House MD IS the line between queer coded and queer baiting because 1) they are actually queer coded and 2) they are queer baiting each other and themselves.

Scorptra kiss in the Crimson Waste?

I have some thoughts on this - mainly, I’m going to rant about *some* fans again.

(Short version of what happened: Apparently, during a livestream Noelle was asked if Catra and Adora were each other’s first kiss and said that they were originally thinking of including a kiss between Catra and Scorpia in season 3, but ended up scrapping it. (Side-note: I haven’t seen the actual livestream, so I don’t know what they said word for word. If someone has a link to it or something, do let me know. This is just the gist of it from what I’ve heard from others.) And then some fans freaked out about this idea/headcanon in both the positive and negative sense.)

First of all, to get my personal thoughts out of the way: I freaking LOVE this idea! I’m a multishipper, and shipping Catradora has never stopped me from also enjoying some tragic Scorptra. And the angst potential of this is just so good: Catra thinking she’s going to die in the Crimson Waste anyway, and that Adora will never love her back anyway, so she kisses Scorpia and tries to force herself to have feelings for her - and meanwhile, it just makes Scorpia fall even more in love with her, which makes the s3 finale and all of s4 ten times more heartbreaking. I’m 100% here for the angst potential of this! (And I genuinely kind of wish it had been included in the show.) And imagine the potential of Adora being jealous when she finds out?

Now, I absolutely get why some people don’t like the idea. Maybe because they’re just not into Scorptra as a ship, or they really like the idea of Catradora being each other’s first kiss, or any other reason. That’s totally fine. But there are a few... sentiments... I’ve seen from other fans in this discussion that seriously bothered me and I want to address those:

1. “Scorptra kissed in the Crimson Waste; it’s canon; Noelle said so!”

NO. Stop doing that. First of all, Noelle didn’t say this was canon. I haven’t seen the video, but if I understood it right they only said it was an idea they had. And even if they had said it was their headcanon - you’re not obligated to agree with that. Noelle has asked us fans mulitple times not to see their word as law. They’ve tried to make it clear several times that they don’t want to be a JK Rowling who only reveals stuff after the fact, or a George Lucas who edits and changes their work aftewards. Noelle’s word =/= canon. If you want to believe that nothing ever happened between Scorpia and Catra, then that is your right.

2. Anything along the lines of: “Ew, do people really ship Scorptra?” / “Scorptra is gross.” / “Why would you ship Scorptra when you could ship [insert other ship here]?” / “But Scorptra’s unhealthy!”

I am so done with this - and with ship wars in general. Anyone who says anything along those lines about literally any ship gets an instant unfollow from me. Yes, people actually ship whatever ship *you* personally don’t like - get over it. Ships don’t need to be “healthy” for people to enjoy them. And maybe people aren’t shipping that other ship you prefer because it just doesn’t interest them? Seriously, get over yourselves and let people enjoy things.

3. Anything along the lines of “Catra kissing someone else before Adora is toxic”, “Catra should have saved herself / stayed pure for Adora”

Where’s that barf emoji? 🤢🤢🤮🤮

Are you guys for real? I really hope the people saying that kind of stuff are super young, because otherwise wtf??? Please tell me you’re not serious about this one. Do the people saying this kind of stuff realize they sound exactly like the person who wrote that essay about how “She-Ra is actually a Christian show because Catra and Adora saved themselves for each other”? Remember when we all made fun of that? And now people are spreading the exact same nonsense?

This mentality of everyone’s (especially a woman’s) first kiss / first time being something super special that she has to “save” for the right person is just incredibly misogynistic. Why do people feel like it would make Catradora’s kiss any less special if it wasn’t Catra’s first one? Why can’t a second or third kiss be a magical experience, too?

4. Anything implying that kissing Scorpia would make Catra a bad person for “playing with Scorpia’s feelings”.

Or maybe it’d just make her a person who’s confused about her own feelings and who thinks she’s going to die because she’s just been sent on a suicide mission? Seriously, I feel like some people are just determined to hate Catra for everything she does. You have to keep in mind that Hordak sent her to the Crimson Waste to die, and she thought she would. She was at a point where she felt like she’d already lost everything. Does the idea that she’d want to at least kiss someone before dying really make her that unsympathetic to some people? Or the idea that she’s so hung up over Adora (in her mind) not loving her back, that she’d try to force herself to have feelings for Scorpia?

