#and the allo folks I know are way more on the fence about it

[glimblshanks]

Okay I have to ask-

[grison-in-space]

Mmmmmmm. @rivette-the-red, it's important to me that you know that I am ace, that I am... somewhere between aromantic and homoromantic, fuck if I know, and that I have a pretty complicated relationship with the notion of romantic relationships. So.

It's so weird to me seeing people briskly and confidently claim that any kind of textual relationship is definitely my kind of relationship, or definitely belongs to the ace community. Partly that's because I'm still used to being able to tell which of two specific activists the showrunners are basing their ace character off of, and partly because, like...

One thing that really upsets me, as someone who is used to finding ambiguous depictions of relationships to find herself mirrored within, is when some other person marches in and says "I can see myself in this, so it's mine." I feel this way particularly about Boston Marriages and Jane Addams and history, when the "canon" as we know it is incomplete and never heard of the concepts we casually refer to today. If there's room to see myself in something, but also room for someone else to see their own experience of queerness reflected within, who am I to tell them that they can't look into the glass, too?

Furthermore--and I don't think this is necessarily happening here, but it sets my hackles off and it will set off hackles in other queer communities--there's a definite tendency of homophobic people to insist that a given depiction of a relationship is really between two straight people, and that everything is really perfectly normal and no one has to be queer at all. The rhetoric people trying to push for this position often adopt is that we need to see more platonic friendships, and why are people looking for queer relationships always trying to pervert those with gay romance?

The difference between that and an asexual reading of those close friendships is of course that an ace person's relationships are not to be subordinated to the first heterosexual love interest that comes along; they are not lesser than, but primary family connections in and of themselves. But that nuance is not necessarily visible to the straight person desperately trying to find a way to argue that the characters are really straight, with none of that objectionable queer taint to them - - after all, straight people have friends, too! And after a while of hearing the straight people say "you can't see yourself here, this is just ours," that rhetoric begins to rub a lot of allo queer folks raw and bleeding.

One thing that I have learned over almost fifteen years of being part of ace communities and conversations is that it is very easy for two groups who are marginalized in opposite ways along the same axis to blame each other for their own marginalization, and for each group to assume that the other is occupying a comfortable and secure position and that they are occupying a narrow, treacherous little scrap of land. This has been an ongoing tension between ace communities and other queer communities, but I have also watched it between subsets of ace communities for a long time.

With love, there is no subset of queer community that is not starved for representation and recognition. We need specific stories - - absolutely we do - - but we also need to be good stewards of ambiguous stories. Which this one absolutely, without any doubt, is. I'm sorry. This isn't just for you; it's queer, but it's queer in such a way that many kinds of queer people can see themselves in it. There is no good to be done in fighting over ambiguity and trying to prevent other people from seeing themselves in a story. There's no good to be done in trying to set up a fence around a mirror so that no one but you can look at yourself in it. You don't have to agree that the mirror only shows the faces of other people, but you shouldn't insist that it only shows your own face, either. Otherwise why should anyone else let you look at yourself in it, either?

ETA: the author you mention downthread who typically described the relationship in his head as less romantic and more platonic is Terry Pratchett, and he is dead. Until Terry died two years ago, Neil Gaiman was much more likely to coyly imply that Crowley and Aziraphale were in a romantic relationship. However, neither are now or have ever been willing to say categorically How Things Are without the other, and Neil is visibly unwilling to do anything that Terry might or might not have liked in his absence. So no, you do not have canon on your side. No one has canon on their side, because as far as Neil is concerned, the God who might impart the Word of canon was an amalgam of the two of them, and with Terry's loss that God is dead.

Good Omens Fans: *freaking out about angels and demons representing neutral genders and such*

Me, a die hard Supernatural fan that has dealt with content and subjects like this before: