Semi-serious answer: I'm a LiveJournal vet from the early 00s, probably one of the few who never migrated to Tumblr, and am also passingly familiar with the even earlier Western slash discourse along with its modern MxM romance offshoots... and can still probably rattle off most of the major arguments. You'll notice a lot of them are inextricable from the very concept of "fandom", due to the history of the category.
"Yaoi bad"
gays bad (this was, after all, the dark ages before the coming of Liberal Savior Obama)
"how dare you contradict the almighty canon"
it's inherently misogynistic
it simply transposes heteronormative gender roles to a superficially queer aesthetic
"Yaoi good"
it's inherently subversive/anti-corporate
queer representation matters
support female creators
female gaze good, male gaze bad
it's better written/better characterized than het romance (very few who made this argument stopped to question why they might feel this way)
Basically liberal feminism in a nutshell, I guess. These days my personal opinion is somewhere between "let horny people be horny" and "it's another potential avenue for education/radicalization."
Yeah, that used to be seen as a net positive (the female gaze argument). Rarely saw LGBT people participating in the conversation... these were predominantly spaces for straight white women.
Semi-serious answer: I'm a LiveJournal vet from the early 00s, probably one of the few who never migrated to Tumblr, and am also passingly familiar with the even earlier Western slash discourse along with its modern MxM romance offshoots... and can still probably rattle off most of the major arguments. You'll notice a lot of them are inextricable from the very concept of "fandom", due to the history of the category.
"Yaoi bad"
"Yaoi good"
Basically liberal feminism in a nutshell, I guess. These days my personal opinion is somewhere between "let horny people be horny" and "it's another potential avenue for education/radicalization."
The big "yaoi bad" argument I see nowadays is "straight women fetishizing gay men"
Yeah, that used to be seen as a net positive (the female gaze argument). Rarely saw LGBT people participating in the conversation... these were predominantly spaces for straight white women.