#and by gay in this case I mean Queer but in the shorthand way that lets me do a fun alliteration

[waldensblog]

"How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me." The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him:—

"You yourself never loved; you never love!" On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:—

"Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done."

I can't help but wonder how the 1890s audience reacted to Dracula's very unhetero behaviour here...

[vergess]

Your tag #jonathan harker's gender markers got me thinking. IS there a specific word or term for when an author takes a heavily gendered trope and applies it to a protagonist who isn't that gender? I've heard it described as "queering" the thing, which is good and fun to say, but I was wondering if there was anything more explicit or in depth you might know about?

Hmm. I mean I guess I would call it gender non-comformity in the character, is all?

I mean there are a lot of related terms, but while I suspect there is a specific word for this, I don't know it.

But there's all kinds of... well, there's so many related concepts that I barely know where to begin haha. Disorganized thinking? Never heard of her.

Like, in certain contexts where the author's intentions are known and relevant, such as with gay actors in... bluh some time period where being gay on screen was extra illegal. So, in that case, you can call it "queer coding" to say, "these were conscious choices made by the author to express a sexual, gender, etc variance for the character that would otherwise be censored or banned."

But we certainly don't have any knowledge of that sort pertaining to Bram Stoker, no matter how many implications and anecdotes there are. So we can ask "is Stoker queer coding? If so, what could the intended message be?"

But we cannot say "he definitely was queer coding."

Meanwhile, "queering," as in the sense of "queering the narrative" refers more to the act of asking that question and trying to answer it. It's actually shorthand, and the full term "queer reading" may be clearer.

Queering is something that an audience does, rather than an author. It's the application specifically of queer frameworks of gender as a way of interacting with a text.

So, some of the more common examples are like. Well. Literally the act of calling a character "gender nonconforming," which itself requires you to have a working concept of gender norms for the time, and also to know what the hell "gender nonconforming" even means.

Which, I have to emphasize. You'd think it's self-evident but many people stop at "Girl who plays A Sport". Queer theory, as a type of interpretation, can focus heavily on this.

At the way, WAY more granular level, there's also specific trope names for particular ways characters are commonly shown as gender nonconforming. Of relevance to Our Good Friend Jonathan Harker, I would suggest:

Masculine girl, feminine boy

Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous

The Twink

Hemo Erotic

Gender Inverted Trope, found by @firecoloredwater

[thebreakfastgenie]

Sorry; just a point of clarification on my last anon because I think it got lost in me trying to put my thoughts into order. I also experienced quite a lot of "let men just be friends" as a way to shut down "gay shipping" in earlier years of fandom and I think that has also lent itself to a bit of defensiveness about that argument. The point of bringing up e.g. Good Omens was to that end. These days, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who isn't chomping at the bit to see whether Gaiman canonizes a romantic relationship in the sequel, but back in the day there was a lot of "if you interpret this as romantic or ship it, you're wrong, this is just what friendship looks like, let people be friends" that shouted down a lot of the 'shipping. So even though I know you are not doing that, I do still have a bit of a defensive reaction to people using that line because I remember a time when it was used to shout down LGBT interpretations of a work.

Honestly, I do understand that. I remember seeing that too, and I think like with a lot of things related to LGBT issues, public opinion--or in this case fandom opinion--turned really fast, so it's kind of a strange adjustment.

I do actually try to avoid that line for exactly that reason, but sometimes I just can't think of a better shorthand. I'm open to suggestions on that front!

Also, I'm sort of removed from it, because... gay ships just don't mean that much to me the way they do to a lot of fandom-inclined queer people. I think they may have when I was younger and figuring things out, but nowadays when I'm invested in and passionate about a ship, it's honestly just about a story I find interesting. I don't find meaningful representation in non-canon gay ships; I barely find it canon gay ships, but that's another conversation about how I just don't quite fit in here.

So on the one hand I'm like... trying to talk about my experiences in fandom and my desire to make room for platonic interpretations without invoking language that many of us associate with homophobes or implying that shipping is inherently bad or wrong, but on the other hand I don't really relate to the significance of LGBT interpretations. If I want a gay story, I'll find one. I'm not looking for one in M*A*S*H or most of the other media I consume. I know these LGBT interpretations are very significant to other people and I want to respect that, it's just not something I exactly relate to.

[feline-felon]

I was thinking recently about the people who police other people about how different words and labels are used in the lgbt+ community (e.g. queer is a slur discourse, trans-masc lesbian isn't a thing discourse, that sort of thing), and it got me thinking about how we use labels in general.

Now, I'm not that well versed in the happenings of the lgbtqia+ community to begin with, so take everything I say with a grain of salt (I have been wrong before, I'm only human after all). But with the formalities out of the way, here's my take on it:

Labels aren't designed for you to fit them, labels are designed for them to fit you. The whole point of labeling things in the first place is to give us a shorthand way to talk about them, and make people's experiences easier to understand.

Because the human condition is so varied, if we had a label for every possible human experience of sexuality or gender, we'd be here all day and things would still be confusing (thus defeating the point). So, we use a few labels with broad definitions to encompass a vast array of experiences.

Just because someone doesn't absolutely perfectly fit a label (e.g. a gay man who only likes other men, except for one woman), it doesn't mean they aren't allowed to use that label, or make their experiences any less valid. You don't need to conform perfectly to a label to use it to describe yourself, just the vague outlines. They're all a little bit vague on purpose, and that's to give you the wiggle room needed to have them fit comfortably around you. And in any case, you can still get into the specifics of it if you want, but the labels are still there in case you want or need a quick and easy way of identifying yourself.

In essence, I suppose the labels are better used more like guidelines than hard rules. Heck, you don't even need a label if you don't want one, and that's fine too. Just do whatever you find comfortable, and live and let live, I say.

But hey, that's just my two cents. What do you guys think?

[variousqueerthings]

some musings on the dynamics between the girls of yellowjackets

I'm fairly certain that one of the main points of yellowjackets is portraying all these different versions of hyperintense homoerotic girls' dynamics that sometimes veer into an actual romantic relationship (tai and van), but crucially Do Not Need To in order to be authentically queer dynamics

jackie/shauna and misty/nat and tai/shauna and lottie/laura lee (and I think next season whatever dynamic lottie/van/misty are gonna have and probably lottie/nat) and more I haven't remembered or will probably appear in s2, they're all queercoded

it's not queerbaiting, it's a series of intense dynamics that you don't often see represented, even in stories that ostensibly are about girls and women. it's letting them be this intense, rather than falling for a sort of heteronormatively acceptable distance you see in... too many things about girls and women... --

jackie loves shauna more than anyone and also tries to "own" her, shauna looks up to/resents/thinks about more than anyone/loves jackie -- that is just canon, that's not in dispute

christina ricci said about misty and nat: “As far as the group goes, Natalie was the best version of an outsider and Misty very much identifies as an outsider, so for her, ‘this is another outsider like me but she’s so cool and she’s an outsider but by choice.’ She represents the best version of what Misty could be but isn’t capable of being, so she sort of covets Natalie’s time and affection. She sort of wants to possess her in a lot of ways.”

