#his white picket fence if he's in a queer relationship

[metalhoops]

Like a lesser hero in a fantasy tale, the night was cut clean in two by the dull glow of a flashlight beam, flanked by two boys. It was an odd pastime but a familiar one to them. They had grown at home in the strange dark places of the town, aware of what might be lurking in the shadows between the pines. 

Eddie, the first boy, with his hair and clothes as black as the forest floor, shook the silent woods with the intermittent clatter of his stainless-steel rings on the metal shaft of the light, his makeshift weapon. Each ring was a treasured yet well-worn possession. The ear of the pig ring and the temple of the skull were permanently scratched from the repeated action.

Steve, the other boy, was more prepared. He came brandishing a baseball bat, its wooden body a sister to the surrounding trees with a halo of gnarled nails, hinting at the more sinister air of their surroundings.  

Unlike Eddie’s fantasy games, the backstory didn’t matter. It was the reason the boys were there, of course, but it was also the imminent threat they didn’t wish to speak of. In their shared pasts, there had been portals to other worlds, monsters beyond human comprehension and near-death experiences that’d brought on the winter of Eddie’s life, and the spring of Steve’s. 

Eddie had spent the past month jumping at shadows in the corner of his new bedroom or in the woods beyond the trailer park. Steve, on the other hand, had bloomed beautifully and brutally before Eddie’s eyes. Before the Upside Down, he would look at Steve and all he’d feel was ire, righteous indignation and a small yet frustrating, pang of lust. 

When he looked at Steve in the yellow glow of the torchlight, he saw a man who’d come when Eddie called, in the middle of the night, with haste and a plan. He saw someone who believed in him or at least, cared enough about him to go willingly into the night when Eddie had reported seeing sinister shapes shift past his window.

It was enough to get Steve to leave the confines of his isolated mansion and slum it with the poor folk down in the proverbial trenches. Eddie now saw a man he very well might be in love with. Jagged shadows cast by stray branches sliced across his face, resembling the snaking vines of the Upside Down. The boys had barely escaped the place and every moment after felt as though they were living on borrowed time. 

“What’d you say we do one more loop past the old train tracks and call it a night?” Steve asked, at last, his body sticking close to Eddie’s side. He felt a pang of guilt for dragging Steve out of bed, again, just to find nothing. 

“We can head back now, I’m probably going crazy, man.” 

“No, I wanna check. Otherwise, it’ll bug the hell outta me. We’ve all been a little crazy after everything we’ve been through. I mean, I’ve almost died like ten times. Think the eleventh time might be the one that sticks- you know?” 

It reminded them of another night, in another world. It had been a quick yet intimate conversation with a stranger. If we get out of this, Eddie had thought at the time, I might actually want to get to know this guy. Months had passed. He still felt like he didn’t know Steve enough to say what he wanted to say, but Steve needed to hear it. 

“That’d be a real bummer, you know? If you died. I wouldn’t have anyone to go on long walks in the moonlight with.” 

The two boys had fallen out of step with one another. Steve had charged forward in the semi-darkness leaving Eddie a few paces behind.

“Nancy would come with you.  After the first time, when Will and Nancy’s friend went missing, she’d swing by my house, and we’d sit on the deck chairs watching the pool. Honestly, you might be better off with her. She’d bring a gun,” Steve spoke, tossing the jagged bat from hand to hand, with the skill of an ex-high school sports star. 

“Why is it you and I always end up in the woods trying to set each other up with Nancy goddamn Wheeler?” Eddie spoke disbelievingly as he jogged to catch up with Steve. He laughed, his hand bumping Eddie’s side as the two fell back into step. 

“She’s not my type, Stevie. You can have her,” Eddie tacked on, trying to defuse some of the tension that had arisen between them, skimming his light amongst the trees. 

“I don’t think she’s my type either. Well— not anymore. We tried it. It didn’t work out. We wanted different things,” Steve admitted.

