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shirlleycoyle · 3 years ago

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How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon

Every fictional character you can think of has experienced 9/11 in fanfiction.

A Clone Wars veteran with two lightsabers is on United Airlines Flight 93 and prevents it from crashing. Ron and Hermione get caught up in the chaos as the towers fall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends watch the attacks unfold on TV from Sunnydale. We have spent 20 years trying to process what happened on 9/11 and its fallout, and that messy process can be tracked through the countless, sad, disturbing, and sometimes very funny fanfiction left across the internet.

Many of the fanfics written in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks seemed to directly respond to the news as it happened, processing the tragedy in real-time through the eyes of characters they loved. In the absence of a canon episode where Daria Morgendorffer paid respects to those lost, writing fanfic about these characters also experiencing trauma helped fans cope.

One YuGiOh fanfic published on fanfiction.net in May 2002 could have been ripped exactly from what this writer experienced that Tuesday morning. “It started as a normal day,” user Gijinka Renamon wrote. Yugi and his friends were in school, where their teacher informed them of the attacks and sent everyone home from school.

“After reading people’s 9/11 fics, I decided to write my own, and put a certain character in it. And Yugi and his pals were my first choice,” the author's note reads, explaining the connection they felt to United flight 93 and the World Trade Center attacks. Given that they lived in Pennsylvania, and “it’s close to New York, I felt really sad about it.”

Stitch, a fandom journalist for Teen Vogue, told Motherboard that this reaction to 9/11 is not at all uncommon in fandom.

"Fandom has always been a place that positions nothing as 'off limits,'" she said. "Historical tragedies like the Titanic sinking and atrocities like… all of World War 2 show up regularly across the past 30 years of people creating stories and art about the characters they love. So, on some level, it makes sense that 9/11 and the following 20-year military installation in the Middle East has joined the ranks of things people in different fandoms turn into settings for their fan fiction."

Reactions depicted in a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics published in the weeks after the attacks ring a little truer to the characters. “Tuesday, 11th September 2001,” written by Anna K, almost echoes the lyrics from “I’ve Got a Theory,” one of the songs in the musical episode that aired in November 2001. “We have seen the apocalypse. We have prevented it. Actually, we’ve prevented quite a few. So we know what they look like,” they write, before taking a darker turn. “They look a lot like…New York today.”

Killing demons and vampires doesn’t phase the Scooby Gang, but when preventable human death is brought into the picture, it’s gut wrenching.

“What am I supposed to do…When I can’t do anything to save the world?” Buffy cries into Spike’s chest, watching the attacks unfold on TV in a fanfic the author described as being “about feeling numb and helpless.”

In “Blood Drive,” Kirayoshi writes about Buffy and her friends saving a van full of donated blood meant for victims of the attacks from a group of thirsty vampires. One Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic even takes a blindly patriotic turn, where noted lesbian witch Tara McClay helps Xander hang an American flag from the window of the magic shop to make Anya feel better.

Experiencing 9/11 as a young teenager was overwhelming not just because of the loss of life. Almost immediately after the event itself, it was as if the entirety of American culture re-oriented itself towards an overtly jingoistic stance. As we get distance from the attacks, seeing the tone of television and movies from the early 2000s is jarring, and some have gone viral on Twitter. In the world of pop music, mainstream musicians like the Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted from the radio while Toby Keith sang about putting a boot up the ass of terrorists. On the Disney Channel, a young Shia Labeouf reading a poem he supposedly wrote about the events. The poem concludes with the line, "it's awesome to be an American citizen."

In a world so completely saturated with this messaging, it is not surprising that fanfic authors started including 9/11 in their work so soon after the event. Even The West Wing had a strange, out of continuity, fanfic-esque episode where the characters reacted to 9/11. In some cases, it made sense that the characters in the stories would be close to or a part of the events themselves.

"For characters like John Watson or Captain America, the idea works to an extent," Stitch told Motherboard. "In the original Sherlock Holmes works and the 2011 BBC series, Watson had just returned from Afghanistan. For Captain America and other Marvel heroes, 9/11 was something that was addressed in-universe in The Amazing Spider-Man volume 2 #36. Technically, 9/11 is 'canon' to the Marvel universe."

In “Early Warning: Terrorism,” a fanfiction for the TV show Early Edition in which a man who mysteriously receives tomorrow's newspaper, predicting the future, avoids jingoism, but tries to precent 9/11 from happening. This fanfic remains unfinished; it’s unclear if the characters successfully prevent 9/11 in this retelling.

Largely in fanfic from the era just after 9/11, when many young authors were trying to emotionally grapple with it, the characters don't re-write or undo the events themselves. It's this emphasis on the reaction to tragedy that colors the fanfiction that features 9/11 going forward.

Although fanfiction authors have been writing about 9/11 consistently since soon after the event, whenever that fanfiction reaches outside of its intended audience, it looks bizarre.

A screenshot of a Naruto 9/11 fanfic on the Tumblr subreddit comes without any context, or even more than two lines and an author's note. It’s impossible to suss out if this falls into the category of sincere fanfic without the rest of the piece or a publication date, but modern-day commenters on the Reddit thread see it as classic Tumblr trash.

Screenshot from r/Tumblr

“Bin Laden/Dick Cheney, enemies to lovers, 10k words, slow burn,” one user joked in the replies, underscoring the weirdness of Naruto being in the Twin Towers by comparing it to a What If story about Cheney and Bin Laden slowly falling deeply in love.

It’s hard to tell how much of the 9/11 fanfic and fanart starting a few years after the attacks is sincere, and how much of it is ironic, and trying to make fun of the very concept of writing fanfiction about 9/11.

A 2007 anime music video (in which various clips, usually from anime, are cut together to music) that combines scenes from The Lion King with Linkin Park’s “Crawling” and clips from George Bush’s speeches immediately after the attacks feels like the perfect example of this. Even the commenters can’t seem to suss out if this person is a troll or not.

There’s no way that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 9/11 fanart could be serious, right? Especially if the description pays tribute to “some of the nation's most memorable buildings,” and features five of the main characters as child versions of themselves. The comments again are split between users thanking the artist for a thoughtful remembrance post, and people making their own headcanon for why Twilight Sparkle is surreptitiously absent from the scene.

Screengrab via DeviantArt

There’s Phineas and Ferb fanfic that combines a 9/11 tribute concert with flashbacks to Ferb being rescued from the towers as a baby, written on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It jumps from introspection to lines like, “‘Quiet Perry the Platypus. I’m trying to listen to these kids singing a 9/11 tribute.’”

The author's notes make it more likely that they meant for this to be a tribute piece, but it doesn’t quite make sense until watching a YouTube dramatic reading of it from 2020, fully embracing the absurdity of it all.

“For me, 9/11 is synonymous with war. It completely changed the course of my life," Dreadnought, the author of a Captain America fanfic Baghdad Waltz that sees Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes fall in love over the course of the war on terror, told Motherboard. "It’s the reason I joined the military, and I developed deep connections with people who would go on to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. These very much felt like my generation’s wars, perhaps because people I graduated high school with were the youngest folks eligible to serve at the time.”

Dreadnought told Motherboard that although they didn't deploy, their career has kept 9/11 and the trauma from it in their mind. After seeing that people who fantasize about Steve and Bucky getting together seemed particularly interested in reading fanfiction that related to 9/11, they decided to try their hand at it.

"I had to do something with all of that emotionally, and I’m admittedly a bit emotionally avoidant. So I learned through fic that it’s easier for me to process those feelings and the knowledge of all the awful stuff that can happen in war if I can turn it into something creative," Dreadnought said. "Give the feelings to fake people and then have those fake people give the feelings to readers!"

To Dreadnought, who is a queer man, the experience of researching and writing this was more cathartic than they first expected, especially as a way to navigate feelings about masculinity, military culture, and queer identity. But they said the research they did, which included watching footage of first responders at ground zero, was what helped them finally process the event itself.

"It was like a delayed horror, and it was more powerful than I expected it would be." Dreadnought said. "When I was eighteen, I was pretty emotionally divorced from 9/11; I just knew I wanted to do something about it. So coming back to it in my 30s while writing this fic, it was a very different experience. Even the research for this story ended up being an extraordinarily valuable exercise in cognitively and emotionally processing 9/11 and all of its second and third order effects."

Fanfiction that features 9/11 provides an outlet for people who still grapple with the trauma from that day. But Stitch warns that the dynamics of fandom and how it relates to politics can also create fiction that's less respectful and more grotesque.

"With years of distance between the stories written and the original events of 9/11, there seems to be some sort of cushion for fans who choose to use those events as a catalyst for relationships—and Iraq and Afghanistan for settings," Stitch said. "The cushion allows them room to fictionalize real world events that changed the shape of the world as we know it, but it also insulates them from having to think about what they may be putting into the world."

The tendency of turning these events into settings or backgrounds for mostly white, male characters to fall in love has the unintended effect of displacing the effects that the war on terror has had on the world over. Steve and Bucky might fall in love during the war on terror, but they would also be acting as a part of the American military in a war that has been criticized since it started. Fanfic writers in other fandoms have come under fire for using real world tragedy as settings for fic before. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake Supernatural fanfiction about the actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki going to the island to do aid became controversial within the fandom. There have also been fics where characters grapple with the death of George Floyd that is written in a way that displaces the event from the broader cultural context of race in America.

"A Captain America story where Steve Rogers is a 'regular' man who joins the US Army and 'fights for our freedom' post-9/11 is unlikely to deal with the war’s effect on locals who are subject to US military intervention," Stitch said. "It’s unlikely to sit with what Captain America has always meant and what a writer is doing by dropping Steve Rogers into a then-ongoing conflict in any capacity."

After enough time, “never forget” can even morph into “but what if it never happened?” A 19k+ word Star Wars alternate universe fanfic asks this question, wondering what would have unfolded if someone with two lightsabers was on United Flight 93. This fic, part of a larger fanfic series with its own Wikia, considers what would have happened if Earth was a military front in the Clone Wars.

In this version of events, a decorated general who served in the Clone Wars is able to take back control of Flight 93 before it crashes, landing safely and preventing even more tragedy from happening that day. In the end, all of the passengers who made harrowing last calls to their loved ones before perishing in a Pennsylvania field survive thanks to the power of the Force, and are awarded medals of honor by President Bush.

Twenty years after the attacks, it’s painful to think about what would have happened if people got to work 15 minutes later, or missed their trains that morning. There weren’t Jedi masters deployed to save people in real life, but for some of the fanfic writers working today, the world of Star Wars might feel just as removed as the world before September 11, 2001.

Fiction serves as a powerful playground for processing cultural events, especially generational trauma. The act isn't neutral though; a decade's worth of fanfiction that takes place on or around 9/11 shows how our own understanding of a traumatic event can shift with time.

