#and the thing about queerness is it literally gets woven into the narrative. and it's Obvious.

[averlym]

which is gayer? SIX or Adamandi (real)

adamandi

[noneorother]

Spoiler alert; the Maltese Falcon is literally a (secretly) gay icon.

So here’s the thing. I’m usually not one for talking about head canons. There’s no way we’ll ever really know why Crowley has the Maltese Falcon alongside his other two “winged statues” (wink wink, nudge nudge) in his flat. But in my little art director heart I really feel like some context could help people think about the historical implications of what the Maltese Falcon might represent for Crowley, and how life often imitates art.

So how is this mysterious black bird (ahem) a symbol of coded queerness in film?

The Maltese Falcon, written & directed by John Huston and released in 1941 (ahem), is an adaptation of Hammett's 1930 novel, which features not one, but three openly gay villains in San Francisco. If you want to adapt this novel in 1940's Hollywood, you had to deal with the Hay's Code,

...A set of moral censorship guidelines for the American filmmaking industry, and was effective in place until 1968. There are several reprehensible facets to the Code, but the one most relevant here is Section 2 – titled simply “Sex” – Item 4: “Sex Perversion, or any inference to it, is forbidden.” While this does not explicitly forbid filmmakers from the use of homosexual characters in a narrative, the implication is transparent enough. Any positive gay representation was clearly made impossible.

Screenflipped (How Subtext Saved (and Damned) Homosexuality on Screen)

The Hays code effectively sublimated all the gay representation in the novel into subtle coded references (sound familiar?) that could be defended if taken out of context, but taken as a whole paint a very erotic gay picture:

Cairo’s calling cards and handkerchiefs are scented with gardenias.  He also fusses about his clothes and becomes upset when blood from a scratch ruins his shirt.  And if you look carefully, he makes subtle fellating gestures with his cane during his interview with Sam Spade (Bogart)...Some gay critics have also focused on the falcon as a phallic signifier; the way it is treated and touched by various characters.

Emanuel Levy

What's amazing about this is that, despite how coded the references have to be, and how negative the portrayal might be, this is probably "the first example of an explicitly gay-coded villain in American film." Think about it. Crowley loves movies, and in 1941, when the whole world was burning, and the object of his desire is so close for the first time in decades, and yet still so impossibly far away, he could go to a movie theatre and watch gay characters lust after an equally unobtainable Maltese falcon on the silver screen. Who wanted (like him), and were sexual and dark (like him). Who had to sneak around, and make innuendos and use coded signalling and double speak, just to exist.

And even though the hero of The Maltese Flacon finds a perfect straight-laced, alpha male rogue in Humphrey Bogart, "it's undeniable that Bogie was a gay ally -- or as allied as you could get in that era.  He frequented gay bars and had close friendships with gay men throughout his life, including Charles Farrell, Spencer Tracey, William Haines, Noel Coward, and even a young Truman Capote (who beat him at arm wrestling)." And just one year later, arguably in his most famous film role, Bogart played another hero in the (also subtly queer coded) film Casablanca, alongside noted bisexual actor Conrad Veidt in his last ever film role before his death.

Veidt played the hero int the first positive gay romance ever featured on film, Different from the Others (1919). It was a SILENT FILM, that's how early it was. Why do I mention Casablanca and Veidt? Take a look at the posters on the wall in the backstage room after the bullet catch in season 2...

Queer history is, albeit quietly, woven into the very fabric of Good Omens. You can't hear it over the noise of the traffic, but it's there.

Why does Crowley have the Maltese Falcon?

My head cannon is that the 1941 Church/Magic Show/Zombie evening (date??) ended badly and Crowley did a geographic to Hollywood where he worked on the film (it would have been in production in 1941) and kept a souvenir.

[kitkatpancakestack]

That is such a good point about how we're desensitized to the significance of Buck and Chris's bond. (Desensitized to so much of Buck and Eddie's whole buckandeddie thing. Not a singlething about any of this is normal.) But Buck and Chris, especially. I don't really have an ask unless you were up for elaborating.

@yramesoruniverse there are just no words to describe what is happening with the Buckley Diaz Family unit on our screens. I don't have any prior boxes to shove them into, because they are actively carving out their own legacy in the realm of TV and how this dynamic can be portrayed, and I think especially for people who have been in it for a while, watching the show week-to-week, year-to-year, it's easy to get desensitized to it!

I was watching the show casually with one of my friends who had never even heard of the series before, and I think I was going through s3, and after a series of episodes he just went, "So what the fuck is going on between those two firefighters and that guy's son?" and I know we like to go, "Well they're in love obviously lmaoooo," but like? I am constantly reminded by people who do not watch this show how suspect the relationship of the Buckley Diaz family is and they're right.

I was thinking a lot about how you say people, especially queer people, reflexively balk at the prospect of this family thriving in the end, and I think about the juxtaposed misery/excitement that accompanies that reaction. We've been fed bits and pieces over years, that seemed isolated at the time, but are now being presently and retroactively woven together to present this narrative that is queer as fuck, and yeah, I guess it could be a bit jarring.

And as for Buck and Christopher, the way the show decided to make the foundation of their bond surviving a literal natural disaster together speaks volumes to what they had planned for these two (and Eddie). They went all in at the get-go, immediately precluding whatever trivial ways potential future love interests might try to connect with Eddie through Chris. The way the Buckley Diaz arc kicks off with, "There's nobody in this world I trust with my son more than you," just puts that out into the canonical universe, and doesn't try to hide or evade from it's truth, but rather double-down and explore all the layers in its meaning. The way the show (five rounds of edits!) sticks in those little moments of Buck and Christopher to remind the audience that this duo exists as an independent pairing, a pivotal relationship, is telling. There's so much I could go on about.

But yeah. Anyway. We are desensitized to the epic love story they are telling about these three, and I wish people would just let themselves be ooey gooey over the perfection of this narrative.

[plrks]

Collider: When it came to watching this, the second, you know, you see Nicky and Joe, I’m like, “Oh, that’s it, it’s that love story again, that’s the thing in her filmmaking that gets me so much” and it’s beautiful and bold and everything that audiences have been asking to see instead of these disposable husbands that are in one scene and can be cut out for China, things like that, you know. It’s a very beautiful, bold statement that as a queer person I felt very empowered and touched by. So I’m curious about your approach to lacing that rich of emotionality, romance and queerness into a space that does not usually make room for those things. Gina Prince-Bythewood: Yeah, it was one of those things that surprised me when I read the script. I loved Nicky and Joe. And I felt like, “God, we haven’t seen this” and in the same way that Kiki and I talked about the importance of seeing ourselves as heroes, it was the same thing with Nicky and Joe, the opportunity to do that. But it started with these two people, just their characters. If you just think about it, these two men who, you know, fell in love during the Crusades and you know, back then—there was a time in our history where homosexuality wasn’t a thing, it was just out there, it was just love is love, truly love is love and then through the centuries, through the years, religion and governments have so corrupted people’s thinking, used and weaponized it and now suddenly, finally, hopefully, step-by-step, coming back to love is love. It was just so much that both Luca and Marwan, the two actors that we talked about—about just the depth of what their relationship was, the depth of their love, what they’ve been through. But Marwan—he was so excited about that speech and I think anybody would love their significant other to say that and it was certainly in the graphic novel and it was very important for Greg when he sold it to Skydance to make them promise that it would stay in it. When I came aboard I was like, “This is why I’m here. You don’t have to worry at all.” To see the way the audience, the test audiences, embraced the relationship—there was literal applause in the middle of the theater, in the middle of the screening, when the kiss happened. That says a lot to me that it’s being embraced and I think because it would just—you know, in the same way I wanted to normalize Andy and Nile as these female warriors, I wanted to normalize Nicky and Joe. I didn’t need to make a big production out of it, it was just, as you said, and I’ll steal that, it was just woven into the narrative. It was just part of it. It was part of the grounded, real thing, and, you know, I love that scene, I love those two characters, and I love what the actors brought to it.

Gina Prince-Bythewood on the depth and importance of Nicky and Joe’s relationship in The Old Guard (2020) (x)

[ineffable-endearments]

Okay. Now I'm going to submit some theories about how I think Crowley and Aziraphale specifically are going to go in the future of Good Omens.

Again, this post is not really...specific theorizing about plot events. It's big-picture stuff.

With that said, this post will get a bit heavy at times, in the sense that it will contain opinions that not everyone will like. It drifted into rambling about queerbaiting and all that stuff. I'm not going to spam anyone's dashboard with drama over it, but it's very possible someone else might try. It's also not really a negative post, depending on what you want to hear, I suppose. But if you're only in the mood to read fluff today, you'll probably want to pass it up.

Oh! Also it's very long, and sexuality is discussed in a vague way that doesn't involve any story elements or body parts.

For starters, I don't think Good Omens 2 - or even 3, if that comes about - is going to have anything explicitly sexual or romantic between the two of them, where "explicit" is things like the characters giving outright definitions of their relationship or outright discussing exactly what goes on between them, either on or off-screen. I also don't think there's going to be kissing or "hooking up" (come on...that person on Twitter shouldn't have even asked). Those actions are too blatant for what Neil has already said about the series. While they technically leave some room for interpretation, they probably don't leave enough.

I DO think it's quite possible other characters will continue to define the relationship FOR them and Crowley and Aziraphale will continue to not deny it.

As far as the queerbaiting debate, "is Good Omens queerbaiting"...it's gonna depend how you define it. I always learned that queerbaiting was basically where the creators intentionally make it look like a character is gay or otherwise queer but then swap that character development out for a cis identity and hetero relationship at the end. The point is that the "bait" leads to queer audiences being actively hurt. That's the behavior that seems awful to me, and I don't see Neil and company doing that.

