#The Indian Media

[lateatnewyork]

COLONIZING AT ITS FINEST! 001

pairing: oscar piastri x indian!female!kohli!reader

summary: the indian women's cricket team is in australia the same time as the grid for their ODI tournament. and a certain rookie driver and a rookie cricketer fall for each other.

extra information: reader is kohli's younger sister and is 21, oscar wins the melbourne gp. reader went to a british boarding school so she knows like lando.

ynkohli

liked by BCCIWomens, ishankishan and 547,890 others me n the gang 💯renukasingh (virat's memes are top tier) view comments

viratkohli is that the only photo you could find ➥ ynkohli yeppers landonorris get into finals so i can watch 😞 ➥ ynkohli thats the plan user01 what's lando doing here ➥ ynsno1 yn went to a british boarding school and she met lando in britain when she was out. shes also a huge fan of f1 anushkasharma get the cup !! ➥ ynkohli will do 🫶 user54 why is she so famous compared to other cricketers? /genq ➥ user67 she was an influencer during her teenage years and everybody loved her cos shes rlly funny and shes also virat kohli's sister. mclaren 🏏👀 ➥ ynlover yo wtf ➥ user6 erm what ➥ user08 um renukasingh we ate those photos up ➥ ynkohli realsies!

mclaren

liked by ynkohli, oscarpiastri and 245,765 others i got two tickets to melbourne gp babyy view comments

ynkohli give them to me plsss 🙏 ➥ mclaren bet ➥ user05 IS SHE DATING SOMEONE ON THE GRID ➥ user49 not necessarily shes been a fan since she was a kid danielriccardo COME WITH ME SUNDAY DONT SAY MAYBE ➥ user67 going along with the caption is so him 😭🫶 maxverstappen watch me win... again ➥ lewishamilton hes a bit overconfident? ➥ landonorris ^ ➥ fernandoalonso ^ ➥ georgerussell ^ ➥ charlesleclerc ^ ➥ carlossainz55 ^ ➥ schecoperez ^ ➥ averagef1lover not the whole grid coming after max 😭 ➥ rbrmylove ok but is he wrong ➥ user07 if oscar doesn't win im gonna kms ➥ oscarpiastri dont do that 😓 ➥ user07 HOLY SHIT IM GONNA DIE WTF user03 this is a day after the odi finals 😭 if yn loses shes going to be so sad at the gp

BCCIWomens

liked by oscarpiastri, viratkohli and 350,905 little y/n kohli appreciation post because INDIA IS IN THE FINALS !!!! view comments

user09 what is oscar doing here ➥ ynsno1fan forrealsies user98 SHE DESERVES THIS SM ➥ user05 FR BRO user48 IM SO HAPPY

oscarpiastri

liked by viratkohli, landonorris and 463,218 others little gf appreciation post 💗 view comments

user58 OSCAR SOFT LAUNCHING WAS NOT ON MY 2024 BINGO CARD ➥ user48 SAME cricketlover whats virat doing here? ➥ user52 idk bro f1lover GUYS WHAT IF ITS YN KOHLI ➥ rbrmylove who?? ➥ f1lover shes an indian cricketer ➥ lestappenshipper BRO AND THE BCCI ACCOUNT POSTED AN APPRECIATION FOR YN AND OSCAR LIKED ➥ sixerhitter AND THE CAPTION ON THIS ONE logansargeant youre not slick ➥ oscarpiastri shut up ➥ averagef1fan LOGAN TELL US (ill give u three bucks) ➥ logansargeant I CANT (make it 300 and u have a deal) ➥ averagef1fan logan im broke ➥ logansargeant well too bad then user05 they look so happy in the last photo landonorris yk what big feet mean😉 ➥ oscarpiastri LANDO ➥ danielriccardo LANDO ➥ carlossainz55 LANDO ➥ maxverstappen LANDO ➥ fernandoalonso LANDO ➥ lewishamilton LANDO mclarenfan polite cat has rizz confirmed???

ynkohli

liked by danielriccardo, smrithimandhana and 506,472 others your honor, i love him. view comments

rohitsharma what 😀 ➥ishankishan 😀 ➥viratkohli 😀 ➥hardikpandya 😀 ➥jaspritbumrah 😀 ➥shubmangill 😀 ➥sachintendulkar 😀 ➥rahuldravid 😀 alexanderasaintmleux you both are so cutee ➥ ynkohli nuh uh u r lilymhe ur so adorable ➥ ynkohli stop ily averagef1lover um what are the wags doing here? ➥ user05 i think shes dating oscar piastri cricketlover whos oscar piastri? ynloml NO WAY SHES TAKEN WHAT

f1wagupdates

liked by alexanderasaintmleux, lilymhe and 209,879 others new wag??? oscar piastri spotted in a park with a girl view comments

averagef1lover thats so yn cricketlover yn and oscar?? user05 CRICKET AND F1 CROSSOVER??????? ynlover my two worlds colliding user06 if it was yn tho theyd be so cute f1fan THE WAY HES LYING IN HER LAP ➥ user49 THE WAY HIS HAND WENT LIMP WHEN THEY KISSED ➥ lestappenshipper SKSKSKKSKSK

BCCIWomens

liked by ynkohli, landonorris and 738,952 others THE INDIAN WOMENS TEAM ARE NOW ODI CHAMPIONS!!! view comments

cricketlover WOOHOOOO averagef1lover IDEC IF SHES A WAG OR NOT I LOVE YN ynloml shes so fine 🤭 lestappenshipper theres no way oscar 'polite cat' piastri has the yn kohli rohitsharma 🥳 shahrukhkhan 🥳 arshdeepkaur 🥳 sachintendulkar 🥳 renukasingh 🥳 anushkasharma 🥳 ritikasajdeh 🥳 sanjenaganasen 🥳 saratendulkar 🥳 landonorris IM SO PROUD OF YOU YN

ynkohli

liked by oscarpiastri, suhanakhan and 834,271 others colonized the colonizer ! oscarpiastri comments are disabled

oscarpiastri

liked by ynkohli, logansargeant and 506,783 others i love being colonized 😍 comments are disabled

a/n IM SO SORRY FOR BEING MIA FOR SO LONG GUYS I HAD THE WORST WRITERS BLOCK 😭 this is written for the sole purposes of entertaining me i havent seen and oscar piastri x brown reader anywhere so hopefully you guys like this !!

[starryalpacasstuff]

The Absence of India in Discussions on Queer Asian Media

(Edit: Since making this post, I've compiled a list of all the queer Indian media I can find here (it's also pinned on my blog). India may still be relatively absent from discussions on queer media, but it doesn't have to be that way, and change starts with us!)

So, yesterday @lurkingshan tagged me in an ask she got from @impala124 about the absence of India when we're talking about queer Asian media. I was intially just going to reblog it with my thought, but as it kept growing I figured it'd be best to just make my own post. Please read the ask linked above first so this makes sense.

