#I’m going to miss it deeply

[thisisworsethanitlookslike]

I can’t believe Hilda is over now

[rainbow-sunshine-unicorn]

Remember when Anthony Bridgerton said:

And then it turns out that this is him with his wife:

[age-of-moonknight]

Blood Hunt (Vol. 1/2024), #4.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Pepe Larraz; Colorist: Marte Garcia; Letterer: Cory Petit

[angelnumber27]

It’s so embarrassing and heartbreaking being in so much pain over losing someone while knowing they don’t give a fuck if you live or die. Your favorite person becoming a stranger is a special kind of hell.

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[astral-catastrophe]

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[didnt-hear-idsb-live-again]

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[x-itzzzzzz-x]

terrified of ending up alone but the more i go on everyday the more it seems glaringly obvious that i’m just not meant to be around others

[irate-iguana]

Wow, I can’t believe that Mamma Mia 2 was less gay than the original. What. What was that?

The first movie was made in 2008 so you kind of understand why Harry’s romance was so rushed. I assumed the sequel would’ve taken the opportunity to correct that error by giving him a proper romantic story arc, but he gets nothing? You wouldn’t even know he was gay if you didn’t watch the first movie. Literally everyone else in Mamma Mia 2 gets a romance, even Cher who only appears at the end.

[godblooded]

christ almighty i miss being happy.

[theworstcreature]

I just tried to use wattpad and I don’t know how you fear wattpad users do it. Every single fic I found was either smut, Y/N (nothing against yn but i just personally don’t like readinf it) or ships I’m not that fond of. No heart wrenching stories and definetly not as easy to use as my darling ao3 (may she soon recover) so all in all, I respect the hell out of wattpad users that actually find good fics in a sea of yn and oneshots. Maybe I just don’t know how to use it but still.. I miss ao3 and how easy it is to find good writing

[thatswhatsushesaid]

sarcasm aside, this (blocking/being blocked by people who disagree with my interpretation of the book) is actually a source of frustration and sadness for me, like

i want to see that discourse because i want to understand the arguments that the antis are making, not only because i want to be able to tailor my counter-arguments to specific assertions, but also because a broken clock can be right twice a day. i’m not so entrenched in my jgy stanning that i can’t respect a good argument about another part of the book, another character dynamic, just because it comes from someone whose takes on jgy specifically are superficial at best, or rancid at worst.

like. we’re not gonna be buddies if you hate jgy and think he’s a monster, but if you say something insightful about wwx or wen ning or wen qing or nie huaisang (especially huaisang!!), i do actually want to see that?? if you say something that makes sense or piques my interest, i might still be galled that the interesting thing came from a jgy anti (because really, the nerve), but i will still end up sitting with that interesting thought. but now i can’t. because you blocked me! or i blocked you at your request.

i guess this is why i so rarely block anyone even when their jgy takes make me see red, because even if they are guaranteed to also see red nine times out of ten when i post something, there’s always the chance that i’ll write something about another part of the book that resonates with them, and vice versa. and it bums me out that those opportunities for lightbulb moments from unlikely sources are becoming fewer and fewer.

[zaidepersonal]

life is overall good but ngl a single straw could break my back any minute now 😭

[yourheartinyourmouth]

being the only person you know who is struggling is so fucking humiliating.

we’re talking about getting me a job at a gas station. my friends all make $60K plus.

i have to work in a gas station.

[litrallytyrus]

the idea of having to watch a whole season of rina + a bunch of theater kid seniors graduate high school + ej caswell is apparently a guy who peaked in high school + did i already say rina …….. like i’m already tired

[callixton]

idr if i already posted abt this but i have been in a little phase of feeling sad abt being aro bc i’ll be reading things abt happy couples and go oh that sounds nice :’) but i am literally currently in a stable and good relationship and i fucking hate it so like. no it doesn’t ur deluding yourself :(