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thenightling · 11 months

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Alex and Paul (the first gay couple of The Sandman)

Some Sandman fans may have missed that Alexander Burgess and Paul McGuire were couple in the original Sandman comics.

Don't feel stupid if you missed it. It was deliberately subtle at first.

Remember, the first issue of The Sandman was published by DC comics in 1988. Neil Gaiman had to be discrete. He had a lot more freedom later on and that's why in The Sandman: The Wake you got to see Paul out right call Alex the "love of his life." I didn’t even notice it at first when I read it in 2017 but then I heard a fan reading that made it much more obvious.

Now here are the subtle hints at Alex and Paul's relationship from the first issue of The Sandman. (Note: It's also more obvious in the first chapter of The Sandman audio drama and the first episode of The Sandman Netflix series).

1. First, we don’t even see Paul until Roderick Burgess is deceased. This is because Alex would not have dared to have an open gay relationship when his father was alive. Also keep in mind this was the late 1940s when their relationship would have started. Homosexuality was still very much illegal in the UK. A common trope was to pass off your lover as a live-in employee. For women it was sometimes a housekeeper or maid. For a man it was a groundskeeper or handyman. This was Jerry Dandridge's explanation for Billy Cole in the 1985 film Fright Night. Paul’s official title is the gardener but that seems to just be an excuse as to why he’s allowed to live in the property. 2. The use of language. Here you can see Paul calling Alex “Darling.” It’s not just an “English thing.” Most English men in the 1940s and 1950s would NOT have called another man darling. A woman to another woman, yes. A woman to a man, yes. A man to a woman, yes. But a man calling another man “darling” is like shouting “Hello, we’re gay!”

3. The next clue is in that same scene.

This is a visual clue. You have a blond man in a turtleneck smoking a cigarette (a visual stereotype idea of a gay man) and the painting of Roderick Burgess glaring down disapprovingly. 4. Notice Alex’s wording. “We’re safer just leaving him down there.” Why “we”? That indicates that they are in on it together. Alex had no real reason to tell a mere gardener about his supernatural captive. The implication is clear, they are “partners” and Paul is living there with him. And again, Alex’s father is glaring down disapprovingly. 5. Paul asks Alex if he fancies a game of tennis. You don’t usually get asked by your gardener if you want to play a game. This is no mere employee and employer relationship.

6. Now it’s been over twenty years and Paul is still with him. Paul’s status has changed from gardener to personal assistant. Alex hands his occult organization over to Paul even though Paul (weirdly) doesn’t believe in magick. They have an immortal being that doesn’t eat or drink locked in the cellar, with solid black eyes, and cannot escape a crystal cage inside a binding circle but he doesn’t believe in magick...

7. You don’t usually live with your gardener turned personal assistant who is also your driver. Also I’ve been told that this is a come hither look Paul is giving him right here.

8. In 1988 Paul is still with him, pushing Alex’s wheelchair. And Paul calls Alex “love.” Darling and love are not terms men usually use toward other men except if they are not straight.

9. He trusted Paul with the key to Morpheus’s cage. I doubt he would do that with just anyone.

10. Later the relationship is made much more blatant in The Sandman: The Kindly Ones when Paul refers to Alex as the love of his life.

11. Paul is now a lawyer. The implication is clear. Alex shared everything with him. His fortune, his estate, everything. He financially supported Paul and paid for his law education. Alex was Paul’s Sugar Daddy. He’s older than Paul by roughly twenty years.

12. It’s hard to see but on the nightstand next to Alex’s bed is a copy of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, which Neil Gaiman admits is a love story between two male presenting entities.

13. There’s a cruel moment in The Sandman: The Wake where it looks like Paul might have died but he hadn’t. He and Alex finally get a happy ending.

#The Sandman #Sandman #Alexander Burgess #Paul McGuire #Neil Gaiman

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batboyblog · 5 years

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I’m really happy about how IT chapter 2 handled Ritchie and ya know… Reddie. How do you feel about it?

mixed feelings.

get some shit out of the way, Tumblr tends to be a SUPER binary good-bad space, if something isn’t perfect it’s “canceled” so I want to just roll this out upfront

I AM VERY HAPPY! THEY! DID A GAY CHARACTER!

it’s pretty rare to see gay characters in genre films, like a horror action movie, and particularly being a hero in well anything, all good.

Things I don’t really love, one sided pining. Clearly there’s a lot of closeness with Eddie, and some subtext things, where you can read into it. But there’s clear TEXT that Richie is gay, clear TEXT that he’s in love with Eddie. We don’t get that from Eddie’s side. It’s a pretty common trope in books of a certain type to have the sad homosexual in love with his very straight BFF. And like we wouldn’t have that with straight people, indeed see Ben and Bev. The gay cowardly lion, this is just a personal thing, but like there aren’t gay heroes in much, and to me it was odd that Richie was the one who ran away, when in IT1 (a New Hope?) it’s Richie who goes in hard with the bat, indeed he’s the one who holds everyone together at the moment when all is almost lost. But now that he’s gay he’s got to be maybe the most scared, always throwing up and nearly fainting and running away. I also would have liked something about Richie’s life going forward, we see Bill learns to write an ending, Mike is finally going to Florida, and Ben and Bev are about to sail off into the sun set together, Richie is going over the past, not clearly brave enough to have told Eddie (I’d like to think he did, but we don’t know) not shown going forward with life as a gay man (either going on a date or telling honest jokes)

I think in a movie about fear and the fears of childhood, it was great and very important to have a character who’s scared of being gay, I maybe would have... I would have liked it if cousin Bowers was more clearly into Richie, like I was 100% sure if the kid was straight and freaked out or gay and freaked out and that hits really different depending. any ways sorry, I think it could have been flushed out more I’d say it was a 8 of 10, great it was there, happy it was there, there were a few flaws.

As an unrelated aside, I’ve noticed a lot of the time they’ll hire straight actors with heavy straight energy, like Bill Hader, to play gay characters and like... I wish they’d not do that.

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thesswrites · 5 years

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Global Terror

Fear is a universal constant. Everyone on earth is afraid of something; it might be irrational like the number thirteen or clowns, or a very abstract concept like death of a loved one, but everyone knows fear, down in their bones. A lot of factors will eventually decide what an individual fears - someone who was stung by a bee as a very small child may well develop a fear of flying insects in later life, for example, while someone who was in a car accident is likely to find car journeys stressful in future. While individual experiences are likely to define our fears, the experiences that we share as a culture are equally likely to define our more abstract fears. This in turn will define trends in horror media in a nearly self-perpetuating cycle of societal fear response. This essay takes a look at various cultures and their reactions to societal terrors as shown in horror media, beginning with some of the less examined cultures and ending with the 'melting pot' that is, for better or worse, the perceived core of mass media.

Europe is an interesting source of horror, largely because of its early fairy tales being the progenitor of most commonly-used modern Western horror stories. Eastern Europe as a whole has lived with monsters for a very long time, from the narrative perspective. While the vampire mythos has existed since ancient Greece, and the forerunners of the modern vampire were British and Irish (John William Polidori first with the much-forgotten Lord Ruthven and Bram Stoker with Dracula), Romania and Slavic Europe have a surprising number of myths about vampires. Slavic and Romanian folklore is, in fact, so riddled with monsters that it's almost impossible to be truly afraid of them, as most fear is, at its root, of the unknown. That combined with the ease and blamelessness in which one can become a vampire in Slavic folklore means that there is an entirely different kind of horror involved in tales involving the blood-drinking undead; combined with the fact that everything from birth defects to an animal jumping over someone's open grave can make a vampire, the only way to truly find the fear and horror from these creatures is to become these creatures, at least from the narrative perspective. Films like Night Watch, Let The Right One In and Not Like Others delve into the lives of these cast-out souls, and the horror is found in the tragedy of their haunted, hunted existence and their battle with their own natures, not in the fates of their victims.

There is another purpose to the focus on the monster as the terrorised party in Slavic culture; the fear of standing out. Up until fairly recently, to stand out in Eastern Europe was the worst thing, when survival largely depended on keeping one's head down and not being noticed. Particularly post-World War II, the idea of birth defects or living 'impiously' by local standards being an offense punishable by death is a familiar one to those in Germany, Poland and Russia, even if that last is largely because of a significant guilt for letting it happen to countries that were ostensibly under its purview beginning with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. All told, in the tale of 'the different need to be exterminated because the world says they're wrong and dangerous', countries with their chequered history are likely to show sympathy for the different. Since supernatural creatures have been used as an allegory for the different and bizarre for at least a century, that makes it entirely unsurprising that that entire section of Europe will find the horror in being the 'different' one, rather than being the one hunted by the 'monster'.