*cracks knuckles* this is going to be the most fun I've had writing a post in ages. (For a little background, I'm a queer Indian, born and raised)

So, this is a very interesting question on a subject I've been rotating in my head for the past several months. There's a lot of different variables that contribute to the noticeable lack of discussion on Indian and South Asian queer media in general, so I'm just going to talk through the ones I've noticed a little randomly.

Talking about Asian media in general, it's well known that the mass popularity of kpop and anime has contributed massively to the increase in popularity of Asian media. If you've been in the Asian media fandom for any amount of time at all, you'll have noticed that media from Korea, Japan, and China gets by far the most attention from international audiences; all East Asian countries. There may be several reasons for this, but in particular, it's no secret that the fetishization of East Asians is a massive proponent in the popularity of media from these countries, while there's no such interest in South Asians. If we shift our focus to queer media specifically, media from these three countries is still extremely popular, with the addition of Thailand and the Philippines to some extent; both South East Asian countries. From what I've seen, there's very little international interest in media from South Asian countries (although, if we're talking about India specifically, I can't exactly say anything. Bollywood has not been good lately). If we talk about queer South Asian media, the scope of interest falls even further. If you'll notice, MyDramaList, one of the most commonly used websites for finding and tracking Asian shows only allows for East and South-East Asian shows. So, that's one reason—there's just not much international interest in Indian media in general. As Shan said in the initial post, it's partially because of a difference in priorities. Korea is notorious for using media to gain global standing, the role of the 'soft power' of Thai bls in the recent bills for equal marriage in Thailand has been widely discussed, the list goes on. Could racism also play a part in the massive gulf of interest in media from East Asian versus South Asian countries? Probably. But I'm not going to get into that too much.

Moving on, there's obviously a massive lack of queer media in India. I think this is greatly exacerbated by the fact that it's very hard to support the people making queer media beyond buying and/or streaming their work. The majority of people engaging with Indian queer media are queer Indians, and a lot of us have to do so in secret because of the society we live in. This means that creators that have to push through several obstacles to publish their work often receive little incentive to continue doing so because of the lack of engagement. Because of the lack of media, international fans are less likely to become interested in queer Indian media, and the cycle continues.

I will say though, contrary to what Shan said, I think Indian media, particularly anything that came out post 2019 might actually be on the easier end of the spectrum when it comes to access. This may simply be bias, so forgive me if I'm wrong here, but from what I've seen, a lot of queer Indian shows are in fact available on streaming sites, and at most you'd need a vpn to access them. I think the two main things that actually hold back queer Indian media from becoming more popular are a lack of noise and it's relatively lower quality.

The main way we find out about new shows in this space is through either word of mouth (well actually, post) or because we follow production houses known for producing media. Because of the sparse nature of both the media and the consumers, there's very few people who learn enough about the media to want to give it a shot. For example, there's a film on netflix called Badhaai Do (hindi for Congratulate Us) that I've been meaning to watch for a while. It centers around a lavender marriage and I've heard a lot of good things about it, so I was slightly surprised to see that most of the people on tumblr I interact with who have been engaging with queer media for far longer than me had never heard of it. There's also a, Indian BL from 2017 called Romil and Jugal that I've written about before here, and I would've never learned of it's existence if not for a friend hearing about it from another friend of hers.

Because there's so little queer indian media, it's natural that the quality leaves much to be desired. The main issue is, because the queer asian media market has become so saturated lately people are becoming a lot more selective with what they watch, and for good reason. This means that queer media from india is simply unable to grow and improve over time, leaving it stagnant. Back in 2016-2018, the overall dearth of queer media from Asia meant that a lot of people were willing to watch shows that were average or even worse. Thailand particularly seems to have benefitted from this, being able to grow and evolve its queer media due to the successes of shows like SOTUS, 2gehter, TharnType and more even recently, KinnPorsche. Queer Indian media will have a much, much harder time with this because of all of the factors I've talked about and more, meaning that it is much harder for queer media to evolve. Honestly, though I haven't been able to watch/read much queer media from India, the stuff I have seen is really quite decent, it's just that it tends to fail in comparison to some of the brilliant stuff we're seeing from other countries. A while a ago, I bought four queer books by Indian authors, and of the three I've read so far, I'd genuinely recommend two, albeit one with quite a few reservations (I'll be writing about them sometime in the future, just haven't found the time yet). While talking about this with @neuroticbookworm, she brought up the excellent point of how Indian media in general has just been of fairly poor quality lately. It seems to me that a lot of it is catered to more conservative audiences, which results in people like me becoming disillusioned with Indian media and simply moving onto things from other countries. It has been a long time since I've watched anything worthwhile come out of Bollywood. So, it becomes even harder for queer Indian shows to be found at all; a majority of their target audience has already forsaken Indian media as a lost cause.

So, those are a bunch of reasons because of which there's not a lot of discussion about queer Indian media in fandom spaces like Tumblr. Something else I'd like to point out is, it's very hard for queer shows in India to gain much traction whatsoever. Live television slots are ruled by the infamous Indian serials, the majority of the audience being people in their late thirties and older, particularly women. And while homophobia is just as prevalent amongst the youth of India as it is amongst older generations, younger people are far more likely to be engaging with queer media, in India at least. This means that it would be near impossible for queer shows to air on live television the way they do in countries like Thailand and Japan. The majority of Indian youth use global streaming services to watch shows, hence the greater concentration of queer shows on service platforms. (Romil and Jugal is something of a dark horse here—I don't believe it was ever aired, but it was produced by a producer who has a few decently popular serials under her belt and is available on an Indian steaming service—another reason I'm determined to research how tf this show ever came into existence) If we talk of movies, the industry is limited by the iron fist of Bollywood, another reason it's very hard for queer movies to be produced and why they're generally found on streaming sites.

There's just not a lot of people who have the balls it would take to make a queer Indian show/movie and push it to the Indian public beyond a streaming service. I mean, we're all seeing what's happening with the Love in The Big City drama right now, and believe me, public backlash in India would be the same, if not much worse. And if no one in India is watching these shows, why would anyone in any other part of the world? There's barely any public figures that would be willing to participate in such a project, so queer media stays underground. Currently, Karan Johar is the most popular—and one of the only—out celebrities in Bollywood, and, well, he's treated as something of a laughing stock by the public. He has one or two queer adjacent shows under his belt as a producer, but once again, they're barely known and available only on Netflix. There was a movie called Dostana in which he played a straight guy pretending to be gay but, well, that speaks for itself. And well, I can't exactly blame him for it, knowing how the Indian entertainment industry is.

