#actually no i think i'm imagining that because i simply haven't seen enough fat people in webcomics to recall meeting characters like that

[horrendoushag]

sick of reading webcomics where everyone has the exact same meets-societal-bs-beauty-standards-in-an-averaged-way body type with the only variation being height. where are the fat people. where are the people who aren't fat but aren't thin either. where even are the guys with narrow shoulders or the girls with big curves or the girls with no curves to speak of. where are the fat people. where is the anything. no substance. by being solely beautiful you have become ugly. even the old people have straight backs and flat stomachs. what.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

Do you think Misha is really straight? Because that would mean Cockles wasn't real all along.

i've been kinda-sorta avoiding answering the asks i have along these lines, partly because i have real life stuff going on, partly because i'm obsessed with ofmd, and partly because i haven't really wanted to get into my feelings about it, because i'm still a little upset.

but look. not to overhype my credentials, but as one of the leading cockles experts out there... misha is not a straight man. i don't like calling him a liar, but he's not a straight man. i know too much about him, i've watched him do and say too many queer things for it to be even a possibility in my mind.

look, this is what happened. misha came out as bi. without prompting, he named himself as bisexual. if you watch the video, there is simply no way for it to have been a misunderstanding or for him to have misspoken. he came out.

that was on a friday, and he didn't post the "i'm straight" tweets until monday, after a full weekend of interacting with con-goers who treated him as having come out, and he never corrected them. some people claim that he was upset about the attention his coming out was getting, but i've heard of no accounts of him telling anyone "there's been a misunderstanding", only that he was potentially distressed about the media attention.

before misha's tweets, stands, the company that sells spn merch and is, i think, owned by misha (or at least closely tied to him?), sent out an email pushing bi spn merch with a reference to misha's coming out. stands posted a tweet about supporting "a queer man". that tweet was soon deleted. later that same day, misha's "i'm straight" tweets were posted, after more media outlets started reporting it.

i don't know what happened exactly, but i suspect that misha has a lot more trauma than any of us know about. we know that he was homeless for years as a child, we know he was bullied, we know he self harmed as a kid, we know he had a really difficult family situation and he moved around constantly, changed schools constantly, had a hard time making friends, was fat as a child and bullied for it.

it's pretty easy to observe that misha developed his characteristic bombastic overconfidence (calling himself "the overlord", etc) as a way to compensate for his actual insecurity, that he insulated himself from his pain and loneliness by intentionally standing out as "weird" by choice instead of by force. when we get glimpses of misha's underlying pain and vulnerability, it becomes pretty easy to see just how much of his personality has been deliberately constructed as means of self-protection.

and my point in saying that, is that despite all the confidence he projects, i think misha is genuinely terrified of coming out and being publicly known as queer. i don't know if this is due to general cultural homophobia or if he has personal trauma at the hands of homophobia, but when you examine all the pieces of his life i don't think it's difficult to imagine that he has at some point been traumatized by homophobia and it's left a lasting mark. he's very quick to stand up for other queer people, but he seemed damn near fucking terrified to call himself bisexual, even in a room full of his fans, a large number of whom had just identified as bisexual too. he's made "weird" his brand, has never hesitated to do bonkers off-the-wall shit, but it took him until the age of 47 to develop the nerve to come out.

i don't know if the backpedaling was due to personal trauma or professional worry, but i think he started panicking and dove back into the closet. personally, i feel like he should have foreseen it being picked up by the media, considering that he is famous, but i can't be angry or disappointed in him for going back into the closet. whatever the cause, i'm sure that it's a valid one.

mostly, it just... makes me really sad. like i said, i've seen enough over the past nine years i've been a cockles scholar that i know he isn't straight. and i just find it fucking heartbreaking that this man carries so much pain and fear in his heart that even after he worked up the courage to say it out loud, it still has such a powerful hold on him that he felt the need to lie about who he is.

it's just... fuck, it's just an utterly miserable thing to have to witness. you could see both the joy and the terror in him when he came out, and i was so happy for him and so proud of him. i'm not not proud of him now, but it just makes me so profoundly sad.

i haven't been able to laugh at any of the jokes and memes about it, because i care about him as a person and i genuinely think he carries a lot of unresolved trauma here. now he's the butt of a thousand jokes, and if he ever does choose to come out again it's going to be so much harder and messier for him. he has such a kind heart, so he probably feels like he's let his queer fans down, he probably feels terrible about lying, he probably has no idea what to do now.

i just feel really awful for him and i wish he could the have peace and freedom he deserves.