Warning: Spoilers for the new Case Closed movie, Detective Conan: The Million-dollar Pentagram
The new Case Closed movie included a stunning reveal which blows a big hole in one of the series’ most popular ships: “KaiShin,” or Kaito Kuroba and Shinichi Kudo. The film revealed that the two characters are, in fact, cousins, ruining the ship for a great many fans.
Shinichi Kudo is better known to most as Conan Edogawa, the persona he adopted after being shrunk to child size. Kaito Kuroba is a jewel thief known as the Kaito Kid, and one of the few characters to regularly evade Shinichi, who has never been able to unmask Kaito and reveal his true identity. Despite this, Kaito and Shinichi have been known to team up against common enemies on occasion, and Kaito is known to look forward to his encounters with Shinichi, which sparked fan imaginations.
The “KaiShin” ship is one of the most popular on fanfiction websites for the series, with over 2,800 fanfics written involving the two characters.
The extremely popular ship was dealt some heavy damage after the reveal in the 27th film, known in Japan as Detective Conan: The Million-dollar Pentagram, which focuses on a heist by the Kaito Kid which Shinichi/Conan sets out to stop. The film reveals that Kaito and Shinichi’s fathers are actually twins, making the two characters cousins. Despite the fact that the film was only just released in Japan, fans around the world have already begun to grow angry about the reveal and its impact on the shipping fandom.
Kaito and Shinichi are quite similar in appearance, even sharing a voice actor in both the English and Japanese versions of the series, and for shippers, fall into the classic archetype of “rivals to lovers,” but there was previously no indication that the two characters were related in the entire 30-year history of the franchise. The ship was actually so popular that at one point, the characters’ Japanese voice actor, Kappei Yamaguchi, created an unofficial video depicting the two characters kissing.
Fans who’ve already learned the news have taken to social media to voice their displeasure about the reveal, accusing series creator Gosho Aoyama of queerbaiting and profiting off of these fans for decades, only to go and deliberately dash their hopes. Oddly, this isn’t the first time a ship in the series has been revealed to be cousins; the characters of Akai Shuichi and Miyano Akemi were also revealed to be cousins with an even more explicitly romantic (albeit straight) relationship, although the characters were unaware of their shared bloodline.
While it’s still early, since the film was only released in Japan on April 12, the news has spread like wildfire throughout the fandom, stunning many and ruining the ship for them. Debates are sure to rage on as to whether the movie’s depiction of them as cousins should be considered canonical, and fans around the world will ultimately have to decide for themselves how this news impacts their feelings towards Case Closed‘s biggest ship.