Outer limits of shipping imagination reached, everybody go home

[unjapanologist]

Home from Tokyo, will get cracking on a bunch of replies now. In the meantime: I looked at the list of pairings on the cover of this dojinshi and felt like a really, really undeveloped fannish person because I only know how to ship mere humans. I should get more practice at looking at the world around me and finding the shipping angle in everything.



(Mukibutsu Anthology 7, multiple authors)

And this is just one book in a series of large thick anthologies about objects getting it on. Anthropomorphic (gijinka) manga have been all the rage for several years now, ever since Hetalia: I don't remember if Hetalia started it or if it was simply the most succesful representative of the trend. I bought a bunch in the beginning - the ones with the antropomorphic trains and the antropomorphic Japanese prefectures and the antropomorphic condiments and the antropomorphic fast food restaurants - because the idea seemed novel and possibly interesting, but most of them were pretty boring comedy stuff with some nudge-nudge-wink-wink hints at shipping. The stories in this dojinshi are not boring. Clearly, all that was necessary to get me extremely interested in shoeshine/shoes was the addition of explicit and, um, fully realized shipping.

Comments

[unjapanologist]

The manga didn't do it for me, but the dojinshi, hell yeah. Though I'm really fascinated by how many anthropomorphic manga play with cute characters of things that are really not cute in RL - there's anthropomorphic manga about weapons, and about WWII-era Japanese battleships.

Now I'm going through the anthropomorfic tag on AO3 and wondering about the theoretical implications of the fact that this is considered a tag on AO3, while it's considered a fandom (genre) in the dojinshi shops I've seen. *overthinking it*