#And wonderful queer character...

[thelostgirl21]

Oh. My. God.

Hugh... Hugh, you are awesome...

I was watching an interview they made with Hugh, Cassie and Graham where they asked Hugh "Does music play a part in you developing your characters?"

He answered that it was a conversation that he and Cassie had actually had, because they'd both made a bit of a playlist for theirs, and he'd been listening to Jobriath to help get himself in the mood.

And when he said that, I went "Wait, hold on..." because I remembered there was another interview - where they'd asked him if the actors had any say when it came to choosing the wig their character would wear - where Hugh mentioned that yeah, they did, and that he'd wanted his looks to be a bit inspired by '70s Glam Rock...

Guys...

Jobriath was the 1st openly gay Glam Rock artist, whose career suffered a major backlash from homophobic audiences (from what I understand, the way his publicist chose to exploit his sexuality as a marketing tool didn't help), that sadly died of AIDS back in 1983 (at age 36).

He played in the musical "Hair", and here is how he looked back then...

But the picture that fucking killed me, however, is this one...

Because, I mean...

Another interesting fact: His birth name was actually Bruce Wayne Campbell.

He changed it to Jobriath Salisbury after deserting from the US Army.

They eventually did find him and arrest him, though, and he spent about 6 months in a military psychiatric hospital after suffering a breakdown.

Just thinking about poor Radovid attempting to run away from the Redanian court, only to be pulled right back in, and definitely looking right in the verge of a breakdown here...

(I'm hoping Radovid's story get a happier ending than what happened to Jobriath IRL, though...)

One of his songs is actually called "Take Me I'm Yours"...

And it's totally worth a listen!

Baby, you just amaze me and daze me

You're the blind spot in my consciousness

C'mon and forsake me and break me

And drink the blood of my obsessiveness

Make me cry out and die out

Of love for this world's fallacy

Refuse me diffuse me

To the corners of the galaxy

Take me I'm yours

Take me take me I'm yours

Take me I'm yours

Take me I'm yours

I can't say if this particular song was a part of Hugh's playlist when developing the character, but...

... suddenly feels like an even more inspired line to me.

There are other songs and lyrics from Jobriath that do give me some solid Radskier feels...

Ex:

I've always wanted a movie queen

To call my very own

That bright and shining star

I've worshipped from afar

Came to earth to be with me tonight

I've always wanted a superstar

To cherish as my own

But so high in the sky

I never dared to try

To take the steps that I can take with you tonight

So basically, Hugh Skinner was offered to play a gay Prince/King on a major fantasy show...

And apparently, thought that he'd take the opportunity to draw inspiration from, and subtly pay homage to, a near-forgotten gay cultural icon.

And it's perfect!

[strangely-epic]

this wretched triangle is ruining my life

zoomed in pic of the human bill headshot on the sketch page because i like it

[lloydfrontera]

ok so you know how in china 'cut sleeve' was used as an euphemism for homosexuality. that but in lorasia they use 'lullaby singer'. or 'angel fighter'. lately 'knightly escort' is making the rounds. there's a lot of euphemisms for gay people actually.

[katamiss]

Why can't queer heros be with queer heros. Like every single hero who is queer in DC is with a civilian, Tim drake, and Benard jon kent with Jay even Kate Kane was with a civilian. It was the commissioner, so at least she knew about the vigilante stuff, but you get my point.

Now I do adore these relationships and find the civilian x hero to be fun, but i also think it can be so messy and to me doesnt always feel genuine, like you love this person but your hiding a major part about you (and putting them in danger) . Some civilian relationships do work, but why does every single queer relationship have to be with a "non main character". Who we don't get to truly see in other comics or in their own comics

I just want queer heros to be with queer heros It's like Dick grayson can be with Kori and Baraba, and batman can be thrown at every hero who is a woman ever but never queer heros they are always with civilians.

