#as well as around actors playing queer characters and writers writing queer stories

[realllism]

I feel like lately “don’t assume anyone’s sexuality” has turned into “assume everyone’s straight because you could out them otherwise” and that’s not progressive at all, “don’t assume anyone’s sexuality” is not saying you should speculate or you should ask them in an inappropriate setting or force them to out themselves, it literally means that you don’t necessarily know someone’s sexuality from just looking at or interacting with them

[thesiltverses]

Hello! I found the silt verses about three weeks ago and have listened to it several times since. I have a few things to say.

I absolutely adore that episode about the national grid workers. I think it’s my favorite episode of any podcast I’ve ever listened to. My favorite part of that first episode Paige is in is how she justifies not standing up for Vaughn, that cognitive dissonance that you wrote so well. This episode gives me what I wanted from that episode, the workers all banding together to stop the wasteful sacrifice of one of them. The actor who played the foreman did an incredible job as well. I think that having him discuss which of his workers he would sacrifice was such a significant moment, despite how brief it is. It cuts right to the big question that I took away from the podcast which is, “How much is someone willing to sacrifice in order to maintain their comfort?” And the utter disrespect of Glodditch (apologies for the spelling) refusing to cancel even the radio but asking grid workers to kill themselves for 200kw/h! Top tier episode.

I grew up in the south and went to college in Appalachia. I saw the disparity in technology and “advancement” if that makes sense that poverty brings, and the way you set up the world invokes that feeling in me again. You are an amazing world builder and storyteller.

I really enjoyed the cameos - I’m a big fan of malevolent/devisor, Old gods of Appalachia, and all of Jonny sims work, so hearing familiar voices was an absolute delight. Harlan Guthrie as an acolyte of the snuff gods might have been a bit too on the nose with some of the things that man writes, though… /pos

I’m transmasculine, and something that I really appreciate is how you manage to make a trans man do some objectively awful things, but still manage to make him a complex, full character that I was rooting for very frequently. Brother Faulkner is so, so important to me as a character. Paula Vogel has a play called “Indecent,” which is about the true story of a troupe of I believe German Jewish actors between the years of 1910ish and 1940s putting on a show called “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch, also a Jewish man. “God of Vengeance” has queer themes and received a lot of criticism from the Jewish community for showing Jewish folks in a “bad” light at a time when there was already so much hatred for Jewish people. Brother Faulkner being as complex and, in my opinion, malicious and cutthroat as he is at a time when trans people face so much bigotry, especially legislatively in the United States, brings this conversation about “God of Vengeance” up again for me. I also love how normalized non-binary people are in this world, without question. “Sibling this or that,” the hunter, adjudicator Shrew - big thanks from me for all of this.

All of this to say, I love this podcast. Can you talk more about the rhetorical gods? Is Babble one? What makes them one if they are, or why aren’t they? I’m fascinated by them. Can you talk more about the propaganda gods too?

Thank you so much for the thoughtful and kind words!

I'll check out Indecent, it sounds really interesting and I'm very glad to hear Faulkner works for you as a character. I think the topic of how to include and write queer characters who are capable of terrible things and thoughts (because, after all, these characters are human beings and not tutelary exemplars), within the context of both a rising movement of transphobia right now and centuries-old scapegoating / pathologising portrayals more generally, is a really knotty but a really important one, and I always want to make sure I'm approaching it with care and due responsibility as well as a sense of humility around the limitations of what, as a cis writer, I can actually achieve.

To that end, I don't want to ever take the audience response for granted, but I'm always really grateful to hear that the portrayal is working for a listener!

Propaganda gods: gods whose prayer-marks or ritual verses are fed directly to the enemy, enforcing destructive or sabotaging changes to reality (so rather than sending a destructive saint or angel to rampage over the foe, you might drop pamphlets or send radio messages to the enemy to 'convert' them).

Rhetorical gods: gods whose followers possess reality-warping powers of language itself (which is why 'rhetorical god' is a polite way of saying 'liar's god'). In other words, the paranoia around them comes partly down to the fact that a disciple like Val may appear to be a limitless shaper of new forms, rather than shaped into a limited form of their own, as a result of their worship.

[lurkingshan]

Intergenerational Trauma Challenge - 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us

It’s winter and I’m huddled up in my house hiding from the cold weather, so obviously this is the perfect time to tackle another entry on the intergenerational family trauma challenge list. This week I finally watched 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us, a Thai drama about Wang, a young man just coming of age who is desperately seeking answers about his father’s death; Sasiwimol, Wang’s very complicated mother who does not want to dig up the past; Inthawut, his father’s best friend who has been hiding from it for years; and Siam, the black hole at the center of this story.

Before I dig into the trauma themes, let me just say that this show is excellent, if not for everyone. It has a very intentional style that makes it feel like a stage play—the writer is a playwright—and it’s basically eight episodes of very intense conversations. It’s not a romance and there’s an intellectualism in the writing that I found kept me at an emotional remove from the characters even as I marveled at how well crafted the dialogue is. And the dialogue is very important, which is why the translation of this drama is much stronger than we typically get from Thai productions—the words matter. It’s also loaded with visual metaphors and is all around beautiful to look at, and the three main performers are fantastic. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes theater, stories about complicated families, or beautiful and talented actors showing their work. And more than anything else, this show does incredibly strong thematic work and its messaging is on point: this is a story about how noble idiocy ruins lives.   

So, with that said, onto the trauma! Spoilers ahead, and I am assuming anyone reading past this point has watched the show. Some themes you’ll see in this one: taboo, denial of queer identity, homophobia, filial piety, and lots of emotional manipulation. Shoutout to @bengiyo and @twig-tea for reading this to make sure I didn’t miss anything in this complex story.

There are two main sources of intergenerational trauma radiating down toward Wang: the absence of his father, Siam, and his intense relationship with his mercurial mother, Sasiwimol. The story is structured around Wang’s determination to seek answers about Siam—both who he was and how he died. He has grown up knowing a certain story: that his parents met and fell in love in college but divorced when he was young, that his father loved him very much despite not staying with his mother, and that his father was an alcoholic who died in a drunk driving accident. Shortly after his father’s death, his mom put him in boarding school so she could focus on her career and became a weekend parent to him—as she was not around to structure his day to day life, their relationship became more about her taking him on fun adventures and spoiling him when she had time off, treating each other as best friends instead of like a mother and son, and never talking about Siam. He has always suspected there was more to the story of his parents that he was not being told, and as he has grown up, come into his own queerness, and picked up on his mother’s casual homophobia and obsessive devotion to compulsory heteronormativity, his suspicions about the secret his mom was holding became sharper. 

Enter Inthawut. Inthawut was Siam’s best friend, and with nothing to go on but a set of old pictures, Wang has an instinctual certainty that he is the key to the secret he’s seeking. And thus he engineers a way for he and his mom to “coincidentally” stumble onto Inthawut’s property and get invited to stay a few days in his isolated home, at which point Wang begins his campaign to figure out what the hell happened between Siam, Sasiwimol, and Inthawut at any cost.

One of the things I find most interesting about this story is how much the plot hinges on Wang going against Asian cultural norms in his pursuit of the truth. He is not respectful to his elders. He does not maintain filial piety and deference to his mother. He refuses to restrain his emotions. Instead, he is pushy and relentless and emotionally manipulative (all tricks we can plainly see he learned from Sasiwimol) and Inthawut doesn’t stand a chance against him. And so, because Wang explicitly acts against these cultural values, the truth comes out and the trauma is no longer suppressed. 

And in the end, it’s a simple, if desperately sad story: Siam and Inthawut were in love, but Inthawut was battling internalized homophobia and deep-seeded fear and so he relentlessly pushed Siam away and toward dating and then marrying their friend Sasiwimol. And when Siam, miserable in this heterosexual relationship he never actually wanted, finally snapped and confessed his true feelings, Inthawut rejected him and ran away to study abroad. Inthawut was running due to his own fear, but he also had noble notions of somehow protecting Siam from his own queerness and told himself that if he was gone, Siam would accept his heterosexual life. Of course, that did not happen, and in the fallout of this rejection Siam sank further into alcoholism and died soon after. Inthawut’s reaction was the exact worst fear of all gay people who work up the courage to confess to a friend they have developed feelings for: outright rejection, abandonment, and destruction of the relationship. And in his mind, he did this to Siam “for his own good,” a fairly textbook execution of the noble idiocy trope. In the aftermath, we see how Inthawut has isolated himself, part in penance, part in self-protection, and intellectualized his way to a romantic construction of his own cowardice that he tries to convince Wang is righteous.

But Wang is deeply affected by how the denial of his father’s queerness ruined his life and is absolutely not having any of Inthawut’s self-denying bullshit, and this is where things get messy, as both Wang and Inthuwat seem to start seeing Wang and Siam as interchangeable and they develop an emotional entanglement that is deeply unhealthy, to say the least. Wang wants to understand Siam so badly that he starts to be him, and Inthuwat is so desperate to address his regret and shame that he starts to see Wang as Siam, as well. Wang also uses this attachment as a way to shock his mother and forcefully bring her real feelings about Siam and Inthawut to the surface. Despite Wang’s many loud protestations to the contrary, I don’t believe that he and Inthawut actually love each other. They are using each other to work out their trauma about Siam.

And they’re not the only ones! Sasiwimol seems to have her own psychological confusion about Wang as he relates to Siam, and their dynamic is very strange as a result. She refers to Wang as dua-eeng (and has taught him to do the same with her rather than calling her “mom”), a Thai endearment that literally means “self” but is often used between lovers. They have a very physically affectionate relationship that often had me grimacing in discomfort, and she clearly sees Wang as both a source of pain—because he is so like Siam—and her one source of comfort and happiness. She is a successful woman by any standard, but she’s also desperately lonely, hanging on tight to Wang as her only companion in a way that often veers into overbearing, and deeply wounded by her past with Siam and Inthawut. It was through her own friendship with Inthawut that she pursued Siam in the first place, and she clearly feels betrayed not only by Siam, but by Inthawut, both for getting in the way of her relationship with Siam and for leaving them. Her feelings about both men are complex and the story never fully spells them out, in part because Sasiwimol never does. Determinedly not thinking about what happened between them is a big part of how she copes, along with sublimating her suspicions into homophobia, which she perpetuates quite intentionally in her work via production of heterosexual romance propaganda.

Wang clearly loves his mother even as he is frustrated by her prejudices, her desire to control him, and her tendency toward emotional manipulation. He is a perceptive kid and he has studied her closely; he understands her very well and can often predict exactly how she’ll react to a situation. Which is why his decision to announce baldly to her face that he is in love with Inthawut—not only coming out as gay but declaring his intention to move out of her home and in with a man 20+ years his senior who is deeply entangled with her own trauma—felt very intentional to me. He knew what kind of reaction that would get from her, and he wanted it. And sure enough, Sasiwimol crumbles at this repetition of her trauma and the perceived disloyalty of Wang choosing Inthawut over her just as his father did. The rest of the emotion she’d been holding back comes pouring out, resulting in the three of them finally airing out everything that lies between them and everything they are feeling about the Siam-shaped hole in their lives. And once she breaks down, Wang is able to forgive her for the grievance she’s caused him and ultimately decides to remain filial and continue living with her, because he does not actually want to punish his mother for what happened to his father. 

So, in the end, where did the story leave us with all this trauma? I can’t really say that any of these characters have healed, but I do think Wang kick-started that process, at least for himself. He got what he needed most out of this little scheme: deeper understanding of who his father was and why his life took such a drastic turn. He remains caught in the dysfunctional dynamic with his mother, and I’m not sure he’ll ever fully break out of it, but at least there is more honesty between them now about what they’re dancing around. She now knows he is gay and she has to accept it to keep him with her, and given that he has backed off from asking her to accept something much scarier than that, I do think she will find a way to make her peace with it. Inthawut is the character who seems to have progressed the least, standing firmly in his stasis and remaining determinedly alone with his pain, though the show leaves us with a note of ambiguity that suggests he may someday find the courage to move on.

