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#but also the portrayal of his queerness and his arc being ace and personal growth centered rather than yet another 'tough boy turns gay'
palehottubchild · 2 months
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i know we all joke about the best ace rep and our favourite character being an eshay (and tbf im european that word means nothing to me) but imo thats one of my favourite things about his characterisation: the fact that he is not something an allo audience would mecessarily expect or imagine to be ace.
small disclaimer, im happy with any ace rep we get in the first place and if you do like what im about to describe more power to you, this is just my personal opinion.
That being said, i love that cash is kind of an 'unconventional' ace character, for lack of a better word. all too often ace characters fall into one of two stereotypes, either the heartless cold robot that is already kind of weird or other in itself and does not care about your or anyone elses feelings (this also includes nd coded characters), or the innocent sweetheart who is so pure and cute and has (most likely) one singular character trait (somehow almost always books). again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this since these people exist in real life, but they do push yhe aspec community further into the little boxes that allos have already put us in.
Now what i love so much about cash is that he is one of the most clearly genuinely kind people in the show. Despite him being surrounded by bad company, he is constantly shown to be gentle and sweet with his grandma and is obviously uncomfortable with the whole harper situation the entire time (not saying he handled this perfectly but thats not what this post is about). He is shown to clearly care about people deeply and he is not afraid to show this, except for when he is in bad company.
However, him having and showing emotions does not push him into the pure innocent cinnamon roll part either. He goes out to parties, does engage in enough sexual activities to end up the map, openly flirts with darren and is totally rocking his mardi gras outfit (including thong on head) without hesitating once. He is also stereotypically a 'tough guy', which is also not a type of guy too often represented as any sort of queer in popular media afaik. all in all the way cash is portrayed as an eshay to me makes him being aspec so much more valuable to me and while i understand the eshay posts are mostly jokes i did want to talk about it
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