your ship is not canon
ETA: just for clarification, because the essay doesn't really make this clear: I actually wouldn't say that the kind of "ship wars" described below are particularly common within this fandom, but these are some thoughts on why they might be happening in such corners of the fandom as they are (principally, on the Court Records forums).
It seems to me that the two most common and trouble-causing faultlines in the shipping corners of most fandoms are the divide between slash and het shippers, and the divide between canon and non-canon shipping. Often (although by no means always, obviously, depending on the canon and the fandom - in HP and Avatar, to name just two examples, the canon/non-canon divide splits the het shippers), these two oppositions are congruent - a common reason given for dislike of or lack of interest in slash pairings is that they are not canonical or even perceived as plausible within the boundaries of canon.
These divides can be and often are resolved with a healthy and respectful dose of YMMV, but they are equally often the cause of a significant degree of a fandom's infighting and resentment. Dislike of slash, or conversely perceived "heterophobia" (not a word I particularly like, but never mind), can still be a contentious issue, and canon ship wars can be unreasonably and mystifyingly vicious. When the two issues collide, meanwhile, you often get an outpouring of derision and frustration on both sides, all the customary canon ship-war arguments trotted out (your reading is anti-intellectual and simplistic/your reading is delusional and projecting) along with those often unpleasant tensions and insults that often lurk around the divide between slash and het shippers (you're not open-minded enough/you're just an inane fangirl), and a couple of new ones arising from the collision (your prejudice blinds you to what's in front of you/what you're seeing and writing isn't what the creators would have wanted, and a lot of others that get more dangerously close to, and often cross the line into, outright homophobia).
I'd hypothesise, from the fandoms I've lurked in and been involved in over the last 8 years or so, that whether a fandom tends towards conflict or peaceful resolution across these faultlines depends on a couple of factors. It seems to me (perhaps paradoxically) that the less ambiguous the divide between canon and not-canon, the more likely canon and non-canon shippers are to live and let live - canon shippers get the textual fulfilment they're after, non-canon shippers accept and don't pretend that they've got any chance of getting it and happily get on with getting what they want from fic; there's no conflict of interpretations. Conversely, the more equal a chance there is of two (or more) ships becoming canon (or at least, the more obtrusive the queer subtext within the canon), the more the respective factions are likely to argue - because each side's arguments, interpretations, and desires are in direct conflict with the other's, and that can easily lead to defensiveness and resentment.
What I want to talk about here is how this plays out in the Ace Attorney fandom, in the context of the backlash against P/E specifically, and more generally slash. From lurking on the Court Records forums, I've seen that a good degree of the slash vs. het arguments (or let's be honest, to a great extent, the P/E vs. any other het Phoenix ship you can think of) come back again and again to this issue of canonicity. I've seen post after post of P/E shippers and, usually, Phoenix/Iris shippers setting out long and involved cases for the relative canonicity of their ships. What's interesting, though, is the circularity of these arguments - because either side's cry of "your ship is NOT canon" can be shot straight back at them. There are very few canon ships in the Ace Attorney universe, and barring Feenie/"Dollie", none for the main characters. What I wonder is how far and in what ways it's this ambivalence and lack of resolution in what little romance there is in the series that drives the tensions between slash and het shippers in this fandom.
Disclaimer: I should admit up front that not only do I ship Phoenix/Edgeworth, I actually very much dislike all the major het ships for Phoenix in the series. I've done my best, obviously, to avoid bias, but I do want to be honest about my own preferences.
The interesting thing about the Ace Attorney series in this respect is that the main "canon ship" war, as it normally plays out, is between one of usually three m/f ships (Phoenix/Iris, Phoenix/Maya, Phoenix/Thalassa) and an m/m ship (Phoenix/Edgeworth). There seems to be a genuine belief that Phoenix/Edgeworth, if not canon, is at least as canon as either of the other three ships, and some would say more canon. This is a belief, however, that I've seen cause no end of outrage in people (usually, but not exclusively, het shippers) who don't subscribe to it. This raises two questions, then, I think: what is it about the texts that encourages this kind of interpretation, and why is it the cause of so much resentment?
