#every time you complain abt astarion liking women I make him fuck my female PC characters *HARDER*

[yes-these-obsessions-are-healthy]

It's really annoying when people try to dictate what specific queer sexuality a character must be because of their looks and behavior.

If you're getting angry that Astarion is being shipped with female PCs, then I'm sorry you lack the imagination necessary to comprehend the sheer kaleidoscopic range of queer male sexuality.

Iron Bull from Dragon Age: Inquisition never got this sort of flak as far as I know. He was confirmed Pansexual as well. Why is it that Astarion is so fiercely claimed as gay but Iron Bull is not? They have the same sexuality, but their personalities are different. Is it because Iron Bull is masc and Astarion is not? Is it because Astarion just so happens to mirror the stereotypical uppercrust fop and people simply can't conceive of someone being that audacious and sassy and him not being 100% homosexual? It truly isn't that difficult.

People are very protective of preserving gay and lesbians characters' sexualities, but why is it that same protection is never lent over to Bi characters' sexualities? Why is it that monosexuals insist on tugging a character with the capacity to be attracted to more than one gender or sex into Straight or Gay box. All it says to me is that your understanding of bisexuality is still stuck in the 1990s. Though we often joke that we are "half gay", we say it because that's the way society views it, not because it's actually true. If you're Bi/Pan, you're not gay or straight, you're something else entirely.

The fact that Larian took the "hot-headed fighter woman" and "catty, foppish uppercrust" archetypes and made them Bi should make you happy that they subverted expectations, not pissed that they didn't write utter cliches. Like it or not, fiction to a great extent does its best to reflect at least some aspect of reality, and for Bi people that are so often erased by the dominance of the "Gay or Straight" narrative, it's nice to see, because God knows gay people peddle the same exact monosexual bullshit that straight people do. They aren't immune to the misconceptions and propaganda. Bisexual people may behave, look, and act in a way that is reminiscent of certain 'subgroups' lesbians, gays, and straights, but our sexuality is not just an arrow on a sliding scale of Heterosexuality -- Homosexuality.

At some point you need to stop and realize that this 'hoarding' of Bi characters that gay and straight people tend to do only reflects and reaffirms one of the most historically and contemporarily pervasive issues we have in the LGBT community, that being how people view and police queerness through prescriptive rules and inductive and deductive reasoning, i.e. 'Astarion dresses, talks, and behaves like that, so he must be gay. He must be gay because he dresses, talks, and behaves like that', rather than the much more progressive and open-minded descriptive "Astarion has the capacity to be interested in any sex/gender, therefore he is Pan. He is pan because he has the capacity to be interested in any sex/gender."

Gays and lesbians need to accept that they don't have a monopoly on queer expression. If a Bi person does something that does not conform to cis-heteronormativity (such as Karlach being butch) and they affirm they are Bi, then they're no longer gay/lesbian-coded. They're Bi, so their behavior, looks, etc. is that of a Bi person. That's it.

not to be That Person but y’all have got to learn to be more normal about bisexual characters. this isn’t 2012. women romancing astarion is not the problem, nor is karlach “lesbian coded”. the real problem is y’all’s biphobia stemming largely from homophobic stereotypes