Great Britain is a particularly interesting case, given its approach to life as a whole. The British Empire, and the two islands in general, have suffered a great many highs and lows, to the point where 'Keep Calm and Carry On' was effectively its motto long before they quasi-officially adopted it during World War II. Also, its folklore is full of just as many horrors as those found in Eastern European folklore, though British folklore mostly focuses on trickster beings that live somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram covering spirit, monster and god. All things taken into account, it's surprisingly difficult to find a truly terrifying British horror story. The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' mentality mean that even the great classics, such as Dracula and Frankenstein, convey more of a clinical if occasionally suspenseful retelling than a conventional horror story. More modern British entries into the hallowed halls of horror show the other side of British esprit de corps - the ability to laugh at themselves in even the most dire of circumstances. This is a country that deals with terrorist attacks by stating in a ha-ha-only-serious way that "I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this", flagging up that the surest show that this was an emergency was that a popular sandwich bar chain had run out of chocolate cake, and interrupts live coverage of the incident to air a popular soap opera. These are not a people that seek visceral terror as a form of entertainment, simply because it's so difficult to achieve. Even the few things they do find scary are often subject to parody; for every 28 Days Later apocalypse scenario, there's a film - usually by or starring Simon Pegg - to parody it, a Shaun of the Dead or a The World's End or, most recently, a Slaughterhouse Rulez.

However, looking at that example, as well as classics like Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, there is one thing that the British seem to fear: a breakdown of the normally accepted rules of conduct, be they scientific, political or societal. Victor Frankenstein brought on his own doom by over-reaching himself in his field, and compounded it by ignoring his responsibilities to his creation. There are too many examples of this to count in Dracula, though the most notable is the fate of poor Dr Seward, who delved too deeply into things he should not have touched. This trend continues in microcosm and macrocosm in British cinema today; The Quiet Ones follows scientists tormented because they breached a realm of study best left unexplored, whereas 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later touches on both "Science Shouldn't Go Too Far" and "What Happens When The Rules Stop Working?".

Going to the other side of the globe for a moment, some of the front-runners of the horror genre are from the Pacific Rim. Japan and South Korea are renowned for their dark, suspenseful horror films, with Japan adding extra bombast with disaster movies whose messages and cultural impact have stood the test of time even if their special effects have not. The disaster movies are easy ones to dissect from a cultural standpoint; nuclear radiation and its effects, as well as large-scale property damage, have been a stark scar across the Japanese consciousness since 1945. Like the aforementioned car accident victim attempting to ride in a car without panicking, the radiation fears and mass-destruction imagery of the Godzilla movies are an almost guaranteed poke to the hindbrain.

Going back further in the consciousness of the region, however, we come to the underlying cultural fear evoked by the more subtle horror films of both Japan and South Korea. From Ringu in Japan to South Korean films such as The Wishing Stairs, the largest driving force for the supernatural plot elements are guilt and revenge, evoking the honour code that has driven both nations for a very long time, while also touching on the horrors left after their various wars of attrition with the 'death of innocence' trope. However, while Japan focuses on these themes in a more general way, South Korea often approaches the matter in a somewhat more focused - and, to the modern eye, disturbing - way in that many of its defining offerings to cinematic history touch on the latent homophobia of the nation. The Wishing Stairs, Whispering Corridors and particularly Memento Mori all focus on teenage girls, and all of them either imply lesbian relationships or outright feature them. It's unclear whether this is a call to arms, trying to see homosexuality as something more acceptable by framing it as a trait held by a sympathetic character, or a show that 'queers get what they deserve'. It's certainly seen as a common enough situation to be nearly commonplace in movies of that type, though blending it into the horror genre so completely frames it as something to fear.

Across the Pacific, we find Hollywood, and the so-called 'melting pot' that is the United States. Arguably the primary source of the world's entertainment media, the US should theoretically produce a range of horror as broad as the cultural heritage of its people. In a way, that's the case, as American horror authors and scriptwriters often borrow from the folklore of other nations or even simply remake them. However, as these are framed in the American idea of what 'scary' is rather than tapping into the cultural fear that inspired the originals, these remakes seldom come off as well unless they deviate significantly from the source material. Even going back past the days of cinema, consider HP Lovecraft - while born in the United States, America at that time was still only a few generations removed from being a British colony, rebuilding on its own after a bloody civil war. It had hardly been long enough for the nation to develop its own cultural identity, although it was clearly trying. Lovecraft began that in terms of horror; while still deeply entrenched in the "break rules to delve into things you should not examine and be damned" mentality of British horror, his deep-seated racism showed the first glimmer of a largely American fear of the black population, so recently freed.

Nowadays, however, US horror is a difficult subject to examine because of the subgenres on offer in the wider horror genre. Paranormal romance, for example, has taken a great deal of the horror out of classic movie monsters like vampires and werewolves, with the 'action-adventure' label making them one more antagonist to shoot. These days, the true horror in US entertainment media comes from a source whose very mundanity makes it all the more terrifying - other people. Born of urban legends as much as real-life serial killers, slasher movies are the one movie genre that is very specifically American (the British being too inured to the idea of the knife-wielding stranger by Jack the Ripper to really bother with it). Despite supernaturally-born outliers like Freddy Krueger, slasher-killers have always simply been troubled individuals, from Norman Bates to Jason Voorhes to the convoluted chain of Jigsaw killers. The Purge franchise takes it one step further, casting everyone in the immediate vicinity as a potential killer just waiting for the opportunity. While the actual reasoning behind this cultural paranoia is unclear, the fact that most entertainment media is optioned by committee under the auspices of swathes of marketing data means that there is at least a vocal minority of the American public that identifies enough with this mindset to engage it on an emotional level. Given the shape of US politics today, this is worrying on so many levels it's impossible to discuss them all in an essay of any reasonable length; it would probably take a proper academic paper written by someone with several degrees and preferably no personal investment. Perhaps someone living somewhere sane like Switzerland.

So what does all this tell us about the cultural makeup of the countries under discussion? It certainly indicates that Slavic Europe and the Pacific Rim are still haunted by the spectres of a particularly violent past, and that Britain has an inborn need for order that may or may not have originated with the loss of the Empire. The United States, meanwhile, shows some deep-seated paranoia, a fear of itself that shows no signs of abating and even seems to be ramping up as the years go by. It's entirely possible that the entire world needs whatever the cultural equivalent of therapy is, but given the cathartic nature of entertainment media, this is supposed to be a form of therapy from the cultural standpoint. At least most of the rest of the nations seem to be recovering, though they will always still be suffering from whatever the cultural equivalent of PTSD is; Britain, in fact, has recovered well enough to laugh about it, although given the shape of the sociopolitical landscape, they may have recovered too well and be doomed to repeat the lessons they refused to learn from history. The United States, meanwhile, appears to be wallowing in its own divisiveness from a cultural standpoint, with the primary indicator of the things it fears showing a nation that would be happiest alone in a bunker surrounded by land mines with a high-powered firearm, shooting at anyone who gets too close.

There’s no great sociopolitical message here, unless it’s one that a reader wants to find for themselves. It’s just fascinating from an anthropological standpoint how much what people - on a cultural level - are afraid of can sometimes tell us about what kind of people they are.

#general essay: genre media

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fanders-fic-awards · 6 years

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One Short Day (Summer Fic Comp 18)

Summary: Patton has a really bad day, so Virgil tries to help.

Trigger Warnings: The Q and F slurs. To skip them, skip the from ’“Okay,” Connor said’ to ‘Oh. Oh.’

Word Count: 2059

Ballot

Patton was having a very, very bad day. First, his coffee maker broke, spilling coffee everywhere and probably ruining his favorite sweater. Then his car wouldn’t start; thankfully, however, he had listened to Logan and gotten a portable jump starter kit that didn’t require a second car.

He pulled up to school, barely in time to start his first class of the day, which was senior-level Honors English. The bell rang, and 30 tired and unenthused seniors walked in the door.

“Good morning, class!” His greeting was met with mumbles, so he tried again, with even more pep he wasn’t at all feeling.

“What is up, everybody?”

“Hi, Mr. Sanders” came the ever-so-slightly more energetic response.

“Now, kiddos, I know it’s early on a Monday, but you can do better than that! I be-leaf in you!” Patton held up the plastic maple leaf he kept on his desk, eliciting 29 groans and 1 giggle.

