#harding is CLEARLY queer-coded okay | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

anti-spop · 2 months

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Don’t forget, Sea Hawk is also apparently Asian. I also thought Frost might be Asian at first bc she kinda looks… maybe stereotypical isn’t the exact word, but just like what comes to mind when you think of a little Asian girl. Not to mention, she was originally designed as a white (Nordic coded?) teenager for this show before they decided to age her down into the little sister character. Never mind the fact the little sister character already existed in the old series with Glimmer and Allegra, and they could have done something with that, but I digress. I’ve also seen some people say Angella is Indian coded, because of the accent and her voice actress. Or maybe it’s because they think her gem is reminiscent of a bindi?

But yeah, idk about Perfuma, Entrapta, or Spinnerella. I think Perfuma could be latina because if the actress? But the character gives off the vibes of such a essential oils Karen that I associate with entitled white women, to the point I think she might just be a tanned white woman? Though I’ll admit, when I first saw her design I considered black and white biracial, and I considered Pacific Islander. So I have no idea. I’ve also seen some people interpret Entrapta as black. Though, I doubt it based on the hair alone. I like to think she’s latina, simply because I want her as my Latin rep, and not the literal cat. As for Spinnerella, I got nothing. Maybe white? All I know is that Huntara should have been black, and isn’t even coded as black. And I think that’s dumb, because I would have loved buff, queer, gets-a-character-arc Grace Jones in this show, since we didn’t get to have it in the old one.

Okay, hold on. I had no idea Sea Hawk was apparently half-Asian. I had to look this up. It was "confirmed" (as in, on Twitter) by the lead character designer for SPOP, who also "confirmed" Scorpia as half-Asian as well. However, I'm pretty sure Frosta is supposed to be Inuk like Katara, but I don't think that was ever confirmed. I could be wrong. I'm not even sure where her kingdom is located, for that matter. The worldbuilding in SPOP sucks so badly I barely remember how the kingdoms were like, save for Perfuma's and maybe Mermista's.

Idk, man. I honestly don't think that much about most characters' ethnicities, because the SPOP crew clearly didn't put a lot of thought into it. I mean, the literal cat teenager who licks herself, who walks on fours, who bites and claws people, who hisses and hates water, and who's sexualized on top of it all, is supposed to be Latina. Or Iranian or Middle Eastern, because apparently OG Catra came from "Purrsia", which is like... the Persian Empire? And fans really want to apply that to the reboot, too. Except Catra's origins were never brought up in SPOP, only that Catra was found abandoned in a cardboard box according to Nate. Regardless, neither theories are great because both Latinas and Iranian women (and Middle Eastern women in general) are not treated like people. They're sexualized and are victims of colonization. I've heard people headcanon Catra as Indigenous, too. Which is even worse considering she got her hair cut against her will.

As for the other characters... I just don't care, lmao. I will agree that Huntara should've been black, too. But since the SPOP crew didn't care about developing their kingdoms and their origins, then I don't think that hard. I mainly mention and dissect "Latina" Catra because the fandom won't shut up about her. Idk about Entrapta's ethnicity, but if Latina Entrapta makes you happy, go for it. Especially because Latin America is pretty diverse, so there are a lot of possibilities.

I don't agree with the term Karen, though. I get what you mean, that Perfuma is annoying and ableist and treats other people like garbage, but sadly that's another term that actual misogynists use against any women who get angry. But I know that's not your intention, I get where you come from.

#sorry this got long lmao #i'm just.#what the fuck i didn't even know sea hawk was half asian!!!!#and i'm not even happy about it i'm just angry that this is another thing they never expanded on #asks #spop critical #racism tw #long post

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mxmaneater · 4 months

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How do you see Gortash as queer coded?

Oh, it would be my genuine delight to explain.

Alright, so I have several lines of reasoning, so I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit first.

Gortash’s obsession with his appearance

Okay, so we all know about Gortash’s eccentricities when it comes to the way he looks. He wears an ostentatious villain coat, bedecked with golden bits and bobs, matching pants, and a matching shirt (that he wears provocatively low and can’t seem to ever lace properly). He also clearly styles his hair, which given its length, takes a non-significant amount of time each morning.

Now. Am I saying these things on their own make him queer? No, of course not. The assumption that gay men take more care with their appearance is a stereotype, though I would argue that there is a subset of people for which this is true. However, stereotypes also form the context for which we interpret characters and situations, and that social context is very real (even in cases when a stereotype is not), which is why I don’t discount these details either.

Additionally, when it comes to the Netherstone, Gortash could have easily stuck it in the middle of a suit of armor like Ketheric and called it a day. But as a politician (and someone who likely doesn’t see a lot of combat), I get that a suit of armor wouldn’t be his first choice. Nonetheless, the option he goes with (and presumably takes the time and effort to craft and construct himself) is the pair of gauntlets, which are essentially ornate jewelry. Jewelry that’s functional and dangerous, yes - but also needlessly beautiful. And he really only needed one of them, but - again - his attention to detail with appearances drove him to build a matching set to become part of his Signature Look.

Cool. So let’s move on to:

Gortash’s political career

Alright, so I like to view Faerun as a fairly equitable place in terms of gender distribution in positions of power (at least compared to reality). From what I can find on forgotten realms sources, it seems like the Council of Four was composed of 2 men and 2 women (at least until Stelmane is murdered); therefore, I think it’s not a stretch to assume that power is pretty evenly divided. Great - love that for Baldur’s Gate. Which it was true out here as well.

Even still, that means that 50% of the high-ranking government officials and patriars that Gortash is charming and manipulating as part of his rise to power are men. As a devout follower of the God of Tyranny, I find it hard to believe that he would just pass up on the opportunity to use sex as a form of manipulation with men, when we have canon evidence that he uses this tactic to gain power with women (hello Lady Jannath). Why would he - someone who views ascending in power as a holy mission - suddenly be squeamish when it comes to seducing (both literally and metaphorically) the other 50% of his targets?

Also, like I mentioned earlier, although Faerun may be a veritable gender utopia, the social contexts that influence us in reality don’t suddenly go away when we boot up bg3. The writers of the game as well as the consumers - us - are very much bound by the social contexts within which we operate, meaning that certain character traits can be queer-coded for us, even if they wouldn’t necessarily look that way to someone who lives in the world of the game (if they suddenly became sentient and engaged in discourse).

What does that mean? Okay, so we live in a society that is highly patriarchal and run by men (read: politicians as well as all other highly influential positions of power). Within these circles, men are forced into “compulsory relationships” with other men (because remember, women don’t hold the clout they desire, and therefore don’t matter) in order to exert and obtain power; relationships such as “male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry” (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet) characterize these spaces. Now, as Sedgwick - one of the mainstays of queer literary theory - explains, men enter into these “male homosocial” relationships because they must if they wish to gain power and ascend the ranks; however, the very necessity of these close, male relationships (to the exclusion of, or in superiority to relationships with women) also puts men in the dangerous social position of making it easy to become too close with other men and therefore jeopardizing their access to the very power they sought. This is the foundation of her argument about forces that keep men in the proverbial “closet.”

Okay. So back to Gortash. Gortash is not driven by fear of stepping over that line - he seems utterly unbothered by professing his connections to whoever he views as influential, regardless of gender (see: default Durge, which I’ll get to later). He is not scared of stepping beyond this larger, societal “closet” that most men get defensive about in order to protect their relative power. Sure Faerun is less homophobic than our reality, but again, the coding of these characters doesn’t change drastically based on the in-game setting, because it is ultimately people in our reality who are interpreting and interacting with the game and its characters.

Also, I make a distinction between Gortash being “queer-coded” and not “gay-coded”; if anything, examples from the game would have me characterize Gortash as bisexual - if he even conceives of sex as an identity factor and not just a means of gaining power over someone, which is a big assumption. I definitely view him as someone who thinks more along the lines of the latter - and wouldn’t it benefit him, in that case, to be an equal-opportunity manipulator?

This is getting long, so I’ll jump to my final point:

Gortash’s devotion to the Dark Urge

Whether you read the past relationship between Gortash and the Dark Urge as sexual/romantic or purely a business dealing, the fact remains that Durge is the one character Gortash views as his equal. And yes, you can customize Durge’s appearance and gender, etc, but the default origin character is male, so a certain amount of “canon”, I believe, can assume at least the possibility of a male Durge. Gortash - the Chosen of Bane, who loves nothing more than domineering over others - wants to willingly share his Empire with Durge, once he’s conquered the city; that is not a level of devotion that you could expect Gortash to hold for anyone but his “nearest and dearest.”

And from the letters you can find, it’s apparent that Gortash specifically sought Durge out - tempting him with information about Bhaalist artifacts that had been “stolen” and displayed in a museum in order to form a connection. This, combined with his desperation to regain Durge as a partner in Act 3 (to the point he’s weirdly forgiving of insult and refusal), offer queer subtext, if not text-text, confirming his particular interest in Durge as a person. After all, he only “tolerates” Orin, who, despite her own eccentricities, is only trying to accomplish the will of Bhaal, just like Durge presumably was as well. In fact, most of the characters dismiss Orin as just some “crazy bitch”, which I find hard to believe isn’t rooted, at least partially, in sexism - especially since people forgive Durge very easily for similar crimes. (I could write my own dissertation about Orin, but I’ll save that for another time).

In conclusion, there is enough queer-coding between Gortash’s appearance, habits, career, known manipulation tactics, and special relationship with the Dark Urge to at least make the case that he isn’t super straight. Even without the letter in which he wrote his penpal Franc that he loved him for bringing “wet, slithering malice” into the world.

#enver gortash #queercoded villains #queer theory #bg3 #durgetash

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princess-of-the-corner · 5 months

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Okay so, if I could summarize each of the four main characters and what makes them so interesting:

Ruby Rose: She dresses in black and red, has a lot of death motifs, and is the most willing of the four main characters to fight dirty. She's also an altruistic sweetheart who just wants to make the world a better place, is heavily coded as both autistic and asexual, and her entire character arc across the first eight seasons of the show is based around her deteriorating mental health as she holds herself to higher and higher standards until she just can't live up to role she has given herself. She's also seen blushing when talking to a pretty girl in Season 3, and while one boy younger than her is implied to have a crush on her, she has NEVER shown ANY interest in boys outside of the noncanon parody spin-off. Also, while it's never explicitly mentioned in show, analyzing the information we DO have reveals her to be perhaps the SOLE survivor of a HORRIFICALLY thorough genocide, even if Ruby herself doesn't realize until after Volume 5.