The messages of this work are clear. Internalized homophobia and denial of your own queerness are poison for your soul. Rejecting a loved one “for their own good” is an act of cowardice and selfishness, not an act of love. Hiding from and sublimating your trauma will never allow you to heal. Refusing to process your pain will only lead to you pushing it down on the next generation. Ultimately, this story told us that bravely looking ourselves and our trauma in the face and confronting our truths head on is the only way to begin to heal, and that running from them only leads to ruin. 

[chevelleneech]

Both Buck/Tommy and Buddie shippers are being so dramatic about everything.

On one hand, you have people acting like Buck and Tommy is written in the stars and anyone who dislikes them are being unjust and hateful. On the other, you have people acting as if Buck can’t possibly be in a relationship with a man who isn’t Eddie, and claiming he can is somehow based in racism and hatred of Eddie.

Neither is true! The problem is that prior to 7x04, Evan Buckley was not a canon queer character. He was viewed that way by fans and Oliver Stark was all for it, but that does not change the actual canon history of the character. Therefore, the writers can only fix what they feel fits the current story. They can retcon a few things and so on, but both sides are acting like they’re right, and it makes no sense.

Yes, Buddie shippers have Oliver and Ryan on their side for the most part. Yes, Oliver believes Buck has been queer all along and he thinks a lot of the headcanons about his character’s reaction to things make sense, but he is NOT saying it’s all true. He agrees Buck was likely experiencing some jealousy when Eddie first showed up, but that does not mean Tim Minear is going to make that theory canon. It’s fans and Oliver who think it, but that does not equal canon.

As well, with things being slightly retconned or adjusted to fit the story… Tommy is obviously no longer an asshole by proximity. He was rude to Hen and Chim, but we’ve seen he him interact with the two of them since in civil ways. We know Chim thinks he’s cool. Continuing to demand he apologize on screen is a waste of time. It was five seasons ago, and the story had to change to fit Tim bringing his character back. It happens.

As for Buck/Tommy shippers, y’all have got to get off the high horse of Possibility. At the moment, there are so many ways their relationship can go, and the only reason you all are so high and mighty about it, is because you’re technically never going to be wrong until you’re wrong. Which is annoying.

Yes, Tim could choose to have Tommy stick around for another season. Yeah, Buck and Tommy could be endgame. Yeah, Buck and Tommy could… any and everything is possible, but acting as if Tommy is the love of Buck’s life and deserves fan devotion is crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I like the character. He seems nice if a little cocky, but I like that. I like that he’s written as a grown man who, even though he’s changed, still has a little bit of asshole in him.

Because yes, what he did to Buck on their first date was rude. He didn’t explain anything and left him standing outside the restaurant as if he hadn’t just told him he’s never dated a man before, and as if they hadn’t just run into his best friend. It was a dick move. However, it’s also kinda realistic. So I dug it, but that’s also all we really know about him.

Tommy is an army vet, flies helicopters, was a firefighter, and is gay. Which he struggled to come to terms with, and can be a dick. The way y’all treating him like a savior is insane. Y’all are trying to rub it in people’s face that his relationship with Buck is canon while Buddie isn’t, and I don’t understand that. Buck wasn’t even bisexual three episodes ago, so where is this higher than thou attitude even coming from?

The only thing people should be focused on is the fact that Buck is now canonically bisexual. Tim liked the idea and Oliver loved it, so they finally made it happen. Now, his story has even more potential. I’d even go so far as to say season 7 is going to be a cleaning and re-establishing of all the characters, because so many of them feel a little different.

We’ve got bi!Buck, meaning we’ll get to see him in one or more relationships that he isn’t used to being in. We’ve got a new actor playing Harry, and he’s older, meaning they’re going to have to write to his strengths and build a storyline there that is more mature. Bobby and Athena almost died together for real for real, thus hopefully we’ll get to see their relationship evolve and what if it changes them in any way. Chim and Maddie are finally getting married, so we get to see them kickstart a new chapter together. Hen and Karen have a new child, which will hopefully bring them more storylines and hijinks as a family. And Eddie is dealing with forcing himself to accept a relationship he may not even want to be in. And he’s aware this time, which could result in him ignoring his fears or bowing out, then having to face what bowing out means.

Point is, there is no reason for all this drama.

Buddie is not guaranteed just because it is a popular want for fans, and an accepted theory by the actors and showrunner. They’ve all said it has to fit the overall story without forcibly gearing the writing in that direction. Which means it could happen two episodes from now or two seasons from now. We just have to wait and see.

At the same time, Buck and Tommy are not an established couple yet. They’re going on their second date, and it’s been said Tommy isn’t in the last few episodes of the season. So it’s possible he and Buck are still together, but Lou isn’t a series regular nor regular recurring, so he’s just not contracted to be on set. Which is fine, but acting like a quick breakup is also bad storytelling is ridiculous.

Fans have hated Buck’s relationships with women from the jump, and him breaking up fast isn’t exactly new. So if it happens with the first man he dates… okay. Tommy can become more than a stepping stone, but the writers aren’t obligated to make his first experience with a man something deep and profound. It can be fun and eye-opening and still have mattered, even if it ends fast.

Y’all have got to let the stories play out, and not scream bloody murder if your headcanon doesn’t become canon. Because truth be told, Buck being canon bi is the biggest flex of fan service I’ve ever seen, even if I think it adds to the depth of him. So I can’t imagine how difficult it is to be sure not to continue giving that same group of fans everything they want outright, when there’s so much more story to unfold.

Which means they can’t just make Tommy the love of Buck’s life because Buck/Tommy fans have ditched Buddie or were never Buddie shippers, and want to be right. But they also can’t have Eddie come out and he and Buck start dating, because Buddie shippers have waited five seasons. Just wait to see what happens, and in the meantime, enjoy watching Buck discover more of himself. With Tommy as his current love interest, and Eddie as his best friend.

[allatseapod]

Meet the crew!

Look what the tide washed in!

Noah (they/them) is the writer of All At Sea and the voice of February. They're currently in the process of completing their MA in English Literature, which focuses on the importance of the found family trope in queer, POC-led narratives. When they're not drowning in books or literary analysis, you can find them staring blearily at a blank Word Doc, or drowning in all the different audio dramas they still need to listen to.

Scotchy @secondhand-coelacanth (any pronouns) is a producer of All At Sea and the voice of Sturgeon. They found their passion for podcasting through working on The Hermit Archives as an editor and minor character, and can't wait to bring more sounds and noises right to your eardrums. When he isn't splicing voice lines for enrichment, or surviving the horrors of academia, Scotchy can be found making music, crocheting, or fishing around for a new hobby to try out.

Louis Wolf @louis-dc (he/they) is a producer of All At Sea, he is a disabled artist/actor based in Colorado. Doing theatre in high school helped to reveal his passion for storytelling, specifically with acting and directing. This has fed in well to a love of dnd. When not playing ttrpgs with friends, Louis can be found playing video games, yelling about superheroes, or watching bird documentaries with their cat. Louis is the assistant producer of Soul Operator, you can hear them as Alex in episode eight of The Grotto and Athena in the upcoming audio drama Forged Bonds. He is creator of upcoming talking head podcast Media Microscope.

Rowan Odom @twinstrangersp (they/them) Rowan, sound designer of All At Sea, is a non-binary creator whose passion lies in creating stories in a post-Covid world, specifically those filled with queerness, love, and horror. They also make time for D&D and random crafts in their spare time! They are one of the Strangers of Twin Strangers Productions and the creator of the studio’s first AD, Syntax. They are also the main editor in the upcoming Rites of Descendancy and can be heard as a voice in The Moon Crown as Aria, and Syntax as Elora.

Rusty Cornmagnate @cornmagnate (he/they) 20 y/o artist and graphic designer, author of visuals for All At Sea

El Carters @waysofink (they/them) is our transcriber & beta-reader/listener. Creative writing graduate from Poland who fell in love with the audio drama format in 2022. Since then they have been getting involved in some projects (like this one) & writing their own show - Nightpocalypse. When not writing, El likes to indulge in some sewing, soundscaping, DnD, media consumption, and various arts and crafts.

[punkascas]

aww, man, i'm hella bummed over the news of ofmd.

i wasn't even jonesing that hard for s3 — like i'd of course watch it when it came out, but s2 reiterated and reenforced for me why i'll always choose fandom and fanworks over canon — but i feel gutted for the writers and actors. i feel grieved and jaded. and i feel aggravated that it is a familiar, well-worn groove of jaded grief over how queer stories and stories centred on non-white cis characters with diverse casts don't get their chance to flourish and grow. they don't feed the capitalist beast, even though they absolutely fckin do you're just dumb media executives. those stories are not as easy to market; not the sure, quick buck. not the stories for 18 – 25 year old straight white boys you can peddle to advertisers and that look good in quarterly-projection presentations.

i'm sad because the cast really seemed to get on. really seemed to have one of those rare mixes of chemistry and off-screen friendship. and i want to see them hang out and be creative together and fall further in love with now they portray found family on screen with so much ease and sincerity and full of genuine joy.

i'll miss them. i'll miss watching them play their characters. they seem to love them as much as and for the same reasons that we love those characters.

and to a lesser extent i'm a little disappointed to never find out what the plan would've been for s3, where djenks originally had the characters end up, how and if the creative decisions in s2 would've been addressed. fandom will of course find answers to this, and i know i'll probably think those stories are better if i could compare because i always do, but there's still a part of me that wants to know what djenks and the writing team and the cast would've done.

that all said, a part of me finds it extremely awkwardly morbidly hilarious that the s2 ending is now the official end. the ending that i can only read as a fascinating-yet-distressing lovecraftian horror story waiting to happen. like, not great as a final note due to how much it upset and divided the fandom. i wish it had been an ending that sparked opportunities for community-building and excitement and creativity that comes from a place of wanting more rather than feelings of betrayal or discomfort or creativity that comes from the need to process or to fix or to ignore.

but also as someone who enjoys absurdist dark humour, it's kind of perfect to me. the ending is an amazing (accidental) representation of schrödinger's cat of a conclusion. and i love it.

like, you can read the ending as happy. the main couple is together; the crew has their freedom and found family and can continue a life of adventure without the drama ed or stede can cause. izzy… whatever, i guess. whatever people who are cool with izzy's fate wanted for him.

or you can read the ending as, like: stede, run! you just shacked up with a known mentally and emotionally unstable guy who just very traumatically (and violently) ended a longterm codependent relationship. with the fresh grave of your boyfriend's ex right out front. because both of them are dudes that literally hoard each other's corpses because the codependence and obsessive possession just runs that deep. and you made these life choices while on an isolated spit of land with no one else around but the sea and a rundown shack whose aesthetics are straight out of a horror film. and that's implied to smell like death in one of your last lines of dialogue ever. nothing good will come of this, my guy.

if you know me, you know which reading i'm taking and running with.

[cherryblossomshadow]

Quantum Leap's Nonbinary Indiana Jones Episode

Jessie Gender After Dark

0:00

Jessie: I was able to do [an interview] with the wonderful creative team behind the most recent episode of Quantum Leap – the episode titled the Family Treasure

0:30

Jessie: This episode specifically was a lot of fun, because it is an Indiana Jones-style episode. You know “go on adventure and find treasure,” that sort of thing. But doing it with a nonbinary actor and non-binary character: Wilder Yari playing the character of Dean I was able to talk to not only Wilder who played the non-binary character Dean, as well as Shakina, who was the writer of this episode (who is also I believe the executive story producer of the show and has written several episodes of the series before including season 1's uh trans focused episode as well)

2:10

Shakina: I love injecting queerness into these tropes that we know and love. And finding a place for us where we haven't necessarily been able to find a place for ourselves before. So Quantum Leap gives us the chance to do that week to week in a different genre, and I was just like really lucky when I got handed this genre. I was sort of asked to create a kind of adventure treasure hunt story and given the challenge of finding a way to bring a non-binary character to life in that

4:05

Jessie: I'm curious what it felt like for you, to be able to have fun [and] tell the story [where] being non-binary was like a source of connection [for this family]. Usually it's a source of derision, especially in tales set not-in-the-modern-day

4:30

Wilder: It was such a joy. So wonderful. I really give a lot of that credit to Shakina for writing a story that was about an empowered moment as opposed to story that comes from pain, shame, “I hope you accept me; I hope I'm okay.” Dean, when we meet them, is already like, “this is me. This is how I am, and I'm okay with that.” Also what I really loved about it was that it felt more realistic in a way, like life happens while you're doing other stuff. “You're looking for this treasure, also I'm non binary. But we're looking for the treasure. That’s the point.” Like, that's not the whole point of the story. We are more than just our gender identity. So it felt really nice to be able to be part of a narrative that was like, “Yeah we're looking for gold. That's what we're doing.”

