(This is another post but they're both versatile about topping and bottoming in my brain, okay? Okay. But you do you.)

oh lol no i completely agree with you, that's why i put "bottom" in quotes. i just mean, a lot of people in fandom have very old fashioned views about same sex relationships, and one of the most common is that gay couples are just remakes of straight ones - with a "man" (top) and a "woman (bottom) - and therefore q, being the skinny one, is the woman which means he's the bottom, which means he must be short too. it's like an ourosborus of homophobic stereotypes. and so we end up with 4876847684 fics where q is now tiny just because people want to write him getting railed by a great big hulking manly bond.

We're definitely on the same page. Sorry, my little "you do you" line was aimed at the more general "you" 😊

So, obviously Bottom!Q and Top!Bond isn't a homophobic take just because it exists (I know that's not at all what you're saying anon, but I wanted to clarify in case there are any anons ready to jump into my inbox and accuse me of having that opinion). The specific type of writing and characterisation that gets padded around Bottom!Q and Top!Bond, though? It can absolutely be indicative of persistent stereotypes. Sometimes I don't think it's getting all that much better as time goes on, either. Even years after people stopped expliclty warning for M/M in their fics like it was something gross (RIP LJ and slash warnings and *lemon starts here* line breaks), I feel like reading through fandom slang often feels like a game of Wait is This a Joke, A Reclaimed Slur, or is it Actually Homophobia? Obviously it's also a problem IRL. People see a skinny gay man and immediately think "bottom" which is tragic.

I see evidence of it all the time in fic comments and tumblr tags where Q is described as either cute or adorable, and Bond is described as the hottest, most irresistible, most jacked man in the world. And it's not just Q's characterisation that suffers! If fic writers only see Bond and Q as those things it removes a lot of their agency as characters to act in really interesting and unexpected ways.

All this isn't to say people can't have their preferences, but as is the case in the wider world of dating and romance, preferences don't exist in a vacuum. When you see these assumptions over and over again, you start to see a pattern and it's clear what's driving the thinking behind it (which is, to be clear, centuries of cultural and social conditioning around gendered constructs and homophobia).

Anyway, I happen to think Q's really hot, and would occasionally be quite domineering if he was in the right frame of mind. He can be that way from the top or the bottom, IMO. And there's space for him getting railed too. But even that doesn't have to be written just one way. I often wish it was written with a lot more bantering/bickering.

There's a wider point to be made here about sex in fic often not feeling anything like sex in real life, which is messy and intimate and and (if it's good sex), starts with wanting to feel good, and not with implicit assumptions about who's doing what. Because we're all WAY more complex as individuals than media ever reflects us to be, and put two or more complex people in a room together to have sex? If you're doing it right, it's not going to feel like rote stereotyping. I sometimes wish both fic writers and romance writers had a better understanding of that.

Okay I feel the need to clarify if you've got this far and your opinions are different from mine and anon's, that's okay, we can all disagree. You can still want to see Q get railed, I promise.

Thanks for the ask, Anon! ❤️