Weiss Schnee: Basically Chloe with better writing. She starts out as a seemingly shallow, petulant rich girl with an ego larger than her father's corporate empire. She's also deeply aware of what a monster her father is, comes from a broken home, and even BEFORE her character arc is primarily motivated by a desire to redeem her family name after her father married into the family and turned her grandfather's company into a standard evil megacorp. She's also canonically bisexual.

Blake Belladonna: She's a Faunus, a former member of the civil rights group-turned-terrorist organization known as the White Fang. Her ex boyfriend, Adam Taurus (who is heavily implied to have started courting her when she was 12 and he was 18), has slowly but surely been subverting the White Fang's actual purpose in order to turn it into an instrument of his bloodlust, and thus her driving motivation for much of the first few seasons is to atone for her perceived role in the White Fang's fall (as she unfairly believes herself to be responsible for his fall to the darkside, because he would divert blame to HER whenever she tried to confront him on it), and also try and fight racism. She's also the team's second in command. She was also the first member of the cast to be confirmed queer, and is the closest thing to a harem protagonist the show has, with three characters (not including her abusive ex) all having been confirmed to have fallen for her at different points. Her eyes are the same color as her partner's soul.

Yang Xiao Long: She might wear the image of a hard-drinking party girl, but she has NEVER consumed alcohol on screen, is PROBABLY the best student on her team, built her weapon herself, and is a genius mechanic on TOP of being a berserker who gets stronger the more and stronger hits she absorbs to charge her Semblance with. She's both the tank AND the team mom, because all three of her parents AND her uncle have let her down in some way, shape, or form since she was a child, forcing her to grow up so her sister wouldn't have to. Her birth mom walked out on her when she was a baby, her actual mom mysteriously disappeared on a secret mission, her uncle's too drunk to be much help around the house and is usually absent on top of that, and her father is very clearly not up to the task of raising two children on his own, no matter how much he may try and genuinely loves his girls. Also, she's Ruby's older half sister, and a good chunk of her arc is dedicated to the fact that it takes her until season 9 to realize that she's gay and in love with her best friend. Her eyes' default color is the same as her partner's soul.

GOD that's gay.

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acidh2otoby · 1 year

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Resident Evil Sexuality / Identity Headcanons, part 2

Ingrid Hunnigan

Lesbian / Female

Hunnigan is a strong headed lesbian that falls under the more masculine side but still identifies as female

Any time Leon tried to flirt with her in the beginning, she wanted to jab in his face but couldn't because he was in a different location

The only reason Leon stopped was because Hunnigan made the small joke after one of his flirts saying, "I pull more girls than you without all the stupid pick up lines"

Jake Muller

??????

It must be a Wesker thing because Jake confuses me as well

From one point of view I think "There really isn't enough screen time between him and any other character other than Sherry or Chris, who Jake clearly has a rivalry with"

From the other I think "But there's a chance he's queer of some kind"

But I honestly don't know...

Jill Valentine

Lesbian / Non-binary

You cannot tell me that Mx. Valentine is not a lesbian that doesn't identify as a specific gender

Like, c'mon, LOOK AT THEM

That was theirs and Chris' bonding in S.T.A.R.S. was both of them finding out they were attracted to opposite genders and Jill being non-binary

That's why they're both tight with each other because gays protect each other, it's a code

Karl Heisenberg

GAY / Male

If you think Heisenberg is straight, you are fucking mental

The part of his greatest plan of getting his revenge on Mother Miranda(r) that he didn't tell Ethan was trying to win his heart and running away with him, CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE

The moment Heisenberg saw Ethan, he thought, "I'mma make this bitch mine"

Leon Kennedy

(I love him and his stupid food-loving ass)

Bisexual / TRANSGENDER (female-to-male)

Leon's bisexuality has a preference, a preference for men, Ada is his only exception otherwise, he'd be gay

He's SO TRANS, it baffles my mind how much transness oozes off of him

Leon's flirting isn't to necessarily gain a female's attraction but more-so just because it boosts his ego just a bit because he knows he's hot

Piers Nivans

GAY / TRANSGENDER (female-to-male)

Riddle me this, Batman... have you, in your entire life, met ANYONE with the name Piers?

Doubt it, Piers rats out his identity faster than a bullet from his sniper

Also, he's SO in love with Chris, it's so fucking obvious

I said it once and I'll say it again, FRIENDS DON'T LOOK AT FRIENDS THE WAY PIERS LOOKS AT CHRIS

Rebecca Chambers

Aroace / Non-binary

I never remember Rebecca ever trying to gain anyone's attraction on purpose and actually kind of avoided it

They had love for people, but never romantic, they looked at Chris like he was a big brother and not a potential boyfriend

They didn't even show any attraction to Billy, who was more than nice to them while my dumbass was wishing I was getting saved by Billy every 20 seconds

Also, Rebecca being non-binary just clicks in my brain a certain way that works for me

Rosemary Winters

Pansexual / Genderfluid

Rose doesn't quite understand why it should matter who you're attracted to and even got into a few arguments about it

Being born from someone that had a virus also fucked up her genes pretty good, they were born female but their puberty process and mental gender never matched

They never blamed their dad for the weirdness of going through puberty but they did find it a bit annoying

Sherry Birkin

Straight / Transgender (male-to-female)

Sherry started her transition really early and didn't even realize what it was until she was in her 20s

It was also William that helped her be comfortable with herself even as a kid, because Annette sure wasn't about to

Leon made sure that she was okay with herself as well whenever he saw her

Sherry was able to twist her words to be able to get surgeries from the government for free, making excuses that missions would be hard if she didn't have the right kind of body

Sheva Alomar

Bisexual / Female

Sheva also has a bisexual preference, she prefers women over men

Not to say there's only one guy keeping her bi but she's threatened past boyfriends with it, makes her laugh every time

She definitely had a crush on both Chris and Jill in the beginning but it calmed down when she had to actually work with them (mainly Chris)

Steve Burnside

(I RAN OUT OF FUCKING PICTURES OF USE IN THIS STORY AND HE'S THE LAST CHARACTER FUCK!!!)

Bisexual / Transgender (female-to-male)

I think we can all agree that there was definitely something queer with Steve in all versions of him

Steve doesn't have a specific preference and is kind of a hopeless romantic

The sad thing about Steve that kinda separates him from the other trans characters here is that he never got a full transition before he died 🥲

Did I ads that part to make people feel sad for him again? Yes I did because I genuinely liked his character

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thranduel · 2 years

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will’s art and the d&d party have always been a big part of mike and will’s relationship

i find it so interesting how in the very first season, they make it clear that will is an artist and very passionate about drawing. he draws things that mean a lot to him and gives his artwork to the people he loves most.

they chose to show mike looking through will’s drawings of their party (and confirmed that mike collects them and has a binder filled with them) after he thought he lost him. they could’ve used anything else, like mike looking through photos of them together or maybe d&d figures they used to play with, but they specifically chose will’s drawings to highlight how important art is and how it’ll play an important part in their relationship later on (like when mike finds out the truth about the painting from season 4 and eventually realises his feelings for will).

season 2

when will is possessed, joyce is telling will how she gave him a box of crayons for his birthday and he drew a big rainbow space ship and she was so proud of him. i still remember when season 2 came out, people immediately knew this was queer subtext (since will was written as queer). i don’t think joyce specifically meant it in that way in the show, will just simply drew a rainbow ship because he had lots of colours, but it was definitely supposed to be a little hint directed towards the audience. it’s also interesting how they specifically chose this memory and then shortly after, mike talks about the day they first met and how asking will to be his friend was the best thing he’s ever done. see how they've used art and mike in the same scene again?

season 3

mike and will have an argument where mike projects a lot and gets defensive. he’s forcing himself to be a certain way (even finn said this in an interview) and trying so hard to be what society considers “normal” (aka straight). society expects boys their age to start talking to girls, and that’s what mike feels like he has to do. will says “you’re ruining our party” (and sometimes when mike and will talk about the party, it’s also code for their own relationship) and he’s clearly upset that his best friend is becoming distant. then mike eventually asks “i mean, what did you think, really? that we were never gonna get girlfriends? that we were just gonna sit around in my basement all day and play games for the rest of our lives?”. then will says “yeah. i guess i did. i really did”, because that’s all he’s wanted. he feels safest when he’s with mike and playing d&d is an escape and distraction from the real world. mike’s basement is basically his second home, and a cute detail that many people missed is when mike saves will in season 2 on halloween night and tells him “i’m gonna get you home, okay?”, he actually takes him to his basement where they talk about going crazy together.

anyways, after their fight in 3x03, will ends up leaving and breaking down because he thinks he’s just lost his safe place, and mike eventually rides his bike in a storm to apologise. then, at the end of season 3 during their last private moment together before will leaves town, mike is concerned when he sees will putting his d&d board in the donations box. he asks “what if you wanna join another party?” (aka “what if you meet other people in your new town and forget about me?”) and will says “not possible”, because he could never move on from the boy he loves most.

season 4

we see will working on a special painting for mike. as i mentioned above, the last private conversation they had together was about their d&d party and it’s always been incredibly special to both of them. will was thinking of mike while he was away and wanted to give the painting to him as a welcoming gift for when he came to visit. i think he thought about their last conversation a lot and it’s also his way of saying “see? i kept my promise. i could never forget about you”. also, i think it’s important to remember that mike and will have been by each other’s side since they were 4 years old, so being away from each other was so difficult for both of them. they both admitted that they’re afraid of losing each other and things weren’t the same when they were without each other.

in episode 8, will sees that mike is upset and decides to give him the painting. this painting is what makes mike the happiest he looked all season. his face lit up the moment he opened it and you could tell he immediately felt so much better. will then confessed his love for mike and told him that he’s the heart of the party that leads and inspires them all. he also told him that he was so lost without him, that he makes him feel better for being different and that he’ll always need him. this made mike feel so loved and gave him so much strength.

look at that smile!!!!!!!

anyways, when i first watched this scene, i felt sick that they had the audacity to take something so personal and special for will and mike (will’s art and their d&d party) and make it about mike and el. hearing will use el’s name as a disguise in an attempt to help mike feel better and bring their relationship closer absolutely broke me. it was selfless of him and it was beautiful to see how much he loves mike and how he would do whatever he can to make sure he's happy, but it was also such a cruel thing for the writers to do, especially as it led to mike saying his forced monologue in episode 9 (which i don't even want to talk about because that's a mess for so many reasons). seeing will cry afterwards was absolutely heartbreaking as well.

i truly believe that this painting will be brought up again in season 5 and it’ll be the thing that finally makes mike realise his true feelings. after all, mike only confessed to el because of will. he thought will was talking about el when he was actually talking about himself he entire time. this painting was so heavily focused on and the duffer brothers said it took so long to make it perfect. i highly doubt they used it as a plot device to force another ship back together while will suffers all alone. that would be the most cruel and unnecessary thing they could do to a kid who has suffered enough. will's art and the d&d party is also a very personal thing between mike and will only. no one else. making it about another ship isn’t okay at all. they have to address it again because it’s important to both of them and it's the only thing that’ll make sense from a narrative standpoint. it would also be so beautiful to finally see two childhood best friends realise their feelings for each other after all the slowburn and build up and it would make rewatching the show so much more worth it because then you’ll notice all the little details.

