Ok I’ll bite, I’m curious:
Mephisto/Amaimon - why ship it? (All 3 q’s)
Rin/Shiemi — why don’t you ship it? (I hope I’m asking this right)
I think we will probably have similar reasons but it never hurts to ask!
1. Ok! So for the first, really my og aoex ship was amairin bc I'm a battle couple shipper first and foremost but mefiama was a close second and it's bc I'm a demon lover after everything lololol
Specifically, I've loved characters like mephisto and amaimon as long as I can remember, starting from my og fav yyh Yoko Kurama and Hiei (which in my head is a different ship than Hiei/Kurama). But, like that ship, I actually never really liked/like the ways fandom portrays them. Characters like Hiei and Amaimon both end up woobified and turned into stereotypical uke characters with the big sexy dom/seme mephisto/Kurama to seduce/play with them.
And to me that always pissed me off bc of how ooc it made them all out to be. I love Hiei and Amaimon bc they're little feral shitheads who have a massive independent streak to them and act/are totally inhuman. They both poke at each other and cause each other headaches and I live for it lololol
They're spicy as hell too and I love that in a ship. The second I saw Mephisto keeping Amaimon strung up on spears in the cuckoo prison that was it for me 😩👌🔥
2. The draw for these characters and the ship is that they're both inhuman creatures that only pretend at humanity, or in amaimons case, is forced to play nice by mephisto if he wants to be stomping around his territory.
What I really love about them, though, is that while Mephisto has the upper hand in the dynamic, Amaimon also knows his character and can see past his clown mask bullshit. He knows the demon Mephisto really is under all the sparkles and show boating. He's an observer and even when Mephisto is focusing on his goals and plots and shows, Amaimon is there on the sidelines keeping tabs and picking everything apart. I think Amaimon thinks Mephisto is interesting or has potentially interesting ideas. The thing about demons is they're constantly looking for something to keep them interested through their eternal existences and with Mephisto, Amaimon has a source of enrichment lol
I also like the fucked up premise of how Amaimon has an inherent trust in Mephisto that gets abused in canon. We saw him getting incredibly hurt by the shiemi reveal, as if Mephisto keeping that info from him meant Mephisto was treating him like one of his human pawns and not with respect as another demon king.
3. I'm not sure if there's an unpopular opinion I have for them, except that I tend to find most fandom treats them incredibly ooc and it makes it difficult for me to enjoy content of them from others. Mephisto as the over simplified seductive seme, doing typical melodramatic evil villain stuff and Amaimon being reduced to a uwu baby idiot who has never had sex despite being a who knows how old demon king. I've got a ton of bitching I've done over the years about it (and it's the same treatment Hiei always got back in the day so I'm used to the frustration) 😂
1. Man I feel really bad to say this but this is one of the most vanilla/boring ships in the fandom outside of bonrin. It's just so typical hot headed anime boy protag/girl next door love interest, even as much as they're both incredibly well developed characters, and as much as I love Rin.
It really just comes down to Rin being a, like, base ingredient for me as a ship. Like him being involved in a ship isn't on its own enough to make me enjoy/ship something. (Amaimon, on the other hand, immediately spices any ship up and I've even got a few rinamaishi fic aus out there lol). But I've never been interested in the sweet, hard-working character archetype. I can't help it, I'm into edgy bastard gremlin characters, the antagonists and anti heroes lololol (The exception to this in aoex is Yuri and that's bc she's got that little mischievous bad girl zing to her I love lololol). Shiemi just doesn't have that spice I need to really invest in a character.
2. What would have made me like it is just if Shiemi was a different character lololol like, she's just too sweet for me, like a marshmallow. Her in her string Independent woman era isn't really doing it for me either bc it feels like all her character development got cut out in that training arc she was just in. We missed a good opportunity to see her reconcile things with her grandma and her growth just to watch her toss an Amaimon copy and it feels like we got cheated out of her character arc.
If she just had that little spark that Yuri had it might work for me but I haven't seen it and until then it feels like every other typical anime main character/love interest ship, and it's just never been a dynamic I've never been into.
3. Positive things I have to say are that I think Kato has always done a phenomenal job making her characters feel realistic and not the usual anime shallow stereotypes. So when ppl tell me they enjoy the ship I'm like yeah, if ur into those kinds of characters and that ship dynamic, you've come to the right series to get a really well developed couple who feel fleshed out and who have had a developing relationship throughout the series. Totally understandable, just not for me.
I hope I actually answered these right 😂 thanks for the ask @philosophicalparadox 🩷