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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meret118 · 2 years ago

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"Book of Queer" How to watch: Premiered on Discovery+

The most appropriate way to kick off Pride Month is with a celebration of LGBTQ+ history, honouring the heroes who likely never imagined there would be a month-long explosion of rainbow merchandise and corporate statements.

With the help of queer historians and experts, "The Book of Queer" aims to shed light on historical figures whose contributions have been overlooked, or their queer identities erased, by mainstream society. Narrated by queer icons and featuring an entirely LGBTQ+ ensemble cast, the five-episode series will include stories about Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bayard Rustin, Josephine Baker, Harvey Milk, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and more.As conservative lawmakers across the US attempt to ban educators from even acknowledging the existence of queer and trans people in classrooms, this series, infusing facts with comedy and musical fun, is a vital reminder that LGBTQ+ people have existed throughout history.

"Dead End: Paranormal Park" How to watch: Premieres June 16 on Netflix in the US

Fans of queer cartoons should make sure to clear their schedules for the arrival of "Dead End: Paranormal Park." The animated horror-comedy, based on creator Hamish Steele's graphic novel series "DeadEndia," follows trans teen Barney (voiced by Zach Barack) who gets a job at the local haunted theme park where an encounter with a demon gives his dog Pugsley (Alex Brightman) the ability to talk.

The coming-of-age story will see Barney, along with his pal Norma (Kody Kavitha), encounter zombies, ghosts and other supernatural beings while also navigating family, identity and even crushes.

The current political climate is especially hostile toward queer and trans youth, so an LGBTQ+-inclusive kids and family series in which a young trans protagonist (voiced by a trans actor) finds a space and friends that let him embrace his true self and laugh along the way cannot premiere soon enough.

"First Kill" How to watch: Premieres June 10 on Netflix

If you’re dying for a dose of delicious supernatural queer teen angst, look no further than "First Kill." Based on a short story by V.E. Schwab, the series puts a young lesbian twist on the classic forbidden romance between a vampire and a slayer.

Teenage vampire Juliette Fairmont (Sarah Catherine Hook) has hit vamp adolescence and is finally expected to kill and feed on actual humans. Although she has been pushing back against this rite of passage for as long as possible, Jules can't help but be drawn to her crush, Calliope Burns (Imani Lewis). Cal, a recent transfer student, has a secret of her own: She's the youngest daughter of a family of monster hunters.

Cal is eager to prove that she can take down a demon by herself, but she quickly discovers that killing Juliette is as impossible as denying her feelings for her. The series should appeal to anyone who thought "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Twilight" would have been better if it were gay.

"Queer as Folk" How to watch: Premieres June 9 on Peacock

The men, the sex and the city are hotter than Hades in Peacock’s multicultural, New Orleans-set remake of the pioneering soap, this time without the same over-reliance on white, cis men to propel the narrative. (Whether you see its depiction of a mass murder reminiscent of the Pulse nightclub shooting as a strained device or an apt reflection of current affairs and LGBTQ history is another matter.)

Still, carving out new terrain by moving Babylon to Frenchmen Street, and queer Southerners — especially queer people of color — to the foreground, this "Queer as Folk" conjures its share of carnal pleasures. As Brodie's (Devin Way) move home upends the lives of his ex (Johnny Sibilly) and a talented young drag artist (Fin Argus), you can have your bourbon ginger and drink it too. As for the rest, painfully earnest and more than a little pained do not read, in this particular political moment, as terribly far off the mark.

More at the link.

#Queer #Lgbtqia #Tv

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gaylonelydyke · 4 years ago

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if it’s not too late, 12 for episodes and ships, and 17!

its never too late! thankyou for the ask 🥰 oo damn this is gonna be a hefty one, just to prepare you this is gonna be long 😅😅😅

spoiler alert for my friends who are finishing up season 2 rn, be careful if you look at my top five episodes, pay attention the the episode numbers, i will put [ ] in bold at the beginning and end of spoilers!

12. Top 5 ships

5. faith x myself because have you seen faith? shes such a babe! spare consensual kiss maam?

4. willow x oz, i dont know if this is an unpopular or not but i feel like if the 90s had been more accepting of term then willow wouldve been bisexual, but like even now tv shows will rarely let characters say that word :( but anyway i love them! theyre both quirky and kinda awkward but its such a sweet relationship and you really see how they go from awkward crushes to an actual deep relationship, oz is one of my favourite characters too what a dude!

3. giles x jenny, mlmxwlw solidarity in this bisexual couple! there is no an ounce of straight between them and i love it, i love their dynamic, i love that giles *respects women* (im staring daggers at xander rn), also the original girlboss x malewife couple askdjaksjhd

2. drusilla x spike, these two!!!!!! once again a bisexual couple with zero straight between them, the vibes are off the charts. sexy vampires, goth x punk love, i just love them man, and their relationship is so interesting to delve into. like theyre vampires, theyre soulless and yet they have a capacity for love, they care deeply for eachother, theyre so tender towards eachother in season 2 in the way they take turns to care for one another, also drusilla picking spike up with one hand made me gay and thats on that

1. willow x tara!!!!! lesbians man lesbians! they have a beautiful relationship, until a certain point wink wink, they feel like a perfect match, willows become more outgoing due to buffy and xander snd having a proper group of friends, so its cool to see her as the more outgoing independant one in the relationship, and tara is such a honey 🥺 the biggest sweetheart in the world what a babe!!!! also like how groundbreaking was their relationship? as a queer couple, they had p much the dame amount of screentime as a aueer relationship today! and willow says the word lesbian so many times and is always making gay jokes which is something shows today are too scared to do, its honestly refreshing which is weird for a show in the 90/00s

12. Top 5 episodes

this is so hard because its such a damn good show so i had to rlly be picky about this but here we go

5. 6x22 ‘grave’- i watched buffy for the first time last year at work coz i worked with one other person just packing shit, and THIS was the episode that made us cry infront of eachother. the scene with willow and xander at the end is one of my all time favourite scenes and like legit we were watching and we starting going like ha.. this is so sad Q_Q and we looked at eachother and we were both crying akdjdjsjdhs its SO GOOD, like this is a friendship ive been so invested in and [seeing xander be able to pull her back from that dark place was so heart wrenching and amazing god its so good]

4. 3x12 ‘helpless’ - im finishing up s2 in my rewatch rn so i havent rewatched this one to double check but i remember loving it man. buffys father daughter relationship with giles is my favourite of the whole show they make my heart ache, so i love that this is an episode that really shows you how dedicated giles is to her, [its the breaking point where he finally disregards the fact that hes a watcher and acts as her father once and for all, its a turning point for their relationship where he is finally embracing the fact that shes like a daughter to him and i just love to see it Q_Q get you a dad who will leave his lifes calling for you]

3. 4x22 ‘restless’ - season 4 is interesting coz it has really good episodes and them some gd awful ones 😂😂 but this one just blew me away, i love a good character study episode and this is THE SHIT! its so weird and creepy but in the most perfect way, its not on the nose its so subtle, it feels like an uncanny valley version of buffy almost, i like that they finished the season first and then took this episode to do something out of the box and different i feel like it lets them fully explore this idea without the pressure of needing plot included. [also the cheese man is iconic. dont however like xander being all nasty with willow and tara but whats new there man]

2. 1x12 ‘The Prophecy Girl’ - for my first watch of buffy i wasnt that into the first season, like i enjoyed it but i didnt think it was anything super special? but this episode changed EVERYTHING for me. up until now buffy had been fun, witty, charming, but not anything new atleast for me, maybe in the 90s it was but right now its your average teen supernatural show. but this episode!!!! the emotion! buffy facing her death, her speech about how shes just 16 and shes scared and she doesnt want to die, that is what i wanna see!! its heartbreaking and it made me cry, and then it gives us the wonderful moment of giles trying to take her place and buffy realising that she has to be the one to do it, man its so good! basically anything with buffy and giles being a duo is gonna make it an automatic yes from me and this is indeed the case for this episode, i just love that the show remembers that shes a child! shes not brave all the time, shes not strong all the time, shes just doing her best and sometimes its overwhelming, 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 i bow to this episode

1. 2x17 ‘passion’ - i know i just sang praises about prophecy girl but THIS EPISODE IS THE SHIT, the best episode full stop. i wont accept any argument. angel is probably my favourite big bad, its so funny to see plain bread, mopey brooding angel become this charismatic, funny, poetic, blood thirsty angelus, hes everything i want in a villain and in this episode he delivers! rip jenny tho love her. i think the tension built around angel is so good, because of his drawings and notes left around, every scene youre worrying like is he here now? are they safe or what? its so tense! and also it is me and im a slag for buffy x giles father daughter moments and this episode fucking delivers! giles discovering jennys dead body is probably one of the best scenes on the show, the dramatic irony is heAVY, we know jenny is dead, we know that these flowers arent from her, but giles is so so happy, and i want to see him happy but you just know somehing horrific is about to happen and damn does it. its a masterpiece! i love jenny and giles so much it is so sad, but also the fact that it gave us that scene makes me almmmoost ok with it? i also love the moment where giles breaks down in buffys arms, hes been there for her and now shes returning the favour and hes accepting it i just 😭😭😭 also on a different note, angels narration of this episode is amazing! it gives us great insight to who he is as “evil angel” and like even though hes awful i was also kind of rooting for him coz hes just such a great villain

sorry this is so long lmao, last question!

17. Which characer do you wish had less of a focus on them in the show?

i dont wanna get yelled at butttttt i dont like the amount of focus on dawn. i think it makes sense for the her first season considering the story arc but that season really does double down its focus onto dawn and buffy and it barely leaves room for anyone else to have a storyline, it keeps the episodes super depressing too its like a constant level of just sadness the whole time because we’re so stuck in THEIR arc, theres no room to balance it out and have a breather, some people might like that its more serious but i really really didnt like, i love episodes like prophecy girl where it is campy and brings the more emotional notes in when the time comes, but dawns whole arc is just constantly depressing the whole time i just hate it, and also just shes not a character i felt i could connect to because of how suddenly shes introduced, so its weird to have her SO focused on in the first half of that season coz we dont know her yet so i feel like the emotional moments dont land the way that they should? basically they shouldve eased us into dawn or introduced her differently and maybe i would like her enough to want the focus on her but i really just dont

adksjakjshd apologies for the essay this is, thanks for the ask!

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #why did i write a paragraph for everything im so sorry #i wish i knew how to add a read more link but i dont on mobile #my post #dawn fans please dont murder me #i dont hate her i just dont like her yanno #i am scared people are gonna hate me for not liking her but we all have our tastes

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adorpheus · 4 years ago

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on fujoshi and fetishization

Lately, more and more, both here on tumblr and on other sites, I keep seeing people spew unfiltered hatred at fujoshi - that is, women who like mlm content such as gay fanfic and fanart featuring men with other men. And I don’t mean like a specific type of fujoshi, like the ones who are genuinely being weird about it, but just like a general hatred for girls (but especially straight identifying girls) who express love for gay romance.

