Since I'm seeing a lot about yume, what it means, and acceptance of non-m/f yume on the tl lately I figured I may as well add a bit of my own to it.

I just wanna talk about the history of yume as a self-ship term, and how it's evolved over time.

Thread:

The term is actually quite old, and has its roots in the days before smartphones, when we had (flip) phones with small screens that could only show a few lines of text at a time.

Back in those days, there were mobile-friendly websites around that hosted cell phone novels, which ended up becoming pretty popular. It's from there that "dream novels" (since "yume" means "dream"), which can be considered equivalent to Y/N fiction, were born.

Some sites wouldn't mention the self-insert character by name at all, while others would use simple JavaScript to allow readers to set their own name to appear throughout the story.

These dream novels existed both with original characters and as fanfiction, and readers of them were known as dreamers or yumejoshi ("dream girl(s)"). Of course, there were also plenty of dream novels around which featured a male main character, so it wasn't exclusively girls.

So, while the term is now used for fans who self-insert with characters in series, it originally just referred to people who read dream novels.

As such, it's clear that the term has evolved in its usage between then and now, and it's for the same reason that forms of yume that aren't just romantic m/f ones are perfectly valid.

Even if a lot dream novels paired the MC with a character, not all of them did (in fact, there was even a term for platonic yume; 友情夢 yuujou/friendship yume), and even if a lot of yumejin are romantically interested in their comfort characters, not everyone is the same.

Yume has never been exclusive of non-romantic relationships, or of non-m/f ones, so it's honestly sad that yume twitter has essentially made it that way nowadays. Yume is for everyone, and none of us gets to exclude people from something that brings them comfort.

By excluding people like this, by hyping up m/f yume (particularly where the male is fictional) more than anything else, you're going against the very spirit of yume, and I hope this thread did a good enough job explaining why.

Also to tack on since I forgot to mention it in the thread, non-monogamous yume is absolutely included in this. If your yume is polyamorous you're just as valid as anyone else and it's not weird at all.