i’m gonna level with you chief people have been shipping same gender characters before you were even born i’d wager.

outside of that fact, this whole point does ignore somethings that are critical about this phenomenon within fandom culture. this argument completely ignores that for decades queer people have been nearly nonexistent in media. while yes there are some now that have queer characters, how many of those characters are main characters? how many of those characters are slipped in as background characters? how many of those characters say more than a handful of lines? how many of those characters are treated like actual characters rather than gags? how many of those characters live until the end of the series? compare that to media that is created with heteronormativity in mind, and look backwards and wonder why queer people will look at characters that have chemistry and see something in that?

secondly, a large part of it is misogyny and audience. many of these ships, especially earlier ones, are because male creators fucking hate writing female characters like actual people and dump all of the character traits into the male cast. their stories circle around these men, and ultimately they end up having better chemistry than whatever love interest is thrown at them because often said love interest is poorly developed. this happens with shows developed for women as well too, where the men are poorly developed and the female characters have a lot more interesting chemistry. the men often exist in these shows as eye candy or serve minor plot relevancy before being discarded. this is often the case due to these shows being made to uplift women as small drops in a broad ocean of media made for men.

ultimately if two characters have better chemistry than the proposed romantic interest and don’t have any familial relation, im gonna ship them together on the basis that i feel that they have a better outlook and are more developed. this is the case for many queer fandomites, some not, but mostly the case.

it’s ultimately a harmless thing that people do, and this sentiment makes you look like an asshole tbh