tai and shauna having a shorthand of understanding and comforting each other -- the attempted abortion mirroring the baptism -- the attempted bacchanalian orgy/ritual murder -- shauna having literal visions of jackie's ghost -- etcetc -- they're intense and queercoded

the fact that tai and van are the only relationship to have sex/be in a specifically romantic relationship means they're the only ones confirmed as lesbians (although interestingly van is played by liv hewson who is non-binary and I wonder if that will play into the text -- might not, but who knows)

it doesn't mean they're the only characters with intentional queer dynamics -- it's basically the story of a sisterhood/cult/survivors of trauma, of course it's gonna be queer -- they're a seriously messed up found family with one adult functioning unwillingly as parent who is also explicitly gay in the text

when jackie is left out in the cold, she's broken up with shauna, yes, and wants shauna specifically to come out to her and bring her back in, but in the death-dream she has she's not just dreaming about shauna... she's dreaming about all of them. All of them wait with blankets, give her hot chocolate - dream!shauna says it first, but then they all say: "We all love you Jackie"

I can only imagine these relationships will continue to develop in ever more messed up -- and loving -- ways come next season

TL;DR while I get people can feel nervous about queerness in text, in this case writing the characters with messy, not-easily-definable relationships to each other aren't bugs, they're features, especially as there also are multiple canonically queer characters present

this story isn't queerbaiting. it's a five-course meal

[morsobaby]

I really hate the fact that I still flinch/get on edge, even for a few seconds, whenever I hear someone (outside of familiar🏳️‍🌈 comfortable situations) call someone gay in finnish. Like this is not about identity policing, this is about the fact that our word for gay (" Homo") is still being used in the same manner as faggot, amongst teen boys. Ykno, not even always referring to any actual dating behavior, but just used as shorthand for dumbass/loser/annoying/wimp ect. "Oh well I didn't mean it in a derogatory way! It was just a joke!" then why'd you use it as an insult? What's the joke here? You wouldn't be using it in that way if you didn't mean to imply something negative. This isn't a case of queer friends being rowdy with each other, this is indirect homophobia. We do have a derogatory term for a gay person but that's just slightly too controversial to say in casual "joke" mocking. It's only used by actual older generation homophobes, or if you really wanna make it sting. You go white boy, assert dominance over your friend!

At least as far as I've experienced, it's so bad that most people outside of actual genuine gays, use the ENGLISH WORD GAY. Not our finnish word for it, they say "Gay". Bc people still use our word as a slur sometimes, you can never be 100% sure how they meant it. Imagine us not being able to use our own fucking language to describe ourselves. Fucked up world. Some are even considered "radical" or "edgy" gays if they openly use that on themselves or others without batting an eye

When my mom calls me over to like, look at a cute gay couple on TV or tell me about her queer friends, she says Gay, in English, in English pronunciation.

Same with lesbian. In finnish we'd say Lesbo/lespo but people more or less resort to switching momentarily into English to explain that this girl likes other girls. Additionally some lesbians I've known don't even wanna fucking say lesbian, they say gay, Finnish or english. Lesbian is also still used derogatorily so much so that it's not a comfortable word to use regularly like any other word. I also still flinch when someone refers to me as a lesbian. I've literally been insulted with that word, by family members too btw. They say "Lesbian!" as a comeback when I criticize their poor sensitive hetero lifestyle. Fucked up world. We use English instead bc it's a Trendy language, it's international and educated! It's socially correct!

In case anyone decides to come @ me on this: English is great for international usage and lots of Finns having a good understanding of it is helpful in interacting with foreigners or immigrants. As accessibility and education it's a good thing to have. And yea finnish doesn't have original terms for some of the others, like pansexual bisexual, nonbinary in some cases, or anything about the ace/aro spectrums (as far as I'm aware). Yea, we do have "Muunsukupuolinen" as a sort of descriptor for a nonbinary person but it's lengthy and I've honestly never heard people use it outside of formal settings where saying Nonbinary would sound too "pop culture" ish.

Oh yeah, also, saying "Trans" in finnish sounds really clumsy! It's just one letter away from our word for Tranny! ("Transu") If you don't wanna mouth out "transsukupuolinen", get inventive or resort to english pronunciation of the word!

*Slams my head on a desk multiple times*

[aromantic-enjolras]

Hey, I have a question: You say Enjolras is aro, then what do you make of "Antinous, wild"? "They are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechméja"? "Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk"? All the other times Enjolras is compared to historical/mythological gay people? (In other words, Enjolras is canonically gay - not aromantic - and I'm wondering why you're ignoring what's so obviously written)

... Okay, I'm going to answer this seriously, just in case you're actually in good faith. There are a bunch of different reasons, so strap in.

1. I mostly don't make anything of the comparisons in the Brick. Both because it's a 2000 page novel and if I needed to understand and analyze every single image in it before I made any headcanons I would be here until Judgment Day (I'd need a couple of days just for Grantaire's rants); and because Victor Hugo is not shy about beating you over the head with his subtext, so if I have to go looking for it, I consider it isn't on purpose.

2. "They are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechméja" is not a sentence referring to Enjolras. It's part of Grantaire's description. And as much as I see Enjolras as aromantic AF, I can very easily see Grantaire as being in love with him. That said, if you put that sentence in context, it talks about how he's one of those people whose name you only see tagged onto someone else's, like Patroclus and Achilles (you see people talking about Achilles on his own, but if you hear someone talk about Patroclus, it's almost certainly attached to Achilles). Also, one of the people mentioned in that sentence is Pollux!! As in Castor and Pollux! The mythological twins! Unless there is another mythological Pollux I'm not aware of (and neither is Wikipedia), ewww!!!!

3. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this with any finality (maybe @pilferingapples can give their opinion here?), but are those even "historical/mythological gay people" for Victor Hugo? Because just because someone is a shorthand of "queer" in 2021 doesn't mean they were in 1864 for a straight author. If you're looking for confirmation in the text, you need to look at it from their eyes, not yours.

4. As for "Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk", if you had taken the time to browse through my 'aro!Enjolras' tag or my 'my opinions' tag you'd know I have already answered this question multiple times. In particular, here, here and here. Basically, I interpret that scene as Grantaire finally rising up to the occasion, after failing multiple times, and Enjolras finally seeing him as more than a nuisance and offering him respect and acceptance in his final moments. It's the culmination of Grantaire's arc, not Enjolras' (at least not that way).

5. On the other hand, there are a few lines in the Brick that just scream 'aromantic' to me. In particular, "it did not seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one passion—the right; but one thought—to overthrow the obstacle.” and “His impassive temerity astounds me. He lives alone […] Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to be intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice and as bold as fire.” Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him, that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: “Patria.” Yes, you can interpret those as him being not into women 'because he's into men', but what the text gives us is that he's not into women because he's too preoccupied with the Revolution. He has no time nor inclination for romance.

6. That said, of course I don't mean to imply that Victor Hugo consciously coded Enjolras as aromantic. I don't think he even knew what aromantic was. This is how I interpret it: you are in no obligation to agree with it, because interpretations are just that: interpretations.

7. Also, if we're going exclusively by the Brick, I'm pretty sure Enjolras is also supposed to have no flaws outside of Loving The Revolution Too Much.

8. I have to ask, though: you do know a person can be aromantic and gay at the same time, right anon? If you go through my tags, you might even see that my Modern AU Enjolras headcanon is aromantic and homosexual. He has sex with men, he just doesn't fall for them or want to date them.

9. And lastly, simply because it sparks joy. I also ignore the fact that they're all dead most of the time.

And a couple of extra points that are kind of off-topic so I put them aside:

10. This might be a pet peeve of mine, but honestly, talking about the Ancient Greeks as "gay" already feels iffy to me. Their way to structure relationships was so different from ours that it doesn't make sense. Homosexual relationships for men were a rite of passage and of patronage that had little to do with romantic attraction and love as we understand it. If sex between men is socially mandatory, does it make sense to say they were gay because they had sex with men? Were all married women in the XIXth century straight or bi because they had sex with men?