My own response to the first answer would be, broadly speaking, that although it's by no means a genuinely queer or subversive text, the Ace Attorney series is not as heteronormative as it could be. To elaborate:
I may just be speaking for myself here, and any other perspectives would be welcomed, but one of the reasons that I think writers are drawn to slash is because there is an overwhelming tendency in modern media a) to privilege representations of male homosocial relationships (whether friendships, rivalries, mentor-student relationships, and so on and so forth), and b) to offer representations of heterosexual relationships that fall fairly flat compared to the depths of emotion and psychological complexity presented in said male homosocial relationships. More to the point, there is a constant reinforcement (whether consciously or unconsciously a product of social heteronormativity and homophobia) of the idea that the homo is social and the hetero is sexual. The result is texts centring on intense and emotionally charged male-male relationships (I think, incidentally, that the comparative lack of f/f fic in most fandoms is a direct result of the fact that female homosocial relationships are massively underplayed in most media - but that's an issue for the feminism month), that are then corrected or neutralised by the insertion of a heterosexual love interest - although (as fandom rightly and gleefully points out) this in no way precludes a male protagonist being bisexual, the sad fact is that this will then be taken (again, consciously or unconsciously, and usually I would say unconsciously) by most people as an assertion of his heterosexuality, one that makes his intense homosocial relationships safe and acceptable. Examples of this kind of pattern: the Seifer-Squall-Rinoa triangle in FFVIII, or the Sirius-Remus-Tonks set-up in the Harry Potter series. I would say, then, that slash shipping arises from intense and well-justified frustration with this - frustration at the heteronormativity of it, frustration at the unsatisfying representations of heterosexuality, frustration (whether as a queer fan or a straight fan) at being repeatedly told that contigent on the genders involved, deep emotional relationships can't have a sexual dimension, or satisfying sexual relationships can't have an emotional dimension.
The problem (or, you know, the great thing, as far as I'm concerned) with the Ace Attorney series is that the heterosexual "correction" of the text doesn't ever happen. The first three games have as probably their main sub-plot (assuming the Fey's story to be the primary overarching plot) the development and resolution of a deep and complicated emotional attachment between two men, charting the history of their involvement with each other, the level of their investment in the other's well-being, their professional and personal respect for each other, and the extent to which each is the cause and/or facilitator of major personal and emotional growth in the other - exactly the sort of thing that you could believably, although of course not necessarily, see developing into a romantic relationship. However, at no point is the heterosexuality of these two men directly asserted in the way that it so often is. Edgeworth's isn't asserted at all, and Phoenix's very ambiguously so. Phoenix shows physical attraction to women, and he has a relationship with a woman in his past. On the other hand, his single heterosexual relationship is heavily qualified and difficult to interpret as a reflection of Phoenix's sexuality, given that any feelings involved, however genuine, must be understood as coloured to some extent by Phoenix's immaturity and naivety and Iris's constant awareness of working for her sister; more to the point, he is given no actualised heterosexual love interest at any point in canon. And it would have been very easy to do this - although I don't think Maya was ever a viable choice, the Iris plot could have been wrapped up very differently, with a far more explicit declaration of romantic intention or desire (as opposed to faith, gratitude, possible lingering attraction - although it has to be pointed out that Pearl punches Nick at one point for paying too much attention to Godot, make of that what you will - and a sense of putting the past behind them, which is what we do get), and there could have been an indication in AJ that Phoenix and Thalassa were going to start co-parenting, or similar, and either would have been plausible. But it doesn't happen. What we're left with, therefore, at the end of the first three games, is one homosocial relationship which is not precluded from becoming romantic, and one romantic relationship that is not precluded from becoming platonic.
