#because honestly sexuality is such a nuanced thing with him in all verses for different reasons

[yeleltaan]

“Flesh.”

Down to her haunches, poised as a beartrap, the assassin slips a portion of dried meat past her lips, and chews thoughtfully before speaking again.

“Hunger, you possess. I know this for certain; you hunt for knowledge to feed upon, after all. You collect facts. You devour stories. But, and you’ll forgive the directness, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen your appetite sway towards flesh. You don’t stare at naked shoulder blades, your throat doesn’t parch at a bared thigh… I don't recall ever hearing you comment on the beauty of all that is bodily, as a matter of fact. I’m curious: is it just because the human form is unappealing to you, blood of dragons? Or the act itself simply not on the list of your desires? I do not judge.”

She angles her wrist in his direction.

“Dried meat?”

Before all else she utters the word, and as is the case every time Heysel presents him with another topic, Cayin puts his reflections aside to focus on what she may share. She imbues his interest in learning, something he would have deemed wholly unremarkable, with a lyricism that feeds the pride- but even with this in mind the mention of appetite, hunger and flesh briefly mislead him into a literal interpretation, one that would have swiftly led to confusion if she didn’t chose to elaborate. She does, and as the true meaning of her inquiry sets in, his gaze begins to lower following an invisible path to the grass at his side. Verdant strands are caught between his fingers as the latter squeeze and slide along their rising shape. An inhale signals for his response, but all air in his lungs fails to find the words to carry it in time, and so he only breathes out again, deep in the thought.

Think before you speak, one of those small wisdoms he tries to incorporate into his habits. But for some reason this time the deafening silence of his indecision rings his ears with a strange discomfort. His hands move to settle on his robe again, grasping and folding handfuls of it while his arms remain crossed loosely over his lap. Quiet breeds expectation, and today it is unwelcome, which is why he opts to begin prematurely, like one walks into the blinding mist hoping each step will reveal enough to take the next.

“…It’s not. I don’t dislike it.” It appeared strange to him once, but then so did the trees, the rivers and rocks and castles, sands, fields, clouds and even lights, nearly every piece of the world you could fathom, for it was new, and so were the eyes that looked upon them. In time it all fit into place more comfortably, including the physique of man and its many derivatives.  Some such sights he’s revisited through his memories, others he’s built solely from the foundation of an artist’s depiction. Harmonic, grotesque, balanced in its small asymmetries, each piece presumably there for a purpose. Worth picturing again sometime, maybe.

But that’s not what he feels when he sees them up close. Because in the truth of the moment, the first thing he catches is an absence of fur, or at least any dense enough to impede the path of his teeth where it matters. Then, an absence of scales- instead the thin, easily pierced skin that wraps around fat, muscle and cartilage. Shapes alluding to the bones within, connected by tendons, guarding only some of their organs. Everywhere, at every turn, his eyes look first to survival.

The same observations must come naturally to her, a master of her craft. Surely she knows these connections intimately by now, how to undo them without waste, how to bring about the collapse of the whole human structure, at times without even the need to sever. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to him like that’s stopped her from retaining a different paradigm of appreciation for it. Not that he’s ever witnessed the signs of it on her face.

 “It’s just… there’s much else to stare at. Much to look out for.” Things he truly needs for himself, and those he needs to keep away. Those that may make a difference when he’s in need of taking something else. “…I don’t know.”

When she offers the meal right in front of him, it all seems so much more obvious. Two clawed fingertips hook through the given meat, and without a second thought he bites a chunk from it. His jaw munches on its own, and it tastes good. And it is a pleasure that seems so much easier to make happen, than to find someone pleasing and willing to sate you in a safe place. A simple delight that comes in the form of a need that sustains him so vitally, of course he would be hungry for this.

And still, throughout all that chewing his head lingers in more of those stories he’s read. Upon swallowing, his eyes lift to hers to give another inquiry in return, as is their custom.

“…Would you say it’s something worth hungering for?”

