me when i see ronance being critised yet again bc robin is steve's best friend who wouldn't "break bwest fwiend code" and nancy is steve's ex who bwoke poor stevie's heart uwu.

first of all, nancy and steve have been broken up for TWO YEARS already. steve has already forgiven nancy for the break-up. and let's not forget that a big part of why the break up happened was bc nancy was actively mourning the loss of her best friend.

am i saying she handled things perfectly or that her grief is an excuse? no of course not. but i am saying people do not have nearly as much empathy for nancy's trauma and how it affects her as they do for other (male) characters, they just jump straight to calling her an evil bitch. first it's her fault that barb's dead bc she dared to be blinded by romance as a teenage girl then it's her fault when she pulls away from the same guy bc of what happened like... what do you want from her, genuinely?

i'm begging you to stop centering male characters for once in your fucking lives omg. if you don't ship ronance, that's fine but don't bring up this bullshit as a reason not to ship them. robin buckley and nancy wheeler are so much more than their proximity to steve harrington.

btw i'm not hating on steve okay. sorry for the rant i just saw a tiktok that pissed me off so much about how steve would/should be mad about ronance

Other RnM fans?

Rick n Morty fan creator/artist here, trying to make friend brohs with ppl who are also obsessed with the show. I have a hard time reaching out due to my anxiety. (proshippers DNI)

tldr; you're also a neurodivergent queer artist nutjob that makes crackpipe art an shitposts, heavily kins a character at one point or another, and we should be friends because we can be insane together LMFAO

Fav show ships: BP x Rick all day, (I love flesh curtains, and their dynamic is just so yes... I...) Morty x Alaska (i named the vat of acid gf Alaska because the Alaska trip..) Summer x that one girl... Morticia X Jessica, Rickcest/ Rick selfcest is aight, I obsess over Miamicop. I think selfcest in cloning / multiuniverse theory is harmless, but don't come at me with any of that proshipper/inc3st/rickorty shit. I will block you, report you, and put you on a DNI beware list; this is a threat & a warning. That shit is never EVER ok.

if we become friends/wanna know about;

I'm diagnosed Audhd, I'm a transmasc demiboy, I like to be referred to as nonbinary and a transgender male with He/They pronouns. Panromantic Demisexual.

I'm a rick kinnie, just means I identify with rick, in another universe I could be him XD, I relate to him, we share the same personality literally (ENTP 7w8); he's my self identifying comfort character. But my big interest with this show/comic is probably due to some kind of autistic hyper fixation and imprintation.

Hobbies: Crafting, Digital illustration, Fursuit /Costume making, Youtube, 3D designing, Making silly video skits, Writing, Character design, Shit posting, Creating ai voice bots for fun n fandom purposes (will make le memes), Trying to be a youtuber like Imbrandonfarris and Britany Broski, collecting stuff, VRchat, Collecting fluffy soft shit like stuffies, pillows, blankets, and hoodies. I SLEEP IN A NEST OF ALL OF THESE

Personality?: Chaotic, Unhinged, Tired and fed up with this shit, All the Energy AND NO ENERGY, I'm so tired please god help me, i'm an enigma. Ambiverted. If ur looking for a cool crazy cat dude broh who draws weird ass digital art and is always tired but jacked on coffe, adderall, and Naproxen i'm your guy.... :'}

I do alot of art and have alot of burnouts due to my adhd- I've been told I'm  innovative, clever, and expressive. I can jury-rig your glasses easily with a paperclip if you're screw comes out and loose frames causes the lens to pop. I'm very detail and idea-oriented, i come up with thousands of ideas, questions, and theories. Because of this, I tend to come up with one idea after another without actually going forward with plans and actions because i get so overwhelmed with my massive brain XD

Even tho I'm socially awkward, I love people, I want to make friends. I like being alone a lot but I hate feeling lonely. :C When I get to know you I'm very very chatty; as long as I'm not too tired or piled with heaps of assignments. I would say I'm pretty laid-back and easy to get along with, I get so stuck up in my personal world up in my head that I lose sight of important things around me, I blame the adhd. I'm an observer, I like to watch and see how things happen, I am a very hands on person.

I'm constantly learning, i love science with a passion. I got hyperfixated on evolution of different animal clades a while back. I am immensely curious and focused on understanding how the world operates and functions. I'm looking for mental and intellectual stimulation, lettuce skip casual conversation about wheather- whats your favorite dinosaur? (fuck ignore my dyslexia) and before you say a pterodactyl let me stop you right there- they aren't dinosaurs. if you like understanding the world through learning various things about science, technology, or culture, I'm your guy. but I'm also just a silly hoo hoo aah smart ass.

god this is finally done... I've been writing this for an hour......

i think it's so so so funny that my main transmasc hc character literally Is The Way He Is bc he's amab. like hiei's one of approx 3 characters ever whose asab is actually relevant and having it otherwise is impossible in the text. ridiculous.

