Go For It Nakamura, Syundei and Fetishism
There is a lot of controversy surrounding the mangaka of Go For It Nakamura as people caught wind of Syundei's other works that portray age-gap relationships between adults and minors. People are debating if the response to this revelation was too harsh or if Syundei deserved to be scrutinized at all. What I want to address is the naive expectation that BL writers should keep their fetishes out of their works when yaoi is already inherently fetishistic.
There has been a rebranding of fujoshi culture as a "safe space for cishet women" rather than as a fetish community; that yaoi is actually just a source of escapism from the weight of patriarchy. I understand the oppressive nature of constantly being perceived as a woman and how objectification is inescapable. There is real comfort in being able to just consume something without having to constantly be aware of how women are being watched/dressed/judged/treated/harmed/etc. However, it's misogynistic to just remove women from visibility altogether in order to avoid the chances of bad female representation. Escapism is not activism and I've become deeply frustrated with this self indulgent mentality that privileged women can justify with faux-feminist lingo. If cishet women's consumption of BL is strictly escapism and not fetishistic then why do they turn their nose to lesbian stories? Not only are straight women disinterested in GL, many of them exert lesbophobic and misogynistic ire towards women in fiction (ie. the backlash to a lesbian story in Bridgerton, hate against female characters "getting in the way" of gay ships, the lack of support for women's stories, etc). The use of progressive language to mask fetishism has made us assume yaoi/yuri is a genre based in solidarity and appreciation when in actuality, it centers cishet people's desires and dismisses queer people's feelings.
Despite its fetishistic overtones, yaoi and yuri still depicts gay love and intimacy that provides much needed representation for the queer community. However, we mustn't mistake that just because the genre is about gay relationships, that it is LGBTQ+ media. The exclusion of trans people, the lack of queer community, and the assertion of gender norms makes it evident that the ultimate intentions of BL/GL is to provide a sexual fantasy of gay bodies for the pleasure of straight readers.
I have to play devil's advocate when it comes to the controversy surrounding Syundei because the reality is; Syundei was always making content for fetishists, NOT gays! The crackdown on Syundei for her age-gap fetish is frankly being oblivious to the genre Syundei is partaking in. YAOI IS A FETISH GENRE!!! We were never the target audiences, there was never an objective to portray gay people in a sincere light, and it's why when it came to reacting to Syundei's other fetish, the anime/manga community took her side. We're the ones who are out of line here because we expected authentic representation to come from our voyeurs. We can't control a space that never humanized us, we were always just objects of perversion to these people. What we should focus our energy on is seeking out and supporting works actually written by queer people for queer people. There are plenty of real LGBTQ+ manga that deserve attention and their own anime!
We also have to distinguish fetish, kink, and addressing taboo in order to understand the stories we're consuming that's not just hammering puritanical expectations about a complex and nonconformist community (but it goes without saying that sexualizing minors is bad).
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