To talk a little more about the specific comparison between India and Korea, I think you're fairly accurate in saying that the two countries seem to be roughly on par in terms of homophobia, although that's an extremely vague statement that's rather hard to either prove or disprove. While the difference in international attention towards Korean and Indian media is certainly a major component of the difference in discussion about the queer media from these countries, there's obviously other things that go into it as well. There's this video I watched some time ago on the progression of queer representation in K-dramas that's quite well researched. It's an hour and a half long, so in case you don't have the time to watch it (though I do recommend it), it basically talks about some of the dramas with queer rep that have aired on Korean television and their impact. While it's hard to gauge the level of impact of these shows on the availability of bls and gls in Korea, they certainly had an effect, if only telling the queer population of Korea that they are seen and heard. To my knowledge (although I may be mistaken), no such queer rep has ever aired on Indian television, meaning that there's nothing to push creators to put queer media out there. There have been old movies and shows that depict queerness, but none of them ever reached the sort of the scale where they may have some sort of impact on the industry. As I mentioned earlier, the widespread popularity of K-dramas (and k-pop) does make it easier for creators to make queer media since there's a much higher chance of the shows being successful thanks to the international audience. Bringing back Love In The Big City, the success of the book abroad and the high probability of the show being well received internationally is probably one of the reasons it was able to be produced amongst domestic backlash.

Now, I've been talking a lot about how it's difficult for queer Indian media to gain any sort of international recognition with domestic attention. However, it's not necessarily the case. Here's where I start rambling (I say, as if this post isn't verging on 2k words). It's been proven that the presence of the international market allows for greater creative freedom in spaces beyond television. The best example comes from Korea's very own 'soft power'; K-pop. There's a K-pop group called Dreamcatcher that debuted in 2017 with a rock sound and horror concept that was extremely rare in kpop at the time. They succeeded mainly by focusing most of their promotions to the foreign market, knowing that their concept would not be well liked in Korea. And they succeeded. Today, Dreamcatcher has a sizeable fandom and has even been growing in popularity in Korea, with the Korean public warming up to their genre and having influenced other girl groups to try out similar sounds. We've already talked about the lack of international attention for Indian media, but there's also the issue that the producers of queer Indian media aren't marketing to foreign audiences, which remain ignorant.

That's all I have, this is so long good lord. All in all, there's a bunch of factors that feed into each other creating a cycle which means that, unless there's a break somewhere, queer Indian media will remain unrecognized. I'm excited to see what other people have to say, because this is a topic close to my heart and I'd definitely enjoy seeing more discussions around it.

[themoonsaid]

Hindi is not difficult. reading in Hindi is not difficult. writing in Hindi is not difficult. counting in Hindi is not difficult. Hindi numbers are not difficult (१२३४५६७८९०). alphabets क्ष,ष,फ are not difficult. you just consume, are surrounded by and have been taught english and the latin alphabets way more than your native language and script use some sense

(this goes for any language not just hindi btw)

[serenado-exe]

So anyway -

The point is that Pizza Tower still has a racist, outdated stereotype of Indigenous people in the Oregano Desert level.

It even has a achievement for rain dancing around a totem pole (totem poles are a Pacific Northwest thing, not a Plains Tribe thing). They war cry at you and they throw tomahawks (because it's always tomahawks or spears).

Bellyache about the screencaps being 5 years old if you want, but the stereotype made it into the game, so he hasn't changed that much. He didn't change enough to have a shred of awareness about using a racist stereotype. And before anyone tries: that trope isn't a hallmark of Wario games or 90s animation, it's a hallmark of racism.

Even if he "doesn't" make bigoted jokes anymore (though I would consider the Tribe Cheese one such joke), he made an entire level based around that trope.

And like every other time there's an anti-Indigenous caricature in videogames or popular media, it doesn't get mentioned, or it gets glossed over because the creator went "Oopsie! That was cringe."

The exclusion of the Tribe Cheese from that salvo of screenshots undermines the entirety of it, because it's a solid example of him not having changed enough to be conscious beyond "that was unfunny," and everyone just focuses on what he said and when - without the connection to how that mindset still lingers in the final product of the game.

[lazer-t]

Coelacanth, watercolour + fineliner

Original piece for sale here Sold!

[neuroticbookworm]

Engagement of QL Fandom in Indian Queer Media

I was tagged by @lurkingshan and invited to respond to an ask she received from @impala124 that noted the absence of India in the Asian queer media spaces and discussions, and questioned the reasons behind it. @starryalpacasstuff has also responded to it in a great post (check out the reblog additions for a treasure trove of Indian queer media recs), discussing, among many things, Korea’s culture export aiding their queer media ventures, access to Indian queer media, and the quality of Indian queer media. @twig-tea’s addition discussed the ease of access of Thai BLs via YouTube and how it prompted Korea and Japan to re-enter the genre.

My thoughts on Indian queer media are complicated and involve several detours to understand Indian media culture, its economic power, and how it navigates international viewership. For context, I am an Indian cinephile who grew up watching a wide variety of Indian media in terms of both language and genre. I naturally transitioned into watching Western content as globalization of the 2010s brought HBO and Comedy Central to Indian screens, and later sought out queer media, Asian media and Asian queer media on the internet.

Indian Media Industry - A Primer

I know there are a lot of countries right now that produce QL media, so I am gonna mainly consider Thailand, Japan, and Korea, the three countries most prolific with ql, for the purpose of this discussion. All of these countries, while regionally diverse, have managed to considerably homogenize in language and culture over the course of history and colonization. India, on the other hand, is still significantly and distinctly diverse in language, culture, religion, food, media styles, social norms, and on and on. India has 22 official languages and thousands of regional ones that are used in various capacities everyday. This diversity is then reflected in the media produced by India, with multiple powerhouse film industries dominating box offices simultaneously. Bollywood is the biggest one and obviously well known internationally, but Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali-language film industries are successful in their own right and consistently produce box office hits and self-sustain in the larger Indian media landscape. This makes domestic media highly regional in India. Even today, in the age of social media, it takes a box office success to the tune of hundreds of millions of rupees for a film to break out of its domestic audience and cross over into other Indian states.

This diversity has also led to the different industries developing media styles unique to them. I watched this video a while ago of a creator documenting his experience of dipping toes into Indian Cinema for the first time, and he ends up covering three movies from three different industries, because the pathos of each of them is so fundamentally different yet effective in their own ways. This diversity also applies to the television industry, both traditional cable TV soaps, and the modern shows made for streaming sites. And all of this, *waves hands*, presents a set of challenges like no other country faces for both Indian queer creators and Indian queer media audiences.

