Yes, You May Yume

10.22.26 // 1:08pm

Yumeshipping is real hot right now, ain’t it?

I’m not really on social media at the moment. Well, that’s kind of a lie—I’m arguably on social media now more than ever before, in the sense that I’m making videos and interacting with comments. But that’s not really what I mean. In the past, I’ve operated as your standard fandom account: I’d write fanfiction, I’d make random little posts about my favorite characters or how rough my day was, and of course, I’d interact with my moots. That’s far from how I use the internet right now. I really miss interacting with fandom, but I’ve found that I’ve aged out of it in most spaces that aren’t Final Fantasy XIV (I suppose because a 900 hour RPG doesn’t appeal to children), and I don’t really want to talk to 14-year-olds.

From what I’ve gleaned from the odd post that’s trickled through my Instagram and TikTok feeds, though, it seems like yumeshipping is all the rage. Yumeshipping, for the uninformed, is the act of romantically pairing yourself with a fictional character—yume being Japanese for dream, and shipping deriving from relationship. Back in my day, we called this “selfshipping”, and it was widely ridiculed—at least in the spaces I hung out in.

Selfshipping was often associated with “Mary Sue” esque characters. Mary Sue, in fact, derived from a parody of self-insert selfship Star Trek fanfiction, published in 1973—which implies that this has been going on for as long as there’s been communities around written work. Heck, even my mom said she used to write self-insert fanfiction of herself and the lead singer of the Bay City Rollers. Mary Sue, though, refers to a specific subsection of self-inserts where the character is perfect: they’re nice, they’re beautiful, they’re charming but not pretentious. Everyone who meets them immediately falls head-over-heels for them, and they’re automatically an expert at everything that they try.

A classic image depicting the difference between a normal OC and a Mary Sue. The biggest thing here is that your OC needs to have flaws in order to be compelling, and sometimes it can be difficult to do that when they’re a self-insert and you, yourself, are a child who hasn’t quite developed empathy centers yet.

In writing and fanfiction-adjacent communities, this was seen as something to make fun of. Many years after 1973, this aspect of fan culture was again parodied in My Immortal, perhaps the most infamous fanfiction of all time. Generally, when people read fanfiction, they want to read about the characters they already know and care about; if they wanted to read original fiction, they’d read original fiction. Not to mention that fanfiction featuring one of these perfect self-insert characters was generally written by young people (as young people often lack the worldliness to recognize the character flaws in themselves), meaning that the writing itself was often juvenile and the plots either middling or nonexistent. Meanwhile, the most well-written and well-regarded fanfiction in fandom was written by middle-aged moms who didn’t have the patience to read through subpar writing (see: the MsScribe drama, which revealed that 90% of the real upper echelons of the Harry Potter fanfiction community were, generally, moms of aging kids with too much time on their hands).

That is not to say that these communities of moms didn’t “selfship”. Snapewives were a HUGE thing. The issue is that the fandoms that dominated the internet when I was young—Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, any given anime—featured a cast of children, and you didn’t really see 40-year-olds proudly announcing that they wanted to be in a relationship with a 15-year-old. They shipped the 15-year-old with other 15-year-olds—a perfectly normal thing to do.

Even in fandom conglomerates like Superwholock, you didn’t see selfshipping much. The romantic aspects of these television shows was what often drew fans to them to begin with: Doctor Who had a different romance every season that people felt passionately about, while Supernatural and Sherlock were both defined by their fanon slash pairings. Original character x Dean Winchester existed, sure, but it paled in comparison to Destiel. For example, on AO3 as of writing, out of the 326,617 Supernatural fanfictions on the platform, 129,392—roughly one-third—are Destiel, while only 9,146 are Dean/Reader, while 6,086 are Dean/OFC. It’s not nothing, but it’s definitely nowhere near the Destiel behemoth, or even Wincest’s 40,843.

I mentioned Superwholock on stream the other day and nobody had any idea what I was talking about. Oh my god. I’m dying

Reader/Canon is an interesting case, as I don’t think it’s exactly yume. Reader/Canon fics are generally normal romance fanfics with (Y/N), or “your name”, used to represent a nameless character you can project onto. I remember there being browser scripts that would automatically change Y/N to your name to help you better imagine yourself in the fanfiction.

I’m sure there are plenty of yumeshippers/selfshippers who enjoy these sorts of fics. However, these days, I tend to see Y/N treated a little differently—I almost always see it exclusively in explicit fanfiction. Long romance stories with unnamed protagonists do exist, but it’s really hard to give this nameless character a meaningful character arc while still keeping them someone that anyone can project themselves onto. Instead, you usually see Y/N in quick drabbles or, most commonly, smut. You don’t have to give Y/N a personality if all they’re doing in the fic is boning.