#byler #mike wheeler #will byers #stranger things #byler analysis

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bad-luck-clover · 2 years

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SPOILERS FOR STRANGER THINGS SEASON 4 VOL. 2

Okay I haven’t posted in forever but but I was literally crying this morning over the Stranger Things Finale before I even watched it so here are my two cents:

Why the fuck is the message of season 4 “don’t be honest about who you are or what you’re struggling with or it’ll hurt/kill you no matter what you do?” Because that’s the point this finale seemed to make.

Will started to open up to Mike about his feelings, albeit in a very indirect way, and that just resulted in Mike pursuing El even further. And even after all of that Mike and El still aren’t actually talking and Will has still been demoted from main character and plot catalyst to the sad gay side character that’s sometimes a monster detector??? So I guess Will just has to continue hiding who he is while he watches his sister and friend/crush continue their codependent and ultimately stagnant relationship and he’s once again being tossed aside in favor of a character that was supposed to die season 1. I mean I love El, but come on, they’re treating Will like he’s completely irrelevant now.

Max started coming to terms with her trauma and mental health, started opening up to her friends finally and was rekindling her relationship with Lucas. She was obviously hurting after Billy died and it was even mentioned that she was suicidal, but she fought to stay alive and get back to her friends who she loves. It was such an obvious metaphor of battling mental illness and Max’s character arc in the first part of the season was so amazing to watch. But no, apparently it doesn’t matter if you fight through the struggles of mental illness and seek help from your support group, the trauma monster is just gonna torture and literally break you anyway, sorry.

And Lucas, despite finally standing up to Jason after trying so hard to fit in and be part of his group, got beat up and then watch the girl he clearly loves be mutilated right in front of him and then put into a coma.

I mean even Robin, who’s still understandably deep in the closet, started to open up a tiiiiiiny bit and had hope for her potential relationship with Vickie and then immediately saw her kissing a guy. But the second she gives up on that and steps a bit further back in the closet? Oh, Vickie broke up with him, thanks for not coming out Robin, you get a cookie.

And Eddie. I do not understand how they could kill the one character who was always 100% unapologetically himself the entire time we saw him. He was labeled a freak and later a psychotic devil-worshipping murderer and yet he never changed who he was to please anyone or even lashed out at the people who wanted to hurt him. Not to mention he’s queer-coded as hell and I seriously doubt that was unintentional. I mean if you’re writing a period show and you do research about 80s culture and especially subcultures and outcasted groups for Eddie specifically, why would you give his character a black bandana in his back pocket if you’re not trying to imply that he’s queer? He was always true to who he was, he protected the kids who reminded him of himself when they were lost and being picked on. He was nice to everyone as long as they weren’t an asshole and he ultimately fought to save his friends and all the people who hated him. And what did he get? He got brutally, painfully killed while the entire town still believed he was a monster and no one besides Dustin and his uncle, not even the other people he fought with in the upside down, mourned or even acknowledged him.

It’s so infuriating that Max and Will (and Robin and Lucas to a lesser extent) suffered and were hurt because they were beginning to open up. But Eddie has always been open and nothing was going to make him start pretending to be someone else so he just straight up died. The one person who was always honest and never lied about who he was and they killed him for shock value. Like am I just reading into this too much or does that literally send a message of “if you start to open up you’ll get hurt. And don’t even try to fully be your true self, because look what’ll happen”

And yeah, sometimes life is cruel and you get hurt unjustly for just being who you are. But this is a fictional tv show where children fight off monsters. A show who’s main audience are the very outcasts they’re now sidelining and killing off in favor of more conventionally “typical” characters. I relate to Will, Robin, Max, and Eddie the most out of all these characters and now I’m being made to watch them suffer for all the reasons I relate to them so much.

Mike and El are still in a pretty unhealthy and unbalanced relationship and they’re fine. Jonathan and Nancy are still lying to each other and refusing to communicate and they’re fine. Steve, as much as I love him, is still pining after Nancy without actually directly talking to her (which, sidenote, is just a huge disservice to his otherwise fantastic character arc imo) and yeah he’s hurting seeing her with Jonathan again but he’s ultimately fine. The only people who really suffered are the only ones who have stopped lying about who they are or what they’re struggling with or who never did so in the first place.

How can you write the line “Forced conformity, that’s what’s killing the kids. That’s the real monster” and then punish the handful of characters who are trying to break away from that conformity? Why the hell, in a show that used to be all about outcasts forming relationships and fighting monsters against all the odds not in spite of being different, but because they’re different, are those very characters being hurt and punished for not being like everyone else?

Like, I’m just so fed up and tired. This show is legitimately ruined for me now, and it’s not because a character I liked died or the ship I was rooting for didn’t happen. It’s because I look at these characters I relate to being tormented and hurt for being queer or neurodivergent or having trauma, things that I experience/struggle with myself, and the message I hear is “What you are is wrong and bad things will happen to you because of it. You deserve to hurt because of what you are and you will never be safe or happy.” And that fucking kills me, especially since this was a show I loved so much just yesterday and now I can’t even stand to watch it.

#stranger things #stranger things spoilers #vol 2 spoilers #this is so fucking long but i'm devastated and still processing #i was prepared to be let down but not THIS BAD #long post #will byers #mike wheeler #eleven #max mayfield #robin buckley #lucas sinclair #eddie munson #nancy wheeler #jonathan byers #also erica is an obvious exception to this #she is unapologetic and untouchable by death

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brw · 1 year

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🔥 brutally honest ask for the Fantastic Four. Please and thank you.

mmm this is hard because I don't think i have many opinions that fellow FF fans would find controversial but for the larger marvel fandom I think they are. anyway the fantastic four are both in and out of universe the most important team in marvel. It's fair to say without them and without their success the Avengers and X-Men wouldn't be here the way they are today. they are the first team in superhero comics to really focus on the "we're a family, not a team" thing and other teams are very clearly inspired by that and writers try to recreate that vibe. writers don't give them enough respect as the first team in marvel history.

okay just remembered some opinions that some FF fans may not like so here i go. sue in leekirby FF wasn't bad you guys just have kneejerk reactions and refuse to read things in their historical context. sue shouldn't be a scientist. while im glad reed is being written with his autism in mind, that isn't enough. i do not want writers to be able to pick and choose wherever or not reed is autistic, I want reed to be explicitly diagnosed with ASD. i don't want this to be coding any more, it needs to be canon. if you think johnny is the only queer member of this team.... get well soon i guess.

Unpopular opinions

#ask games} answers #fantastic four #ty for asking!

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fixomnia-scribble · 1 year

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Evolution

HOLY HECK.

Criminal Minds: Evolution (aka Season 16) is off to an incredible start. Spoilers and pics below the cut. Messer and the team have pulled off the tricky balance between taking us back to familiar places and faces, and finding new energy as well as new problems to contend with in new ways.

Below be spoilers.

Firstly, this is a welcome-back to the characters, not a plot analysis. I’m intrigued by the idea of a season-long arc, and I think it’s an interesting concept: how pandemic life may have altered crimes that depend on predator access to people out in public.

One comment I’ve seen online, about the psychological game the killers are playing, is: “Isn’t it horribly ableist to show the choice between permanent disability and death this way?” And this is my response, as a non-disabled person: I think the point was to make the viewer think that. I think the point was to make people think, hang on, would I actually pick death over permanent paralysis? Wouldn’t there be plenty to fight for and ways to live? But this is just me.

Let me just get the predictable out of the way: everyone is back, if only name-dropped a couple of times, and they look amazeballs. Age and experience are cool, network people. So far there’s no word on whether Gubler and Henney will sign on for future episodes, but they are clearly missed and not forgotten, while on supposed secret assignments.

Prentiss is the new Strauss, dealing with the budget-bleating Dep Dir Bailey, a spindly, grinning 30-year-old with his eye on a top job. He probably hasn’t been in the field since Academy, has no respect for Prentiss and has no idea what hell he is in for.

Lewis is her usual powerhouse self, still relatively fresh in her mental outlook compared to the long-time agents who have gone though bitterness and back together. She’s also dating a lady powerhouse at DoJ, thereby becoming CM’s first canonically queer BAU agent. The world does not end, and Prentiss’ response is that it’s nice to have someone so happy in the office - and that Tara’s going to get so much shit from the team - simply for making such a catch, and dating someone over at DoJ.

(Note: thanks to the eagle-eyed forum spotters who noted Tara’s plaid jacket and closeup of her nice short manicure as a little extra bi-coding. Whether it was intentional or not, you’re right, that’s hilarious!)

Which brings me to the next point: there is cussing! A lot of it! Because this is on streaming, not cable! Rossi and Prentiss, predictably, get to drop all the bombs, some of them fairly large. Not only is it disarmingly natural, but it feels like a relief. Of course these two have been cussing all the way through - we’re just now getting to sit at the big kids’ table and hear it.

Here’s hoping we get to hear Prentiss cussing in multiple languages.

Rossi is having a Truly Awful Year. Having re-married his third wife at the end of S 15, he’s been grieving (or trying not to) since her death from an undisclosed illness a year ago. He’s living in a basic commuter hotel to avoid rattling around his mansion alone, living on room service, a landslide of case notes, a couple changes of clothes, Alka-Seltzer and eyedrops and microwaved pasta (!) He’s abrasive and snappish and obsessed with the case, and the higher-ups are noticing.

Each member of the BAU tries to reach him, clearly not for the first time.

Prentiss’ intervention scene just slew me. She threw everything she had into it, all her affection and hard-earned wisdom and shared grief, and he quietly handed it all back with “You’re a better person than me, Emily. And I’m okay with that.”

(Confession: even with Rossi in the depths of grief, Shipper!Me is still jumping around going is it finally time for these two?? I have headcanoned them as being friends with extended benefits for years, whenever both are fancy-free and in the same city. They get each other on a very deep level and they’re friends, first and foremost. They could light a fire and yammer about old-school sci-fi writers all night, or shut up and hit the sheets together to forget a bad case.