The Challenges for Creators

Since the Indian media industry is not a big monolith and is made up of multiple film industries, queer creators who are trying to get their foot in the door will face a unique uphill battle in whichever regional industry they’re trying to break into. And trying to research, learn, and understand each and every single one of them will take me and my non-existent research team years, so the simpler thing to do would be listing the factors that have worked for other countries to foster their media industries to produce QL content, and discuss if India could replicate them. The list goes like this:

Japan’s rich history in yaoi

Thailand’s use of BL as a soft power to promote tourism

Korea’s culture export via kpop and other media

While India does have religious mythology that discusses sex, gender and queerness, it is often subtext with a lot of intersectionality. Does Ardhanarishvara represent fluid gender, or a symbol of harmony, or both? The debates are endless. Japan’s yaoi roots are as deep as they are explicit. And this rich history could be why the Japanese domestic audience is open to queer media even when the country is still conservative.

Thailand’s rise as a major player in the QL industry is remarkable, but there is a case to be made that the country’s media industry was directly and indirectly boosted by the government’s interest in establishing revenue from tourism, and exporting culture to international audiences via food and media. While the revenue from tourism in India is substantial, the Indian economy is not built on it. And the Indian media industry is thriving and regularly makes bank with their already established content models, so the producers have a pretty low incentive to deviate and fund queer media.

I bet every coin I own that not a single one of us on this hellsite have successfully eluded the allure of Korean media in our lives. The Korean media industry is a well-calibrated machine that shall and will target every single human into funneling their time, attention and money into the Korean culture and economy. And I think queer creators looking to make queer content in Korea would’ve had good incubation in an industry that was looking to make as much content as possible. And once again, while Indian movies have significant international box office collections, that is not where the Indian media industry, and just India in general, makes its money. The priorities are just not the same. And to be perfectly honest, India is nowhere near the level of Korea at producing and exporting television shows to international audiences.

All of this is a long winded way of saying that the conditions required to foster a QL industry in India are not the same as what we have seen work so far from the other major players. And sadly no one has really figured out the winning formula yet.

These are just a few reasons, and I haven’t even discussed nepotism and how painful class mobility is in India, making it even harder for new queer creators to break into the industry. There’s a reason why movies with queer representation like Badhaai Do, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, and Kapoor & Sons all feature characters in the upper middle class or above. Hell, they’re even played by actors whose portfolio is already filled with daring and experimental roles, or by first- or second-gen nepo babies who would literally have nothing to lose from the potential backlash for playing a queer character. Poor, queer characters in Indian media have never been a part of a fluffy romance as far as I know. They are reserved for the gritty dramas where intersectionality of queerness, poverty, class and caste could be examined.

The Challenges for the Audience

And once again, all of this, *aggressively waves hands*, makes things harder for even the domestic audience to engage with Indian queer media, let alone international audiences. Kathaal - The Core, a 2023 Malayalam movie about a queer man in his fifties coming out of the closet and contesting in his village body elections, was a box office success in Kerala, and I can tell y’all with complete certainty that not many people outside of Kerala would’ve even heard of it. And this was not some small indie venture – in fact, the lead characters were played by Mammootty and Jyothika, who are both absolute legends in their own right in the South Indian film industry.

Super Deluxe was a 2019 Tamil-language black comedy film that tells four interwoven stories that run in parallel, and one of the stories is about a trans woman who, pre-transition, was married and had a son. She returns to her family as her post-transition self after years of disappearance, and the film engages in conversation around sex and gender, through the innocent questions of her young son. The movie is gorgeously made, and outrageously sharp and witty in its commentary on society’s views on sex, morality, religion and family. And once again, I don’t think it is well-known outside of the domestic and international award-circuit audiences it was promoted to (last I checked, it was available to domestic audiences on Netflix).

Sometimes, even the domestic audience might miss the queer representation in their regional media when it is indie enough to not get aggressively promoted. The Hindi-language anthology movie from Netflix, Ajeeb Daastaans (2021), featured a story where two women from different caste and social class meet at the workplace (the sapphic story, Geeli Pucchi, starts at 1:17:05, if anyone wants to check it out). It served biting commentary on the intersectionality of queerness, misogyny, caste and class. And once again, I’ve never found a person with whom I could discuss it with (other than my mom, with whom I watched it).

And sometimes, even when a massive show with queer representation is well promoted and well received by critics, it still manages to fly under the radar in Indian queer fandom spaces. Amazon Prime India spent a lot of coin on the show Made in Heaven (2019) – and it was worth it. The show follows the lives of two wedding planners, Tara and Karan. Karan is closeted (except to his close friends) for most of the show, but after he makes some powerful enemies in his line of work, he gets publicly outed, which puts him on the path of dealing with his family’s shades of acceptance, queer rights activism, and reconciling with an old friend. The car scene in episode 9 made me cry, and yet I’ve never read a word about this show from Indian QL fan blogs here on Tumblr.

Following every film and TV show that releases in one language, across all modes and platforms, and keeping an eye out for queer representation is hard enough. Doing it in multiple languages is downright impossible. And then personal preferences come into play. Personally, I enjoy nearly all genres of media, but I am primarily an angst monster, so I seek out and watch sad shit on the regular. All four examples I’ve listed in this section are good queer representations, but they are deeply sad, rage-inducing, heartbreaking and realistic. If one wanted to watch an Indian queer romance that’s inside the bubble, I’m not sure if they can even find one – I have certainly not come across any. Even the queer Bollywood movies designed for a box office run, paying homage to iconic Bollywood romance sequences, were still outside the bubble. When a niche audience like the QL fandom collides with a complex media-churning machine like the Indian media industry that is fundamentally not designed to cater to them, all we get is a lot of puzzled looks and question marks.

A Thought Experiment On The Future Of Indian QLs

Now that I have established the challenges, I want to engage in a little thought experiment – if we were to receive a steady stream of Indian QL content, what would it look like, and how can the fandom engage with it?

If we are looking for content from a stable production entity for Indian queer media, like Thailand’s GMMTV, Japan’s MBS Drama Shower, and Korea’s Strongberry, we would be waiting for a long time, at the very least a decade or two. What we could get are small indie queer shows like Romil and Jugal, squirreled away in a streaming platform exclusive to India and only accessible internationally via VPN. Another example is the list of sapphic shows @twig-tea shared with us a while ago, here. These are gonna be low budget, probably-not-great-quality shows reminiscent of early GMMTV.

Another variety of QL content we could get are the Bollywood queer romance films and TV shows. They will be cheesy and tropey and romantic, and might interact with the bubble, but probably mostly from the safety of an upper middle class setting. This means they would eventually run out of fresh perspectives they could tune into in their limited scope and the stories might turn stale and repetitive (I’m deriving this from the general state of things in the Indian media landscape over the last couple years). International access might be a little easier than the previous case, but not as easy as going to YouTube and hitting play.

The third and final variety are the gritty dramas with heavy social, cultural, religious, gender and class commentary that Indian cinema industry has always made, and has upgraded in the recent years to include queerness. Once again, the access will be hard, but if we are looking for queer stories that also show the audience what it is like being queer in India, beyond the glitz, the glam and the colors of pre-packaged Indian experience often sold to the West, this is where we will find it. Most of it will be sad, but we are a sad bunch who constantly make sad shit, so it will be on brand for us.