I don’t think these readers/writers are yumeshippers, necessarily. I think that, on average, they like a character and they’re horny for them, and they aren’t compelled by either the concept of shipping or any of the characters’ canonical love interests. Famously, all of Dean’s love interests in Supernatural were written off within a season due to backlash from the fandom—people either wanted Dean to stay off-limits because they imagined themselves with him, or they wanted him untainted by grubby little female hands because they wanted him to make out with Castiel. Or his own brother.

Yumeshipping, as I understand it, is a lifestyle. Rather than the selfshipping or oshikatsu that I’m more familiar with (oshikatsu being hardcore devotion to a fictional character or idol, but not in a romantic way), yumeshipping is more like a belief. A religion, even. It reminds me more of kinning culture.

I have no clue if kids still kin. Kinning was popular when I was in high school, and it essentially meant that you felt such kinship with a fictional character that you believed you were them. I saw kinnies who just felt a strong connection to their kin—trans Homestuck fans who named themselves Dave, for instance—and I also saw kinnies who treated the movement as a spiritual belief and truly, undoubtedly, knew that in a past life or parallel universe they were definitely Alexander Hamilton from the hit musical, Hamilton. These kinnies would become very upset and/or aggressive when stumbling upon another Hamilton kinnie, as the existence of a double interfered with the illusion of them having this unique spiritual connection.

A famous meme from this era. I don’t think this person kinned Thomas Jefferson, but this sort of projection/diversity-swapping went hand-in-hand with it. In the AA fandom, I remember it was popular to headcanon Apollo Justice as hispanic, and people demonstrated that by drawing him with dark skin and making him obsessed with tacos. I suppose it comes down to the fact that both American history and Japanese video games don’t have a diverse cast, and therefore Western youths feel the need to tweak aspects of their characters so they can better relate to them; though I also think, in the taco Apollo and most likely Miku binder Jefferson cases, the people who created them ~thought~ they were making the property better by adding more diversity, but in reality were revealing their own internalized racism by defining Mexican culture solely through tacos and black culture solely through… whatever in god’s name is happening with Jefferson here.

I’ve always thought this was weird and weak as hell. Wouldn’t you have so much in common with someone who liked your favorite character enough to kin them? I mean… if you choose to believe in the spiritual side of it, aren’t you, like, the same person? I guess the belief/assumption is that these other kinnies are, like, false prophets. I just think it’s so juvenile to be like, “Only I’m allowed to like Klavier Gavin! Only I’m allowed to be Klavier Gavin!” It’s a very playground-esque, these toys are mine and not yours mindset, even though, objectively, the Klavier Gavin toy has been set out by Capcom with the intent of everyone playing with him.

Yumeshipping appears to have replaced kinning in popularity. It’s very similar, though. I’ve seen yumeshippers where they like the character a reasonable amount—they draw fanart and they make headcanons, but they understand that the character is fictional and people have different opinions about them. I’ve also seen non-sharing yumeshippers that have public crashouts whenever somebody else ships themselves or another character with said F/O, because it again ruins the illusion that they and their F/O have a unique, special relationship. F/O stands for “fictional other”, a portmanteau of “significant other”, which goes to show how seriously some people take this.

I have had lots of people come into my streams and ask me to tell them that their yumeship is “canon”, or ask for me to validate them. I usually do—but oftentimes, if yumeshipping is brought up, my eyes glaze over… because even though I have no definitive proof, it almost certainly means that the person I’m talking to is a child.

I’m sure adult yumeshippers and kinnies exist. There’s that woman on Instagram who got officially married to that character from… Rent a Girlfriend, I think? She’s an adult. But like I mentioned before, it’s childish. People tend to grow out of these “imaginary friend”-esque relationships. This isn’t even mentioning the neurodivergent aspect of it all—the fact that these are mostly neurodivergent children makes me very, very reluctant to say anything remotely critical of them. At that point, I’m just bullying autistic kids. How could I do that? I was also once an autistic kid!

I would like to think I'm not bullying, per se. I don’t have a problem with yumeshippers. I think they’re a little silly, and I will say—as a silly person with silly interests—I get a little annoyed when people won’t just admit that the thing they like is silly. People who take any aspect of their hobby too seriously bother the hell out of me. It’s probably my biggest pet peeve ever? I mean, I’m literally writing this after ragequitting D&D (for like the tenth time); I know that sounds like I’m the one who took it too seriously (and you’re probably right), but the thing that made me Hulk out today was every other player immediately going full aggro-competitive during a pseudo-PVP section, which makes my blood boil. Bro, I hate when people take board games hyper-seriously. It’s a game, and I want to enjoy it at a nice, leisurely pace—people who play to win to the point of boning over other players and not letting them have fun at a friendly game night irritates me so much.

