[God writing this and realizing i've been a shipper since 2009ish is insane and every year it passes it's going to be wilder]
I think Yugioh was my first actual fandom, in that while I didn't participate at all [because, hello, I was an early teen and I knew self-preservation], I searched for fanfics like a madman and scorred the webs for fanart, hogging them in my nice little yaoi carpet file.
And nothing made my heart go faster than searching for angst fics of those two, in fact this was the ship that helped me find h/c and whump as a genre.
It was your classical tale of Seme abusing the Uke physically, emotionally, and with this ship the third special way, spiritually, lmao. I think it had the fundamental chemistry of ships back then, jaded top and sweet sunshine bottom. It also was a time when few of us could understand Japanese, and so the overall view of the characters was what was popular either in mainstream or fandom.
While searching on how we actually ended up with tendershipping as a name, I found that not only did they try to rebrand it as stockholmshipping (way on the nose for me), but the shipping name had a lot of discourse on Tumblr, which, as an etymology nerd, I find interesting.
I'm partial to tendershipping, not so much because I like the idea of Ryou being overly tender with Bakura or vice versa, but more because I love the phrase "tenderness of flesh". That painful soreness that my grandpa used to tell me it meant I was alive. [I do like tender as a tenant, though; it does give way to a more transactionary lens of the relationship between these two; it's just more romantic the other way.]
On our modern and liquid fandom, OOC is a more commonly used term (and sometimes more readily accepted when you're on the receiving end of the accusation); after all, with Word of God being easily accessible, its hold over fandom became stronger.
Looking back, it's no wonder Ryou was mischaracterized so easily. With limited screen time compared to Yami Bakura and other characters, it's not hard to see why people thought he was just a sweet, cute boy - especially since we had little exposure to what the author accurately wanted to convey (do remember we had those now-infamous dubs and scanlations).
But revisiting the manga, you realize that:
Also, isn't it fucking weird how ryou is omg, my friends mysteriously disappear, and that's why I keep changing schools and not…actually be that terrified? He accepts the idea of something cursed and occult happening to him like a feeble Christian farm girl getting lost in the woods and accepting Mary Magdalene's visage as a normal Tuesday thing. I adore this boy.+infinite cute points
On the yb side, there's the really cute "Im pretty happy here, landlord" line, the getting pissed because a teacher said ryou had to cut his hair, and the whole "noo, you can't die on my watch because that would be super lame of me." Lmao, hes so tsun tsun, you didn't really see much of that back then; it was more of "eugh,,, I GUESS i have to deal with you now? and you're cute", kind of actitude of him towards ryou. Yes very reductive but once again it WAS late '00s and early '10s
oh yeah! i love how Thief King Bakura can either be in tendershipping or be a completely diff shipname and ship dynamic.
Going back on track, there's a significant shift in early 2010 and mid-to-late 2017 shipping scenery. Although I was young back then and might not have fully grasped the inner changes and their depth, it feels like nowadays there's more diversity in how characters are expected to act in ships and the kinds of chemistry that can be explored. Things like older ukes and sillier semes are approached more commonly.
Im using Harada USUK djs as a benchmark here (mainly because their usuk/ukus djs were the first I remember seeing where they play with role expectations), but it's becoming more mainstream to explore our dolls with more intrinsicate patterns. Nowadays, it's much more common to see tendershipping where both characters are on equal ground, or where ryou is the one leading, or in a more active phase making assertions and actions that are centered on his needs and wants.
What was once common was taking one character's agency and giving it all to another character to explore how this loss would affect them and how they would react. And now it's more common for both characters to have agency in their world and relationship, and the attention is on the clash that comes from this, a pull and push.
I'm making a very unserious sociological claim here, but I think it has all to do with a growing demographic. Our foremother in the fujo community began shipping around her late teens to early 20s, but she typically retired in her late 20s or early 30s, often coinciding with the ages society expected them to start a family or settle into a more "serious" life. I'm, of course, not saying they dead stopped consuming and talking about it, but the social pressure back then was harder. Now there's a pushback on that narrative, and you get to see older and older shippers. I suppose another plus is that having a geographically close community is not strictly necessary to fujo.
And as any sociology study would tell you, having a diverse community is the easiest and strongest way to make it healthier and stronger. It is quite possible that the older one gets, the more intricate one searches for its ships to be; the more one lets a fandom or community grow, the longer its branches grow.
The fun thing about fandom is these little wild chases; we go on about understanding them as closely to canon as possible, and with characters like the Bakuras, there's so much you can do. Was Kazuki overlooking or leaving things behind about them to continue the story? Was it really meaningful? Did he ever leave us enough tidbits and cookie crumbles for us to go hog wild with confidence? In this particular case, there's not much we can do to get the word of God ok about them or confirm certain headcanons. Me going, "Yeah, actually, Ryou tries to communicate with TKB/YB as he gets older because he's lonely and wants to know if he actually can" is as truthful as someone saying, "No, that would entirely undermine his character development and the importance of him moving past death to find comfort in the living world."
That's the somewhat uncomfortable takeaway with this: you can't be 100% certain your characterization is canon, and for the most part, you actually shouldn't care about that. Sure, you can put limits on what you can accept in your playground for your dolls, but beyond that, it's wild west baby, and you should only care about what's more compelling to you. Young me ate the fuck up h/c tendershipping fics because back then that was the most entertaining dynamic; it gave me a way to explore the characters and their what ifs, especially with characters like ryou that have enough substance to be so captivating while still being a mystery, and current me adores a more assertive Ryou in that relationship, one that knowingly muddles himself with what's unknown and scary, either because he's too brash in that or because he's too sympatetic. Theres more agency to him and what he can and could do. It's less black and white and more delicious and toxic grey.