I hate to break this to you all, but women (including straight women!) actually are allowed to like mlm fanfiction and fanart, even enthusiastically so. A woman simply expressing her love of gay fanfic, even if it is in kind of a cringey way or a way that you personally don’t like, is NOT automatically fetishization.

I’ve been on the receiving end of fetishization for my entire life, from a very young age, as many black and brown folx have, so I consider myself pretty well acquainted with how it works. Fetishization isn’t just like, being really into drawings of boys kissing, or whatever the fuck y’all are trying to imply on this god forsaken site.

Fetishization is complicated imo, and can encompass a lot of things, such as (but not limited to):

1 - dehumanization, e.g. viewing a group of people as sexual objects who exist purely for entertainment purposes, rather than acknowledging them as actual people who deserve respect and rights

and

2 - projecting certain assumptions onto said people based on their race/sexuality/whatever is being fetishized. These assumptions are often, but not always, sexual in nature (like the idea that black people in general are more sexual than other races, etc etc etc).

I’m going to use myself as an example to illustrate my point. Please note this isn’t the best or most nuanced example, but it is the most simplistic. A white person finding me attractive and respectfully appreciating my black features as part of what makes me beautiful is not, on its own, fetishization. A white person finding me attractive solely or mostly because I’m a PoC is now in fetishization territory. Similarly, assuming I’m dominant because of my blackness (like saying “step on me mommy” and shit like that) is hella fetishistic.

That being said, theres definitely a difference between how fetishization works in real life with real people, and how it shows up in fandom.

Fetishization manifests in many different ways in fandom, but most commonly on the mlm side of things, I personally see it appear as conservative (or centrist) women who love the idea of two men together, but don’t actually like gay people, and don’t necessarily think LGBT+ people deserve rights (or “special treatment” as its sometimes dog whistled). These women view queer men as sexual objects for entertainment rather than an actual group of people who deserve to be protected from systemic oppression. I’ve noticed that they often don’t even think of the men they “ship” together as actually being gay, and may even express disgust at the idea of a character in an mlm ship being headcanon’d gay. In case its not obvious, this is pretty much exactly the same way a lot of cishet men fetishize lesbians (they see “lesbian” as a porn category, rather than like, what actual LGBT people think of when we read the word lesbian). There’s a pretty popular viral tweet thread going around where someone explains seeing this trend of conservative women who like mlm stuff, and I have also personally witnessed this phenomenon myself in more than one fandom.

The funny thing is, maybe its just me buuuut.... The place I see this particular kind of fetishization happen most is not in the anime/BL fandom, from which the term fujoshi originates - I actually see these type of women way way more in western fandom spaces like Supernatural, Harry Potter, and Hannibal. I can’t stress this enough, there’s a shocking amount of people who are like, straight up trump supporters in these fandoms. If you want to experience it, try joining a Hannigram or Destiel group on facebook and you will probably encounter one eventually especially if you happen to be living through a major historical event. Like these women probably wouldn’t even be considered “fujoshi”, because that term doesn’t really apply to them given they aren’t in the BL/anime fandom, yet they’re the ones I personally see actually doing the most harm.

Of course this isn’t the ONLY kind of fetishizing woman in the mlm/BL world, there are other ways fetishization shows up, but this is the most toxic kind that I see.

A girl just being really into BL or whatever may be “cringe” to you, or she may be expressing her love for BL in a “cringey” way, but a straight woman really enjoying BL is not, on its own, somehow inherently fetishization. Yes, sometimes teenage girls act kind of cringe about how much they like BL and that might be annoying to you, but its not necessarily ~problematic~.

That being said, IT NEEDS BE REMARKED that a lot of the “fujoshi” that you all hate so deeply, are actually closeted trans men or nonbinary people who haven’t yet come to terms with their gender identity, or are otherwise just NOT cishet. I know because I was one of these closeted people for years, and I honestly think tumblr and the cultural obsession around purity is one of the many reasons I was closeted so deeply for so long. STORYTIME LOL!!! In my early adolescence, I was a sort of proto “fujoshi”. I identified as a bi girl who was mostly attracted to men, or as most (biphobic) people called it, “practically straight”. I wrote and read “slash” fanfic and looked at as well as drew my own fanart. We didn’t use the term fujoshi back then, but that’s definitely how I could have been described. I was obsessed with yaoi, BL, whatever you want to call it, to a cringe-inducing degree. I really struggled to relate to most het romances, so when I first discovered yaoi fanfics (as we called them at the time), I fell in love and felt like I finally found the type of romance content that was made for me. I didn’t know exactly why, I just knew it hit different. LGBT+ fanart and fanfiction brought me an immense amount of joy, and I didn’t really think too hard about why.

At some point, in my early 20s, after reading lots of discourse™ here on tumblr and other places like twitter, I started to get the sinking feeling that my passion for gay fanfiction was ~problematic~. I had always felt a sense of guilt for being into mlm content, because literally anyone who found out I liked BL (especially the men I dated) shamed me for liking it all the fucking time (which btw is literally just homophobic, like can we talk about that?). In addition to THAT bullshit, now I’m seeing posts telling me that girls who like BL are cringey gross fetishists who inspire rage and should go die?

Let me tell you, I internalized the fuck out of messages like this. I desperately wanted to avoid being ~problematic~. At the time, I thought being problematic was like the worst thing you could be. I was terrified of being “cancelled”, before canceling was even really a thing. I thought to myself, “oh my god, I’m gross for liking this stuff? I should stop.” I beat myself up over this. I wanted so badly to be accepted, and to be deemed a Good Person by the internet and society at large.

I tried to shape up and become a good ally (lmfao). I stopped writing fanfic and deleted all the ones I was working on at the time. I made a concerted effort to assimilate into cishet culture, including trying to indulge myself more deeply in the few fandoms I could find that had het content I did enjoy (Buffy, True Blood, Pretty Little Liars, etc). I would occasionally look at BL/fanfic/etc in private, but then I would repress my interest in it and not look for a while. Instead I would look at women in straight relationships, and create extremely heterosexual Couple Goals pinterest boards, and try to figure out how I could become more like these women, so I, too, could be loved someday.

This cycle of repression lasted like eight years. Throughout it all, I was performing womanhood to the best of my ability and trying to become a woman that was worthy of being in a relationship. I went in and out of several “straight” relationships, wondering why they didn’t make me feel the way reading fanfic did. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out why straight intimacy didn’t work for me. I just didn’t enjoy it. I always preferred looking at or making gay fanfiction/fanart over actual intimacy with men in real life.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a trans coming out video that someone I was following posted online, my egg started to crack, and to make an extremely long story short, after like 3 years of introspection and many gender panic attacks that I still experience to this day, I realized that I’m uh... MAYBE... NOT CIS..!? :|

I truly believe if I had just been ALLOWED TO LIKE GAY STUFF WITHOUT BEING SHAMED FOR IT, I probably would have realized I was trans way way sooner. Because for me, indulging in my love of gay romance and writing gay fanfic wasn’t me being a weirdo fetishist, it was actually me exploring my own gender identity. It is what helped me come to terms with being a nonbinary trans boy.

Not everyone realizes they are trans at age 2 or whatever the fuck. Sometimes you have to go through a cringey fujoshi phase and multiple existential crises to realize how fucking gay you are AND THATS FINE.

And one more thing - can we just be real here?

A lot of anti-fujoshi sentiment is literally just misogyny. omg please realize this. Its “women aren’t allowed to enjoy things” but, like... with gay fanfics. Some of the anti-fujoshi posts I see come across my dash are clearly ppl projecting a caricature they invented in their head of a demonic fujoshi fetishist onto any woman who expresses what they consider to be a little too much enthusiasm for gay content and then using their perception of that individual as an excuse to justify their disdain for any women, especially straight women, ‘invading’ their ~oh so exclusive~ queer fandom spaces.

god get over yrselfs this is gatekeeping by another name

idk why i spent so long writing this no one is even going to read it, does anyone even still use this site

*EDIT: HOLY SHIT WHEN DOING RESEARCH FOR THIS POST I FOUND OUT THAT Y-GALLERY IS BACK OMG!!!

#rant #fujoshi #I SAID WHAT I SAID #personal #gender stuff

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ifeveristoday · 4 years ago

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i need to be writing instead of reading comic books

but after I post this it’s back to the grind

Spoilers for Willow #4: “The subtext is rapidly becoming text” (actually there isn’t a chapter name for this issue. Purposeful? Read on)

In the many, many years since Buffy has been off the year, and tbh during its run, a lot has been written about the metaphors the show used to stand in for real life terrors. My opinion is that when they did it correctly, it was subtle and fit the story - and when it wasn’t...it really, really wasn’t. Anvils of foreshadowing, if you will.

One of the takes was that the vampires represented homosexuality/queerness - which I don’t agree with, because that aligned gayness with something bad or immoral, and when the vampires weren’t shown to have grey nuances, they were complete monsters with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

However the show definitely played around with Otherness in regards to Buffy and the Scoobies in varying degrees: the feeling that you’re the only one/no one will understand/you exist on the fringes from mainstream society, and chosen family because the people who are supposed to care for you don’t and can’t understand.

It’s about identity and finding out who you are and what you do with that knowledge.

Identities and queerness is something that the Willow miniseries has baked in from the very first issue. Willow is lost and trying to figure out who she is - not just as Xander and Buffy’s best friend, Rose’s ex, dutiful daughter and excellent student and survivor of trauma. She is trying to figure out where she fits in post Hellmouth and losing Xander (who is a huge part of her life and as we see in this issue, the one person who made her feel like she belonged pre-meeting Buffy.)

She even divides her life like this: Pre Buffy and After She Went to Hell and Back. The dangling thread metaphor is a lovely way to sum up Willow’s feelings - she continually references not feeling comfortable in her skin, and being a little undone, of being an Other in Sunnydale. This could refer to both her sexuality and not fitting in with Sunnydale’s typical ‘ignore it and it will go away’ vibes/and also high school is just difficult for different kids. Her circle is really two people at the beginning - Xander and Rose. When she meets Buffy, it expands to include Buffy, Giles and Ms. Calendar (I’m sure Willow knew Ms. Calendar before, but it was in a strictly teacher/student way and not Ms. Calendar knows the big picture and is almost a friend way).

And for a while - that’s enough for Willow.

But then Xander is taken away. He’s her anchor, moreso than Rose was. And even though Jordie didn’t write the Willow comics, it’s a really lovely thing to see Willow and Xander’s platonic bond as the emotional core of the series repeated in her miniseries. Romantic relationships often take precedence over platonic relationships (especially those between men and women) so it’s refreshing that the Boom!verse acknowledges how important Willow and Xander are to each other. They love each other and the loss of that love unravels Willow. She’s suddenly that dangling thread again. As much as she cares for Buffy, and Giles, and the new Scooby gang, Xander is her person.