5:30

Jessie: I thought one of the coolest moments obviously was the chest binder moment. I'm curious what it felt like to you to film that. It can be a very vulnerable scene, like showing your body, especially in this way. But it also was a very empowering moment. Especially in like media made for wide consumption like Quantum Leap, you don't get to see that like, “Hey, binders are this cool part of it.”

6:00

Dean: Yeah, I really loved it. I mean, I'm an actor; I'm a freak. I'm like, “Yeah, put me on a hillside, put 40 people around. Yeah, I'll take my shirt off. That sounds great.” But what I really loved about it was that I felt really taken care of and loved on the set. Truly. And again a huge part of that is working with Shakina, having her on my side the whole time, and the Costume Department as well

7:00

Jessie: I wanted to ask about putting that important point about how binding could be dangerous, if not done well or properly. I thought that was really nice to get in there, because we don't really hear that discussed very much, and it's an important aspect of it to talk about

7:20

Shakina: Yeah I mean trans health is really important. Especially when you're coming into your own self, and there's not a way to learn about things. We get these like clues and hints from the world around us. So this was in service of the show, like I'm trying to write a great episode of TV here, because I love Quantum Leap and I want to keep it going. But also in service to my community. Like, “Okay, here's one shot to get a little something out there. You know, for the kids.” And it's like, we've always been here. We've always been doing this. We had unsafe ways to do it in the past, but we did it anyway. Now we have safer ways to do it. Talk to your family, come out when you're ready, be open, be in your power.”

8:00

And in that scene particular. The Trope of the trans masc person being exposed for wearing a binder and being a liar and not being who they were. That is something we've seen in Hollywood movies literally for generations. And what I wanted to do with that scene is reclaim the Trope in a way Because it's beautiful iconic imagery. I mean, Wilder looks so good standing in the sunset on this hillside with the tattered fabric, and they're just this like Dreamboat James Dean nonbinary matinee idol, and it's like, we never get to be that. And we're that now. Instead of like you know the Brandon Teena story or “just one of the guys” or “she's the man” or some sort of “I'm crying and I'm sorry, I was lying to you about having breasts.” And it's like, “No that's not what this is.” So it was a chance to spin that narrative and introduce something new

9:00

Jessie: To get kind of philosophical, because something I've been reading more and more about and been writing about my own stuff has been discussions of Queer Temporality and how queer people view time differently across generations and through our community and through our own personal histories. And one of the things that I really loved in this scene is how Ben's relationship with Mason/Ian informed how they interacted with the character in the episode and learning how to give the language to what it means to be non-binary in that moment. And I'm sort of curious what you were thinking about in that sort of wibbly wobbly timey wimey of it. Of someone from the future giving voice to someone in the past, but then that can influence in the future as well. And how that feels very queer well

9:50

Shakina: I think that queer identity, we get these gifts of being able to name ourselves. And that usually comes from like an angel in our path who gives us the language that we didn't know that we needed. And so this opportunity to show that that happened to me in my life, and now I'm like dramatizing that for the show. But what I love about Ben's Journey with Ian is that in season one “And let them play,” Ben learned how to become an accomplice and Ian guided him through it and ultimately got to like come in and see it happen. This time, we don't need to tap the non-binary person into their emotional labor, because Ben's got it. He knows how to be an accomplice. He knows how to show up. So in that moment where it's like, “Should he step in and intervene?” Like, “Oh no, we have a non-binary question! Who can answer it?” There is the cis accomplice being like, “Hey, let me tell you what I know from my friend,” and share this information. It's just a beautiful kind of solidarity, and the fact that it happens through time- Listen if you got me started on the actual psychological Quantum healing nature of rewriting- I love that conversation, but it’d be an hour. But I believe in it hardcore, and I think that's what we're doing on the show. And so I hope that in some Multiverse way, we have restored some self-authorship to our transmasc and non-binary siblings of the past

.

See also:

[denimbex1986]

Two of Europe's hottest stars sit in a green leather armchair each between a movie poster adorned with a bouquet of flowers. They look like two carefree unshaven Irish lads who could be on holiday in the sun. Paul Mescal wears a white t-shirt, while Andrew Scott sports a turquoise "No problem" t-shirt emblazoned with pop culture alien ALF, the 80s sitcom character whose name stands for "Alien Life Form" .

Perhaps a subtle reference to their new film, "All of us strangers"? It is certainly not about aliens, but is in any case a cosmic love story about two extraterrestrial aliens who find each other in a lonely world. At the same time, it is a kind of supernatural "ghost story" about a queer son who gets a second chance to talk to his dead parents.

- Although the role scared the crap out of me, Andrew Haigh's script was the most original I've read in ages. Everything in this film is rooted in tenderness and love – and who doesn't dream of going back and redefining the relationship with their parents, Andrew Scott wonders rhetorically, making a gesture where he is given the opportunity to discreetly flex one of his biceps at a zoom screen from London.

For a Swedish audience, he is perhaps best known for the role of the arch-villain Professor Moriarty in "Sherlock Holmes" and "the hot priest" that Phoebe Waller Bridge becomes obsessed with in the second season of "Fleabag".

Andrew Scott believes that "All of us strangers" is the most personal thing he has done.

- I love the mix of naturalism and surrealism in this film, it's completely different from anything I've played before. I've always wished I was in Derek Cianfrance's tragic love story "Blue Valentine" and suddenly I get a chance at a film similar to "All of us strangers". I've never before brought myself into the role in the same way and for once I didn't have to work on my accent, smiles the Dublin-born actor who has long lived in London.

In "All of us strangers" he plays Adam, a gay writer with writing cramp who slowly falls for his mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) who lives in the same soulless and deserted apartment complex in London's East End. Parallel to the budding romance, he commutes to his childhood suburb to meet his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) exactly as old as they were when they died in a car accident when he was 11 years old.

Andrew Haigh got the idea from Taichi Yamada's novel "Strangers" from 1987. After much effort and trouble, he managed to transform the rather traditional Japanese ghost story into something more poetic, psychological and personal.

- I ignited this whole idea of ​​meeting his dead parents again and being able to reconcile with his own past in order to help with the future. It was of course crazy risky, but it wasn't about making a traditional ghost story, but about creating something vulnerable, true and honest that would be an emotional experience, says Andrew Haigh.

In the past, he has directed wayward films such as "45 Years", "Weekend" and "Lean on Pete", as well as TV series such as macho "The North Water" and "Looking", which revolves around three gay friends in San Francisco. "All of us strangers" is his most personal film to date. To get closer, he made the main character a gay writer.

- I am gay and this is a story I have wanted to tell for a long time, a film about the experiences of "queerness", non-heteronormativity, and how it can make people feel like strangers in their own family. The concept of going back in time and dealing with the complicated issues of growing up queer within a family has its own challenges. It's also about the difficulty of parenting and saying the right things at the right time, says Andrew Haigh.

- For me, the film is also about the writing process itself. To investigate one's own past through a fictional world. Not that I look back on my upbringing with a desperate sadness, more curiosity, melancholy and a strange nostalgia. But just like the character Adam, I look back on my own life, says Haigh.

For the director, it was also a highly private experience. Among other things, he filmed several scenes in his real childhood home in Croydon, south London, which he left 40 years ago.

- It was a ghostly experience. Like walking into a haunted house, but it was my memories that were the ghosts. We designed it the same way as when I was a kid. When we finished, I closed the door behind me and experienced a catharsis, as if I was free and could move on, says Haigh.

Nevertheless, it is still not straightforward. In the same vein as he was to film a key scene where the grown-up Adam talks to his father, Andrew Haigh visited his father in the dementia home.

- Although I had the same partner for 18 years, he asked me: "Do you have a wife?". My first thought was, "Oh my God, am I going to have to come out again?", but then I pretended it was raining. Oddly enough, I felt a bit terrified about having to tell him I was gay again - even though he was fine with me coming out in my 20s, says Andrew Haigh.

- So that scene with Adam was extremely difficult to write. I wanted to make it a moment that was as simple as it was meaningful. I was incredibly moved, he says.

In many ways, "All of us strangers" is reminiscent of "45 years", which is also a kind of ghost story. A fate-filled drama about a struggling British couple (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) who are suddenly haunted by an old love story just in time for the couple's 45th wedding anniversary.

- Yes, I think there was definitely a similarity between the films. But I've always been interested in the past versus the present because that's how we learn throughout our lives. Our first fifteen years have such a dramatic and profound impact on who we become as an adult, he says.

In "All of us strangers" he fills it with pop music from his upbringing in the 1980s; Pet Shop Boys, The Housemartins and, not least, Frankie goes to Hollywood's "The power of love", which becomes a signature song for the entire film and not least its emblematic final scene.

- There was something in that song that spoke to me already as an 11-year-old without me really knowing about it. A bombastic pop song that is loaded with longing. Actually, it was quite subversive to be mainstream, there's a melancholy and darkness lurking beneath the surface, says Andrew Haigh.

Although Holly Johnson's "The power of love" wasn't exactly Paul Mescal's cup of tea, it helped him get in the right emotional mood during the recording.

- Andrew has interpreted the power of love in the most extraordinary way. This is his way of saying that Adam and Harry's relationship is also a grand love story that has its place up there in heaven with all the other heterosexual love stories. I think it's very beautiful, says Paul Mescal who was Oscar-nominated last year for his performance in Charlotte Wells' Aftersun, where he played a tormented father on his first joint charter trip with his eleven-year-old daughter.

He does not think that the self-confident but traumatized Harry is an essential character from father Callum in "Aftersun".

- Harry belongs to a certain kind of family of characters that I have played, but is also completely different. Subconsciously, I'm obviously drawn to this kind of material that deals with tormented masculinity and humanity, smiles Paul Mescal.

Like Andrew Scott, he is a great admirer of Andrew Haigh's films. In addition to the script, Scott was also a decisive factor in his acceptance. Before "All of us strangers", they had admired each other from afar. The recording turned into a bromance in full bloom that ended with intimate scenes where Paul Mescal "went down" on Andrew Scott co-star and licked a kind of cake mix from the co-star's body. In interviews, Mescal has explained that it was such a powerful moment that it almost scared him.

- Yes, there was a special charge between us. We were both very aware of how intense it was and how we were somehow aware of how committed we were to each other. It is very beautiful that the story often lies in the character who is listening, which is quite unusual. The challenge was to tell a story via sexual intimacy. We treated the sex scenes as if they were dialogue scenes, the only thing different was that we were half-naked, smiles Paul Mescal.

Andrew Scott believes that sex scenes between two male actors often tend to be about raw sexuality, but that "All of us strangers" felt radical because it was more interested in highlighting the tenderness between the characters.

- The first scenes when Adam and Harry meet in the elevator and at the front door trigger the film's sexual charge. When they are separated after the slightly awkward meeting, it creates an urge in the audience for them to reunite. When they finally sit next to each other on the couch and they stare at each other, it gets very, uh, sexy. I like the scene where Adam forgets to breathe because he hasn't been with anyone in a long time, says Andrew Scott.

Like the director, Andrew Scott talks about working on "All of us strangers" as a kind of cleansing bath. Before the recording, they both talked about their experiences in the loneliness of growing up queer in the gap between the 80s and 90s.

- Going back in time can be both anxious and nostalgic. For me, the challenge was trying to bring together Haigh's story with my own story, both the pain and the joy, says Andrew Scott the day after the film's Irish gala premiere in Dublin.

Although he was not entirely comfortable with the idea of ​​being in the same room as his parents when they watch the sex scenes in "All of us strangers", he seems to have managed it without a pillow of shame.

- It was a magical evening in my hometown. My family was there and all the other people I love so much. Suddenly it was as if I saw this whole journey that I've been on, realized that this is a deeply personal film that hit me right in the heart. I really love this movie.'

[cyncity2000]

I posted 1,221 times in 2022

That's 141 more posts than 2021!

