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pandasmagorica · 10 months

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Happy endings, sad endings

Sometimes endings are happy. Sometimes endings are sad. Sometime they are bittersweet. And sometimes they are open, ambiguous.

Some people are okay with sad or open endings. Others are not.

The main driver of this post is the impending ending of By My Favorite this coming Friday. I'm posting this on Tuesday, August 8, and the finale is Friday, August 11.

This post has partial spoilers for 3 Will Be Free (through the end of the series), 55:15 Never Too Late (ditto), Bad Buddy (ditto), Secret Crush on You (ditto), Be My Favorite (through the end of episode 11), and miscellaneous queer films and plays, as seen through the lens of someone who is watching Be My Favorite for the first time and has years of queer media watching behind him.

There is some current angst in the Be My Favorite discussion that it could have a sad ending, that is, that Kawi will die. We don't know for sure this will happen. It looks bad. It looks so bad that Pisaeng desperately tries the crystal globe and is rewarded with a trip to the past. The mystery uncle who seems to know everything there is to know about time travel says you can go back in time and change your actions, but you can't change fate. So, the series could still end with Kawi's death at a relatively young age, in his late 20s.

It could also be open-ended where we spend all of episode 12, the finale, in the past and we never find out what happens seven years later.

The point is, it's looking like we're not going to get an unambiguously happy ending.

And I'm okay with that.

I love happy endings. And I think we are getting enough of them that we can tolerate a sad ending now and then.

As I mention in my Tumblr intro post, I'm an older queer cis dude. When I was in college I saw the plays Boys in the Band and Fortune and Men's Eyes on stage. Both present sad pictures of gay male life. Even if nobody died (in Band, don't remember for Fortune), I can't really say that either one presented a happy ending.

When I was coming out in my late 20's, I saw various gay-themed films of the time (from what I can remember) Sebastiane (martyrdom), The Consequence (disappearance), The Children's Hour (suicide), This Special Friendship (suicide), The Music Lovers (suicide or murder), Death in Venice (death from disease), That Certain Summer (rejection by the son), Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (multiple murders), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (happy ending for the straight couple, death for the homosexual), Fox and His Friends (financial ruin), El diputado (don't remember, but I think it wasn't happy), Deathtrap (the gay characters supposedly kill each other), Taxi Zum Klo (gay teacher shows up drunk in class), Making Love (couple splits but one gets a new relationship), La Cage aux Folles (I think this one ends with the conservative in-laws accepting the gay couple parents), and Personal Best (one of a same-sex couple ends up in a straight relationship).

Gay characters were showing up in non-gay films as well, but didn't always end well. For example, in Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980), there is a gay character who dies. It happens in the middle and is not the focus of the film, but that was common for the time. @absolutebl calls this "Kill the Gays".

There were happy endings for gay characters in film, more and more as time went on, but it wasn't until I moved to San Francisco and started attending the Frameline film festival that I started seeing happy endings regularly. Nowadays there are so many happy endings to gay films that I don't mind the occasional unhappy one.

My lesbian bestie says happy endings for lesbians are few and far between. Heterosexual Jill is a good one.

Okay, lets do some time travel back before I started watching gay and gay-adjacent content.

When studying queer film history casually, I saw Mädchen in Uniform (Germany, 1931) which had an attempted suicide which was averted. But things changed, at least in the US, with the implementation for the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hayes Code, from 1934 to 1968. This required banning on-screen representation of homosexuality, and all extramarital sex had to be shown as unattractive and illicit. Homosexuality became coded, hidden. There was a gay-positive reference at the end of Some Like it Hot (1959), but that film was denied a seal of approval. However, since the code was technically voluntary, it got distributed anyway and was a hit. (Sadly, I didn't like it when I saw it as part of the same study series.)

Okay, so now we move to QL. Thai QL apparently started with the same trend of unhappy endings (Love of Siam and the gay part of Dew the Movie, for instance). But nowadays we get mostly happy endings, particularly on GMMTV.

Some argue whether Bad Buddy has a happy ending. Pat and Pran are together, but officially have to keep their relationship a secret, even though their parents actually know. I argue it is a qualified happy ending, as they are together and happy, if not fully open.

Secret Crush on You has happy endings for not only the gay couples, including femme characters, but also for the non-binary/trans character.