“Ayy, you got me, Thomas!”

“Yeah, because you tell the same joke every day, Mr. Sanders.” The entire class laughed at Thomas’ quip, Patton included.

“Good point,” Patton ceded, pointing at him, “Get it? Good point? Also, valid observation.”

“You have cat to be kitten me. It’s too early for this bull-”

“Hey now, language! But you definitely deserve a Patt on the back for the excellent dad jokes today.”

“Was… was that a self-referential pun? To a crowd that usually doesn’t know the first names of their teachers, when you only just told us your first name last week?” Joan, Thomas’ friend, spoke up.

“Well, yeah! Why do you think I told you guys? Before that,” he said with a mischievous glint in his eye, “I was Patton pending!”

“I never thought I’d say this, but can we please get to actually learning things?” Talyn, Joan’s datemate, called from the back of the class.

“Right, as usual, Talyn,” Patton laughed, “so who has thoughts they’d like to share on the chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray you all read over the weekend?” Silence fell, with the exception of a murmur from a boy named Connor.

Patton knew it wasn’t right for teachers to have favorite or least favorite students, but Connor was by far his least favorite. Connor was the kind of student who put no effort into understanding the material and then complained that he didn’t get it, that it was boring. Patton frankly couldn’t understand why he was taking an honors course, and nothing he said or did seemed to get through to the kid. And that’s what bugged Patton the most. Every no-effort paper, every barely passed test, felt like a personal failure to Patton. He was responsible for his students and their success. At the end of the day, however, he knew that learning is communication, and communication is a two-way street. He didn’t dislike Connor as a person, of course, he was simply sad and frustrated by his apathy towards his education.

“What was that, Connor?”

“N- nothing, Mr. Sanders.”

“Now, kiddo, we both know that’s not true. Your thoughts are as important and valid as anyone else’s. So, please, share them with us.” Patton’s voice was firm, making it clear he wouldn’t accept ‘no’ for an answer.

“Okay,” Connor said, a challenging smirk on his face, “I think that this book is a waste of our time and that no one cares what a dusty old queer had to say about other faggots over a hundred years ago.”

Oh. Oh. Patton’s chest got tight and he briefly saw red before he remembered where he was. He noticed at least five students flinch at the slur and realized he had been presented an opportunity to make a real difference in his students’ lives. Patton took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts before beginning.

“Thank you for your honest input, Mr. Williams. While your phrasing was incredibly offensive, and we will have a serious conversation with the principal after class about your use of those slurs, you bring up a point that warrants discussion, one that has occurred in countless English courses.

Why should we care? What did this novel add to the world, and does the author’s background add or remove weight from their work? I was going to discuss Oscar Wilde’s sexuality and the homosexual themes throughout the novel after we finished reading it, but since Connor brought it up, this seems like a perfect time.

Before I start lecturing, I want to know if any of you have things you’d like to add to the discussion. Yes, even you, Connor, provided you phrase your comments more carefully.” Patton paused, giving his students time to speak up if they wanted to. He was immensely relieved when a usually very quiet girl named Samantha rose her hand.

“Yes, Samantha, the floor is yours.”

“Oh, um, I just wanted to say that I think it was really brave of Oscar Wilde. I feel like the book is about vice and, um, how it destroys people, even if you- if you can’t tell by looking at them. The fact that it’s Basil Hallward who is explicitly gay is really important. Other authors might have added being gay to the list of 'sins’ Dorian Gray is guilty of, but Wilde makes Hallward something of a tragedy.

The portrait is basically the product of Hallward’s sexuality, a representation of it. Gray destroys it and then kills Hallward, which by could be interpreted out of context as a 'punishment’ for Hallward being gay. And while killing the gay character is a tragically common trope, that’s not what Wilde wrote. Because it’s Gray who killed him, it can be argued that acting the way he did is yet another example of the debauchery that causes not only his death but in the end makes him as ugly as he always feared he’d become.

Sorry, I know you hadn’t assigned that far, but I really liked the book and needed to know how it ended. And, uh, sorry for talking so much.”

“Samantha, please do not apologize for any of that. That was very well put and almost every point I was going to make.” Patton wanted to comment that he noticed her voice getting stronger and more sure as she talked, but he didn’t want to embarrass her.

“Oh, um, thanks, Mr. Sanders.”

“Mr. Sanders, what are the 'other points’ you wanted to make?” Joan asked, who had been giving Connor a murderous glare the entire time.

“Before I answer, is there anything anyone else would like to say?” Patton waited for anyone to speak up, but when no one did, he continued, “I want to discuss the larger picture. But we’ll have to table that for another day since the bell is about to ring. If you want to read ahead, please do, but I’m not going to assign another chapter for tomorrow- all I ask is that you come prepared for a discussion of notable LGBT+ authors and how their identity shaped their works, such as William Shakespeare, Truman Capote, Emily Dickinson, and Tennessee Williams. Wow me with what you bring in and there are extra credit points in it for you! Have a wonderful day, and I look forward to our discussion tomorrow. Connor, a word, please.”

—-

Virgil came home to complete chaos. There was a mess of tangled fairy lights on the couch, and it looked like there was an explosion of flour in the kitchen.

“God, Pat, you are lucky I love you. What’s up with all the messes?” Virgil called out, laughing fondly at his chaotic energetic boyfriend.

“Oh hi, my love! I meant to have it all cleaned up by the time you got home. Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess! How was your day?”

“It was really good. Got a really big breakthrough with the couple I told you I’ve been struggling so much with- I think they’re gonna get somewhere really healthy.”

“Oh my goodness, that’s so great! We have to celebrate- as it so happens, I made chocolate cake, and was gonna make stroganoff for dinner.”

“Pat, it’s my turn to cook, remember? You spoil me too- shit. I can’t believe I missed it. What’s wrong, sunshine?”

“Nothing, Virge. I just wanted to do something sweet for my sweetie!”

“Please let me in, love. Can I help?”

“I- I don’t know, and I didn’t want to worry you. It’s just been a really rough day.”

“Let’s make a deal. Let’s make lasagna together while you tell me what’s up, and then I’ll draw you a bubble bath and we’ll watch 8 Mile?”

“Not 8 Mile, not tonight. Make it the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, and I’m in.”

“As you wish, Patton-cake.”

“I love you too, dork.”

The two men got busy making lasagna, singing and sort-of dancing as they cooked. When they put the dish in the oven, Patton started talking.

“V, it was a hell of a day. The coffee pot broke, and I spilled coffee all over my sweater, and I really need to call your brother and thank him for the advice about the jumper kit. Without it, I wouldn’t have gotten to work on time. But that was little stuff, and you know me, I brushed it off and was really excited to talk with my kiddos about The Picture of Dorian Gray. And class started really well, you’d have died at how they kept the pun train rolling. I love them all so much. I’ve talked to you about Connor before, right?”

“I think so. Total slacker, could be one of the best students in the class if he gave a damn?”

“Yep, that’s the kid. He dropped the f and q slurs a couple of times complaining about the book.”

“Oh my god Patton are you okay? What happened? Did the kid get his ass handed to him like he deserves?”

“Breathe, Virgil. It’s all okay. He’s got detention for 2 weeks, his parents know and are pissed, and I was able to turn it into a good teaching moment. Well, technically, Samantha did.”

“Quiet Samantha?”

“Yeah, she had some incredible insights into the book and how it deals with sexuality and morality. She apparently read ahead and finished the book, so she was able to tie in Gray’s death too.

It was incredible to watch. She’s so quiet and started out so unsure, but by the end, she was so confident, I almost cried.”

“You cry at everything, Pat. Don’t argue- you cried last week because snakes don’t have legs. For real, though, that’s amazing. You are amazing.”

“It was all her!”

“No, it wasn’t. I was just like Samantha in school. I had so many things to say, but I was terrified of being wrong, so I said nothing. Except in classes where I completely trusted the teacher, where I knew my ideas would be really heard, not just listened to, and respected. Teachers like that, teachers like you, change the world. I guarantee that Samantha will never forget today, and neither will any LGBT+ kid in that class.

God, Patton, you change lives. You are the most incredible person I’ve ever met, and it blows my mind that somehow you think I’m worthy of your love. Every day, I try to be someone you can be proud of, and I want to keep doing it for the rest of our lives.” Virgil slipped out of his chair and onto one knee, pulling a small velvet box out of his jacket pocket.