[devondespresso]

thank you for your addition to that ace dustin post, i really appreciated your take and your dedication to nuance that the original lacked. like you said, disqualifying the headcanon doesn’t actually address the root cause of why desexualizing dustin in fanworks could be harmful (and not exclusive to ace headcanons) and instead was just ‘i’m right you’re wrong and this is bad’. what bothers me the most about it is how much circulation it’s getting from allos who do not understand it at all, and are just jumping at a chance to exclude aces to be honest. like a post about an actual ace headcanon would never get nearly as many notes as this post is. and that’s upsetting. i’m even more upset that they’re saying ace will is bad when that’s been a headcanon long before he was canonically gay and there is so much canon relatability to me with will that i think lumping that in with this was even more harmful. anyway sorry if you’re getting any hate or anything, just wanted to say you’re totally right! 🤍

sykdjhshhsnh dude this is so sweet i really appreciate it!!

yea it really does suck how posts can get so popular when theres people getting hurt by it. its not even like the all statements are wrong. its 100% a real problem that disabled characters are infantilized and treated like they can't have sex because they're disabled.

its also a real problem that asexuality gets equated to infantilizing or assuming someone can't have sex because they're disabled because of our lack of sexual attraction or the different degrees we feel it. that it carries the implication that asexuals are comparable to infants and can't have sex.

and not only can these ideas coexist, but they're the same side to the argument against infantilization and stigmatizing sex by people who don't fit people's expectations of someone who has sex.

also i appreciate the concern about hate. thankfully i haven't gotten any direct hate from that post and honestly had no idea if it is still talked about. op blocked me (which to be clear im 100% fine with i really didn't want to have a big argument about it anyway) so i don't see the post on my dash and assumed people dropped it after a while. your message was actually the first direct response ive had about outside of the post itself

also also i hadn't seen headcanons about ace will before but i absolutely love it!! theres definitely problems in the fandom with babying him and making him out to be this sweet uwu baby angel too pure for this world and shit but again thats a problem entirely separate from asexuality. i could totally see will being ace, he strikes me as very romantic in season 4 with the painting and his car confession puting so much emphasis on loving mike as a person and what he means to him. they haven't had many chances for physically intimate moments so far so i feel like you could easily headcanon him as any type of asexual and especially if your headcanoning them to see yourself in his character

i hope you have a lovely day anon!! im not super well-versed in the byler fandom but feel free to gush about ace will (or any stranger things characters!) anytime in asks or dms if you feel like it 💕💖💕

[2ndblogg]

Hey! Just read your hot take on novel!wangxian and I absolutely agree. I'm gonna have to say here that I believe it boils down to the fetishization of homosexual men in a lot of the fandom culture that surrounds mlm shipping, as you said it's a space for a lot of women to experiment with their desires and whatnot, but I think therein lies the breaking points between reading novel!wangxian as a good, healthy relationship vs. reading it as a very flawed and toxic one. As an LGBT person, reading the way the author dealt with their relationship made me extremely uncomfortable, it just really feels like something that is written by someone who is more invested in using her queer characters for satisfying her and her reader's own pleasure than a well-built, strong relationship between two characters. Not to take away from the novel in some other aspects, I believe that novel!wwx is a much better, much more nuanced character than what he is in cql, but when it comes to wangxian, I think the intentions are very different for each of them. To each their own, I guess, but I do find it very troubling that some people in the fandom have a really hard time admitting that novel wangxian is not even remotely healthy.

Absolutely.

And can I just say how glad it makes me to see that not everyone is praising this book for it’s lgbt representation...

But I guess that’s also why I just occasionally feel the need to scream my frustrations into the void or try to make sense of the novel.

And why I try to be understanding and accepting of people’s opinion of the novel and not take it ‘personally’ (in the sense of sitting there thinking “holy shit this is how they view ME, this is what they think of ME” etc).

I was in fandoms back when they were really a place dominated by straight (homophobic) women and realism or lgbt representation wasn’t on anyone’s mind (and the occasional dude butting in to say that’s not how sex works or bottoming is experienced was ignored or told to get out). I experienced this change to fandoms being more of a lgbt space, of people becoming aware that media can shape your views of groups of people, of people becoming aware of their fetishizing of fictional gays vs. their prejudice against real life lgbt people etc.