5. “Noelle had to fight so hard to have the Catradora kiss in the end, so Dreamworks would have never allowed this anyway.”

Probably true, but can we please not act like that’s a good thing? Can we please not turn this into “Actually, censorship of queer relationships is good when it’s a ship I personally dislike”? That’s... uhm... really not cool.

Why were we allowed to read Animorphs as kids, anyway?

It’s a question I see come up in this fandom again and again: How the heck did Animorphs books make it into school libraries and book fairs across the country to be marketed to eight-year-olds when they feature drug addiction, body dysmorphia, suicide, imperialism, PTSD, racism, sexism, body horror, grey-and-black morality, slavery, torture, major character death, forced cannibalism, and genocide?  

To be clear, I don’t actually know the answer to that question.  It is, admittedly, a little odd to consider, especially in light of the fact that Bridge to Terabithia gets banned for killing one character (much less several dozen), The Witches gets banned for having a character trapped in the body of an animal (without even going into issues of predation or body horror), The Chocolate War gets banned for having moderately disturbing descriptions of violence between teenagers, Bird gets banned for dealing with the realities of drug addiction, Winnie the Pooh gets banned for having talking animals, Harriet the Spy gets banned because the main character lies to her parents, and The Secret Annex gets banned because Anne Frank describes normal teenage puberty experiences throughout her diary.  And yet Animorphs was marketed to children as young as six nationwide, and (despite selling better than even some classics like The Chocolate War at its peak) no one ever bothered to burn those books or cry that they would rot children’s minds.  

If I had to take a wildly inexpert guess, knowing as little as I do about the publishing industry and the standards parent groups use to determine whether books are “moral,” I would venture to speculate that there were several different factors at work.

Grown-ups judge books by their covers just as much as children do.  For proof of that phenomenon, just scroll through the Animorphs tag on tumblr, any relevant forum on Reddit, or any old post that uses that stupid meme.  The book covers suggest that the stories inside will be silly, campy adventures about the escapist fantasy of turning into a dolphin or a lizard.  People don’t look too closely at the books with the neon candy-colored backgrounds and the ridiculous photoshop foregrounds, especially not when they imply a promise that the novels themselves will be the most inane form of sci fi.  

There’s no sex.  To quote the show K.A. Applegate most loves to reference: "I guess parents don't give a crap about violence if there's sex things to worry about."  The large majority of books that get banned from schools are thrown out for having sexual content: the freaking dictionary was banned from California schools for explaining what “oral sex” is, And Tango Makes Three was removed from shelves because apparently married couples are inherently shocking if they happen to be gay, and the list of most-banned books in the U.S. is full of books which explain in perfectly child-appropriate terms what puberty is and where babies come from.  Animorphs, by contrast, never gets more explicit than Marco calling Taylor a “skank” or Jake and Cassie’s few stolen kisses.  The only mentions of nudity are implied (and even then only when the kids are first coming out of morph), and the most explicit thing we ever hear about Rachel and Tobias doing is staying up late in her room to do her homework together.  It becomes unbelievably obvious in retrospect that there’s a decent level of queer representation in the books (Marco repeatedly describing both Jake and Ax as “beautiful” or “handsome,” Mertil and Gafinilan, multiple characters casually morphing cross-gender), but it’s also possible to overlook the queerness if you don’t know it’s there.  There might be explicit autocannibalism in this series, but at least it never uses the word “nipple.”  

There’s no profanity.  Again, there’s a strong implication of profanity—Rachel and Jake especially often “use certain words to describe things” in a way that makes it incredibly obvious what they’re saying, and context clues tell us Ax says “fuck” at least once—but given that the strongest expletive that comes up with any regularity is “good grief,” this can act as an obvious (if dumb) heuristic for parents that a book is appropriate for children.  People love to count the swear words in Catcher in the Rye when describing why it should be banned (generally without, heaven forbid, reading the goddamn book).  Other works such as To Kill a Mockingbird have been banned for using a single word, regardless of context.  If a parent is looking to object to a single word or set of words as grounds that a book is inappropriate, the worst they’re going to find is half a dozen instances of “heck” and maybe a dozen of “crap.”

