Union Yaoi: Fighting the Good Fight on Behalf of the Animation Industry

The animation industry is currently facing a crisis. Layoffs, pay cuts, and the rise of generative AI in rapidly growing sectors of the industry have all contributed to an actively hostile environment for animation workers. Given The Animation Guild’s (TAG) upcoming negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) this September, many felt uncertain about the state of the industry that they had invested their time and energy into. To inform the general public, as well as animation fans worldwide, Animation Workers Ignited (AWI)—an online fan group unaffiliated with TAG—began posting animated shorts about the negotiations, as well as videos detailing criticisms of the animation industry in its current state.

These shorts became wildly popular online, mainly on the animation and art sides of Twitter, thanks in large part to the voice actors behind them—Alex Hirsch, the creator of the wildly popular Gravity Falls (2012–2016), and Adam Conover, board member of The Writers Guild of America West and also known for Adam Ruins Everything (2015–2019). Their key role in these shorts led to the hashtag #RIPCartoonNetwork to trend, alarming some users, who came to believe that the beloved cartoon channel had actually died, while also educating the larger online community on the fact that, according to Conover, “animation is under attack.” Later shorts also used the hashtags #NoAI and #StayTooned, the former directly addressing the fear in the animation industry, as well as the wider entertainment sphere, that the rise of AI would lead to its use in animation, replacing already overworked and underpaid workers, cutting corners for the sake of profit margins. These concerns are not entirely unfounded, and Conover makes it clear that they are a major sticking point in their negotiations with the AMPTP.

Yet it wasn’t just these shorts that helped bring news of the negotiations into the mainstream—credit for that belongs, unexpectedly, to yaoi. Yaoi refers to male-on-male romance in Japanese media, often seen in boys’ love (BL) manga. Given the presence of the queer community within the animation sphere, both professionally and online, it wasn’t entirely surprising that fans began shipping the two boldly colored characters from AWI’s shorts under the hashtag #UnionYaoi. What was surprising, however, was that the first such post shipping them came from a reply chain on X, including one of the actual artists who worked on the shorts, as well as Alex Hirsch. A fellow creator eventually posted a drawing that they had made of Conover and Hirsch’s characters—now affectionately known as Pink Husband and Green Husband, respectively—locked in an intimate embrace, with the hashtag #STANDWITHANIMATION emblazoned across the foreground. The post quickly went viral, amassing 10,000 likes and sparking a firestorm of “Union Yaoi” art pieces, as the ship grew more popular. Post after post depicted these two characters in a variety of romantic situations, each receiving thousands of likes. They even garnered approval from Conover and Hirsch, who saw it as a fun and impactful way to rally support for TAG amongst the online animation and art communities.

The AWI fully embraced this moment, with their Twitter accounts reposting dozens of Union Yaoi art under #StandWithAnimation. Posts went viral across multiple platforms, with Tumblr in particular, the “queerest place on the internet,” creating dozens of pieces in support of animation workers. Even the Canadian Animation Guild jumped on the trend, sharing Union Yaoi on their own Twitter account, turning the trend into a global effort. The power of yaoi, it seems, transcends borders and, in some cases, gender. A significantly smaller but still somewhat popular subsection of gender-flipped pieces also gained traction. Though negotiations should hopefully be completed soon, if there’s one thing to take away from all this, it’s that yaoi conquers greed.