11. On that note, every time I see someone brandishing Achilles and Patroclus as the OG canonical gays I wonder if they know anything about them that doesn't come from pop culture. Because if you read the Illiad, they're cousins. It was the Classic Greeks, around Plato's era, who started shipping them.

@p-trichor you wanted to read this rant? Here you go. ^^

[benisasoftboi]

So on Friday night I made this post:

Which I expected that maybe ten, twenty people would see? I didn’t think anyone would really care about a joke about something so old and obscure, and it would just get lost in all the Detective Pikachu stuff. Instead, within five hours, it had become my most popular post. 

I know it’s still not a huge number, but it’s still way more attention than I’ve ever received for anything... ever, so I’ve been thinking about Pokemon Live a lot since. Which has been bad, because this morning I had to take a very important political economy exam, and instead of thinking about Bretton Woods or Marx, I was thinking about Pokemon. I nearly referred to my country’s former Prime Minister as ‘David Camerupt’. It wasn’t good. 

I need to expunge my thoughts. Specifically, my thoughts on one topic in particular - the way this show treats, or rather mistreats, the character of James. Because I truly, truly love Pokemon Live. I do. It’s one of the most glorious dumpster fires I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a poor quality recording of. But this is the one thing I definitely don’t love.

I don’t expect anyone to read this. I mean, I said that last time, but this time I really don’t. It’s a long essay on a niche topic, and it isn’t even funny. But on the off chance it’ll get you to stick with me, I promise that there will be pictures of Andrew Rannells cuddling puppies at the end. 

So,

How Pokemon Live Mistreats James, and Why It Matters:

The Mandatory Mentioning of The Actor

I’m guessing anyone who knows anything about Pokemon Live also knows that now highly successful, Tony-nominated Broadway and television actor Andrew Rannells was in it playing James. And if you didn’t, now you know why I’ve mentioned him twice now. I’m a big fan of this guy.

He hated this role. Absolutely despised it. Apparently the show was a miserable environment to work in for everyone. The costumes were uncomfortable. The audiences were unbearable. There’s a making of for this show, which can be viewed on YouTube in its entirety - I’ve watched the whole thing more than once and you can see in every cast member’s eyes - there’s no light there. They’re all dead inside. It’s almost heartbreaking.  

To be clear - he’s the only one of these people I, or anyone else I’ve seen, ever makes fun of for this show. And that’s because he’s fine. He’s fine! He’s done very well for himself and talking about it won’t hurt his career, and there’s just always something really hilarious about seeing very successful people in terrible things, isn’t there? Chris Hemsworth in Saddle Club, Zach Braff in Babysitter’s Club, literally everyone in Foodfight. It’s not malicious or in any way intended to be punching down - just poking fun at a really good actor’s really bad early work. It’s not even really making fun of him, more that he was in this.

But there is one reason he hated the role that I don’t find so funny, and that’s that he felt the people that wrote the thing had made James a grossly over-the-top, borderline-to-over-the-line (depending on your tolerance) homophobic stereotype. And... yeah. They undeniably did that.  

Rannells understandably dislikes the character, and to be honest - that makes me a little sad. Knowing that musical!James is probably the only version of the character he (and likely a lot of parents who saw the show, and other cast members) ever really encountered, that’s a huge shame. Because if we go back to the anime the musical’s based on, the one I, and many others, grew up on, James is quite different. In fact, I personally consider anime!James to be the best character in the entire Pokemon franchise.

Why We Love Team Rocket 

Just want to quickly note that I can only discuss the anime up to about halfway through the Sinnoh seasons - I’ve seen basically nothing after that. My childhood was some original series, a lot of Hoenn, and a fair bit of early Sinnoh (somehow skipped over Johto almost entirely, don’t really know how that happened). If any of this is now not accurate, well - it’s not really relevant for this discussion anyway, but I still apologise. 

The Team Rocket trio, James especially, is, pretty queer-coded. This is not unusual for villainous characters in children’s media before the 2010s, so much so that I would guess that a lot of the time it wasn’t even being done deliberately - it was just that common a trope that it was all but expected your show would have at least one flamboyantly effeminate, villainous bloke. And James - especially early James - has no qualms about showing his feminine side:

Notice that Jessie adopts masculine attire to match - she doesn’t always do this, but I like that they have her at least do it sometimes. 

Team Rocket’s disguises became less and less likely to involve cross dressing as the show went on, but it’s one of the things best remembered about them. James also has a strong association with roses, and possesses several other feminine mannerisms. Arguably he’s far more downplayed than most other villains of the type (even more so than others present in Pokemon - Harley’s a great example, who was also, coincidentally, played by Andrew Rannells), but it’s present. And while yes, obviously in real life none of those things should be taken as definitive indication of a person’s orientation, and straight men are perfectly capable of twirling around in pretty dresses - in fact, I fully endorse it - this is fiction. Specifically fiction from the early 2000s. And in fiction, certain things are intended as visual cues and shorthand.

So I really, really doubt we were supposed to think James is entirely straight (I personally have always thought that he’s actually bi, but I’m not opposed to alternatives). You could make the case, but like. Come on.

But how is this different from musical!James? And how is this different than any other villain like him? Very simple. Anime!James has depth.

Not a tremendous amount. It’s a children’s cartoon made to cash in on a popular video game. But he, and Jessie and Meowth, are among the most well-rounded characters in the show’s cast, in a way that’s actually very relatable. It helps that they aren’t actually very villainous people most of the time. I know so many people who grew up with the show that loved, rooted for, and identified with them over the actual protagonists, by a mile. Myself included - I can remember two separate James-centered episodes that made me cry as a kid.

And these three are particularly beloved by young LGBT adults. We know from their backstories that they all came from rough circumstances - Jessie desperately poor and struggling to get anywhere or be recognised, Meowth having changed a fundamental part of himself in attempt to gain love and instead being ostracised for it, and James running away from an abusive household. They’re three people (/Pokemon) who felt alone in the world, that have now found each other. And whether you view Jessie and James’s relationship as romantic, friendship, or found family, it’s far more compelling than any other relationship in the show, at least to me. They may be criminals, but it’s not hard to see why some kids - especially the kids who might already feel like they’re just a bit different - would latch on to them. 

Even if you didn’t know James’s backstory, he still has a character. He’s frequently shown to be the most moral of the trio, he has a stronger bond with Pokemon than honestly even Ash - even more of a running gag than his flamboyance is the fact that his pets love him so much that they just wanna hug him all the time, with inevitable slapstick consequences - he has dorky hobbies like bottle cap collecting, and he’s even occasionally shown to be a bit of an environmentalist. Yes he is in many ways a stereotypical camp villain - but he’s also more. And that’s why we love him. 

And I’d bet anything there probably were some little boys who watched the show and saw James and thought ‘that guy’s like me!’. And yeah, that guy is a villain, because god forbid a maybe-gay character also be a good guy. But more than any other character like him that I’ve seen, he’s also always been a person. And considering how most of the other options kids like that had at the time were either one-note villains or nothing (and even now it’s sparse pickings) - that’s valuable.

And then there’s Pokemon Live.

*long, long sigh*

Oh, Pokemon Live. You beautiful disaster. 

What did you do to my boy?

Is there nothing that better encapsulates it than the bit where James asks Giovanni where Mecha MewTwo (...I know) “stands on campaign finance reform, social security and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”?

