Scary tiki goddess

I guess maybe put more succinctly, if we're still going down this road...

Filtering for Ike and Soren on ff.net shows 373 works vs 66 for Ike and Elincia. Even when you check the little "pairing" box, it's still 36 marked Ike/Soren vs 8 marked Ike/Elincia. It's crazy, since the big FE pairs have mostly been between Fates/Awakening characters, but after Heroes I see Ike/Soren everywhere now -- looking at the general FE page, it seems like the most popular non-Fateswakening ship period. "Canon" argument aside, I can see how people would see this as a deliberate choice on the part of IS.

I don't have a dog in this "X Ship is Canon!" race, but this itself is false information... on just Archive of Our Own, there are 7 times more Ike/Soren works than the second most popular pairing in the Tellius section. I don't think it matters at all, but it's far and away the most popular ship for the continent. Popularity doesn't really have any bearing on whether a ship is canon, though. (How popular is Astrid/Makalov?)

I hold my partner dear and we are romantically involved, and if I were to say that my sense of how dear I hold her is renewed, people would probably say that's pretty gay. What privileges your anecdote over mine? For the record I'm not actually aligning myself with any concrete interpretation of Ike's sexuality, but I'm questioning why someone would see that line in his profile and say "I hope fandom doesn't read this line in a way it could be obviously read in."

Ike can hold as many people dear as he wants, but the fact of the matter is that his profile took care to point out how he holds Soren dear. The original point I was questioning: why shouldn't people consider this addition to the body of textual evidence for romantic Ike/Soren? (Tangentially, I can't imagine Soren as the hand holding type, at least not openly.)

So a hug and end cutscene to PoR would be considered romantic in combination, but the Ike/Soren hug in combination with Ike's renewed sense of how dear Soren is to him isn't?

I don't really want to lecture you, but it's actually a good thing to expose yourself to different opinions to strengthen your own position. You can't really argue against the opposing position if you don't fully understand it. Out of curiosity, seeing as you're a writer, how would you write an obviously gay character?

IIRC FE7's English translation is a pretty faithful rendition of the Japanese; I remember reaching their supports as a child and the implications completely flying over my head until much later. :P As for the entertaining Ike/Soren debate, let's try to take this one thing at a time. No it doesn't. Have you read it? If not, you're misrepresenting a dissenting opinion based on your assumptions, not facts. This has always been a weird line of argument to me, because the 3 possibilities (1. Ike is asexual 2. Ike has gotten with a woman 3. Ike has gotten with a man) aren't mutually exclusive. I can talk about Priam more, though. Just to get the record straight, I don't think a female character has to be a serial womanizer to be plausibly gay (or potentially attracted to other women) and I feel like the same could be said for a male character. I feel like your argument was stronger before your edits (though Anri says hi), but if you're going off the assumption that 1. Awakening canon has bearing on Tellius canon 2. Priam's claim can be taken at face value and 3. There's no chance of Priam's situation bearing any similarity to Marth and Anri's, you still have to defend the claim that Ike procreating precludes the possibility that he, at some point in his life, entered into a romantic relationship with Ike or Ranulf (or any unnamed male suitor :P).

You don't need to be married to start or have a family? It would make more sense for canon to all but outright state Ike's sexuality, considering the game's country of origin and the time it came out. This post explains my point better than I could: http://amielleon.dreamwidth.org/237826.html So no, best friends don't "always" have to be lovers, but people certainly can be both.

Bastian and Lucia don't get married, but their paired ending is inarguably pretty romantic. (No one would argue there isn't attraction there.) You don't have to be married to be romantically involved with someone, and it'd be kind of out of character for someone like Ike, who eschews ceremony and fanfare as much as he does, to tie the knot with anyone he's romantically involved with. Why couldn't Ike and Ranulf be canon? There are less people arguing for it because there's less textual evidence than Ike/Soren, but it's more believable than basically any ship between Ike and a woman. Again no disrespect intended, I'm just trying to determine what "confirms" a ship to you.

Why would it matter that Lucia/Elincia doesn't get a paired ending if paired endings don't grant canon authority over ships without paired endings? If they do, Ike's paired ending with Soren and his "renewed sense of how dear Soren is to him" seems like pretty damning textual evidence. I guess what I'm driving at is what makes Ike/Soren less canon than Geoffrey/Elincia?

Considering how Geoffrey/Elincia is a canon couple between milk siblings, this is more of an argument for Lucia/Elincia and Ike/Soren than against.