However, I think it's far and away the most likely option that it will be left up to interpretation whether Crowley and Aziraphale are, you know, a buddy duo or a romantic couple or some sort of ineffable queerness all their own off-screen. So if your definition of queerbaiting is "the characters seem gay to us, but homophobes can tell themselves they're not," then yes, I think that debate will follow us to our graves if we let it.

I am a cisgender, possibly straight (?? demi/bi? I might never find out) woman. There is absolutely no way I could ever tell anybody, ESPECIALLY not gay guys and nonbinary people - the people Crowley and Aziraphale tend to resemble the most - how to feel about their treatment in the story. All I can offer is that I'm one flawed individual and there are things I have the emotional capacity to handle and things I don't. Crowley and Aziraphale as both a canon construct and a fandom pairing mean an absurd amount to me, and I can't hang around in spaces where people are constantly talking about how my own interpretations of them are not enough, or how the story is written with ill intentions. I don't want to stop anybody from venting about it, but I am going to be removing myself from those situations.

I like to imagine 1990 NeilandTerry, or TerryandNeil, as a sort of two-headed God who came up with Crowley and Aziraphale, set them loose on Creation, and now are watching them get up to way more ridiculous stuff in the brains of their fans than they'd ever imagined in the first place. I like to imagine them watching, amused and bemused, as their creations fall in love in thousands of universes, and saying, "Well, we didn't specifically Plan for this, but we did promise free will."

This is psychoanalytical toward a public figure and is therefore a bit dangerous, so please take it with an entire mountain of salt, but I sometimes think perhaps Neil sees some of his and Terry's friendship in Crowley and Aziraphale, and suspect that he wants to reserve the possibility that they could be platonic because he and Terry were platonic, while at the same time leaving room for the fans to have their own interpretations, too. Because if there's one thing that comes up really frequently with Neil, it's his belief in imagination and how much stories matter to people. He can have his little corner of the universe where A and C reflect himself and Terry, and we can have...literally anything we want, as long as we're willing to extrapolate just a little bit from canon. It's not even that much extrapolation! It's just "Yes, they love each other, so what exactly does love mean to you?" and if love means kissing, well then, if we can think it, we can have it.

Given that Neil has written LGBT+ characters before, I think he has non-bigoted reasons for wanting Aziraphale and Crowley to remain undefined, and given even the small chance that those reasons may involve the grieving process for a dead friend, I believe it is unkind to argue with him about it or hold his reputation hostage over it.

With that said, do I want canon kissing/hooking up/all that stuff we put in fics? Listen, I can't deny that I do! Personally, I'd be over the moon. I'd probably be so happy I'd have to go to the hospital to get sorted out. Even the thought of it makes me giddy and light-headed, because that physicality is a part of my own experience of love.

However, there are a lot of people who would feel left behind if that happened. Ace and aro people in the fandom whose love for their friends and partners is just as strong as mine, but who are sex-repulsed or just don't want to see kissing on-screen. The loss of Crowley and Aziraphale as a pairing who are extremely easy to interpret as queerplatonic would be hurtful to them, and I do not want to see them hurt like that. I don't think Neil does, either.

So, once again, the "best for everyone" option becomes a really strong canon relationship based in both narrative function and profound affection, which has genuinely thoughtful queer undertones and leaves open the logical possibility for romantic or sexual encounters but does not insist that they must happen. People, especially fans who are super invested, tend to have an easier time imagining scenarios that take place off-screen (e.g. kissing, sex) than they have erasing scenarios that they've already seen in canon (e.g., if someone wished they could continue viewing it as an ace relationship but they were shown "hooking up"). Also, while relationships are super emotional and extremely subjective, I'd argue that in a long-term adult partnership, the non-sexual connection is more important than the sexual one. As a fan, I'd prefer to extrapolate "they love each other so maybe they'd have sex" rather than "they're sexually attracted to each other so maybe they'll intertwine their whole existences together."

It probably isn't necessary to add, but I will anyway: I'm aware that Good Omens is sort of sacrificing social leverage - the ability to whack homophobes over the head with canon if they try to deny the show's queerness - and is thus not really contributing to making specifically gay relationships more widely seen and accepted. However, I don't think all stories have to invest heavily in every social issue they touch on for them to still be meaningful. I also do think Good Omens is an excellent example of a relationship that is extremely profound without being heteronormative.

I don't think the next season is going to be a rom-com. It will likely not even be a "love story," where the definition of "love story" is "a story that follows the development of a relationship and employs certain plot beats to make its point." Remember that conflicts and breakups are key to love stories, so if it IS a love story, then we're going to have to watch the relationship get challenged in ways some of us might have thought were already resolved in season 1! And while that could be thrilling and ultimately very good, it would also be likely to undercut some of the careful headcanoning and analysis we've already done. Any sequel is going to do that to some degree, but a second love story would probably do it a lot, with interpretations that people are even more protective of.

I'm sort of thinking the next season is likely to be a fantasy-heavy mystery, only because those are the two concepts Neil's introduction led with - an angel with amnesia who presents Crowley and Aziraphale with a mystery. Crowley and Aziraphale's connection to each other can still absolutely be a major theme! It can still be the thread stitching the plot together! It just probably, in my opinion, won't escalate and escalate and escalate like it did in season 1. And it will probably be woven in there among a lot of other plot threads that are, in many moments, louder. Still, I'd love to be left with the impression of these two existences, the light and the dark, subtly becoming more intimate, subtly growing more comfortable in this shared place they've chosen in the universe, gradually starting to behave like they know they aren't alone in the world anymore, all while other things happen to and around them.

Nonsexual physical intimacy - a really great hug, or leaning together on the sofa, or a forehead touch, or something like those, something that could happen in a lot of different kinds of relationships but is undoubtedly based in deep trust and affection and a desire to be close...that's the dream, for me. Oh, how lovely it would be.

Of course, I could be just absolutely, embarrassingly wrong about all this. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

[sapphicambitions]

hey! hey! why do you hate the television format??

Ah yes, thank you for reminding me

I would like to state for the record before we begin that this is my personal reasons for not enjoying the format of television and not “why television is bad'' because im sure there's many people whose reasoning for liking TV is the same as my reasons for disliking them. please dont get mad at me if you disagree lmao

I feel like the short answer could be: “I have a degree in theatre and i prefer books” 

But really i hate the fact that the story is subject to change via outside forces.

In a well written play or book, there is a beginning, middle and end. It is a complete story that has been well thought out and woven together. Every detail is important and makes sense dramaturgically. You have your characters and your plot and nothing about that changes. We’re taught in Theatre School (TM) that the playwright is the first artist, and everything goes back to the playwright’s words. The story cannot change because of outside forces and it will not change over time. Once a book has been published, it is done. And yeah in theatre, a play can be done by many people with multiple interpretations of the story but it always goes back to the playwright’s words as they are the first artist and it is about honoring those words. Yada yada. you get it.

TV is always subject to change. Actors leave because there was drama on set or because they have other projects to work on. Writers change and the tone of the show changes. Or they go to a different network and the show changes. You never know how long the show is actually going to go so it could be cancelled in the middle of an important plot they never got to wrap up or the show could extend past the original plot idea and the seasons get more and more ridiculous as they’re just trying to come up with shit to do so they can keep the show running.

Like supernatural, which went on for far too fucking long and just kept spitting out nonsense when they could have wrapped up in season five.

Like the Vampire Diaries, where the main fucking character Elena Gilbert left the show (which was ridiculous!!) or when her little brother Jeremy was just like written out of the show and then never talked about again like what the hell

Like Timeless, which got cancelled after two seasons and left so many loose ends (they had to like, beg for a movie to wrap everything up) 

Like the Magicians, which just, like, sigh. Y’all know. I don’t want to get into it. Y’all know. 

Hell, even Parks and Rec, with Ann and Chris leaving the show. If Parks and Rec had been a book Ann would have never left!!! Never!!! 

Characters get pregnant because the actors who play them get pregnant and suddenly THAT’s the plot line of the season. (Wynonna Earp, Brooklyn 99, The Office, How I Met Your Mother, Sex and The City, Bones, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Once Upon A Time, Charmed, The Vampire Diaries, Parks and Rec, Grey’s Anatomy, The X-Files, Yes I Looked Up This List To Prove My Point)

If an actor breaks their foot then the writers have to change the plot. Everything about the story is subject to change due to outside forces and that might be a selling point for some people but i do not vibe with it!! 

And also, you’re watching the story unfold over the course of time and something could change halfway through the season and they abandon the really cool plot they were working on to suddenly set up a way for them to kill off the main character of the show. (okay apparently i do want to get into it with the magicians).

Like call me a snob but i like a concise arch! Something that the show is working towards, the story that they’re telling and the thesis of the show, and the end goal they’re working towards. I just honestly don’t like the “stories wrap up in one season and will we get another? Maybe? Okay yes we will so let’s come up with a new big bad for the characters to fight who’s got ideas” or like if you get seven seasons into a show and they’re like “And here’s my long lost sister that ive literally never mentioned before but we needed something exciting for the plot so here she is!” like i hate that shit. I know my old roommate loooooved when TV shows pulled twists like that so im not saying it’s bad writing im saying I personally hate this style of writing. 

I just keep throwing in these disclaimers so no one gets pissy at me lmao 

I think what caused me to realize and put a name to these feelings was watching the Schitt’s Creek Finale. I love Schitt’s Creek because it feels like one concise story. The characters all grow and develop and have an arch and at the natural conclusion of that arch, the story wrapped up. I loved that shit. It was a game changer for me. Any other show would have kept going and the tone of the show would have been totally different and frankly im glad they wrapped it up when they did and as they did. It was a perfect ending. 

I haven’t really watched the Good Place but I’m told similar things about it. 

Avatar the Last Airbender which we can all agree is the greatest show ever written had a clear plotline throughout the whole series and a goal they were working towards even if they did have side plots, it was all building up to one endgame. And it was stellar. 

