#eta: yes this is SPECIFICALLY about sh e ra but more importantly it's about the general trend in f/f fandom

[direquail]

this is a friendly reminder that if you shame queer fans for headcanoning not-canonically-specified queer female characters as bi/pan, you’re being a massive dick, and a terrible ally to bi/pan people.

Acting like bi/pan people working out their lives and desires through fandom is the same thing as a corporate-owned media property “forcing” a female character to sleep with a male one, or the same as decades of top-down censorship and institutional homophobia, or is some kind of bad-faith attempt to make a queer character “straight”, is gross. Peoples’ experiences of their real-life sexuality and their desire to reflect those experiences in their fandom activities can’t and shouldn’t be conflated with that, and trying to do so is, frankly, dehumanizing to bi and pan people. Their sexuality or romantic orientation is not institutional violence.

There’s a literal world of difference between cishet male gamers whining about a fictional woman who’s (already) not available for them to fuck, or assholes harassing clearly-identified lesbians on dating apps, or even the painful institutional history of queercoded women having to sleep with men onscreen, and queer people identifying with fictional characters and projecting their experiences onto them. The first three items listed are symptoms of privilege and entitlement and systemic homophobia, but the last item is queer people affirming queer people, which is something you should support, or at least not actively antagonize over, and not just when it’s only about you.

Be uncomfortable if you want, avoid content about it if you want, but just because you identify in a particular way with a character doesn’t mean someone else relates the same way, and they shouldn’t have to. There’s a world of difference between that and deliberate and malicious erasure. People who interpret an unspecified sexuality differently than you are still just doing the exact same thing you’re doing--they just came to a different conclusion than you.