#sorry i used up all my srs explaining energy this is my comfy pajama blog

[denialcity]

I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but why do you tag posts with ship tags if you only view the relationship in a platonic way? Why not just use the platonic tags?

heya you’re alright! don’t mind, im gonna outsource this to the amazing @firecoloredwater bc im out of spoons from real life, but i agree w everything below

Hey! This is Para answering (with some Red commentary/edits), because we approach shipping the same way + Para has worded some of it before. Hopefully this will answer some of your questions!

The easiest reason to address is that platonic tags don't have as well established a tradition/format as ship tags in general do. AO3 has a semi-well-known system (still somewhat recent) but Tumblr really doesn't; the platonic version of TobiIzu could be Tobi&Izu or Tobi+Izu or Tobirama & Izuna or platonic!TobiIzu or any number of other variants. Some people use Tobirama/Izuna for platonic, even. Certain niches will of course develop their own conventions, but tumblr as a whole doesn't have anything that strong, so using platonic tags exclusively would A: be harder, and B: mean fewer people find the post.

Now, if someone will be actively squicked by people interpreting their post as romantic when they meant it to be platonic, then that's worth doing. But Red is happy to share and usually perfectly fine with their posts being interpreted as romantic/sexual when Red was thinking platonic, or vice versa. So there's no reason not to use the overall tag, even if it comes with a presumption of romance (which Red politely disagrees with).

The other answer is: Red usually doesn't only view the relationships in a platonic way.

When people say "ship" and "shipping" a lot of people assume that means specifically romantic+sexual relationships.

But there's also another thing that goes on under the terms "ship" and "shipping" which is more like, "I want to see what these two do to each other. I want to examine their interactions and what happens when you put them together and how they change as a result." And sometimes the answer to "what happens" is sex and/or romance, but sometimes it's not, and even when it is that's not the point of the exercise.

Often the goal here is intensity: the characters are hugely important to each other and change each other's lives and selves, for good or ill, and whether that gets framed in a romantic or sexual or platonic or fraternal or complete other way is often dependent on the particular AU. (This, of course, is vastly oversimplified, but hopefully it makes sense.)

Some people take one approach with certain characters and the other approach with others, so this can get even more mixed up. Some people vary their approach by AU, or mood, or whatever other reason, or they just sort of fuse the two together. It's complicated, basically; I'm trying to do broad strokes but actually fandom is just a whole bunch of people each doing their own thing, so there are always exceptions to everything and things I haven't mentioned.

Red's shipping (and mine) tends to be that second type, and as a result, how we interpret a given character interaction can be pretty ambiguous and fluid. Sometimes Red will draw something for an AU where we haven't even decided if the characters are romantic or platonic yet, like this art of everybody lives verse Itama and Kunimi, or blessed sacrifice AU TobiIzu cuddles. Is it romantic or sexual or platonic? Who knows! Not us yet! Quite likely not the characters as it happens either!

So then, how do you tag romantic vs platonic when you don't even know which it is? The simplest answer is, it just gets the normal ship tag and people can see it however they want to.

(We've mostly figured out where BSAU is going by now, on the basis of what creates the most angst. But not until well after that was posted.)

Even when one version of a ship is preferred, Red is usually happy with the other version (eg: Red prefers HashiMada to be platonic, but romantic HashiMada is still good). It's just like getting your second favorite food instead of your first, is all.

So basically, in summary: platonic ship tags aren't as standardized as "overall" ship tags so they're less useful, open/ alternative interpretation is welcome, and Red ships “whatever the fuck these two had going on” rather than strict delineated relationship categories.