seen ship wars across many fandoms, and I've noticed the rising trend of making use of LGBT signalling to try to force creators into making queer ships canon despite there being no canon support for it. This is especially ironic when large parts of these shippers tend to be young heterosexual females who love the idea of two men in a sexual relationship, despite themselves not really being invested enough in the individual characters to like any of their canon ships.
Just to make things clear, I have nothing against fujoshi. Hell I can probably be considered one myself, as I do ship multiple gay pairings (not as many as het pairings, but definitely a non-zero number). What I do dislike in shippers is the insistence on their ship being the OTP for the fandom, and if their fanon is contradicted by canon, then it is the canon which is at fault.
The fact is, at the end of the day, canon is the basis of the fandom. All other fanons and headcannons sprout from canon, but they are derivatives, and not the original. No one is stopping you from having your version of the story, but repeated insistence and tantrums will not make your version the correct version.
I'm not going to delve into every problematic popular queer fanon ship that shippers tried to make canon here, but suffice to say that there is one similarity I see in majority of them - they tend not to be healthy relationships. Because there is usually a reason the ships were not canon in the first place, but the shippers just refuse to acknowledge it.
Be it because the character(s) in canon are heterosexual (which shippers love to insert gaynst in to symbolize their 'awakening'), perhaps even married (which is totally okay because their wives are beards and the characters are assholes), not really that close to each other (but they are totally in love secretly), enemies (which is apparently just foreplay for foe-yay), or even plain rejected each other (because it is totally fine to have non-consensual relations and it is romantic).
Look, I'm not saying stop shipping altogether. I'm saying stop pushing your version of fanon subtext as the one truth because it irritates the hell out of people and paints a bad picture of your ship (or even your whole fandom).
Plenty of the troublemakers originated here in tumblr. Not sure if any of them will see it, but just needed to get this off my chest.
Oh yes, and Kawoshin is still love. Maybe platonic love or agape love or one-sided love, but still canonically love. And that is good enough for me.