And maybe that's because DC is too scared to make "too" many queer heros but it just feels so sad that we can't get all the fun, messy and sad tropes that come with a hero x hero relationship with all these wonderful queer characters

The only version we kinda have is harley and ivy which is good and I think we all appreciate but there is so many other confirmed queer charachters who are heros and not villains (anti heros now i believe though) I want so true heros to be queer I don't want our main queer charachters to be villains like it always is in all media

Why can't Tim and Kon date or Jon and Damien. Or idk wonderwoman since she's canonically bisexual but god forbid we let that woman date any woman. Let dick grayson be officially queer since he's on every single DC pride poster. Let him date a man. Or let Stephanie Brown be officially bisexual like many people, and even writers see her as and let her date Cass because people also see her as queer. Honestly, there are so many other charachters that I personally don't quite know well enough to write on. But either way, can we just please have queer heroes date other queer heros instead of being stuck in this shitty loop of Lgbtq heros can never be with other lgbtq heros

(If there are any hero x hero that are queer that I am uninformed about, please do tell me I would love to read about them and be proven wrong)

[steph-the-4th-robin]

Day 25 of Characters That Are Definitely Queer but Comics Won’t Let Them Be:

Cassie Sandsmark

[project-sekai-facts]

How are we feeling about ensekai’s emu3 translation!!! (I’m mad)

(if you remember the 3 whole posts i made when asahi got de-gayed on EN you'll know i am mad too and that this is probably going to get long)

i don't like to be too cynical but it was so obvious that they were going to change that line, i had a feeling since the event first released on JP and after the incident with Asahi where I went through and tracked down multiple other examples of EN removing queer subtext it became clear to me that in no way shape or form was "emu-chan really loves nene-chan" making it to EN without getting changed. what i didn't expect was them changing Nene's line after Luka's comment, which actually makes this whole situation far worse than many of their other instances of toning down queer subtext.

for anyone who isn't aware of what happened, in chapter 5 of the current Emu event, there's a scene where Nene, Rui and the Virtual Singers are talking about what would cheer Emu up. The vsingers all talk about how much Emu loves spending time with Nene, leading to the following exchange

If you look for them, any fan TL of this scene will be something similar to this:

Luka: ...Fufu. Emu-chan really loves Nene-chan, doesn't she? Nene: Th-that's nothing special...

EN's official translation is this:

So what's the issue? I'll start with Luka's part. In the original text, she uses the word daisuki, which can mean to "like a lot" or "love". It's a word you will see frequently in the idol/idol-adjacent genre of games, due to its ambiguity in that it can be read as either platonic or romantic when used towards a person, and often will be used in ambiguous situations so that it's harder to confirm the writers' intentions either way. so here, fans of the emu/nene ship could view the fact that emu loves spending her time with nene as more on the romantic side, but people who don't like the ship could view it as platonic and move on.

while they didn't translate daisuki directly, Luka's line still works, and still contains the ambiguity that works as ship tease in the original text. it's a perfectly fine localisation that still conveys the original intent. despite that, there is something to be said about EN's consistent refusal to translate daisuki as love in most instances when it's not used on An/Kohane (but then again, EN has literally teased An/Kohane on their twitter account so is it all that surprising?).

Here's some examples:

Aibou no koto ga daisuki de / he loves his partner -> he cares about his partner very much (The Power of Unity chapter 7 when Kaito is comparing Arata to Akito and Toya)

HARUKA-CHAN, DAISUKI DAYOOOO!!! / HARUKA-CHAN, I LOOOOOVEEE YOU!!! -> You're the best!!! (Dear Me, As I Was Back Then chapter 4 when minori is at an ASRUN concert. this one isn't actually that great of a localisation)

Honachan no koto daisuki dakara. Kore de iinda yo. / I love Honachan, so this is fine. -> I want what's best for her. And this is it. (Leo/need main story chapter 14 after Saki tells Honami she won't bother her anymore)

Minna daisuki de - taisetsuna tomodachi na no / I love them all - they're my dearest friends -> They're all amazing, and very dear to me. (Leo/need main story chapter 17. this isn't good either)

What's particularly amusing about that last one is that there's a second official translation for it that I assume was done by JP staff (since EN never promoted doing the Journey to Bloom subs like they did back when they provided subs for Petit SEKAI) that actually keeps the word daisuki as love.

Yeah. I love all my friends - and they mean the world to me.

It's a better localisation than the official EN team one.

Questionable localisation choices aside, Luka's line is fine and is actually in line with the original. The issue with this localisation very much lies with Nene's part, because that is an entirely new line.