I also recently rewatched parks and rec which is one of my favorite shows of all time and i do truly love it but like the whole point of the show originally was that they were gonna build a park and there were times in the show that they just totally forgot about that goal to work on other storylines until they were like ANN’S LEAVING WE GOTTA BREAK GROUND. That’s annoying! And once parks and rec started getting really popular and making more money they were able to be like “let’s send them to england! France! DC! Scotland! San Francisco! Let’s bring in Michelle Obama and Joe Biden and John McCain and Madeleine Albright! Which like all of that was really cool and some of the best parts of the series but also just another example of how the show changed over time as they got more name recognition and money. 

Also lmao i just had the thought that it doesn't really matter what community did because the point of that show was to be batshit and they succeeded spectacularly. What a good time. Just had to add that in there. 

So yeah that’s why i hate the television format because everything is subject to change from the plot to the tone to the writing to the characters and a lot of times there isn’t a clear narrative arch as they’re just coming up with nonsense to keep the show going and i just don’t vibe with that. 

So if i hate the television format why do i still watch it, you ask? You never shut about tv shows on your blog and yet here you are declaring that you hate them. What’s up with that. Well, the answer is simple. I have major FOMO. Also lmao quite honestly i just recently came to these conclusions and put words to these feelings during the quarantine so after 23 years of being pissy at tv shows all the time i honestly probably will watch less of it. I probably wont stop completely tho. Ive already said that im not gonna watch tv shows with queer characters until the show is over and its been confirmed for me that the show treats its queer characters and viewers with respect and dignity and i stand by that. (It’s the only reason why ive started to watch black sails.) im for sure never watching another cw show again. I have literally never finished a CW show because something has happened in it halfway through that pissed me off so much i never finished the series

So that’s my opinion does anyone also feel the same way? I feel like im crazy

[jcmorrigan]

In Defense of Archibald Snatcher

Oh, wow, we’re coming up on almost the sixth anniversary of The Boxtrolls, my favorite film of all time, and though the fandom for it seems to be either dead or in hibernation, I still have the torch lit.

I actually have been of the mindset of the opinion/s I’m about to present here for all those six years, but never really thought it prudent to lay them out until I recently had a friend I was recommending the film to who I warned about some of the elements considered “problematic” and I offhandedly mentioned that I could do a whole essay about why they don’t bother me and said friend replied with a desire to want to hear it because we share infodump for infodump, so here we go, I’m poking the hornet’s nest surrounding a controversial film with a dead fandom.

But if you were on Tumblr back in the heyday, you might’ve seen the reaction to this film when it first debuted. Specifically, what a lot of people honed in on wa that the villain, Archibald Snatcher, employed a dragsona to be able to push his agenda and implement his evil scheme. There was outrage. There were accusations. There was lambasting. And above it all, one question hovers: was this transphobic?

I want to start, before we get into the weeds, by saying that if you are anywhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and you were offended by this film or this character, your experiences are completely valid. I’m about to present the counterargument in language that assumes my take is fact for the purpose of not having to write fifty thousand clunky disclaimers, but analytical as this may be, it IS an opinion, and if you don’t think it’s right, then hey, that’s super valid, and I’m not gonna try and change your mind, because if you’re hurt, then you’re hurt! You just may want to nope out of this post right now because I’m about to lay out my observations and thoughts to the contrary of the accusations of this being homo/transphobic.

First of all, the obvious facet that comes to mind is how strange it is that we only ever saw the word “transphobia” put on this phenomenon rather than “homophobia” when using a female alter ego as a disguise or a performance art is not the same as being a woman assigned male at birth. One only needs to take a look over at RuPaul’s Drag Race to see examples of this culture. Lots of gay men wearing dresses. No women perceived male.

All the same, I will say that on the surface, adding any kind of queercoding to the story’s villain, who the audience is supposed to boo and hiss at, looks really, really bad on paper. However you interpret it, Snatcher is definitely queercoded. He openly flirts with the man he’s trying to trick as a means of getting what he wants, he displays sincere enjoyment of wearing the dress, and he runs the gamut of flamboyant hand gestures. But if you dig a little further, there’s even more to the story: his tale is one of a man who desires to pass as one of the elite class in his society, but is held back by something he can’t change about himself no matter how he denies it.

Let’s look at the rest of his story. Snatcher is in pursuit of the White Hat: the ultimate status symbol. To that end, he’s decided to otherize the Boxtroll population of the town and play upon the culture shock in Cheesebridge to convince the humans of the “upper world” that the Boxtrolls are predatory monsters who must be killed. This sounds like a pretty black-and-white good-and-evil scenario, right? You’ve got your population of innocent sweethearts being attacked and your genocidal racist orchestrating their destruction. But there’s a third layer still: Lord Portley-Rind, the chief White Hat himself. Lord PR is actually the worst of the lot. It’s because he doesn’t accept Snatcher that Snatcher feels he has to resort to this tactic. He demonstrates open hatred of the Boxtrolls and of Snatcher (”I’m not sure who should be more worried: the Boxtrolls or us!”). There are implications in how he treats his daughter that he’s a textbook sexist who believes there are men’s roles and women’s roles in society and nary the twain shall cross. And he’s the rich guy controlling the entire city and letting children’s hospitals and crumbling bridges go to waste by spending the budget on frivolous cheese. In short, Lord PR is basically the ur-example of a nightmarish fictional Republican (and oh, how I WISH he hadn’t been so prophetic).

I’m not saying Snatcher was justified or good. No. He’s in no way redeemable. But over the course of his interactions with Lord PR, you can see just how much society’s elites treat him as inhuman or like a dirty buffoon. He’s looked down upon, he’s insulted even when he’s doing the “service” Lord PR desires, he’s rejected until he’s gone above and beyond his contract and I think it’s even a little bit implied that Lord PR would’ve reneged on the whole deal if the mob hadn’t cheered for Snatcher in the end. So what you have is a prim and proper billionaire who subscribes to gender roles telling a man of the lower class, obviously economically downtrodden, that he doesn’t deserve what Lord PR has.

The idea of meritocracy is woven throughout the film. Listening to the speech in the background of Snatcher’s anaphylactic attack, while the visuals are focused on Eggs rescuing Fish, you can hear Snatcher rambling about how his father told him that if you work hard, you will receive a White Hat, but he worked hard all his life and got nothing. One of the White Hats literally says he got his through being rich. It’s not hard to infer that Snatcher has figured out how broken the system is and realized the only way to win the game is to cheat.

But there’s still one more thing holding him back from his victory, something that actually trips him up when he achieves what he wanted. Cheese is presented as another status symbol: the rich eat it and are connoisseurs of its flavor. Snatcher is deathly allergic to it. The goal he’s chasing, he can’t even have without threat to his own life. His reaction is to pretend he isn’t allergic and to expose himself to having allergic reactions on the regular to show how much he’s ready to become part of the elites. I’ll reiterate: Archibald Snatcher wants to join the elites, but is held back because of something about himself he cannot change that only matters because the upper crust said it should.

Okay. So we’ve established the man is gay, or somewhere on the queer spectrum. How is this not really, really horrible?

Because the narrative invites you to feel some sympathy for him. No, not for his actions or any secret soft side or tragic backstory (that’s a job for the fans), but because he is chasing a dream he cannot attain. Perhaps the film’s biggest shortcoming is how little consequence comes to Lord PR in the end, because Lord PR, for all intents and purposes, is the worse villain on the board. Snatcher’s ploy is to take the class below the one he inhabits and paint its members as the bad guys: a nuisance that must be exterminated for the betterment of society. And we’ve seen this. We’ve seen plenty of real-life examples of have-nots turning on have-lessers because the haves benefit from oppressed groups infighting and being distracted from who holds the money and the power. A lot of times, you see that while intersectionality is definitely something we need to pay attention to, racism, sexism, and homophobia are not concepts that are all explicitly linked. If you experience one, that doesn’t mean you don’t project one or two of the others on other people - particularly if you’re trying to make yourself feel better about the discrimination you face.

When you look at the hierarchy, Snatcher is, I reiterate, a very bad person. But he’s also a victim. Not as much of a victim as the poor Boxtrolls, who get the malice trickling down from both the Red Hats and the White Hats, but he is a victim. We see him mocked, laughed at, turned away. And though he’s not redeemable, there are aspects in which he is sympathetic.

But what about Frou Frou? What about that particular disguise?

Well, for one, it’s used to make yet another allegorical statement. Snatcher is able to get attention paid to him if he weaponizes female sexuality - though it is a very shallow attention that largely results in the straight men of the town swallowing his propaganda while also objectifying him. Most of the comments made on Frou Frou are slimy, smarmy “compliments” on her body from the White Hats. Lord PR’s wife harbors a distinct distaste for Frou Frou because her husband most certainly prefers ogling Frou Frou to actually paying attention to their marriage. Frou Frou is a propaganda vehicle to make it look like more than one person is on the same page as Snatcher; Snatcher himself drives the action of his scheme and gets the dirty work done.

It’s also worth noting that if you take away the implications, villains using alter egos to trick their nemeses is a tale as old as time, from sea witch Ursula making herself more supermodel-esque in order to marry the prince to mythological Loki actually crossdressing much in the same vein in order to fool the Frost Giants. There’s a reason disguise masters and shapeshifters are intriguing villain archetypes: because we’re always a little bit afraid that someone isn’t who they say they are, and because - yeah, I’m about to go here - I think we all wish we could shift shape ourselves to take on new forms that suit the goals we’re trying to accomplish, even if that means “fooling” others. So it’s reasonable to think Laika wasn’t aware that there was any queercoding to even be had here - but I do think the crew was aware, and not in a malicious way.