165 posts created (14%)

1,056 posts reblogged (86%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@salemruinseverything

@combeauferre

@sithiegoodness

@castielsupernatural

@twelvefifteencomic

I tagged 1,193 of my posts in 2022

Only 2% of my posts had no tags

#i like (the idea of) queue - 567 posts

#bastille - 127 posts

#send my regards to super hell - 110 posts

#video - 81 posts

#spn - 58 posts

#tiktok - 53 posts

#jill gets asks - 47 posts

#writing shit - 44 posts

#charlie barnes - 36 posts

#destiel - 35 posts

Longest Tag: 138 characters

#so when it went back to paper for a bit i’d just take entire plates of fruit and dessert with me when i left 🤷‍♀️ sometimes real food too

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

yes i’m totally normal about woody & his dad doing a lil pub gig with dan and charlie and proceeding to play teenage dirtbag together, during which dan comes up to the mic with his phone open to the lyrics and then proceeds to immediately leave his microphone and go share with charlie instead for literally no reason. i’m fine <3 just . look at this shit

53 notes - Posted April 17, 2022

#4

ok but i am CRYING at this headline

57 notes - Posted January 6, 2022

#3

this was too long for twitter but honestly i was pleasantly surprised about the publicity for heartstopper because i expected everyone on twitter to be like "wELL if every single actor doesn't immediately come out to everyone then how do we KNOW all the queer characters are actually being played by queer actors hmMM??" bc yknow. the internet is just Like That 🙃

and heartstopper's response (bc they almost certainly anticipated this) was literally just like "we have a queer cast, trust us, and not a single person in the cast owes you any more information than that. not to MENTION we go above and beyond to show you that this tv series was CREATED not only by an openly queer author who was given FULL control to write the entire screen adaptation of their own graphic novels, but also by a openly queer director who specifically made sure to hire as many queer workers as possible for every. other. department of the show. because yes, it's super important that queer actors play queer characters; but it's even MORE important that the representation extends FAR beyond the people you see on screen."

bc THAT IS HOW YOU HAVE GOOD REPRESENTATION. NOT forcing all of your actors to spend every single interview fielding questions about their own personal gender & sexual identities. good representation is making sure that―unlike the majority of films and tv shows, sadly―if you look beyond the main cast, the roles of director/producer/writer/photographer/makeup artist/crew member/etc are ACTUALLY fulfilled by a diverse group of talented people. true representation doesn't stop at the actors, or the portrayal of characters. it goes all the way up the ladder to everyone making the movie/tv show/etc happen in the first place. change can't happen long-term unless "older," well-established people in the industry (like euros lyn) use their position to create opportunities for fresh, new, young, diverse talent.

tldr heartstopper is a brilliant example of how to properly create a series both by and for the lgbtq+ community, and i was SO relieved to see all the publicity revolve around the story and the actors and the importance of representation WITHOUT requiring anybody who wasn't already out to clarify anything about themselves.

(ramble mostly inspired by this and sourced from this, if you haven't watched the video you 100% should !!! also ofc special shoutout to kit for taking absolutely no shit from twitter)

70 notes - Posted May 16, 2022

#2

me, busy screaming about bim & senab maybe going on the US tour with bas

meanwhile, bastille:

85 notes - Posted April 18, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

ok slight tour spoiler ahead but: during one segment he asked us to pick a noise and an influencer. someone said ‘boink’ and he was like ‘somehow that still sounds sexual’ and then we got to influencer and he was like ‘oh my god did someone say PHIL??’ so the sentence ended up being something about a secret society called the boink run by phil lester

and THEN he fucking says (something like) ‘joke’s on you, me and phil have been in boink together from the START!!!’ and. dan. my dude. YOU were the one who said boink sounded sexual do you not realize what that Sounds Like 💀

172 notes - Posted October 14, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[decastde]

I totally agree with your buck/eddie post, I don’t think shipping them is wrong or anything but acting like they must be canon or it’s not a good story is just not a good way to look at it. The writers as well as Oliver and LFJ are telling a wonderful story about two queer men in their 30s/40s and we should celebrate that.

I also think destiel is a very different situation to buddie, for me dean was bi-coded from even season 1, but it became more overt (not explicit but overt) as the seasons went on, kind of similar to how buck was bicoded, but dean’s felt more intentional from the writers since it was over a long period of time and used a lot of queer references that would fly under the radar of a lot of audiences. I think buck’s bicoding was probably accidental at first but by s4 they’d decided to play into it, and obviously now it’s canon (which is great! love that!).

Destiel seemed like the accidental bit to me (at first), misha was initially a guest star but he was playing a great character and had a lot of chemistry with jensen (however you choose to interpret that chemistry). Overtime the writers started to play into that on purpose and I think the actors did as well, misha has confirmed this from his side but tbh I don’t think we’ll ever get a straight (ha) answer from jensen about it. Which is fine tbh, I’m okay with that, I don’t need actors to confirm anything really.

Anyways, I never really got that vibe from buddie? Like Oliver was playing into bi buck slightly, but I don’t think it was ever buddie specifically and I don’t think Ryan, as supportive as he is, ever played Eddie as anything but interested in women (or mostly shannon). I respect people’s head canons but I don’t think buddie is a given for the writers so if people could stop saying “when buddie goes canon”, because tbh i think they’re setting themselves up for disappointment a bit.

Holy fuck, that got long, sorry 😅. I kind of rambled a bit there but I hope you got my point. I would say don’t feel like you have to delete your buddie fics, I have plenty up of fandoms i’m not even interested in anymore (though obviously orphan/delete them if that’s what you feel is best). Anyways have a great day!

Yes, absolutely get your point.

I agree Dean is for sure bi-coded. My jaded heart will forever lament SPN couldn’t hang around just a few more years (despite how weird it had got) so that they could have had the kind of response Oliver and 911 got with the bi storyline. 😭😭 Ah well.

Yeahhh, back when Tommy appeared I feel like, sorry for making a sweeping generalisation, adults understood that was it for Buck and Eddie. If it were not a procedural general audience kind of show then 2 characters having bi/queer awakenings would be awesome. Sexuality is a spectrum etc, later in life realisations happen and all that jazz. But, as you say, they’ve never been intentionally played to be in love with eachother. Again, sure, storylines can change, but if realising you liked men and didn’t consider the man you are closest to then……it’s a shame perhaps, but no.

I don’t know. It’s got slightly better now since the initial finale aftermath and there is no problem with shipping anything you want. Go for it! It’s the threats and entitlement, the rudeness and mean spirited accusations that people who like Buck and Tommy are gross and blah blah blah. It just feels like a real ‘old man shakes fist at cloud’ moment as they (again, sweeping generalisation) don’t realise how amazing the Buck and Tommy atoryline is.

I could be a total bitch and rant on and on about how in general there are some hideous takes and just not understanding media (and the real world) but I know that in ten years most of them will look back on their behaviour and cringe themselves inside out.

I don’t know if I will delete the Buck/Eddie stuff I wrote, it already annoyed me that it went against canon anyway but that’s just me. Lesson (not) learned to not write during the hiatus. I looked into orphaning them but I feel bad.

Gah I went on and on. Sorry. Have a great day yourself! ☺️

[centaurianthropology]

What ‘Our Flag Means Death’ Did for this Older Queer Fan

I’ve been trying to articulate what feels special about ‘Our Flag Means Death’ to me for a while.  I’ve been active in fandoms since the ‘90s, back when webrings were your best bet for good fan content.  I have seen a lot of shows come and go.  And I got very used to my fandom experience going something like this: find a new show or movie or book or other thing, write a lot of meta about character motivation and plot structure and costume choices, and often find a pairing I found appealing.  The chemistry was usually good, with variations on antagonistic, friendly, or other chemistry.  And if I was lucky, the show would drop a few hints that there was something there.  You learned very quickly to be grateful for scraps, and to never expect too much.  There was never, NEVER an expectation that a queer pairing would be ‘endgame’, or would ever be manifested in anything more than a few lingering glances and the actors and maybe a writer or two being all for the relationship EXCEPT. 

Except the producers, the studios, the audience.  It would never be accepted.  So it was confined to glances.  And that I understood.  I could appreciate that.  I knew that, if they could, those writers and those actors would have gone there, but gay marriage being legalized seemed like an impossibility, queer cinema was treated as niche or arthouse, and the only queer characters allowed on network shows had to be sidekicks who never had sex.

After that came the era of the queerbait.  Showrunners were more aware of fandom in the mid-2000s, and really wanted that sweet sweet audience retention.  So some shows started to lean into the possibilities of queer relationships.  They played up that things might happen between characters on screen.  It was no longer “we want to, but the network/producer won’t let us”; it was “maybe there is something there! *wink* *wink*”, only to turn around and inevitably claim that the audience misinterpreted, that there was nothing there and never had been.  It was somehow less than what we had in the ‘90s, because then at least we knew we were never getting anything, we knew that the writers had pushed something as hard as they could and they felt as shitty as we did that it wasn’t going to happen.  This was, well, bait.

And yet I don’t really think I understood that feeling of being baited, because I never got the canon queer ship on screen.  Whenever I saw the bait, as a fan who had been around and seen the talks in the ‘90s about queer rep on network TV, I knew that it was bait.  I knew that they would never follow through because everyone was convinced that two men kissing would end their television show.  So no matter how much they teased the audience, I knew it was lies, and I didn’t feel like it hit me as hard.  I told myself it didn’t hurt.

Now we’re in a new era where queer relationships are directly confirmed by creators, but there’s always still this halting before the final hurdle.  “These two men are in love,” they’ll say, but then turn around and say, “but it’s so elevated and pure and perfect that they would never sully it by smashing their faces together.  So they’re definitely in love guys!  Just don’t expect them ever to show that physically.”  Because gay love is now in vogue, but gay kissing and God forbid gay sex are still that bridge too far.  Even shows with great queer rep that aren’t explicitly billed as queer romances will stop before the kiss.  

And this doesn’t feel like asexual rep or an embracing of queerplatonic relationships, because it definitely doesn’t feel like they deliberately set out to write that.  No, it always feels like they wanted to have their cake and eat it.  They want the queer fans that will come to see a queer relationship, but they don’t want to lose those fans that they are still convinced will stop watching when two mens’ lips touch (it’s different for women, because straight men love lesbians, and so they get a pass for ogling reasons, which ...  is a whole different story, and a whole different long post, frankly).  

And then comes David fucking Jenkins, who seems like an impossibility.  He is an apparently straight white cis man in his forties.  He is the exact sort of demographic that you would never expect to deliver a meaningful queer story, or a story with explicitly anti-racist or anti-colonialist beats.  On first glance, he’s every other showrunner who’s tried to pull a fast one on queer audiences before.

But as this article shows, there was something different ticking away in his head.  He watched Star Wars and came away with the impression that Finn and Poe were the couple with chemistry.  He saw how fans treated Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega and wanted to do better.  He’s almost blissfully unaware of the long history of queer fans getting ignored, then baited, then told that gay sex or kissing would ‘lessen’ such a wonderful relationship.

So he set out to write a queer sitcom about pirates.  And since it was a romcom, of course the two leads were going to kiss, because that was the point of a romcom.  That’s what the audience signed up for, and to turn around and give some bullshit line about how their mouths touching would lessen what they had was inherently ridiculous.  A romcom has specific beats, sure.  They were inevitably going to be separated by misunderstanding, but there was also an agreement with the audience that it wouldn’t be forever.  

And the kiss sealed that deal.  It showed that he had none of those weird hang-ups or beliefs that if he showed two men kissing, his show would be over.  And you know what?  He was more right than he could have ever imagined.  What he was doing was, in his head, simply following through with the agreement established by all romcoms.  It wasn’t remarkable or revolutionary.  It wasn’t until he was surprised that more people weren’t believing it was a romcom by the moonlit scene in episode 5 that he started to understand something was happening that he hadn’t been privy to before.  I think it was only after that that David Jenkins did a deep dive on queerbaiting, and realized how pervasive it was, how even the queer audiences weren’t willing to believe what was obvious on screen.  That, in the words of Lucius: “This is happening.”