Without him, everything else doesn’t seem to fit right - so when she settles into Abhainn, it all clicks. Suddenly she’s in a place where everyone else is like her - the comic uses the witch identity as a nod to Willow’s interests, but really, it’s also not subtle shorthand for Willow has found a queer community. The word ‘witch’ comes up a lot in this issue but it might as well be LESBIAN in bright flashing lights.

It’s a self sustaining commune, where it seems to be a primarily plant based lifestyle, with cozy sweaters and women of all races and ethnicities and flowing dresses and undercuts and mason jars and it might as well have a flannel emporium and home improvement store, you know?

The way Willow talks about witches and how it saved her life - I felt also applied to when one realizes their sexuality. She doesn’t have to pretend or feel like an Other in Abhainn, she’s accepted as she is because everyone else is like her.

Except...the whole secret town hidden from the majority and everyone believes the same thing and dismisses the outside world kind of sounds less like a utopia and more like a cult. (Call your best friend, you’re in a cult)

And the cult leader is the charismatic, older Aelara, who praises Willow constantly and tells her how special she is, how necessary she is to Abhainn. Willow may even have a little bit of a crush on her.

It’s only when a mysterious blonde bursts into Willow’s room that her life changes again. This girl has a completely different take on Abhainn, and the fear in her eyes gets through Willow’s rose-tinted glasses. Because Willow’s had these doubts too, but didn’t feel she could do anything, because so much about Abhainn feels right.

Who is she? (*cough* Tara? We shall know soon enough.)

Like the other blonde in Willow’s life, she’s inspired to take action and to figure out what Abhainn’s secret is and they meet in the woods to leave - where they’re met with a pack of wolves.

Willow’s power has increased over the span of the comics and she manages to stop the wolves in their tracks. Only to be met with Aelara who is no longer channeling Stevie Nicks but a hooded, scary figure. She tells them they can’t leave.

It’s a really great place to end on for the penultimate issue because there is a real sense of danger - we know Willow does make it back to Sunnydale, but the how and why will be explained, hopefully in the last issue.

This maybe Tara character has promise - she asserts herself in front of Willow’s doubts, has a family that doesn’t know where she is, implying they would care that she’s been missing. And the fact that Willow just trusts her at her word and does the scary thing to meet in the forest at night shows the glimpse of the Willow post Buffy - a girl who does question the status quo, who does fight for what she believes in, even if it’s hard and terrifying.

Another excellent issue.

#willow comics #boom! verse #boom! studios #thoughts and reactions #read this miniseries if you haven't #really stresses that people should have facets to their personality and shouldn't define themselves by One Thing

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danijadegordon · 5 years ago

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Top 10 (L)GBTQ Shows & Movies To Stop The Pining.

As someone who has been consuming as much LGBTQ media as I can, I feel I need to do something productive with the hours I have poured into this. Most of these are able to be streamed on Hulu, because as I’ve learned, Hulu is home to some of the best queer media. A fair warning, most of these are sapphic or mainly sapphic. Without further ado, here is my top ten favorite LGBTQ Films and TV Shows.

10. The L Word (stream on Netflix)

I am pretty sure that no queer women under the age of 35 actually enjoys this show. However, I do think that every woman who likes women should watch this. The cheesy plotmlines and messy characters make the show interesting to watch even if other parts (*cough* Jenny *cough*) make it unbearable. Anyway despite its flaws and slightly biphobic undertones, I think at least a few episodes need to be watched.

9. The First Girl I Loved (stream on Hulu)

Honestly this is just like a good chick flick but make it gay. High school unrequited love, dramatic kisses, it's pretty good, clearly not that memorable.

8. The Fosters (and Good Trouble) (stream on Hulu)

Honestly, this show did so much for Gen Z queer people, or at least myself. The diverse main cast, interesting storylines, and head on approach to sexuality and gender, this show helped me learn about the LGBTQ community before I actively sought it out. As in, this show was some of the first representation on TV that I really saw. Steph and Lena showed a side of marriage that I hadn’t seen. Instead of just beautiful wedding photos I saw that love can be hard and messy and still be worthwhile.

The subsequent spin-off show (Good Trouble), continues to showcase diverse people and (dramatized) real life situations. It feels like the show that first showed me that it was okay to be different, has grown with me as the show is life as a young adult. This show makes me feel like I am in middle school again in the best way, chock full of nostalgia.

7. Marvel’s Runaways (stream on Hulu)

I am not a huge marvel fan, (*gasp* I said it!), it just feels like men showing off and creating chaos to fight chaos. I much prefer softer shows that make me laugh and have a large female presence (and it took me 19 years to realize I liked women....). But, twitter broke me down on this one and I am pretty obsessed.

The plot is exciting and fast paced, and it’s refreshing to see everyday concerns of young adults/ teens weaved in between the action. Each character has unique features and negative and positive traits and the cast is DIVERSE. The relationships between the characters are also complex and the slow build sapphic romance between two of the main characters is everything you could ever dream of.

6. Buffy The Vampire Slayer (stream on Hulu)

I learned the other day that Dolly Parton produced this show, which for some reason makes perfect sense to me. Of course the show that I spent my formative years watching would be produced by a legend such as Dolly Parton.

I am not totally sure this counts as LGBT media but One Day at a Time (stream on Netflix because it’s good just not on my list) references it as something young lesbian (and bi) women do and I did so here it is.

I can pretty much sum up why I love this show in 3 words, Sarah Michelle Geller. I thought she was the coolest person ever, and wanted to be her so bad. Watching her kill the creepy vampires, just iconic. And in later seasons when Willow dates a witch, amazing, just *chefs kiss*. I was obsessed when I saw this show for the first time and I wish I could re-watch it for the first time.

5. Vita and Virginia (stream on Hulu)

Historical women being gay is one of the most validating things, and furthermore some of the most beautiful love stories. Vita and Virginia is based on letters sent between the two women (Author Virginia Wolff and Vita Sackville-West), and shows a high stakes and emotional relationship between the two. The 20s fashion and culture paired with the universal queer feeling of pining, this movie was everything.

It is also important to note that Vita is a tiny top and Virginia is a beautiful soft giantess bottom (she’s like 6ft or something crazy), and I think that is enough reason to watch this movie in itself

4. The Girl King (stream on Hulu)

Based on Christina of Sweden, who ruled over Sweden for 10 years before marrying the Pope and becoming the Virgin Queen Of Rome, is breathtaking. The juxtaposition of Christina harsh exterior to the world and her court, and the softness she shows her lady in waiting is captivating. This movie gave me the strong female leader that doesn’t get shown nearly enough in today’s media. This movie made me laugh, cry, and hold my breath in anticipation. It is beautiful and makes me proud to be a queer women.

3. Little Fires Everywhere (stream on Hulu)

This 8 part series based on the NY Times best seller written by Celeste Ng, is dramatic and poignant. It forces you to think critically about moral areas that we like to think we have the right answer to, and it makes me rethink your own privilege.

The dance around the subject of sexuality and romance, and motherhood throughout every aspect of the film is enchanting. What is a perfect life, what is a perfect mother, and how do you move on and grow from mistakes. This show is beautiful and regardless of gender or sexuality this series is worth the watch.

2. Motherland: Fort Salem (stream on Hulu)

There is no match quite like that of lesbians and witchcraft, and this show does both brilliantly. This show is female dominated and exciting. The characters are interesting and all have different things that motivate them. The history behind the world the show lives in is deep and fleshed out. It’s the fantasy TV show that I have been waiting for my whole life without knowing.

With a strong queer women as the main character, who has a complex and passionate love story with ANOTHER strong queer women, this show is just amazing. Unlike male dominated media (production included) this show gives viewers the tender and tension filled moments that aren't given to sapphic love stories usually. It doesn’t feel overly sexual (looking at you Blue is the Warmest Color) but it’s not just friendship under a different label.

It releases new episodes every Wednesday so, get caught up because this show is worth it!

Portrait of a Lady On Fire (stream on Hulu)

I never understood why french was a romantic language, until I watched this movie. The score is beautiful and the slow burn romance between the two main characters is captivating. I don’t know what more to say, painters and ladies just go together it seems and this movie proves that. It’s a bit long but it doesn’t feel like that long of a movie.

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estelofimladris · 6 years ago

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Queerness and Death in The Magicians by SE Fleenor (The Removed Syfy Article)

[ NOTE: This article is being reposted in its entirety because it was removed by the Syfy website where it was originally posted. I (estelofimladris) did not write it, but still had it open after its removal. Please read and enjoy - send the writer, S.E. Fleenor, some love if you can. ]

by S.E. Fleenor

SPOILERS FOR THE MAGICIANS SEASON 4 FINALE!

By now you already know that The Magicians’ Quentin Coldwater died in the Season 4 finale. Yes, D-E-D, dead. There’s no resurrection in the works and no trick of astral projection or Niffin state of higher being can bring sweet, depressed, narcissistic Quentin back.

The decision to kill off a major character — the major character, if the Lev Grossman novels still mean anything (they don’t) — is almost always controversial. But we live in the day and age of Game of Thronesand The Walking Dead and Thanos snapping half of the Avengers (and the universe) into nothingness. Any character could die at any moment (and sometimes all of the characters could die at any moment) and that’s the brave, new, kill-happy world our media is made in.

So, why does it matter that Quentin is dead?

Well, my friends, let’s revisit a little trope we like to call Bury Your Gays. Throughout media representations of queer folks, reaching back to 19th-century Victorian novels, the formula has been about the same: An LGBTQ+ character is introduced, they reveal their sexuality or an attraction to a specific person, and then they die, die, die, often horrifically. This trope is also called Dead Lesbian Syndrome due to the overwhelming number of queer women who have been slaughtered onscreen — not exactly the representation queer women have been begging for.

Back when archaic censorship laws ruled the page and the screen, writing about queer characters was taboo and the only way queer writers, or folks who wanted to create queer characters, could include LGBTQ+ characters was by portraying them unfavorably. Queer characters could exist, but only as a warning of what a “perverted” life would bring you. So, in order to get some kind of representation, LGBTQ+ characters had to suffer.

Sounds a little rough, huh? Like who would really bury their gays? Oh, just Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The 100, The Walking Dead, The Expanse, Jessica Jones, Xena, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Hex, Torchwood, Hemlock Grove, Teen Wolf, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Dracula, The Vampire Diaries, Arrow, Salem, American Horror Story, Ascension, Lost Girl, Scream, The Shannara Chronicles, The Exorcist, Van Helsing, Doctor Who, Gotham, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Purge, and last but not least (and not for the first time): The Magicians.

Let it be noted that I have only included science fiction, fantasy, and horror TV shows on this list and only those that I know about. The list is much, much longer when you include non-genre TV shows and film. (Autostraddle has a very complete list of queer women on TV who have been killed off, for those of you who feel like being sad.)

Oh, did you recognize a bunch of queer-friendly shows in that list? Does that somehow feel like a violation of the promise made when a series goes out of its damn way to present itself as queer and feminist?