And tbh MXTX just writes like one of those, she writes wangxian like everyone wrote their gay relationships around 2005 and earlier; clear power imbalance, clear roles and attributes that are divided into ‘manly’ and ‘feminine’, certain physical attributes (like the female self insert character aka the bottom being pretty and slight and weaker and shorter), men/the penetrating partner can’t really be raped so anything the woman/bottom tries isn’t really ‘bad’, the male love interest is forceful and self centered but ONLY because he’s so in love and since he’s emotionally stunted he has to express that through sex, men/tops NEED sex and it’s rude/mean to deny them that, the girl/bottom isn’t THAT horny or in charge of their own sexuality but wants to please their partner and what they really get out of it is the emotional aspect, decisions need to be made for them because the dude/top just knows better, the girl/bottom is childish and flirty and the guy/top suffers through it until he finally snaps and shows the girl/bottom who'sboss etc etc. (honestly homophobia and misogyny is so tightly knit in this kind of fiction, if it wasn’t so frustrating it would be very interesting).

Tbh I disagree with novel!wwx being more nuanced (despite a lot of ppl whose opinions I really respect also feeling this way), because I simply cannot seperate him from the wangxian relationship. All I see are tropes and stereotypes applied to make him ‘work’ in the context of the wangxian relationship instead of an actual personality...

To me, in CQL WWX is clearly the main character and you love his interactions with LWJ and want more of them and value them, wheras in the novel most of the time WWX plays second fiddle even when a scene should technically be about him and LWJ’s presence is incredibly suffocating, because he’s always being controlling or at the very least influencing WWX.

I also don’t feel like WWX has much of a character arc/growth. We’re essentially told he had one but the only thing that really actually changes is him hating himself a bit more and letting LWJ smash..., and I guess: he’s less independent than ever, he’s more isolated that ever...

I’ve called novel!wangxian a relationship between an abuser and his victim, because you can find evidence of that in the text. Not because I think the author wanted to portray an unhealthy gay relationship. Like you said, she was fetishizing and wrote for a similar crowd. But to me that ‘realization’ helped...I still don’t see how people can call it a masterpiece but I can at least understand hyping something you like up...

And like, badly written gay relationship or not; gay/straight,man/women, I see how people can find it hot. Exploring your sexuality through fictional characters isn’t necessarily a strictly straight girl phenomena. I probably have read fic that was exactly like this, I can’t judge anyone for it. But no one prints out the last PWP they read and goes, “this is ideal lgbt representation and nothing will ever be this good, the fact that it includes rape makes it so realistic” like????

(Is that part or an effect of the woke and purety culture? you can’t say ‘i like this book but it has flaws’ or ‘i’ve enjoyed this but it’s not up the feminism or lgbt acceptance that i preach/live’ so you have to pretend it’s flawless?)

And like, I do think novel!wangxian is a nightmare when it comes to lgbt representation and I do believe this is largely due to a cishet woman writing about gay men and fetishizing them (the fact that a lot of peoples arguments why novel!wangxian ‘is better’ boils down to ‘there’s kissing and sex’ is also pretty telling). And I am frightend and worried by some peoples response to it.

But is it really fair to see it as just that? It’s a problem sure, but that same thing happens in straight media (which I am admittedly not well versed in). Stephanie Meyer didn’t set out to write Edward Cullen to be a creep and non of the teenage girls that went crazy over him viewed it as such...Reylo fans (aside from some of them proclaiming Finn to be the real villain and saying it’s racist and misogynistic to not find Kylo Ren hot) found a way to view him threatening her as romantic and sexy, Loki fans that didn’t ship him with Thor usually fell into the camp of “he would be a perfect boyfriend” or “what if this OFC was his slave and he raped her everyday <3″... like ignoring/glorifying/romanticizing behaviours or exploring what kinks you might have through the safety of fictional characters and fictional settings isn’t JUST happening when it comes to ‘the gays’...

And not just specifically in fandom spaces either, a lot of ‘romantic’ movies include inappropriate touching, the boy/guy knowing better than the girl what she wants etc. And I absolutely do believe that that’s something that normalized these things for a lot of young girls and guys (I don’t want to get into this too much, I’ve really seen a change in the past few years, but before that it was pretty common for young boys to believe they need to keep pursuing and pressuring a girl that has said no, girls truly thought boys could die of blue balls, girls thought it was their duty as good girlfriends to let their boyfriends fuck them even when they weren’t in the mood, that they couldn’t talk about what they want in bed or what they don’t find enjoyable because ‘sex is for boys and girls get a relationship in exchange’ etc.).