And they didn’t believe it until the kiss, because that’s always the line that shows aren’t willing to cross.  When he stepped over that boundary he didn’t even know existed, he had an audience ready to go to war for him.  Because he had delivered.  There was no waffling, no bullshit.  He just delivered.  And after that, well ...

The audience flocked to him.  They campaigned, made cakes and Twitter storms and were unrelenting.  They were a groundswell for a show that had gotten no advertising, no buzz, no press before its airing.  It’s clear that HBO Max had the same old attitude that he had crossed the line with that kiss, and that the show would flop.  But it was the opposite, and instead of tanking his show, it got him a renewal.  

And I myself felt such a lightness in my heart after seeing that.  Even with the darker end the season had, I knew that this was a romcom, that our lovers would be reunited, get over their miscommunications, and would be together in a meaningful way.  David Jenkins had the idea, and then he filled his writers room with people to bring that idea to life, to push back and buy in.  Queer people, people of color, people of different cultures.  This is the move of a man who has a dream to write a diverse, queer story, and knows that he has a good idea for it, but also knows that he needs people who have lived those lives to help him avoid stumbling blocks that he never could have seen.

Seeing this leads to the extraordinary result of writing that is well aware of how queer characters and characters of color have been treated by the media, and how queer fans and fans of color have been treated too.  It also led to him going on his own journey of discovering, realizing why people reacted the way they did, why they were hesitant to believe he would deliver, and why they would fight so hard for his show when they did.  It was effervescent, like drinking champagne, to finally just ... have this.  For it to happen both with the writers knowing it was something special, and the showrunner not understanding why it wasn’t always so easy just to deliver these stories.  Just to see the chemistry and go for it.  Just to treat characters with respect and still let them be silly and ridiculous.  To have an entire world that feels queer friendly, beyond the queerness of the lead characters.

It only really hit me recently, when I heard that tired old excuse of “they love one another, but kissing or sex would cheapen that relationship, so they’re in love, but not in a sexual way”, and I was finally sick of it.  Because David Jenkins and his silly gay pirate show showed that it’s bullshit.  He showed that your audience booms when you finally set aside the fear of two men kissing, and just pay off the relationship.  When you embrace queerness not just in words, but in deeds.  It took OFMD to finally rip those tolerant blinders off me and for me to think, “Oh, just say that you don’t want to show two men kissing because you think whatever audience you have will think it’s gross.”  Just say it.  Just be honest instead of trying to parade this as a better form of queer representation.  I wouldn’t like you any more, but I would respect the honesty.

Finally getting what I always secretly wanted from a show--but would never admit that I wanted because I knew I would always be disappointed--has taken away my ability to tolerate whatever excuse showrunners trot out for not taking that final step.  OFMD opened my eyes.  It woke me up to realizing that I had spent twenty years pretending I wasn’t hurt when a show teased a relationship they never intended to pay off.  I haven’t felt so giddy about a show in years, and I have *never* felt so giddy about a queer genre show (because I’ve never seen one before that delivered so well on both being queer and on being genre)!  This was not a show billed as a romance, but a show about pirates, but it delivered such a lovely romance and such a lot of silly pirates!    

So thank you, David Jenkins.  As you went on your journey of discovery about queerbaiting and how it made you feel, I have been on a similar journey.  And you helped me get there.  You and your silly gay pirate show.

[writer-monster]

11 reasons why cap 4 should reintroduce Bucky Barnes as the love interest, an essay

to start this off, i am not writing this essay from a shipping place nor do i believe that this would have any influence at all over the upcoming movie. i expect nothing. this is simply something that i would personally like to see. (of course no hate to anybody who thinks differently)

here are 11 reasons why i think making Bucky into Sam Wilson's love interest in Cap 4 would be a good move for Disney.

-

1. on the Chinese film market - and why it's an irrelevant argument against the inclusion of homosexual themes in Cap 4

the Chinese film market is something that has been blamed for a lack of diversity in Hollywood films a lot lately. many people claim that this market with a lot of buying power has been responsible for the lack of gay and black representation in particular within Hollywood films.

and we have certainly seen Hollywood treating it as such, going so far as to cut gay scenes from movies for their Chinese releases, and vastly minimising John Boyega's (a black actor's) presence in the Chinese poster of Star Wars The Force Awakens.

[image ID: on the left is an image of the American poster for Star Wars The Force Awakens, featuring John Boyega prominently on the right-hand side. And on the right is the Chinese poster for the same movie, in which John Boyega is barely visible.]

so we know at the very least that Disney believes this through their own actions and efforts to self-censor for the different markets.

but Captain America 4 is a black-led movie, don't you forget. and Disney can't minimise Sam Wilson/Anthony Mackie in the movie or the poster because it's his movie and his poster. and no amount of creativity in the editing room can change that (thank God!).

so if by their own argument the film is already going to be either banned, panned or slammed in China... then what do they have to fear from making it a gay movie too?

-

2. oh, the queerbaiting

queerbaiting is an unusual cultural idea. and sometimes i find myself thinking that the term is far too easily used, but then all of a sudden i will stumble upon a movie or show that is so quintessentially cruel and overt in it's... well... queerbaiting that i will start to wonder what the hell kind of a bizarre relationship all these straight people seem to have with their friends. take Troy and Abed from Community or John and Sherlock from Sherlock as the perfect examples of this. (in which my reaction to the show's creators saying the show wasn't gay was to ask so then why did you make it so gay?!)

i felt that Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in tfatws were getting quite close to this level of queerbaiting.

there was the field scene, the couple's counselling scene, the boat scene, the couple's counselling scene, Bucky going with Sam to face Karli when she told Sam to come alone, the couple's counselling scene, ALL the staring scenes, Sam checking out Bucky's ass here as they said goodbye, the "i would move in with him but" hidden scene, "Uncle Bucky" showing up at the cookout scene, the romantic walking off together into the sunset together ending scene, and the couple's counselling scene. did i forget anything? but i mean seriously, the couple's counselling scene!!! that thing they did with their legs and their crotches while staring deep into each other's eyes, would any straight guy willingly do that? do straight guys crotch-snuggle now?

[image ID: an image of Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes during the therapy scene with the quote, "Isn't anybody going to drag me into impromptu couple's therapy and slot my legs firmly between theirs before staring deeply into my eyes?"]

(yeah i stole this image from a buzzfeed article on the fan reactions to the couple's therapy scene. but given that they stole 80% of the content of that article from fandom tumblr, i think it's pretty even-steven.)

there's also the fact that people started talking about bisexual Bucky Barnes a lot after the tiger pictures line, and the lead writer Malcom Spellman responded to the talk of Bucky's bisexuality with "just keep watching". well we watched, Malcolm. but it's beginning to feel like you were just jerking us around.

-

3. the writing

seriously though, what else is Bucky Barnes doing right now in the MCU? his only remaining connection to anything going on right now is through Sam. there is literally nothing else established that's left for him to do that doesn't involve Sam. he moved to Louisiana to be closer to Sam (canonically), he hangs out with Sam's family (canonically), and Steve is presumably gone and is definitely not coming back for more adventures.

he has no villains or loose ends left. he has no other superheroes that he appears to be in contact with. he has no girlfriend or potential love interest, or even other friends or family. he is living in a tent that he has secretly set up in Sam's backyard and is mysteriously appearing from the bushes when it's time for dinner like a stray cat.

in my opinion there is no other meaningful and pre-established progression for Bucky's character that wouldn't just feel cheap.

plus, i don't think the general audience would be all that surprised if they kissed. i think a LOT of people picked up on all that tension. i think a lot of straight people picked up on all that tension too.

-

4. the chemistry between the actors & the chemistry between the characters

the original pitch for tfatws was essentially just this, it was the chemistry between Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie and their respective MCU characters of Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson.

now obviously Anthony and Sebastian are simply friends, and i wouldn't mean to imply anything more. but they are also not their characters.

Sam and Bucky's scenes together before tfatws were both limited and short, and yet audiences still fell in love with the dynamic between the two characters.

in interviews, these two actors are constantly slipping into character and flirting with each other and frankly it's adorable. plus it's really entertaining. i'd love to see that dynamic, unfiltered, in a movie.

because believe it or not the flirting is actually even more open in their interviews than it was in tfatws. and i'm leaving some links as proof.

this here is known as the "married" compilation

and here's a "lucky dip" selection of interviews - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

and here's Anthony trying to get Seb to take his jacket off.

i'm just saying, why not let their chemistry shine? these two are so talented and so entertaining, especially when you put them in a room together. and can you imagine how absolutely hilarious and brilliant it would be to watch them navigate being a couple?

(and for those who bring up the "friends would be uncomfortable pretending to be dating" argument, i'm not here asking for a sex scene or anything. i don't think anyone would expect them to show any more intimacy (physical or emotional) while playing a couple than what they've already shown together in say... tfatws or in their own interviews. not that i actually expect anything regardless.)

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5. if they were a man and a woman they would've gotten together in tfatws

i have no more to add here. just that... yeah, they would've.

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6. and i'm not talking about the comics here, i'm talking about the MCU.

i understand fully that none of what i'm saying here falls in line with these characters from the comics. but the mcu itself doesn't fall much in line with the comics either, and these two characters especially are very different from their comics counterparts.

i'm not asking for these two to get together in the comics. tbh i don't think that it would work.

but the mcu Sam and Bucky are different and closer than their comics counterparts. they've got different histories, different backstories, and a very different dynamic. please rest assured that i am only talking about them in the mcu.

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7. Bucky Barnes is believably bisexual. and Sam Wilson has never been proven to be straight in the mcu, nor has he had a love interest.

(now please continue to keep in mind that these points only stand for the mcu versions of Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson, and not at all for their comics counterparts.)

Sam Wilson has never had a love interest, which is crazy because have you seen that man! he has had two blink and you'll miss it moments of verbal expression of attraction to women, both in TWS. and that's the extent of it, through his entire history in the mcu.

Bucky Barnes has had a number of surface-level female love interests, but none of them even came close to the level of connection and chemistry that Bucky shares with Sam.

and i'm sorry SarahBucky fans, but i just don't think there's very much to their relationship either. i love Sarah, i really do. but it's Sam who shares all the meaningful moments and history and chemistry with Bucky. and i don't see what making her into a love interest would do for Sarah's character either, what would that add to her story?

[Picture ID: Bucky at the cookout with Sam, Sarah, Cass and AJ. Bucky and Sam are looking at each other and smiling.]

and also there is the whole tiger pictures thing... again. which does strongly suggest that Bucky is bisexual whether this was intentional on behalf of the writers or not.

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8. it's representation... AND it feels natural

marvel hasn't had a lot of queer representation that's been noticeably present in the MCU at the time of writing this.

there have been a lot of failures so far, from the bisexual erasure of Valkyrie in Thor Ragnarok to the wlw erasure in Black Panther.

there was queerbaiting almost identical to the bisexual Bucky baiting for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. when asked if he had considered featuring a gay hero in gotg2, director James Gunn stated that "We might have already done that. I say, watch the movie." after the movie's release audiences were understandably confused about the lack of queer representation. To which the director followed up his comments with, "But we don't really know who's gay and who's not. It could be any of them."

there is also Loki, considered by most fans after the airing of his six episode series on Disney+ to be both a poor attempt at both genderfluid representation and bisexual representation. with both attempts being summed up fairly well by the term "blink-and-you'll-miss-it". (also it's just terribly written and Loki doesn't wear any interesting clothes! fanficcers are a Goddamn blessing in this hard time!)

and let us not forget that Andrew Garfield was apparently FIRED for pushing for a bisexual spiderman. a bisexual spiderman within an interracial mlm relationship no less.

so for all these failures, marvel, why not allow us queer fans this? two brilliant and heroic men in a loving interracial relationship. two heroes that we can look up to.

now, one of the biggest detractions from the argument for representation is the idea of "forced diversity". and some poorly written characters certainly do end up feeling forced into the narrative. take Iceman in the comics for example, with Jean Grey just straight up suddenly telling him he's gay. like, marvel, sweetie, that's not how this works! and i don't know a lot of queer people who thought much of that "representation".

but the crux of the "forced diversity" argument is almost always that it feels unnatural within the story, right? and i don't think that anyone could say that about MCU Sam and Bucky ending up together, given these characters' existing chemistry and their history. they've both played characters in gay relationships before so we know that it's not outside of either actor's wheelhouse. and y'all know that Anthony and Seb can act, people. if it's in the script i believe that they'll make it seem like the most natural thing on earth.