We are also getting some mixed endings in queer-adjacent series.

55:15 Never Too Late leaves a straight teacher dead and the gay character alone (but, I argue, more at peace with his current fate and the opportunity to move forward now that he knows he is loveable). The other straight characters have a chance at happiness but it remains to be seen if they will achieve it. Also, the gay character's 15 year old love interest is left alone, not knowing why the 15 year old he loved disappeared. Hopefully, he has a chance at happiness as well. I'd call it a slice of life open ending.

3 Will Be Free leaves our 3 lead characters safe. The gay character appears to no longer be part of the throuple, but this was the least of his worries during most of the series. The trans character has lost both of the men who she loved and who accepted her unconditionally, and has had experiences which will likely haunt her for the rest of her life, but has gotten closure and affirmed her identity. So I'd call the ending mixed.

So, let's get back to some possible not-so-happy endings for Be My Favorite (thanks to @twig-tea for some episode 12 speculation:

Pisaeng's trip to the past does not result in Kawi surviving. (Kawi may even say he's okay with this.)

Pisaeng breaks up with Kawi so as not to ever infect him.

Pisaeng waits until he is about to be sick then leaves Kawi temporarily so as not to infect him. (Least time away from Kawi but also least dramatic. And if it's fate that Kawi dies it may not help.)

Pisaeng and Kawi wear masks once Pisaeng realizes he's getting sick. (Okay, this one is even less dramatic but I can't believe in the age of COVID they didn't think of that, even if the series doesn't seem to acknowledge that 2020-2022 was treated by most of the world as an epidemic. Not sure whether Thailand is as mask-positive as Hong Kong although I have noticed some masks in various Behind the Scenes videos.) But it's too late and Kawi gets sick and dies anyway.

Let's face it. We have Schroedinger's ending. It's already been edited and in the can (well, on the hard drive). Whatever we will see on Friday has already been ordained: happy, sad, mixed, open, ambiguous.

But we've had enough happy endings for gay characters that if this one's sad, then bring it on. I'll be sad, but not mad as long as they set it up.

And it would be nice to see happy endings for trans and lesbian characters as well.

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hellomynameisbisexual · 4 years

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Let’s talk about the B in LGBTQ. A recent CDC poll found that 5.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men aged 18-44 identify as bisexual, which is significantly higher than the percentage of women and men who identify as lesbian/gay (1.3 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively). Even many people who don’t identify as bi have swung both ways at least once: 17.4 percent of women and 6.3 percent of men age 18-44 surveyed have had some same-sex contact.

Yet we don’t hear all that much about bi rights. But bisexual people still face discrimination, often from unexpected sources. Here are just a few of them.

Mental Health Professionals

YouTube vlogger Connor Manning recounted an awful encounter with a therapist who told him that he isn’t really bisexual. Instead of offering him proper treatment, the therapist spent a half hour trying to convince him not to call himself bi.

About the incident, Connor says,

What if I was someone who was freshly questioning their sexuality? …For a lot of people, especially those seeking help for their mental health, these things are an issue and they’re confusing and scary. To have someone who’s supposed to be a resource I can trust, someone I can open up to, try and invalidate my identity was really deeply sad to me. I also talked to a few people about it after the fact and they told me that this is something that happens all the time, unfortunately.

Research confirms this. A 2007 study published by Columbia University Press found that more than a quarter of therapists assumed their bisexual clients needed therapy for their sexuality. About a sixth saw bisexuality as a symptom of mental illness. Seven percent of therapists in the study tried to convert their bisexual clients to heterosexuality; 4 percent tried to turn their bisexual clients gay or lesbian.

Unfortunately, the misconception that bisexuality isn’t a real, unique sexual identity is very common. It’s so common that bi rights activists have an expression for it: bi erasure. Bi erasure is pretty much what it sounds like: Insisting that bisexuality isn’t real and that bisexuals are “really” just confused straight or gay people.

Faith Cheltenham of BiNet USA says that bisexuality is often subsumed under ‘gay’, but in reality “being gay is as different from being straight as being bi is. It’s not being half straight, half gay… you’re going to have a completely different life cycle experience from your gay peers.”

A young bisexual person going through that unique life cycle might feel lonely and confused and seek a therapist for help. If that therapist just turns around and tries to suppress their sexuality, it’s devastating.