“Patton Sanders, at the risk of sounding cliché as hell, will you make me the happiest man alive and marry me?”

“Virgil… my sweet and sour misunderstood shadowling, I couldn’t do any of what I do without you. You’re as important to me as air or puppies. You make me want to be the best version of me, and there is nothing I want more than to marry you.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes! Virgil Raine, I absolutely will marry you!” Crying, Patton pulled Virgil up and kissed his fiancé. “Now, let’s have some engagement lasagna and take an engagement bubble bath!”

“You’re such a dork. I love you so fucking much.”

“I hope you do, 'cuz we’re getting married!”

“That we are,” Virgil chuckled, tears in his eyes as well.

@mystrangedarkson

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sherlolo-land · 7 years

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WHY MOLLY'S EXISTENCE IS THE BIGGEST PIECE OF FAN-SERVICE IN BBC SHERLOCK (The Ultimate Analysis)

Ok so i’ve been wanting to do this for so so so long but since my account is mostly about my art, i decided to submit it on here, since it is very very… suitable lol. Forgive any grammar mistakes. English is not my first language and i’m not used on writing extremely long analysis. Let’s start!

Introduction:

After spending time thinking about it again and again and after molly’s character humiliation in season 4, i came to the conclusion that Molly Hooper is a character made simply to target the teenage female audience. In a few words Steven Moffat wanted to make more girls watching his show, using a character who was only there so they can identify with.

Part 1: Molly’s supposed role in the show

Molly was supposed to be in only the first scene of the very first episode of Sherlock BBC. Moffat liked Louise’s acting so he decided to keep her in the show entirely. Molly’s first scene with Sherlock can be considered very awkward since Molly comes off as very shy, awkward and “fair”. Exactly the way a teenage girl would act around or to her own crush. If Moffat liked Louise’s acting for that reason, then it is pretty clear what he wanted to do with her character

Part 2: Molly’s Appearance

Molly is a 30 something year old woman. But for some “bizarre” reasons she dresses like 12-15. Extremely girly, “too ugly, it’s cute” and non mature. Take a look:

She also appears to be extremely uncomfortable wearing a “revealing” dress in ASIB but she still does because she thinks that this is what it takes to get Sherlock’s -aka the man she has a crush on- attention (And don’t you dare to call me sexist about that. It has been established many times that Molly changes her appearance in order to look better for Sherlock. Something many young shy girls actually believe it’s the right thing to do.

Not to mention that she actually never wears makeup in situations that have nothing to do with Sherlock. And of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but look the other female characters on Sherlock:

Riiiight. Molly looks extremely child-like next to the other female characters and i do not think this is a coincidence or something that “just sort of happened”. There is a reason why they made her look like that. She had to be average looking, clothes that can be considered “cute” more than “fashionable” and she had to look as young as possible. And that reason is that she had to be more appealing to the 15 year old who watches the show so she can see herself through Molly Hooper.

Bonus: They literally made her a blog that looks like this

I mean… yeah!

Part 2: Molly’s Personality

Molly is very shy, awkward, clumsy, romantic, cheesy and insecure. And this is stated in many parts of the show. As i mentioned above, how she actually feels awkward in the Christmas dress and how she feels insecure especially how she is willing to change her appearance just because Sherlock told her so -see the lipstick scene in ASiP. I’m not saying that grown people can be shy or insecure. But as a grown up, a 31 year old person who has a very serious job, you learn to control it. From the other hand, these characteristics are very common -to the point of being stereotypes- when talking about teenage girls. Molly does not only have all of them, but she has them in a superlative point, making them main aspects of her personality.

Her being kind and sweet has nothing to do with the characteristics mentioned above. Miss Hudson is kind and sweet too but she doesn’t act like a teenage girl.

Molly’s character is actually a very common character trope, usually used in movies and shows, to target young female audience who has the same personality, it’s in the same “level” of looks - this might sound harsh but it’s the truth. Usually girls who are more average looking (not necessarily on the face, it can be just the clothing style too) and have a hopeless crush on a guy he will never return her feelings

Part 3: Molly’s crush and how it is in real life

As we know Molly has a crush on Sherlock. Sherlock is the mean, the super intelligent, dark and mysterious guy who doesn’t return Molly’s feelings. And not only that; He constantly manipulates her, takes advantage of her feelings because he knows that she has a crush on him

Another very typical kind of real life “relationship” that has been represented in multiple films and shows.

“A very shy, awkward ect ect girl falls in love with the very mean, cold and dark guy who doesn’t really have any feelings towards her. But somehow, she gets that guy to notice her and she eventually receives two cheek kisses. The shy and cheesy girl humanizes the ’‘bad boy” and he eventually realizes that he is in love with her.“

This is what this relationship actually stands for. Imagine how many real life girls who are shy and all, are in love with a guy who ignores them or he is mean to them. Seeing Molly Hooper and her relationship with Sherlock, makes them hope that this will happen to them too with the boy of their dreams. They empathize with Molly and they see themselves on her. We can say that they have the ’'shy girl” representation they “need”. Lol.

Part 4: Fan Service scenes in the show

After all that, it is not wonder how 5 out of 6 Molly scenes in the BBC show, have to do with her crush on Sherlock or they have a glimpse of “”“’'romance”“”“ between her and Sherlock. They are also the longest and her most ”“important”’. Let’s count some!

1. Molly’s first scene that literally made her part more important. Molly asks Sherlock out, he rejects her. She comes back with his coffee and we have the whole “small mouth” dialogue ( ASiP)

2. Sherlock’s fake compliments regarding her hair (TBB)

3. The whole “jim is my new bf i moved on” thing that establishes that Molly cannot find someone else other than Sherlock (TGG)

4. Christmas scene and cheek kiss (ASiB)

5. Molly getting “confused” and “jealous” of Irene because she thinks she is Sherlock’s gf -2 scenes- (ASiB)

6. “I don’t count”, the scene when Sherlock asked Molly to help him (TRF)

7. The ultimate teen girl fantasy: The kiss scene in Anderson’s mind (TEH) -which was completely unnecessary for the plot, let’s be real. It was only there because Moffat thinks fans of Benedict will get turned on bruh. We can love an actor without wanting to fuck him ffs-

8. Another ultimate fan-service scene: Sherlock and Molly solving crimes together. “You mattered the most” 1. Sherlock didn’t mean this romantically 2. Sherlock’s pressure point is John and villains always go after him since he is the “damsel in distress”, the cheek kiss, Molly hasn’t actually moved on (TEH)

9. Molly showing up with a guy looking exactly like Sherlock (TEH)

10. Molly’s obviously existent crush on Sherlock (TSoT)

11. Being the “ignored and manipulated because of her feelings, by Sherlock” woman (TAB)

11. The forced “i love you scene” (TFP)

Now let’s take a look at her other scenes and how useful they were for the plot -not really tbh lol:

1. Molly worrying about Sherlock having to make a speech

2. Molly slapping Sherlock (HLV) -no she wasn’t 'powerful feminist who stands up for herself’’. She could have find other ways to stand up to Sherlock for all the times he hurt her and not slap a man heartbroken and high as a kite- Period!

3. Molly just… existing in Mary and John’s house and Rosie’s baptism (TST)

There might be more but i guess they ain’t actually important to remember.

The only scenes where Molly is being useful to the plot without having her crush on Sherlock being addressed or something, it’s her “male” scene in TAB and the “anyone but you” scene in TST.

Reading into all this makes us realize that Molly’s existence literally goes around her hopeless crush and most of her scenes are only there to please the teen female fans, because they can see their “dream love story” getting “unfolded” on their TV screens.

Part 5: How Moffat sees it

Moffat’s reputation when writing female characters is really not good. And Molly Hooper is actually a good example for that. Moffat uses Benedict’s looks and the fact that he -as Sherlock mostly- has become a sex icon, to attract his female fans. He thinks that female fans of Benedict (or Sherlock) actually fantasize about him and he is their dream guy. After all Who wouldn’t like Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes to smash their window, jump in the room, ruffle his infamous curls and snog them?1!1!! This is what Moffat believes, girl fans want. But of course he can’t have Sherlock seductively talking to the camera and naked all the time. So what does he do? He creates a character based on the most common teenage girl stereotypes, who symbolizes the female audience, in the show , and put her in some lowkey useless scenes with Sherlock, who can be considered romantic if you ignore major facts -such as, Sherlock is homosexual. Moffat succeeded on targeting a whole “audience group” just by intruding into the personality of the socially awkward 14 year old girl, who is in love with the “dark” guy.