First off, I like that James is politically engaged! Good for him! Completely out of character, but still!

And I do find this line incredibly funny, but I want to be very clear about why I find it funny. The line is funny because referencing a real world American discriminatory military policy in a Pokemon musical is just... so completely absurd. It’s super jarring and when I first watched it, I had to pause it so I could stop laughing about the possible implications of Pokemon Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Is there a Pokemon American military then? Pokemon Democrats and Pokemon Republicans? Pokemon Bill Clinton? POKEMONICA LEWINSKY???

It just raises so many questions.

Also Rannells’s delivery is incredible.

But the thing is, that’s not the joke here, is it? The actual ‘joke’ is ‘HA HA HE’S GAY! HE SAID THAT BECAUSE HE’S GAY!’. Which gets even worse when you think about it and realise that this situation is really just a gay man (I don’t think there’s any doubt about it in this particular incarnation, is there) asking his boss whether or not he thinks people like him should be discriminated against. How is that a joke? (The answer is that it isn’t.)

Which makes it that much more inappropriate for a children’s Pokemon musical, which is sort of, in a dark way, almost funnier. It’s that juxtaposition of something kiddy and cute with something that definitely isn’t. 

But hilarious as I find it, given the chance to I would go back and get rid of that line. I dislike what it implies - that being a gay man is nothing more than a punchline - more than I like the absurdist humour. 

And that’s the whole problem with how they chose to write James for this whole thing. They took a really good example of how you can have this type of villain while also making him a good character, and they turned him into nothing more than a stereotype.

You could say ‘but it’s a much shorter story than a TV show! They wouldn’t have time to make him nuanced!’, to which I would say 1. He doesn’t have to be nuanced, he just has to be slightly more than I’M GAY and 2. There have been 21 Pokemon movies at time of writing, two of which came out before Pokemon Live did. None of them, at least of the ones I’ve seen, committed any character assassinations like this. The first one even had another baffling reference to real world America:

That’s so out of nowhere and silly that I laugh every time I think about it (the Minnesota Vikings are an American football team, if you didn’t know). See, Pokemon Live! It’s possible to do jokes like that which aren’t at the expense of a minority group! Wow!

The anime even has examples of how you can do the gay jokes and make them funny. They are very rare in the show (beyond the humour of James’s personality), but remember the whole Flaming Moltres joke? It’s actually great. It’s a couple of good puns, it’s possibly Rachael Lillis’s best delivery in the whole show, and, just for confirmation, I’ve shown the clip to a few actual gay men in my life, who all said that they think that it’s very funny, and totally non-offensive. The joke is still ‘lol he gay’, but it’s also a neat play on words, it feels very in character for both of them, and it doesn’t have the same malicious, taunt-y feel of the Pokemon Live ‘joke’.

Look, the Pokemon anime is far from perfect. There are lots of moments where you have to grit your teeth and remember when it came out. But it still gave us a really, really wonderful character, and he absolutely deserved better than this.

Do I Still Love Pokemon Live?

Yes.

Even with all of this, it’s still an absolute masterpiece of unintentional hilarity. In some ways, this makes it funnier. Of course, of course, it couldn’t just have terrible costumes and a nonsense plot and really, really bad rapping - of course it’s also kind of offensive. Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be.

And I would love to talk about all the things I genuinely love about it, and maybe I will one day.

But the thing is, it’s also representative of everything that was wrong with gay-coded characters at the time, something that the show it’s based on came way closer to handling well than most other stuff of its time, no less. And that, as a whole, isn’t funny at all.

So I want to be clear. I love laughing at this show because it’s a weirdly earnest cash-in musical for something that definitely shouldn’t be a musical, with endless bizarre, quotable moments - not because the way it warped this character is actually funny. I love laughing at the character’s lines because they’re absurd choices for a Pokemon musical - not because they’re in any way funny on their own. And I love laughing at the fact that Andrew Rannells was in it because he is so much better than this - not because this is what I think he should be reduced to.

And speaking of, here’s those pictures I promised:

I love one man.

[vixianna]

So I Just Figured Out Something Weird About Exclusionists...

So, I was looking through a few exclusionists blogs. Normally, I’d say that was purely a #mistake, but this time it was enlightening, especially about specific claims exclusionists make about asexuality.

So, a good number of the posts I looked at were aimed at lesbian and gay people, which is like normal and nbd. They were about helping questioning people who thought they might be lesbian or gay and describing their experiences as lesbian or gay people. A large number of responses to asks were like “well if you feel lesbian/gay, then you probably are.” which super valid, that’s how it works for LGBT+ people. Except, a lot of the people I saw sending in questions, especially to like bottomsona’s blog, specifically expressed experiencing attraction to multiple genders, but were not at the moment interested in pursuing relationships with men. Most of the responses were tailored around "well, if you're not going to date men, you can just call yourself a lesbian if you are only gonna date women/women-aligned people", which is fine on its own, I’m not the label police.

However, this response was informed by the stance that that lesbian(or gay, or bi, ect) existed as a label to communicate who you intended to date not who you are attracted to. I bring this up because a really common and previously to me super goddamn weird obsession of exclusionists was focused on how "asexual doesn't communicate anything". “How can you be asexual and still date/have sex?” And it occurred to me after reading this that if exclusionists were using sexuality labels as a shorthand for “who I am sexually/romantically available to” and not “who I feel attraction to” without any implication of dating/sex/relationships/ect then all of their “asexuality is a modifier and also doesn’t mean anything and the definition keeps changing!” starts to make sense.

Instead of:

-Lesbian = woman who is solely attracted to women

-Lesbian = woman/woman-aligned person who is solely attracted to other women/woman-aligned people(this definition still has a lot of problems but it's the one that is closest to how they use it)

It's:

-Lesbian = woman/woman-aligned person who is solely interested in forming relationships with women/woman-aligned people

They mean it to communicate like availability, openness, to others about who they are going to form intimate relationships with. This connects with several inclusionists observations that exclusionists seem really fucking pissed about things that don’t immediately signal whether you are available to them or not. Or more accurately, whether you are available to what they understand to be “gay relationships” or not.

For example, this is why they feel asexuality is a “modifier” because in this case it would have to be a combination of “doesn’t desire sexual relationships” and “desires relationships with these genders”, and it’s why they are so obsessed with whether or not asexuals have sex, and with whom, and under what circumstances. Because obviously the only way asexuality means anything if it is communicating that you do not desire a sexual relationship with others.

This also explains why they are so freaked the hell out about anyone saying they are asexual, especially kids, because it would be announcing a specific aspect of your sex life (and why some of them keep comparing it to kinks?? For reasons that used to confuse me.) To them it is only communicating your desire to have sex or not(which is why they find ace spectrum sexuality especially confusing or “not real” or describe it as “just people being normal”.)

This means one of the bigger problems is them operating from the idea that sexuality labels are meant to communicate to others who you'd be open to fucking/being in a relationship with, and not a representation of like your internal experiences of attraction.

This is also one of the reasons why they are so hostile to the idea of “examining your attractions closely/at all” because it ultimately “doesn’t matter”, not if what really matters is who you’d be willing to be in a relationship with and everything else is “incoherent” and “not important”, because your label is supposed to communicate who you’d fuck/date. It is essentially why they are so hostile to a-spec identities, but it also spills over onto other groups.