The second question I find more difficult to answer. As I've said, I don't ship any of the major "canon-plausible" het pairings for Phoenix (Phoenix/Maya, Phoenix/Iris, Phoenix/Thalassa), nor have I ever been at all invested in whether a ship of mine is or will become canon, so anything I say now is pure conjecture and I would welcome other thoughts and corrections. I would be inclined to say, though, that the strength of people's reactions is a product of the collision between two emotionally-charged complexes of attitudes. In this fandom, there is a central male/male relationship that is not as precluded as it would normally be by the structures of the texts, insofar as it is not corrected or neutralised by the explicit canonical establishment of heterosexual love interests for either man, which means that the kind of canon/non-canon ship wars that in a lot of fandoms divide het shippers, here map on to the other major divide in most fandoms, slash shippers vs. het shippers. As a result, the two "kinds" of argument, if you like, become bound up in and exacerbate each other - the divide between slash and het shipping becomes coloured with a desire for canonicity, while debates over canon vs. not-canon start to play out along the well-worn lines of arguments in favour of and against slash. Given that more often than not, as I've said above, it's issues of canonicity that produce most of the drama and vitriol in the shipping corners of the fandom, and that attitudes towards slash and het as genres are often very strongly felt and touch on sore spots with many people, bringing the two together seems guaranteed, I'd say, to produce a pretty volatile cocktail.
It seems to me, then, that both the intensity and the exact shape of the backlash against slash in the Ace Attorney fandom is at least partially determined by the deliberate ambiguity of its canon romantic plots. You could argue, for example, for a double dissatisfaction on the part of het fans - not only do they not necessarily have as much fic to enjoy (is this true, do people think? It always seems to me that slash just about predominates in this fandom, but that might just be a function of where I personally hang out), but they also aren't getting any canon-fulfilment either where they might normally expect to. This is the key here for me; slashers are not only used to getting canon-fulfilment, I think they've often learned because of a sensitivity to heteronormativity not to expect to, whereas het ships have, as much as I know I dislike it, a higher degree of canon likelihood simply by dint of being het ships. On the flip side of that, perhaps the willingness of slashers to keep ship debates going comes from the novelty of feeling that they might have a chance - does it produce, for example, a higher degree of investment, and perhaps a sense of justification and defensiveness, a backlash on their part to being repeatedly told that their ships are not and will never be canon. I've noticed also, meanwhile, that because there is no hard canon evidence (a canon kiss, for example, or declaration of love) for any pairing, ship debates end up falling back on arguments that are a lot less clear-cut, a lot more difficult to either argue for or against, and a lot more redolent of heterosexism: the "straight unless proven otherwise" argument gets pulled out, and the converse argument outlined above (that the absence of assertions of heterosexuality in the context of normal media paradigms is itself suggestive of queerness) brought up in response; debates start to centre on plausibility rather than canonicity, which then opens multiple other cans of worms, including the faultline between the fact of heteronormativity (suggesting het ships to be inherently more plausible in terms of authorial intention and likely canonical resolution) and the undesirabilty and unrealisticness of heteronormativity (realism dictates, of course, if not probability, that Phoenix being queer is no less plausible than him being straight). Not only are these the sort of arguments that can go on indefinitely without resolution, they are also the sort of arguments that end up dredging up prejudices and correspondingly angry reactions.
I think this kind of ambiguity is deliberate on Capcom's part. It seems to me that they are perfectly aware of their fanbase, and aware that to resolve the canon romance in any direction would be to alienate, to some degree, a proportion of that fanbase. It's because of this that I personally feel a) that Phoenix can be said to be canonically bisexual, and b) that Phoenix/Edgeworth is as canon as any other Phoenix-ship - in that it's my belief that Capcom is deliberately keeping the shipping open to interpretation, and that Phoenix/Edgeworth is one such interpretation that they want to keep open. That, though, is a personal and probably optimistic argument. I do think, though, that this creative decision is at least partly responsible for sustaining an undercurrent of resentment between slash and het fans (and particularly, Phoenix/Edgeworth and Phoenix/any female fans) in some corners of the fandom. I don't think this is by any means the only factor influencing negative reactions against slash in this fandom, but it's something I've noticed and been wondering about for a while. Thoughts, anyone?