Conclusion:

Molly Hooper is entirely a character made and developed only for the satisfaction of the fantasies MOFFAT thinks his female audience has. She was never supposed to develop from the very beginning since her role in the show is only to chase after Sherlock. I, in no way, think that still loving a man without him having the same feelings or being kind is a sign of weakness or something bad. But the fact that Moffat sees his own female fans like that -as i said in a superlative and overmuch level- and he prefers to put a completely useless female character in the show, to have her hanging from the hot guy’s balls, only to give satisfaction to the teen girls who ship themselves with Sherlock or/and Benedict, but refusing to make Sherlock explicit homosexual, it is just sad. He of course uses the gay subtext as he does not want to lose the lgbt audience too but he is being a jerk to the fans when talking directly to or about them and he keeps denying things that he HIMSELF put in the show. I guess it’s all about marketing after all. And more people need to take their heads out of their asses and realize that.

Why is it easier for Moffat to satisfy some teen girl audience, with things that will never happen in real life anyways, instead of giving the LGBT community the right representation it needs?

#sherl0lly #molly hooper #ship wank #fandom wank #submission #damn good post pulling all the punches #moffat is a sexist homophobe who would rather cater to the whims of 15 year old girls #and not give the LGBT community what they fucking deserve

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supershylockfandom-blog · 7 years

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The Whirligig of Gender Will Have Its Revenges

Over the course of our trip, I was very vocal (perhaps too vocal) about two things in particular:

1) Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespearean play (save for the possible exception of Hamlet, but lately the odds have tipped from his favor to Viola’s).

2) I absolutely loathed the Globe production that we attended.

By the end of the play, I was deeply incensed (not to mention a few drinks in)-- so much so that I couldn’t stand to stay for the triumphant finale jig and left early. After that, I called home and ranted to my younger sister until I felt calm again and went back to my flat. To be clear, I have never been so emotional about disliking a theatrical (or cinematic) production of anything to this day. I’ve even seen Twelfth Nights I’ve liked less than the one we saw as a class without being half as disturbed or upset by them. “Why then, did this particular version have such an effect on you?” You are not asking yourself this question, because my opinion is neither here nor there to anyone but myself; I wondered this while half-drunk, actually, and later, once sober again, came upon the answer:

As a preface, I would like to point out that, in the 21st Century, there is no wrong way to interpret Shakespeare, so long as you have a particular vision in mind and follow through on your plans. There are, of course, inadequate methods of performing and staging (for the record, I thought that the blacking and acting we saw was effective and skilled), and some Shakespeareans-- particularly those at The Globe-- are especially staunch about leaning into “original practices,” but theater has evolved so much in the last 400 years that even productions that call themselves traditional Elizabethan stagings are not that (consider the Tim Carroll Twelfth Night: where are the prepubescent boys meant to be playing the Viola, Olivia, and Maria? Why is the blocking so modern?) All that is left is the text and its sparse stage directions. I am aware that my disdain for the Emma Rice production is based mainly upon personal preference. However, I like to believe that my opinions hold enough water to be worth the attention and respect of others.

(Under the cut for length.)

My two favorite things about Twelfth Night are, in order, its inherent queerness and bitterness. Make no mistake, being an Elizabethan comedy, it can just as easily be light, frothy, and straight (as evidenced by what we witnessed last week) and even the darkest versions thereof must make room for fun potty humor and slapstick and heterosexual, cisgendered couplings (as those too, are in the text). Those things, as much as any present queerness or anger, are part of the fun of Twelfth Night, and the former is where most of the comedy comes from. But the genderqueer, non-straight, and angry undercurrents that can be detected in this play (whether placed there by its author knowingly or not) go oft ignored. I am disappointed by this, naturally, but never before have I had it thrown in my face this way by a company so prestigious as the Globe.

I think my central problem with the Rice staging was her Feste.

Yes, I did notice that Feste was portrayed by a very talented and engaging drag queen. No, that did not help. But did it make my experience worse? Absolutely, 100%, yes. Feste is perhaps the pettiest, most resentful character in the text. He cares not for the emotions of others, particularly not that of his Lady Olivia, who’s grief he mocks and belittles (granted, this is his job, and at his kindest, he has been portrayed as genuinely fond of her, but more often than not, he is a punch-clock entertainer, who cares only for the emotions of others as long as they will pay him for what he elicits) in his first appearance, after being absent from her court for an extended period of time.

Feste. Good madonna, why mournest thou? Olivia. Good fool, for my brother's death. Feste. I think his soul is in hell, madonna. Olivia. I know his soul is in heaven, fool. Feste. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen (5.1. 357-362).

His only real interests throughout the play appeared to be song, logical wordplay (”simple syllogism[s]”), crude jokes (”many a good hanging prevented a bad marriage”), weaseling pocket change away from the rich, and enacting petty revenge. At his best, he’s a puckish partygoer and delightful busker, at his worst, he is apart from all other social groups in the play and cruel to at least the same degree as the bear-baiting merrymakers.

“Earlier, Malvolio had mocked Feste for his dependence on others... But [Feste] also mirrors Malvolio specifically as a dependent in a court and as one the play most clearly shows as a solitary character. He is the one who echoes Malvolio’s words about dependency on approval in shortened form, ‘An you smile not, he’s gagged’ (5.1.363-4), back to him at the end. And after he exults ‘Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges’ (364), Malvolio in turn mirrors him, promising his own revenge” (66 Novy).

Feste is at his most useful when existing as a mirror for other characters-- he contextualizes his lady’s grief with cruel mockery, challenges Viola’s wits and disguise, and most importantly, shows Malvolio the cruelty that he callously doles out. When his dialogue is chopped up into saintly wisdom from a loving goddess in the Heavens, his status as a dynamic character and device is stripped from him. When Feste is robbed of his archetypal trickster-status, it weakens the core themes of the play which are written into the very title (as Twelfth Night and the Feast of Fools were, of course, traditionally a day of opposites, much as Feste the wise fool is a natural mirror and walking contradiction). When he is robbed of his anger towards his social betters (Olivia and Malvolio), this is further weakened.

My qualms with making Feste a benevolent Goddess are based entirely upon the text; my problems with casting said benevolent goddess as a drag queen are two fold. My first is in the broader scope of media representation of drag queens, trans women, and feminine genderqueer persons. Most often, the cinematic and theatrical tradition is to demonize such individuals as lascivious perverts, which is obviously dehumanizing. As well-intended backlash, many younger content creators have thus spun around done the patent opposite by deifying them (this is also, notably, a dichotomy experienced by black women/femmes, be they cisgender, trans, or otherwise gender nonconforming). Deification is in its own way a subtler form of dehumanization. Much like the treatment of so-called virtuous women in the Victorian era, the representation of any group as somehow morally superior or “above” the rest of the rest is restricting. An anti-Semite might do well to wonder: “Hath a Jew not eyes?... If you prick us, do we not bleed?” but any white, cisgendered woman who routinely refers to black women and femme queers as “black goddesses” (which is absolutely a thing, as those of you who frequent tumblr, twitter, pintrest, or instagram most likely know) should be reminded that, just like all people, black queer femmes fart and defecate regularly, and they, like all other members of the human race, run on a sliding scale of morality, wisdom, and grace, depending on the individual. The archetypal example of this “heavenly body” trope is Angel of Rent, being a Latina trans-woman (or gender-fluid person, or drag queen, depending on the interpretation) who is always given the moral high ground, dies a tragically noble death, always has resources to bestow upon the less fortunate, and is literally called “Angel.” Much like Feste, she is the only gender non-conforming femme poc in her cannon, and that, paired with the erasure and demonization of this particular group that has been so common in Western art and media, leaves them as the sole representation of said group to be found in fiction. Each time a character of a group so mishandled as that is brought into play, that character becomes a mouthpiece for the entire population of such individuals that exist in reality. The trope of the black, femme goddess is much kinder than the demonization and willful ignorance of old, but in 2017, we should be beyond this refusal to portray those who exist outside of the white, straight, cis hegemony as anything other than individuals as complex as everyone else in their canon. Anyone who is tempted to bring up the “Sister Topas” scene as a counter-argument is welcome to it, but this derives from a halfhearted attempt to recast Feste as a personification of fate after four acts of being nothing but sage and understanding. It is not deeper characterization, as it is not played as either vengeance or cruelty-- at best, it is a twist of fate personified, at worst, it is whoever doctored the script backing themselves into a character-writing corner by striping Feste of his humanity.

