redwoodalchan | My Latest Random Fandom Observation

So I was exploring the “Shiki” fandom recently and I stumbled across an interesting observation, which I'm pretty sure is relevant to many fandoms all over the place.

Back when I watched “Shiki” this past Halloween, it seemed clear to me by the end of things that Masao, who was my favorite character, had a crush on Megumi, a pretty female vampire (I'm pretty sure I've spoken about this before, but either way). This is never expressly spelled out in canon, but I couldn't really see any other way to interpret the fact that after becoming a vampire he spent virtually all of his time with her, he never spoke badly to or of her even when she heaped verbal and physical abuse on him (and this is the same character who hated several other boys for no reason), watched her talking to another vampire through the bushes only to comment on her, and asked her if she would like to run away with him when things got bad.

That being said, what I found really funny about this little point is the way it got distributed throughout the fandom. It seems to have been received massively differently depending on which part of the fandom you're visiting.

For example, the one fanfic in the Pit that features Masao is a fic shipping him with Megumi. But the most dramatic example of this is on the ask blog dedicated to Masao on Tumblr. That blog contains about eighteen entries in total—six of which referred to Megumi in some way shape or form (and four or five of those six directly referred to how much Masao liked Megumi/liked creeping on her). While that isn't the majority of total entries, it's still more than any other single topic, including his relationship to characters besides Megumi, general comments offering him sympathy or talking about why he was awesome, antagonistic comments, and questions regarding his sexuality (the most popular topic, after Megumi, seemed to be asking him to marry them, which I don't get in the slightest). In any case, though, to “Shiki's” RPers and fanfic writers, shipping these characters is the obvious thing to do (it's also probably the easiest way to even get Masao into the spotlight—he has so many haters that the best way to focus on him is to mention him in conjunction with a more popular character).

However, by the same token, nobody on any of the wikis dedicated to discussing or analyzing “Shiki” seem to have noticed this at all. I've visited the “Shiki” pages on TVTropes and MyAnimeList, as well as the Shiki wiki, and none of them mention anywhere that Masao has or could have a romantic interest in Megumi. Now, to be fair, it isn't exactly confirmed in canon that he does, and so it's possible that the wikis just wouldn't be interested in it... but since all of them believe Megumi's side of the story, that Masao is just hanging out with her so that he won't be the only one to run away in the end (and Megumi is hardly an unbiased witness herself), I'm not sure if that explanation entirely works.

Of course, maybe it does work; if so, you'd expect to see similar trends in other fandoms. Now, the thing about the “Shiki” fandom is that it's rather small and out of the mainstream, which probably means that trends get laid barer there than in larger fandoms like Harry Potter or Pokemon, simply because there are fewer people vying to have their interpretations heard. But I'd still be interested to see if there's any differences between how different methods of interacting with the fandom absorb and channel different interpretations and questions about their characters.