EXACTLY. And, that, my sweet babies, is why people are pissed about the death of Quentin Coldwater, generally speaking. We’re sick of seeing queer characters die over and over again. But, what specifically about the death of Quentin is so frustrating? I’m so glad you asked.

Full disclosure: I'm not going to get into the creators' rationale for killing off Quentin. I've read all the interviews with the creators and with Jason Ralph, who plays Quentin, and they all read like a whole lot of familiar BS. (At least Hale Appelman, who plays Eliot, gets it.)

In the first season of The Magicians, Quentin, Eliot, and Margot have a threesome. It’s the first time Quentin has sex with a man, as far as we know, and it’s the first time we see him start to confront his queerness. In Season 3’s “A Life in the Day,” Quentin and Eliot end up in a different Fillory, from before they were born, where they must solve an unsolvable puzzle. As they spend a lifetime working on the mosaic, they fall in love, raise a child, and make their queer family work. Upon returning to the main timeline, barely a word is spoken about their encounter, and queer folks everywhere braced ourselves for that experience to be treated as an anomaly from another timeline. (Another weird queer trope where characters get to be LGBTQ+, but only elsewhere or else when or, or, or…)

Season 4 brought unexpected twists and turns, such as Eliot being trapped inside his own mind by the Monster. With that, many a fan prepared to let Queliot rest. And, then “Escape from the Happy Place,” took us into Eliot’s mind and — after exploring a lot of deep trauma that has a particularly queer flavor to it — back to the day Eliot and Quentin came back from their lifetime in Fillory. As they sit on the steps of the throne room, Memory Quentin and Memory Eliot talk about what happened between them. Memory Quentin asks Memory Eliot why they shouldn’t try to be together, saying “Who gets proof of concept like that?”

Eliot kisses Memory Quentin hard on the mouth and then walks through the door that will allow him to take control of his body for a moment. In the real world, face to face with Quentin, Eliot gets a signal out that he’s still alive. He looks at Quentin and repeats the question Quentin had asked him, following it with, “Peaches and plums, motherf*cker.” When he realizes who he’s looking at, Quentin hesitates, a look of surprise and longing washing over his face.

This deeply emotional and compelling storyline appeared at the same time that Quentin finally officially rebuffed Alice’s advances, telling her he no longer wanted to be together, that he could never see her the same way again.

Then, after all that work, after all the maturation the characters undergo, the series undoes everything, shoehorning in a last-minute declaration of love between Quentin and Alice and killing off Quentin when he uses magic in the Mirror Realm, without ever seeing Eliot again. Quentin then goes to the Underworld branch of the library and meets with Penny 40 while reminiscing over his life and pondering over whether or not he died by suicide. (The treatment of suicide in the episode is problematic and deeply offensive.)

There are probably as many critiques of this ending as there are people who watched it, but I’m going to focus on the main issues that stood out to me.

The series has gone out of its way to confirm Quentin as queer and tease the possibility of a queer love story.

Queer viewers are used to surviving off subtext and tend to be fairly generous in what we’ll accept. Seriously, many a queer considers Thor: Ragnarok to be part of the queer canon when it’s not even implied onscreen that anyone is queer, and have you seen people shipping Carol and Maria in Captain Marvel? Maybe it’s because we’re used to being served scraps that the Bury Your Gays trope feels so pointed. Oh, you’re not happy with the almosts and the could-haves and the alternate timelines of queerness? Well, then we’ll make your characters queer and just murder ‘em right up.

After Season 3, The Magicians could have never acknowledged the relationship between Quentin and Eliot that takes place in another timeline or they could have shrugged and been like, “Must have been the opium in the air!” They’d already done as much with the threesome in Season 1 and all but ignoring Quentin's queerness in the episodes that follow. The series didn’t have to confirm that Quentin wanted to follow his attraction to Eliot and give being together a try. But, The Magiciansdid. The series took the time onscreen to show Eliot and Quentin kissing again, to show Eliot declaring his love for Quentin in their own code, and to show Quentin dedicate his time to helping Eliot get free.

Furthermore, how messed up is it that the series spends a significant amount of time dredging up the trauma of Eliot’s queer youth only to make him realize his biggest regret is how he treated Quentin, just for Quentin to be forced back into the closet? An episode that was deeply evocative and affirming of queerness smacks of voyeurism when taken in the context of the finale.

At the last minute, after confirming his queerness, the series forces a relationship between Quentin and Alice.

It’s hard not to see the last ditch shoving of Quentin and Alice together as an attempt to shove Quentin himself back in the closet. Season 4 shows Quentin rejecting and wanting to be apart from Alice, only for him to decide that he loves her and wants to give their relationship another try because? Honestly, I’m not sure what rationale he uses because it MAKES NO SENSE. And, what the hell does he think of imprisoned-in-his-own-body Eliot while making this decision? To judge from the series, not a whole hell of a lot.

It’s totally cool if queer or bisexual characters date people of different genders — that’s not the issue. The issue is that without a moment of hesitation, Quentin whiplashes from his lover who he knows is trapped by the Monster and cannot see, hear, or reach him to his ex-girlfriend who he has distanced himself from due to her selfish behavior.

In the context of his death, I like to call this particularly messed up turn of events “Bury Your Gays and Stomp On Their Graves” because all the work that had been done to show Quentin’s coming to terms with his own sexuality is undone shortly before he dies.

There are other ways to write a character off a series.

A lot of people fall back on bad faith arguments like: what is a show supposed to do when an actor no longer wishes to appear in the series?

The answer, of course, is: ANYTHING ELSE. They could have done literally anything else to write Quentin out of the show and release Jason Ralph from his commitment. The Magicians takes place in a world WHERE MAGIC EXISTS, where characters leave the main story to go on their own adventures, and where average human beings can become gods. There’s no excuse for falling into lazy storytelling and reifying a trope that has been well-documented and mourned for a long time.

In the novels, Quentin gets kicked out of Fillory and decides to use his discipline, minor mendings, to build a new world for himself and Alice. He essentially walks through a door and never comes back. THAT WOULD HAVE WORKED and it wouldn’t do the work of retraumatizing queer audiences.

It comes down to this: To ignore the wider implications of making a character specifically queer, having him return to his prior unhealthy relationship with a woman, and then killing him off is a disservice to queer people everywhere. It is, at once, a declaration of the meaninglessness of the queer experience and an unforgivable reminder of the expendability of queer lives.

Series like The Magicians (and before it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) trade on their reputations as queer and feminist shows. We watch them for their powerful women and their kickass queer characters and their storylines that affirm the power of survival. And what do they give us in return? They bury their gays.

Does that mean that all LGBTQ+ characters should be immortal? The rational response would be: of course not. Up until today I may have agreed with that argument, but right now I’m feeling a little less generous. It’s 20-f*cking-19 and there is no excuse for Bury Your Gays to pop up in a progressive TV show. Maybe until series and creators who make their money off queer characters and queer fandom take responsibility for how they use the lives and bodies of queer people, maybe until then, all LGBTQ+ characters should be immortal.

I’m pretty damn sick of watching every character who loves like me, who looks like me, who explores the bounds of their sexuality like me, die. I’m sick of watching characters bust down the doors of the closets that held them back only to have their queerness erased or elided through their deaths. I’m sick of watching relationships between men and women blossom onscreen only to see queer relationships torn apart by death.

Queer people deserve happy endings. We deserve them in real life and we deserve to see them onscreen and we deserve them now.

Until that’s the norm, you better damn well consider any queer character you create immortal. Because if you don’t, we queers will f*cking haunt your basic ass.

#quentin coldwater #the magicians #the magicians spoilers #peoplelikeme #quentin coldwater deserved better #syfy #se fleenor #i own nothing

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brunnismemorybank · 2 years ago

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Yeah, some people need to look up what "bait" means. It's a tasty-smelling morsel that lures you into a trap. Without a trick, bait is simply the morsel, or in the case of media, fanservice.

If a show's writers convinced its viewers that it was going to reveal a character as queer in order to up its viewership, but they know that it won't, then that's queerbait. But nobody watching the show in 1998-9 would have believed that the network was going to allow a canonically bi/lesbian lead on a teen fantasy drama. There was no one to trick. It was shocking enough when the next season had a supporting character develop a lesbian identity.

Besides, as OP notes, Buffy spends most of the season struggling with the fact that she and Angel will never have a normal romantic relationship. She has sex dreams about Angel, fantasizes about a prom date with Angel, nearly destroys her relationship with Giles by hiding Angel, and compares Angel breaking up with her to dying (and she would know). Even if the show aired today, it would come across as an unrequited crush on Faith's part, not as a potential canon pairing.

Submission message for Foot clan lieutenant and brute rise: arguably the foot clan lieutenant and brute

Submission message for Faith and Buffy: faith and buffy pleeeease

All propaganda was send in to me and is being kept in my inbox as a resource. All propaganda is shared by me, but not my own opinion.

Faith/Buffy is not queerbaiting. It has its own issues, but there was no teasing of them hooking up, Buffy was clearly infatuated with Angel at the time, and dealing with her own shit, and she's never shown any indication of being queer, and just... aaaghhh!

Sorry, I just personally feel like this doesn't count, and people are being mad about something that wasn't there.

Buffy and faith weren't queer baiting. Heavily queer coded (and canonically so! In the comic) but it's not like they dragged us out and then made fun of us for seeing it.

#buffyverse #buffy summers #anti-fuffy #i mean i don't oppose shipping it in fic or art #but the show didn't trick queer viewers at the time into falsely believing they'd get rep #meta #mine #not-mine

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binkywinky · 5 years ago

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hi! Comics rec anon here! to answer your question, I'm not entirely new to comics, have read a few but not enough to say I have a specific type. The first series I read was all the jessica jones comics which I really liked, also the miles morales series which i enjoyed and the spidergwen series which was cute but the art was kinda annoying lol. i also like a couple of dc ones like mister miracle. so i think i prefer a general rec from you since the comics world is so big. thanks in advance!

Got it. Hmm… let’s see. It’s probably easiest to break it down by publisher then. I’ll try to give a mix of ongoing, finished, and “classic” stories.

Fair warning, I read a lot of comics (probably about 60 per month, and that’s not including manga), so even though this may feel like a long list, it’s short for me.

Marvel

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man - Relatively new series, and it’s been fantastic so far. Great art, and a bit more grounded than the Amazing Spider-Man run (which is also great). Stellar art, too.

Miles Morales: Spider-Man - A little YA-ish at times, but overall enjoyable. You get to see a lot more of Miles’ personality in this one, which is always fun.

Superior Spider-Man - Because nothing is more fun than seeing a semi-reformed Otto Octavius try to be a hero.

Captain Marvel - Kelly Thompson does a phenomenal job with this series. She has a great hold of Carol’s voice. Would highly recommend Kelly Sue Deconnick and Margaret Stohl’s previous runs to give context (Captain Marvel 2012-2017, Mighty Captain Marvel, and The Life of Captain Marvel).