And in much the same way movies have only relatively recently begun being called out for that, it’s also still pretty recently that they’re being called out for having their one queer coded character be a pedophile and a murder or whatever...Like, society as a whole becoming aware of these issues.

But do authors that publish their work with a specific target audience in mind have a responsibility to think about the effect it might have on them? (And I can already hear loud screams of ‘no way, it’s not your fault if your audience isn’t smart enough to understand that this bad thing is bad’, but I actually do believe in a way they do. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write whatever you want, just maybe take a look at HOW you bring your point across. (We do KNOW people are influenced by what propaganda they’re consistantly fed. I mean, you wouldn’t write a pro-drugs childrens book...) )

What if the author isn’t aware of their bias and prejudices? Or their target audience isn’t their actual audience?

And do we, society and media, judge female and male authors differently when it comes to romance and sex in fiction? (The answer is yes btw) But also, where do we draw the line at calling something ‘badly written’ and calling it toxic? Can it be both? As I’ve said before, a lot of people claim that only the physical intimacy scenes of novel!wangxian are bad, because they’re badly written and OOC, some say the book as amazingly written and only the wangxian relationship is bad because the author doesn’t know how to write gay men. In my ‘hot take’ I essentially said that’s not necessarily bad writing so much as it’s simply an (okay, unintentional) toxic relationship. And would this relationship still come across as toxic (or badly written, whichever you want) if we didn’t know the author to be a cishet woman? Or if a gay man had written it? (my personal, eloquent answer for this is: yes, but differently.)

Which was really all just a rambly way to get to my point of: it’s not just fetishizing of gay men, it’s also the homophobia and self-inserting in a safe situation.

You can literally replace WWX in the novel with a female character and it wouldn’t change a thing. The author takes such an effort into building up this power imbalance in every aspect of their life that if WWX were a heroine nothing would change in this (sexist/ancient society) setting.

(And clearly this is something that appeals to people if you look at the amount of female!WWX fics...)

Not even the sex scenes. There are maybe two allusions in all of them combined that WWX might also have a dick but like, you can’t be sure and it sure as hell doesn’t need stimulation.

(and again, that could be written as a kink...but it’s just not.)

CQL is a gay love story. MDZS at it’s core is none of that.

But I also very much agree with your ‘to each their own’, like here I am criticizing and trying to find explanations and whatever, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why someone might like (or write) a book like this, I vastly prefer CQL!wangxian but people have their own reasons for not doing so.

The ‘problem’ really only lies in, as you said, people not being able to accept that it’s not a healthy relationship. Or claiming it to be perfect lgbt rep.

And because my brain can’t shut up today:

I also can’t stop thinking that the way some people ‘glorify’ the book as due to their age and ‘inexperience’.

When I was a pretty young kid and got into fanfiction, there was nothing but completely OOC!whump to be found in the first two fandoms I was in. And I loved it. It was YEARS later that I thought I might like to read something with the characters being...in character. What I’m trying to say, in different stages and phases of your life you might enjoy different things, for different reasons...and obviously, in that moment, you won’t think about ‘what appeals to me here/should this appeal to me/etc’.

I don’t mean inexperience as ‘sexual inexperience’ here, though of course that could be part of it, but also like, inexperience with this genre (is this the first book like this you read, or did you just read 50 in a row that all had the same unhealthy vibes?), with lgbt people and issues (do you know any lgbt people or is your only image of them either the cute boy you can’t have and don’t want to see with another girl or grown men in full kink gear in front of children during CSD? and also: do you think ‘i like this’ and that’s the end of it or do you notice how many people idolize this objectively unhealthy relationship and won’t allow critique on it...)  

I...just wanted to say thanks really.

I just can’t stop rambling apparently and I know I mostly just repeated what you said or what I already said but in longer... I just really do feel very strongly about novel!wangxian and the perception of them and have actually at times felt very personally...worried/affected, by people’s acceptance and love of them and I just... have to try and make sense of it...

[asettledsky]

Alright, I have more thoughts on the Betelgeuse vs. Beetlejuice thing. 