It seems to me that the two most common and trouble-causing faultlines in the shipping corners of most fandoms are the divide between slash and het shippers, and the divide between canon and non-canon shipping. Often (although by no means always, obviously, depending on the canon and the fandom - in HP and Avatar, to name just two examples, the canon/non-canon divide splits the het shippers), these two oppositions are congruent - a common reason given for dislike of or lack of interest in slash pairings is that they are not canonical or even perceived as plausible within the boundaries of canon.
These divides can be and often are resolved with a healthy and respectful dose of YMMV, but they are equally often the cause of a significant degree of a fandom's infighting and resentment. Dislike of slash, or conversely perceived "heterophobia" (not a word I particularly like, but never mind), can still be a contentious issue, and canon ship wars can be unreasonably and mystifyingly vicious. When the two issues collide, meanwhile, you often get an outpouring of derision and frustration on both sides, all the customary canon ship-war arguments trotted out (your reading is anti-intellectual and simplistic/your reading is delusional and projecting) along with those often unpleasant tensions and insults that often lurk around the divide between slash and het shippers (you're not open-minded enough/you're just an inane fangirl), and a couple of new ones arising from the collision (your prejudice blinds you to what's in front of you/what you're seeing and writing isn't what the creators would have wanted, and a lot of others that get more dangerously close to, and often cross the line into, outright homophobia).
I'd hypothesise, from the fandoms I've lurked in and been involved in over the last 8 years or so, that whether a fandom tends towards conflict or peaceful resolution across these faultlines depends on a couple of factors. It seems to me (perhaps paradoxically) that the less ambiguous the divide between canon and not-canon, the more likely canon and non-canon shippers are to live and let live - canon shippers get the textual fulfilment they're after, non-canon shippers accept and don't pretend that they've got any chance of getting it and happily get on with getting what they want from fic; there's no conflict of interpretations. Conversely, the more equal a chance there is of two (or more) ships becoming canon (or at least, the more obtrusive the queer subtext within the canon), the more the respective factions are likely to argue - because each side's arguments, interpretations, and desires are in direct conflict with the other's, and that can easily lead to defensiveness and resentment.
What I want to talk about here is how this plays out in the Ace Attorney fandom, in the context of the backlash against P/E specifically, and more generally slash. From lurking on the Court Records forums, I've seen that a good degree of the slash vs. het arguments (or let's be honest, to a great extent, the P/E vs. any other het Phoenix ship you can think of) come back again and again to this issue of canonicity. I've seen post after post of P/E shippers and, usually, Phoenix/Iris shippers setting out long and involved cases for the relative canonicity of their ships. What's interesting, though, is the circularity of these arguments - because either side's cry of "your ship is NOT canon" can be shot straight back at them. There are very few canon ships in the Ace Attorney universe, and barring Feenie/"Dollie", none for the main characters. What I wonder is how far and in what ways it's this ambivalence and lack of resolution in what little romance there is in the series that drives the tensions between slash and het shippers in this fandom.
Disclaimer: I should admit up front that not only do I ship Phoenix/Edgeworth, I actually very much dislike all the major het ships for Phoenix in the series. I've done my best, obviously, to avoid bias, but I do want to be honest about my own preferences.
The interesting thing about the Ace Attorney series in this respect is that the main "canon ship" war, as it normally plays out, is between one of usually three m/f ships (Phoenix/Iris, Phoenix/Maya, Phoenix/Thalassa) and an m/m ship (Phoenix/Edgeworth). There seems to be a genuine belief that Phoenix/Edgeworth, if not canon, is at least as canon as either of the other three ships, and some would say more canon. This is a belief, however, that I've seen cause no end of outrage in people (usually, but not exclusively, het shippers) who don't subscribe to it. This raises two questions, then, I think: what is it about the texts that encourages this kind of interpretation, and why is it the cause of so much resentment?