The last scene in which they’re obviously and appreciatively checking each other out and cracking jokes about not getting laid is not helping.)

Alvez is doing his best largely a solo agent, since the team have been split up into single SSA units rather than partners. He consults with JJ regularly, and she backs him up in dealing with Rossi’s outbursts. We get less insight into his inner life than the others, but it’s clear he’s concerned about the team, and is trying to bring in enough solves to prove their worth.

Penelope! Is! Back! She’s living her best damn life, and has new firm boundary skills. As always, she has a lot going on - her Anglophile Baking Club, and mentoring small genius security network coders on the super-secure young adult chat site she developed, for starters. The look on her face when Alvez knocks on her door is priceless, as is their banter, picked up without a pause from S15. (I may have replayed, “Take your carbs and exit, sir”, a few times.)

Garcia’s turn at Getting Through to Rossi is magic. Whether she had the right words or whether it was just the right time makes no difference - it was a gorgeous scene. The power of Garcia is highest when she is just herself, not trying to offer well-known words of advice. She manages to deliver a sound waking-up as well as a shift in perspective. And clearly he hadn’t let anyone hug him in a long time. Clingy Rossi is rather sweet, but don’t tell him that.

In contrast, the lighting as Rossi leads Garcia back to her old lair is like returning to Kansas before the tornado. I hoped for a moment that her decorations would still be up, but as we enter, we see tidy piles of boxes, a rank of dark monitors on the grey walls, and a starkly clean desk. But as she logs in, each monitor pops awake in determined pastels, and we see her retrieve the pink post-it note that she’d left for the next incumbent of the room - not knowing it would be her. We don’t see what she wrote, and we never will, and that’s as it should be. It’s a wrench seeing her step back into the darkness of her old life, but it’s also a triumph. She’s still got it, and it’s on her terms now.

Lastly, but far from least, JJ quietly shines in these opening episodes as a stalwart, seasoned profiler, nearing the top of her current skill set and about ready for a bump up the ladder. She’s been emotionally anchoring the team while trying to work harder than ever to ensure their future as a unit, and it’s telling on her. She and Will hardly see each other, Henry has his first girlfriend, and she’s missing them all. But she’s resourceful as ever, and Will is his rock-solid self. They’ll find ways to make their schedules, um, meld together. On the kitchen counter if need be.

(If Rossi retires and he and Prentiss get together and JJ steps up as the new Hotch and maybe gets to stay in DC more, and if they get the jet back along with Reid and Simmons...)

#Criminal Minds #criminal minds: evolution #Emily Prentiss #David Rossi #Luke Alves #Penelope Garcia #JJ Jareau #Tara Lewis #Criminal Minds S16

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tsukiyadori · 2 years

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Tsubaki: It would be a type of "like" with no sex, you know? Are you okay with that?! Hiiragi: I'm fine even with none. Fudanshi Kazoku chapter 34.3

OMFG!!!!!!

Did Tsubaki basically just say he was ace???

And asking Hiiragi out for basically a romantic-only relationship???

He totally did???

Using entirely non-queer language and still getting the point across?

WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH!! ohmygosh!!!!!

takes a deep breath

Short break from loosing my mind for a summary: Tsubaki calls Hiiragi out for talking things out. Goes straight to the point that when Hiiragi confessed, he misunderstood it and thought it was a coming out to liking BL. Confesses that he didn't like Hiiragi in a sexually-romantic way, it was just a "like" as in with friends. He should have clarified that at once, but thought it was hard to say out, but realized this couldn't go on, so that's why the break up happened at the year end party. Apologizes for what self-indulgent thing he's going to say after breaking up like that, but

I might not be able like you the way you like me, but I want to be with you forever.

Tsubaki: Wouldn't you become 「family」 with me? Hiiragi: … 「Family」 means….? Tsubaki: Eh, ah, is it strange after all…?

Tsubaki: Erm… Within the half year we've been together… I think I came to… "like" you. But it's not a "like" in the sexual sense [eros], but that being said it also hasn't the nuance of a friendship. My "like" is like Katsura: You know, I like being with you. It's fun, it's interesting, it makes me super happy. (sfx: And therefore see) If we became family we could be always together right? Being together and being happy, isn't that convenient/just about right? Tsubaki: Being together forever, like family, it's… a "like" like that. Hiiragi: … … Couldn't that already be considered the same sort of "like" as mine? Tsubaki: I-It's not the same!!

Tsubaki: It would be a type of "like" with no sex, you know? Are you okay with that?! Hiiragi: I'm fine even with none. If it's a "like" that's about wanting to be together with the one you like, no matter who says what, it's the same as mine. Besides the one I like is telling me he "likes" me and even wants to "become family"… That's just like a proposal you know, Saotome-san. Tsubaki: …

Tsubaki: H-He's right. This is almost like a proposal. Hiiragi: Then… I'm looking forward to dating as "family". Tsubaki: Eh, ah, right. Lo-Looking forward to it, too. Did Katsura-chan [propose] to me with such feelings, too? sfx: no… I see… was that so? Hiiragi: By the way Is a kiss within the bounds of "family"? Tsubaki: ?! Hiiragi: Due to the influence of my grandmother, we often kiss for a greeting… Sign: Quarter [foreigner] Hiiragi: Are you fine with the sense of values of my "family"? Tsubaki: Thi---- This is something that needs further elaboration!! Narrator: And there was Tsubaki, who thought that the definition of "family" was something that needed to be compared and aligned.

Side note: すり合わせ is used in that last line.

Do I love what a clean, concise short word this is Japanese as opposed to in English? Absolutely.

Ok, that was basically almost an entire translation, but lemme just loose my brains over this all.

Katsura and Tsubaki: Actually confirmed most queerplatonic thing ever that I've seen. (Next to Nagiko no Hanashi, but FK is a much happier one.)

But there is still a clear visible difference between Katsura vs. Tsubaki and Tsubaki vs. Hiiragi. The way he acts around Hiiragi all crush-styled with blushings and embarrassments is very clearly romantically coded. Tsubaki and Katsura had none of that.

Tsubaki still being confused and wondering if that's what Katsura felt at the time (clearly not, but it's the next best thing he can reference)

Tsubaki basically as good as declaring he's ace.

Also clearly saying what this means in terms of his expectations and wants from this relationship.

Hiiragi saying he's fine with that.

And that it's the same for him? (What are the flopping odds.)

Openly directly talking about the boundaries of what is okay to do with each other?

Whilst even adding extra healthy communication about how to communicate over cultural differences?

And acknowledging that navigating all of this will need more talking things out?

Them all being flipping cute at trying to do that with the limited vocabulary that is available out there?

That suddenly all of this is recontextualizing everything past from an "oh yeah the usual notorious sanitized blushy maiden disaster awkward x way too pure cinnamon roll" romance INTO SOMETHING ACTUALLY LEGIT PLAUSIBLE??

This is existing in an adult setting that acknowledges that mature content exists, but still sets itself apart to it?

Coming out of a series that basically started as a sort of slapstick manga over a niche interest that is being thrown shade upon since forever?

And serves up some of the most underrepresented relationship styles and conversations out of blue nowhere?

Am I over the moon?

HELL YES.

I like how they aren't really ever using queer language, actually. Even Hiiragi doesn't outright say he's gay when he's talking about it in terms that make very clear what he means. It makes it very around the bush, but that's kind of exactly how you navigate this in a language that doesn't offer to represent concepts it's not familiar with. Queer spaces may invent all its new words as much as they like, but bar maybe the four main words of the original LGBT acronym it'll still take a long time until they will leave its status of a niche technical term into mainstream knowledge. How do you navigate talks in the meantime? This is such a nice reference example, really. It's roundabout, but gets the point across. And in such simple shortness, too. And the series does have a little nod to that these technical terms do exist. (That colleague of Tsubaki's who talked with him about BL drama is talking about "same-sex love", that's already a lot clearer than what Hiiragi ever says about himself.)

And the chapter's use of "family". It doesn't hit the strokes really, but it really is the next best thing in between friends and lovers. Does it sound kinda simple? Yes. Does it do its job with just a few words added for further clarification? Yes. Does it indeed sound like a de-facto proposal? Yes. Is this hilarious at the same time, too? Yes! Is it kind of simple genius because the title is also about family and this started out as a plot of a single father-sons family? HECK YES.

Do I adore how Katsura paved so many ways ahead of her death for Tsubaki? Absolutely. (Give me a series with just her and Tsubaki, and I'll so take it!) Not only did she place acceptance and support for it ahead of time before it ever happened, now she's even there for laying the ground bricks of a reference and proof of concept as something closest to what Tsubaki wants to express now and was in sore exasperation because he couldn't find anything that aligns to it anywhere in media.

I'm so looking forward to seeing how it's going to continue with these two. There is a lot it can still address, and I'd love to see it.

Tsubaki is still having very misinformed ideas about what sex means. (Or even romance.) Is he going to find out that he might be fine with it, once he learns that the BL porn is anything but the real thing?

Or is he going to stick with that, it's just impossible for him?

Is he still going to be pretty much everything ace without the plot doing an u-turn? Because he totally looks like it, when even the idea of kissing freaks him out right now, and with him clearly not having had any signs of cravings to bone anyone.

Is he going to find out that Katsura's "family" is different from his sort of "family" idea?

Is Hiiragi going to wind up being clearly ace, too? Him being all cute and innocent and called out for being so pure in his little wants out of a relationship very much look the part, too. Even Tsubaki's book smarter than him about it all in many cases, cue Hiiragi not getting the horny reference about the names of his two bunnies. (That TOTALLY is a joke that hits home in terms of realism.)

Hiiragi's love language is still a whole lot more touchy than Tsubaki's. How will they navigate and discuss this? Or will Tsubaki just continue to die his blushy maiden deaths? Now that he doesn't have to hold it in because of the misunderstanding dating premise?

Hiiragi definitely does want a romantic kiss, he's secretly tried that before, but stopped because he didn't consider it right without asking. Now he's talking about kisses again.

Will there be more talks about consent for even as "harmless" as kisses? I mean, probably likely, they basically kinda had something like that even for hand holding. Putting this into words when innuendo and flirting subtext flies over your head due to lack of understanding is important. And these two are both clearly under educated in these matters. (But sometimes also over-educated, lol.) Obtuse idiots they are, so often, both of them.

Also, Hiiragi is invested in doing a romantic date. Totally. How's that going to look like?