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9. it'd be a nice change

there's been an ongoing meme lately about "Disney's first gay character", the joke being that they continually announce gay characters without really ever including gay characters in their films.

this is to the point where Disney has formed a reputation amongst queer audiences of being homophobic.

if Sam and Bucky were to become a couple, then Disney could have its first actual gay character within a gay relationship. AND have him be in the lead of his own movie, no less.

it's also worth keeping in mind that there's likely an overlap between the people who were outraged by a Sam Wilson Captain America, and the people who'd be outraged by a gay Captain America. and if they were already not seeing the film, then i don't think much is gonna change that.

queer audiences would definitely love it, and the media attention would be guaranteed to be huge. i mean, simply look at the amount of media attention mere rumours of a character's queerness gets you and multiply that by a canon confirmation of said rumours.

but i'm pretty sure that Disney already knows this.

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10. and yet, in truth, it's not about the representation

in truth i've never felt that i had any trouble relating to characters of any sexual orientation, race, gender, sex, body type, etc. (although that is not to throw any shade at all on people who do wish to see themselves represented) but for me, i think it's more about the story than the packaging.

and yet, a love story is still just a story. straight or queer, monoethnic or interracial. when two characters have chemistry and history and have sacrificed for each other time and time again, and they also can't keep their hands or their eyes off each other, then i'm pretty sure that that's a love story.

straight or queer, monoethnic or interracial, it shouldn't be about these simple labels. it should be about how well written the relationship is. it should be about chemistry, and history, and sacrifice.

because i'm fucking sick of all the hollow, forced romances in media no matter the genders of the participants. i'm sick of lazily written, shallow relationships where any two people sharing the same space for any extended period of time will simply fall in love. it's boring, it's repetitive, and as a writer myself it drives me up the wall!

romance stories suck! and everyone knows that romance stories suck. between twilight, and most of the entire YA genre, and love triangles (so boring), and romance used as poorly-written throwaway subplots in Hollywood movies, the world is in agreement that the romance in western media is simply dreadful. and yet we still want love stories. it's an entire genre that sits at the heart of the human experience (<3), and yet one which so few of today's best known writers seem truly able to capture.

i don't think that i'm the only one who feels this way, either. i suspect it's actually a large part of why fandom is so romance-centred in the first place, that we're all just starving for a good love story.

(btw i think fandom has a reputation for being something that as a whole that it is not. it has this reputation for straight up demanding things and harassing people until they get their way. while unfortunately there are a few people who do this, they're fucking annoying and i swear that they're far from the majority.

in my experience fandom is mostly about writing a five thousand word story at three am while drunk off your ass because it might make someone whom you've never met smile, editing it in the cold light of day, and then posting it. expecting nothing. sometimes getting nothing. and sometimes getting someone send you kudos or a comment so heartbreakingly wonderful that it makes you smile in return.)

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11. so once again, it is all about the writing.

i want to see Sam and Bucky get together in the mcu, not because they would be a gay couple but because i genuinely believe that their story has potential to be an amazing love story.

and i know the mcu isn't about the romance. it's why in my personal opinion we haven't gotten a lot of good canon romances besides Peter Quill and Gamora. and i don't think that the mcu should be all about the romance either. i fucking love the action and the fighting scenes. i love the comedy. Captain America: The Winter Soldier had no romance and it was a fucking treasure, it was an amazing spy-action-thriller and it made my little gay heart dance. Thor Ragnarok had no romance, and it was an utterly brilliant comedic spectacle action film. not every movie needs romance.

but mcu Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes were doing couple's therapy and fixing a boat and walking off into the sunset together in tfatws. they were inseparable on the battlefield. they've got a dynamic. it's beautiful, it's romantic, and it's gold.

a budding relationship between them in the next movie would be a good way to explore both characters more without the narrative feeling too stilted and separate. at the end of tfatws, both Sam and Bucky fans found that their respective fave felt somewhat underutilised and that their characters were underexplored.

now, that problem would be even more difficult to remedy in a movie, because the plotline of a movie needs to be really tight to work (giggity). and we know that the central conflict of the movie is gonna be action-based (which is good), but we still need each character's personal journey and growth to tie into the main conflict. (which is another issue that some fans found with tfatws, that these characters didn't really feel connected to the action-based plot on a more personal level.)

if Sam and Bucky are already in a relationship, however, this whole dynamic changes. first, their relationship has already been set up for nicely since TWS and through tfatws and they would officially be the best-fleshed-out couple in the mcu. but most importantly, a relationship gives them a perfect vehicle to explore both of their pasts comparatively and connect them personally to the action-based plot.

do you want to establish that Sam is a little too trusting and naïve? then establish this through his relationship with Bucky, and through showing his placing his trust in Bucky. (rather than through having him sympathise with a villain who threatened to murder his sister and his nephews).

perhaps you want to show Bucky recovering from his trauma? show us how comfortable he is with Sam. they get along, they're enjoying each other's presence, we see more of Sam's life and of his family, and then let Bucky tell Sam something that's raw and dark and honest about his life as The Winter Soldier. something about a memory, one that he only just recalled. he's opening up. and maybe what he tells Sam is even something that sets up the future action-based conflict, to ground that in something real.

you want to explore that Sam has trauma too? do this through Bucky. he tells Bucky a story about his time in the military. in the form of a flashback, he shares his own story of loss to evoke before the audience the shared theme of feeling at fault even when you're simply a helpless bystander to an act of pure destruction.

then, action sequence! and it's directly connected to Bucky's time as the Winter Soldier. explore the grief of someone whose life the Winter Soldier tore apart manifesting into a villain perpetuating the cycle of pain. establish your villain.

Later, Sam is dragged into battle against this villain for protecting Bucky. But Bucky doesn't want Sam to protect him. He feels guilt for what he can't control and he doesn't want Sam getting hurt because of him. Bucky reminds Sam that he has a family, one who needs him and who loves him. He tells him to go home.

Sam reminds Bucky that he's a part of that family. And that sure Sam's a hero and his job is to protect anyone and everyone, but that he's doing it because he wants to. It's not simply to prove that he can, or to prove that he's not a bystander (this connects to Sam's trauma here), but that he's doing it to help people.

and this gets Bucky thinking about who he is and what he's doing here. is he a hero who stands by Sam's side? or is he an ordinary man who stands aside? or perhaps, does he stand alone? what does he stand for? Maybe Sam knows. But does Bucky?

Sam and Bucky fight off the villain again, and for the first time Bucky meets this adversary face to face. And Bucky recognises this villain, and has a flashback to the genuine pain that he inflicted upon them in the form of the Winter Soldier. Bucky freezes mid-fight, he almost dies, and Sam has to save him.

Sam chews Bucky out for almost getting killed because he was afraid for him. but Bucky takes this the wrong way and goes off to fight the villain alone, or perhaps to die alone, he's not quite sure.

He puts up a half-hearted fight. He apologises for what the Winter Soldier has done, and he waits for the killing blow, when Sam swoops down and he saves him. He asks Sam why he saved him and Sam calls him a moron. And then, Sam asks him what sacrificing himself would solve. He tells him that you can't choose your past but you can choose your future (connecting to his own experience of loss and guilt and grief). And that no matter what Bucky Barnes still has a future, whether that's as the Winter Soldier or the White Wolf or just some dork with a day job. And that he has a future as a part of Sam's family too.

Sam fights the villain, and it's toe to toe. He delivers a few good blows, but receives a fair few himself. And then the villain tears off his wings, first one and then the other, in a manner reminiscent of what the Winter Soldier did to him in TWS. Through Bucky's eyes there's a flashback to highlight the parallels. Sam gets back on his feet and he fights his best fight, but is now losing.

And then the heavily injured Bucky steps up and fights by Sam's side, and only together do they take down the villain.

"So... I inspired you, huh?" Sam teases with a smile, utterly exhausted. "With my heroism and-"

"You inspired me." Bucky said, equally exhausted. "Let's leave it at that."

Together, Sam and Bucky go back to the safety and warmth of their family. Sam fixes his wings. Sam goes back to being Captain America. And Bucky... he's around, but it's unclear what he's doing.

That is, until the very end. When Sam is in a fight, and suddenly Bucky shows up and helps him out.

"What are you doing here?" Sam asks.

"I've made up my mind." Bucky says. "I'm the Winter Soldier. But now I'll save lives, Sam. Now, like you, I'll be a hero."

Sam smirks. "So does this make you my sidekick, then?"

Bucky smiles. "C'mon, at least make me a partner." He says.

"How about co-workers." Sam says (in flashback, he remembers back to the death of his last on-the-job partner).

"How about friends." Bucky says, with a wry look.

"Bucky... I don't want to see you put your dumbass self in danger." Sam says.

"Oh, and it's ok for you to go running off into danger on your own all the time?" Bucky asks.

"Yes." Sam says stubbornly. "Absolutely it is."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not a dumbass?!"

"Sam, if you think I'm not gonna be watching your back for the rest of time... then you're the biggest dumbass I know. And I don't care if you need me or not, I will be there for you."

"Because Sam, you're more than Captain America. You're more than a good soldier. You're a good man. And I think sometimes, the world forgets what the difference is."

-

...or something like that.

(i only spent like 15 minutes on that. you know if i were actually writing this movie i would come up with something much better. and if anyone from marvel is seeing this, yes i can come work for you. i will make the time, let's do this thing right!)

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finale

at the end of the day, whether or not the mcu chooses to make Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes a couple, it's their decision. and they don't owe me anything.

i'm just some random person on the internet. who thinks that Captain America 4 should #givecaptainamericaaboyfriend

[entertainment]

Entertainment Spotlight: Brandon Kyle Goodman

Brandon Kyle Goodman can currently be seen playing Deco in Netflix’s Feel the Beat, which follows a failed actress returning to her small hometown, who is roped into training a misfit group of young dancers for a big competition. Other acting credits include eager father-to-be Andy in Amazon’s Modern Love, as well as roles in People Just Do Nothing, Alive in Denver, Plus One, and Papi Chulo. Aside from acting, Brandon has found success as a writer for Netflix’s animated comedy series Big Mouth, which is set to return to Netflix in 2020 after an unprecedented three-season renewal. As a proud gay Black person, Brandon has recently emerged as a staunch advocate for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, actively speaking out against the injustices plaguing the African American community. He encourages his followers to donate to The Innocence Project, The Bail Project, NAACP, and Black Lives Matter.

What drew you to the role of brave, outspokenly queer Deco in Feel the Beat? 

What drew me to the role was Deco’s fearlessness, as well as the movie’s choice to not center Deco’s story around his identity. He was allowed to be unapologetically queer without taking on an oppression-based narrative.

You are in the writing team for Netflix’s hugely successful Big Mouth. Can you tell us about how you got there and what it’s like writing for an animated series?

I was fortunate that the creators of Big Mouth considered reading a script of mine. We met a couple of times and discussed my experiences to determine if the writers’ room was the right fit. Thankfully it was and continues to be. Writing on an animated series like Big Mouth is truly a dream. It forces me to expand my imagination in a way live action doesn’t, while also strengthening my ability to tell impactful stories in new and exciting ways.

What inspired you to enter into the creative industries, and which came first for you—acting or writing?

I grew up with a minster for a grandmother and an actress for a mother, so creativity was ever-present in our household. More specifically, I watched two very talented women write for themselves. They blessed me with that tool. Even though I professionally started as an actor, as a middle schooler, my first love was writing. Acting soon followed. I’ve been fortunate to have many moments where they get to be linked together, and honestly, there’s nothing better.

You use your platforms to speak up and share your experiences as a Black person in America. Can you tell us a bit about how the response has been?

The response has been overwhelming and bittersweet. On the one hand, as a human being, there’s nothing better than feeling heard and seen. On the other hand, as a Black human being, it’s painful that it’s taken this long to be heard and seen, and quite honestly, there are a lot of people pretending they hear and see us. I choose to keep my focus and attention on the ones that really do—the people really doing the work and striving to do better, be better, and fix this abhorrent mess of a system.

In what ways does your activism influence your creative work?

