Ayo the definitions for Camilo Madrigal on Urban Dictionary are so fucked like who writes this shit. 👀

But then again, I can’t say I’m surprised, because after all this is 1) Camilo Madrigal, and 2) Urban Dictionary we’re talking about here.

I saw you mentioned Queer As Folks recently. OMG how I missed Brian and Justin. When they went angst, they reeeeeaaaally served angst. I seriously don't have access to watch the entire series in my country, I can only watch snippets from youtube. I'm so sad 😭 Can you share with me what you like most about QaF and maybe if you have your favorite Ao3 fics about them. Thank you so much, Key ❤

Aaahhh, Anon!

You've unsurfaced some deep memories.

Okay, I just finished writing the thesis below. I'm back from the future. A lot of what you're about to read is pure emotion, so I apologize that it's not, uh. Well structured or especially rational. Queer as Folk was very formative for me, so my thoughts on it are very formless. \:D/

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I watched Queer as Folk in high school, and it was a core experience. I vaguely remember writing Brian/Justin fic, but I think I mainly just read, and unfortunately, all of the fic I read was on LiveJournal, so I have no idea how to find it anymore. I'm really, really bad with names and titles, so I'd really only know them if I saw them again. :')

I have hot takes, though!

As far as fandom goes, the US version was phenomenal. So much fic. So much fic, and I loved it so much. The fanvids, the art, the meta, etc. It was such a great fandom.

BUT as a show, I preferred the UK version. I thought it was better crafted, the story and characters felt a lot stronger, and the dialogue was fantastic. It felt more inclusive in every way, and it had this…cozy warmth to it. Even at his worst, Stuart is nowhere near as much of a menace as Brian, and I think that's because he has Vince, and Brian has Michael.

(I didn't like Michael. At all. \:D/ The actor is lovely! I just regularly pined for the character to be pushed through a nineteenth floor window and then get stepped on by an elephant tourist visiting family at the Pittsburgh Zoo.)

The US version also screamed Written by White Cis Gay Men Who Held a Weird Grudge Against Lesbians and Didn't Believe Bisexuality Is Real. I was a "definitely straight except for that one time and that other time and that other other time I had suspiciously queer thoughts and also argued a shade too passionately about queer rights at the dinner table" teenager, and while I loved Brian and Justin as a ship, the UK version made me feel like I could find friends who'd feel like family one day. (And it came true, and they're queer, too.)

I think of the US version of Queer as Folk as fandom fodder. After every episode, I'd dive into LiveJournal, read fics, meta, look up fanvids, etc. I learned so much from Elder Queers who talked about safe sex and the importance of getting tested and all the things either referenced in the show or totally ignored that Elder Queers were like, "This was ignored but if you're ever in Justin's situation, here is what you do, please promise you'll do this."

The UK version is the one I rewatch when I want to revisit that warm, safe feeling.

And it'll always fuck my brain up that the US showrunners of Queer as Folk watched Stuart fuck a fifteen-year-old that was blatantly framed as "this is a bad thing, Stuart is doing a bad thing, everyone is aware that this is a bad thing, this is very bad, Stuart" and thought, "Okay, the bad thing is that he's fifteen, so let's age him up to seventeen and make him the love interest instead of the best friend who's the same age."

MIND. BLOWN.

I mean, it explains why Michael's all [evocative hand gestures]. His English counterpart actually ended up with his hot Irish best friend. And, like, Vince is obsessed with Dr. Who, so they gave Michael comic books? Like? Why not Star Trek? And he's obsessed with Brian and has the same soul-destroying crush that Vince has on Stuart, but there's a point to Vince's crush on Stuart the point is that they end up together and Nathan is a high school boy who is genuinely meant to be a blip on the radar in the background of their story.

It's been long enough that I don't hate Michael anymore, I'm just still fascinated by CowLip's bizarre story decisions.

Here's how I'll summarize my complicated relationship with the US version of Queer as Folk:

Season five was an insult to me personally, and I never watched the last episode. That stupid ending reversed all five seasons of Brian's character arc and landed him exactly where he was in the first episode, only multiple years older. And CowLip talked about it like it was brilliant and not a pathological misunderstanding of how storytelling is meant to operate to connect with audiences.

But.