Attraction, dating, ect are not so clear cut or easily defined for many members of the community, especially Nonbinary people. So a lot of our sexuality labels require more introspection as do our genders. Further, that’s one of the reasons behind the push for NBs to use alignment language(or even have it prescriptively assigned). If you don’t tell others if you are man/woman aligned(and often you have to pick either one or the other!) then they don’t know whether you are someone they could be attracted to/should be attracted to/are included in their attraction label. Or more exactly, they don’t know if you are someone who they would form a relationship with, whether or not they are personally attracted to you.

It is also ultimately, why they are so hostile to queer as a single label. Because while it, as an orientation label, definitely tells you this person is likely “sga” by their standards(which are highly flawed and cissexist lmao), it doesn’t inform you “who”/“which genders”/“how many of them” you are available to form intimate relationships with and so “is useless” and virulently attacked because of it. Never mind that it is often used by people for whom gender is a complicated subject, or picking out which genders they are attracted to is difficult or impossible(m-specs, Nbs, ect), it doesn’t communicate what they feel labels are meant to:

Who are you sexually/romantically available to?

Mind you, the claim that people are ID’in as queer in order to infiltrate the community is even more ridiculous than the one against ace/aro people.

Why?

By their own admittance, and concurrent campaign, queer is seen as a slur by straight people. The chances of some “cishet woman calling herself queer because she pegs her boyfriend.” as so eloquently described by hatetobreakittoyou, existing is literally nil. Like, in what universe are Real CisHets™ going to think "this person is really straight and one of us" about someone who describes themself as "queer"?

This means a person would be literally putting a target on their back...for what? Being an open member of a violently targeted minority group does you no favors. There is nothing for this mythical woman to gain by putting herself through the ringer pretending to be LGBT+!

It’s a coherent, if wrongheaded, expansion of their idea that identity labels need to be completely immediately clear and only exist to tell others if you’d fuck/date them, but it’s an ultimately destructive stance and ideology to have. It’s m-spec antagonistic, requiring that m-specs be both in “sga” relationships and have to be “sga” in order to be m-spec(which is you know also exorsexist). It’s hostile to ace/aro people. It’s hostile to queer people and others whose identity is far more complicated. It prioritizes lesbian and gay people(especially binary ones, and especially cis binary ones). It fractures the community, and it’s one of the main toxic tenants behind a lot of their garbage ass rhetoric.

You don’t have to be open to dating/fucking at every particular moment every gender you are attracted to to be m-spec. Your label says nothing about whether you are interested in dating or sex if you are a-spec. That’s not what these labels have historically or even currently mean in general usage, which is why there is so much cross talk when trying to come to an accord with exclusionists. They are working for radically different definitions of even typically understood sexuality labels.(bi to them means “same and others” and not “two+”, ace means “doesn’t want to fuck” and not “doesn’t experience sexual attraction/attracted to no one”, ect)

Has anyone else encountered these underlying beliefs and would be willing to talk about it? Because I’d like to get some dialogue going so that we can maybe more easily actually understand some of the underlying tenants of Exclusionism.

[autistic-danvers]

can you please explain more on the “ace people belong in lgbt spaces” thing? i’m really trying to understand how, but i just don’t. if someone is cis gender, and only interested in people of their opposite sex, then they’re straight right? what is it about them not wanting to have sex that fits into being lgbt??? i’m not trying to be rude, but i just do not understand at all.

(I'm well aware of this websites relationship to the word Queer, but since you asked me and I'm very open about my feelings for it I'm gonna assume you don't mind. Also, I don't think you're rude, at least you're trying to understand yeah?)

this answer would not exist without @eloquentdrivil who is way better with words and smarter than me :)

ALL people fit into one of two categories: queer and non-queer. That is, people who belong in the LGBT community, and people who do NOT belong in the LBGT community.

First, we need to define non-queerness; that would be people who are cisgender AND hetersexual AND heteroromantic. All THREE of those descriptors needs to be true in order for non-queerness to be true, and if non-queerness is true, then that person is NOT LGBT. Everyone ELSE, besides people who check ALL THREE of those boxes, *IS* queer and belongs in the LGBT community,

Heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality/pansexuality are all words used to describe an individual's relationship with their own sexual attraction. Usually these terms are shorthanded to include romantic attraction as well, because a large majority of peoples' sexual and romantic attractions align, allowing them to summarize both their sexual and romantic identities in just a single word.

However, there are words to singularly describe romantic attraction as it sits separately from sexual attraction: heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic/panromantic. These words JUST describe someone's romantic attraction, completely WITHOUT a sexual element. For most people, this can be described by comparing the utter adoration one feels for their love interest when watching them play with kittens, versus the heated feelings that person might feel when watching them, say, take off their shirt.

Now when it comes to the colloquial terms, straight, gay, lesbian, bi, and pan, they largely serve the same purpose as the sexual descriptors, by summarizing both sexual and romantic feelings into a single term for brevity and convenience. The problem comes when you start equating the word "straight" to mean "completely non-queer" (people who are cisgender AND heterosexual AND heteroromantic) which is just not the case, because straight trans people are a very real group of people in our community.

Which is why those colloquial terms have added qualifiers, and why it's very important to take those qualifiers into account, because they're there for a reason. They're there to describe an added fact of that person's identity that the base-term doesn't necessarily describe on it's own. Straight trans people, for instance.

In the case of asexuality and aromanticism, the ace and aro parts of people's identities often gets treated as unimportant or unnecessary, which, at its core, stems from a disbelief that these identities are real, in the same way non-queer people believe lesbians just "haven't met the right man yet."

But asexuality is NOT heterosexuality, in the same way aromanticism is NOT heteroromanticism. These words describe COMPLETELY different concepts and are therefore NOT interchangeable. Individual sexual descriptors are mutually exclusive. A heterosexual man is not ALSO a bisexual man, because those words describe two DIFFERENT sexual attractions. In that same exact vein, someone cannot both "experience sexual attracted to someone of their same gender" AND "not experience sexual attraction" at the same time, because only ONE of those statements can be true.

Now, looking back at the original qualification for what defines non-queerness, because asexuality is NOT heterosexuality, an asexual person DOES NOT HAVE all three qualifications for non-queerness. Nothing else about their identity matters because you need all THREE (cisgender, heterosexual, and heteroromantic) in order to qualify as non-queer, and they do NOT have all three.

Even the more nuanced descriptions of asexuality, like gray-ace, disqualify them from a heterosexual reading BECAUSE their attraction IS NOT typical sexual attraction. And the atypicality of that attraction is what qualifies them as a queer identity and thus, belonging in the LGBT community.

The LGBT community isn't a club; it's a refuge from abuse and a response to non-queer people denying us even a shred of humanity because we're "immature, attention-seeking, deviant, broken, and sick," because of our experiences, identities, and attractions.

To argue that ace people don't qualify as "queer enough" to belong in our community is to say that non-queer people were valid in excluding us from society as a whole; both arguments are built on the same principle and seek ONLY to exclude those they feel they have a fundamental right to abuse for x, y, or z reason.

Ace people are fundamentally queer. That's a fact. We can either protect them from abuse, or we can perpetuate that abuse. Those are the only two options.

Which option do you pick?

[too-spicy-and-too-queer]

Pride Week Three: Aro Community & Relationships

Following up with the week three questionnaire from @aromantic-official​.

1. What is your favorite aspect of the aro and arospec community?

Most people I’ve met in the online aro community understand and practice the core values of intersectionality.  Also the aro community talks a lot about how broad and different experiences can be from one individual to another, not just in being aromantic, but in being queer in general.  Another thing I like about the aro community is how many people in it are trans.  It’s been a better trans space for me than any other trans community I’ve encountered, even though it’s not a trans community.