Once they reached the train tracks, Steve surveyed the old wood and rusted metal. The place also had history. He could smell freezer burn and rotten meat on the breeze. When looking at Eddie’s profile he felt a sudden charge to the air like the calm before a thunderstorm. 

He thought of a conversation he’d had years before with Dustin on those very tracks. He knew with sudden certainty why he’d hauled himself out of bed in the middle of the night, once again to chase Eddie’s hunches. He and Dustin had been talking about love.  He gave himself the same advice he’d given the kid all those years before. 

Don’t fall in love. It’ll only break your heart.

“Right, you wanted that whole hoard of kids and an R.V. vacation thing? Three girls, three boys. A whole brood of Harringtons,” Eddie breathed, kicking up dirt and leaves with his shoes. Steve shot Eddie a perplexed glance, surprised he’d been listening and shocked he’d remembered the statement word for word.

“Right, yeah. I know, make fun all you want, dude. It’s crazy I know.” Once more, they fell out of step. 

Eddie stopped while Steve kept walking, playing the role of a funambulist, his hands outstretched as though standing at a great height as he walked foot over foot across the thin metal. 

“This might surprise you Steve but for once I wasn’t going to give you shit,” Eddie replied, walking beside Steve, jumping from wooden beam to wooden beam. 

The metal track gave Steve a good half inch of height, making it so that for once the two weren’t eye to eye. Eddie kept flicking the light between the vast track ahead of them and the empty woods behind. He still felt as though any moment something could burst through the cracks in the earth left in the wake of the quake and drag them back down into Eddie’s personal version of hell. He couldn’t help but think of Steve’s words. The eleventh time would stick. Eddie didn’t know what he’d do without him. 

“So, what do you want?” Steve asked, shaking Eddie from his thoughts. When his answer didn’t immediately present itself, Steve continued.

“I mean, you know what I want. Six nuggets, touring the country. What do you want?” 

The question startled a scoff out of Eddie. It wasn’t as though anyone had bothered to ask him that before. He didn’t know. 

“I’ve got no clue. I’m not like you. I don’t sit around thinking about the future. I’m just trying to get through today,” Eddie confessed, speaking more candidly than he’d intended. 

“Alright. You don’t know what you want to do with the rest of your life. That’s pretty normal, but having nothing? Dude. You’ve gotta have something. Let’s start small. What do you want to do tomorrow?” 

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind having breakfast with my uncle and spending some time with the kids and the band. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get to see you, hopefully under some better circumstances,” Eddie explained as Steve misstepped, almost falling from his perch. 

He corrected himself, placing an outstretched hand on Eddie’s shoulder for balance. Eddie tried not to preen beneath the other boy’s touch. 

“I like the sound of that,” Steve confirmed, daring a glance at Eddie. 

The storm within him continued to brew. Eddie’s plans for whatever small future stretched out before them involved Steve, which was more than he’d gotten from anyone else.

Nancy wanted a career in investigative journalism. She wanted to change the world for the better. It was a noble goal. One Steve had admired endlessly but he couldn’t help but feel like a small child asking for a seat at the grown-up table when trying to compete with the hopes and dreams of Nancy Wheeler. For her, he would’ve changed his dreams to play a small part in her life, but he’d come to realise that wasn’t a good way to love. 

Every relationship Steve had went to hell eventually. He didn’t want the same fate with Eddie. He wanted to continue walking the fine line between friendship and whatever awaited them on the other side of the electric storm. Steve didn’t know if he was ready for all the complications being in love with Eddie would entail. It’d wreak havoc on his sense of self and take a hatchet to his dreams of white picket fences. That was on the slim chance Eddie felt the same way about him. 

When Steve looked at Eddie he felt as though he were back at the bottom of Lovers Lake. To love Eddie was to drown beneath the crushing weight of possibilities. 

“You okay?” Eddie asked, a hint of concern in his tone. 