What’s especially alarming about this is the fact that bisexuals (especially bisexual women) suffer from mental health problems at a higher rate than the rest of the population. They need help more often, but they’re less likely to get it if they have to fight uphill just to have their sexuality acknowledged as real.

Immigration Officials

Since 1994, United States immigration policies have recognized persecution for LGBTQ status as grounds for asylum. However, it’s not always easy for bisexual people to gain asylum. In correspondence with Unicorn Booty, Apphia Kumar, a bi rights activist, wrote that Immigration officers aren’t properly trained to handle bisexual asylum seekers, and often don’t understand it. “They have the incorrect perception that bisexuality is a choice or can be hidden in the face of persecution or that our identities depend on the gender of our partners.”

Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit denied a bisexual Jamaican man asylum on the grounds that the man wasn’t “really” bisexual. Why not? Because he was married to a woman, even though he had dated men before and had been repeatedly assaulted for having sex with men.

Claiming that someone isn’t “really” bisexual because they’re currently an opposite-sex relationship is like claiming that someone isn’t really bilingual because they only speak one language at a time. It’s a ridiculous attitude based on broken logic. But immigration officials, even well-meaning ones, reinforce this misconception. Via email, Kumar noted that immigration lawyers often don’t understand bisexuality or they don’t consider it strong enough for an asylum claim, so “to increase the chances of someone getting asylum, they advise the asylum seeker to apply as gay or lesbian. This in fact increases the trauma of invisibility and doesn’t allow us to be our true selves in the long run.”

Their Partners

Bisexual people face a higher rate of intimate partner violence than straight or gay people. According to a 2010 survey by the CDC, a staggering 61 percent of bisexual women are raped, physically abused and/or stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetimes, compared to 44 percent of lesbians and 35 percent of heterosexual women.

Bisexual men face unusually high rates of domestic violence as well: The number is 37 percent of bisexual men, compared to 26 percent of gay men and 29 percent of heterosexual men. Interestingly, the majority of this violence is coming from an opposite-sex partner. Ninety percent of bisexual women report being abused only by a male partner, and 79 percent of bisexual men report being abused by female partners.

Why is the rate so high? LGBTQ-rights activists say it comes from cultural stereotypes that paint bisexual people as immoral and undependable. Queer activist Lola Davidson writes, “A big factor of violence towards bisexuals comes from the oversexualization of bisexuality in the media and pornography. Bisexuals are often portrayed as very promiscuous and morally-ambiguous, often cheating on their partners or threatening their identity in some way.”

Stephanie Farnsworth also believes that anti-bisexual domestic violence comes from insecurity and fear of infidelity. She writes, “Checking through messages, demanding that no alone time is spent with a person of any gender and isolating one from friends suddenly becomes the norm because bisexuality is still read as wanting to have sex with anyone and everyone even though this disregards the logic that no one would ever expect a heterosexual person to fancy everyone of a different gender to them.”

We can find an example in this in the allegedly abusive relationship between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and the media’s trashy response to it. Gossip rags suggested that Depp’s violence stemmed from Heard’s bisexuality, that he was afraid she would cheat on him with a woman.

Sadly, when bisexuals are abused, they might not have anywhere to go for help. At a Bisexual Community Issues Roundtable at the White House, one bi survivor of intimate partner violence told a heartbreaking story about being rejected by a battered women’s shelter:

The shelter staff told me I didn’t belong there, that they only served women abused by male partners. They referred me to a new gay community anti-battering project. That group also turned me away, saying that I was bisexual, not gay, so they couldn’t help me. What I felt too angry and defeated to say back then was, “Why can’t services be designed with bisexuals in mind? If we design services sensitive to bisexuals, they end up being responsive to both heterosexual and gay people, too, don’t they?”

The Media

Unfortunately, the media does a lot to reinforce negative stereotypes about bisexuality.

On television and in film, bisexual characters are usually portrayed as schemers, manipulators, and hedonists. Depraved bisexuals are so common in fiction that they even have their own TV Tropes entry. Here are just a few well-known examples from the list of evil, unhinged, monstrous bisexual characters:

Obviously, it’s not inherently wrong to portray a bisexual character as a bad person. But it’s a problem when an overwhelming number of dramas associate bisexuality with evil.