2. Are there any notable differences in your experiences in this community and other LGBTQIA+ spaces you have been in?

Most queer communities I’ve been in don’t understand intersectionality, heavily favor able white middle-class experiences, and fail to adequately challenge patriarchy and exploitative capitalism.  The aro community understands the basics of all this, at least, and in some cases is pretty good at challenging these aspects of the kyriarchy.

A lot of queer communities I’ve encountered claim to represent the entire identity but then heavily favor one particular experience or narrative.  Mainstream queer narratives especially get favored, like focusing on monogamous romantic gay coupling, or focusing on the medical aspects of transitioning.  Many IRL queer communities I’ve encountered actively engage in respectability politics, which I find reprehensible.  The online aro community avoids all these pitfalls.

Also the online aro community is by far the youngest queer community I’ve been involved in.  But even though I’m 10-20 years older than most people in it, I feel more welcome and accepted for the reasons I stated above.

3. What’s one way that the aro community could be better or more inclusive? Do you have any tips on improving in this regard?

Be even more intersectional.  There are limits to this when a community is an online community because there’s not a whole lot we can do to reach people who don’t have internet access.  But I have noticed the community is mostly western.  Amplifying aro voices from regions outside the west would be good.

4. Do you think there are flaws in the way that different types of attractions are navigated, discussed, and defined in the aro community?

Oh absolutely.  My last post covered this some.  But the biggest problem I see is that the aro community focuses too much on defining the aromantic experience as lacking something that is present in the alloromantic experience.  I think this is reductive and detrimental to aro representation and visibility.  The focus on lack is even in the name, with the “a-” prefix.  I think the reality for most aromantic people is far more complex, and the current focus ignores all the ways we experience intimacy and attraction and relationships that most alloromantic people do not.  There is so much more to being aromantic than simply not experiencing romantic attraction!  We need to talk a whole lot more about this as a community.

A good example is that I see a lot of aro people complain about how hard it is to find friends who prioritize friendship, or intimacy in friendships, or are willing to make commitments in friendships.  I think most aromantics experience intimacy in fundamentally different ways from a lot of alloromantics that can’t be explained by simply an absence of romantic attraction.  Not to mention that defining it primarily as a lack of something plays into amatonormative narratives in ways that are harmful to the representation of aromantic identities, and it’s misleading to questioning arospec people who do experience some form of romantic attraction.  I’m sure some individuals experience being aromantic as primarily just a lack of romantic attraction, but I think the community as a whole focusing on that in our core definition is a bad idea.  I’ll write a post about this in the future.

5. Do you consider yourself nonamorous, amorous, aplatonic, experiencing queerplatonic attraction, etc., or do you not use those terms? Are you romance positive, neutral, repulsed, or don’t use those labels? Do these answers intersect?

Labels are tools.  Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re not.  Sometimes different tools are better in different situations.  I’ll use some labels sometimes and other labels other times.  But most importantly, labels are the tools with which we communicate meaning about identity, but the labels themselves aren’t the meaning.

But in general, I’m pretty amorous.  What I mean by this is that I like sex and I love many kinds of affection, especially words of affection and touch.  I love cuddling and it’s a core part of intimacy for me, and any intimate relationship for me that lacks cuddling is fundamentally unfulfilling (though it can still be satisfying in other ways).  Emotional intimacy is the most important thing in the world to me.

I don’t care for the word “queerplatonic” because I think it’s reductive for the kinds of experience people try to describe with it and it invokes the platonic-romantic binary.  I am interested in the kinds of relationships people usually describe as “queerplatonic” but I prefer the label “partnership” in most cases.  Also, for me, I would not call these relationships platonic at all, so that’s another reason why I don’t use that label.

I often say I’m romance positive, but I’m not actually; it’s just a convenient shorthand that roughly communicates something vaguely accurate about my experiences.  What I mean by this is that enjoy some things that amatonormativity says are romantic, but to me they aren’t romantic.  For example, I love kissing and making out, but I don’t experience romantic attraction.  So to me, kissing isn’t romantic and I’m not kissing for romantic reasons.

6. Have you ever been in a relationship you would consider committed, such as a queerplatonic/quasiplatonic, romantic, soft romo, friends-with-benefits, or others? How did being arospec affect that and the boundaries you set?

Yes, I’ve been in pretty much all of these kinds of relationships.  I’ve been in about a dozen romantic relationships.  But all of this was before I came out as aro, so I wasn’t really setting boundaries to address my aro needs for the most part.  I just endured repulsion because I thought it was an inherent part of intimate relationships.  So for me, because I didn’t realize being aro was a real thing, being aro in these relationships mostly meant that I was miserable most of the time because I had no way to tell my partners that I was feeling repulsed or that I wanted things different from the normative relationship models.

But being aro also gives me a kind of perception into romantic norms that a lot of people lack.  For example, I dated a Marxist feminist for a while, and she taught me about feminist critiques of romantic relationships, and I was able to pick up a lot of this very quickly because the flaws of romantic social constructs and institutions are painfully obvious to me.  This is similar to how trans people have a perception into gender norms that cis people lack.  The socialization on these topics doesn’t feel “natural” to us in the same way that it does to others.

Right now, I have no idea what kinds of intimate relationships I want in the future.  I just know I want to try different things now that I know I’m aro.  I want to break the normative models of intimacy even more.

[lampfaced]

unpopular opinion ahoyyyy

what I say: I ship Brainstorm/Nautica

what it sounds like I mean: I want them to make out and have sexytimes

what I actually mean: I wouldn’t actually change anything about their current dynamic of idiot nerd besties that have small intimate moments like hand-holding; but I don’t know how else to express how much I love their relationship in one word - I can’t figure out where the fuck the line between romantic and platonic love should be drawn because I’m aromantic and don’t fully understand what one of those is, and as a result I choose to headcanon them as somewhere on that weird-ass spectrum but not on one end or the other; trying to describe it as either one or the other doesn’t really work so I leave off any further descriptors

also I don’t want them to have do the nasty with each other; I don’t want anyone to bang because I’m sex-repulsed and keep that element out of every single ship of mine

elaboration in no particular order: 1) being aro-ace I don’t understand why a platonic relationship can’t be just as important, or more important and fulfilling than a romantic/sexual one, or that without sex/romance in a relationship it’s just not as great; but “platonic relationship” seems, to society at large, to mean “just best friends” when that’s not always the case, and because of that describing it as “just platonic” doesn’t cut it for me; 2) like I said, I have no idea where to even separate what counts as platonic or romantic, and it can vary so widely between individual cases what counts as something you’d do only with a romantic partner vs. what you can do with a close friend, so what some might see as romantic another might see as close platonic love, and I waver a bunch on whether I’d consider the ship one or the other but I say I’m okay with it either way; 3) they’re already amica endura and it’s the closest damn thing I’ve ever seen to a fictional equivalent of queerplatonic partnerships, and I choose to see them as having the capacity to be happy being each other’s queerplatonic life partners/most important people in each others’ lives and not need any other big relationships in addition, so “ship” or “OTP”  is still the best shorthand for me to describe it

idk with the series ending soon, and the recent little displays we’ve gotten so far in the comics that have resulted in people getting irritated with Stormy Seas implications over the other more popular “gay ship” options for the two (Perceptor for Brainstorm, Velocity for Nautica), I’ve been... mulling a lot. not gonna get into why I don’t ship them with said other options here because that’s slightly besides the point but if asked I may elaborate. I realize I don’t owe an explanation to anyone about why I ship what I do, or why I should have to explain why I don’t see it as a strictly “hetero” ship and that makes it more acceptable than an actual “hetero” ship. but for some reason I still wanna put this out there.

