Proship and Fandom Culture: Debunking anti's view of proship.

Fujoshis are cool, actually

Explaining the terms:

Fujoshi (腐女子, lit. "rotten girl") is a Japanese term for female fans of manga, anime, and novels that feature romantic relationships between men. The label encompasses fans of the yaoi genre itself, as well as the related manga, anime, and video game properties that have appeared as the market for such works has developed. The term "fujoshi" is a homophonous pun on fujoshi (婦女子), a term for respectable women, created by replacing the character fu (婦) meaning married woman, with the character fu (腐) meaning fermented or rotten, indicating that a woman who enjoys fictional gay content is ruined for marriage. The name was coined by 2channel in the early 2000s as a derogatory insult but was later reclaimed as a self-descriptive term. "Fujoshi" carried a connotation of being a "fallen woman." An issue of Yureka, which examined fujoshi in detail in 2007, contributed to the spread of the term.

Older fujoshi use various terms to refer to themselves, including as kifujin (貴腐人, "noble spoiled woman"), a pun on a homophonous word meaning "fine lady", and ochōfujin (汚超腐人), which sounds similar to a phrase meaning "Madame Butterfly", possibly taken from a character nicknamed Ochōfujin (お蝶夫人) in the 1972 manga series Ace o Nerae! by Sumika Yamamoto.

Men who, like fujoshi, enjoy imagining relationships between characters (especially male ones) in fictional works when that relationship is not part of the author's intent may be called fudanshi (腐男子, "rotten boy") or fukei (腐兄, "rotten older brother").

The term "fujin" (腐人, "spoiled person") also exists as a gender-neutral version and is used by some nonbinary fans.

The kanji "Fu" (腐) is often used as a prefix in fanwork titles on sites such as Pixiv to clearly mark works that contain male-male relationships

Now, to the actual chapter:

It's true that yaoi never had a very good reputation, I belive that the main cause is the presence of queerphobia and anti-ship culture in fandom spaces in the late 90s and early 2000s
Even so, many doujinshi (including yaoi) of popular animes were sold in cons and amateur manga markets all over Japan. This was the gateway into the world of manga creation for many mangakas (MAINLY women), who began their careers as doujinka (doujinshi artists).

So many now well-respected mangakas got their start as doujinka, making yaoi and other fanworks for their favorite series. It gave these women a voice in an industry that otherwise would have been much harder to break into.

In the early days of online fandom, spaces were often heavily policed by mainstream norms and cultural expectations, especially around queerness and shipping. Yaoi became a target for this negativity, in part because it challenged heteronormative expectations and allowed women, queer people, and others to explore same-sex relationships in ways that mainstream media often ignored or mishandled.

The collaborative nature of fandom also fostered deep community bonds. Fans would critique each other's work, write fix-it fics to explore different dynamics, or create massive crossover AUs where anything was possible. These spaces were some of the first to truly embrace the idea that you didn't have to wait for professional creators to give you the stories you wanted-you could make them yourself !!

Fandom, by its very nature, thrives on subversion. Yaoi and slash fiction (Due to the lack of canonical homosexual relationships in source media at the time that slash fiction began to emerge, some came to see slash fiction stories as being exclusively outside their respective canons and held that the term "slash fiction" applies only when the characters' same-sex romantic or erotic relationship about which an author writes is not part of the source's canon.) were acts of defiance, pushing back against both the lack of representation in media and the rigid expectations society placed on gender and sexuality. They became spaces where fans could imagine a world different from the bitter canon version. Over time, this fan-driven subversion became part of a larger conversation about who gets to tell stories and what kinds of stories are worth telling.