#anyway it was certainly A Conversation

[helenofblackthorns]

fun fact my mom went out of her way to tell me one of my cousins came out as bi. is this because I kinda told her I wasn't straight like three years ago 🧍🏻‍♀️🧍🏻‍♀️🧍🏻‍♀️

[beatcroc]

i already wrote up a whole essaypost about the dynamic for these two but it's funnier to summarize it like this. also it's the only way youre gonna see anything resembling fp getting closure abt any of this :^) [x]

[helios-two]

cindy + studcoms compilation

[neolxzr]

you do see my point though, I was saying that yes a piece of media can have a character imply they are queer, but it’s frustrating when they won’t explicitly confirm such, because of (in the case of… checks app store purchase statistics…. A multi million dollar game franchise!) the need to market to as many people as possible. Shumika will never be “canon” because some people just don’t like shumika and won’t spend money on the game if shu and mika are in a relationship, whether or not that’s because they like the ship or the characters or are genuinely homophobic or whatnot. If the writing team cared about telling a love story, they would tell a love story, not go “well maybe they’re in love, it’s up to viewer interpretation!” like this works, sometimes it adds to the meaning of the work, but enstars really doesn’t have an excuse for their constant “this character might have feelings for this other character, but we’ll never have them say it out loud!” except the fact it makes them a lot of money, since they can market to people who like a character being the way they want that character to be, whether that’s with that character being in love with another in game character or self-shipping or whatever else. Outside of shipping, this is why some characters like Shinobu haven’t changed despite wanting to change (he continuously talks about how he wants to be more mature and taken seriously but his cards continue to make him look small and cute because his fans like that about him and god forbid we change anything!) I just think enstars should not be your first thought when someone asks you about a good piece of queer media because they’re doing just about the same job as large cast games with characters of the same gender (minus Arashi) who continue to have characters go “we’ll do all these things to imply we could be in love, but we’ll never have our characters actually date! teehee!”

i can understand being frustrated about your ships not being "confirmed", but the obsession with what is "canon" and "not canon" is just straight up not a very interesting discussion to have. what happyele's or the writers' agenda is is not of particular importance to me. one of the first things they teach you in classes about media analysis is that once a work is out there, the intentions of the creator no longer matter. the only thing that matters in your analysis is your own thoughts and the way you interpret a text.

if we were having a conversation about how much the creator of something sucks, then sure, talk about that all you want, but i am specifically referring to discussions about the piece of media and these characters and their relationships and their growth and the themes of the work etc. those things are removed from whether or not the company writes the way they do because of profit motives or whatever. companies make money, that's just what to expect. if you want art that is free of profit motives, read something by an independent creator.

even so, it feels strange to place enstars into the bucket of "stuff that should be gayer but the bad company that makes it wont let it be" because the characters ARE so very openly queer. there are so many instances in it where characters pour their heart out to each other or offer themselves to another character in beautiful and poetic ways, and i think it's wrong to claim it doesn't count because they didn't confirm their relationship status at the end of it. if you ask me, there is absolutely no way to interpret enstars in a way completely free of queerness. there is so much explicitly queer text that ignoring it is just plain incorrect. but, if homophobic people like this game and choose to look the other way at all of the gay shit, again, that is not my problem.

why is canonization the only thing that matters? is a shitty BL with awful writing better and more worthwhile than enstars as a queer narrative because the characters had explicit gay sex on screen? are poorly written gay characters in the background of other media with nothing going on more worth talking about than shumika or wataei or rinniki or whoever else just because they say the words 'i'm gay' out loud?

queerness is so much more than all of that. it is so much more than labels and it is so much more than relationships that are easy to understand. it is so much more than the extremely narrow view of it that the internet has concocted about it over the last few years, where you’re only allowed to talk about queerness if you yourself are openly queer and out of the closet, and even then you’re only allowed to make art that makes for “good representation.” that is just so incredibly limiting. i would rather tons of companies who are trying to profit off fujoshis make vaguely gay media with unconfirmed romances and relationships that aren't easily defined by labels than have less queer art in the world.

more queer art means more queer people who will find something to really connect to. more queer art means telling more queer stories. why should who is allowed to write lgbtq media be limited? why should the kind of media people are allowed to make be limited?

its fine to criticize happyelements if youre unsatisfied with the way they do things, im not always 100% in love with everything they do either. i wouldn't even consider enstars to be the worlds' best example of a queer piece of media. but no one is forcing you to like or engage with it or give the company money if you're unhappy with how they write and market their game. they don't owe anyone explicit confirmation that any of their characters are dating, and it doesn't even matter if they do provide that confirmation or not.

regardless of who made it or for what reason, queer stories are worth talking about, "canon" or not.