Jessica Jones - Not sure if you’ve read Kelly Thompson’s recent run or just Bendis’, but hers is definitely worth a read.

Avengers (2019) - actually a solid run. I would check this out if you’re more into crossover, large-scale storytelling. They’re in the middle of War of the Realms, though… so maybe wait until like August or September?

Immortal Hulk, Daredevil, and X-23 - also good. I read them off and on (not really my fave characters to read on their own, I enjoy them in ensembles), but the stories are solid.

Rogue & Gambit - mini series that I absolutely love by Kelly Thompson (she does great character work) that came out last year. Mr. & Mrs. X is a follow-up to it and also tons of fun (nearing its end as well).

Runaways - I fell off of this when Brian K. Vaughn left, but I can say up through his run ended is well worth the read.

As far as classic stories, Infinity Gauntlet, The Dark Phoenix Saga, X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, Secret Invasion, and Secret Wars would be my first recommendations.

I would’ve recommended Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider, but maybe wait on that. It’s about to end soon and transition to just Ghost Spider (where she leaves Earth-65 and comes to Earth-616 where Peter and Miles are). Same for X-Men. I’m currently reading Uncanny, but X-Men is about to be overhauled soon. So probably hold on that front.

DC/Vertigo

Honestly, not the biggest DC fan (I lean more towards Vertigo actually), but there are a few that I enjoy.

Action Comics (starting at #1000) - I am not a Superman fan, but I enjoy this series, which says a lot. I enjoy what Bendis is doing with him in this run.

Naomi - a new series, also by Bendis, following the story of a young Black girl who is investigating the circumstances around her adoption. Don’t want to give too much away, but probably my fave DC run at the moment. And Jamal Campbell’s art is fucking gorgeous.

Dial H for Hero - it’s fun. It’s weird. Not for everyone, but maybe give it a shot.

The Flash and Batman, New 52 runs - New 52 gets shit from fans a lot, but I thought these runs were awesome. Very good story-telling.

Dark Nights: Metal event - Probably one of the best things DC did in a long time. It’s a massive event that pretty much reworked the DC universe and all the characters. Enjoyed it immensely.

Heroes in Crisis - this miniseries ended very recently. It’s a story focused on a major event that happens at Sanctuary, a rehab for superheroes suffering from mental health issues (e.g. PTSD after doing something that nearly killed them). Not your usual superhero story, which I liked.

American Carnage - very gritty story focused on a white-passing Black man who infiltrates a white supremacist organization. It’s really fucking good.

High Level - I picked this book up randomly because the cover looked cool. I’ve been reading it ever since. I would say it’s weird sci-fi/fantasy/cyberpunk adventure. A little strong on the language, but very interesting story and great artwork.

Birds of Prey - awesome series with the DC women. A little shaky sometimes, but Gail Simone does really good character work. Her run is probably the only one I’d bother reading.

Deathbed - miniseries by Vertigo that ended maybe a year ago. It’s so bizarre and hilarious and out there. I loved it.

Batwoman (J.H. Williams run) and Batwoman: Rebirth - Kate Kane, my favorite lesbian superhero. Williams did a great job in his run (and the art is to die for). Don’t read the back half, they change writers and it’s a goddamn mess. But then Marguerite Bennett (a queer woman) picked it up in Rebirth, and it got awesome again. Also, shout-out to Greg Rucka for officially making her queerness canon in 52.

Wonder Woman - Wonder Woman’s my fave of DC main characters (along with Martian Manhunter and Wally West I & II), and my favorite run for her is Greg Rucka’s. He does a surprisingly good job of writing women. The run is over at the moment, but I’d check it out. Good stuff there.

For classic stories, Kingdom Come, Watchmen, Flashpoint (precursor to New 52), and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman are some of my faves.

Image

Image is probably what I read the most. Definitely has the most diverse pool of comics to choose from.

Saga - My favorite comic series of all-time. I’ve gotten so many people to read this and they love it. It’s weird - really weird, actually - but the storytelling is phenomenal. And it’s on hiatus right now, so plenty of time to get caught up.

Ice Cream Man - This series is so fucking weird, but I love it. It’s sorta like… Tales from the Crypt? Different stories (mostly horror) that all feature this demon ice cream man.

The Weatherman - This series is such a goddamn delight. I don’t want to ruin the plot but just… yeah. Read the first issue and it just goes crazy from there.

Man-Eaters - Sort of a niche story. Basically, this takes place in a society where when women get their cycle, they turn into giant cats and maul men, so they’ve given them pills to keep them from menstruating. Sounds weird? Wait until you read it. Probably a highlight series of the year for me.

Black Science - You might not like the art in this one, but maybe give it a shot? These scientists are trying to solve the problem of limited resources on Earth by hopping across dimensions for new ones (infinite dimensions, infinite resources). Only problem is, their machine got damaged so now they hop uncontrollably to whatever dimension it chooses for however long it decides. It’s a wild ride.

Middlewest - An interesting take on parent/child relationships and how the consequences of abuse, anger, and depression can manifest in dangerous ways. Sounds more bleak than it is - the story actually has quite a bit of humor.

Excellence - Very new series, but with a PoC lead, about PoCs, with mostly PoC creators. A story about a secret society of Black magicians and a son whose next in line to take on the mantle, and it’s pretty fucking cool. Issue 2 comes out this week - check it out!

The Walking Dead - I don’t think I have to explain this one, do I? Zombies.

Lazarus and Lazarus: Risen - Sci-fi story set in a dystopian society where the world is ruled by like 15 or so families, and they each have a Lazarus to fight for them. This is told from the perspective of the Carlyle family’s Lazarus, Forever.

Die - If Dungeons & Dragons and Jumanji had a baby, it would be this book. Sounds weird, but once you read it, you’ll find the description to be accurate.

Anything from Brian K. Vaughn - I have yet to read something from Brian K. Vaughn that I don’t like. Saga, Paper Girls, Y: The Last Man, Runaways, Barrier… his shit’s always good.

Independents / Not Marvel, DC, or Image

Some of these are nostalgia-based, so fair warning.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BOOM Studios) - very new series that’s out. Great art. If you were a fan of the show, I think you’ll like it. It’s a re-imagining of sorts. There’s also an Angel series that just started.

Nancy Drew (Dynamite) - Listen… I could not stand Nancy Drew as a kid. Never got into it and thought it was boring as hell. But I really loved this miniseries (another Kelly Thompson run). It’s maybe 5 issues?

Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and Go Go Power Rangers (BOOM Studios) - Honest to God, if you had told me 3 years ago one of my fave comics would be a Power Rangers one, I would have laughed in your face. Both of these series are really good and provide the continuity, nuance, and characterization the show lacked. Fan of the show or not, I’d say it’s worth checking out if you enjoy the teenage superhero genre. Also, just some really amazing art and world-building.

Anything from Jinxworld - This is Bendis’ own publishing company. He’s put out Cover, Pearl, Scarlet, and United States vs. Murder, Inc. All of them are really good.

Umbrella Academy (Dark Horse) - This is the series the Netflix show is based off of. Right now, they’re doing Hotel Oblivion in the comics, but start with Apocalypse Suite and Dallas.

So, there you go anon. There are FAR more I would recommend, but I tried to give a good range of books for you to choose from without (hopefully) overwhelming you. And if you have any questions, I’m more than happy to talk about any of them.

#binky answers anons #binky talks comics

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media-studying · 5 years ago

Text

QUEERBAITING: BAITING A QUEER AUDIENCE WITH THE PROMISE OF REPRESENTATION?

So, I finally got around to translating my term paper on Queerbaiting. I initially intended on translating it all manually, but ended up not having the time for it. Finally I decided on using DeepL for the translation, as it works great for academic writing and can handle german sentence structure.

This paper was written in September 2018 and turned in on September 31st. It was graded with 1.3 on the german academic grading scale (”very good” or ~3.7 in the US).

Introduction

Although the phenomenon of queer baiting made its way into media research a few years ago, the number of publications written on it remains manageable. A keyword search provides 125 academic texts containing the term "Queerbaiting" and almost exclusively from the last 5 years.[1]

Nevertheless, queer baiting does not seem to be a topic unknown to the non-academic general public. A search with common search engines and the keyword "Queerbaiting" yields 150,000-175,000 results [2], including Wikipedia entries, videos and articles in online magazines. In the English-speaking world there are various online articles that deal with this phenomenon - often in relation to television series such as Once Upon A Time (cf. Langfelder 2016) or The 100 (cf. Shakeri 2017). But there are also German-language texts on this topic (cf. Sky 2018). Even in the Lexikon der Filmbegriffe of the University of Kiel there is an entry on this subject (cf. Schlichter 2017). Queerbaiting seems to be a topic that repeatedly sparks discourse.

In social media, users can exchange views on this topic and there are different opinions on what can be considered queer baiting and what not. In preparation for this work, I have asked online for examples of queer baiting in order to extend the selection of the object of investigation by the examples I know personally.[3] The following answers show a dissatisfaction with the current amount of representation of queer [4] relationships in film and television. Among the mentioned examples were the already mentioned television series The 100, the series Supergirl, Riverdale, Pretty Little Liars and 13 Reasons Why, as well as the cross-media Harry Potter franchise.

But queer baiting is not limited to the protracted storylines of television series; this phenomenon can also be observed in games like Life Is Strange or films like the Pitch Perfect trilogy.

The present work deals with the term queer baiting and the related concepts. In this context, the representation of LGBTQ+ identities in American Hollywood film will also be discussed. In addition, two social media posts will be examined as concrete examples, which served as advertising for the film Pitch Perfect 3. The work will answer the question why queer baiting can be so frustrating for LGBTQ+ viewers and which mechanisms make queer baiting possible.

[1] Via Google Scholar, as of 24.09.2018.

[2] Via Google: 153,000 results, via Yahoo: 175,000 results, via Bing: 175,000 results, as of 24.09.2018.

[3] This took place via a post in the anonymous social network Jodel, in a channel (@girlsgirlsgirls) in which primarily LGBTQ+ topics concerning women are discussed. The respective post can be found under the link: https://share.jodel.com/post?postId=5b210941c3c100000f3bced8&channel=other&_branch_match_id=572700582120145397.

[4] Queer as generic term for identities and sexualities falling into the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

Terminology

Queerbaiting is a term coined by fans, whose meaning has changed over the years (cf. Nordin 2015: 4f.). Also in its established meaning there are different approaches of how the term can be interpreted.

Eve Ng defines queer baiting as a practice originating from producers that exploits the interest of recipients in narratives with LGBTQ+ themes without actually fulfilling these expectations.