And all of these different varieties of content are gonna need to be picked up and promoted by the Indian folks in the QL fandom who are tuned into these regional industries. India not being a cultural monolith that is easy to package and ship is precisely why we have all these beautiful and crazy and sometimes even contradictory styles of media that are offered for us to explore. And therefore, the fandom engagement on Indian QL content would also vastly differ from the fandom engagement for Japan, Thailand and Korea. A dedicated fandom captain might not emerge, but rather, a collective group of folks tuning into and promoting finds from their regional industries would be the way to go. In addition, if this content is not available in English, we would need fan subbers to provide translation expertise to even make it accessible, something we see often for Japanese media on Tumblr.

I know from observation that watching media in a different regional language could sometimes be as foreign to Indian audiences as watching media from other countries. The language, traditions, mannerisms, social mores and food would all be different from region to region, but I guess it would be a good litmus test to observe how well the fandom acclimates to a culture that is so eye-wateringly diverse and not as constantly promoted to them.

When I was texting @waitmyturtles discussing how we can approach answering this question (remember when this all started with a question, some two thousand-ish words ago? Yes, that question), at a point in our conversation I exclaimed "Ugh, everything in India is too complicated!" This long-ass post of mine is in no way the complete account of why things are the way they are in the Indian queer media landscape. But all I know for sure is that it’s not simple. And I really do not want anything related to India to be simple, because being unbearably frustrating and complicated is not a bug, but a feature of India. The road to Indian QLs is unique, but I will do my best to check the paths and share and recommend them to my friends whenever possible. And I invite my fellow Indian QL fans to do the same.

[stfulara]

ladkiyon ko good touch, bad touch toh sikha dete ho, ladkon ko bhi bad touch ka matlab samjhao

[manincaffeine]

Hey Desi mutual ✨️

Let’s spread some Diwali cheer ✨️🪔

Reblog your favorite Diwali photos or videos and let’s brighten up the feed together! ✨

[sajra-savera]

Me seeing y'all interact with your cool friends on Tumblr while I just use this app as a podcast to speak my intrusive thoughts :

[whoseafraidofliloleme]

𝐒𝐨 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐠, 𝐇𝐨𝐠𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: 𝐊𝐰𝐨𝐧 𝐘𝐍 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐞. 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐞'𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐩𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐃𝐮𝐫𝐦𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐠𝐮𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲/𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬.

𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐋𝐞𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐱 𝐅! 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫.

𝐓𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐬/𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞𝐬: 𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐮. 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐏𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐀𝐔. 𝐘𝐍 𝐢𝐬 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲'𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐧?. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐦𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐘𝐍𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐢𝐭. 𝐋𝐞𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐃𝐮𝐫𝐦𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐈𝐓 𝐛𝐨𝐲. 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐩 𝐘𝐍. 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐩 𝐇𝐞𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐮𝐧𝐠. 𝐎𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐘𝐍. 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐘𝐍. 𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 5𝐭𝐡 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫. 𝐔𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝. 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐏𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐥𝐢𝐥 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐭. 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫. 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫. 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐚. 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐭. 𝐅𝐥𝐮𝐟𝐟.

𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬: 𝐄𝐧𝐡𝐚. 𝐀𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐚. 𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐨𝐲 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐃𝐨𝐨𝐫, 𝐋𝐞 𝐒𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐢𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐍𝐦𝐢𝐱𝐱.

𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭: 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍. @xeee334 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐒𝐊/𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐋𝐘 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭.

𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭: @honeyhuii @chirokookie @nyxtwixx @clar-iii @centheodd @prdxinvade @hiqhkey @junnniiieee07 @acciomylove @kpoplover718 @anotherimaginesaccount @ashxxgyu @bubblytaetae @xiaoderrrr @shinkenprincess-oh @hoondiors @nxzz-skz

First Chapter Posted: 1𝐬𝐭 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 2024.

Final Chapter Posted:

Look at me, back at it. Another Heeseung Harry Potter fic... He's my bias. Obvs I think abt him more than the other members 🤷🏽‍♀️. Profiles coming soon but the first chapter ain't gonna come till November.

I'll be using Karina from Aespa as the YN faceclaim. Feel free to imagine whoever you want.

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬 1: 𝐇𝐨𝐠𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐏𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐬 ♧♧ 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬 2: 𝐃𝐮𝐫𝐦𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐨𝐲𝐬 ♧♧ 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬 3: 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐮𝐱𝐛𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬 ♧♧

1. 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤?!

2. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐕𝐢𝐤𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐊𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐬 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞.

3. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧.

4. 𝐏𝐞𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥.

5. 𝐀𝐧 𝐀𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐆𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧.

6. 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫.

7. 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐇𝐨𝐠𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐅𝐢𝐭.

8. 𝐁𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠.

9. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐁𝐞𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦?!

10. 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐈𝐭.

11. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.

12. 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲'𝐬 𝐒𝐢𝐝𝐞.

13. 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐞.

14. 𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐎𝐧.

15. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐞𝐉𝐚𝐞?

16. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤.

17. 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐓𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐩.

18. 𝐃𝐞𝐥𝐮𝐥𝐮 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬.

19. 𝐘𝐧𝐡𝐞𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐥𝐞.

20. 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐬 𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐫 𝐆𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩.

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

[coolestguyonearth]

Another serious post!

Thank you all SO much for your support regarding my initial post about the Chinook nation. I'm hoping you'll lend me your attention one more time in preparation for this year's election.

Political candidates have time and time again promised aid to our nation only to utterly fail us when elected. I'm asking you all to get really mad about that on social media. It sounds silly, I know, but anger is a valuable weapon, especially during election season. Outrage fuels action. Today, our chairman sent out an email and provided us with these instructions:

1. Share the message and graphic below on social media to show your federal representative candidates that you are a #ChinookJustice voter, and justice cannot wait.

Copy the text below, paste it into a new social post, and update the bracketed text:

This November, I'm voting to support leaders who prioritize restoring federal recognition of the Chinook Indian Nation. [Tag your federal candidates] — if elected, what will you do to ensure  #ChinookJustice is restored?

^ these graphics are made to fit facebook, instagram, and twitter formats

2. Once you've taken action online, you can order shirts, stickers, lawn signs and more to show your community that you are a #ChinookJustice voter. All proceeds support community needs.

This is our redbubble store, and this is our printify! There are cute totes, pins, stickers, and even license plate frames.