I recognize this is entirely a me thing. I know this and can remove myself from situations where I feel I’m about to go aggro; ala, I do not go to game nights. Yumeshippers don’t bother me enough to “remove” myself from them, which I guess would be blocking them—I just think that they’re silly, in a fun way.

I would also like to officially report that I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I’m old. The youth have left me behind.

I mean, I get it. There’s a lot of fictional characters that I like and who I may even have a little crush on. But I don’t get it. I am not interested in envisioning myself with my favorite character in any romantic capacity. If I have a crush on a character, I ship them with another character and write fanfiction where the two of them kiss. Similarly, if I relate to a character, I will take them and project more and more of my own personality traits onto them until they’re entirely indistinguishable from me… but I don’t kin. It’s just how I characterize them. Everybody, I think, characterizes fictional characters differently, even if they’re trying to make them as accurate to canon as possible: we all see the world in a unique way, and thus we understand characters in unique ways, too.

I don’t want to envision myself with my favorite character… let’s say Klavier, for instance, because. What on earth do Klavier and I have in common? Nothing, really. I don’t think Klavier would hate me, but I don’t think he’d like me. I don’t even think I’d like him! He’s a diva! I think that’s fun and compelling in a fictional setting, but in reality, where he’s physically sitting next to me? No way! That’s annoying! And he’s also a copagandist! WHO DID YOU VOTE FOR, KLAVIER?

Part of it might be self-flagellation: Oh, what would Klavier Gavin, handsome rockstar prosecutor, see in a guy like me? But it’s less that and more… if I view things realistically, which I kinda have to do if I’m factoring myself into the equation, I have to admit that the relationship could not function. He’s always busy. He has a murderer for a brother. He keeps flirting with his rival defense attorney… it’s just not gonna pan out, Klavvi.

Maybe realism isn’t the point of yumeshipping: it’s a dream, after all. But realism and logic and fairness and equity plagues me like a goddamn curse. I can’t stop thinking about the implications. It’s the same reason why I can’t get into, like, Omegaverse, because I’m too busy thinking about the worldbuilding for this universe that is made Exclusively for smut. Surely this Omega presenting on company time violates corporate policies! Where on earth is HR?

I also think omegaverse is lowkey transphobic. You took a perfectly good gay relationship and somehow turned it straight? Huh? I wind up reading a lot of it though, just because it bumps up against werewolves and breeding kink. I don’t think it’s FOR REAL transphobic, it’s just me reading too much into the world. I’d be interested in more alpha/alpha or omega/omega ships, you know?

It’s just not how I enjoy my fiction. I enjoy fiction as fiction; I derive no joy from inserting myself or my own values into it. I am fascinated by the nonexistent worldbuilding of Omegaverse, for example, but some people might say to that, “That’s not the point; you should dislike it because it features so much noncon.” That’s not it—I don’t care about fictional noncon. It’s not real. I do, however, care about the fictional world making sense within its own rules and reality. Rape is horrendous—but what defines “rape” in a fictional setting where the entire population are slaves to genetics and pheromones they can’t control?

I like toying with these fictional concepts. I like imagining characters in all sorts of situations, to fluffy to serious to dark to disturbing, because it’s fun to push the limits of my imagination.

I’m real. I’m bound by the values and morals and worldview that I possess in my known reality. According to those values, I could never date Klavier. He’s kinda a cop, and I hate cops. Full stop—this is no longer a fun mental exercise, and I’m not interested in pursuing it.

On the other hand, within the setting of the Ace Attorney universe, Klavier is a swell guy. He’s one of the good ones. The euphoria I’d get from imagining myself with Klavier can be very easily replicated in his relationship with someone like Apollo or Ema, both of whom I relate to and project onto. A rockstar falling for a normal dude? Klapollo. An obnoxious diva falling for someone who has no interest in his shit? Klema. Dynamics that are fun to explore in fiction, but I would have no interest exploring for myself in reality.

Similarly, through fiction, I can put Klavier through all sorts of horrible situations. I can have him attacked or broken up with or pushed to his absolute limit, because it’s a fun creative exercise, and it’s cathartic to explore intense emotions in the safe space of fiction. Would I want to do any of those things to my partner in real life? No! Don’t be stupid!

This is probably the reason why I never got into Superwholock as a fandom, or why I struggle to read fanfiction about things like Star Trek or Buffy: they feature real people with real faces. They’re fictional characters, yeah, but… eerugh. They’re human. I can’t read a fanfiction about Leonard Nimoy getting naked, even if it’s as Spock. It feels so wrong, dude. It gets weirder when you realize that there’s fanfiction of Leonard Nimoy out there not playing Spock—just him! I am famously the world’s number one RPF hater—I think it’s weird, and in my perfect version of AO3, I wouldn’t allow it. I think it’s kind of messed up to write pornography of real people without their consent.