However, watching Snatcher’s scenes as Frou Frou, there’s something that comes across in his character that you don’t see so often when he’s presenting male: he’s legitimately having fun. He dances, he flirts with the crowd, he adds more flourishes to his speech, he gets sassy. Frou Frou is a means for him to express himself, to allow himself to be feminine when he has built his philosophy on needing to do “what a man does” (he repeats this at least twice) in order to achieve greatness. He can be a little more himself when he’s Frou Frou, even though Frou Frou isn’t him. Taking a new identity that’s allowed the other half of the gender roles allowed in Cheesebridge (which runs on a binary because it’s run by the White Hats) lets him act a little less like what he needs to be to be taken seriously and a little more like he has freedom.

Put this back in context of the greater narrative: given all the parallels we’ve seen, it’s safe to assume that Cheesebridge, as a whole, is not accepting of deviations from gender roles, whether it’s being open and proud of your LGBTQ+ identity or simply wearing the clothes that don’t belong to your gender. Snatcher is taking an enormous gamble here by using Frou Frou at all. On one hand, it’s a calculated risk; he knows if he can appeal to Lord PR’s unchecked sexist libido, he can secure another avenue to being heard. On the other, however, it’s not really much of a leap to say this is something he wants to do, someone he wants to be more like, and isn’t allowed to, and since he’s cheating at the game anyway, he might as well go all the way and do what he wants with his life.

I’ve seen a lot of people take issue with the scene where he reveals himself to Lord PR and comparing it to some actual homophobic/transphobic media. And again, if that still stands to you as your primary analysis and emotional reaction, then feel free to turn away, reject my analysis, and know your thoughts and feelings are completely valid. But I think this scene differs from your usual “person with male parts tricked you into thinking they were a woman” scene in a couple ways.

For one, Snatcher decides to out himself on his own. To Lord PR, it’s when he’s got nothing left to lose. Again, when he realizes the game is broken and the odds are against him, he takes control and decides to be himself a little more. Now everyone knows he likes to act a dragsona because he wanted them to. But also, earlier on, when he revealed himself to Eggs, it was again on purpose. Eggs didn’t figure him out. Snatcher needed Eggs to know the level of the threat he was dealing with: that he was the person Eggs has been running from since the start and is no less dangerous in a dress. It’s always been of his own volition. There’s no “I thought you knew” or disrobing to see a body that doesn’t match expectations - Eggs ripping Snatcher’s wig off is maybe a little iffier, but again, in context, that’s him trying to show Snatcher’s identity, not as a man but as Archibald Snatcher, to expose the corruption, and Snatcher actually plays it completely off because he’s that good of an actor.

Which brings me to my second point. There’s only one person who reacts in an “Oh, gross!” manner to this revelation, and it’s Lord Portley-Rind. The one we’ve established is sexist, homophobic, and your textbook Rich White Straight Cis Man. The one at the top of the food chain. The one who’s been objectifying Snatcher and acting like a slobbering pervert about Frou Frou from the beginning. The homophobe realizes he has been a little gay. The sexist realizes his objectifying a particular person he perceived female has consequences. And this is why to me, that scene is actually hilarious. Because I don’t feel like I’m laughing at Snatcher’s expense. I’m laughing because Lord PR just got called OUT, and this is exactly the kind of discomfort that is karmic given how he’s treated his daughter, his wife, and everyone in his city who’s needed him.

Cycling back to when Snatcher outs himself at the ball, Eggs doesn’t really seem to care that there’s a gender-role-play involved here. His concern is not that this is actually a man; his concern is that it’s specifically the person who he knows is trying to ruin everything. Same with Winnie when Eggs passes it on. Eggs trying to reveal Snatcher to the crowd doesn’t even begin with “Frou Frou is fake,” but a line I will never forget: “Archibald Snatcher has lied to you all.” Not even drawing attention yet to the fact that he’s in the room. Starting out by having everyone remember that guy they are all sure ISN’T there and pointing out he’s bad news.

To look at Lord Portley-Rind’s “Oh my God! I regret so much!” as a dig at Snatcher is to say that Lord Portley-Rind is the lens through which we should be viewing this story, which it most certainly isn’t. The lens is Eggs and Winnie. Adjacent lenses are Fish, Shoe, and Jelly. Lord Portley-Rind is an antagonist to every single character in this film save the other White Hats.

Which is why if this film falls flat anywhere, it’s in letting Lord Portley-Rind get away without consequence. I think I can take a guess as to why this primarily happened: it needed to wrap up in a little under two hours, and dismantling systematic oppression and abuse of socioeconomic power can’t be done in a two-hour escapade. I still wish he were at least villainized a little more, as that’s where the narrative was leading up to that point. One of his earliest scenes with Winnie foreshadows that he will have to choose between her and the hat, and it takes him two tries to make the right choice. This story, until the very last act, has not supported him being a character to like or sympathize with, even in such subtle ways as Trout and Pickles stealing his hat and running around with it to taunt Snatcher - showing that a symbol is really only a symbol, and doesn’t indicate your worth. Anyone can put on a hat. Lord PR has just been brought onto an equal footing with them, if only for a moment.

Okay, so why have this whole three-layer narrative anyway? Couldn’t we have made this story more clear-cut between the Boxtrolls and White Hats, with no queercoded villain to get in between?

Yes...but I’m not sure that would have been best for the viewing audience. And there’s plenty of precedent as to why Laika thought it was a move for the better.

Queercoded villains are in every aspect of our fictional and fandom lives. Here’s a bitter pill to swallow: all your favorite Disney villains are queercoded. All of them. “But Frollo’s arc is about - “ Being a man in a religious system afraid of being tainted as sinful for being attracted to the wrong person. “Gaston, though, is - “ Very chummy with LeFou, and I’m talking the animated versions. They’re all colorful, flamboyant, foppish for the men and full of socially-unacceptable strength for the women. These were the cornerstones of our childhood nostalgia and characters we still feel culturally attached to.

It’s not just in Disney. Are you a fan of musical theater? Well, then your favorite villain probably got a big song and dance in which they wore some glitter. Classic lit? Google the name of your favorite literary canon villain and “queer theory” and see what happens.

I don’t think we can really say this is good or bad. On one hand, it’s not great that a marginalized group can only see themselves in the character we’re supposed to hate. On the other, though, we don’t always hate that character. Villains hold a unique place in our culture. They do bad things, horrible things, but the story can’t take place without a conflict, and we like when that conflict has a name and a cool design such as a tall, imposing sorcerer/witch in flowing robes - or perhaps a tall, graceful man in a long red coat and a towering crooked top hat.

I’ve had lots of friends and trusted Internet reviewers talking about how queercoding in villains can actually be really empowering. If you’re a fan of the villain, you get to see a power fantasy in which someone who has something very big in common with you gets to enact karma on others for wronging them! You get to wear the cool robes, sing the fun song, do things that are not really legal or acceptable! I think a great analogy is if you check out the book “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” by Sady Doyle. It’s primarily about sexism rather than queer issues (though it does touch upon them!), but examines how women throughout pop culture and storytelling history have always been the witch, the monster, the demon, and how that sucks, but it also means that women have a great pile of fictional power fantasies to pick from to indulge in. It’s the same principle. I myself may not be same-gender-attracted, but I am asexual, and still waiting on my glamorous villain who uproots society as revenge for being forced to do something analogous to having a sexual relationship...*taps wristwatch*

Meanwhile, queercoding is not as prevalent in heroes. And I think that’s where everything’s tripping on its own feet. Because a gay villain among a bunch of straight heroes does look pretty bad. Are some of the heroes queercoded as well, though? Well, that’s just realistic diversity. People are gay, and there happen to be some good ones and some evil ones here. I don’t think Snatcher’s dragsona is entirely unproblematic, but I do think it could have been mitigated a lot with more implications that Eggs and Winnie might be queer in some way (and believe me, I choose to interpret them that way, because the more the merrier).

The thing is that in pop culture as of late, there seems to be a trend to scrub away all villainous queercoding because it’s seen as a black-and-white issue. To go back to the Disney villains, do you feel like the live-action recreations of Jafar, Scar, and Gaston are missing a certain je ne sais quoi? Well, think about it through this lens and it might be that you savez quoi after all. They’ve all been made incredibly straight as of late, with off-the-record actor confirmations about having obsessive crushes on the film heroines. I can’t speak to why this has happened; there’s a lot of history behind any given social movement, and I haven’t managed to really unpack this one. “Blame Tumblr” is too easy; I would want to know who were the loudest voices, why they said what they said, and what was the intended accomplishment, not to mention if this had built on other social-media or real-life platforms over the years and was influenced by any outside source by news or marketing. I can’t say why queercoded villains are being burned; I can only say it’s happening. And it was happening big-time in 2014, when The Boxtrolls was released.

I also feel like I would be remiss to mention that The Boxtrolls is based on “Here Be Monsters,” which I believe to be one of the worst books I’ve ever read, bar none. That version of the story has...pretty much everything that’s perceived to be in the film version’s text as problematic. Frou Frou is presented as something to laugh at Snatcher about throughout, largely because everything about Snatcher is presented to make him seem gross or like a buffoon. There’s a whole scene of the hero rifling through his desk to find soiled underwear. Not to mention that the original purpose of Frou Frou in the text was to manipulate the town’s women by dictating the fashion trends they should follow and the beliefs they should hold in order to fit in. This is something that does need commentary on it, but in that text in particular, it seems like the women are silly and easily swayed, and that they’re the town’s weak link because they’re slaves to fashion. The Boxtrolls completely flips this around so that the town’s weak link re: Frou Frou is the rich MEN who objectify women, particularly the men that happen to be in charge of the whole town, and looking at that divide alone tells me how much care was put into this adaptation at every level.