[not-poignant]

Everyone can feel however they want about any character etc etc obligatory disclaimer... that said, I do wonder how people would feel about Temsen if he was white. It's the same thing I wondered when I saw some comment reactions to Kadek back when he was introduced in FFS.

I'm a big fan of Temsen, btw. The way he talked about both Efneisen and Gary's abusive actions was really responsible and useful, and I love characters who have both an upright moral core and the smarts to be able to take actions effectively.

Hi anon!

Yeah I do...sometimes have these moments as well. I also have the self-reflective 'am I writing POC too often as assholes' and then think about Eran and Leo and some of the other characters I've written and it's like okay, I don't think it's necessarily that specifically (though there's always room for improvement) and I really really do like writing hot assholes dsfjkaf

I also love Temsen, I love characters who are just really complicated but ultimately still doing their version of their best. And that anon might not have been thinking of the race factor at all, but it is something that also occasionally plays in the back of my mind because after 10 years of writing, there is a certain kind of 'he just rubs me the wrong way' that characters like Eran, Kadek, and Temsen have gotten just a little bit more than some of the other characters (and on the flipside, the 'oh I didn't know they were POC' which is...a whole...*sighs* - probably at its most painful when it's fanart so you know someone's put a lot of effort into something but also blanked the description of a character's skin colour and features at the same time) - I guess there's just an awareness? Also an awareness of my role in what I'm perpetuating as a white person because realistically I will unfortunately fuck it up too.

I am team 'give anon the benefit of the doubt' because I do canonically write Temsen to be unnerving and intimidating and I do think some readers will be a lot more receptive to / sensitive to that than others. But yeah, I also think this is a really understandable thing to wonder? It's a crunchy space to be in, because I also think Temsen's hitting the mark if he is unnerving some people as a character, just like Gary does. A sort of 'I like it when disabled / POC / queer people can all be hot assholes' lol

But in this instance like, in addition, Temsen has been one of the least directly harmful characters in the entire cast in terms of his actions and I do think about that a lot.

I think until society gets better about racism and decolonisation gets way way way way further it's just a normal thing to wonder about tbh.

(And on an aside, I am glad that the sentiment largely swung towards very positive towards Kadek by the end of FFS. He's one of my favourite side characters that I've written in a while, and I'm hoping to write more with him in side stories one day).

Also re: the talk he gave Efnisien, that has honestly helped Efnisien so much. Him stepping into his strength and consciously thinking about it has directly led to so much of the positive growth he's experienced in the last like 10 chapters. It was so needed, even if the timing wasn't great, Temsen really delivered on that front.

[eddiegettingshot]

“you have to be okay with representation you don’t relate to”

lesbians actively campaigning for two men to make out sloppy every day: …. Yeah

like 😭😭😭😭😭 huh?

[bornuntohimself]

revisiting the half of a fic i wrote about renarin coming out to adolin and my plans have been completely thwarted by the realization that we have basically no information about how lgbt people on roshar refer to themselves

[tapewormsoda]

breakups are so fucking weird. three years and just like that it's gone. huh

[theambivalentagender]

Fellow writers/comic artists/people involved in the writing thing in some way:

Do you ever get this problem where you watch a bunch of media produced and set in another country, and then when you go to write all the dialogue starts coming into your head filtered in the accent(s) and manners of speech of that country that are distinctly different from where you've set your work?

I've watched all of Good Omens twice in the past week and now as I'm trying to plan out the next Valley Echoes comic everyone's suddenly got strong British/Scottish accents.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Okay now that antisemites have decided to crawl onto my post, it really just solidifies to me that some people don't give a fuck what they believe so long as it hurts jews. I guess I'm glad I got that lesson hammered into me in a space that is "safer" than real life, but it never ceases to amaze me regardless

[acaciapines]

the current writing mood: oh god do i use quote or italics for this dialogue.

which breaks the rules ive set up more...italics for innerworld conversations bc nobody is 'talking' in the traditional sense but also everyone is sharing the same space here so maybe quotes shows that....hmmmmmm.....

[help-me-or-kelp-me]

Hiii I saw one of your posts dear.. are you a Muslim? :D

...No????

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

"the Commander getting an elixir that allows them to talk to any animals that wish to speak with them is definitely a concept that I will use entirely responsibly" I say as a lying liar who tells lies.

[vulpinesaint]

being a poet is actually not a job title it’s a condition and it’s terminal

[laurapalmerz]

i am by no means a complete james defender, but that doesn't mean i hate his guts. i just think that his character is poorly written after a certain point.

[delphi-dreamin]

So, my back is still aching and I have managed to pull one of my glutes. But uh. Guess who got laid for the first time in years??