I use the term queerbaiting to refer to situations where those officially associated with a media text court viewers interested in LGBT narratives - or become aware of such viewers - and encourage their interest in the media text without the text ever definitively confirming the nonheterosexuality of the relevant characters. (Ng 2017: 1.2)

By this, however, she also understands narratives that contain LGBTQ+ themes, but where there is a discrepancy between the audience's expectations and actual representation in the media text. It is precisely this discrepancy between the expectations built up and the actual text that constitutes queer baiting for her (cf. Ng 2017: 1.2). These expectations of the audience arise through both intratextual references and the "producer paratext", which contains information on the text from the producers (this can be any form of extratextual promotion from the producers) as well as through so-called "queer contextuality" - the summation of the audience's previous experiences with the media representation of queer figures (cf. ibid.: 1.3, 2.5).

While Ng uses her definition very openly, Judith Fathallah is much more precise:

Queerbaiting may be defined as a strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the attention of queer viewers via hints, jokes, gestures, and symbolism suggesting a queer relationship between two characters, and then emphatically denying and laughing off the possibility. (Fathallah 2014: 491)

In this definition, the focus is less on the relationship between producer and recipient, instead it defines queer baiting via intratextual cues and codes, and the intratextual rejection and/or mockery of a queer relationship.

The core of the phenomenon remains the same in both definitions: First, references to a non-heterosexual relationship are scattered, be it in the text or in the paratext - a queer reading is promoted - this leads to expectations on the part of the recipients, these expectations are then not fulfilled in the text, the relationship is not realized or possibly even the possibility of a queer relationship is dismissed as absurd. Queerbaiting is therefore a concept to be understood literally: one is baited with a queer relationship.

While queer baiting is a rather recent phenomenon (cf. Nordin 2015: 66), queer readings of media texts go back further. The queer interpretation of the relationship between the characters Spock and Captain Kirk of the Star Trek franchise demonstrably dates to the 1980s and beyond (cf. Jenkins 2006: 90f.). This interpretation of media texts - "queer reading" - stems from the lack of adequate representation:

A queer reading is constructed by a reader who, denied the obvious manifestation of homosexual desire, in a context in which heterosexual desire is normalized, seeks to identify the codes by which authors have indicated passionate relationships between same-sex members of their texts or have created available metaphors through cross-species relationships. (Mendelsohn 2002: 45)

Queer baiting is thus always connected to queer reading, since it would not be possible without this reading by the viewer - only the willingness to regard certain codes as homoerotic subtexts enables the systematic exploitation of these by producers.

The definition of queer baiting used in this work as a deliberate economically motivated tactic is based on the definition of the authors Guerrero-Pico, Establés and Ventura:

[...] 'queerbaiting' [is] a tactic whereby media producers suggest a homoerotic subtext between characters as a means to improve or maintain a show's ratings without actualizing or consummating such a relationship beyond suggestion and innuendo. (Guerrero-Pico/Establés/Ventura 2018: 313)

Although this definition explicitly refers to television productions, it can, in my opinion, also be applied to the example used in this work, which is the last iteration of a film trilogy that takes up subtext established in earlier films.

If one speaks of Queerbaiting, it cannot be avoided to also deal with Bury-Your-Gays, a phenomenon, which often appears in connection with Queerbaiting and represents a similar problem. Bury-Your-Gays is the recurring motif that queer figures in media texts often come to a violent end. In this way, despite the existence of these figures, a heteronormative narrative is promoted by denying queer figures a "happy end" and thus placing queer identities in a negative context (cf. Waggoner 2017: 3). Examples are Chloe in Life Is Strange[5] and Lexa in The 100 [6] . Since queer female characters, mostly lesbian women, often find a violent end in the media, one also speaks in this context of the "Dead Lesbian Syndrome" (cf. Guerrero-Pico/Establés/Ventura 2018: 312). Ng regards this phenomenon (without explicitly naming it) as a form of queer baiting instead of an independent phenomenon (cf. Ng 2017: 1.2).

Guerrero-Pico, Establés and Ventura examine the reactions of fans to the death of the serial character Lexa more closely. Among other things, they were able to observe an online movement called "LGBT Fans Deserve Better", which was primarily concerned with the representation of lesbian and bisexual women on television. This included online attacks on the producers of the series The 100, mainly via Twitter, as well as the wider context of negative fan practices, which for the authors fall under the term "fan-tagonism" [7] (cf. Guerrero-Pico/Establés/Ventura 2018: 312).

[5] If the player has chosen one of the two ends. Also Chloe's ex-girlfriend Rachel, who is already dead at the beginning of the game.

[6] Further examples are Sara Lance in Arrow, Tara Maclay in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hugh Culber in Star Trek: Discovery and all queer characters ever released in The Vampire Diaries. A list can be found on the website Does the dog die? (https://www.doesthedogdie.com/#topicTable ).

[7] A Portmanteau from "fan" and "antagonism".

Representation

One aspect of the debate on queer baiting is the question of the representation of queer persons and relationships in film and television. Why is this representation important? And if representation is important, is queer baiting a problem for them?

The prevailing opinion in literature is that representation is important because it serves identity formation and affirmation. Through (positive) representation, negative feelings concerning one's own identity can be overcome and social isolation can be reduced (cf. Guerrero-Pico/Establés/Ventura 2018: 314). What is regarded as satisfactory representation changes over time, what was still regarded as positive representation in the 1990s would no longer be accepted as produced by many people today (cf. Nordin 2015: 63).

Whether queer baiting causes a representative damage is difficult to answer, Brennan sees no damage caused by queer baiting, instead he sees the creative potential for fans who create transformative works (cf. Brennan 2018: 202). However, the indignation caused by queer baiting cannot be denied, so it should be reconsidered whether subjectively perceived damage is not caused by the absence of representation. Guerrero-Pico, Establés and Ventura summarise the views of participants in the "LGBT Fans Deserve Better" movement as follows:

Queerbaiting is perceived, therefore, as a commercial trivialization of the problems that affect lesbian and bisexual fans, who do not find a normalized and healthy representation of their affective and sexual identities in hegemonic discourses (Guerrero-Pico/Establés/Ventura 2018: 327).

While the evaluation of representation in the viewer is subjective, there are tools to create a comparable basis for discussion. One of these tools is the so-called Vito Russo Test. This test, developed by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and named after its founder, is based on the Bechdel Test. For a film to pass the Vito Russo test, three conditions must be true:

The film must contain at least one character that is recognizably gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and/or queer.

This character must not be primarily defined by sexuality and/or gender identity.

The character must be involved in the plot of the film to the extent that his or her absence would have a significant effect on it - he or she must be of significance. (cf. glaad.org 2018a)

The organisation GLAAD also publishes an annual report entitled "Studio Responsibility Index" which examines and classifies the LGBTQ+ representation in the films of the previous year of the seven largest Hollywood film studios[8].

For the 2017 film year, 12.8% of the films examined contained at least one LGBTQ+ character, of which 64% were gay men. Overall, 71% of the LGBTQ+ characters were men and 29% women (cf. Glaad.org 2018b). Of these films, 64% passed the Vito Russo test (cf. Glaad.org 2018a).

The film Pitch Perfect 3 and the studio Universal Pictures (short: Universal) dealt with in the following section can also be found in this report. Of the 14 films published by Universal, 4 included LGBTQ+ persons, so that Universal published the most LGBTQ+ inclusive films of the studios surveyed, of which only one passed the Vito Russo Test - Get Out. Pitch Perfect 3 did not pass the test, despite the presence of a lesbian character[9] (cf. Glaad.org 2018c).

[8] 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and Warner Brothers.

[9] The character Cynthia (Ester Dean) is only a background character. "Ship": short for "relationship".

Pitch Perfect 3

The Pitch Perfect Trilogy is about a fictional university's A-Capella group The Barden Bellas, which protagonist Beca (Anna Kendrick) joins in the first film of the trilogy. The sequels play about 3 years after their predecessors and show The Barden Bellas during and after their time at the university.

The example I chose coincidentally shares a name with the video game Life is Strange: Chloe (Brittany Snow). This was connected by fans with the name Beca to the Portmanteau "Bechloe". This "ship name"[10] is used by fans to refer to the romantically interpreted relationship between the two characters. This relationship, however, takes place exclusively in the subtext and parate text of the films. The latter will be examined further here.

Already in 2016 Kendrick spoke in an interview with the LGBTQ+ magazine The Advocate about the relationship between the two characters and called it a quasi lesbian relationship[11] (see Advocate.com 2016). In the same interview she indicated that the homoerotic subtext perceptible in the second film was intended by the production side as a reaction to the queer interpretation of the relationship through fans (ibid.)[12].

Online marketing for Pitch Perfect 3 also plays with this interpretation of the relationship between the two characters. A commercial clip distributed in the Snapchat app shows Kendrick and Snow approaching each other, giving the impression they're going to kiss next. Instead, they turn to the camera and Kendrick asks the viewer to move up for more (in the app, linked websites or additional information can be accessed via this function). Due to the way the app works, previous content can no longer be accessed, but the video was saved by a user and published via Twitter[13] (Figure 1).

(Figure 1)

From the user's brief commentary it can be concluded that she felt a certain resentment about this type of marketing. In the reactions of other users to this post, the term "queer baiting" already appears repeatedly, so it can be assumed that at least some of the users regard this video, or the film to which it refers, as such.

The video plays with the expectation of viewers who emerge from a coded body language. Due to the physical closeness and the placement of the two actresses' hands, a pictorial language emerges with which otherwise romantic relationships are represented. The invitation to the viewer insinuates that a kiss is possible and that perhaps there is room in the film being advertised. The viewer who is interested in queer narratives thus gets an incentive to see the film, which, however, does not fulfil this expectation.

Another video[14] published on the Twitter account "Universal PicturesUK" shows scenes from the film Pitch Perfect 3, including a scene in which the seemingly naked characters Beca and Chloe stand behind one another, a scene in which the two characters are again shown over which red hearts have been overlaid digitally this time, and a scene in which Chloe puts her hands on Beca's chest to push her aside and then grabs her further, observed by the character Aubrey (Anna Camp).

(Figure 2)

The video is accompanied by the comment: "One day left ... Will Bechloe ever happen 👯? #PitchPerfect3 in cinemas tomorrow." (Figure 2). Not only is a very clear visual language used here, the term "Bechloe" is also used in a targeted manner, thus revealing an awareness of the possible queer dimension of the relationship. The queer reading is taken up and reinforced by the montage of the film scenes. In the context of the film, however, these are treated more as jokes than as opening up an actual romantic dimension, for which the film was criticized by GLAAD, among others (cf. Glaad.org 2018c).

On the basis of these examples, three observations can be made which answer the question of whether this is queer baiting:

The producers were aware of the queer reading of the material.

The producers used this reading to build up the expectations and hopes of the audience and to give them an incentive to see the film in the cinema - aware that these expectations would not be fulfilled.

The exploitation of this queer reading had no negative effect on the economic performance of the film, Pitch Perfect 3 was more successful than the first part of the trilogy, although not as successful as the second part (cf. Boxofficemojo.com).

