#Also yeah: sorry but im not impressed you have a queer character that technically exists I can read just so much gay shit from asia lmao

[hypermascbishounen]

Ime It's pretty easy to tell when an author doesn't care about your experiences as a queer audience member, but about how they personally look telling your story for you to other people.

Like, it's on a scale. There's definitely stuff that's well intentioned if a bit clumsy, vs stuff that's deeply cynical "praise me for including u, faggot". And sometimes there's also people really just trying to tell their own story and struggling.

But overall, I think a lot of it comes from a really cowardly position of just fully ceding ground to bigots on media interpretation. Because the idea that queer things aren't canon or real unless you fully halt the story to spell it out to the audience in painstaking detail, is also the position of every homophobe who denies queer subtext/implications in any work they happen to think should be about them by default. (It's also basically the position of erasing queer people from history and treating cisheterosexuality as default, but that's a deeper topic).

I simply do not think looking at a work bleeding with queer subtext so dense there's no cisheterosexual explanation for parts of the plot, and then declaring it "not canon" and thus not "real" representation, compared to a work with what amounts to shallow tokenism, is a progressive stance actually! Sometimes shit is just gay, and not admitting that is asinine. I think at best, people who've internalized "queer subtext is invalid" often go into writing not knowing how to show and not tell, when it comes to character identity or relationships - things that often go poorly when *just* told.

If it's really that difficult, and you're personally lucky enough to not have to deal with censorship(reminder that ability to publish uncensored queer work is often more just privilege than being particularly brave or creative), you can put it in a character bio.

at a phase in my life where when i get the sense a book is trying to offer me Representation (TM) i hiss and scream and start kicking and ripping bricks out of the wall. this character's Coherent Identity And Articulation Of Their Issues had Better fit in with the rest of the worldbuilding (it won't)