That Depraved Bisexual trope mostly applies to male characters. Female bisexuality is often presented as a performance meant to titillate men, or a way for a woman to sow her wild oats before settling down and having a “real” relationship with a man. The Daily Beast writes:

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to unpack the appeal of this falsified narrative of bisexuality. The concept of a bisexual or lesbian woman who needs to be “saved” from her own sexuality is essentially a revamping of the classic damsel in distress narrative, with the male character’s conquering masculinity cast in the role of hero. The character of the bisexual woman offers the potential for a killer combination of girl-on-girl action paired with the possibility of heterosexual redemption.

But it’s not all bad. We’ll always have Darryl, the goofy, paté-loving boss on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Non-fiction isn’t much better than entertainment media. Bi erasure abounds here, as news publications and biographers have a hard time acknowledging that bisexuality even exists. Many real-life bisexuals, past and present, end up referred to as either straight or gay. When actress Amber Heard announced that she had a girlfriend at a GLAAD event in 2010, the press called her a lesbian.

When actress Anna Paquin discussed her marriage to actor Stephen Moyer, Larry King asked her some really clueless questions:

King: “Are you a non-practicing bisexual?”

Paquin: “Well, I am married to my husband and we are happily monogamously married.”

King: “But you were bisexual?”

Paquin: “Well, I don’t think it’s a past-tense thing.”

Larry King: “No?”

Larry King, syndicated talk show host, holds a weirdly common misconception that bisexuality means constantly having sex with men and women simultaneously.

The LGBTQ Community

The queer community treats bisexuals like a redheaded stepchild. Gays and lesbians often have the same negative attitude toward bisexuality that straight people do. A survey published in the The Journal of Bisexuality found that bisexual people receive only a little less discrimination from gays than they do from straights.

Bisexuals make up about half of the queer community and have always played a significant role in the LGBTQ rights movement, but they receive disproportionately little support in return. In Forty Years of LGBTQ Philanthropy: 1970-2010, Funders for LGBTQ Issues reports that bisexuals receive the least amount of funding out of all targeted LGBTQ sub-groups, less than 0.1 percent. Gay men received the most funding.

Back in 1999, Dan Savage told gay men not to get into relationships with bisexual men. Savage has softened toward bisexuals since then and insists he’s not biphobic, but in a more recent thinkpiece, he totally dismissed the concept of biphobia and suggested that bisexuals were to blame for discrimination against them because they weren’t out enough. Savage also wrote that it is “difficult for me to accept a bisexual teenage boy’s professed sexual identity at face value.” That’s not very different from clueless straight people who think that gay teens are just going through a phase. Coming out as bi is hard enough without getting shade from the people who are supposed to be your allies.

Bi people have to fight to make their voices heard in the queer rights movement. When they express their sexuality, they are often met with hostility. Bi activist RJ Aguiar says that when he wore his #StillBisexual shirt to the 2016 LA Pride Parade, he was “met with a lot of silent, sideways looks, and even the occasional remark like, ‘What are you doing here? This isn’t for you. Go home.’ “

Telling a bisexual person that they’re not welcome at an LGBTQ Pride Event is appalling. The queer community has to do better, and stop trying to chase the B out of LGBTQ.

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itcameuponamidnightqueer · 4 years

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2019 is over and i have feelings

it’s the end of the year and this is mostly filled with rambling half-thoughts, but that’s what you do at the end of the year—you reflect and ramble until it almost turns into something. this is under a read more only because i don’t like clogging up people’s dashes with really long posts, so you know, skip or read at your own leisure.

i don’t really ever do any kind of reflecting that doesn’t come out in the form of fanfiction. i have some feelings, i write a few thousand words about them, i throw them out into the world, and that’s it. i’ll reread my own stuff but i never really think again about what prompted me to write them because it’s over. the feelings are done but the words are memories and that’s all i need, usually.

but 2019 was a tough year in ways that i can’t express in fic, so i’ll just throw out a few thousand personal words and be done with it.

in september of 2018, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and i don’t think i’ve really been happy since. most of it isn’t being sad about the diagnosis—maybe a lot of it is and i just need a whole heap of therapy to unpack that—but rather how much the cancer changed. it was very advanced when they caught it and she’s made almost a complete recovery in just over a year, and given how shitty everything was to start, this is the best way a bad situation could have ended. not that it’s over, but you know.