Will it capitalize on that joke of Katsura's that Tsubaki is basically the ideal uke? How is Hiiragi going to play that seme role?

How will they navigate the BL fandom side of it? Tsubaki still digs it, but probably will be conflicted/confused/wondering/worrying about Hiiragi knowing and getting the wrong idea of him wanting it for himself, too, just because he reads it. Meanwhile, Hiiragi also has long since read a bunch of them, but clearly wasn't out to try imitating any of it.

How will this entangle across the other subplots?

But whatever it is going to do, it already did more than 99.999999(...)999% of just about all romance did for me out there.

Is it trying to be queer?

Probably not beyond the BL flavor. Suzuri Machi's other works are very silly light BL with that typical quite trashy silly note.

Is Fudanshi Kazoku an accidental fluke from that which turned genius?

For me so far, yes. Because it doesn't feel fake, but also doesn't give this unpleasant this hits home a bit too much feels, that things coming from a first hand real place tend to do. (The age vs. fandom shades in the earlier chapters however do feel very first hand real.) So probably it came organically out of what these characters wound up being penned up like? It's also still rough in a few ways, but that works out in this slapsticky style. Maybe it's how it allows for a lot of self-insert in the details that it seems to often hit home in such a hilarious manner?

But I don't care right now, gimme more of stuff like this!!

SO having my fingers so crossed that it keeps the consistency up.

#manga #fudanshi kazoku #腐男子家族 #ramblings #translation #english translation #suzuri machi

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writingwithcolor · 2 years

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Magical humanoid worldbuilding, desi fairies

Anonymous asked:

I think I've read myself in circles on handling coding and potential stereotypes. I'm writing a fantasy novel that has a bunch of magical humanish-oids that all go to school together.

World building Context:

A thousand years ago, all magic users were humans. Humans as we know them today separated from magic itself and wizards, elves, faeries, and dragons came to exist. The faeries practiced magic in a specific way for so long it became ingrained in their being and dragons spent so much time in dragon form (they used to be, for all intents and purposes, animagi) that became their natural state, and the human form is their second/animagi state, elves are an own-story creation not relevant at the moment. (I hope that makes sense). The MC is a wizard, her friend group has folks from each of these backgrounds.

Since this happened all over the world there are dragons (DB) and faeries of all ethnic backgrounds. The main two dragon characters I have are black twins, there are other DBs at the school who aren't black but the main two are. The dragons aren't scary - they're traditionally the treasure keepers, bankers, and museum curators of wizard society because they have utmost respect for property and gold (as you would if you knew how damn hard it was to track down ancient relics and find gold after the humans started digging it up!). They aren't seen as scary, but powerful, and the twins are going to be well rounded distinct characters (high level: feminine, soft, but powerful in pink and her brother is queer, super smart/thinks reading enough can solve any problem).... but still Dragonborn. I have seen posts in the past where this type of casting (?) might be problematic - traditional to OUR world dragons are scary and the villains, these two are human but clearly non-human "animal" born - and others where the emphasis was on the importance of character and context.

The school itself is diverse because... that's life and also my reality in Canada. All of the magic/ancestral humans including the wizards aren't any one specific race and that will be clear/shown in the book (wizards are as human/not human as the rest, non-magic humans are just referred to as Humans, everyone else is Fae, Elf, Wizard, or Dragonborn("DB")).

My first question is: when world building these types of characters/elements and one comes up against a potential stereotype is context and character development actually able to be enough? Are there guidelines on how to ensure it is enough before beta readers/sensitivity readers? Are there things to avoid (non-specific to each type of magic human) that might be a confounding problematic Thing? (Naturally, I know there are limits, like there will never be okay Jewish coded lizards human for example).

More Context: The main faeries are going to be South Asian/probably desi - I haven't found anything in my research to red flag that yet re:stereotypes but I'm still looking.

My second question is: With the separation of magic/human culture being a literal millennia ago, is there a way to know how "much" coding to include? The physical characteristics will be coded, I was thinking that their names (Dragonborn too, also an ethnically indigenous wizard [I haven't done enough research to know their specific ethnic background yet]) should definitely relate to their homelands even separated from humans since they're still in the region, but things like cultural celebrations/values/formal wear that have changes so much in that time + these characters are at this school because they are in Canada aka at some point in the last XYZ years their families moved here + each magic human type having their own culture specific to their community... circles, I have read myself in circles on your wonderfully helpful Tumblr

Worldbuilding

There isn’t a cut-and-dry answer to your first question. Some stereotypes have a variety of means of representation, though they fundamentally tend to come from a sort of xenophobia. This can be expressed through jokes, through exoticization and sexualization, as well as through derogatory descriptions and associations. Understanding your confirmation bias and use of stereotypes is going to be based on your deconstruction and metacognition about your writing. Have you found yourself reflecting stereotypes in your writing? Have you found examples as of yet that you’ve gotten stuck on?

Contextual development can help with stereotypes to an extent. If you don’t make direct associations to stereotypes and actively work to limit them in your worldbuilding, you can limit some of what may pop up. Same goes for character development.

Beta/sensitivity readers are there to help review your writing for parameters that you request. That is what you pay them to do. If you’re looking for stereotypes in your writing, you can ask your sensitivity reader to look over it with fresh eyes and evaluate whether you are or not. Keep in mind that whoever is working with you will have their own set of biases and experiences; the best way to evaluate your work for stereotypes would be to ask a variety of people to read through your draft and see what they think. Take a look at this post for more information.

There aren’t really specific guidelines for when you can or cannot give your work to a beta/sensitivity reader. I would suggest doing so after you’ve gotten through enough drafts that you have the narrative structure, the characters and their arcs, and the general tone of the story down to the nitpicky things, because it will give you more room to work on things you might not be able to see.

In terms of other stereotypes, avoiding sexualization, isolation, and demonization are always a good rule of thumb. I would caution you about potential demonization of the faeries and the dragons even if they are equally respected because of the common tropes that surround these groups. You can look here for our guides on specific tropes or search the archives for the stereotypes tag for more detail.

Coding and South Asian faeries

As for your South Asian faeries, look here for Mod Jaya’s reasoning on why you’ll have to tread carefully in your coding: Characterization for South Asian-coded characters

Try to consider your bases; will they simply have the physical features? The Fae didn’t come from Hindu mythology, nor do we have a very transferable alternate mythology that would work for the circumstance. How do you plan on reconciling the different aspects of their background? Think about it as you design your characters.

The amount of coding you have is going to be dependent on the story you are trying to tell. Physical coding is great; make sure that you’re not doing so with stereotypes and derogatory descriptions. Check out this link for some background on coding with nonhuman characters. Think about what you’re writing and decide on the elements that will fit in with the flow of your narrative.

You can probably include ‘national’ holidays that everyone celebrates, and then more specific holidays that relate back to your characters’ backgrounds. In terms of food/clothing, consider what they will have access to in a melting pot environment, and what they will have held onto, as well as their preferences for cultural expression.

For example, I wear salwar kameez to dress up in my daily life, but I probably wouldn’t want to wear a lehenga to something like prom, just because I would want to make sure that the dress would be kept well for when I’m actually obligated to wear it.

~ Abhaya

#coding #South Asian coding #desi coding #faeries #fairies #South Asian #worldbuilding #race coding #ethnic coding #asks

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gay-strawberry · 2 years

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okay lets talk sapphics because theyre very dear to me (since im one myself)

finding nice lesbian/bisexual women representation in media is hard and a BL was the last place i expected to find it but here we are.

i dont know if they will end up together or if we will get to see their relationship evolve (fair, ‘cause this isnt their story) but the fact that theyre both queer coded cant be denied, in this essay i will-

#1 ink’s lack of interest in men.

we see her reject pat (more than once lmao), and she makes very clear that what she had with pat in high school was just friendship (so not only she doesnt like him now, she never did).

#2 their first interaction its them literally flirting.

god the “chracter A: i cant do it its too hard 🥺👉👈, character B: i will teach you 😏” troop its so cliche but so good 1000/10 never stop using it please

#3 ink’s interest in pa.

she insists pa goes with them to eat (and its kinda sad when she says no)

then when she finally gets to be with her, even if its suppose to be a date with pat, she pays way more attention to pa (and the cakes) than to him and its more than happy to be left alone with her (and to get to eat pat’s cake).

this ↑ ss literally summarizes the date. pat tired and rejected while ink asks pa to feed her hahsdfhjhahsdjfk i love it here.

#4 pa’s curiosity and interest in ink.

shes helping her bro to get ink even if it goes against her own advide (dont date friends) just because its ink, just because she likes her (looks like someones living her own crush thru his brother, who she probably thinks has more chances to date ink than her anyways).

she likes her yall. thats all 👀👀👀

#5 whatever the f*ck they got going on in ep 7

they were so gay in this episode. i was thriving !! like theres no straight explanation to any of their scenes,

-their encounter here is very clearly out of a romcom. the music, the stare, the smiles,

-them holding hands for no reason (pretty self explanatory) and pa’s face when ink calls her pretty. i cant tell whats gayer, calling your homies pretty or reacting like that to your homies calling you pretty.

-flirting thru sweets and anonymous notes (sighs) theyre so much like episode 2 patpran, just date already

-ink saving pa (and her friends) from a stupid dude bro

and look !! at pa’s face like- nngghghg shes so gay for ink. me too me too

-pa’s friends instatly crushing on ink (me too tbh) and pa agreeing with them

# bonus: wai is now interested on pa (cant blame him, shes the cutest prettiest girl ever). which i hope leads us to pa rejecting him and realizing thru the whole thing that she likes ink (the same way pat did with ink and pran, i do love a parallel ngl)

anyways thats it. sorry for the rant. but not really because i will probably add to this if more happens between them.

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lorenfangor · 3 years

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I heard that #40 was super homophobic :/ so I skipped it. But now your fic is making me want to give it a try. How problematic is it? Are the characters worth it?

Okay.

Let’s talk about #40.

The plot of The Other (a Marco POV) is that Marco sees an Andalite on a video tape sent in to some Unsolved Mysteries-esque TV show, and he assumes it’s Ax and hauls ass to save him from being captured. Ax, being Ax, has videotaped the show, and they pull it up and Tobias uses his hawk eyes to figure out that it’s not Ax, it’s another Andalite - one without a tailblade. Ax is appalled at the presence of this vecol (an Andalite word for a disabled person) and we find out that he and others of his species have deep ingrained prejudices against at least some kinds of disabled people.