So why’d I do this, besides having a friend who wanted to read it? Because Archibald Snatcher is legitimately one of my favorite fictional characters. Yeah, I know, he’s a horrible person and terribly racist, and no, I don’t think his demonizing an entire people is anything to be emulated. But on one hand, there are places where I not only empathize but identify with him, particularly where it comes to living out the majority of one’s life trying to live up to a meritocracy - I did everything right, so why am I not on top? He’s also just fun and satisfying to me. He’s the exact brand of evil I eat up. He’s quippy, flamboyant, sadistic to a point, and altogether enjoying his job way too much. Even though he isn’t in power all that long, he is a power fantasy for me, too - wishing I had his talent to talk my way into others’ hearts by saying the right thing, and maybe cultivating a little bit of that I didn’t realize I had (but not to use for evil purposes). I loved him from the moment he turned up because of his sheer dynamic presence - his drawn-out vowels, his sinister smile, his silver-tongued manipulations - and to this day I find him an inspiring character when it comes to writing fiction, both in the realms of fanfiction and original villain creation. You could say he’s a comfort character to me. And maybe this has been the delusional rambling of a woman trying to protect a character she likes for surface reasons by spelling out what look like analytical points of discussion.

But I don’t think Laika was trying to be mean-spirited or homo/transphobic in their character creation. I think they were trying to make an engaging villain who had some layers you could pick at to see more about the narrative as a whole and the message of societal corruption and how the way to overcome it is to be true to yourself rather than defined by your status: a lesson Snatcher fails at the finish line when Eggs gives him one last chance to “make you.” And ultimately, if you really and truly did like Archibald Snatcher, you’re not wrong or invalid in the least.

[the-ghost-of-jason-todd]

as an aside re: trans characters who come out at some point in the series because i’ve been thinking about it for weeks now... you guys know that you don’t have to inform people who don’t know yet, right?  if someone is misgendering a character because they haven’t reached the point in canon where the reveal happens then it’s not really misgendering and it’s disingenuous to call it that?  for a real-life person who would have to listen to the wrong pronouns and experience the dysphoria etc. it would be different, but we’re talking about characters and story arcs.  character trivia is limited to what has been revealed at any given point in the narrative and it isn’t going to hurt the character to operate on limited knowledge.  besides that, as a trans person, i don’t blame people who misgender me if they don’t know my pronouns?  if i haven’t come out to someone i don’t expect them to do it right.  if, at any specific point in canon, the viewer/reader wouldn’t know that a character is trans, then... i don’t see the harm in letting them speak about the character using the knowledge they have?

believe me, i get how frustrating it is to have a trans character and not be able to go LOOK TRANS CHARACTER, to see everyone respect them as trans straightaway, but in the context of experiencing media there isn’t a definitive point in time when a character comes out like there would be in real life.  people enjoy media at different speeds.  people will get to the coming out scene at different times.  personally speaking, i really hate when people bring me ‘gotcha!’s when i sincerely didn’t know something yet.  i don’t want people spoiling me and condescending at me about something i don’t know because i simply haven’t gotten there.  

i don’t mind when people rec series to me because there’s a trans character, that’s not the issue here.  i don’t mind knowing about trans characters, and besides, i can usually spot them from 100 meters away.  i 100% WILL get into a series if i get a whiff of trans representation because there is a trans/queer/lgbt/diversity deficit in media and we’re all very aware of that.  the thing is, there’s a difference between advertising trans characters (which, when done by big-name studios, often becomes a selling point and a diversity back-pat for media creators who do the bare minimum--that’s a different conversation) and having trans stories actually woven into a piece of media.  i like both, because i’m literally starving for trans rep, and sometimes a character/their arc can BE both... but there’s something so special about getting to see trans character growth in a series that isn’t otherwise about trans struggles, where i can experience a trans character in the same unassuming way i experience any other character.  

i LOVE when i get to enjoy trans reveals in canon as their own organic part of the narrative, as B or C plots and side-arcs.  like whoo, that moment of vindication!!  i love to get hype about it the way the series intended, you know?  let me have that!  it’s nice to have all the up-to-date information, especially about representative characters, but... the widespread need for the most current, exact info is a very specific fandom phenomenon.  some people just aren’t in it for that.  sometimes people simply want to enjoy the story.  i don’t think there’s a reason to correct casual fans about future plot points. 

and i know that sometimes shit is confusing because there are times when you’re dealing with an adaption or a translation where things get mixed up (or purposefully ‘cleaned up’), or when the reveal happens in promotional materials or quasi-canon extra bits that not everyone sees, but in cases where you know things will become clear for the viewer/reader at some point... like, you can just let it go.  you don’t have to correct me if i’m going to figure it out on my own soon enough.  

[sobdasha]

i got caught up with this not because i did better but because i’ve had no time/watched some tv

War for the Oaks, Emma Bull I began reading this book at the same time as The Innkeeper's Song, listed below. I started out dragging my feet on this one and racing through TIS. But one book got progressively more amazing while the other book got progressively less impressive and my better book is this one. This was the roomie's first brush with urban fantasy, and one of her friends got her a second-hand first edition paperback, and so she talked about it a lot until I finally picked it up and she said "Uh but also I haven't read it in forever so I uh. Don't know how it holds up." (She rightly fears me because as you will have noticed I am a Very Particular Reader.) Reasons I disliked this book at first: - fashion choices that scream "1980s" and fashion choices that scream "lesbian" are incredibly similar and guess which of the two I am not getting, seeing as this was published in 1987. - Eddie is breaking up with her garbage boyfriend which is good but she has an incredible amount of chemistry with Carla which is disheartening given that I know I won't get sapphics and Eddie will end up dating some other boy with whom there is no chemistry. - This is a book about rock-n-roll bands I don't know any of these songs (okay I might know these songs but I don't know artists or titles so I may as well not know any of these songs) it's kinda wasted on me. - oh boy I'm so excited to watch her and the phouka fight like Kagome and Inuyasha or any other pair with this dynamic yaaaaay /sarcasm Reasons this came to be a Good Read: - Everyone dresses so goddamn queer in this book that you know what, everyone except that jerkass Stuart is queer. He's garbage so he can be straight or whatever. It's my reading experience I do what I want. There's no way these people aren't bi. Also it's canon because everyone takes one look at the phouka and assumes he's gay. …………………………with slurs but still. - Good supporting cast. - I both failed to give the phouka a deep voice and also to sustain a Stereotypical Gay voice (which, the dialogue will totally 100% support), but I did accidentally voice him with Tatum's dub of Tomoe from Kamisama Kiss which was completely appropriate in the "vaguely gay vaguely British unambiguously prissy" department, and also entertaining because it reminded me of the dynamics in that anime but, y'know, better. - I almost gave up when the romance hit hardcore but it turned out later that was actually a fake-out that was meant to be garbage and set us up for the endgame much later, by which point Eddie and the phouka actually had the same level of chemistry as Eddie and Carla, so I could actively enjoy the ship. A win! Anyway it was fun. It may not have aged the best in the sense that it strove to be accurate to time and place (see: homophobic slurs), but the character dynamics held up pretty dang well. I would definitely read this again and enjoy myself; in fact I plan to.

The Innkeeper's Song, Peter S. Beagle I was very excited to read this because I was so blown away by The Last Unicorn but the more I read the more disappointed I got. Half the time I feel like that weeb who is like "hello I only like your fanfic you wrote when you were 13 and high on pixie stixs, all your stuff now sucks", and half the time I tell myself, "Maybe there is a reason I've only ever heard of The Last Unicorn and had no idea he'd actually written other books." As you have probably picked up by now, I have a knee-jerk dislike of first person PoV where it must prove itself worthy to me first, despite the fact that I like plenty of things written in first person. I also have a knee-jerk dislike of "I will change the narrator every chapter and announce loudly who it is instead of doing it subtly but unmistakably in the content of the text itself." This book had both. Despite all my harsh judgment, it would be incorrect of me to say that this writing choice is not valid. That this writing choice cannot be used to amazing effect. I do not believe that is what happened here. I did not feel it was adding much to the story to begin with (other than being the shortest and straightest path to advancing a narrative with many fronts), and I was definitely unimpressed when we got to the string of chapters, all of them less than a page and some no more than a paragraph, during the orgy scene where the 3 women have sex with 1 teen boy who's been thirsting after them, and they pay him a lot of worshipful attention in the orgy even though none of them actually like him, and also this is when we reveal one of the women is a man in disguise in the most confusing way possible so my cringe got even deeper as I waited for Beagle to fuck up a trans storyline. (It was literally just "I'm on the run so I'm magically dressing as a girl" but it took a really long time to clarify that after.) In addition to not liking the narrative structure, I just wasn't interested or invested in the actual plot. It didn't feel very urgent or important and at the end I was like "what even happened and also why did it happen." I was underwhelmed. I was definitely the wrong audience for this book. Oh also because I was not enjoying myself I started to get really irrationally annoyed by the way fantasy fauna and flora would have fantasy names and they would be italicized. In a first person PoV. Where the narrator is literally speaking the language that this word is native to. It half felt pretentious, and half highlighted what felt like a loose thread: everyone is literally narrating to someone (presumably collecting the story, after everyone has gone their separate ways) and this has all been woven together into a proper narrative, but our story collector is absent despite addresses to such a person. What purpose does this serve? Does it make it more ~authentic~ fantasy? Because I don't buy it. Now my suspension of disbelief is snapped; I'd have preferred it was either left out entirely, or made into a brilliant framing device like in The Name of the Wind.

Giant Bones, Peter S. Beagle This one was short stories "set in the same universe as The Innkeeper's Song", which basically meant some city names were reused, as well as all those italicized fantasy names and the "I am narrating my story to an audience in-story" frame. You know, all the things I didn't particularly care for. I pressed on to see if there was anything I might like, but since I can't remember, I assume there wasn't. Because this left me wanting, and the title was Giant Bones, I went to reread Conservation of Shadows by Lee instead, starting with "The Bones of Giants," which was greatly preferable, so much more my speed. That's when I did the write-up for the last round of books lol.