it shifted our family completely. i don’t think it brought us closer, maybe my sister or my parents feel differently, but i don’t. morgie turned inward for maybe the first time in her life and kept us at arm’s length in the beginning. she told us very clearly that she didn’t want the cancer to take over her whole life—she wanted us to act normal and talk about normal things as if this was just a temporary snag.

i’ve had epilepsy since i was fifteen months old. i know what it feels like to do that same thing, to minimize and downplay the experience of a chronic condition. because my epilepsy has, gratefully, been very manageable. i can count on one hand the number of seizures i remember having. i have an annual checkup with a neurologist, she confirms the dosage of my meds, and i say goodbye. that’s it, no problem, see you next year.

(it could be so much worse, they say. you’re very lucky, you hear for twenty nine years.

i am not lucky.)

morgan’s cancer kind of opened the flood gates, i think, and a whole heap of shit came spilling out. you know how you see those posts on here about ADHD or autism and a few captions down the line someone is always like, “wait, you mean not everyone [is like this] or [does that]?” i feel like i’m just coming to realize that about my childhood.

not everyone takes days off of school to go to the children’s hospital—for an EEG, or an MRI, or to get blood drawn, etc. “normal” seven-year-olds probably aren’t managing their own prescriptions. my condition is less severe than many others’ but that doesn’t mean it’s normal. it’s certainly not. i’ve always understood “it’s manageable” to mean “it’s not traumatic”, and only now am i realizing that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

and all of a sudden, this thing that i’ve been living with for so long, that i thought i had under control, is rearing back with a vengeance. and because i have been taught to be grateful for the “best” of a bad situation, because its mildness has turned it into something we don’t talk about, i draw inward and it festers and rots into shame. i’ve been operating like this since i was a kid and i think maybe i’ve finally hit capacity.

on top of that, i’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis. i seem to do that every few years—five years ago as ace, four years ago as nonbinary—and i guess it’s time for another one. tbh it’s kind of been scraping at the back of my brain ever since i realized i was nonbinary, because even that didn’t feel like enough, but i didn’t know what would.

i’ve said it in a few posts over the years (probably somewhere in both of the linked ones), but i personally really like labels. i spend so much of my time with myself (physically, sure, but i mean emotionally) and very rarely ever share things out loud, so how can i know who i am if i don’t find the right words? gay was good to start. ace fit in later, and then eventually it was just queer. and it will probably stay queer, but there are different parts of my queerness that i haven’t named yet, and the ambiguity is making me itch.

i’ve had this post sitting in my likes for about a week now—i identify with it too much to ignore, but it scares me too much to reblog it, and also i don’t want to until i can explain my feelings and fears. transness feels like something i’ve been hiding from for a while—not in a repulsive way. more like that “i’m in this photo and i don’t like it” meme. that thread encapsulates a lot of what i’ve been thinking about and struggling with for a few months: that i don’t feel trans ~enough, but i also don’t feel not-trans.

everything i’ve been thinking about feels like i’m quibbling with myself over something really small, like how much of a difference would it really make to think of myself as trans...instead of? along with? being nonbinary; why is this a detail i’ve been obsessing over. everything i said in the nb post is still true, except my concept of gender has changed a little since i wrote it. i don’t feel like a woman and i don’t feel like a man, except i also don’t think gender means anything, even when presented as two binary options, so what do i really know? how do i know i’m not a man if i think “man” means nothing?

and i really am thinking about it in the smallest of terms—headcanon-ing characters as trans, feeling drawn to the trans flag over any others. it’s really dumb, that this is what’s triggering a bit of gay panic. what does it matter, i keep asking myself. i’ve seen posts over the years breaking down the stripes of each flag, pointing out that nb/genderqueer identities are already represented, and i wish that were enough but it’s not. it’s so dumb, i keep thinking, to see myself in the whole of the trans flag when i don’t think i belong to the whole transgender experience. and even that sounds dumb, when i hear it—of course there isn’t one whole transgender experience. i hear it, but i haven’t yet listened.

anyway. all of this and a lot of other things have been broiling and rotting inside of me for my whole life probably. i’ve literally never said any of this out loud, to friends or family or strangers. i’ve worn that like a badge since high school—isn’t it admirable, how i can talk and laugh and live without dumping my problems on anyone else. isn’t it better to be accommodating, to keep your burdens from weighing other people down? only you don’t realize until later how tiresome it is to be heavy.