Despite this, Marco and Ax go looking for the Andalite in question because he’s been spotted by national TV, and they meet a second one, named Gafinilan-Estrif-Valad. The vecol is Mertil-Iscar-Elmand, a former fighter pilot with a reputation and Gafinilan’s coded-gay life partner. The two of them have been on Earth since book 1; they crashed their fighters on the planet and have been trapped there thanks to the GalaxyTree going down. Gafinilan has adopted a human cover, a physics professor, and they’ve been living in secret ever since.

Thanks to that tape, Mertil has been captured by Visser Three, and he’s not morph-capable so he can’t escape. Gafinilan wants to trade the leader of the “Andalite Bandits” to the Yeerks to get his boyfriend back; he can’t fight to free Mertil because he’s terminally ill with a genetic disorder that will eventually kill him, and (it’s implied that) the Yeerks aren’t interested in disabled hosts, even disabled Andalite ones. Despite Ax’s ableism, the Animorphs agree to work with Gafinilan and free Mertil, and they’re successful. Marco ends the book talking about how there are all kinds of prejudices you’ll have to face and boxes that people will put you in, and you can’t necessarily escape them even if they’re reductive and inaccurate, but you can still live your life with pride.

So now that I’ve explained the plot, I’m gonna come out the gate saying that I love this book. I love it wholeheartedly, I love Marco’s narration, I love Ax having to deal with Andalite society’s ableism, I love these characters, and as a disabled lesbian I don’t find these disabled gays to be inherently Bad Rep.

that’s of course just my opinion and it doesn’t overshadow other issues that people might have? but at the same time, I don’t like the seemingly-common narrative that this book is all bad all the time, and I want to offer up a different read.To that end, I’m going to go point by point through some of the criticisms and common complaints that I’ve seen across the fandom over the years.

“Mertil and Gafinilan were put on a bus after one appearance because they were gay!”

this is one I’m going to have to disagree with hardcore. I talked about this yesterday, but in Animorphs there are a lot of characters or ideas that only get introduced once or twice and then get written off or dropped - in order off the top of my head, #11 (the Amazon trip), #16 (Fenestre and his cannibalism), #17 (the oatmeal), #18 (the hint of Yeerks doing genetic experiments in the hospital basement), #24/#39/#42 (the Helmacrons’ ability to detect morphing tech), #25 (the Venber), #28 (experiments with limiting brain function through drugs), #34 (the Hork-Bajir homeworld being retaken, the Ixcila procedure), #36 (the Nartec), #41 (Jake’s Bad Future Dream), and #44 (the Aboriginal people Cassie meets in Australia) all feature things that either seem to exist just for the sake of having a particular trope explored Animorphs-style or to feature an idea for One Single Book.

This is a series that’s episodic and has a very limited overall story arc because of how children’s literature in the 90s was structured - these books are closer to The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley High, Animal Ark, or The Baby-Sitters’ Club than they are to Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events. Mertil and Gafinilan don’t get to be in more than one book because they’re not established in the main cast or the supporting cast, I don’t think that it’s solely got anything to do with their being gay.

“Gafinilan has AIDS, this is a book about AIDS, and that’s homophobic!”

Okay, this is… hard. First, yes, Gafinilan does have a terminal illness. Yes, Gafinilan is gay. No, Soola’s Disease is not AIDS.

I have two responses to this, and I’ll attack them in order of their occurrence in my thought. First, there’s coded AIDS diseases all over genre fiction, especially genre fiction from that era, because the AIDS epidemic made a massive impact on public life and fundamentally changed both how the public perceived illness and queerness and how queer people themselves experienced it. I was too young to live through it, but my dad’s college roommate was out, and my dad himself has a lot of friends who he just ceases to talk about if the conversation gets past 1986 or so - this was devastating and it got examined in art for more reasons than “gay people all have AIDS”, and I dislike the implication that the only reason it could ever appear was as a tired stereotype or a message that Being Queer Means Death. Gafinilan is kind, fond of flowers, and fond of children - he’s multifaceted, and he’s got a terminal illness. Those kinds of people really exist, and they aren’t Bad Rep.

Second off, Soola’s Disease? Really isn’t AIDS. It’s a congenital genetic illness that develops over time, cannot be transmitted, and does not carry a serious stigma the way AIDS did. Gafinilan also has access to a cure - he could become a nothlit and no longer be afflicted by it, even if it’s considered somewhat dishonorable to go nothlit to escape that way. That’s not AIDS, and in fact at no point in my read and rereads did I assume that his having a terminal illness was supposed to be a commentary on homosexuality until I found out that other people were assuming it.

“Mertil losing his tail means he’s lost his masculinity, and that’s bad because he’s gay! That’s homophobic!”

so this is another one I’ve gotta hardcore disagree with, because while Mertil is one of two Very Obviously Queer Characters, he’s not the only character who loses something fundamental about himself, or even loses access to sexual and/or romantic capability in ways he was familiar with.

Tobias and Arbron both get ripped out of their ordinary normal lives by going nothlit in bad situations, and while they both wind up finding fulfillment and freedom despite that, it’s still traumatic, even more for Arbron I’d say than for Tobias. And on a psychological level, none of the main cast is left unmarked or free of trauma or free of deep change thanks to the bad things that have happened to them - they’re no less fundamentally altered than Mertil, even if it’s mental rather than physical. And yes, tail loss is equated with castration or emasculation, but that doesn’t automatically mean Mertil suffering it is tied to his homosexuality and therefore the takeaway we’re intended to have is “Being gay is tragic and makes you less of a man”. This is a series where bad shit happens to everyone, and enduring losses that take away things central to one’s self-conception or identity or body is just part of the story.

Also, frankly? Plenty of IRL disabled people have to grapple with a loss of sexual function, and again, they’re not Bad Rep just because they’re messy.

“Andalite society is confusingly written in this book, and the disability aspects are clearly just a coverup for the gay stuff!”

Andalite society is canonically sexist, a bit exceptionalist and prejudiced in their own favor, and pretty contradictory and often challenged internally on its own norms. In essence, it’s a pretty ordinary society, and they’re really realistic as sci-fi races go. It makes sense from that perspective that Andalites would tolerate scarring or a lost stalk eye or a lost skull eye, but not tolerate serious injuries that significantly impact your perceived quality of life. Ableism is like that - it’s not one-size-fits-all. I look at Ax’s reactions and I see a lot of my own family and friends’ behaviors - this vibes with my understanding of prejudice, you know?

“Mertil and Gafinilan have a tragic ending, which means the story is saying that being gay dooms you to tragedy!”

Mertil and Gafinilan have the best possible ending that they could ask for? They are victims of the war, they are suffering because of the war, they get the same cocktail of trauma and damage that every other soldier gets. But unlike Jake and Tobias and Marco, unlike Elfangor, unlike Aximili? Their ending comes in peace, in their own home. Gafinilan isn’t dying alone, he’s got the love of his life with him. Mertil isn’t going to be as isolated anymore, he’s got Marco for a friend. Animorphs is a tragedy, it’s not a happy story, it’s not something that guarantees a beautiful sunshine-and-roses ending for everyone, and I love tragedy, and so I will fight for this story. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it deserved better. But it’s not less meaningful just because it’s sad. Nobody is entitled to anything in this book, and it’s just as true for these two as it is for anyone else.

“It’s not cool that the only canonically gay characters in this series don’t get to be happy and trauma-free and unblemished Good Rep!”

This is one I can kind of understand, and I’ll give some ground to it, because it is sucky. The only thing I’ll say is that I stand by my argument that nothing that happens to Mertil and Gafinilan is unusual compared to what happens to the rest of the cast, and that their ending is way happier than Rachel and Tobias’s, or Jake and Cassie’s. But it’s a legitimate point of frustration, and the one argument I’ll say I agree has validity.

(Though, I also want to point out that I think there are plenty of equally queercoded characters in the story who aren’t Mertil and Gafinilan - Tobias, Rachel, Cassie, and Marco all get at least one or two moments that signal to me that they’re potentially LGBT+, not to mention Mr. Tidwell and Illim in #29 and their long-term domestic partnership. There’s no reason to assume that the only queer people here are those two aliens when Marco’s descriptions of Jake exist.)

“Marco uses slurs and reduces Gafinilan’s whole identity to his illness!”

Technically, yes, this is true, except putting it that way strips the whole passage of its context. Marco is discussing the boxes society puts you into, the ones you don’t have a choice about facing or escaping. He’s talking about negative stereotypes and reductive generalizations, he’s referring to them as bad things that you get inflicted upon you by an outside world or by friends who don’t know the whole story or the real you. The slurs he uses are real slurs that get thrown at people still, and they’re not okay, and the point is that they’re not okay but assholes are going to call you by them anyway. He ends by saying “you just have to learn to live with it”, and since this is coming from a fifteen-year-old Latino kid who we know is picked on by bullies for all sorts of reasons and who faces racism and homophobia? He knows what he’s talking about. He’s bitter about what’s been said and done, he’s not stating it like it’s a good thing.

Yes, absolutely, this speech is a product of its time, but it’s a product of its time that speaks of defiance and says “We aren’t what we’re said to be,” and in the year this was published? That’s a good message.

tl;dr The Other is good, actually, and Mertil and Gafinilan are incredible characters who deserve all the love they could possibly get.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #mertil/gafinilan #mertil #gafinilan #mertil-iscar-elmand #gafinilan-estrif-valad

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pyroclastic727 · 4 years

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Owl House said fuck capitalism

So this episode was interesting. Lilith pretty much killed her sister. Why the fuck would she do that?

Even more interesting: why is Belos like that? How did Hooty put his head through one of those guards? Who the fuck is the Titan, and why does everyone like him? And how are these all tied together?

This episode was a metaphor for capitalism

...and another delicious step towards radicalizing the youth into dismantling this fucked-up neo-feudal system.

We’ll start with Belos.

Emperor Belos is a weird name, don’t you think? We all thought it was spelled “Bellows,” but it wasn’t. In fact, it’s five letters, starts with Be, ends with os, and describes a megalomaniac emperor that restricts people’s freedom in order to accumulate wealth for himself.

Sound familiar?

Emperor Bezos Belos created capitalism. He saw the beauty of magic and decided to make himself the most powerful.

Belos created a system that destroys the masses and boosts his power.

I’m dipping into fan theory a little, because the fan theory fits. We know that people get branded with coven magic that makes it so they can only specialize in one area. We know that Belos is the most powerful witch in the Boiling Isles. We know that the excess magic, magic created by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

It’s the same system that many viewers see all the time. A job takes up all your day and tires you for the night, so you can only do one skill for the rest of your life. Jeff Bezos is the most powerful man in the United States. Excess money, money taken by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

The magic goes to Belos, like how the money goes to Bezos. Belos created capitalism, and he won it.