is what i thought, but it's actually wayy way more complicated than i previously gave it credit for!! plus there's a LOT more queercoding than i first thought. lemme explain:

[tw: eugenics, fascism, queerphobia, self harm, suicide mentions]

[yu yu hakusho spoilers/meant for ppl who've seen yyh but probably understandable to ppl who haven't]

[ft too many uses of the word queercoded and my mushy feelings about hiei's arc and the queer experience]

hiei is literally thrown out of his home as a baby for being born male and that's just INCREDIBLY queercoded on its own, but specifically a lot of this is presented with the fact that he's a fire demon. this could just be a trait he got from his father, or it could be tied to the ice maiden species. i think it's a stretch to say gender/sex present the same across all demonkind, much less that it resembles our own. frankly, binary sexual classification doesn't really work for a lot of species (and it really doesn't work for humans anyway, because intersex people exist). his maleness is associated with it, and this creates a potential sexual dichotomy that, in this species, females present with ice powers and males present with fire powers. (i understand this has a very goofy "girls are cats boy are dogs" energy to it but let's roll with it for now). so hiei could have been born with what humans would consider female sex characteristics, but the ice maidens would look at him and go "oh he's on fire get this little man outta here". (this could also be where the idea that he'll destroy them comes from, if all males are, y'know, melty).

some of my initial thought process on this came about because i figured "oh if they reproduce asexually they've probably got all xx chromosomes, and that's how they only have xy kids when the parent has sex with someone outside the village", but even if that's the case (assuming chromosomes work the same for demons), there's still a ~50/50 chance hiei ended up with xx chromosomes anyway. perhaps fire is considered the primary sex characteristic that determines one's asab in the same way genitalia is for humans. so, to a human audience, we'd see his traits and go "oh he's trans", which i think counts for biological coding.

the ice maiden society is also incredibly restrictive in terms of gender and sexuality. they consist entirely of (ambiguously determined, as discussed above) women who reproduce asexually. one is not allowed to leave the bounds of this society, nor perform sexual taboos, such as sleeping with outsiders. hiei was only born because hina acted outside of the strict sexual norms of this society. people's queerness is sometimes chocked up to "poor parenting" (often based in sexual/gender/religious/otherwise traditional nonconformity) of parents. and even though hina loved her son and didn't want to see him, y'know, thrown off a floating island, the society as a whole still deemed him an outsider and a problem to be eliminated and left him for dead for the greater purity/"protection" of the culture. it's serving fascist eugenics tbh. (and hiei doesn't destroy their culture like they and he had expected, subverting their expectations of him and his "kind", though the idea that that subversion matters more than preventing further harm is one I'd disagree with. the choice to cut them out of his life entirely to me is somewhat more justifiable to me given a familial view over a community/cultural one, but i digress). regardless, this is reminiscent of societal marginalization in general, but especially categories that can show up in isolation in families (i.e. queerness, neurodivergency, disability, etc) in a way that other things (i.e. race, religious affiliation, etc) generally don't, and can thus be painted as rooting out abnormalities or defects in individual, bloodless, mundane cases (as opposed to the broader elimination that we associate with genocide)

there's also yukina, who left to find hiei, and who hates the ice maidens (presumably at least partially because she knows what happened to him). think of this as them trying to find each other after familial fallout.

this is all to say that if we view maleness/fire demonness as an equivalent to genderqueerness in the ice maiden society, hiei's story maps onto queer experiences incredibly well. so he's got that cultural/queer experience coding too.

we also see hiei topless all the time (he's actually incapable of keeping his chest covered. when he doesn't take it off it burns off or whatever like he can't fight covered up. can't even make it through the intro with it covered. whore behavior <3). "but he's got male presenting pecs, so he's amab," you might say. but he is (key to his character and returning home) well acquainted with a plastic surgeon. he literally has a body modification done as part of his backstory (specifically one he had to tell this story to to receive treatment!!!). transcoded asf. and frankly him being topless all the time is very reminiscent of lots of transmasc ppl who've just gotten top surgery. like they paid too much not to show it off. (this was actually the first thing that made me go "omg,, he's trans lmao. that surgeon guy totally gave him a 2 for 1 deal" and then it just. kept piling up. he's also quite short (4'10") and has a relatively high voice (definitely masc, but in a very in-the-throat way that a lot of afab ppl use), but neither of those are that compelling).

he also has a somewhat more flexible view of his body than the others, getting drastic invasive surgery, beating his arm when it disobeyed him(????? ok babe), and willingly sacrificing parts of it to learn fighting techniques (specifically a fire technique, so more gender stuff). this could be tied to genderqueer people's greater willingness/need to change their bodies, or potentially harmful practices (such as improper binding) to alleviate dysphoria.