now that i have all of my fics moved over to AO3, i’ve been thinking about all that i’ve written over the years. it’s just shy of 730k. that’s more than the first five harry potter novels combined, and i’ve never told anyone in my life about it. that’s twelve years and so much of me to keep to myself. but i’ve done it because that’s kind of what i learned to do—my epilepsy was my first and most guarded secret and along the way i guess i learned to do that with everything. it doesn’t help that so many of my interests have been things that are either solitary or a source of “shame”. most of my friends i know through various social media sites. i’ve had this tumblr for nine years and the only people who know about it are other tumblr users. there is so much more of me than a few hundred thousand words hanging around this garbage dump.

i don’t know if there are any conclusions here. 2019 was rough, for even more reasons than i’ve barfed into this post. i’m not sure if i’ve learned anything from it; i don’t feel wiser or anything. i feel tired and mostly sad. i wish i could snap my fingers and resolve everything, but if i could do that, i’d already have done it. on top of everything, these are probably my last few months in chicago for a while, but that’s a whole other mountain of feelings to unpack.

anyway, i’m going into 2020 determined to get over myself, maybe find a therapist and a good masseuse.

happy new year.

#me #my back and my brain: the two things i take the least care of #where's that kristen wiig 'and i'm a huge fucking mess' gif when you need it #this came out more maudlin than i intended but #there you go

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gascon-en-exil · 5 years

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Lords and their Knights: When FE Chivalry Goes Gay

@mwritesink prompted me to write about my favorite tropes in FE and how they evolved over the course of the series. I already crossed a few others off in an earlier post, but this one is a particular favorite of mine where M/M romance in this series is concerned and one I felt had enough examples to constitute a piece of its own. Let it not be said that this is merely the gay variation on the well-worn heterosexual romance trope of a lady and her knight (ex. Eirika/Seth), because negotiating the fundamental power imbalance in this type of relationship takes on different dimensions when both parties are male. I draw a closer comparison to courtly love, which in the traditional sense is also socially transgressive (being adulterous) and not consummated via marriage or other public means...which in FE terms means an S support and possibly a eugenics baby. A vassal in love with his lord rather than his lord’s wife is not only cutting the female intermediary out of what can already be a very homoromatic scenario, but it’s directly tangling together a kind of martial romantic love and ideas about what knighthood/vassalage even is or ought to be - two topics FE loves to explore. I’ve therefore compiled a few of the most notable examples of this trope across the series to talk about in more detail, because if one is willing to be liberal with subtext there’s surprisingly quite a few to pick from.

(And yeah, this is also in part because I like hot rich men who take orders, and this series already has plenty of gay or otherwise ambiguously non-straight mages, thieves, archers, and their ilk without my help.)

The Sad Gay Knight: Quan/Finn

This one I’ve talked about before in a fair amount of depth, from my hopes for how a Genealogy remake will treat Finn to speculation on just what Quan got out of this relationship besides a devoted retainer and (we may assume) a nice piece of ass. The summary here is that Finn’s love for Quan supersedes anything he’s shown to feel for any of the various women he can hook up with and quite frankly astonishes in its ramifications for the future of Leonster and Thracia as a whole. It’s poignant, adulterous (but Ethlyn’s probably ok with it?), and messy as all hell once you factor in whatever’s up with Glade and whatever Lachesis wasn’t feeling about the whole situation. It is also, naturally, very sad; Finn loses his lord when he’s only around eighteen, and with their kingdom collapsing around him and the entire continent consumed by war he dedicates the next twenty years of his life to raising Quan’s son to be the king Quan himself had wanted to be. And for all his labor he apparently derives no lasting satisfaction, spending his epilogue wandering around the Yied desert and at last returning only to (possibly) pen the history he’s helped to make.