These observations confirm that the two videos are queer baiting as defined by Guerrero-Pico, Establés and Ventura. In addition to some reactions to social media platforms and some texts published online, a media outcry seems to have failed to materialize; no "Shitstorm"[15] could be observed in this example, as in the Bury Your Gays trope.

[10] "Ship”: short for relationship.

[11] „I mean, our characters are pretty much in a lesbian relationship. As far as we’re concerned, they’re secretly in love.” (Advocate.com 2016).

[12] „If people didn’t think it was cute, we wouldn’t have pushed that chemistry even further in Pitch Perfect 2.” (ibid.).

[13] The video can be found under the title: "Twitter - megs" in the appendix.

[14] In the appendix under "Twitter - Universal PicturesUK".

[15] Shitstorm: „Unter Shitstorms werden in der Forschung krisenhafte Ereignisse verstanden, die ihren Ausgangspunkt in sozialen Medien haben und im Wesentlichen durch Empörung statt sachlicher Kritik gekennzeichnet sind.“ (Pleil & Bastian 2017: 141). "In research, shitstorms are understood as crisis events that have their starting point in social media and are essentially characterized by indignation instead of objective criticism".

Conclusion

In summary it can be said that queer baiting is an economically motivated tactic, the intention is not to represent queer figures and relationships, but to win as many paying recipients as possible. However, it is precisely this representation that is important in the process of identity formation, especially among young people (cf. Guerrero-Pico/Establés/Ventura 2018: 314).

Queerbaiting works because there is already a lack of and - in parts of the audience - a desire for satisfactory queer representation, which leads to queer readings of media texts. In this subaudience there is also the will to consume and spend money for media products in which LGBTQ+ representation exists. Since in most cases this 'need' is not satisfied, or the representation is not long-lasting (Bury your gays), the discrepancy between expectation and actual media text described by Ng (see above) arises - resulting in frustration and disappointment. The examples chosen for this work show that the homoerotic subtext and the queer reading of the media text is indeed desired by producers and consciously used. Irrespective of how queer baiting is ethically judged, it can also be argued that in most cases it is a targeted false advertising, since it implicitly advertises content that is not reflected in the media text.

Since most of the recently produced films do not even meet the minimum of queer representation described in the Vito Russo Test, the use of queer baiting is unlikely to change much in the foreseeable future.

Sources

Advocate.com (2016). The A-List Interview: Anna Kendrick. Website. Advocate.com. https://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2016/11/01/list-interview-anna-kendrick (27.09.2018).

Boxofficemojo.com. Pitch Perfect Trilogy Movies at the Box Office - Box Office Mojo. Website. Boxofficemojo.com. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=pitchperfectseries.htm (27.09.2018).

Brennan, Joseph (2018). “Queerbaiting: The ‘playful’ possibilities of homoeroticism”. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 21.2. p. 189-206.

Fathallah, Judith (2015). „Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of BBC’ Sherlock”. Television & New Media. 16.5. p. 490-500.

Glaad.org (2018a). The Vito Russo Test (2018). Website. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/sri/2018/vitorusso (26.09.2018).

Glaad.org (2018b). Overview of Findings (2018). Website. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/sri/2018/overview (26.09.2018).

Glaad.org (2018c). Universal Pictures & Focus Features. Website. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/sri/2018/universal-pictures (26.09.2018).

Guerrero-Pico, Mar / María-José Establés / Rafael Ventura (2018). “Killing off Lexa: ‘Dead Lesbian Syndrome’ and intra-fandom management of toxic fan practices in an online queer community”. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. 15.1. p. 311-333.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). “’Out of the Closet and into the Universe’: Queers and Star Trek”. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: NYU Press. p. 89-112.

Langfelder, Natasia (2016). “Let's End Queerbaiting in 2016”. Website. AfterEllen. https://www.afterellen.com/tv/471593-lets-end-queerbaiting-2016 (24.09.208).

Megs (2017). „I have HAD IT“. Tweet (@badassbeca). 21.11.2017. 21:10. https://twitter.com/badassbeca/status/933200998574804992 (26.09.2018).

Mendelsohn, Farah (2002). „Surpassing the Love of Vampires: Or Why/How a Queer Reading of the Buffy/Willow Relationship Is Denied”. Fighting the Forces. Wilcox, Rhonda V./David Lavery. Oxford: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers. p. 45-60.

Ng, Eve (2017). “Between Text, Paratext, and Context: Queerbaiting and the Contemporary Media Landscape”. Transformative Works and Cultures. Vol. 24. Online. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.0917 (24.09.2018).

Nordin, Emma (2015). From Queer Reading to Queerbaiting: the battle over polysemic text and the power of hermeneutics. Master Thesis. University Stockholm. Online: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A839802&dswid=2391 (25.09.2018).

Pleil, Thomas / Matthias Bastian (2017). „Soziale Medien in der externen Organisationskommunikation“. Handbuch Soziale Medien. Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik / Monika Taddicken (Hrsg.). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. p. 129-149.

Schlichter, Ansgar (2017). „queerbaiting - Lexikon der Filmbegriffe.“ Website. Filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de. http://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/index.php?action=lexikon&tag=det&id=9334 (24.09.2018).

Shakeri, Sima (2017). “Bury Your Gays,' Queerbaiting, And TV's LGBTQ Problem”. Website. HuffPost Canada. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/06/30/queerbaiting-bury-your-gays-tv_a_23005000/ (24.09.2018).

Sky (2018). „Queerbaiting – Der trügerische Schein einer Repräsentation | Geekgeflüster“. Website. Geekgeflüster. https://geekgefluester.de/queerbaiting-der-truegerische-schein-einer-repraesentation (24.09.2018)

Universal PicturesUK (2017). „One day left … Will Bechloe ever happen 👯? #PitchPerfect3 in cinemas tomorrow.“. Tweet (@universaluk). 19.12.2017. 10:00. https://twitter.com/universaluk/status/943179139590139905 (26.09.2018).

Waggoner, Erin B. (2017). “Bury Your Gays and Social Media Fan Response: Television, LGBTQ Representation, and Communitarian Ethics”. Journal of Homosexuality. Online. (02.11.2017) https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2017.1391015 (29.09.2018)

#media studies #tv and film #queerbaiting #university #college #term paper #academic papers #academic writing #academia #writing #mine #studyblr #studying #lgbtq #lgbt #queer

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absynthe--minded · 6 years ago

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something I think a lot of the kids (and older teens, to some extent? but mostly sixteen and under) need to understand is that it's brand fucking new to be able to consume all queer content all the time and actively choose to prioritize movies and shows with LGBT characters period, let alone LGBT ships

prior to this current "Golden Age of Television", if you wanted a network show with gay (not bi, not pan, not trans - gay and gay only) characters, you had... well, basically Will and Grace, and later seasons of Buffy, and Ellen before it was canceled, and occasional one-off episodes of shows like Friends or Star Trek. that was it. Xena got away with it because the queer content was plausibly deniable. you could claim Gabrielle was just her super dedicated platonic friend. also Xena was generally seen as a geeky thing and you could push the envelope more with B-grade properties like that, whose fanbases tended to stick with a show regardless of Quality. premium cable channels like HBO or Starz or Showtime would make more explicitly gay content like The L Word or Queer as Folk or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (the original), but those were generally walled off away from wide access and only happened because the subscriber-not-advertiser model enabled more risky content (and yeah, this kind of thing was incredibly risky, and was automatically classed as Adult Content and more sexually explicit just because it involved non-het couples and characters). the one-off episodes often featured lesbian characters because lesbians showing physical affection for one another was more acceptable than gay men doing the same (look up the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss; it's a thing.)

movies were a little better but not much, in that gay men had been making films for other gay men for a few decades at that point, and there were a few lesbians directing too (the 90s brought us The Watermelon Woman and But I'm A Cheerleader, for example). but you had to go looking for those films specifically, and in the pre Internet days were limited by things like "if the movie you were searching for had a release outside of film festivals", "if the national chain of video rental places that was your only option even had a dedicated gay and lesbian section", and "how homophobic your area was". if you didn't have a dedicated LGBT bookstore, you were often left with whatever could be dredged up at the local Blockbuster, which wasn't much.

books were slightly better. especially speculative fiction. you could find some queer characters in sci-fi, or heavy queer subtext in a way that suggested the author wanted to do more but was pressured by higher ups to tone it down. and because LGBT bookstores were a thing, you could get smaller publishing houses to work with you and put your work out there sometimes. but if you were dealing with even a little homophobia, this didn't help. libraries kept most of those books in a dedicated section, making clandestine access kind of hard. and if you didn't have any other way of finding that kind of material (like a bookstore, or LGBT friends who'd loan you stuff), you often went without. even very well meaning librarians were limited by the homophobia of their surroundings sometimes.

this is the very recent reality.

fandom wasn't much better. slash existed, both m/m and f/f, but it wasn't accepted or seen as appropriate in a lot of circles. the early HP fandom had massive divides over if slash about the adult characters (or adult versions of the kids, etc) was even okay at all on a moral level because These Are Children's Books. a lot of fic archives would ban slash, as would forums and fansites with archives. some het advocates got really ugly. (and I'm not saying that every slash shipper was, by today's standards, a Good Queer or a Good Ally. lots of straight women would jump through all kinds of hoops to justify their ship, and "I'm not gay I'm just in carnal lust with you specifically" was a trope you'd see turn up now and again. but that was due mostly to lack of exposure to the queer community as a whole for everyone not just straight women, and even slash as written by straight women was more complex and complicated than I'm Jerking Off To This. lots of those fic writers defended LGBT rights outside of their work and did their part to be allies. don't assume everyone was the same.)

like with original works, you had to go looking for slashfic, and you'd face criticism if you were found reading or writing it in the wrong fandoms. sometimes there was legal action taken against slashers by the owners of the copyright - this happened to Han/Luke fans in the eighties with the Star Wars fandom, despite Lucas being okay with fanworks as a whole. there were a couple of Big Slash Fan Spaces (Star Trek TOS, Starsky and Hutch, etc) but outside of that you were essentially on your own. fanfiction.net, when it did finally launch, did a lot to change this, but FFN wasn't without anti-slashers doing their part to try and censor content they didn't like. and other posts have detailed Strikethrough and Boldthrough and FFN's bans on adult content better than I could, but suffice it to say that queer content has always been seen as more taboo than het content even if it's SFW.

things changed, gradually, but even as recently as the mid-2000s it was still a joke to be LGBT in public. stereotypically gay characters were poked fun at and made fun of. Brokeback Mountain was a huge joke and everyone mocked it. it's really only been in the last five years that "mainstream content aimed at queer audiences" is a thing at all, let alone in kids' shows. and even now there's network pushback, and fear of backlash from conservatives.

so kids, don't assume that All Queer All The Time is the easy option. we've fought for what we have and it happened because of years of baby steps. you're incredibly fortunate to have as much representation as you have. stop tearing down your fandoms for Not Being Good Enough. they're giving you a lot more than I ever got growing up.

#queer history

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