I remember watching the Babylon bombing episode. Viscerally. I was staying at my sister's house, and I waited until everyone fell asleep. I snuck into their home office to watch the episode on their computer because I kept all queer media I watched secret from everyone in my very conservative family. I turned the volume down to one bar, kept the lights off, and held my shallow breath whenever the house made any kind of noise. Because Brian had never said "I love you" before, and this was it, because he thought Justin would be one of those corpses rolled out on a gurney from the club where they met, where their friends and family all gathered, the only place they felt safe being gay.

And many years later, when something similar happened far, far away at Pulse in Orlando, a memory surfaced of secretly watching an episode about love and desperation and grief. Of feeling caged inside a sexuality prescribed to me. And it was the first time I came out on social media.

Because it was a ridiculous show in some ways, and a terribly written one sometimes, but I think it also cut to the quick for many of us who just…didn't have anything else. We didn't have many options back then, and the fandom was massive, and it nudged me a little closer to understanding who I am and who I love.

(part 1) this is random but something im curious about is do you think the next few years will see a radical shift in more lead lgbt couples in shows? i feel like when supernatural started it was all about subtext/queerbating between characters we would never see canon (maybe), the last few years have seen an update in more side lgbt characters/couples and while not a lot, more main lgbt characters then we had before. I don't know if tumblr/twitter fandom translates to general audience...

Yeah, I mean, the only way is up. I feel lucky that I managed to encounter a fair amount of queer content in my formative years, whether targeted programming on TV, or taking the route of not really differentiating the perceived cultural value of independent media like webcomics and webnovels etc from the mass media as I was young enough to naturally grow up on the internet as the internet itself was growing up and web 2.0 was pretty much taking off alongside my use of the internet. And that I had liberal parents who didn’t regulate our internet, and lived in a community where culturally I didn’t really fear being discovered casually accessing all this like in particularly this terrifying seeming evangelical christian community in America.

Which really makes me feel like A: everyone should feel that comfortable in themselves via the media as I did as a mass accessible thing or B: that the world at large should be soaked in as much representation and more that I encountered as a curious teen because at the very least it did me no harm and at best helped handhold me through an awful lot. 

And then brings us to the problem that the world isn’t actually like that and for a lot of people their media is restricted one way or another, from everything such as the era of social media weirdly making us much LESS broadly travelled on the internet as I was back in the day (SO many bookmarks - I had like 100 that I would check either daily or on their weekly update schedule, with enough habit that I had pretty much memorised it all without using an RSS feed or just following everyone’s twitter and waiting for update announcements, never mind the vast pit of things which I occasionally checked to see if their sporadic but very worth it updates had occurred somewhere in the last month/year) to the vastly overwhelming amount of media accessible to us. It seems almost to flood the market and creates this panic about watching the worthiest shows and campaigning for them and raising awareness and the FOMO and how things slip by and zomg you have to watch this that and the other, when even just making this list on Netflix now contains more hours of TV than a human lifetime and also one liable to disappear from the service at some point or another without warning. 

And then on top of that you have the absolute cultural monoliths that if you’re not going to have a cohesive culture - which now includes the entire population of the world because of our connectivity on the internet and mass-joining of services - based around smaller shows and stuff, then at the very least everyone is going to watch anything under the main Disney umbrella, other superhero flicks, animated things, and all the really big studio franchises and remakes, as well as a few TV monoliths which manage to get enough people talking to make it seem like “everyone” (again - these days it seems like that’s presumed to be the entire western world plus everywhere else these things air) are watching, like Game of Thrones or whatever… THESE properties are the inescapable ones and on that basis they’re the things we have to lean on the most for representation and then again barely get any, when it comes to gender and sexuality, due to them shooting for such worldwide markets that they can’t imply gay people exist to censors in places such as China. And it exposes the cultural awfulness inherent just in getting a white female character in the lead role of some things, or the absolute garbage fire lurking underneath that if you dare have a black stormtrooper or make one of your female ghostbusters black when you’re already ruining the childhoods of so many how dare… 

In those respects, having side characters who aren’t even major well-known superheroes or jedis or ghostbusters or whatever also be gay (because even well-known lesbian Kate McKinnon didn’t manage to get her ghostbuster to be canonically gay even if we All Knew) would be absolutely groundbreaking, even if it was, like, a role that could be snipped out for the Chinese market or something. And that’s probably exactly what would happen, and cue ensuing riot from whichever fandom, along with everyone rightly pointing out that even for us who got to watch it it was still a tiny side character… I mean Disney is still at the stage of what they did with Beauty and the Beast’s ~canonical gay character~ 