Finn is the embodiment of knighthood loyal unto and beyond death, and that paired with all the romantic and erotic subtext surrounding the two of them - Finn as Quan’s treasured favorite, his catatonia after Yied, the obsessive polishing of the brave lance that Quan gave to him, his inability to satisfy women in some vague way - makes them the defining example of this trope in Fire Emblem. I look forward to seeing how remakes will handle them; Finn’s presentation in Heroes is definitely cause for hope there. As for the issue of yet another story in media of gay men beset by tragedy and death, I did draw up a long headcanon on the technically crack pairing of Diarmuid/Tristan that specifically plays into the lord and knight trope while also allowing Finn a chance to pass his experiences on to a later, happier generation. IS is free to take notes, just saying.

Pretty Blond Twinks and the Men Who Love Them: Perceval/Elffin and their lasting influence

Moving on from Jugdral, I’ve got to say that I’ve really been sleeping on the original gay Elibean duo. Before Raven and Lucius (but chronologically after, because these games are out of order) there was another feminine young man with long blond hair beloved of a severe-looking warrior. Binding Blade gives us the bard Elffin, who in another life was Etruria’s Prince Mildain and Perceval’s liege. The Knight General takes Mildain’s alleged accidental death about as well as Finn takes the death of his lord and lady; he turns grim and humorless, and without a dying dream to guide him he follows the command of the corrupt revolutionary faction of Etruria with little protest. It takes learning that Mildain is alive and in Roy’s army for Perceval to drop the halfhearted Camus routine and switch sides, and the strength of his fealty not to his nation or even to his king but to the prince he’d thought dead is absolutely touching in the moment not to mention incredibly useful since the guy is one of FE6′s best units.

Binding Blade doesn’t give anyone but Roy and his harem paired endings, but there’s still a fair bit to be gleaned from their support lines, both what is in them and what isn’t. Perceval and Elffin each have supports with women, but nothing remotely romantic - Perceval’s support with Larum is particularly amusing since he clarifies that her, ahem, dancing does nothing for him. Also worth noting is that neither of them can support with Clarine, even though one would think they’d make fine romantic choices for her given their statuses and physical resemblances to her beloved brother. Their own support line is quietly intimate. Elffin has changed since his near-death experience, and Perceval is still struggling to accept that their relationship can’t be as it was, that in fact for the time being they can’t now be a knight and his prince. Perceval also frets over Elffin’s refusal to see his father the king, and he later extracts a promise from Elffin to come home to Etruria after he’s done traveling the world as a bard, in one of the series’s several instances of writing what sounds like a marriage proposal in ambiguous terms. Per Elffin’s ending, he’s only gone for a few months after the war, so their promised reunion isn’t long delayed. I’m interested to see what a remake would add to their relationship, because as it stands Perceval/Elffin has an established romance arc that deserves a paired ending or at the very least more suggestive epilogues.

Further compounding their underrated signficance, it’s not too difficult to trace a line from Perceval/Elffin to a number of other M/M pairings in the two later GBA games and in Tellius that present some variation on this theme:

As mentioned above, Raven/Lucius is physically similar and performs a nearly identical gameplay function, with the pretty blond waif again responsible for recruiting his surly but protective boyfriend from the ranks of the enemy.

Gerik/Joshua meanwhile borrows the character of the end of their support line and turns it into a genuine paired ending, with a prince incognito recruiting a swordsman to come work for him. They being who they are however, it’s all handled a bit rougher, with Gerik being impressed by Joshua’s “swagger.” Take that as you will.

Ike/Soren may be the defining seme/uke dynamic in Tellius’s overflowing fount of queer subtext, but Tibarn/Reyson smashes that trope together with this one and FE’s power couple unit archetype plus a dash of whatever the avian equivalent of furries is for wholly unique results. Although both of them are technically royalty, only Reyson is a prince by heredity whereas Tibarn presumably became king of Phoenicis by beating the crap out of any rival contenders as most laguz prefer to do. One can therefore read shades of a courtly relationship in Tibarn’s decision to zealously take up the cause of justice for the Serenes massacre in Reyson’s place. Combine this with Reyson’s characteristic edge that even Tibarn is forced to rein in at times and their relationship comes off as surprisingly more egalitarian than the sum of its parts. Oh yeah, and blond waif dancer + premade OP unit with ludicrous physical stats and movement again.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the conflict of the Tellius games Zelgius -> Sephiran explores what would happen if a gay Camus archetype chose instead to dedicate himself to an antagonistic lord. Sure, you can still recruit Sephiran via a convoluted and unintuitive process, but Zelgius is doomed no matter what.