My second challenge to the choice of La Gateau Chocolat as Feste is that her place in the cast is by its very nature misleading. Twelfth Night is well known among Shakespeare fans as one of the (if not the) queerest Shakespearean plays. It is well-known for featuring one of several Shakespearean Antonios, all of whom are noted for their non-explicit homosexual passion (Twelfth Night’s Antonio’s love for Sebastian is second only to the Antonio of Merchant of Venice and his suicidal devotion to Bessanio, and the villainous Antonio of The Tempest finds his match and constant companion in an equally rotten Sebastian.) Also present is the wooing that takes place between two women, and the Duke Orsino’s apparent attraction to one who is “both man and maid,” whom he never ceases to refer to as “boy” or “Cesario,” even after learning “his” true name and gender. Moreover, of all of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing Paige Boys, Viola spends the most time as her male counterpart, who’s name, as we discussed in class, translates roughly to “rebirth” by way of “cesarean section.” I bring these up because each of these characters have been stripped of their queerness systematically. Cesario/Viola is often played as not just a cross-dresser for strategy’s sake but a genderqueer individual in earnest; Olivia’s realization that Sebastian is not his sister has been played as a horrible, sinking realization; Antonio is often left on stage alone to highlight his loss of Sebastian to heterosexual tradition. I am by no means saying that stagings must be this way or that they must reflect this queer undercurrent, and I have liked versions of the play that exemplify few or none of these choices. My problem with Rice’s Twelfth Night is that, not only does it ignore the inherent discomfort that Feste and each of these queer characters experiences when played as such, but she has dressed her staging up as a celebration of queerness and diversity when that diversity only runs skin-deep (at least, in terms of the aforementioned and belabored queerness.)

I have already explained my problems with Rice’s Feste, so I will now move on to two new subjects: Malvolio and Sir Andrew. These characters are blatantly coded as queer in that Malvolio is played by a cross-dressing woman and Andrew is played as camp gay. However, that is as deep as the queer vein in this staging runs. Malvolio is not traditionally a queer character (although he is often the subject of “genderbending” to varying degrees of success), nor is he played as queer on stage. He is only branded as such due to being played by a woman, despite being played as a man. Andrew’s status is particularly egregious, as-- in being both comically stupid and violently mean-- he is the most difficult to sympathize with of any character; he has no compelling emotional core written into the text, nor is any planted into Marc Antolin’s portrayal of him. He is also a wooer of Olivia’s and, as far as the text and blocking is concerned, more “metrosexual” than homosexual in earnest. What this does is play all stereotypically gay mannerisms (those that he possesses which Antonio, Sebastian, and even the preening Duke evade whether they are played as queer men or not) for laughs and nothing else. “It’s funny,” the audience says, “because he’s in a pink sweater and he’s got a funny lisp.” Meanwhile, Olivia never notices her very real attraction towards another woman, the Duke Orsino’s sexual identity crisis is just barely hinted at, and most questionable of all, Antonio is played as a father figure to Sebastian. Lawman’s Antonio’s body language is neutral and distant, not half as wracked with passions as his lines:“If you will not murder me for my love//Let me be your servant” (1.2.642-3) and “ I could not stay behind you: my desire//More sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth” (3.3.1492-3).

In conclusion: Rice’s staging of Twelfth Night may be good for a laugh, but it robs the text of its philosophical weight, its bitterness, and its genuine queer discomfort, thus replacing these things with a light gloss of queer acceptance by playing “We Are Family” at the beginning and giving Sir Andrew a pencil mustache. I am not upset that Rice’s staging was not queer or angry enough for my liking; I am upset because her staging insisted (whether she wanted it to or not) that a wave of sequins and a disco chorus should be queer enough for me, and I ought to stop being so angry all the time and accept what I’ve been given.

SOURCES:

Novy, Marianne. “Outsiders and the Festive Community in Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare & Outsiders. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Shakespeare, William. "Twelfth Night, or What You Will." Open Source Shakespeare. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 June 2017.

#twelfth night #the globe #twelfth night or what you most definitely won't

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femslashrevolution · 7 years

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It ain't that deep, bro. It's just important.

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

So, this may catch some folk by surprise considering how ridiculously queer I am, but, fun fact: your humble author didn’t actually learn that queer people existed until she was in high school.

(This is relevant. I promise. Hang in there.)

I’m not kidding. I was sitting behind this girl in a creative writing class, my first week freshman year of high school. She was telling a story to another student, and in the course of it made a joke in which she pointed out how incredibly bisexual she was.

It was like I got struck by lightning.

I’d gone to a catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade. And Holy Family was actually one of the more progressive, kind-hearted schools in the area. I know now that most of the teachers didn’t actually believe the official Church doctrine on the subject of The Gays. So instead of telling us that homosexuality was a sin, they just…never brought it up. If they never mentioned gay people, they wouldn’t have to toe the line and say we were going to hell!

Aaaaand the end result was that I literally was never informed that liking girls was like…a thing? You can do that? That’s an option?!

Mind you it still took me like another six months to figure out why I’d had such a powerful reaction to that realization. Because, you know, obviously I wasn’t gay or anything. You can feel free to insert a mental laugh track there, I’ll wait.

I bring this up because to this day, I remember that lightning-strike sensation. The birth of a whole new universe, fresher and wider and better than the old one, right behind my eyes. I swear to god the colors were brighter that day.

In the months and months between that moment and the moment when I was willing to admit even to myself that maybe, possibly, like girls just a little, I started reading femslash. I read a lot of highly questionable het fics too, obviously, because I was fourteen and look shut up we’ve all made mistakes.

I’d be lying if I said femslash was what helped me realize I was gay as all hell, because it wasn’t. I handled that just fine on my own, thanks. The fics themselves weren’t actually the catalyst, it was just that I realized I was seeking out f/f pairings and, hmm, you know, maybe there was a reason for that. Really, femslash didn’t start to mean much to me, or connect me to a community, until I started writing it. And…oh, man. That was the watershed. That really was where I came into my own.

I was seriously unprepared for the level of gratitude femslash authors can receive.

Thing was, I wasn’t even really…doing much, from my perspective. I was just…writing fic, like always. I’d watched the Star Wars prequels and fell in love with what was to me the obvious femslash pairing–seriously, watch Phantom Menace and tell me with a straight face that Padme’s handmaiden isn’t in love with her. And I’d gone looking for fic only to discover a massive pile of nothing. That’s thankfully changed a little since; I like to think I kicked off the Padme/Sabe renaissance. But for a decent chunk of time there, I was the only person writing that pairing on the entire Internet.

Let me tell you–that was a trip and an half.

And the response was…pretty average, as AO3 goes. It wasn’t like I became an instant celebrity or anything. But people got so freaking excited, to a degree I had never expected. I think I’m a decent writer, I’m pretty used to people liking my stuff–but people, when they read the Padme/Sabe fics, were freaking out. They overflowed with enthusiasm, they tripped over themselves talking about how invested they were in this pairing now. Overwhelmingly, responses fell into two categories: “I’ve shipped them for years, I thought I was the only one!” or “I’ve never even considered this, but now I can’t stop.”

That’s the moment. That, right there, is the thunderbolt.

It’s why I work so much with what are, on the surface, kind of done-to-death tropes. 5+1 fics. Sith AUs. Humorously snowballing miscommunications that result in Hijinks And Shenanigans™. Dark AUs. Single-point canon divergence “what-if” fix-it fics. Coffeeshop AUs. My flagship Padme/Sabe piece is, loosely, an Arthurian mythos AU. Hell–my current project, because apparently I hate myself, has turned out to be a series of ~20k oneshots for a different Star Wars femslash pairing based on the plots and settings of Disney movies, just for fun.

Now to my credit, I do pull twists on the tropes! I adapt them, I explore variations, sometimes I subvert them entirely because some tropes are pretty unhealthy relationship models; but the fact is, my playground is tropes and AU settings. The latter is because I, as a writer, really enjoy stripping both plotlines and characters down to their core. (What are the really essential elements of this story that I can use to transplant the plot into a Galaxy Far Far Away? What are the core personality traits and features that these Star Wars characters would keep, their turn of phrase–things that will make them instantly recognizable even if they’ve been relocated to 17th-century France?) But the tropes, that’s something that for me is an integral part of why I and a lot of other people read and write femslash.

I do it for that lightning-strike sensation. That moment where someone stumbles across a Beauty and the Beast AU, or a faerie tale, or a story about defying fate to escape an arranged marriage, or something else they’ve seen a million times–except this time the protagonists are queer women, and nobody questions it, and they connect to the basic premise in a whole new way.