So yeah… that’s thrown back to TV and smaller movies to lead the way and because the generations showing most likely the real global percentages but actually just the young western world stats on queerness in any form (like… 25% instead of 1% or whatever and that’s STILL probably too low) are still teens to young adults. The previous gayest generation above them are still just arriving in power and settling in, and the excellent changes we already have from the generation before that is what we are seeing now... But given THEIR cultural context, even their best can still seem to younger eyes, moderate and not generally placing queer characters in lead roles except in niche or indie or otherwise “acceptable” places to take those risks. I think change is always coming and culturally each generation being more open and accepting that the last is really making changes and so on, hopefully things WILL change rapidly and what was the common state of affairs in the sort of indie media I consumed as a teen will be the mainstream soon because a lot of those creators 10 years later are kicking off… 

All that said, TV in the mainstream is still controlled by Mark Pedowitz types exercising their power over the Bobos who have their Wayward Sisters pitches with the clearly labelled main character for the main teen demographic being queer. The culture is very much that we’re now pretty open and can happily have queer characters, but the main characters are still largely held separate. A good example is Riverdale, which is on the CW, a newer show with writers such as Britta Lundin, who is young, queer, and wrote a novel blatantly based on being a Destiel shipper and fan interacting with the cast and crew in fandom spaces, and whose first solo episode of Riverdale featured a looooot of the gay stuff (yay). 

But while she’s a story editor and writer for the show and can use it as a platform for writing stories for its audience using a whole range of canonically queer characters, the show still keeps all 4 of its mains at a strict remove from this. Cheryl can come out as a lesbian in the second season after a lil ho yay in the first but no clearly marked storyline about her identity, but even though Betty and Veronica kissed in the first episode it was blatant fan service (for Cheryl in-story, lol) and mostly just set the tone that they are the sort of seemingly straight girls kissing for attention while having strong romantic or physical attraction to guys. In the second season the kiss comes up again in joking that Jughead and Archie are the only ones of the main 4 who haven’t kissed, Archie gets one planted on him by a dude as a “judas kiss” moment of betrayal in season 3 and he and Jug are teased that they were expected to get together because they were close but in the same sort of homophobic undercurrent tones as early Destiel snarking from side characters, seemingly less about their relationship and more to unsettle them with implications… I mean it was a complicated moment but in the long run it didn’t seem entirely pleasant to me, especially given the overall emotional state they were in and later plot etc etc. (My mum is 1000% invested in Riverdale now as a former Archie Comics reader as a kid so this is now my life too as I was in the room when my brother callously exposed her to it, hi :P) 

Anyway that’s just one case study but aside from SPN it’s probably the most mainstream teen demographic thing I watch… Other examples would be things like B99 which had Rosa come out as bi and that’s awesome, and made us all cry a lot, but Jake, the clear main character even in a very strong and well-treated ensemble, has a great deal of bi subtext, there’s no way given Andy Samberg’s apparent habit of ad-libbing MORE progressive jokes that he’d ever be intentionally harming people if that’s how his brain works (you know, like other people quick-fire offensive stuff from their mouth working faster than brain sense of humour :P). But at the same time for all Jake’s quipping about crushes and such and the fact the show clearly knows how to be sensitive to bisexuality with Stephanie Beatriz being a strong advocate, just because Jake’s the main character and adorably married to Amy. In NO WAY can that be threatened because they’re SO GOOD, so there’s STILL uncertainty that this will pay off in the same special episode “I love my wife but I am bi” kinda way that seems obvious that could just be said. We all carry on without it affecting anything because obviously Jake’s found his soulmate so we don’t mess with that but they should know it’s important to clarify it… Even with B99′s track record, I’m nervous solely because Jake’s the main character and main characters tend not to get self-exploratory arcs about latent queerness and ESPECIALLY not if they’re happily married. If ANY show was going to do it right and trailblaze in this exact era it would be them, but… gyah :P 

Anyway I guess the conclusion right now is that the more mainstream you are the more uncertain it feels, but we are right at that cliff edge, especially with shows putting in SOME of the work. If B99 doesn’t get us there (or the Good Place where they’ll happily confirm Eleanor is bi in interviews but I believe she hasn’t said it outright on the show despite clearly showing attraction to female characters, again, the denials we know so well in SPN fandom reflect a wider audience view of dismissing this stuff as jokes and not reflective of character feeling and identification without a Special Episode dedicated to confirming it >.>) then we’re very clearly on the cusp of SOME mainstream or massively well-known show doing it at least once in a meaningful way that has an Ellen-style cultural impact on TV writing. 