Nimona, Noelle Stevenson This has been on my list for Forever but I'm bad at reading new books. Anyway! Nimona was very good!! It felt, hm, very self-indulgent in the way that is amazing, where the creator gives themself whatever they want and the work turns out brilliantly because of it. I didn't think I was into friends to enemies to lovers but apparently I love it wen Stevenson handles it (see: She Ra reboot). Speaking of She Ra, I probably would have figured out where the end game was going if I'd read Nimona before looool. I know people referenced it when they talked ships but I just….didn't...pay enough attention. There was found family stuff I enjoyed, dad stuff, I'm finding that I am liking a lot of takes on monster girls, etc. Anyway it gave me a lot of feelings, it was funny, it was good, I need to get a copy.

The Dragon Pearl, Yoon Ha Lee The first time I talked about this book I mentioned something about the pacing and suspending disbelief or whatever, but I want to note that this time the pacing felt perfect and the plot didn't seem weird at all, it flowed very smoothly. I don't know if that's because it was a reread and I knew where it was going, or because I just read it awkwardly the first time. Anyway. Something that stood out to me this time is that, near the end, I realized this story is a bit animated Disney Mulan. There's even the "you broke this you broke that you impersonated a soldier but also you saved China so thanks" bit. Where The Dragon Pearl is wildly different from other Mulan-type stories that I like (see: Monstrous Regiment) is that it is entirely ungendered. (There are some mentions of gender in the book. These amount mostly to, "most foxes choose to be female because Tradition but one of my cousins decided to be male like my brother and no one mocks him for it" and "official name tags also include handy signifiers of which personal pronouns a person prefers.") What I'm trying to say is, a lot of other stuff when dealing with/trying to deconstruct gender stereotyping, ends up reinforcing it in a way. In order to illustrate why the stereotypes are wrong, they end up repeating the stereotypes a lot in order to argue against them. The Dragon Pearl, on the other hand, is genderless in a way that doesn't reinforce the gender binary. There are no gendered clothes. There are no gendered bathrooms. There are no gendered hairstyles or accessories. There are no gendered actions or emotions or stereotypes. There are no gendered bodies (the differences highlighted between Min and Jang-who-she's-shapeshifting-into are of build ie, height, center of gravity, not of private bits). No plot points revolve around the maleness of the person Min is impersonating; no plot points revolve around the femaleness of Min. And they/them? It's never explained why any person uses that pronoun. They just do so that's just how it is. I just think this is amazingly neat and I wanna applaud Lee for this finesse.

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzi Lee I put this on my list because Queer and people were recommending it, but it was not well-advertized to me. I was expecting shallow teen romance, but dressed in historical clothes and unsubtly, unabashedly, unashamedly GAY. So I was expecting some gay. I was not expecting gay pining I actually enjoyed, I was not expecting call-outs for privilege of wealth and class and sex and color, I was not expecting the drama of the romance to not be stupidly fabricated misunderstandings but instead be driven by the need for character development and personal growth, I had forgotten I was expecting people of color, people with disabilities, badass women, I was not expecting a nuanced call-out of ableism ("I don't believe I need to be well to be happy", etc). I was not expecting a reversal of gender stereotypes that avoided saying "X gender is bad." Like, Monty is the team weakest link. Monty faints at the sight of blood. Monty is romantic and emotional and swoons at the slightest provocation. Monty uses his wiles to seduce people, that's the main skill he actually brings to the party. Monty cries. Aside from probably Monty's asshole dad who hates him for being gay, no one else nor the narrative calls these traits out as being Feminine (And Therefore Bad). Like, haha, We All Know These Are All Stereotypes Of Women At The Time, but no one says it. I find there's something really nice about no one saying it. Meanwhile, Percy and Felicity are competent and cool and I heart them. (What the hell, I heart Monty too. He really grows on you. He's so soft and in love and pathetic.) Anyway going back to the privilege thing, I love that Percy and Felicity and others constantly call Monty out on his privilege and refuse to coddle him over it. But they also care about him and they are very tender to him, not because of his privilege, but because he is a person who deserves basic person things, when he has his own issues. Your issues don't excuse your behavior, but yikes we deeply underestimated the sheer depth of your PTSD and we're gentler with you because of it. So try to stop being an ass. This book is just super wholesome and I can already tell this will be one of my new go-to's when I need a comfort book. Like Ancillary Justice etc.

The Gentleman's Guide to Getting Lucky, Mackenzi Lee This is not a fanfiction in the sense that is it written by the author and not a fan, but you need to understand, as part of me selling this to you as earnestly as I can, this is a fanfiction set after The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue which involves hijinks as Monty and Percy try and fail hilariously to have their first time having sex together, Felicity tries to wingman, there are miscommunications and nervous breakdowns and tender resolutions and it is absolutely a perfect indulgence. Because it was written by the actual author everyone is 100% in character and the narrative voice is spot-on. Kudos!

The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, Mackenzi Lee Ace/aro Felicity???? ACE/ARO FELICITY!!! TBH I only vaguely remembered the descriptions for this one, ie "this time it's lesbians," and I was reading this going "there is a suspicious lack of lesbians but so much platonic vibes and also…..maybe…..maybe…????" and like I got both lesbians AND ace/aro Felicity????? Lee wrote this book? As a gift? For me???? I cannot believe I was blessed with "not like other girls"!Felicity as a vehicle for calling out the internalized misogyny inherent in the Not Like Other Girls mindset, and it is glorious. You can like pretty dresses and running around doing science, or you can hate dresses and only love science, or you can only like pretty dresses, or you can like whatever the heck you want in whatever combo, doesn't matter you're still a girl you're still valid and this shit isn't mutually exclusive. Much as I don't wear makeup (I've slowly learned to wear dresses again) in real life, gosh I love Johanna for being like "I love dresses and I love science and what if I was a badass adventurer but also got to be rescued a lot" because that was bitty me. Gimme a princess dress and a sword and a bow and arrows but also a tower to be rescued from and then various adventures. I want it both ways! And that's okay!! Also this is a critique I have apparently wanted since at least 3rd grade, see this proof from my daily journal prompts, I apologize for my lack of attention to spelling and forming letters: "Girls are what ever girls are. Girls like different things so I con't judge them all. Some girls like barbies. Just becaus you my not like barbies dosn't mean those girls aren't girls, it means they like more things that hove barbies. I like nintendo and I'm a girl." Apparently I was a Not Like Other Girls who thought Other Girls were still extremely valid. (that's kind of hilarious though because like, child, you had Barbies and didn't hate Barbies, you are just bad at playing with dolls and props. You're also bad at playing Nintendo.) Other stuff specifically, hm, it was refreshing to not have "I am skinny and perfect and clearly ugly" or even "I am legitimately ugly." Instead we have, "You do realize my torso is a solid rectangle, it laughs at this corset which I guess we are going to put on anyway, also my football player shoulders are going to literally pop the sleeves off that dress" and "I am built like a corgi dog, this is simply a fact of my proportions." Like, Felicity definitely has Issues with her traditional femininity and lack thereof, but I feel like it was never specifically tied to "my body shape is ugly." Also to go back to this book being written for me personally. You know they always say to write things that only you could write, that are self-indulgent, write what you want to see? It's really hard to do without a template to follow. Right before I picked up this book I realized that maybe The Thing Only I Would Write would be saying "a Skadi-and-Njord marriage is in fact a valid happy ending," but I've never seen that before and I don't know what it would look like even if I kind of understand the concept. All the media I consume, if not ending in romantic soulmates, is at least found family. If you are a loner, if you like being alone, your happy ending is to get a manic-pixie-dream-anything (girl, grandson, grandma, dog, whathaveyou) and integrate back into being social. There are no happy endings where a loner stays alone, where you get married but live separately and see each other very rarely because you love them but can't stand to live with them and you need to be alone to exist as you. And Mackenzi Lee just up and wrote it. It's valid to want to live in a house by yourself filled with bookshelves and have friends. It's valid for a girl to marry another girl who is a pirate and sails around most of the time and only comes to visit on occasion so you don't get sick of her and you keep loving her. This is an okay thing for an ace/aro to want, and it's valid to be happy with this. I can't even, y'all. I'm still marveling. I finally have seen a picture of the life I know would make me happy, and it's finally been acknowledged that I can be happy. (The amount of time I've spent, knowing I hate being social, and wondering--how many years down the line, when I'm living alone and content, will the switch suddenly flip? How many bridges will I have left behind when it turns out that I actually feel loneliness, and I'm miserable and unable to make friends and it turns out there are no manic pixie dream whatevers in real life and I fucked myself over forever because I was wrong and I should have been maintaining these social ties now and turning into someone I'm sure I'm not? What if people like me, who don't really get lonely without people, don't actually exist??) Anyway representation matters. Also Felicity being blindsided with Callum's proposal was, wow, okay I should have caught on to ace!Felicity then because that was so very accurate to my life experience minus people cutting fingers off. Look I was quoting stuff at the end to a friend and she was like "maybe that's why there's aces on the cover" and I am a very stupid ace okay. Felicity and Johanna's intense queerplatonic friendship that they keep trying to take up again in among the same sort of "you need character growth" drama that Monty needed re: Percy is also just, chef kiss, god I love this book. I need to buy this book. I haven't yet so what I did is I renewed all the books so I could immediately reread them after I finished them the first time.

[nimblermortal]

thislizard replied to your post: Hey folks, how do I find Inda fanart?

hmmm…check ao3? sometimes people put fanart there or they link to it

I have now learned that there are nine (9) fanworks on AO3 for the Inda series. Sadly, this makes me feel a bit better - it just is that small of a fandom.