Sure, the characters’ love may be forbidden–but it’s forbidden for the same reasons straight people get to have forbidden love. Because one of them is a commoner, because they’re Sith and their masters are rivals. Because the Jedi Code forbids it. Not because they’re queer. Never because they’re queer.

(Mind you I’ve also written some Meg/Christine stuff, wherein the problem is ABSOLUTELY that they’re queer. There’s a place for that. But you’ll notice, if you read my Phantom of the Opera fic, that Mme. Giry figured it out ages ago and, while she might worry, she never disapproves. We face enough examples in the real world of parents rejecting their queer kids. I don’t feel a need to include it in my fic.)

And for a lot of people, these are just fun fics about their favorite pairing. That’s great in and of itself; we’re all starving and scrabbling for crumbs, and my readers are honestly the sweetest and most appreciative people I could ask for. If I just make them happy, hey, my job’s done. But every so often, I get a review or a private message and I can see that thunderbolt realization. I can see their universe opening up.

We can be fairy tales too?

We can have soulmates, these archetypal stories I grew up loving can be about me? We can change each other for the better, we can be heroes, we can be murderous self-indulgent evil-is-sexy Sith, we can be the ones charging the dragon?

We can be genre fiction–stories about assassination attempts and royal duty, intergalactic politics and Greek mythology and dramatic rescues that have nothing to do with the sexuality of the protagonists? We can just…be there because we are?

We’re allowed to do that?

That’s an option?

About the Jo:

Blog | AO3 | RP/etc

22-year-old Psychology major; cis, very white, extremely queer, terrible Cherry Coke habit. In a continuing blood feud with the continent of North America, will bore you by talking about dogs and/or various other animals if you give me half a chance, and I reject the false Star Wars/Star Trek dichotomy. Star Trek is for hope, Star Wars is for stabbing Nazis in the face, and both are Good.

#mylordshesacactus #I Am Femslash #Femslash February 2017 #Femslash February #Type: Meta #submission

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forcri · 6 years

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'They just wanted to silence her': the dark side of gay stan culture

For gay men, ‘stanning’ – being a super fan of – female pop stars can be a valuable part of your identity. But too often this fandom lapses into misogyny and body shaming

Ahead of Britney Spears’ record-breaking show at Brighton Pridethis year, Aaron Hussey noticed a fellow fan wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Spears’ nervous breakdown: the 2007 incident when, head shaved, she attacked a photographer’s car with an umbrella. “I think he thought he was being funny,” Hussey says. “He wasn’t.”

“Brightney Pride”, as it has affectionately been nicknamed, was one of the biggest events of the gay calendar – so big that 4,000 revellers were left stranded once the city’s heaving public transport system failed under the pressure. Surely only dedicated Spears “stans” – the most dedicated kind of fan, a portmanteau of “fan” and “stalker” taken from Eminem’s hit about a crazed follower – would have braved these conditions to glimpse their idol. So why the cruel taunt?

Gay male culture has always coalesced around female pop stars, from Judy Garland to Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande. Academics and critics have puzzled over the source of this connection, their often misplaced theories ranging from the outlandish to the oedipal. But gay men and the women they worship are usually happy to bask in the mutual affection. This year, Spears was honoured with an award by the US’s Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad) for promoting equality. She responded by saying the gay community had shown her “unconditional love”.

But “unconditional” is often precisely what this love is not. Scratch lightly at the surface and what flakes off is, yes, reciprocity and genuine affection, but also callous misogyny.

One theory of the gay fan-diva link is that of shared oppression – gay men and women are both ground under the wheel of hetero-patriarchy. Perhaps in that model, the Spears T-shirt could be read as a show of solidarity, a knowing acknowledgment of her pain and our understanding? But there was nothing knowing in the way another gay fan photoshopped an umbrella into his meet and greet photo with the unwitting star and later circulated it online. These actions have a distinct edge of mockery, the air of a joke that their subject is not in on.

Dr Michael Bronski, a Harvard University professor and the author of books on queer history and gay culture says “There is a long history of gay male fan culture latching onto famous women and then turning on them. Queens would come to a Judy Garland concert and then scream at her when she was too drunk to finish it. The women have changed – it’s no longer Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland. But the dynamic remains in western culture.”

The love-hate dynamic of gay stan culture that Bronski describes is now largely mediated through social media. Heckling in smoky nightclubs has been replaced by “hate memes”, when stans circulate unflattering edited pictures or examples of a star’s least-becoming behaviour, while the cheering has morphed into a lexicon of superlatives and put-downs that may seem impenetrable to the uninitiated: “we stan” favoured female pop stars, they’re “iconic”, a “kween”, an “unproblematic fave”. “She outsold” describes both someone’s commercial successes and a general sense of their superiority. Anyone who fails to meet those standards? “Fat”, “flop”, “failure”.

This online community relies on a dense matrix of references and neologisms informed by everything from drag culture to reality TV. Sami Baker is 21 and a self-professed gay stan – his favourites are Grande, Beyoncé and Charli XCX. He explains that the culture reaches further than many beyond the community might realise, citing the example of the recent avalanche of memes of reality star Gemma Collins. “They originated from gay stan Twitter. The language used within this culture is taken from the same place that Drag Race gets its lexicon, namely the underground subculture where LGBT people compete in various drag and performance categories, documented in the film Paris is Burning, and an inspiration for Madonna and Beyoncé.

For many gay men, Baker and myself included, gay pop stan culture is the distillation of everything meaningful in life. That statement reeks of camp melodrama, but it’s true. To my teenage self, women like Lady Gaga were the only light in a world where my queerness left me feeling like an outsider. As I grew up, the process of connecting my love for them with a wider culture of fandom enhanced my realisation that I was not alone as a queer person. “As I learned more about pop culture and references, that’s when I found people with the same interest,” says Baker. “These same people became my friends, my support network.”

It is hard to overestimate how meaningful the fan-diva relationship is for gay men. What is so perplexing is why this pseudo-religious devotion has always been laced with spite. Earlier this year, pop singer Hayley Kiyoko criticised Rita Ora, Cardi B, Bebe Rexha, and Charli XCX for their single Girls, a song about bisexuality that she, as a lesbian, thought was appropriative. Within hours, stan Twitter had unearthed and circulated incriminating tweets by Kiyoko from nine years ago (when she was 18) in an attempt to “cancel” her – excluding a person entirely from online discourse, except as the target of hate memes – for daring to critique a song they liked.

For Adam Byrne, a 23-year-old gay stan, this was a prime example of gay misogyny: “They didn’t care what she had to say. They just wanted to silence her.”

For him, this behaviour typifies gay stan culture: female artists must obey the rules or suffer the consequences. “A sinister side emerges when their ‘fave’ isn’t giving them exactly what they want,” Byrne explains. “Often jokes made at their expense are said in fun but it’s grim to see the joy [the community] sometimes takes in seeing these women fail: ‘She’s over!’, ‘Flop!’ ‘This era is dead!’ Look at the smug tweets about Nadine Coyle cancelling her tour; the way Katy Perry became gay Twitter’s punching bag.”

Baker says: “I’ve seen stan Twitter make jokes about the Manchester attacks, Demi Lovato’s recent overdose, Beyoncé’s skin tone, Noah Cyrus’s appearance.”

Much has been written about the “queer art of failure” – how queer people are always viewed as failures by heteronormative society, and thus must make a success of their own non-conformity. Perhaps, in this context, it’s unsurprising that gay men seem to revel in the perceived setbacks and shortcomings of their stanned subjects. But the sympathy one might expect to accompany this identification seems absent. The behaviour is less like a playful poke in the ribs, and more like a slap in the face.

Just last week, singer Marina Diamandis – an idol of the gay community – tweeted back to a fan who is part of the gay stan community after he sent her an abusive tweet. “There is a fan culture of degrading people online that I’m really not into. I haven’t been on social media a lot the past 3 months because I suffer from depression and the negative comments really affect me,” Diamandis posted. “Marina omg please don’t take it the wrong way I’m a stan and this was just intended as a harmless joke,” the fan protested. As Diamandis herself pointed out, stan culture can fail to grant humanity to the subjects of their worship.

I think they are real fans. But there is a fan culture of degrading people online that I'm really not into. I haven't been on social media a lot the past 3 months because I suffer from depression and the negative comments really affect me.