My sheer presence on stage or on camera is activism. I’m Black and openly queer in an industry that doesn’t value Blackness or queerness, and especially not Black queerness. I pick my roles based not just on what I want to do but also on whether the role will be a portrayal that will amplify, elevate, and expand representation, or whether it’s a caricature. More times than not, it’s the latter, and those roles I turn down. Whenever I write, I write for myself and people like me. I write Black characters, POC characters, and, more specifically, Black queer characters, and I do it as fully as possible. I want to be seen as a full person, not just an accessory to the white lead. My activism is my creative work.

Which activists currently inspire you, and why?

There are so many, and they all inspire me for the same reason. They’re bold, they’re vulnerable, they’re smart, and they are committed to the amplification, elevation, protection, and equity of Black people: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tamika D. Mallory, Ashlee Marie Preston, Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Mila Jam, Tiffany Dena Loftin, Yves, and Kendrick Sampson, to name a few.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved with advocacy but doesn’t know where to start?

Start in your community. Start at your place of work, your apartment building, your local businesses. Take it day by day. This is a lifelong commitment to life long change. It’s not going to get done in a day, a month, a summer, or a year. So, if you feel like you have to do everything, you’ll find yourself stuck and not making any change. But start with the three things you can commit to working on this month. If you’re feeling ambitious, maybe it’s this week. Remember, in addition to the protests, donations, petitions, phone calls, there are internal things you need to do. What are you reading? What are you watching? What POVs are you exposing yourself to? It all counts.

On the subject of advice, do you have any for young queer Black folx who want to get into acting/writing in America today?

My first bit of advice is to get into it! We need you. We need your voice, we need your experience, we need you to take up space in these creative spaces. My second bit of advice is to be yourself. Work towards showing up fully wherever you go. Obviously, depending on where you are, there are things you have to do to maintain your safety. Your safety is important. But how do you show up in your mind? Are you free in your mind, in your soul? Are you fully yourself in your spirit? Get to know yourself every day, it will make you a stronger actor and writer. It will bring an unmatched authenticity to your work.

What would you change about the industry if you could?

I would change the white supremacist system of doing things. I would change the value we place in whiteness as the ideal. I would change the lack of inclusion on screen and behind the scenes. I would change the all-white executive suites that think they’re diverse because they have a singular person of color on their team. I would eradicate the violent grip on the keys to “the gate”. I would create systems that mentored and shepherded new talent, especially Black, POC, and queer talent—especially from places outside of LA and NY. I would find ways to empower more artists having the ability to create and share their work in a global way. I would ensure that Blackness was valued and treated with the respect, reverence, and honor that it deserves.

Describe each of the following in one word: Who you are, what you value the most, and what you’d be if you were a food item.

Brandon. Spirit. Mac & cheese.

Thanks for taking the time, Brandon! Feel the Beat is now streaming on Netflix.

Photos: Leslie Alejandro

[castiel-left-his-mark-on-me]

Hi, Ary, very inactive ex-mutual(i think???) here. Good to see you thriving! ♥ It's been a while since I've dipped my head into cockles stuff. Could I perchance maybe ask uuuuum tf is going on??? lol I see Mish apparently confirmed he used to stay over at Jensen's in Van, and heard newbs were apparently freaking out about it and getting a bit messy, which I get that, business as usual. But I'm also seeing shit about spin-offs? And Jared getting in a twitter fight with Jensen, causing/resulting in stans to going feral and sending hate?? I know you're not as big a fan of Jar, but that's part of why I figured I'd ask you, you usually have a really level head about this kinda stuff. If you don't wanna answer publically, or at all, that's totally chill!

Hey, Rhi! We're still mutuals! Of course we're still mutuals! When I saw the notification of your ask, I was like "Hey! I haven't seen you in a while!" and my husband was like "???" and I said "Tumblr" and he said "Oh."

It was a wild time haha.

In any case, welcome back to the dumpster fire! We are obviously still a mess. So to catch you up, I guess I will start by summarizing both before and after the finale (not sure where you left off so this might be redundant for you) ... basically, it became obvious as the end of the show neared that Jensen was not on board with the plan for the finale; although Jared never stopped singing its praises.

We got confirmation of this during a zoom interview where Jensen said that he actually went into the writers room as well as called Kripke to basically voice how he didn't agree with the direction the final season was going, but he was shot down on all fronts. In another interview, he was asked "What would you tell your younger self going into this career?" And Jensen responded with: "I would tell myself to just keep your head down and do the work" meaning, "Don't try to change things because you can't." I also think that this whole situation is what he wrote "Let Me Be" about for his first Radio Company album, but that is just my own speculation. All of his reluctance, even though he always followed it up with "But I eventually saw the value in the script" or "I came around in the end" (which never sounded sincere, and I don't think he was really trying to sound sincere) made us all very nervous about what was to come for 15x20; and of course, when the last two episodes aired, we saw just how badly they fucked it up.

After the awful finale, the entire fandom became aware of the CW's heavy handed role in the thing, basically squeezing all the life out of SPN to shape it into a ramp from which Walker could launch itself. They not only erased all the love and joy and representation that Cas's love confession gave us, they also tore apart the things that made sense about the bond between Sam and Dean, making it really just about Sam-- and therefore Jared, which of course, Jared seemed to be fine with ... even though no one else was. Misha barely said anything during the finale, and a few of the other actors talked about the show ending in various posts, but Jared tweeted up a storm ... and Jensen? Jensen just sat in sexy-silent resentment of the whole thing. He didn't tweet, he didn't post, he didn't say a word once he no longer had to, and I think that's because he was already going full-steam-ahead on his plans for redemption.

Which brings us to Chaos Machine-- Jensen and Danneel's new production company that is being run by a queer creative director and has a mantra of inclusivity and representation woven throughout it's fabric; and apparently, the first story that Jensen wanted to tell through this new platform is the origin story of Sam and Dean's parents; so last week (?) he announced the upcoming production of "The Winchesters" -- the untold love story of John and Mary. Obviously, John is not the most likable character from the show, so the idea was met with a lot of resentment when it was first announced, but Jensen has gone on to say that he is excited to take on the task of telling the "true" story behind these characters-- the one that makes sense with the pre-established canon and doesn't reject it. So, given that, the idea is being mulled over with a bit more optimism from the fandom.

Who isn't being optimistic though?

Jared Padalecki.

When Jensen made this announcement on Twitter, many of his friends and coworkers congratulated him, but not Jared. Jared responded with a passive aggressive: "I'm happy for you, man, but I wish I didn't hear about it through Twitter." This of course, sent all the die-hard Jared fans into a tizzy and they immediately began asking him if he was serious (hoping it was just a joke-- we all hoped it was because there would be fallout no matter what one's opinion on Jared is). Instead of leaving it there though or just deleting that tweet, Jared went on to tweet some more, saying that he was being serious that he didn't know about the plans for the prequel, and that he was "gutted" that Sam apparenlty wouldn't be included (mind you, this a prequel to SPN... meaning BEFORE Sam and Dean were even born, so how could Sam be included? But Dean is apparently narrating this story so maybe Jared thought Sam should be helping to narrate it? I don't know). But Jared being Jared couldn't just leave that there, he then went on to tweet at Robbie Thompson who was announced as a writer for "The Winchesters" so then Jared went off on him too, calling him "Brutus" and a "coward" acting like Robbie betrayed him (speculation is-- Robbie refused to write for Walker, so Jared is pissed that he essentially chose Jensen over him). He did fairly quickly, remove that tweet attacking Robbie, but of course the damage was done at that point. And it truly only took his first tweet calling out Jensen for some people to be like "Jared-- that sucks if you didn't know but why are you saying any of this publicly?"

As you might know, Jared has had issues in the past with posting hurtful things on social media, and has even used it as a tool for attack before-- calling out customer service agents and public workers that he felt have wronged him, which is bad enough ... but for him to then do the same thing to his best friend of well over a decade? Many people who had once liked him or at least gave him the benefit of the doubt (I used to ...) stopped after this latest twitter tantrum.

However, some people have suspected for some time that J2 had a falling out either shortly before the finale or just after. Their public/social media interactions have seemed awkward, stilted or even non-existent in moments that they normally wouldn't be. In the past year, when Walker premiered, Jensen didn't say much about his friend's new venture other than a "Congrats. buddy" here and there. Later, we learned that Jensen refused to work on the show ... Jared said he make him do it, drag Jensen to the set "kicking and screaming" which made many fans quirk up an eyebrow because, why would Jensen put up a fight unless the two weren't as close as they used to be? And then Jensen moved his family to Colorado (either permanently or for an extended period at least) which is notable considering how he moved to Texas seemingly to be closer to Jared, even buying a house that was near his. All this was just speculation though; but it wasn't until Jared's tweet complaining about not knowing about the prequel that the theories behind them falling out, became less theory and more fact.

The day after his twitter tantrum, Jared tweeted again-- not retracting his statements or apologizing, but instead saying that he and Jensen "talked" and were "all good". Jensen then tweeted too, parroting this statement to some degree, which only made the whole thing even more sour in the mouths of the fans. The fact that Jared didn't apologize for his outburst and throwing his friend under the bus, and also the fact that Jensen-- Mr. Sexy Silence, Mr. Never Tweets, Mr. Tech-Ignorant-and-Proud, actually had to POST SOMETHING saying that he and Jared made up, it just screamed OPTICS. It was obviously the work of agents and PR firms and lots of people going "Look, if you two keep beefing, that will mean the death of both of your projects. Even more people will stop watching Walker, and this SPN prequel will never get picked up due to the scandal." So, the two "made nice" publicly to quell the chaos, but in my opinion, it's all too little too late. Jared started a storm that he can't contain now with a little tweet, and it seems like he knows that too because before he talked about him and Jensen making up, he asked that people "not send threats". He could have just as easily said that he shouldn't have made this a public issue and that he's sorry, but instead, he continued to play the victim and stoke the flames by alerting us all to the damage he's done.

Now, like I said before-- I used to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't think he's an awful human or that he deserves to be attacked or anything, but he is an adult man with very poor judgment and an obvious selfish-streak a mile wide. He should know better, and he should have more respect for his so-called "friends" and "brothers" than to make them targets to public ridicule. I have a hard time believing that Jensen still sees Jared the way he used to, and I wouldn't blame him a bit for wanting to pull away-- especially when he's moving on to so many new and exciting things. Jared certainly deserves happiness just as much as anyone else, but he went on twitter and basically asked for a scandal, and he got one.

The question is now-- was there a motive behind it? Was just looking for a reason to bring his and Jensen's falling out to light-- while making himself looking like the victim in the process? Or did he genuinely not know about the prequel and just decided to go about "not knowing" in the most toxic and hurtful way he could manage?

In any case, that is the drama ... that is the J2 insanity in a rather lengthy nutshell ... that is the tea ... and I hope it all makes sense.

But the good news out of all of this is, Cockles is thriving-- they are happy and in love and Jensen calls Misha "Babe" and Misha misses waking up to see Jensen in the morning, and they are just as cute and wonderful as can be.

So, I will end that there. I am so glad to see you back, and I hope I answered all your questions in a way that made sense ... I tried anyway!

💖💖💖

[extasiswings]

Kay first of all you didn't need to go that hard on your answer jesus christ lord THE CATHOLIC IN YOU DESTROYED EVERYTHING IN ME IM GONNA BE WEEPING FOR DAYS OVER THAT BLOOD ANALOGY. and second I wanted to ask because I'm new to the Fandom and everyone and i mean EVERYONE is so so confident about canon buddie and LIKE I've been played before dude I've been through this hell hole man YOU CANT GIVE ME HOPE NOW GUYS ITS NOT NICE TO PLAY WITH MY EMOTIONS LIKE THIS so like how certain are we that they're gonna make them actually be together? (By the way i love love love your tumblr and your WRITING DUDEEEE ITS SO PRETTY IT MADE ME WEEP)

Well, a) I've still seen a lot of pessimism, so I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone is super confident (however, I would say that the types of people who are confident about it is more relevant which brings me to...), b) ...look, here's the thing and I've said it at least once before so I hope that this doesn't come off as harsh or offensive in any way, but:

I've shipped a lot of ships in my time, and yes, some of those were slash ships. I've been actively queerbaited exactly twice (in the real, original meaning of the term, the ship being actively used for marketing and teasing and promotional purposes with zero intention of follow-through, not the nonsense that term has been twisted into now where people throw it around to mean "any time I personally thought these two characters should kiss and they didn't"), I've had ships that I shipped but never expected anything from because I was very aware of the fact that my desire to explore a certain dynamic did not mean that the writers were deliberately writing a queer story, and I've had ships that occupied a technically canon space (as in, actively kissed and had sex on screen and had confessions of feelings) but where characters were killed off before there could be legitimate follow-through and where the dynamic was retconned by word of God. The GREAT MAJORITY of the time when people online talk about being baited or let down by something not going canon and I go to the source material, I end up sitting there thinking "...okay, but this is at most a relationship (either between friends or enemies) with occasional garden-variety homoeroticism that people could read as queer subtext if they really wanted to, but it was clearly not intentional and was never going to be anything more than that." [This also applies to instances of, say, if a network or a show has zero queer characters, especially zero queer main characters, and/or if queerness within the show or on the network has never been handled well, there is no reason to believe that they are suddenly going to do an about face and make their main characters queer and in love, context matters].