My own response to the first answer would be, broadly speaking, that although it's by no means a genuinely queer or subversive text, the Ace Attorney series is not as heteronormative as it could be. To elaborate:
I may just be speaking for myself here, and any other perspectives would be welcomed, but one of the reasons that I think writers are drawn to slash is because there is an overwhelming tendency in modern media a) to privilege representations of male homosocial relationships (whether friendships, rivalries, mentor-student relationships, and so on and so forth), and b) to offer representations of heterosexual relationships that fall fairly flat compared to the depths of emotion and psychological complexity presented in said male homosocial relationships. More to the point, there is a constant reinforcement (whether consciously or unconsciously a product of social heteronormativity and homophobia) of the idea that the homo is social and the hetero is sexual. The result is texts centring on intense and emotionally charged male-male relationships (I think, incidentally, that the comparative lack of f/f fic in most fandoms is a direct result of the fact that female homosocial relationships are massively underplayed in most media - but that's an issue for the feminism month), that are then corrected or neutralised by the insertion of a heterosexual love interest - although (as fandom rightly and gleefully points out) this in no way precludes a male protagonist being bisexual, the sad fact is that this will then be taken (again, consciously or unconsciously, and usually I would say unconsciously) by most people as an assertion of his heterosexuality, one that makes his intense homosocial relationships safe and acceptable. Examples of this kind of pattern: the Seifer-Squall-Rinoa triangle in FFVIII, or the Sirius-Remus-Tonks set-up in the Harry Potter series. I would say, then, that slash shipping arises from intense and well-justified frustration with this - frustration at the heteronormativity of it, frustration at the unsatisfying representations of heterosexuality, frustration (whether as a queer fan or a straight fan) at being repeatedly told that contigent on the genders involved, deep emotional relationships can't have a sexual dimension, or satisfying sexual relationships can't have an emotional dimension.
The problem (or, you know, the great thing, as far as I'm concerned) with the Ace Attorney series is that the heterosexual "correction" of the text doesn't ever happen. The first three games have as probably their main sub-plot (assuming the Fey's story to be the primary overarching plot) the development and resolution of a deep and complicated emotional attachment between two men, charting the history of their involvement with each other, the level of their investment in the other's well-being, their professional and personal respect for each other, and the extent to which each is the cause and/or facilitator of major personal and emotional growth in the other - exactly the sort of thing that you could believably, although of course not necessarily, see developing into a romantic relationship. However, at no point is the heterosexuality of these two men directly asserted in the way that it so often is. Edgeworth's isn't asserted at all, and Phoenix's very ambiguously so. Phoenix shows physical attraction to women, and he has a relationship with a woman in his past. On the other hand, his single heterosexual relationship is heavily qualified and difficult to interpret as a reflection of Phoenix's sexuality, given that any feelings involved, however genuine, must be understood as coloured to some extent by Phoenix's immaturity and naivety and Iris's constant awareness of working for her sister; more to the point, he is given no actualised heterosexual love interest at any point in canon. And it would have been very easy to do this - although I don't think Maya was ever a viable choice, the Iris plot could have been wrapped up very differently, with a far more explicit declaration of romantic intention or desire (as opposed to faith, gratitude, possible lingering attraction - although it has to be pointed out that Pearl punches Nick at one point for paying too much attention to Godot, make of that what you will - and a sense of putting the past behind them, which is what we do get), and there could have been an indication in AJ that Phoenix and Thalassa were going to start co-parenting, or similar, and either would have been plausible. But it doesn't happen. What we're left with, therefore, at the end of the first three games, is one homosocial relationship which is not precluded from becoming romantic, and one romantic relationship that is not precluded from becoming platonic.
