#'Good Guy Ryan not wanting to accidentally out his torture plaything'

[solipsistful]

Whooo wants more meta about Mike Walters’ characterisation? The Gay Edition:

I know it’s sorta a Thing to be like, oh it’s nice to have a story where this character is just incidentally gay, like you just sprinkled the gay on top of everything else and it changes nothing, but idk I like reading Mike’s sexuality as mattering at least a bit for what kind of person he is.

More specifically it’s that Mike feels like a rare example of a character who has participated in gay communities, not just “is gay.” The whole “bear” thing; hesitating and then just going “Look, Edgar is a twink? He's a twink, we all know what I mean by that”; Carly Rae Jepsen jokes of a “yeah I’m the kind of gay who likes Carly Rae Jepsen” variety. Just lots of little things like that.

Not to mention how it affects how he relates to other characters (beyond Edgar). I may have just been listening to the first conversation with Ryan and how the first part of that is very much affected by Ryan going “Sooo are we gonna talk about why we recognise each other? It’s fine if not, but. :T” Good Guy Ryan not wanting to accidentally out his torture plaything. And even from the start, the way that WOE.BEGONE feels eerie and mysterious because it accurately knew to talk about an ex-boyfriend very specifically?

Like, yeah, it’s nice to have LGBQ characters where literally all that matters is the gender of the love interest, but to me it’s also like, yeah if you tried to straightwash this guy, not only would that be shitty for all the usual political reasons, but you’d actually have to overlook some particular ways this guy inhabits the world to do that -- you couldn’t just genderswap Edgar, lmao.

- Serpent