I'm once again linking our Instagram, where you can see a variety of posts from birthdays to tribal events. And you can donate to us here and here.

also, a disclaimer - I am NOT an official of the Chinook Nation. I am not affiliated with council, nor am I a general representative. I'm just a guy fighting to protect his family. Thank you for choosing to support us <3

[pariaritzia]

Queerness in Indian Media

↳Film: RRR (2022, Telugu), dir. S.S. RAJAMOULI

RRR is a historical fantasy action drama that follows Bheem (NTR Jr), a Gond warrior who is in search of a Gond girl who was taken away from their home, and Ram (Ram Charan), the British Army officer assigned to catch him. Ram and Bheem meet under false identities and quickly grow closer, but everything is thrown into chaos once the truth is revealed and Ram is forced to choose between his ambitions and his attachment to Bheem.

Long before any white person had ever heard of RRR, queer Indians were cautiously optimistic that there would be something for us in this movie. There was the song Dosti, which felt more romantic than the average song about friendship; Bheem's intense declaration toward Ram in the trailer; Rajamouli explaining that there is no boy-girl romantic song (a staple of masala Indian cinema in any language) because "the romance angle is between these two guys only...bromance...they are the heroes, they are the hero and heroine, and they are the hero and villain"; the lead actors repeatedly questioning interviewers who referred to Jenny and Seetha as Bheem and Ram's love interests; and the writer, V. Vijayendra Prasad, being a huge fan of Salim-Javed movies, particularly Sholay, whose homosocial pairing has been read as queer by queer Indians for decades.

The movie itself gave us more than we could have hoped for from a project made on such a huge scale. Ram and Bheem mimic many of the "hero and heroine" pairings in so many masala movies, doing everything from the "slow-mo staring" for the first meeting, to getting a whole montage song for the progression of their bond, to dressing each other up, to dancing together at a party, to carrying each other, to rescuing each other.

The final rescue scene is perhaps the most telling, as it twists a well-known myth from the Ramayana by putting Ram and Bheem in the position of heroine and hero. It is not Hanuman who tells Rama where to find Sita in Lanka, but instead Seetha who tells Bheem where to find Ram. Bheem, upon finding him, promises to get him out 'even if [he has] to burn this Lanka down to do it'--then promptly carries him on his shoulders the way Hanuman carried Rama, to do away with any suspicions from homophobic audiences.

Those homophobic audiences still made their complaints--a glance at the oldest comments on any clip or behind the scenes video for RRR will make that clear--but they were drowned out by the many fans of the movie. Ultimately, like with any coded movie, the interpretation is up to the individual, but it is undeniable that a number of queer Indians felt that there was a romantic bond between Ram and Bheem. To dismiss that would do a disservice to the many queer people who have, are, and always will work quietly behind the scenes to write our stories, even if they can never say so directly.

[starryalpacasstuff]

Queer Indian Media: A Compilation

A couple of days ago, @impala124 sent @lurkingshan an ask about the lack of discussion about Queer Indian Media in fandom spaces. I wrote about it here, @neuroticbookworm here, and @waitmyturtles here (both of them have excellent points, I highly recommend you read their posts!). It's become quite apparent that people are willing to watch and engage in discourse about queer Indian media, it's just that the lack of popularity and accessibility makes it harder for people to start. So, I've decided to make a list tracking all of the queer Indian media I know of, and hopefully also any meta/discourse about it, which is an idea I've had floating in my head for months now.

This list is by no means comprehensive, so if you have recs, send them my way! Text me on DM, send an ask, tag me in your posts, whatever. And though it's not possible for me to watch everything on the list, I will be slowly going through as many of these as I can and writing about them, as well as hopefully finding more stuff and easier to access versions for the ones that are harder to access right now. This post is going to be a slow work in progress, but I'm hoping to update it regularly. So, if you'd like me to keep you updated, let me know through the tags/replies and I will tag you in future posts!

I've tagged the people who've recommended certain shows alongside each show. Everything on here is available online. The hyperlinked titles lead you to the media itself, meaning that it's available for free online with subtitles. Other details will be mentioned separately.

Disclaimer: The media I have watched/read have recommendation ratings (which will not always reflect my enjoyment of something, rather are based on how much I'd recommend it). While I did lightly screen everything on here, the criteria was 'has a trailer or otherwise showing queerness to be a central theme in the story' and 'is available online', so take that into account if you decide to pick something up, and definitely watch trailers and/or skim the wikipedia pages beforehand.

Movies

Fire | English | @neuroticbookworm 

Recommendation: 8.75/10 A 1996 movie surrounding a lesbian couple packed with commentary on religion, class, purity culture and more. Quick Pitch + Historical Context

Kapoor & Sons | Hindi | @neuroticbookworm

Available on Netflix, Prime, and paid on Youtube and Apple TV

Kaathal-The Core | Malayalam | @neuroticbookworm 

Officially on Prime, also available grey without subtitles

Super Deluxe | Tamil | @neuroticbookworm 

Officially on a paid streaming service called aha, grey on youtube

Dear Dad | Hindi | @neuroticbookworm 

Geeli Puchi (Ajeeb Dastaans) | Hindi | @blorbingqls @neuroticbookworm 

Available on Netflix

Cobalt Blue @blorbingqls

Officially on Netflix, also available grey without subtitles

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga | Hindi | @fallsouthwinter @usertoxicyaoi @neuroticbookworm

Available officially on Netflix, so watch there if you can, but can also be found grey in two parts without subtitles

Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish | Bengali | @silverquillsideas @neuroticbookworm 

I believe it's available on prime, but you might need to do some digging. Also available grey on youtube without subtitles (the movie is in part Bengali, part English)

Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan | Hindi | @silverquillsideas @twig-tea @neuroticbookworm

Officially on Amazon, grey on youtube without subtitles

Maja Ma | Hindi | @flyingrosebeetle @silverquillsideas 

Available on Amazon Prime

Badhaai Do | Hindi

Officially on Netflix, available grey without subtitles

Loev | Hindi

Available on youtube with Spanish (I think?) subtitles

Margarita With A Straw | Hindi

I believe this is a cut version, it is officially on Netflix which is likely the uncut version

Recommendation: 9/10

A self-discovery story about an Indian woman named Laila with cerebral palsy with great rep and beautiful execution.

Meta by @wen-kexing-apologist

Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui | Hindi | anon

Available grey without subtitles, officially on Netflix

Amar Prem Ki Prem Kahani | Hindi | @flowerbeasblog @aneechan

Officially on Jio Cinema, also available grey without subtitles

Time Out | Hindi

Available on Netflix

My Brother…Nikhil | Hindi

My Son Is Gay | Tamil

Hindi dub available on youtube without subtitles

Shows

Romil and Jugal | Hindi | @anixknowsnothin

You do need a vpn if you're outside India to watch it with the above link, it's also grey on youtube without subtitles

Recommendation: 8.5/10 India's modern gay remake of Romeo and Juliet, five years before Bad Buddy Random thoughts

The Married Woman | Hindi | @a-not-knowing-bisexual-wizard

Dev DD Season 2 | Hindi

Legitimately no clue whether this and the prev are grey or official

Made in Heaven | Hindi | @flyingrosebeetle @non-beingnary @neuroticbookworm

Available on Prime

All About Section 377, Still About Section 377 | Hindi

The Story Tales S2 | Gujrati

Insomnia | Hindi

It's a streaming service I've never heard of before, not unlike Gaga, this is one of the darker shows on the list so please do check out the trailer beforehand

Amra 2GayTher | Bengali

Available on two streaming services here and here, both paid

Mini gls from @twig-tea (og post here)

Firsts S3 | @tinyreadinglifelight

Neverland

Maaya 2

Last two eps do not have subtitles but the story is followable

The ‘Other’ Love Story @/silverquillsideas 

Just Another Love Story

Books

Memory of Light

Recommendation: 5/10 A historical book set during the colonial era, the lesbian romance is mostly a subplot that loses it's way towards the end. It's kind of a drag, but the history component is somewhat interesting.

