This thread has been an excellent example of how the entire concept of “shipping,” which is pleasant enough as a parlor game or imaginative projection (or simply a re-labeling of the basic way readers connect to characters in relationship stories—who doesn’t ship Romeo and Juliet?) can become counterproductive to critical discourse and even toxic to the exchange of ideas.
Some “shipping wars” are the result of differing readings of a particular character or different readers’ preferences for a specific character type (or even gleefully perverse and contrarian, as in “I ship [Predatory playgirl domme from Story A X shy virtuous librarian in wheelchair from Story B]”). That’s perfectly understandable—after all, you like what you like.
In this case, however, the character of Sayaka in this series could literally have been designed to disprove the premise that predictions about the future plot are based on liking or disliking a particular character or pairing. She’s a great person without being artificially perfect; she and Touko get along splendidly, and (as the people around them explicitly say) they look great together. She has lot of integrity, discretion, and loyalty. It’s true (as she herself says) that she’s been a bit of a coward as she held back on expressing her feelings, but that only makes her intensely relatable—if every person here who at least once didn’t confess for fear of losing a precious friendship left the Dynasty forum, this place would be a ghost town. A story about Touko and Sayaka getting together could well be a great yuri story.
But no matter how clearly a given proposition is stated, it’s obvious that several posters in this thread have been unable or unwilling to perceive an argument or to understand disagreements in interpretation except through the lens of the other person’s “shipping” preferences. That hasn’t been the only problem—several elementary terms and concepts in literary/narrative analysis have been profoundly misunderstood or misused—but it’s (at least) extremely annoying to explain in detail how a reading of the text isn’t motivated by “shipping,” only to essentially be called a liar, or to see an clear explanation of the fundamentals of narrative form dismissed as if it’s about character preferences.
As a fan, I ship like anybody else, and I find, say, a mental image of Koyomi in domme gear standing over a lingerie-clad Akari quivering in anticipation to be pleasantly amusing (so sue me). But I’ve seen plenty of examples lately of people talking past each other in these threads because they assume that “shipping” is the default motivation for other people’s ideas, at which point what was once a fun, even whimsical, thought experiment has metastasized into a significant barrier to communication.
EDIT: Of course, none of this has anything to do with people who apparently don’t know what words mean—nothing to be done about that.
Seeing you make a new post gives me a feeling that should be bottled and sold as an anti-depressant.