In the original text, Nene's "that's just normal" or "that's nothing special" or however you choose to TL it, is meant to be her questioning Luka's statement, since all the things that the other vsingers said that Emu liked were pretty normal things like going shopping and playing video games with nene. To Nene, these things are normal activities for them to do together, so she gets embarrassed by the fact that Luka concludes from that information that Emu loves Nene. When I dissect it like that I think you can really tell what the writers were going for here lol.

"That's just us being friends" does still convey the idea that Nene thinks these activities aren't anything out of the ordinary and she isn't sure why the vsingers are picking these out as some of Emu's favorite things to do, but it's very different from the original line. "But those are just normal things we do together" is something I just came up with on the spot, but it's a lot closer to the original text and still conveys the same meaning. The fact they changed the line to "that's just us being friends" is, honestly, not even subtle that they're covering up queer subtext. The original scene was very clearly written in as ship tease, and EN mentioning "friends" for no reason, especially since the word nor anything close to it was not used in the original, is instantly a red flag because it's like the go-to for queerbaiting and censorship. This was intentional. There was no need for them to specify that the relationship is platonic, Luka's part is ambiguous for a reason so that fans can view it how they like.

Just to top all this off, here's Rin's original line just before that Luka+Nene interaction:

Oh, and! And! She said that playing games with Nene-chan is also super fun!

And here's Rin's line from the official EN translation:

That's not the same thing, but even more weirdly, the incorrect part (super fun->really loves) is a correct translation for the part changed in Luka's line. So, they can do it, they are willing to say "really loves", just not in the right places. Maybe because Rin's part is less personal than Luka's part? It's strange actually, this isn't the first time they've done this either. Off the top of my head I can think of an example from Shiho's Varied Kindness 2* story where they translated the word "suki" as really loves, despite that being much stronger than the original word used (and the fact that daisuki is used a lot in the Leo/need stories and it's incredibly rare if not entirely unknown for them to translate it correctly).

It's not subtle that they're trying to remove implications of the characters possibly being queer, they did it in curtain call and they did it in walk on and on, and multiple times before then too. And considering some of the content in this year's events and the amount of times they say daisuki alone, it's gonna keep happening. honestly i hate the fact that i keep trying to justify the translations in these posts. these translations are intentional. what happened in the curtain call translation back in october says enough. when a character who uses explicitly romantic language towards another guy passes as a straight character in the translation you know they're doing it on purpose.

oh and once again, it's only the EN server that has this issue. The scene in question was translated almost word-for-word on the TW and KR servers.

read fan translations. they're better than what EN gives us and people put a lot of effort into them.

[k-wame]

ROBERT DE NIRO & HARVEY KEITEL Mean Streets (1973) · dir. Martin Scorsese

[that-disabled-princess]

I love all the representation in The Dragon Prince, don't get me wrong. But as a physically disabled person, I would love to see more physically disabled characters. The lists of queer, POC, and mentally disabled (especially autistic) characters (confirmed or otherwise) seem endless, but the only physically disabled characters I can think of are Amaya (deaf), Claudia (amputee), Ava (amputee), Kazi (glasses), Terry (also glasses, though not seen as much), Sol Regem (blind), and Villads (blind).

And half of those characters are antagonists. It doesn't matter how sweet and kind and good-hearted Terry is, he's working with Claudia. And that makes him an antagonist.

I would really love for Runaan to lose his arm for this reason, especially if he's getting a redemption arc. I dunno, this show could do with more physical disability rep.

**This is about physical disabilities, ableds don't derail**

[stopper-my-heart]

Nothing like Heartstopper S2E8 removing some of Taylor Swift's "seven" lyrics just so that the singing can specifically come back in at "Or hide in the closet" while Isaac is processing difficult emotions related to the book he's reading (i.e., Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen).

Did I mention "Or hide in the closet" hits just as the camera focus finishes shifting away from Isaac?

This is fine

[laurenfoxmakesthings]

I just learned of a specific moment in the latest Doctor Who episode (I've been too busy to keep up). And if anyone uses it to essentially go 'See! He can't be ace!' or treat it as a 'win' for queer rep like we aces aren't queer...

Folks, we can tell people are hot. We just don't find them hot to us subjectively on a personal level.

I'm not saying there can't be interpretations, I'm saying please don't use it as an excuse to erase ours.