queerness is featured a few times in the series and implied in others. we encounter a canon transfem demon named miyuki during the yukina rescue arc. karasu and itsuki are both distinctly mlm demons. hiei even acknowledges this in the eng dub, calling itsuki "lover boy" when he's doing his whole "omg sensui,, i want him to be evil so bad he's so hot" speech. the derision in this case seems to come more from hiei's dislike of him/the situation than disgust at itsuki's queerness (or else he could have just called him disgusting or perverse or whatever). kurama also makes a joke near the end of the series implying hiei is interested in him, which hiei refutes by clarifying his intentions, rather than saying smth like "ew nasty I don't swing that way", which is more standard in anime. I'm gonna gesture wildly to mukuro but we'll skip her for now. all this is to say that the only characters we see exhibiting signs of queerness are demons (other than the people we see atsuko hang with for a single shot). this is almost certainly a case of villainous queercoding (a detriment to the series that does rustle my feathers a good bit. the treatment of miyuki in particular makes my blood boil), but we could also read this as demonkind having different understandings of gender and sexuality in general. perhaps the reason we see this queerness in demons is more because the way their bodies work, the ways they present, and the ways they're attracted to others, to us, look queer.

hiei, throughout his backstory, is consistently demonized by the people around him (some of which is deserved bc he keeps killing people, but some isn't, like the thrown-as-an-infant-off-a-cliff thing). and while his arc throughout the show is about him becoming more able to let people into his life, there's always a distance there. he almost always pushes them away. he's always been treated like a monster, so that's all he tries to be, and it's part of his justification for further distance (i.e. using his criminal status as a reason not to "burden" yukina with the knowledge that they're related). for a lot of queer people (especially before the internet and in places without queer spaces like gay bars), you have no way of meeting people you can trust won't hate you for being queer (even queer spaces have transphobes or nb-exclusionists, etc), so you harden yourself and let very few people in. his trauma reads like a lot of queer ones, especially older american ones. this arc culminates with his relationship with mukuro, and his decision to stay with her indefinitely.

firstly, mukuro's referred to as a king and with he/him pronouns by the cast for a while, before it's revealed that she was hiding her true identity as a woman, and the characters' references to her switch to feminine ones. already tripping wires there. and the first time we learn this about her is when mukuro sees hiei's (queercoded) past and goes "you're just like me" and sheds her clothes (mukuro's backstory doesn't feel that queer to me, but she did have to run away from abuse and dehumanization, potentially for her body/the way she was born as well, so it's not insignificant). hiei's unconscious in one of those green anime healing tubes, but their shared nudity (and thus vulnerability) has a very intimate vibe to it. these fundamentally tightly guarded characters are letting each other in a bit in this way, and that backstory/vulnerability being connected with their bodies/genders, especially when you consider all the other queercoding surrounding them, feels very much like queer solidarity. meeting strangers who have been disowned for birth circumstances and immediately sharing your deepest secrets with each other because you feel some deep similarity to them and bonding over that experience (especially when it relates to asab/agab roles) in a way outsiders can't breach is very queer. (note that hiei didn't want mukuro to know his backstory, but was effectively outed, and she came out in kind). and eventually hiei helps her work through that trauma, and she gives him purpose and a home. a found family with a better fit, something more suited to him, than the main cast (as much as I want them to mesh perfectly).

i think part of why hiei is suicidal in the beginning of three kings is because of that distance and isolation. he'd fulfilled his mission of meeting yukina, but resolved not to tell her of their relation. he feels he can't tell her this big secret of his that might change how she views him, or views her home. it's just before the fight where he tries to die that his surgeon's condition that he could never tell her is revealed. the only thing allowing them to meet is keeping that secret, and the bodily change is what causes it. and he says he wouldn't want to tell her anyway. so he has nowhere to go. he doesn't want to destroy humanity anymore (as evidenced by his assistance in the previous arc and destruction of the chapter black tape), he can't get closer to his home or his sister, and there's still that distance between him and everyone else. (in case it needs to be said, all of this is crazy bonkers queercoded). but in the end, after he and mukuro grow together and bond, he tells kurama to tell yukina her brother's dead, to give up hope, to cut himself off permanently. kurama says he won't, because he believes that hiei will return and tell her they're related someday. and hiei begrudgingly agrees. someday he will tell her. when he's ready, and when he feels safe enough to. and from that change in the beginning and end of the arc, we know he's found that safety in mukuro, and may finally begin to really pursue his own happiness and authenticity. because he met someone like him, he now has hope. he can be loved and he can be enough, and he can look forward to it.

so, to sum up, hiei:

1. was disowned as a child for being the wrong/unexpected gender/sex in an incredibly homogenous society (in which it is ambiguous how they classify sex/gender)

2. has a medical and unusually personal history with a magical plastic surgeon and is topless all the time

3. reacts neutrally/without notice to other characters' queerness (when he is rude, it's for other reasons)

4. is a demon, the only group shown to exhibit canon queerness

5. forms a very deep bond with someone over their shared isolating (queercoded) experiences (with persistent body imagery and a social transition on mukuro's part)

basically, he's transcoded <3