Again, I'm not trying to be harsh, but I think that there used to be a much clearer divide between fandoms and creators and a much more prevalent attitude and recognition within fandom space that we can take crumbs and build castles (the given an inch, take a mile perspective) but ALSO that those crumbs are not necessarily representative of the reality of everything the writers or actors or producers of a particular piece of media were ever doing or intending. And I've noticed a big shift where it seems like now, as that divide has broken down, that has turned into, essentially "because I have these crumbs and they can be viewed this way, therefore that is 100% what was intended here, it was deliberate, it is the One True Correct Interpretation, and any attempt by the writers/actors/etc to clarify (or even pulling the gentle 'that wasn't what we meant but you are free to view it however you want') is a conspiracy against queer viewers." And that's just...not it.

All of that to say, I am personally confident in this particular ship going canon because I am reading the room and the very specific choices that have been made surrounding the development of these characters and of their relationship. As much as I like having fun and being a clown, I tend to be pretty realistic when it comes to when I am reading into things only what I want to see and ignoring everything that could contradict that and when the writing is on the wall and in this case...the writing is on the wall as far as I'm concerned. It's about the way they have never, since the beginning of S3, given any other path a legitimate chance. It's about the way they've doubled down at every opportunity they had to walk away from this. It's about the specific ways they chose to handle the demise of Eddie's relationship with Ana (from the implication in "make sure you're following your heart" that his heart was already somewhere else, to the shooting, to the guardianship scene, to having honest-to-god panic attacks over the thought of a future with this woman, to the specific language choice of her being the first woman that he's wanted anything to do with since Shannon), it's about the centering of Buck and of their relationship in at least one scene in every single episode since the shooting, even in an episode like 5x3 where there was very little time for it. Idk what to say, really, this just...feels different and there's only one logical place this leads and I trust the writers to follow that thread to its conclusion. Could I be wrong? Sure, I could be. But at least for right now, I don't think I am.

[And THANK YOU!]

[cyndavilachase]

I’m Looking Forward Now 💖Thank you and good bye

So, it’s been a little over a week since Steven Universe Future ended… 

I’ve been hesitant to write this, honestly, but I’m tired of holding myself back from properly expressing myself in fear of appearing overly invested in the media I consume, even in private. Writing helps me organize my thoughts and feelings, and I feel like these thoughts in particular may resonate with many, so I want to share them. I want to talk about what Steven Universe has done for me personally, both as an artist, and as a person.

I’ve been around since the day the first episode of the original series aired. I actually remember when Steven Universe was just a logo on Wikipedia’s “List of Upcoming Cartoon Network Shows” list, back when I was a freshman in high school. It piqued my interest, but when commercials finally dropped for it, I thought it was going to be bad because of the way marketing handled introducing Steven as a likeable character. There was still something about it that made me want to give it a chance though, so I went online and watched the pilot before the first episode's release. I was hooked immediately. I knew I was going to love it, and I did. I fell so absolutely in love with Steven as a character, and the world that he and the gems lived in. I became obsessed. I was always so excited for new episodes to come out. Little did I know what else it would do for me as I went through my adolescence alongside it.

As the show progressed, it was evident that what I wanted out of a western animated childrens’ cartoon was finally coming into fruition: this show was becoming serialized. There was continuity, there was plot, there was character development-- it was getting deep. It was pushing the groundwork that Adventure Time laid out even further (thank you, Adventure Time).  

I will give credit where credit is due: earlier western childrens’ cartoons I grew up with like Hey Arnold, and Rugrats, among others, also touched on heavy topics, but Steven Universe was able to take similar ideas (and even more complex ones, concerning mental health and relationships) and expand on them outside of contained episodes and/or short arcs. These themes, which were a part of the show’s overarching story, spanned across its entirety. Continuity was rampant. 

What did this mean? It meant kids cartoons didn’t have to be silly and fun all the time and characters weren’t just actors playing a part in 11-minute skits. Steven and the gems would remember things that happened to them, and it affected them and how they would function and play a part in their story. This was a huge deal to me as a teenager. I always wanted the cartoons I grew up with featuring kid characters to feel more. In my own work, I often felt discouraged when combining a fun, cutesy western art style with themes as dark or layered as anime would cover. I always thought it had to be one or the other because an audience wouldn’t take a combination of the two seriously enough, based on discussions I had with classmates, friends, and online analysis I read at the time. Steven Universe proved to me otherwise. This show was opening the door for future cartoons exploring in-depth, adult concepts. I felt so seen as a kid, and was inspired to stick with what I love doing.

I was actually very worried about the show’s survival. It was in fact immensely underrated and the fandom was miniscule. Then in 2014, JailBreak dropped, and it’s popularity exploded. Part of it was because of the complex plot and the themes it was covering like I mentioned, but also because of its representation. 

I remember when fandom theorized that Garnet was a fusion due to grand, tragic reasons. Turns out, she’s simply a metaphor for a very loving w|w relationship. This was huge. I cannot stress how important it is that we continue to normalize healthy canon queer relationships in childens’ media, and Steven Universe finally was the first to do that proper. Introducing these themes offers the chance for a kid to sit there and ask themselves, “Why is this demonized by so many people?” I asked myself exactly that. Ruby and Sapphire were my cartoon LGBT rep. They were the first LGBT couple I ever ecstatically drew fanart of. I was dealing with a lot of internalized homophobia at the time, and they showed me that I was allowed to love women and feel normal about it. The process of overcoming this was a long one, but they played a part in my very first steps into becoming comfortable with my sexuality. I could go on and on about it’s representation in general-- how it breaks the mold when it comes to showcasing a diverse set of characters in design, in casting, and in breaking gender roles. It’s focus on love and empathy. Steven himself is a big boy, but he's the protagonist, and the show never once makes fun of his weight, or any other bigger characters for that matter. It wasn’t hard to see why the fandom had grown so large.

Fandom was always a joy for me. It was a hobby I picked up when I was in middle school, like many of us here did. I would always cater my experience to fun, and fun only. I only started getting more deeply involved in SU’s fandom when I had just turned into an adult. During the summer of 2016, between my first and second year of college, I drew for the show almost every day non-stop when the Summer of Steven event was going on and posted them online. This was a form of practice for me in order to become not just more comfortable with experimenting with my art, but also to meet new artists, make new friends, and learn to interact with strangers without fear. I dealt with a ton of anxiety when I was in high school. When I was a senior applying to art school for animation, I decided I was going to overcome that anxiety. I made plans to take baby steps to improve myself over the course of my 4 years of college. Joining the fandom, while unforeseen, was definitely a part of that process. I started feeling more confident in sharing my ideas, even if they were fan-made. I fell in love with storyboarding after that summer, when I took my first storyboarding class, and genuinely felt like I was actually getting somewhere with all of this. I remember finally coming to a point in my classes where I could pitch and not feel hopelessly insecure about it. I was opening up more to my friends and peers. 

But this process, unfortunately, came to a screeching halt. 

My life completely, utterly crumbled under me in the Fall of 2017 due to a series of blows in my personal life that happened in the span of just a couple weeks. My mental health and sense of identity were completely destroyed. All of that confidence I had worked for-- completely ruined. I was alone. I nearly died. My stay at college was extended to 4 and half years, instead of the 4 I had intended. I lost my love for animation-- making it, and watching it. I could no longer watch Steven Universe with the same love I had for it beforehand. It’s a terrible thing, trying to give your attention to something you don’t love anymore, and wanting so desperately to love again. I dropped so many things I loved in my life, including the fandom.

Healing was a long and complicated road. I continued to watch the show all the way up until Change Your Mind aired in the beginning of 2019, and while I still felt empty, that was definitely a turning point for me with it’s encapsulation of self-love. I was hoping James Baxter would get to work on Steven Universe since he guest-animated on Adventure Time, and it was incredible seeing that wish actually come true. The movie came out and while I enjoyed it and thought highly of it, I was still having issues letting myself genuinely love things again, old and new. It was especially difficult because cartoons were my solace as a kid, when things got rough at home. I remember feeling sad because the show ended, and not getting the chance to love it again like I used to while it was still going.

By the time Steven Universe Future was announced, I was finally coming around. I was genuinely starting to feel excitement for art and animation again. I wasn’t expecting there to be a whole new epilogue series, but happily ever after, there we were! Prickly Pear aired, and the implications it left in terms of where the story was going did it. I was finally ready to let myself take the dive back into fandom in January of this year. My art blew up, something I wasn’t expecting considering my 2-year hiatus. Following this, I was invited into a discord server containing some of the biggest writers, artists, editors, and analysts in the fandom. I had no idea there were so many talented people in the fandom, some already with degrees, some getting their degrees-- creating stuff for it on the side just for fun. The amount of passion and productivity level here is insane, and so is the amount of discussion that has come out of it.

I didn’t realize it at first, but it was actually helping me gain back the courage to share ideas. I lost my confidence in pitching while I was taking the time to heal, and graduating meant there would no longer be a classroom setting I could practice in. This group helped immensely. 

I have made so many friends through this wonderful series, and I have so many fond memories talking to like-minded creatives, getting feedback and a myriad of sources for inspiration, as well as all of the memes and jokes and weekly theorizations that came about as we all waited on the edges of our seats for episodes to air. I needed this so badly, I needed to get back in touch with my roots, when I would go absolutely hog-wild over a cartoon I loved with people who loved it as much I did. Future has been a blessing for me in this way. I graduated feeling like I was back at square-one, but now I feel like I’m on my way again.

It’s 2020 and while I’m doing great right now, I am honestly still recovering from the total exhaustion that followed after graduating a few months ago, and finally leaving the campus where my life fell apart behind. Needless to say, watching Future was like looking into a mirror. Watching one of my favorite characters of all time-- one that grew up with me-- go through so many of the same things I went through not too long ago was absolutely insane to watch unfold. It’s such an important thing too, to show a character go through the process of breaking down over trauma and all the nasty things that come with it, and to have them go on the road to healing. Steven got that therapy. He wasn’t blamed. The gems were called out. The finale was everything I could have ever hoped for. The catharsis I experienced watching it was out of this world.

As I continue my own healing journey, I will always look up to the storyboard artists, revisionists, and designers that I have been following over these past 7 years, as well as the new ones introduced in Future. It's been such a joy watching these artists release their promo art for episodes, talk about their experiences working on the show, and post the work they've done for it alongside episodes airing.

Thank you Rebecca Sugar, the Crewniverse, and the fans, for making this such a truly wonderful and unique experience. Thank you for reminding me that I am, and always will be, an artist, a cartoonist, and a fan. Thank you, my followers, for the overwhelmingly positive response to my artwork. I have had so much fun interacting and discussing the show with you all again over these past few months. Steven Universe and it’s fandom will always have a special place in my heart, and it will always be a classic that I will return to for comfort and inspiration for decades to come. I am sad that the cartoon renaissance is over, but so many doors have been opened thanks to this show. I am so, so excited to see what this show will inspire in the future, and I hope one day I get the opportunity to be a part of that. 

Goodbye Steven, thank you for everything. I wish you healing, and I wish Rebecca and the team a well-deserved rest. ♥️

-Cynthia D.