[brainrot-dot-org]

ok he definitely crossed a line going to dinner, but like people are freaking the fuck out about him GOING TO DINNER- like yes he lied to kim and buck about his situation, and i’m sure to marisol, but technically all he did was get dinner with a friend.

also karen took hen back after she cheated with ava, and taylor took buck back after he kissed lucy.

people are freaking out about this cheater storyline for no reason and acting like eddie is now somehow less then all the other characters and that he shouldn’t end up with buck anymore. like my dude is really just trying to work through his unprocessed trauma….

[howtodisappearcompletelyand]

20/10 stars little guy

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Just to minimize my chances of being genuinely misunderstood OR deliberately misinterpreted, and crucified for something I don't think, How Dare You Say We Piss on the Poor website etc...I'm gonna say this right up top. I absolutely understand why people don't like Thessaly as a character, if anyone does completely unironically stan her as some kind of feminist hero who Did Nothing Wrong uwu, I personally see it as a bit of a red flag. I don't like terfs real or fictional. In a vacuum, I could even completely sympathize and agree with the people who want her cut.

HOWEVER.

It's really something to me to see people clamoring for her to be cut, because she carries and expressed an ugly indefensible prejudice (transphobia) in words towards (1) person. Meanwhile Hob fucking Gadling enacted one of the most violent forms of antiblack racism I can even think of against thousands no, millions of people, the ripple effects of which still affect billions more today. Just a little light idk, profiting off the fucking slave trade and had to be told by someone else that it was bad...and he's a fan favorite.

People are saying Thessally being Dream's love interest reflects badly on him or is somehow endorsement by the narrative (?!?!?!?!?!? Didn't she (SPOILER ALERT AS IF IT MATTERS BY NOW) help participate in his extended assisted suicide? She's not painted as a great person to me just another character what are y'all SMOKING whatever fine. It's fine this is fine.) But shipping Dream with Mr. Former Slaver is not only not verboten or frowned on widely in the fandom but its THEE most popular pairing by far. So...why the difference?

Like where are the same fans who are saying Thessaly shouldn't just be more clearly shown to be wrong, she shouldn't even be in the show at all when it comes to Hobert's crimes??? Yes, transphobia is indefensible. Isn't racism?

And I hear the cries of "it's fiction!!!" Already rallying (if anyone who needs to hear this even sees it lol) to which I say:

HORSESHIT. I KNOW you don't, deep down, really agree because if you did, why get upset about Thessaly being included??? Why does what she said to one person matter if it's Just Fiction You Guyze. Fictional characters are allowed to do bad things and fiction isn't reality sweaty....except when you only apply that standard to fictional racists you like and simp for, but fictional transphobes you don't are SO HARMFUL they shouldn't even be portrayed in fiction.

Like. Give me a big fat BREAK. This looks like bullshit, no? I'm sorry, but I'd love for someone to try and give any other explanation besides one personally offended you or hit home for you, and the other doesn't.

And if that bothers you or you feel like it says something negative about you...idk what you want me to say??? You can't control how other people perceive you and that's how people outside this majority-of-the-fandom bubble see it. You don't need to respond, I just wish and genuinely hope this gives you a moment to think about why fans who ARE bothered by both (and not just paying lip service to being bothered by the one but railing against the other) are so frustrated with people saying everyone is welcome but in practice only bending over backwards for the comfort and emotions of themselves, and people they can easily relate to.

You don't have to like Thessaly (I don't. I find her an interesting antagonist, I don't stan her. And frankly imo likability is not. the point of her character) but you'll pardon me for feeling more than a bit cynical and side eying people's motivations for what seems a...pretty obvious double standard, on what fictional crimes related to real world issues matter to y'all, and which clearly don't. Either actually bring the same energy to the table for fictional people who committed atrocities, even if against a group you're not part of and thus don't feel the need to empathize with, or just carry on, but accept that you don't have the SLIGHTEST room to talk about cutting characters who do immoral things. And you also need to accept that you look like a hypocrite when you do.

[steph-the-4th-robin]

Day 43 of Characters That Are Definitely Queer but Comics Won’t Let Them Be:

Wonder Man

[teafiend]

[weirdo-from-bonesborough]

Yes i think joyfire would be a horrible ship in execution especially with how dirty RHatO did Kori and Roy. Yes i want to bang my head against the wall every time I remember it wasn’t canon even if it was just Kori dating both Roy and Jason but them not dating each other because dc always has to make being gay a big deal. I contain multitudes.