unjapanologist

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm still working through the batch of over a hundred new Snape-as-a-main-character Harry Potter dojinshi I bought in July, but once more, it seems all of them are yaoi. Now, I didn't do this on purpose. Really. I specifically went looking for het HP dojinshi with Snape in them in Toranoana and other shops that cater to a male clientele, because I know there are het HP dojinshi out there. I've seen them on the net. They weren't in the shops. Not anymore, the friendly sales clerks said. The female-oriented shops still had shelves and shelves of HP dojinshi, the vast majority of them yaoi.

I grabbed every dojinshi that seemed to have Snape on the cover, and even some apparently gen dojinshi that never even hinted at Snape Inside, in the hope that they might have some significant amount of non-yaoi!Snape. No idea yet if I had any success there.

When I go to Kyoto this December, I'm going to look for more samples. There'll probably be some good new stuff to be found then, with the Half-Blood Prince movie having come out this summer. Maybe even some het, but I'm not holding my breath. The bottom line is, this PhD is going to be about yaoi and slash in all but name. All the samples I've turned up by randomly buying every Snape dojinshi I come across are yaoi. I really, really didn't mean for it to be all about yaoi again, after I very deliberately made pretty much all of my undergraduate papers and my 150-page MA thesis about yaoi. I honestly didn't set out to do a PhD on yaoi, too. But scientific integrity obliges me to represent the data as it is contained in the samples, and the samples are yaoi, yaoi, and yaoi. It seems I'm fated to talk about yaoi and nothing but yaoi for the rest of my academic life. I can't get away from it.

Ah, what a cruel fate. I will attempt to bear it with dignity and not too much goofy grinning.