HEY, FOLLOWERS! Y’ALL SHOULD READ INDA AND BECOME INDA FANS AND DRAW STUFF FOR IT!

Why?

-It’s really well-written - not necessarily in a floral prose way, though there is some poetry included, as in a well-constructed way. This is an epic saga, and everything that’s introduced is going to be important later.

-The worldbuilding is quite literally the best I’ve ever seen. Maybe barring Tolkein. Maybe. Sherwood Smith has been working on this world for upwards of fifty years. She’s not as into conlang as Tolkein is, but she’s a lot better at dribbling hints of things into the story so you don’t have to read the gd Silmarillion to find out what was going on in the background. And while she’s not a linguist, she does include freaking linguistic drift in the books, both in the ones set centuries apart and as a minor plot point

-Did you like the more famous Wren series, or maybe Crown Duel, and wished there were more? There is.

-Do you like Victor Hugo and wish there were something like Les Mis but more recently written? There is. You can cry all you want - or if you don’t want to cry, you can try to remember that all of the characters got everything they ever dreamed of.

-Do you want queer representation? It’s all over these freaking books. It is just not necessarily important - after all, some people are plotting for the kingdom and others are plotting for the apocalypse. That being said, at least two sexualities become increasingly important over the course of the series. (If you include Banner of the Damned, then the asexuality becomes really important to the entire narrative and it’s the best representation I’ve ever seen.)

-Do you just want some freaking swordfights? Well have I got a story.

-What about magic both deeply woven into the fabric of society and displayed impressively across the field of the story? Sure! (Although the central country has had sanctions put in place that keep it from getting many trained magicians, so you’ll have to bear with the story for a while - unless you start with Banner of the Damned.)

-Do you really just want to fall in love with characters? WHY DO YOU THINK I LIKE THIS BOOK.

All that being said, Nimbler... Why not?

-The Inda series is something like 3000 pages. It’s not a small commitment. That being said, the slow reader I lent it to finished the first book in 6 months, the second in 4, the third in 3, the fourth in 2. It will pull you in.

AVAILABLE NOW IN LIBRARIES NEAR YOU

[pass-the-bechdel]

Sherlock season four full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

33.33% (one of three).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

41.33%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

One (episode two ‘The Lying Detective’ (46.66%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Ten. Five who appear in at least two episodes, and four who appear in all three episodes.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Nineteen. Four who appear in at least two episodes, and four who appear in all three episodes.

Positive Content Status:

None. Any positive aspects this show may ever have possessed are herein systematically destroyed to form one of the most outrageously offensive collections I have seen in years (average rating of 1.6).

General Season Quality:

Also none. The second episode shows some glimmers of intelligence only to quash them utterly when it reveals its twist; the rest is often as dull and basic as it is idiotic and insulting. 0/10 I heartily do not recommend. 

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Well. At least I’m not stuck for content to discuss, right? Instead, I have so much to disparage I couldn’t possibly fit it all into this post without running five times the length of a typical season review; it’s amazing that they managed to commit so many atrocities in just four-and-a-half hours of television. And on a show that has sold itself on being so smart and intellectually stimulating, too! This season aired in amidst the latest season of Teen Wolf, a show that absolutely does not claim to be aimed at the intellectual crowd and which nevertheless has been tackling the concept of metaphysical existence (no, really) and asking some truly fascinating and emotionally powerful questions about the human relationships it has spent six years building up in all their intricately believable splendour, at the same time as telling some of the most tightly-woven, moving and bombastically entertaining mystery narratives I have ever had the pleasure to sit through. I’m just saying, between the two shows, I know which one has come through the more brilliantly with drama, suspense, poignancy, and above all cleverness. Unfortunately, I’m here right now to talk about the stupid show, not the smart one.

This final season of Sherlock seemed determined to convince us all that Sherlock himself is the best guy ever, the ‘good man’ that Lestrade always hoped he would be (Lestrade was graciously allowed to cameo for the purpose of proclaiming that this was so, in what was definitely not a random, awkward, and overly-manufactured moment at all). As proof of Sherlock’s best-ness, we were treated to a season full of other characters treating Mycroft like utter crap just in case the audience might have thought he was the better guy (which, let’s be real, he is), the woman in John’s life was briskly killed off so that she could leave posthumous DVD messages telling John and Sherlock to be together forever because they’re like, meant to be and obviously they’re The Most Important and she was just in the way of their love (but like, p.s. also they’re super hetero and not gay, ew), and Sherlock was gifted a secret psychotic sister so that he could defeat another female adversary using his Superior Manly Compassion whilst the plot simultaneously completely ignored the horrendous psychological abuses this plot foisted on all three Holmes’ since childhood. I mean, if we acknowledged the psychological impact of all this stuff we’d have to admit that Mycroft has actually done a magnificent job of taking care of his little brother and of achieving something meaningful with his life despite the weight of emotional responsibilities placed on him as a kid and the apparent neglect and utter uselessness of the Holmes parents (who are themselves looking a whole lot less like the kooky comic relief season three wanted them to be), and in acknowledging that we’d also have to acknowledge the reality of the emotional strains that the Holmes brothers have been denying themselves all along and THEN we’d have to admit that treating Mycroft like crap for doing his best with an awful situation is pretty problematic really and that would undermine the season-long insistence that Mycroft sucks, wouldn’t it? No, we must ignore all this stuff: the point is that Sherlock has a crazy sister, and that even if she’s intellectually smarter than him he’s better than her because he Has Emotions, and Mycroft is trash because the emotions he has are inconvenient to the narrative purpose we’re trying to push! Mycroft bad! Emotions bad! Except when it’s extremely limited emotion displayed by a self-absorbed consulting detective who otherwise spends all of his time being manipulative and openly cruel to the people in his life! Man, Sherlock is the best. I wish I could be like him.

Sherlock is, of course, so much the best that he has a long history of drugging his friends and family against their wills, and no one cares about the breach of trust and consent after the fact! He’s so much the best that he wins the heart of a lesbian woman, not to mention the enduring affections of the coroner whom he uses and abuses for LITERAL YEARS, a woman who apparently continues to love him no matter how often he insults her publicly or manipulates her to get access to her workplace, a woman who supposedly keeps right on loving him even after he has failed to change his ways after being called out, and even after she got engaged to another man, and on and on through all the emotional devastation so that she can show up at his flat all smiles in the closing montage of the show. But of course we already knew that Sherlock could be as horrible as he liked without risking the loss of friendship or support; look at John Watson, who stays despite the drugging and being treated like a lab rat, and the trauma of the two years Sherlock was faking being dead, and that time Sherlock pretended a bomb was about to blow up and incinerate them both, and the ACTUAL VIOLENT DEATH OF HIS WIFE (which admittedly had the all-important plot purpose of making John frosty toward Sherlock for a little bit before he was manipulated into caring again, because that’s how good healthy relationships work with wonderful people like Sherlock). And Mrs Hudson puts up with him despite how he treats her like a doormat AND shoots holes in her walls, and Lestrade puts up with him despite the literal crimes Sherlock commits and the havoc he wreaks upon Lestrade’s career, and of course Mycroft puts up with him despite the political strings he has to pull to keep Sherlock out of trouble, up to and including helping Sherlock get away with literal cold-blooded premeditated murder in front of multiple witnesses. No big. Sherlock is a wonderful guy (but clearly Mycroft is the worst ever). No wonder both Moriarty and Eurus focused all their cleverest evil plots on Sherlock, when he’s the centre of the universe and also the Best Ever! It all makes sense now! How clever! (love how the dastardly Moriarty plot from beyond the grave was just that he had recorded a handful of annoying ticking noises for Eurus to play while she got Sherlock to play some Murder Games. That’s amazing plotting, right there, and definitely worth letting Sherlock get away with murder scot-free. But hey, at least making Moriarty’s ‘revenge’ against Sherlock into a large part of Eurus’ plans handily makes her actions not only all about Sherlock, but about Moriarty as well, because it was very gross for a second there when it seemed like Eurus might have some agency of her own. Maybe if she was her own person instead of just another Sherlock-obsessed shill, she would have done better things with her time and talents than making some bland Murder Games in her Island Prison and occasionally sneaking to the mainland to smile at Watson on a bus. I mean, what? Wow, I’m super-convinced that she is the smartest one and also capable of controlling people to do her bidding just by talking to them and all that other crap. Yes, she is surely the scariest and most capable villain who really just needs a hug. This makes loads of sense and is very compelling). 

Urgh. Y’all get it. If you watched it yourselves (my condolences) you hardly need me to tell you how bad it was. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so condescendingly offensive, so obviously plot-holed and yet smugly insistent about its own supposed intelligence.  And that’s before we even acknowledge the queer baiting, the dearth of racial diversity in the cast, or the dedicated policy of misogyny that demands no woman be allowed to pass through the story without being mistreated by Sherlock and then falling in love with him anyway (and if she refuses? If she doesn’t fall for Sherlock, if she doesn’t let him become the centre of her world, if she questions or opposes him? She’s trash, she’s shallow and unlovable, she’ll come out on the wrong side of the story after being manipulated by the villains (I note that no one is ever held accountable for being manipulative in this show, it’s always the victims of manipulation who are treated like idiots for being fooled. Fuck that sincerely)). The only real exception to the rule is Mary, but she commits the crime of being too involved in the story by virtue of being married to one of the leading men, and that means she’s gotta go. This is a story about two men being men and solving crimes! Being smarter than other people and rubbing their noses in it and laughing and sucking each other’s dicks (metaphorically, not literally, that’s queer and we only want Hella Hetero male leads, damn)! Don’t you just love a manly man who runs around town with his just-a-friend manly hetero male friend and solves crimes and is patronising to other people for being less smart than him and more mature and whatnot because omg isn’t it everyone’s fantasy to just be smarter than everyone and be a straight white male and therefore be able to get away with anything? Yeah-huh, that’s what I thought. Obviously there’s no room for women (who are stupid and annoying and too emotional for crime-solving, probably), so is it any surprise that Mary dies, really? She kept John busy while Sherlock was ‘dead’, but now Sherlock is back so we don’t need Mary anymore! She understands, of course, that’s why she sacrifices herself for Sherlock, but only after being prescient enough to prepare some messages encouraging the severe emotional manipulation of her grieving husband so that he can fall back into Sherlock’s clutches and they can live happily ever after in a not-gay way! What an important plot device Mary proved to be. I’m glad she was there to be the a-typical woman-thing to help the plot in a different way to the other boring woman-things, aren’t you? Gee it’s good. What a clever show. I gotta go cleanse my palate now, but definitely not because this show leaves a bad taste in my mouth that sends my sarcasm into overdrive so that I can do something other than keysmash angrily. Ahem. When’s the next episode of Teen Wolf?