Even though it does squick me out, I don’t think that RPF doesn’t have the right to exist. Freedom of speech and all that. People who write that kind of content shouldn’t get, like, arrested. I simply find it weird and would like it nowhere near me.

Similarly, even though I admire a lot of celebrities, I wouldn’t want to meet them. I am content with knowing that Gerard Way has no idea I exist, and I want to keep it that way. I appreciate his work, but I do not think we could be friends, and I am not interested in becoming friends.

On a smaller scale, there are people I’m parasocial with—YouTubers, for instance… let’s say Jenny Nicholson. I’d like if Jenny was my friend—but with her specific kind of content, I can kind of pretend that she already is. I can put on one of her four-hour long rambles and go, “Oh, Jenny! You make such good points! Haha!” And it makes me feel less alone when I’m sadly eating my Uncrustable by myself in the dead of night. However, the version of Jenny I have constructed in my mind—that she herself has erected through carefully-edited videos—is fundamentally a fictional entity, no more real than Klavier Gavin. I know that the real Jenny Nicholson is not my friend, and I’d be petrified if I met her—but the version I spend time with through her videos is a unique character that exists only in my imagination.

I think this is why I connect to VTubers so much. VTubers lack a real face, meaning it’s that much easier to treat them as a fictional character. I love Minto—she’s my oshi and my idol and my friend, and I love her! But I feel all those same emotions towards the fictional Klavier Gavin… and much like him, if the real life Mint was standing right in front of me, I would not only be horrified, but I would be unable to form a meaningful relationship with her—at least not until I got to know her, rather than the fictional veneer she and I have both constructed together.

I suppose, then, the question is: why do I still feel uncomfortable with RPF if I view celebrities as fictional, anyway? Well, because I know they’re not. This is just my own weird, fucked-up, matryoshka’d version of reality that I use to… I dunno, cope? Make sense of this incomprehensibly huge world? Who knows why I do this—psychoanalyze me in the comments. My major hangup, I think, is strictly the real life human face. I can envision shipping VTubers together, no problem. They’re anime characters. They’re not real.

Dokibird and Minto have chemistry like no other. I could see reading fanfiction about them. The issue is that, given their generally chuddy male audience, it’s all kinda bad, if not straight-up AI generated like what’s happening currently with Malfoid. That was also in contest for the blog post of this month—god I hope it’s dead by November, or I’d feel obligated.

I’m a VTuber! Would I feel uncomfortable if someone yumeshipped with me or wrote fanfiction shipping me with another VTuber? Ehhhhh… you know, I don’t think I would. I think I’d choose to assume that they view me in the same way I view other micro celebrities—as that half-fictional entity I described before. This is probably not the case, but it’s how I’d like to believe most people feel anyway, even if they don’t describe it in the same way as me. If they like Beau as the fictional moe mouse creature I play and they yume with that, that’s fine! If they take it further and think that they have a genuine claim to me, Cereus—that they leave the realm of fiction and let these fantasies affect their perception of reality and therefore Me—then that’s where I’d start to have a problem.

I think my opinion on any fandom—on anything ever, really, is, “Do whatever you want as long as you’re not hurting anybody.” Just like, don’t be weird about it? Acting vitriolic to your fellow fans because they ship themselves with the same character as you feels hurtful to me. Similarly, acting weird towards real people has the potential to hurt them. In my perfect, dream world of ultimate equity, I would make every celebrity fill out a publicly-available form that expressly announces their opinion on yumeshipping, and everybody would have to abide by it.

In this same world, people would also have to have a stronger distinction between fiction and reality. People’s inability to recognize this line—especially young people—might be contributing to the rise of yumeshipping. Some people are incapable of recognizing that the emotions a piece of media makes them feel, while real, are not reflective of their lived reality—and therefore, they interpret the appreciation they feel towards a fictional character as real love. They don’t know any differently; with literacy ratings at an all time low, children literally do not have the tools to be able to recognize pathos and distinguish between lived emotions and those fiction attempts to evoke. This frightens me, because it has implications beyond fandom—we’re already banning books and limiting freedom of speech based on paltry reasons… and I worry it’ll only get worse.

Of course, I could be taking this all too seriously. I tend to do that. I’m a hypocrite.

At the end of the day, I think you should be able to do whatever you want. Live your best life, whether it’s with your fictional other, your oshi, or your favorite ship. As long as you’re not infringing upon the joy of others, do whatever you want forever. Who cares! Even if some rando with a blog says they don’t get it—ignore them, do you, and be yourself no matter what.

Not sure if I’m doing anything for Halloween besides handing out candy or maybe hanging out with friends. I was a slutty wolf last year… this time I think I'm just going in decora coord. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten the chance to dress up!

I hope you, too, have a very lovely Halloween!