Why are these so gay (famous last words)?

In one of my fandoms, there was a user who shared the stats of the top 15 ships in the fandom for Pixiv, a Japanese fan site, and compared it to the top 15 ships on Ao3 (which, side note, I thought was very brave of them since a lot of shōnen anime fanbases on Reddit are not the most kind or welcoming to shippers or any mention of them). Of course, there was the typical groaning and moaning of "How could anyone ship this?" and a lot of pearl-clutching going around; nothing new there🙄.

And there was this one person who commented further down in the thread, "Why are these [ships] so gay, my guy? They are clearly straight, and confirmed by the author." I was like, oh shit, here we go again. And they never back this stuff up with proof at all (never mind that the author has never confirmed or denied ANY sexualities). Then, the comments replying to them all said something to the effect of how awful shōnen authors write romances and female characters, and I regained a bit of faith in humanity😆.

It was so refreshing to see even a small part of the larger fanbase acknowledging how much that plays a role in the shipping community. If 90% of your characters are men and 10% women, and that 10% don't get nearly the same amount of characterization or screen time as the men, it shouldn't come as the biggest shock when most of those pairings are m/m. And I know there are plenty of other factors at play, but the skew towards male characters and lack of screen time/page time for the female ones are some of the biggest reasons why this happens, particularly in action/adventure franchises.