Even when gay men aren’t raining outright abuse on these women, their praise can sometimes reveal different forms of misogyny. One recent trend is to laud women by hailing them as “skinny” or a “skinny legend” – a trope that took off with a meme about Mariah Carey. Though it is used figuratively to imply flawlessness, it is revealing that a word historically used to police female physicality has naturally evolved in the gay male vernacular. Can it be anything other than chauvinist body-shaming?

Indeed, “skinniness” is just one of many hyper-feminine traits that gay men seem to prize in our stanned women. Helen Moynihan, 23, is a self-identifying queer woman who says the stanning of Ariana Grandeexemplifies precisely what is problematic about gay male idolatry. “Often I think gay men only see beauty in hyper-feminine, not butch, women,” she says. “It made me laugh when Grande was called a queer icon because she is the least queer person to me: someone who’s always trying to escape hyper-femininity.”

Grande’s blinding highlighter, swinging ponytail and heels are ubiquitous hallmarks of the gay stan hall of fame. Buzzcuts and Doc Martens are few and far between. It’s conditional love again – do we only stan the “right” type of women? Other forms of gay culture are similarly plagued by this insidious heteronormativity – men on dating apps like Grindr use refrains like “masc4masc” to praise masculinity and shun femininity in other men.

It’s important to remember that gay male culture exists at the confluence of many social currents, including wider male misogyny and societal homophobia. It is easy to apportion blame to gay men who are merely trying to find escapism and belonging, and to scapegoat behaviour that is universal. “In our culture of binary, heterosexual dysfunction, men hate women,” says Bronski. “It just so happens that some of them are gay.”

This is an important qualifier. Stanning itself is not exclusively homosexual territory – Eminem, the originator of “stan”, is hardly a queer icon. Dr Lynn Zubernis is a professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and an expert in fandom. She says the bullying behaviours found in gay stan culture are common to all fandoms.

“Because the object of a fan’s adoration becomes very important to the fan’s happiness, when there is some sort of disappointment, that brings a strong – and sometimes problematic – response. That is the dynamic behind the ‘mood swings’ you see in fandom, where fans love something one day and turn on it the next. It’s not about misogyny. It cuts across gender, sexuality, type of fandom, even time. Sports fans sometimes turn on star players in the same way. I don’t think it’s a male-female thing or a gay-straight thing. I think it’s a human thing.”

However, not all fandoms operate with the same power dynamics. In football, the vitriol Dr Zubernis uses for comparison takes on a new dimension when it intersects with racism. In gay stan culture, gender does not just occasionally intersect with online hatred – it defines the landscape. The abuse and objectification of these women is distinctly gendered – any man, gay or straight, tweeting “fat!” at a woman is unarguably misogynistic.

Gay men and pop’s women alike benefit from the mutuality of their “special relationship”. Spears is unlikely to have noticed one nasty T-shirt through the love heaped on her that day. But with gay male misogyny being discussed more widely than ever, in terms of our nightlife, queer spaces, and social movements, what does it say when this relationship is often so heartless? What kind of permissiveness are we helping to cultivate around misogyny? Deep down, do we really know what it means to love these women?

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nognosis-blog · 6 years

Photo

For this photo journal, I will be exploring heteronormativity and its consequences in U.S. society. The photos in this journal will consist of images found on the internet and taken by me. Also, some images in this journal contain harsh, homophobic language, so please be advised.

This first image I selected comes from Omaha, Nebraska, and is from a news story about a gay couple whose pride flag was burned on their front lawn. I selected this image as the first image in this journal to highlight the consequences of heteronormativity in American society. Certain factors in American culture, such as evangelical Christianity, social conservatism, and “family values” have perpetuated an anti-homosexual narrative that has taken root in this country.

This second picture is of some members of the Westboro Baptist Church. This church, located in Topeka, Kansas, is vehemently anti-LGBTQ and is very, very vocal about its beliefs. Noted for protesting at the funerals of veterans or gay people, the WBC uses derogatory signs with harsh, damning words on them to slander and belittle LGBTQ people. I included this image to illustrate the extreme side of heteronormativity and homophobia as it exists in the US.

The third image is of the homepage to Heartlight Ministries Boarding School. Heartlight Ministries is a Christian faith-based group that offers boarding schools to parents of “sinful” children. The ministry came under fire a few years ago when the relative of an actor was purportedly held against her will at one of their boarding schools due to her lesbianism. These schools are similar to other types of “pray the gay away” gay conversion therapy camps that are around the country. In these camps, non-heterosexual adolescents undergo mistreatment and psychological manipulation, often in a religious context, in attempts to change their sexual orientation to heterosexual.

The fourth image I selected depicts a parking space designated for a family vehicle. As shown, the family consists of a toddler, a father, a mother, and a baby in a carriage. This simple depiction of a family seems to suggest that a family is only one with a mother and a father. Although this image only demonstrates heteronormativity at a minor level, it is indicative of how engrained the idea of “one mother and one father” in a family is in the minds of the American people.

Picture #5 is from the New York City Pride Parade in 2017. Although toxic heteronormativity still exists in areas of the country, it seems to me personally that the general shift in attitude of the American people toward non-heterosexual sexualities is becoming one that is more favorable and tolerant. For instance, the somewhat recent Supreme Court decision ruling gay marriage legal further supports this growing wave of progressivism for LGBTQ issues in America.

This sixth image is of an advertisement that I found in the Student Insider magazine that litter campus in the beginning of each semester. The ad, for Mesa Riverview, boasts shopping, dining, and entertainment and provides images to demonstrate these opportunities. However, you’ll notice that the entertainment and dining photographs include a man and a woman sharing intimate space with one another, while the shopping photograph depicts two women, keeping their distance in what seems to be a platonic way. It is clear that here, Mesa Riverview is enforcing heteronormativity by showing two romantic heterosexual couples and one pair of platonic women.

The seventh picture is of a hat of mine that I purchased a while back. I bought this hat out of irony, for I am the most unathletic person I’ve ever met. Furthermore, I’ve always personally disapproved of the gender norm for men to play sports. I actually think that this hat parodies the hypermasculinity that is forced onto young boys by parents encouraging them to play sports. This connects with the theme of heteronormativity in the sense that it fuels gender roles for men and women, and further defines what is normal behavior for men and women.

This eighth image I think nicely summarizes how heteronormativity has become commonplace in media in the US. The magazine from which these clippings are pulled is Cosmopolitan, a tabloid/advice magazine that is heavily marketed toward women. The headlines that have been selected for this image are indicative of the typical content that Cosmo puts out: advice on how to “please your man”. Although Cosmo touts itself on being a women’s magazine, it’s clear that they have only heterosexual women in mind when publishing their magazine.

This ninth image is a still from a popular TV advertisement for Old Spice Body Wash. In the advertisement, the masculine man on the horse addresses the women in the audience, telling them that “their men” smell like ladies because they are using “lady-scented body wash”. Instead, the Old Spice man recommends Old Spice Body Wash to the men of the audience, telling them to “smell like a man, man”. This commercial is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, it assumes that all of the women in the audience that are in a romantic relationship are with men. This clearly enforces heteronormativity. Additionally, the commercial shames men who smell like women, implying that they will never have romantic relations with a woman because they smell like women.

This last image is of the various romantic couples that have been featured in Disney animated movies. These films, marketed toward young children, all feature heterosexual relationships. This also enforces heteronormativity, in this case from a young age. A common trope in these animated films is the “true love’s kiss” which can awaken maidens from eternal slumber/breathe life into that which was dead. In every single instance of these types of kisses, it always occurs between a male and female character. Another commonality in these movies is the need of a female character (i.e. “damsel in distress”) to be saved by a charming young man, which additionally reinforces the gender norms of women to be submissive and saved and men to be dominant and saviors.

Overall, heteronormativity is a pervasive issue that can really lead to cognitive dissonance and self-esteem problems for individuals who are not heterosexual. In this photo journal, I briefly provided some examples of where heteronormativity is created and perpetuated in my personal experience. As our country progresses, it is my most sincere hope that tolerance for all sexualities and genders will be widespread.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLeglXMucy4

https://www.heartlightministries.org/

https://hoochiewoman.wordpress.com/2016/11/05/terms-you-should-know-5-heteronormativity/

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-hit-streets-louder-march-pride-parade-article-1.3276700

http://feministguidetohollywood.blogspot.com/2010/02/old-spice-makes-fun-of-gender.html

http://emharsch.blogspot.com/2013/12/heteronormativity-in-frozen.html

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