I’ve said before that these are two very different characters with very different relationships towards Lydia. This was before I saw the musical. But it’s still true, just in a different way than I thought.

These two characters come from very different story lines, and the very main difference, and the reason all you babies like musical Beetlejuice but don’t like movie Betelgeuse, is that musical Beetlejuice has a... for lack of a better phrase we’ll call it a redemption arc. (A stupid and very rushed one, the pacing in that musical OMG) Whereas Betelgeuse doesn’t because he doesn’t really need one because he didn’t really do anything wrong. (we’ll come back to that). 

Beetlejuice is the main character in the musical. In the movie he’s the antagonist. This change is made probably because it’s a musical and not a horror movie.

I mean.... Beetlejuice isn’t exactly a horror movie, but it’s got it’s roots in the horror genre even if it’s more of a comedy. And horror movies aren’t named after the heroes, they’re named after the monster.  Whereas musicals generally.... aren’t. They don’t have a lot of naming conventions that I know of.

Being that he’s a main character in 2019 Beetlejuice had to be sort of... way more in your face about things. He couldn’t just be an asshole doing his job anymore, he had to be a generally harmless character who did something bad and then could make up for it. Because it’s 2019 and audiences don’t appreciate nuanced characters as much as they think they do anymore. He’s not allowed to end the show while still being morally grey. 

NOTE: I’m not saying he’s not a complex character. I have many thoughts on this subject. But he’s not subtle. It’s why he’s always talking to the audience, so that we know his motivations 100% of the time. Mostly anyway.

Betelgeuse, however, is an asshole who we know next to nothing about. BUT, before anyone gets on the hate bandwagon, there are a few things to point out here.  1. His on screen body count is exactly the same as musical Beej’s. A big whopping ZERO. We don’t know what happens to Maxi Deen and wife, but we also don’t know what happened to musical Otho or the Girl Scout once she was chased by the clones, so....  2. He doesn’t maliciously lie or manipulate anyone into doing anything. He’s got the skeezy used car salesman vibe, and he definitely targeted the Maitlands because he thought they’d be an easy job since they clearly didn’t know anything. But beyond that he didn’t pull anything like what musical Beej pulled. AND he did exactly what he said he was going to do each time he was summoned. 

As supposed bad guys go he’s.... not actually a bad guy? I mean, there are an awful lot of headcanons that make him dark and evil and really damn malicious. But.... absolutely nothing that happens in the movie that suggests this. Those are all just headcanon. The worse he does is be a creep. 

Betelgeuse is being judged not for the content of his character, but because he’s a dirty moss covered horndog. And honestly that’s a little disappointing.

Because Musical Beej is also a dirty horndog, he’s just more equal opportunity about it, and somehow that makes him less of an asshole because he’s more interested in Adam than he is Barbara? One shouldn’t get a pass on sexual harassment just because it’s a same sex thing. It’s not actually cuter than het sexual harassment.  Neither version is blatantly horny on main for Lydia (aside from some leering from Snake!Beej when he was trying to scare everyone, but then again he was trying to scare everyone sooo...) , so using the excuse that movie Beej was being pervy to a minor doesn’t work. And in fact it makes the fact that he tricked her into a marriage in the musical WORSE since they were buddies and theoretically better acquainted in the musical. 

So, circling back. Musical Beetlejuice. HE needed the redemption arc. Because he was an irredeemable demon with no context for human emotion, which is why he thinks it’s perfectly reasonable that he was able to lie and blackmail and torture his way into a marriage (see: His verses in Creepy Old Guy) . He literally needed to do that living and then dying thing to have empathy for other people. He’d been alone, isolated and one of a kind for.... however long he’s been alive I genuinely think he had no idea that humans had emotions on par with what he felt.

In conclusion:  New media today doesn’t stand for likeable asshole characters anymore, because.... I dunno, the new generation doesn’t believe in it any more? Maybe the market got over-saturated with them. (I’m looking at you Sherlock).  Also movie Beej’s looks are working against him. Even at the height of the likeable asshole thing they were all conventionally attractive and that’s why they got so much attention. (Looking at you House). And the moss covered corpse look is sort of particular to monster fuckers.