Don't Let Him Know

Recommendation Rating: 7.5/10 with serious trigger warnings including rape. It's a brutally honest book designed to make the reader uncomfortable, so proceed with caution. I personally liked it quite a lot, but that's majorly because of how authentic the book felt.

Falling Into Place

Recommendation Rating: 8/10 A modern lesbian romance that follows similar beats to the typical thai bl/gl. A little underdeveloped in some places, but overall quite good.

My Magical Palace

Cobalt Blue

The Paths Of Marriage

Marriage Of A Thousand Lies

[waitmyturtles]

Thinking About QL Fandoms and Markets For Indian Queer Media

Alright, ::rubs hands together::, let's see if this old auntie can get the link history of this thread straight first.

@impala124 originally wrote in an ask to dear @lurkingshan about Shan's thoughts on a developing fandom for Indian queer media.

Shan subsequently asked a few of us on the internet, brown Asian and/or otherwise, to weigh in, which @starryalpacasstuff did here. Starry's piece has a few great reblogs with media resources that everyone should scurry to check out.

The inimitable @neuroticbookworm then decided to show us her literary Tae Bo skills and dropped an absolute MONSTER of a must-read regional media and industry analysis here. (Let me emphasize that this is a MUST-READ PIECE if you're interested in Indian media.)

I'm going to use NBW's piece as a reference throughout my weak-ass response tea here, because she covered almost everything that needed to be said about why there ISN'T a robust or developed fandom on the internet for Indian queer media. So go read that first, and if you forget to click back here, it's all good, because I'm just gonna offer some unorganized macro-level thoughts at this point.

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I'd like to first amplify a number of themes that @neuroticbookworm made clear in her piece about the "media industry in India." I'm only putting that phrase in quotes not because NBW wrote it (she didn't), but because it's a wholly inaccurate phrase.

1) INDIA IS *NOT* A SINGLE, UNIFIED CULTURAL MONOLITH. Remember your early social studies classes on early civilizations? The Aryans, Harappa, Mohenjo Daro? Those specific civilizations arose in the north of the Indian sub-continent, and not a lot of social studies spaces outside of Indian classrooms give love to the other regional areas in India -- like, say, all of South India, hello -- that belong to other civilization definitions.

To be grossly overgeneral, ancient civilizations in the northern subcontinent were known as Aryan civilizations, while those of the southern subcontinent were known as Dravidian civilizations. We see these differences today in the food we brown people eat, and ESPECIALLY in the languages we speak. Tamil (a Dravidian South Indian language) couldn't be farther away from Hindi (a North Indian language emanating from Sanskrit).

2) While the prominent political nationalists of India (😐) would like to have you believe that all Indians are monolithically similar -- or rather, SHOULD be monolithically similar by way of all Indians speaking Hindi, consuming Hindi media, and erasing religious diversity (🤬) -- nothing could be farther from the truth of our incredibly diverse and complicated subcontinent. We Indians are regionally, and therefore culturally, diverse in a great myriad of ways, way beyond our food, language, and religious preferences.

[For my non-Indians and non-Asians reading this, think about the two dishes you see the most on Indian restaurant menus outside of India. Chicken tikka masala and tandoori chicken, right? That's typical "Indian" food to the untrained eye. CTM is a British dish borne from immigrant South Asian chefs; and tandoori chicken was created by North Indian Punjabis. My own Indian origins are half-half (lah), I'm half-South and half-North Indian (with some SE Asia thrown in there, boleh!). My brain fucking freezes when I speak to someone who thinks the extent of "Indian food" is CTM and TC, and I have to explain, for the millionth time, the basics of the incredible array of South Indian vegetarian food that I grew up eating and loving.]

Thus, what I'm trying to say is, when we say the word "INDIAN," there are some questions that a curious listener should be tuned into asking to get specifics about just what kind of "India" or "Indian" the speaker is speaking of. I'll often get the question, "but WHERE in India are your parents from," from tuned-in Asians, who want to know specifically about my regional background.

VERY SO OFTEN IN POPULAR DIALOGUE ABOUT "INDIAN MEDIA," THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTION OF THE CONVERSATION IS THAT THE SPEAKER IS ONLY SPEAKING ABOUT HINDI-LANGUAGE MEDIA, WITHOUT RECOGNIZING THAT REGIONAL AND/OR NON-HINDI LANGUAGE MARKETS MIGHT BE MAKING MEDIA, EVEN POPULAR MEDIA, FOR THEIR SPECIFIC REGIONAL MARKETS AND AUDIENCES WITHOUT AS MUCH OF A GLANCE TO THE DOMINANT HINDI-SPEAKING NORTH.

NBW says this brilliantly in her incredible piece, which delineates the major differences in the MANY regional and even sub-regional media markets of India, that produce a VAST array of media in the languages of the regions, markets, and audiences that this media serves.

On a personal note, when I was a kid, I only watched old South Indian films subtitled in English that my South Indian dad found. My North Indian mom watched them with us happily. We didn't do Bollywood in my house because frankly, dad hated those films and wasn't into them. Now that I think about it, it's probably because those Hindi films didn't bear a single resemblance to the cultural and life he lived growing up in South India.

3) Alright, so we have established that in terms of media, to speak about "Indian media" as a monolith is utterly incorrect, and just, go back to NBW's piece to get an excellent analysis of the details of that situation.

NBW does a bang-up job highlighting important pieces of regional media throughout her post, and like I mentioned before, there are multiple lists of media in the reblogs Starry's piece linked above ( @silverquillsideas notes in her reblog of Starry's piece that two important films come out of the state of Bengal, a market that us Indians should certainly pay attention to in particular.)

I therefore might posit that there might not actually be a unified "fandom for Indian queer media."

IT IS CLEAR from the reblogs of the various pieces that we've written over the last few days, that us Indians who love QLs certainly don't INHERENTLY know, universally, about ALL the queer media, across the subcontinent, in the MANY languages we speak, that has been made.

We have a lot of learning to do across our own regional identities.