[clubofinfo]

Expert: One of my less popular beliefs (and that’s saying something) is that any form of sexuality is inherently objectifying. As with all language being violence and all poetry dishonest, that’s not the end of the story, obviously, and certainly not an injunction to never engage with it. My basic argument is that sexual desire is ultimately a very simple lizard-brain thing and while you can hook it up to to complex circuits, there’s a limit to the complexity of the triggers, or at least diminishing sustainability to complex triggers. The triggers can be ‘relatively’ complex, but they have to be ossified enough — have to have permanent enough associations or connections — to actually serve as triggers. You may get off to signs of someone else desiring you, but that’s not seeing them as an ends in themselves. You may get off to signs of someone’s else’s intelligence and creativity, but that’s not seeing them as an ends in themselves. Identifiable tropes or trappings of intelligence or creativity are themselves object-functioning. The causal origin such sexual triggers might reveal desires or motivations or social allegiances that we might say reflect more valorous alignments than others, but any codified trigger is nonetheless objectifying. When we view someone as an “artist” say we objectify them with such simplified pictures in broadly the same way that viewing someone as a body is objectifying, we view them as a thing rather than as an agent. Relating to someone in terms of simplified roles or characteristics is in a similar objectifying vein as relating to them in terms of their body, because such relating turns away from dwelling on the fullness of their existence in all its unknowable subjective complexity. It seems safe to say from everything we know about biology and neuroscience that in order for any stimuli to trigger sexual desire it has be sufficiently simple. It gets harder and harder to construct a triggering circuit as the complexity of the trigger rises. A sufficiently complex sexuality may no longer count as a “sexuality” and it seems unlikely to be able to even function as one. Indeed almost all sexual triggers are incredibly simple. Every remotely common flavor of kink is about severe simplifications of our environments or narratives or relations. In actual life maintaining power or being oppressed can be incredibly complicated and rife with anxiety. But kink uniformly attacks such anxieties, it removes complexity. We see the same with common modes of relating that don’t conceive of themselves as “kink”, people frequently ground their sexual attraction for others in their capacity to signify an idea or serve a role or generally perform as some thing. Even the most vaunted of complex queer practices when they get closer to sexual desire suddenly get very simplistic indeed. Going off of what people say to me in private there’s a huge amount of anxiety and unspoken tension in the present radical queer milieu around being incapable of stating actual desires or triggers for fear of being seen as too simplistic, too unintelligent, too undeveloped. So there’s a kind of tension between radical queer social practice, which delights in exponential complexity and compounding conceptual processes, and the actual sexual desires of said people. The desires tend to be far more simplistic, albeit sometimes cloaked in a bunch of performative academic complexity. Indeed what seems most common in queer practice is the holding of non-standard or unusual desires that are simplistic in function but are necessarily complex in their explanation (because of their non-standardness). A very simple system can require an incredibly complicated amount of explanation to be comprehensible within a paradigm not built to refer to it. I think we’re deluding ourselves into thinking sex can be a site of rich intellectual connection; sex is anti-intellectual. But that’s actually the most useful thing about it, it kills thought. Sex kills anxiety, strips away the tangled and sometimes counterproductive webs we’ve woven, it reduces us from a realm of rich internal subjectivity to something closer to an object. Sexual desire is — in an ethical lens — a lot like getting drunk, it strips away our agency and renders us less capable of fully recognizing or enshrining the agency of others. All we are left with is very simplistic checkboxes of consent, is the other person displaying enthusiasm, etc. We are inherently left with simplistic codes. It’s important to note that while we seek to expand agency, moments of lesser agency or shallower connection are not uniformly objectionable. After all we go literally unconscious for large portions of every day, reducing ourselves to almost as object-like an existence as is possible. We do this because our brains have limits, because as processes of cognition we grow overly complex, we need to strip ourselves down, to restructure and refurbish. It is not clear that such refactorization would not be inherent to any thinking thing, any process of cognition in this universe. There’s an expansive tendency towards building expanding networks of possibility and likewise a contracting tendency towards radical slicing away of those networks to restructure towards more stable or more broadly useful roots. Sex (both desire and mechanism) is a particularly hamfisted means of pruning overgrown complexity, and its internal logic frequently pulls us in the direction of intensely problematic simplicities. But as with alcohol and sleep, sometimes a clunky and intensely dangerous tool is all we humans have to do a necessary job. I know that the juxtaposition of sex with love risks derision for conjuring a Christian mindset, but it’s not like for two millennia millions of folks knew absolutely nothing or were influenced by no substantive insights. And of course such a split is commonly arrived at across many cultures. I think the dichotomy is the most useful/illuminating conceptual schema possible in this realm. Love is grasping the fullness of someone else’s reality, the realness of their full being. Love is a level of engagement that denies simplification, that increases the scale of an individual’s presence in your perceptual universe, fleshing them in with so much detail and motion it becomes both intractable and unboxable. Love operates in the hyper-complex and rich realm of agency and subjectivity. Sex operates in the dangerously simple realm of consent and objectification. You can have loving sex with a partner, in the sense that there’s a smooth arc of increased drunkenness and mutual objectification together (as opposed to a discretized jump to objectification via say the abruptness of adopted kinkplay), but sexual desire is never predicated on something as infinitely complex as love. It’s predicated on specific isolatable, simplistic triggers. Even when those simplistic (objectifying) triggers are things more complex than visual pattern recognition of nice bits, like “I feel safe with this person” or “I desire their happiness”. Such simplistic narratives are obviously dangerous, but they can also be grounding, if only to provide a vantage-point for new attempts at constructing complexity. Sex may even augment and facilitate loving relationships — in the sense that it provides a strong means to mutually shed off the bloated complexities that continuously emerge between two deeply integrated systems. A jump down to a more simplistic base from which to then go back and evaluate the tangles without being caught up in them. Sex can also function as a kind of game theoretic reset where two parties recognize that their tangled maps of each other have become intractable in a way causing problems. Both parties know their anxieties about the other are likely incorrect, but they’re too embedded in a paranoia to state things clearly and without creating further tangles, sex can be seen as a way to ensure mutual defection. Sex offers a way to reduce one another to an “original position” as it were, from which both can collaboratively chart the tangles from a position of relative objectivity. In a flip, sexuality can also have valorous effects by breaking symmetries. Just as self-constrained rationality can be an incredibly useful tactic, it is often desirable to introduce some clumping into an otherwise perfectly connected network to create a kind of topological diversity that facilitates evolution of ideas & cultures. Too complex of affinities and attractions can rapidly make choice between all other agents computationally intractable, thus introducing simple (ie objectifying) attractions can serve to break the ice, as it were, of an otherwise locked up social network. Without something arbitrary like sexual attraction we might find ourselves incapable of selecting among billions of irreducibly complex fountains of agency, much less being pulled into closer orbits of more intense and personal engagement where love can flourish. Of course music tastes and even the automated assignment of numbers of affinity could likewise break such symmetries, but these too would be objectifying processes, even when ultimately serving grander aims. Conversely, assigning simplistic attractions below an agent’s conscious control can also work against clumping, when such clumping diverges far from a perfectly connected network (creating epistemic closures and general constraints on freedom). Sexual desire is often a violently objectifying process, in the sense that any over-simplification that discards detail is always violent. Science can — when successful — entirely compress detail into a more simple description, finding the hidden symmetries and redundancies, without slicing anything away. But the fullness of another mind can never be accurately compressed. We defy simplification. At the same time simplification is necessary and critical for any sort of life. We require simplification. To get anywhere we need to be able to wipe the slate clean, to cut through otherwise tangled knots. Sexuality provides a machete. It’s almost always used to hurt people — its simplifications do violence both upon others and upon our own thoughts and agency — but sometimes a machete can be very useful in hacking yourself free. Without tools like machetes our explorations would be more timid and our missteps more overwhelming. It is precisely tools of simplification that enable searching minds to develop continually blossoming complexity without wandering into deadends and choking themselves out. Sometimes you have to trim to keep growing. Sometimes crude simplification, the slicing away agency and subjectivity, is necessary and useful to serve their expansion. Sometimes you have to take a shot of whiskey to clear your confused thoughts and better ruminate. Sexual desire and attraction crudely objectifies. It is most illustrative to keep it conceptually distinct from infatuation — a kind of relishing of open possibility — and love — a kind of inescapable and incompressible tangibility. All sexuality is an orientation of epistemic violence that inaccurately reduces ourselves and others. A world entirely colonized and subsumed by sexual desire would be a world of objects. And it goes without saying that our present world is permeated and ordered by sexual attraction in grotesque fractals of thoughtless violence. But all this does not suffice to prove that sexual attraction cannot be instrumentalized in the service of agency. It merely proves that sex is a dangerous mechanism that always at least partially mutilates what it touches. Yet we must remember that some of the best and most useful tools frequently live double-lives as weapons of mass destruction. http://clubof.info/