Let’s make it a goal for 2019 or 2020, and hope that a NEW show with a canonically queer main from the start is pitched and becomes a mainstream hit in the next 5… Still got a ways to go before Disney level mainstream but again there IS work going pushing the envelope, especially if we get a movie of a franchise such as idk Further Legends of Korra, or Steven Universe or something else that’s massively pushed the envelope with sexuality or gender for their main character on the small screen in the experimental petri dish they’ve had there for children’s TV. Something that would force Disney to blink about a lesbian princess or Star Wars to let Finn and Poe kiss or Marvel to let Steve and Bucky hold hands or something in order to remain relevant.

Once the Big Cultural Monoliths get in on it, I expect culture as a whole to first of all react quickly on the small screen, but honestly I’ve been waiting for them to snap pretty much my whole life since adolescence and they’re taking such wee tiny baby steps, and some factors are enormous geopolitical awfulness, that the story as a whole is unpredictable and we can only really hope that things don’t slow down. 

(Where this affects SPN is just impossible to say right now, given its almost unique position in this mess due to longevity vs fandom vs almost entirely new generation of writers’ room) 

I wasn’t going to do this…and I’m still not technically posting my review of Carry On early, but I will post my Carry On rant.  This rant will be the things I DID NOT LIKE about Carry On and if that isn’t your cup of tea, don’t drink it, otherwise, I’ll see you under the cut.  

Obviously��spoilers.

We all know this was a self-indulgent and thinly veiled Drarry rewrite and I’m all for that, but their relationship did not develop?like?at all.  It just happened.  There was so little chemistry and there was an immediate hang up on OH GOD(ohwaitcan’tsaythat)MERLIN(shitwe’resupposedtobepretendingthisisn’tdrarryfic)CROWLEY?!! Is HE? isn’t he?  But is sIMON GAAAY?  

But you’re either Gay™ or Not Gay™ …and the idea of bisexuality was never even considered an option, thought, possibility, or anything.  It was all he’s gay or not gay.  And while the book never gave a definitive answer, I (a Bisexual™) was left with the proverbial bad taste in my mouth.  Now I don’t want to freak out and start screaming “THIS WAS BIPHOBIC” but it did come across as a bit biphobic. Like bruh, Simon could be attracted to Agatha AND Baz.  Or, maybe he wasn’t attracted to anyone until he was attracted to Baz *cough*demisexual*cough*…Come on Rainbow, gurl…get your shit together…

Speaking of getting your shit together, Ebb was a lesbian.  How do I know this?  Because of two throw-away statements from her brother, one of which was lesbophobic and one was obscure enough that it may have gone overlooked.  If you didn’t know dryads are female oak tree minor deities, you could miss that.  Also, there was some shit about giving Ebb shit for being a virgin (don’t give virgins shit) and questioning if she was still a virgin (why is Nicodemus so concerned with his sisters sex life?) and made the off-hand comment about “does feeling up other girls even count?”…and yes this is on page 408 of the US hardcover edition (1st edition if I’m correct) and hoo buddy am I not ok with that.  So, if this was never part of her character in any other way, and without these two sentences she wouldn’t have had a canon sexuality, why was it even put in here?  Maybe representation?  Maybe?  Hey, Ebb is a very powerful mage but decided to live the dirty life of a school grounds goatherd.  ok.

I thought I was done with that last paragraph, but I guess not…What queer girl wants to read a book that has a character blatantly saying that their way of having sex isn’t sex?  Eew.  Now I’m done.

You know who else was wlw?  Trixie the pixie, Trixie who never makes an on-page appearance…Trixie, the roommate Penelope hates because she’s a pixie. But boy-howdy do we know she’s terrible.  

You know who else is terrible(sarcasm___)))?  Philippa…you know why? because she had a crush on Simon!  Well, better steal her voice and throw her out of the book and never let her come back. 