They Can Say It, But They Can’t Do It: Awakening and Fates

Ugh. If I must....

I’ve made no secret of my ambivalence toward FE13 dragging the series into open acknowledgement that same-sex attraction is a thing that exists, handled as it was with a lot of explicit homoerotic denial and an assortment of cheap gay panic jokes and...whatever the hell Victor and Vincent are supposed to be. Chrom/Frederick, hot though it may potentially be in fanon, is one of those jokes, making a parody out of a knight enamored of his lord and leaving it to mean absolutely nothing since Awakening’s relationship endgame is invariably S supports for time traveling eugenics babies. FE has taken cracks at the overly dedicated knight before - see just about everything involving Kieran from Tellius, up to and including his overzealous devotion to his superior officer - but Awakening plumbs the depths of Frederick expecting Chrom’s nude image to raise the army’s morale. Just..what do you even say to that, apart from the awkward sputtering that comprises most of their support line?

FE14, for all its stumbling steps toward something less completely offensive, fares little better in this particular regard. Leo/Niles is a deeply troubled albeit thought-provoking callback to the subtextual lord/knight relationship, one where it’s hard to imagine them finding a healthy way to navigate the power differential. Then there’s Ryoma/Saizo. It’s nothing special in localization, but the never-localized festival DLC involves Saizo’s ardent desire to warm Ryoma’s clothing in his cleavage. That sounds like absolutely normal behavior for a servant and not a rehash of Frederick’s shenanigans, uh huh. Fates may indeed be said to be slightly better about playing palpable homoerotic tension for drama rather than comedy...but only slightly.

Paving the Way for an OT3: The Deliverance

This is, incidentally, yet another reason to appreciate Echoes for doing so much to redeem the 3DS games in the realm of (male) queer content. Yes, there’s a large and unaddressed divide between the openly gay and very modern Leon and the heavily subtextual faux-historical queerness of the Deliverance, but taken independently the two presentations work for what they’re each separately aiming to be. Among Clive’s gay entourage are not one but two men who’d dearly love to be the knight to his lord, and Forsyth’s strong desire to put Clive on a pedestal evokes the earlier spoofs of this kind of relationship precisely because Forsyth is that kind of vassal, the kind that would read Ribald Tales of the Faith War and cry like a heavily erect virgin bottom getting his first taste of dick at the brief interludes of tender manly love between Quan and Finn. He’s played for comedy just as much as Kieran or Frederick are, and yet Echoes comes across as less down on the concept as a whole for several reasons, being that

1) Python’s snark over Forsyth’s attraction to both Clive and Lukas is genuinely funny, much more so than when it’s the object of these affections quietly groaning his way through them,

2) Lukas is also there, and his desire to be Clive’s beloved knight is not played for comedy at all but is allowed to be unrealistic and unsatisfying because Clive will never get it,

3) everyone wants to screw Clive for some reason, not just his subordinates but also his sister and the estranged BFF who dies in his arms...and the guy is shown to be unworthy of all of them, and

4) all the characters involved are allowed other avenues for romantic attraction outside of a lord who’s just not that into them. Forsyth has Python, Lukas has both of them as friends and possibly more later, Clair has Gray (...at least he’s not her brother?), and Fernand has a bad rebound that goes to hell in the manner of Zelgius and Sephiran but at least ends with him getting to reconcile with his former friend before he dies.

The setup for the Deliverance’s overarching queerness is a bit strange as it rests on all these characters somehow finding Clive attractive, but nonetheless it makes for an unexpected and refreshing critique of the lord and knight trope, given a situation where the lord just isn’t that into it and in fact doesn’t seem to realize that he can be into it. It’s a good reminder that this isn’t a particularly good dynamic for a stable and lasting relationship, and that as hot as it can be it takes more than impassioned one-way devotion to make it work in the long term.

The good news if you’re into this kind of relationship like I am is that it’s a trope with some life in it yet. Echoes came at it strong, and prerelease information on Three Houses suggests a few possibilities for this dynamic in that game. I’m especially keeping my eye on Dimitri and Dedue, whose relationship appears to contain echoes of the original duo of Quan and Finn. I highly doubt there will be anything on the level of S supports acknowledging this type of attraction, but I’ll settle for some suggestive A supports.

#Fire Emblem

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