The guards aren’t real.

Look, we’ve never seen their faces. They’re all the same. Why would you work so hard to get to the top, just to become a nameless, faceless killing machine?

Oh, also Hooty stuck his face through one. There is nothing under the armor.

Why? Well, it’s the same reason you see all those celebrities going around flaunting their wealth and bragging about how hard they worked. Like all those songs about how they grind every day and work harder than everyone else while you’re out clubbing, and that makes them dope. And then you take a closer look at them and see that they had a small loan of a million dollars fueling them, or an entire talent agency behind them, or their dad was a famous country star in the 80′s.

They’re fake. They’re hollow. They’re a ploy created by the capitalist emperor to try to delude you into working harder.

Let me put this into perspective. I guarantee that every single one of you has heard stuff like this: “Hard work makes you successful.” “I put in the work, and that’s why I’m successful.” “If you work hard enough, then you can be as successful as Mark Zuckerberg.”

And unless you’re a robot or really lucky, I’m sure all of you have failed at this. Maybe they told you that hard work would make you good at math, so you spent 22 hours a week working on calculus, only to pass it by 3 percentage points and have it destroy your perfect 4.0 GPA. Maybe they told you that if you talked to people enough, then you would make friends, so you spent a lot of time talking to people, only to end up lonely and friendless. Maybe they told you that if you did well in school, you would get a good job, so you spent all your time working hard to be a good student, and then ended up in a soulless, dead-end job.

The guards are there to delude you. Look, who really gains from you being productive? The answer is the ruling class, the CEOs, the government, the bourgeoisie. It has always been that. All you get from working is a paycheck that lets you survive. They get a paycheck that lets them get rich. Just like Belos gets the magic and productivity of the specialized coven witches.

The guards are there to trick you. The truth is that nobody can join the Emperor’s Coven. It’s just there to make you think that hard work will make you successful. Then you spend your entire life working hard, trying to prove to the person in charge that you’re worthwhile. You give your whole life to the Coven, and they give you nothing.

Magic is supposed to be something you pursue for fun. Being skilled at things, being good at something beautiful...that’s supposed to be something you do because you want to. But they took that and made it into a source of productivity. It doesn’t matter if you make good content. All people fucking care about is if you upload the day of premiere, if you make a lot of content quickly, if you maintain a million different conversations with strangers who expect you to be the most interesting person in the room. They don’t care how it hurts you. They don’t care how you crack from the stress. How you cry when you think no one can see you, and then you check your phone and someone can see you, someone did see you, and you have to put on your face and be the charming, magnetic person they want you to be. (oh by the way that’s why I wasn’t online much last week)

And it ruins it. Suddenly you can’t watch The Owl House without being stressed. You can’t make any content. You can’t make spells as powerfully as you want to. Your passion is replaced by perfectionism and insecurity, a voice telling you to keep being the best at what you do, or else they’ll forget you and let you die.

There’s also the Titan.

So nobody has mentioned him before, because in addition to the Boiling Isles being a hellscape full of witchcraft and queerness, it’s also full of atheists.

But suddenly we have people saying all this shit about him? Shit like, he gave witches the gift of magic, and then they learned to use it in a civilized manner, since being uncivilized was disrespectful?

I mean, first off, that’s fucking wrong. The island gives people magic. The island, which just so happened to be shaped like a titan-sized human. But the island/titan gives everyone all types of magic. Hell, even Luz gets to use magic, and she’s human.

It sounds really fucking familiar. (tw for discussion of homophobia and colonialism and misogyny). It sounds like when the news is on and they show some Tr*mp supporter talking about how fetuses have more rights than people and it is their holy duty to take away a woman’s control over her body and force her through unbearable pain and into an 18-year commitment she didn’t want to make. It sounds like all the times people tried to say homosexuality should be illegal, citing a single line in a book written two thousand years ago and heavily edited by a European king. It sounds like all the times people said God wanted them to conquer, to own the entire earth, to force the other races into pain to support them.

This is that bullshit thing people do where they commit awful sins and justify it by citing the will of God.

Or, it’s the Coven using religion as an excuse for evil.

Look, the Emperor’s Coven is clearly colonizer-coded. Saying that people’s original form of magic was wild (and showing a picture with the same joyous, rowdy energy of an 18th or 19th -century Black or indigenous party), and that it was God’s will for them to be “civilized?” Sounds like that thing that powerful white people did where they went and murdered people and forced them into their twisted capitalist system. God, gold, and glory, is what they said, because history books just love to omit the gore.

Lilith is passing the abuse cycle along.

You know, like a good little colonizer. God I fucking hate her. She’s a MILF, in the sense that she’s a Mother I’d Like to Fling off a cliff.

Ah, enough screaming about how much I want to drown Lilith in a tub of Hooty’s mucus. Let’s go into why I want to do that, and how she took the evils of capitalism and just...adopted those.

So, Lilith is sick and twisted for what she did to her sister. But, uhh, that’s the point. You see, there are so many other people out there like Lilith who would do the exact same thing, if given the chance. These are the people who do mean things when the teacher isn’t looking, and then act nice and try to frame you. These are the people who will hate you if you’re better than them. These are people who would do anything to bring you down, if you dare outperform them.

It’s greed, my friends. The mental illness that capitalism blesses us all with.

Lilith herself said it: she dedicated her entire life to the Coven. What she wanted was to be the best. And she almost was...except for her own sister. Someone who lived with her, annoyed her at home, bested her at school. Someone she could never beat, no matter how hard she worked. And her sister was younger than her, too! How insulting was that? Lilith wanted to be the best, and someone in her exact situation did better than her.

Lilith was insecure. And it consumed her.

But why? Why does insecurity consume her? I mean, no one can be motivated by insecurity forever. Well, not unless someone conditions it into you.

The lovely thing about the capitalist system is the morals it teaches you. Things like: “You’re only useful if you’re the best.” “Being school smart makes you smart, while being social smart or sports smart or creative smart or fandom smart is worthless.” “Your worth can be quantified by numbers and is based off arbitrary measures like your income or your grades.” Things that can and will drive us crazy if we let ourselves believe them.

And it did drive Lilith crazy. She got so twisted by a society that said being good at magic is her only worth. Look, Lilith used to be good at things, probably. She was good at sports. At times, she slips up and does an okay job of being Eda’s sister. She has a powerful presence when she’s in a room. And she’s wicked good at manipulating people.

But that didn’t matter. Lilith bought into the lies. She let herself believe that magical skill was the only way to measure her worth. And since she needed to be the best, she hurt Eda for it.

The beautiful thing is, Eda didn’t buy that. "It’s my power, kid. And before you showed up, I spent my whole life wasting it.” Is what Eda said, as she used up the last of her power, the last of her life, to save Luz. In her final moments, she proved that she’s not like them. She’s stronger than them.

None of this matters. Not magical prowess. Not the hierarchy. Not the promise of joining the Coven and having more power than anyone else.

The only thing that matters to Eda is her family. Her real family. Her Luz, King, and Hooty. And by extension, Willow, Gus, and Amity. Those are Eda’s real reason for fighting, for dying: to protect them. Look, there’s no way she would’ve come out of that fight alive. She has a family, and her love for them is stronger than greed or jealousy or capitalism.

Lilith never understood that. She thought the water of the womb was thicker than the blood of the covenant. Or, that the water of the womb and the blood of the covenant are stronger than the bonds of found family. She thought it didn’t matter if Eda loved, her, only if the Emperor loved her. Fucking bitch.

And now, a little something to worry about, before we go. Amity Blight. The girl who wanted to join the Emperor’s Coven more than anything, who dedicated her whole life to doing well in school, to being the best, to being perfect.

And then she met Luz. She fell for Luz. Now she’s in a tricky place, where habit and conditioning want her to join the Emperor’s Coven, but her heart wants her to do the impossible and destroy capitalism.

She wasn’t in this episode. Funny that being injured and unable to work ended up saving her from watching her future mother-in-law die. So she bought some time.

But Luz’s true mom is dead. This is the second mom she has lost, and she’s only fourteen. As powerful as King and Hooty are, Luz needs Amity. Luz needs Amity to support her and help her get back her mom.

So Amity has to make a choice. Fear and insecurity, or love and a high chance of death?

She’ll probably choose death. Because that’s the message that this family-friendly show is giving us kids. Fuck capitalism. All you need in life is to do what makes you happy and be with the ones you love.

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tsugarubecker · 2 years

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M*****n will not be endgame

(I’m censoring that ship name all to hell in hopes that it won’t show up in y’all’s tags. If it somehow does please tell me & I will find a way to remove it! The last thing I want to do is disrupt someone else’s tag with a take that they would not be interested in reading, or that would disrupt their peaceful browsing. 💞 Please comment on the notes of this post if this is showing up where it shouldn’t be & I’ll fix that asap!)

So! Hyperfixation go brrrr, I am having some epiphanies about the overarching messages pertaining to romance/healthy relationships in Stranger Things.

I am now positive beyond a doubt that M*****n won’t be endgame. Why? Because their relationship is, in every single way conceivable, the exact antithesis of the thesis statement about romance that the Duffers are delivering, which can be summed up as something like this:

A healthy, real, flourishing, fulfilling romantic relationship is not one that two people fall into by accident or by circumstance, or because other people assume that their interest in each other couldn’t possibly be platonic since they’re “opposite sexes”. Romantic relationships with good solid foundations include things such as: choosing to enter the relationship with intention. Telling the truth to each other. Establishing trust in one another. Consistently demonstrating the willingness to be open, vulnerable, and emotionally available. Choosing each other at each fork-in-the-road moment.

The reason I give many of those specific examples as part of what I understand to be the Duffer Brothers’ thesis statement about what a good romantic relationship looks like is because we see examples of those dynamics - kind of in bursts here and there - between various couples (or people who aren’t couples yet) in the show. I’m sure you can think of instances/examples.

But to go back specifically to why M-ship-name won’t be endgame: the Duffer Brothers do plan to end this show within the next couple of seasons. Probably at S5. They do not have time to develop all of those dynamics between M & E - on the contrary, they explicitly worked, in season 3 especially, to show that M & E exhibit the opposite of many of the dynamics that the Duffers see as integral to healthy & flourishing romantic relationships.

But on the flip side (even ignoring aaaaall the extensive queer coding of these two characters for a second) - who shares many dynamics with Mike that can be said to line up with the Duffers’ thesis statement of what healthy romance looks like? Will!