*I’ve put “hetero” in quotes because of how hetero-appearing couples could be made up of people that are bi/pan/ace or outside the gender binary, it doesn’t mean they’re straight, and also while they’re absolutely the majority, straight couples aren’t by default inferior to queer ones

[jadelyn]

My queer pride flag. With all respect to those who created the chevrons flag and the process and thought that went into it (seriously, I salute y'all, you Did A Good), I...honestly really actively dislike it on a purely aesthetic level and can't/won't use it bc I need my pride stuff to be at least nominally aesthetically pleasing to me. The combination of the muted colors - the off-white and lavender/mauve - and the chevrons design, which is harder to indicate in abstract artistic formats than the traditional colorblock stripes, just makes it a no-go for me, sad to say. But my specifically *queer* identity is still enormously important to me, and I want a symbol for it. So I made one, and I'm sharing it here in case anyone else would like to use it as well. Grey, for the shadowy spaces we so often occupy, out at the edges of the more concretely-defined orientations and identities, neither one thing nor another. Grey for the margins. Purple, for the mixing and blending of two (or more) things that we so often encompass. Plus it's just traditional. And red at its heart, red for resistance, red for the courage it takes to say again and again, I reject your definitions, I will not fence myself in and make myself neatly consumable for the comfort of the mainstream, just because my orientation is harder to classify and pin down in a way the heteronormative world can easily understand. I know you don't like it when I call myself queer, but tough titties. It's what I am. Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you. If nobody but me ever uses it, that's fine - I'm not trying to supplant the chevrons flag or start a flag war, just offer more options. If it's a one-person flag that nobody at Pride will ever recognize, I'm cool with that, because I know what it means to me. But if you're queer - specifically, you *identify as queer* wholly or in significant part, as a major aspect of your identity, not just that you're part of the LGBT community and some people shorthand that as the queer community, but if you'd gladly and proudly say to someone, "I'm queer" - and you like this design, it's yours. Use it as you will.

[aion-rsa]

Is It Better to Reinvent Fantasy Tropes or Pay Homage to Them?

https://ift.tt/3oItn9x

In August, we brought you the first part of this roundtable conversation between three of speculative fiction’s most exciting up-and-coming authors: Emily Tesh (Silver in the Wood and its sequel Drowned Country), A.K. Larkwood (The Unspoken Name), and Everina Maxwell. In honor of today’s publication of Maxwell’s queer space opera Winter’s Orbit, we’re publishing the second part of their conversation. In it, the writers and IRL friends have a funny and insightful conversation about elves and the value of a homage, the difficulties of writing sequels, and how to name a book.

Q: EVERINA MAXWELL: Fantasy as a genre is constantly reinventing elements it’s had since forever. Both The Unspoken Name and Drowned Country contain elves, for example, or at least something that looks like elves if you squint at them sideways. What inspires you to take a familiar concept and put a new spin on it?

EMILY TESH: Oh thank you, you know I love to talk about elves. For me part of the joy of creating genre fiction is working with the constraints and expectations of that genre, whether you’re running with them or pushing against them–borrowing from what Kass said earlier about reusing characters, it’s helpful to have a paintbox rather than mixing your paint from scratch! I especially love having a starting point for what your readers think is going on; in many ways writing a book is an exercise in mind control–what is your reader imagining right now? What have they guessed? What do they know that the characters don’t? What elements of the story are holding their attention? Sometimes one feels a bit of pressure to subvert, to do an original take that no one has done before. But I don’t think that’s always necessary or even interesting. A boring subversion (you thought… X! But actually… the opposite of that!) can’t carry a story by itself, while the familiar tracks of reader expectation can lead you to interesting places. It’s also the case that having your expectations fulfilled can be a satisfying experience as a reader; personally I love to guess the murderer, to solve the lore mystery, to watch characters who are clearly perfect for each other realise they’re in love. 

Anyway my point is: I find it impossible to talk elves in the fantastic without finding myself in conversation with Tolkien, who just wrote so much elf bullshit. I say this from a place of deep love, as a person who has read all of it multiple times including the obscure stuff that didn’t even make it into the Silmarillion. And while “this isn’t like Tolkien!” is something I’ve heard often as a shorthand for “this fantasy is new and fun and subverts those old familiar tropes you know!,” I knew when I started writing Drowned Country that I wanted to do the opposite of that: I wanted to lean right into Tolkienesque elves–immortals who have outlived their own apocalypse, remnants of a civilization unimaginably older than the human world, and also the cool thing where as they get older and older they start to turn invisible. I think there’s a lot to be said for the homage, the anti-subversion. What is a genre without the echoes and reimaginings, the game of expectations, the mutual understanding between author and reader that what we are reading now is built–for better or worse–on what we’ve read before?

Also elves are cool and great and that’s just facts.

A.K. LARKWOOD: I can’t believe everyone spotted the elves in my book, I thought I hid them so well. Anyway my excuse is because I just think it’s cute to give people pointy ears.

TESH: This is also valid.

Q: TESH: Speaking of sources for fantasy tropes: can someone just like… explain Dungeons and Dragons to me? From a writing perspective, I mean. I know that for some people roleplay can be a hugely productive story-generating engine and I am curious about how that goes because it has never worked for me!

LARKWOOD: D&D as I have played it is good for telling exactly one story, which is “some people who are good at fighting explore a mysterious location.” At its best this is really all you need! God knows I have got multiple huge chunks of book out of this very mechanism! But I don’t think it’s good for generating plot so much as it encourages you to think about character. The role of DM and player are not the same as the roles of author and reader, the axis of authority over what happens to this fictional person is very different, so it gives you a different perspective on… what is it that endears you to a character so much that you get very sad when they are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? What makes it fun to spend time in a certain persona, until they are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? Why do some character deaths feel important and meaningful and others feel frustrating and pointless, such as, when you are eaten by bugs in a random encounter? (This was in 2014. I will neither forgive nor forget.)

Fun fact: many years ago I DMed a game which featured some of the locations in The Unspoken Name as playable dungeons. In this game my future wife played a professional wrestler named Roxanne, which honestly makes me think the whole book would have been better if she’d been at the wheel throughout.

Q: MAXWELL: Both The Unspoken Name and Silver in the Wood have sequels. How did you find the process of writing the second book? How does your approach to character and plot change when you know the reader has probably already met them?

TESH: It’s both great fun and the absolute worst! Fun because you already have a world to play in and some character dynamics to play with, and you don’t have to do nearly as much work establishing things either for the readers or for yourself. The worst for almost exactly the same reasons. Writing Silver in the Wood took me a long time for how short it is, because I was figuring out the mysteries along with the characters. Drowned Country, conversely, was written fairly quickly, but it was much harder. This despite knowing up front almost everything I needed to know (beach episode, goffic ruins, sad vampire, mysterious young lady, elves!)–having to tell a story within an established character framework threw me, because it limited my options for what those characters would plausibly do and feel. The two-year timeskip that I ended up building into the book is mostly there to give me breathing room and shake up the character dynamics a bit–my original concept for it followed hard on the heels of the first book’s plot, and I wrote about six thousand words of that before realizing it was hurtling towards being a sad story about a couple having a bad breakup, which I didn’t want to write! I think it was Kass who suggested “just set it two years later” and it worked like a charm.

