@normandinopolis also requested this one!

vomit / don’t ship / okay / cute / adorable / perfect / beyond flawless /
hot damn / screaming and crying / i will ship them in hell

I’ve certainly never made any secret of my love for YatoBisha either! I love this ship and just about everything about it!

One of my favorite things in the world is female characters who are both beautiful and feminine while also being raging badasses and having masculine traits such as being booze hounds or war buddies. Bishamon just ticks all the boxes for me–she’s an incredible woman whose beauty is rivaled only by her overwhelming physical strength and her incredible courage in the face of so much pain and suffering. She’s a powerful, dominating presence but also soft and so, so genuine. She wants to love others and to show her care for them, but she struggles against her own nature as a god of war and her own lack of expertise in the field of love and affection.

Bishamon and Yato are incredible foils for each other–in the same way Kazuma realizes he and Hiyori are parallels, actually!–both gods of war/calamity, both struggling with a desire to be good people who bring happiness to those around them, both with a tragic past that haunts them, both victims of Yato’s father, both boisterous and competitive… They’re just very complementary in behavior, style, and the ways that they think and react to the world. A “matched set” if you ask me.

And in terms of power dynamics, they’re a little bit more balanced than KazuBisha and Yatori–the current situation in the manga is a result of Kazuma who fears his feelings for Bishamon will and can never be returned, a fear he’s passed on to Hiyori, with the idea that gods simply aren’t capable of loving in the way that humans are–which means that a god and human relationship will always be plagued by a gap or distance that would possibly not be present in a god/god pairing. Yato and Bishamon have the shared experience of their divinity that, theoretically, humans like Hiyori and Kazuma simply cannot understand. Now whether or not that’s just Kazuma exaggerating is one thing, but I do think there are dimensions of existence and things that gods in Noragami feel and think that humans would struggle to understand. In some ways, Yato and Bishamon are simply best made to understand each other than other characters.

And there’s just something so fun about this ship. There’s so much potential for sadness and bittersweetness in KazuBisha and Yatori that having a fun ship that is based around being comical, fake anger, and competing with each other like YatoBisha just helps to brighten an otherwise potentially depressing horizon. I love that Adachitoka continues to slip in hints and nods to this ship such as Yato’s recent comment that he knew Bishamon before Kazuma did and always admired her strength. I feel like Adachitoka see the value of this ship and/or at least Yato and Bisha’s total Bash Brothers, back-to-back badasses potential and are giving fans like me just what we love and want–I feel very grateful!