And don’t get me started on Agatha…she’s emotional, likes pretty things, isn’t cut out for the adventure life, doesn’t like to be the damsel in distress but doesn’t possess the means necessary to be a hero, she likes boys, she likes manicures, she’s blonde with blue eyes (I think they were blue…they were light)…and somehow we were led to fucking hate her.  Why?  Why are we demonizing feminine white girls?  There’s nothing wrong with being girly, or not wanting to go fight dragons, and sTOP FOR THE LOVE OF LITERATURE STOP PORTRAYING EMOTIONAL GIRLS AS UNLIKABLE!!! FUCK!

Am I calling Ms. Rowell biphobic? not necessarily, but Baz is. Am I calling Ms. Rowell lesbophobic? not necessarily, but Nicodemus is.

Ok, let’s talk about character deaths.  

So, I may be missing one, but we have a few unnamed baddies (a goblin, some vampires with no names, some numpties with no names) Lily and Narcissa, oh, I mean, Lucy and Natasha…the mothers.  We have the Mage…the Bad Guy™.  And we have Ebb…a lesbian.  

Hmm…handful of women, and the Bad Guy™.  Not a nice demographic.

So, guess we can add this to the Dead Lesbian trope.  Why did Ebb die?  Uh, the Mage was a dick?  I guess.  It could have been left out.  She could have lived.  it wasn’t a huge cathartic event, it happened moments before Harry Simon killed Voldemort the Mage with a non-lethal spell. They mentioned covering her body where it fell at the time of her death, but there was no emotion given to her.  She was written out to be a powerful (but unfulfilled) crybaby mage and when she died, it was like “ok, we’re done with her.”  They never even mention her brother…the one who was responsible for sending Baz to Watford at that moment in the first place.  Nicodemus wanted to save his sister, was denied the chance, sister died, neither character was mentioned again.  

AND DON’T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON THE WAY SIMON SACRIFICED HIS MAGIC!!!!!!!!!!!****still angry screaming**** WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MAKE HIM SACRIFICE HIS MAGIC only to turn around and have him keep his wings and tail…like ok, let’s make him sacrifice his magic, he’ll be a Normal…but not too Normal, or else he’s not important anymore…BOOM.wings&tail. Oh, but he can’t control them….he can’t hide them, he needs to be completely dependent on another mage to hide his wings and tail magically for him…therefore he is now unable to be independent and will now be unable to live life without daily spells from people.  

Does this imply some icky points about him staying with Baz romantically? yes.  Does this imply some icky points of imposing upon Penny once she wants to leave for America to be with her boyfriend.  Yes.  Does this make no fucking sense?  IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE.  

If you want to have a character sacrifice magic, AND THEN MAKE THEM DEPENDENT ON MAGIC TO EVEN LEAVE THE FUCKING HOUSE, you don’t seem to be doing the sacrifice thing correctly.  What if he and Baz realize they don’t want to be together?  Simon is stuck.. Mages are encouraged to be with other mages…Simon isn’t a mage.  Simon can’t be with a Normal, he’s got goddamned wings and a tail.  This has toxic woven all through it.  

But it’s ok, Baz still wants to be with him, and now he isn’t jealous of him and his power…and He’ll Always Feel Sorry For Him…eew. (yes, this is a paraphrase)…Simon feels like he will never be able to keep up, that he will always be less than Baz.  OH BUT THEY CHOOSE TO BE TOGETHER.  This is not the basis of a healthy relationship.  If you strongly feel that you are inferior to your partner and always will be, THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING!

tl:dr; just go read fanfiction…drarry, snowbaz, either will do. AND BE NICE TO GIRLS! this was bordering on mlm fetishistic.  

p.s. it’s 1:43 a.m. and I have to be up for work in less than 5 hours. fml but I had to say this shit.

p.p.s. the longer I worked on writing this, the less I liked the book…I may end up changing my rating…or at least make notes of what I did like to balance this shit out before I do my actual review.

***edit*** I did some fact checking, and it wasn’t even Ebb that Simon covered with the jacket after she died, he covered the body of the fucking MAGE right after he stabbed Ebb in the chest then tried to take Simon’s magic. Like…wtf… yeah he’s your father, but YOU NEVER FIND THAT OUT!