I'd argue that, instead, from an organic growth perspective, that regional media markets in India would respond to THEIR OWN AUDIENCE'S AND MARKET'S DEMANDS and create queer media WITHIN THEIR OWN REGIONS

a) if their market(s) demanded it, AND b) if there was either pre-production funding, or a guarantee of net revenue from the airing of such media.

A fandom doth not create media.

It is filmmakers that create media.

And those filmmakers need

✨ MONEY ✨

✨ MONEY ✨

✨ MONEY ✨

to make media.

Some regional markets will, by nature, be willing to take risks on a filmmaker's desire to make queer media. Those projects could succeed, or could fail. Badhaai Do is one of the best examples of a Bollywood breakout piece that gained even some international attention, and certainly attention ACROSS the subcontinent.

But I want to emphasize this point about

MONEY.

The question that we're pondering is, why isn't there a more prominent fandom for Indian queer media and/or QLs?

@twig-tea made note, in her reblog of Starry's original piece, about the importance of accessibility and subtitling, an important note not just for international audiences, but for regional Indian populations that don't speak the same language(s). Accessibility allows fans to watch the media of their own markets, and markets outside of their boundaries.

But even bigger than this is, before we even get into accessibility, is: the filmmakers need money to spend to MAKE projects, and in an ideal scenario for themselves and/or their studios, they then need to (hopefully) make a PROFIT to demonstrate a sustainable desire and demand for the media they're producing, a profit that could hopefully be re-invested into more and new queer media projects.

Let me not get into all the obstacles in which filmmakers, queer or otherwise, might run into issues with production fundraising for a queer-centered project. We Indians know about our conservative, often violent, obstacles.

NBW does a fabulous job in her piece discussing what COULD be made by way of queer media that COULD gain a stronger cultural foothold over time across the subcontinent.

4) A fandom, most often, develops as a response to media already created. A fandom, HOWEVER, *IS*, often, in today's digital age, often recruited to fundraise for projects they want to see! GoFundMe, right?

I think it was @impala124 in a reblog that mentioned that there's already a "market" for Indian QLs. But we've established now that there are actually many unconnected regional media markets in India that can't be assumed to be glommed together.

If a fandom WANTS to see a particular kind of media, in their own specific regional market, it's certainly well within its rights of speech to create internet buzz for it.

But I think we as fans also need to take responsibility for a better understanding of the economics of media creation, and to be patient as queer media is produced across the subcontinent, and to simply do our best to hype it up on the internet when we can, so that commercial sponsors and potential production funders can then pay attention to what us fans want -- and what we're willing to pay for.

And let me be honest, this is a *tremendously difficult proposition* for a field of media that's just really small against the giant, mainstream, well-funded media markets of India. And this field of queer media would be guaranteed to face crippling and disgusting conservative criticism as it gains more of a prominent cultural foothold -- as we are seeing in South Korea literally at this very second.

Looking on the economic bright side: we see in Thailand and in Japan that QLs make MONEY. Shit, not just Japan being into Japanese QLs, but also, Japan is so into Thai QLs that the major Thai channel and studio, GMMTV, has a distribution deal with the Japanese channel TV Asahi to air Thai QLs in Japan. MONEY, BABY! INTERNATIONAL DOLLAS. Great Sapol, of the QLs Manner of Death and Wandee Goodday, just wrapped a stint in a mainstream Japanese drama, and I'll assume that's because he's hotttt and talented gotten a lot of attention in Japan from his previous Thai QL work, as well as his lengthy resume in Thai mainstream media.

The hunger for QLs is there in these two major national markets, and the Thai and Japanese audience markets have proven that the demand for content for these countries can be economically fruitful. So the media markets of these two (much smaller than India) countries are pumping ever more money into production, and filmmakers are responding with more QL content than ever.

We have not even begun to contemplate reaching that tipping point in India, across our regional markets, yet. Again, NBW offers some creative paths forward that will take time to develop.

Fuck, I mean. Imagine Bollywood looking towards Thailand and its branded pair formula as an inspiration to develop queer media. (IMAGINE.) Get two super popular Bollywood actors together in a branded acting coupling/partnership. Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan doing India's version of What Did You Eat Yesterday?. In aprons! Making keema and rajma and chapatis. ShahSaif (SaifShah?!). KhanKhan. How would that go down?

It's a proven economic formula in Thailand. And that's just one example. We're well familiar, separately, with how Japanese QLs gain traction in bigger media spaces for its audiences, with media being adopted for the screen, as they mostly are, from popular yaoi and yuri mangas.

India and its regional media markets need some proven economic formulas within its regional markets to prove that queer media can gain culturally important footholds across the mindsets of various audiences -- and to prove that those footholds can produce profits.

The fandom element in this is that the regional fandoms, while creating buzz, could also prove to be important economic factors to a regional queer media industry being able to survive, and maybe even thrive.

Assuming that I am speaking to a mostly progressive group of fans here: we can only hope for this, and we must support the queer media that the subcontinent currently produces, IN *ALL* THE LANGUAGES (!!!!), to demonstrate to producers that Indians, wider South Asians, and even non-South Asians, WANT THIS MEDIA. We want it, we SHOULD want it, and damn it, we should SPEND OUR MONEY on it, to show our appreciate to the filmmakers taking risks to make this media.

I'm out! I need a chai and a samosa and a dosa.

[mime-rodeo]

when i say i'm sick of the male saviour trope, i don't mean that i want every single female character to be a completely self-sufficient independent woman who needs no man.

i mean that i want to see more female solidarity in media.

give me a trope where the murdered woman is avenged by her mother or sister or female friend or girlfriend or wife.

give me a trope where the woman who is kidnapped or being assaulted is saved by another woman.

give me a trope where a female detective investigates SA cases and brings justice to women.

give me more tropes where a woman is helped or saved or supported by other women, instead of a man.

yes, everyone needs help and support once in a while but for a woman, a man shouldn't be her only outlet.

[is-the-snake-video-cute]

You’ve seen the new Flight Rising familiar for Starfall Celebration, yeah? The flowers being asters make sense for the Arcane flight’s link to stars, but what can you share with us about the snake? Seems to me it might be based on an Indian cobra.

Definitely looks to be based on an Indian cobra, yep!

A few fun facts about Indian cobras (Naja naja):

They're also called "spectacled" cobras! The name comes from the marking on the back of their hood, which is usually two circles connected by a curved line, like a pair of spectacles drawn with a bit of artistic license. The spots are meant to look like eyes to confuse predators.

They have pretty big hoods, even by cobra standards! They can spread them out really dang wide.

I love seeing them with their hoods down because they always look vaguely confused as to what they're doing.

Indian cobras are among the only true cobras who cannot "spit" venom (the other species that can't is the Caspian cobra).

Baby cobras are the cutest things ever. Look at this baby!