LARKWOOD: I had heard all about The Difficult Second Novel and had blithely been like “but I would simply have no problems with this,” and I was extremely wrong! I wrote The Unspoken Name over several years with infinite latitude to rethink and rewrite, and no expectation that anyone was ever going to read it. “Do the same thing again, but different and better, in approximately a quarter of the time, with more people watching” is always a bit of a daunting prospect. My top tip is: don’t be in your final year of law school, or if you must, try to ensure that a global health crisis doesn’t also happen at the same time. That said, I think it was a productive struggle, and knowing that some people are already invested in the characters does mean you can skip straight to being very nasty to them.

Read more

Books

How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera

By Kayti Burt

Books

Cover Reveal: Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

By Kayti Burt

Q: TESH: How do you come up with a good title for a book? (Yes this question is here to torment you.)

MAXWELL: YOU HAVE TO ANSWER THIS AS WELL

LARKWOOD: HA HA HA. The Unspoken Name was my working title! I made a list of about 30 alternative options and thought very hard about it for several weeks and – of course – reverted to the original. (but the title of the sequel I got right away – you win some you lose some)

MAXWELL: You title your first draft five minutes before you post it on the internet, then you discover the title you picked has been used by several other books, then you go through dozens and dozens of titles until words no longer have any meaning, then someone else (hi, Ali!) suggests something thoughtful based on some imagery and you’re like yes! That one! Please never make me title a book again.

TESH: Since I HAVE to answer–I don’t see what the problem is, guys! You just say literally what the book is about: e.g. Silver in the Wood is about a guy named Silver who goes into a wood, and Drowned Country is about some country which is underwater. Simple!

MAXWELL: Petition to retitle both Emily’s books Some Trees And A Sad Man.

TESH: Some Trees And A Sad Man and its sequel Same Trees, Different Sad Man.

LARKWOOD: I can’t believe we’ve solved the title problem for all time! Really looking forward to Ev’s upcoming masterwork, Two Boys In Space (Who Kiss), and mine, Too Many God Damn Things Happen In This Book.

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TESH: I think our publicists will shout at us if we do not end with: that’s Drowned Country by Emily Tesh for gay disaster folklore and gothic seasides, out August 2020; Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell for space princes stuck in an arranged marriage, coming February 2021, and The Unspoken Name + 2021’s upcoming highly mysterious sequel by A.K. Larkwood for haunted snake goddesses and orcs with dating problems. If you have enjoyed our conversation, you may also enjoy our books!

Winter’s Orbit, Drowned Country, and The Unspoken Name are available wherever books are sold. The paperback edition of The Unspoken Name is also now out!

The post Is It Better to Reinvent Fantasy Tropes or Pay Homage to Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[thedreadvampy]

So the thing is I very strongly disbelieve in anything one might call 'monosexual privilege' because there is only straight privilege in that equation, exclusively same gender attracted people are NOT in a position of power over bi people However I do think 'monosexual' can be a useful term IN CERTAIN CONTEXTS in the same way that grouping, say, people of colour together can be useful but should not be used to imply that they represent a homogenous experience. If I'm talking specifically about the bi/multiple-gender-attracted experience it makes sense to have terms to lump together Group Who Has These Experiences and Group Who Does Not Have These Experiences However writing this I realise that a) monosexual as a term in this case isn't THAT useful because it ignores asexual people who aren't monosexual OR multiple gender attracted and b) the only reason I use monosexual is because multiple gender attracted people seem to have so many labels for basically the same thing, no generally used umbrella term and many people who are multiple-gender-attracted but don't identify as bi get very pissy if you refer to the bi experience, like, ugh, what about the PAN experience what about the POLYSEXUAL experience (let's not use poly as shorthand for multiple gender attraction, hey, guys? That word already HAS a commonly used meaning for a thing there ISN'T really another shorthand for (ie ethical nonmonogamy) and it's confusing as heck bc many people are poly(amorous) and not poly(sexual) or vice versa) Like I try not to be a dick about it but I do sometimes feel like the constant insistence on framing what I personally would call bisexuality (ie attraction to multiple genders) as a SPECTRUM of many different identities is on many levels unhelpful af because the purpose of community labels in my opinion is to name a common experience and I don't...see how the experience of being pan or 'nebulously queer' differs in any meaningful way from the experience of being bi? Like, it's not that I think that bi is the ONLY ACCEPTABLE LABEL if you feel that a different label sits you better, it's just that we shoot ourselves in the foot subdividing into these categories that refuse to identify with each other despite sharing the experiences we want to discuss. So there might be specific issues that are pan-specific or w/e, but in the kind of situation where the word 'monosexual' comes into play that's because we're talking about the experience of being multiple gender attracted! Monosexuality is only useful as a concept because it's a sticking plaster to cover the fact that multiple gender attracted people have rejected the idea of a unifying term for themselves, so we have to clunkily split the world into monosexuals and not-monosexuals which has a bunch of painful Discourse implications bc now we have this term we start talking about privilege in those terms! And say monosexuals are a privileged group when in fact straight people are! Gay people don't have unilateral power of oppression over us! In some contexts it's easier to be bi and in some it's easier to be gay but always it's harder to be sga than straight! Anyway I don't think the word monosexual is necessarily EVILBAD but I do think it represents a key issue with the bi/pan/other Discourse and also it prioritises our comfort (don't call me bi uwu) over the discomfort of other oppressed people (gay people who are uncomfortable being lumped in with their oppressors) Anyway I'm gonna use bi as an umbrella term from now on rather than using monosexual and non-monosexual type categories.

[just-sort-of-happened]

I like your case for non-closeted John and I tend to agree. I'm wondering, what do you take from the scenes in ASiB where John is reading from a leatherbound gilted book that most fans have assumed to be the Bible. I don't mean to imply that Bible-reading=homophobic (I'm a gay divinity school student!) but this show is not extremely nuanced re: religion (though better than many) so I've always read that scene as a shorthand for John's repressed reaction to Irene's revelations. What do you think?

Yeah, I know that the idea that it’s the bible has often lead people to think it’s about, you know, keeping the gay feelings in.

I do imagine that it’s the bible but that he’s reading something about love and patience because being Sherlock’s not-boyfriend is so trying at times.  You know something like 1 Corinthians 13:4-13.  But, I’m a romantic.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think that this is all so much in the realm of headcanon that there’s no way to meta it, really.  I mean we can meta the idea that it’s the bible I think a bit since he’s reading in front of a church at one point but to imagine what it’s about is, well, pretty subjective.

I mean, it’s understandable to think that christianity = homophobia because hey, all the good advice in the world (from the bible) can’t undo the shitty things that leviticus says but yeah, I feel like John’s trying to keep things together on a personal level.

I think it’s because I see him reading that book at times when he seems to be trying to gather all his strength to be patient with Sherlock, to be a good friend, to do his role.

This could be a danger night.  He’s lost his girlfriend to stay home and Sherlock’s probably going to come home and be difficult, 

This is after a tense incident between them to say the least.  Again, John doesn’t know how Sherlock is going to act or how difficult it’s going to be,

Anyway, that’s my personal take on this.  I can definitely see why people headcanon that as a bible and the gesture as him trying to be less queer.  But to me I see him gathering inner strength here, and I see this as a bible but one where he’s seeking some solace and trying to persevere in his role as not-boyfriend to Sherlock.  

Realistically, do we even know it’s a bible?  Could be Alice in Wonderland or something, right?  There’s someone who keeps her head in the face of adversity.  And absurdity.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