Mike & Will chose to enter their relationship with intention, not just circumstance. (“I asked. And you said yes.”) They tell the truth to each other, or strive to. (“It was a seven.” “I guess I did. I really did.”) They establish/have trust in one another. (“You’re like a super spy.” “If anyone can find this thing, it’s Will.”) They demonstrate willingness to be emotionally available and vulnerable. (“Will, I’m sorry, I was being a total asshole!” “Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy.” “Well if we’re both going crazy then we’ll go crazy together, right?” “Yeah, but. What if you want to join another party?”) They choose each other repeatedly. (“Not possible.” “Are you okay? I couldn’t find you!” “Will is alive. Will is alive!”)

The way that these two embody - or are always working towards embodying - the ideal dynamics of a healthy, loving romantic relationship with true connection, is something that the Duffers have worked to show with painstaking detail over the course of 3 seasons. (Season 3 in large part showed them fucking it up because Mike was trying really hard to follow heteronormative tropes of what romance is, instead. Which clearly went super well for him Which means Mike and Will will have soft, emotionally vulnerable moments of working to fix their bond in S4, because character and plot development are necessary as we move towards the end of the show - yayyy I’m excited for them to get back to their genuine connection! - but I digress.)

What I’m saying at the end of the day is that this show could have been about M and E falling accidentally into romance but then needing to back up and be intentional. But it’s not. Stranger Things is actually already exploring that dynamic - with Jancy, Lumax, kinda Jopper, maybe Stancy, etc.

The reason that M*****n is different is that both the elaborate queercoding and the build up of ideal relationship dynamics exist between Mike and Will. And the Duffers simply do not have time to flip the whole story direction on its head now - not without it being rushed and therefore poorly executed. Nor would it make narrative sense after the intentional build up/showing of the good dynamics between Mike and Will and the not-good dynamics between M and E.

And that is why M*****n won’t be endgame - Byler will. Byler is an example which supports the Duffer Brothers’ thesis statement about what real romance is, and Byler being canon is what this show has been working toward the entire time. Exciting!

(With all this said, if there are any M-ship-name folks still reading - I’d be hella down to read an alternate version of Stranger Things where everything went differently! You know? M and E had possibilities in S1, it’s just that the story went in another direction pretty quickly - or, rather, was planned to go that direction from the show’s inception. So, I’d be down to read an AU where things were set up differently between M&E from the jump, and they were the main ship of the series who were allowed to approach their relationship with a lot of intentionality. I think that might be lovely to read. Just putting that out there!)

#seriously i watched a couple ST S1 eps today and my brain has been brrrrrrrr ever since #someone let me sleep *cries*#also sidenote duzie is the superior-est ship in ST #i will not be elaborating or taking criticism at this time. thank you #byler #stranger things analysis #stranger things theory #stranger things prediction #stranger things

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 3 years

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Hot takes about Severus Snape are a wierdly decent glimpse into how a person with progressive values analyses things. Literally every time someone talks about Snape, it’s like this tiny window into how one-dimentionally people actually think.

Recently saw a twitter post that was a fantastic example. Here’s how it goes (paraphrasing):

Person A:“Snape is POC and Queer coded, that’s why you guy’s hate him uwu lol.”

Person B: “Actually I hate him because he was mean and abusive to children under his care uwu but go off I guess lol”

Both of these takes are designed to be dramatic and/or reactionary. They each use partial truths to paint very broad strokes. These are get-em-in-one-hit quips. This is virtue signalling, if you’ll excuse that loaded phrase. Nobody had a substantial conversation, but now everyone who sees their statement knows the high ground they took.

At least a hundred other people chimed in to add their own little quippy hot takes into play, none of which add anything significant, but clearly made everyone feel very highly of themselves.

So many layers of nuance and complex analysis is completely lost in this kind of discussion. On tumblr, you get more of this kind of bullshit, but you don’t have a word count limit, so you guys just spew endless mountains of weak overblown evidence backing up your bullshit arguments, none of which was really about engaging in a real conversation anyway.

Here’s the thing about Snape.

He is a childhood domestic abuse victim. His abuser is a muggle.

He becomes a student at a magical school that takes him away from his abuser and immediately instills in him the idea that being a part of this magical world is a badge of self-worth, empowerment, and provides safety and security - provided that he keeps in line.

There is a war is being waged in that world over his right to exist (he is a half blood).

He is a marginalized person within the context of the narrative, forced to constantly be in the same living space as the children of his own oppressors who are being groomed and recruited into a hate group militia (the pureblood slytherins). They are in turn trying to do the same to him.

He is marginalized person bullied by children who are also part of his oppressor group, but who have “more liberal” leanings and aren’t direct about why he’s being targeted (the mauraders are all purebloods, Sirius, who was the worst offender, was raised in a bigoted household, the same one that produced Bellatrix.).

He had a crush on a girl who is a muggleborn, and therefore she is considered even lesser than him and carries a stigma to those who associate with her. That girl was his only real friend. In his entire life.

For both Snape and Lily, allying themselves to a pureblood clique within their own houses would be a great way of shielding themselves from a measure of the bigotry they were probably facing. There would have been obvious pressure from those cliques to disconnect with one and other.

Every other person who associates with Snape in his adulthood carries some sort of sociopolitical or workplace (or hate cult) baggage with their association. Some of them will physically harm and/or kill him if he steps out of line. He hasn’t at any point had the right environment to heal and adjust from these childhood experiences. Even his relationship with Dumbledore is charged with constant baggage, including the purebloods who almost killed him during their bullying getting a slap on the wrist, the werewolf that almost killed him as a child being placed in an authority position over new children, etc. Dumbledore is canonically manipulative no matter his good qualities, and he has literally been manipulating Snape for years in order to cultivate a necessary asset in the war.

He is a person who is not in the stable mental state necessary to be teaching children, whom has been forced to teach children. While also playing the role of double agent against the hate group militia, the one that will literally torture you for mistakes or backtalk or just for fun. The one that will torture and kill him if he makes one wrong move.

Is the math clicking yet? From all of this, it’s not difficult to see how everything shitty about Snape was cultivated for him by his environment. Snape was not given great options. Snape made amazingly awful choices, and also some amazingly difficult, courageous ones. Snape was ultimately a human who had an extremely bad life, in which his options were incredibly grim and limited.

In fact, pretty much every point people make about how shitty Snape is as a person makes 100% logical sense as something that would emerge from how he was treated. Some if it he’s kind of right about, some of it is the inevitable reality of suffering, and some of it is part of the cycle of abuse and harm.

Even Snape’s emotional obsession with Lily makes logical sense when you have the perspective that he literally has no substantial positive experiences with other human beings that we know of, and he has an extreme, soul destroying guilt complex over her death. Calling him an Incel mysoginist nice guy projects a real-world political ideology and behavior that does not really apply to the context of what happened to him and her.

Even Snape’s specific little acts of cruelty to certain students is a reflection of his own life experiences. He identifies with Neville; more specifically, he identifies his own percieved emotional weaknesses in his childhood in Neville. There’s a very sad reason there why he feels the urge to be so harsh.

Snape very clearly hates himself, in a world where everyone else hates him, too. Imagine that, for a second. Imagine total internal and external hatred, an yearning for just a little bit of true connection. For years. Imagine then also trying to save that world, even if it’s motivated by guilt. Even if nobody ever knows you did it and you expect to die a miserable death alone.

There are more elements here to consider, including the way Rowling described his looks (there may be something in there re: ugliness and swarthy stereotyping). These are just the things that stand out the most prominently to me.

J.K. Rowling is clearly also not reliable as an imparter of moral or sociopolitical philosophies. I don’t feel that her grasp of minority experiences is a solid one, considering how she picks and chooses who is acceptable and who is a threat.

All of that said, this is a logically consistent character arc. Within the context of his narrative, Snape is a marginalized person with severe PTSD and emotional instability issues who has absolutely no room available to him for self-improvement or healing, and never really has. And yes, he’s also mean, and caustic, and verbally abusive to the students. He’s also a completey miserable, lonely person.

There are elements in his character arc that mirror real world experiences quite well. If nothing else, Rowling is enough of an emotional adult to recognise these kinds of things and portray something that feels authentic.

In my opinion, it’s not appropriate to whittle all this down by comparing him directly to the real world experiences of marginalized groups - at least if you are not a part of the group you are comparing him to. There have been many individuals who have compared his arc to their own personal experiences of marginalization, and that is valid. But generally speaking, comparing a white straight dude to people who are not that can often be pretty offensive. This is not a valuable way to discuss either subject.

Also, I believe that while it’s perfectly okay to not like Snape as a character, many of the people who act like Person B are carrying Harry’s childhood POV about Snape in their hearts well into their own adulthood. And if nothing else, Rowling was attempting to say something here about how our perspectives (should) grow and change as we emotionally mature. She doesn’t have to be a good person herself to have expressed something true about the world in this instance, and since this story is a part of our popular culture, people have a right to feel whatever way they do about this story and it’s characters.

The complexity of this particular snapshot of fictionalized marginalization, and what it reveals about the human experience, cannot be reduced down to “he’s an abuser so he’s not worth anyone’s time/you are bad for liking him.”

And to be honest, I think that it reveals a lot about many of us in progressive spaces, particularly those of us who less marginalized but very loud about our values, that we refuse to engage with these complexities in leu of totally condemning him. Particularly because a lot of the elements I listed above are indeed reflected in real world examples of people who have experienced marginalization and thus had to deal with the resulting emotional damage, an mental illness, and behavior troubles, and bad decisions. Our inability to address the full scope of this may be a good reflection of how we are handling the complexity of real world examples.

Real people are not perfect angels in their victimhood. They are just humans who are victims, and we all have the capacity to be cruel and abusive in a world where we have been given cruelty and abuse. This is just a part of existing. If you cannot sympathise with that, or at least grasp it and aknowledge it and respect the people who are emotionally drawn to a character who refects that, then you may be telling on yourself to be honest.

To be honest, this is especially true if you hate Snape but just really, really love the Mauraduers. You have a right to those feelings, but if you are moralizing this and judging others for liking Snape, you’ve confessed to something about how you’ve mentally constructed your personal values in a way I don’t think you’ve fully grasped yet.

I have a hard time imagining a mindset where a story like Snape’s does not move one to empathy and vicarious grief, if I’m honest. I feel like some people really just cannot be bothered to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel and living like they live. I struggle to trust the social politics of people who show these kinds of colors, tbh.

But maybe that’s just me.

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