The second question I find more difficult to answer. As I've said, I don't ship any of the major "canon-plausible" het pairings for Phoenix (Phoenix/Maya, Phoenix/Iris, Phoenix/Thalassa), nor have I ever been at all invested in whether a ship of mine is or will become canon, so anything I say now is pure conjecture and I would welcome other thoughts and corrections. I would be inclined to say, though, that the strength of people's reactions is a product of the collision between two emotionally-charged complexes of attitudes. In this fandom, there is a central male/male relationship that is not as precluded as it would normally be by the structures of the texts, insofar as it is not corrected or neutralised by the explicit canonical establishment of heterosexual love interests for either man, which means that the kind of canon/non-canon ship wars that in a lot of fandoms divide het shippers, here map on to the other major divide in most fandoms, slash shippers vs. het shippers. As a result, the two "kinds" of argument, if you like, become bound up in and exacerbate each other - the divide between slash and het shipping becomes coloured with a desire for canonicity, while debates over canon vs. not-canon start to play out along the well-worn lines of arguments in favour of and against slash. Given that more often than not, as I've said above, it's issues of canonicity that produce most of the drama and vitriol in the shipping corners of the fandom, and that attitudes towards slash and het as genres are often very strongly felt and touch on sore spots with many people, bringing the two together seems guaranteed, I'd say, to produce a pretty volatile cocktail.
It seems to me, then, that both the intensity and the exact shape of the backlash against slash in the Ace Attorney fandom is at least partially determined by the deliberate ambiguity of its canon romantic plots. You could argue, for example, for a double dissatisfaction on the part of het fans - not only do they not necessarily have as much fic to enjoy (is this true, do people think? It always seems to me that slash just about predominates in this fandom, but that might just be a function of where I personally hang out), but they also aren't getting any canon-fulfilment either where they might normally expect to. This is the key here for me; slashers are not only used to getting canon-fulfilment, I think they've often learned because of a sensitivity to heteronormativity not to expect to, whereas het ships have, as much as I know I dislike it, a higher degree of canon likelihood simply by dint of being het ships. On the flip side of that, perhaps the willingness of slashers to keep ship debates going comes from the novelty of feeling that they might have a chance - does it produce, for example, a higher degree of investment, and perhaps a sense of justification and defensiveness, a backlash on their part to being repeatedly told that their ships are not and will never be canon. I've noticed also, meanwhile, that because there is no hard canon evidence (a canon kiss, for example, or declaration of love) for any pairing, ship debates end up falling back on arguments that are a lot less clear-cut, a lot more difficult to either argue for or against, and a lot more redolent of heterosexism: the "straight unless proven otherwise" argument gets pulled out, and the converse argument outlined above (that the absence of assertions of heterosexuality in the context of normal media paradigms is itself suggestive of queerness) brought up in response; debates start to centre on plausibility rather than canonicity, which then opens multiple other cans of worms, including the faultline between the fact of heteronormativity (suggesting het ships to be inherently more plausible in terms of authorial intention and likely canonical resolution) and the undesirabilty and unrealisticness of heteronormativity (realism dictates, of course, if not probability, that Phoenix being queer is no less plausible than him being straight). Not only are these the sort of arguments that can go on indefinitely without resolution, they are also the sort of arguments that end up dredging up prejudices and correspondingly angry reactions.
I think this kind of ambiguity is deliberate on Capcom's part. It seems to me that they are perfectly aware of their fanbase, and aware that to resolve the canon romance in any direction would be to alienate, to some degree, a proportion of that fanbase. It's because of this that I personally feel a) that Phoenix can be said to be canonically bisexual, and b) that Phoenix/Edgeworth is as canon as any other Phoenix-ship - in that it's my belief that Capcom is deliberately keeping the shipping open to interpretation, and that Phoenix/Edgeworth is one such interpretation that they want to keep open. That, though, is a personal and probably optimistic argument. I do think, though, that this creative decision is at least partly responsible for sustaining an undercurrent of resentment between slash and het fans (and particularly, Phoenix/Edgeworth and Phoenix/any female fans) in some corners of the fandom. I don't think this is by any means the only factor influencing negative reactions against slash in this fandom, but it's something I've noticed and been wondering about for a while. Thoughts, anyone?