Some of the worst content is context-dependent.  As I pointed out above, at least five or six different characters (Tobias, Arbron, Alloran, Tom, Allison Kim) attempt suicide over the course of the series.  At least three or four species that we know about (Hork-Bajir, Howlers, Nartec) get largely or entirely annihilated.  However, in order to understand that any of that occurs, you actually have to read the books.  Not only that, but you have to read them closely.  Cates pointed out that some of the most disturbing passages from #33 are, in a vacuum, just descriptions of blinking diodes and weird hallucinations.  The description of Tobias attempting suicide is just a long list of mall venues that flash by as he zooms full-speed toward a glass wall.  Even the passages with Rachel threatening David (or carrying out those threats) don’t make much sense unless you know how a two-hour limit on morphing works.  For the parent skimming these books looking for objectionable content, nothing jumps out.

The books are, in fact, appropriate for children.  This quality is what (I believe) prevented parents like mine from taking the books away from us kids even after reading several entire novels out loud to us before bed.  The books contain violence, but they sure as hell don’t condone it.  They touch on subjects such as drug addiction and parental abuse, but they do so from the point of view of realistic-feeling kids and don’t fetishize that kind of content.  Most of the lessons contained within are tough—that there’s no such thing as a simple moral code, that people with the power to prevent atrocity also have the obligation to do so, that members of the hegemony aren’t actually all that special, that the world is a scary and violent place for most people who have to live in it—but they’re also important lessons, and good ones to teach to children.  I would be comfortable with my own children (assuming I had any) reading these books at the same age I started reading them, in first and second grade.

You have to understand the fictional science to understand (most of) the horror.  Trying to describe some of the most horrifying passages in Animorphs is like “and then they flushed the pool for cleaning, but the pool was full of slugs!” or “but she explained to her son that she had to have a parasite in her brain so the parasite’s friends wouldn’t be suspicious!” or “and then the hawk ate a rabbit, as hawks are wont to do!” while one’s non-fandalite friends stand there and go “... so what?”  The laws of Applied Phlebotinum in the series turn those earlier moments into a war crime, an assisted quasi-suicide, and a loss of identity, respectively; however, you have to understand the laws of applied phlebotinum in order to know that.  For anyone not reading closely, the horror can be overlooked.  For those of us who are reading closely, phrases such as “host breeding program,” “fugue state,” “eight minutes too late,” and “the howlers are all children” (or any mention at all of people being injured while taxxons are in the vicinity, for that matter) are enough to chill your blood.  But again, for that to happen, you actually have to read the books.  Which we can assume most of the people skimming for curse words do not.

Some of those exact same premises wouldn’t be horror at all if handled by a different author.  K.A. Applegate subverts the “wake up, go to school, save the world” trope; normally premises that feature teen superheroes fighting aliens are considered appropriate for all ages (e.g. Avengers Assemble, Kim Possible, Teen Titans) because they feature bloodless violence and gloss over the question of whether aliens are people too.  The utterly arbitrary standard that kids should be allowed to see violence but not blood allows for justification of movies like Prince Caspian, Night at the Museum, and Ghostbusters to feature characters getting murdered in all kinds of ways in PG-rated movies.  “Violence” and “sci-fi violence” are two different categories according to the MPAA rating system; guess which one gets a lower rating.  Of course, there’s a crapton of science showing it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference to kids whether or not they see blood, they’re still gonna learn violent behaviors and potentially be traumatized, but again where the arbitrary standard persists.  Therefore, if most of the premises of Animorphs books don’t sound horrifying, they must not actually be horrifying.  Right?

The books are almost as light as they are heavy.  Part of the reason I have comfortably loaned my copies of the early books to friends with ten-year-old kids is that it’s not primarily a downer series.  Animorphs aren’t R.L. Stein books, which always end on (the implication of) the protagonist’s death.  They’re not uniform horrorfests like Dolls in the Attic or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  Applegate doesn’t fetishize violence the way that Cassandra Clare and Ransom Riggs do.  The most-quoted passages from these books are the ones that are funny, not horrifying.  These are stories about the joy of aliens discovering Volkswagen Beetles, about the wonder of being able to fly away from one’s life, about friendship and the power of love being enough to make the gods themselves sit up and pay attention.  The whole saga tells the story of six kids sacrificing more than their lives to save their families, and of how that sacrifice brings down an empire.  I suspect that many parents were either paying so little attention they didn’t realize these stories could be classified as battle epics or as kiddie horror, or else were paying so much attention that they concluded that this series is a battle epic worth reading.  

Then again, maybe there was a whole other set of market pressures which accounted for the lack of censorship which I don’t know about.  If so, the economics side of tumblr is encouraged to enlighten me.