It was only then that Steve realised he’d stopped walking, his knuckles turning white as his fingers dug into the fabric of Eddie’s jacket. 

No. Steve was far from okay, but he couldn’t voice it without ruining everything. 

“I need a minute,” Steve muttered, stumbling back from Eddie, removing his hand as though he’d grabbed the wrong end of a hot poker. 

He’d moved on instinct, forgetting where he stood on his precarious perch. He tumbled ass backwards off the train tracks, trying to save whatever sense of dignity he had left by scrambling to his feet quickly. He heard his bat clatter to the forest floor as he headed off into the woods, unsure of his direction. He needed space to sort his head out. 

There were only two ways Steve knew how to face a crisis; two base and primal instincts, fight or run. Eddie wasn’t a wayward creature that devoured cats or a schoolyard bully. He couldn’t punch himself loveless and doing anything to hurt Eddie was worse than torture. 

Steve wanted Eddie to hit him. It’d shake loose some of the tension in his chest at the sight of the boy’s brown eyes; the eyes that reminded Steve of the deep warm wood that was fashionable in homes during his childhood. The familiar floorboards of the entryway where he’d lay with Tommy after hours of swimming, drip-drying on the wood, warping it to the shape of their bodies. 

Eddie’s eyes reminded him of home. Not the place he’d grown up in, but the sensation one felt when they recalled a fond memory, years removed from context and complications. Steve couldn’t imagine a future where Eddie would hurt him, even if that’s what he wanted. 

He did what he did best. He ran away. 

Without Eddie’s flashlight, the woods were a gaping maw of some unseen creature. Even the breeze on the back of his neck felt warm. Steve collapsed at the base of a tree and searched his pockets for a lighter. He didn’t bring his cigarettes but there was something soothing about the weight of the object in his hand and the repeated action of sparking the flint and extinguishing the fire with a twist of his wrist. 

Steve heard approaching footsteps signalled by the crunch of leaves underfoot.  He prayed Eddie wouldn’t ask why he’d run. If he asked, Steve knew he’d tell him. Then they’d both be screwed. 

Steve tried to spark the lighter again, but no flame would ignite. It was out of lighter fluid. Just his goddamn luck.  

“Steve?” Eddie’s voice echoed through the trees. 

The direction was all wrong. Eddie’s call came from a distance. The footsteps were close. Right goddamn on top of him. Fuck. 

Steve acted fast, fumbling in the underbrush, trying to find a weapon. He grabbed a stray branch with enough heft to wield. He was good at making use of what he had. He held the wood aloft, scrambled to his feet and fumbled with the lighter, desperate to get one last spark out of it. He knew how much the creatures hated fire. In a way, he was thankful that he knew what he was dealing with for once. 

The swiftness of the footfalls and the length of the shadows cutting through the blackness let him know within seconds he would be face to face with a full-sized Demogorgon. 

Steve felt the creature before he saw it. A sudden force collided into his body knocking him from his feet. He had just enough time to get the jagged end of the stick between himself and the creature. He felt the branch wade into the creature’s soft flesh. 

Eddie called his name once more, drawing the creature's attention away from him. Steve had an opening.

His trembling hands flicked the lighter again. This time, for a brief and brilliant moment, it sparked. He shoved the naked flame against the creature's wound. He wasn’t sure if he’d hurt it or just made it mad. It thrashed and writhed, grabbing at Steve’s body, and pounding him into the damp earth. Now Steve had its attention. 

He tried to strike out but this time the monster was too quick, its body bared down on Steve and before he knew it, he was face to face with the monster's strange unfurling flesh mouth and razor-sharp teeth. So, this was how he’d die. 

“Mother fucker,” Eddie muttered as two shifting figures caught his attention. 

Steve was pinned to the ground by something that looked fresh out of his nightmares. The others had told him there were more things out there than the bats and demonic, skinless hell-wizard they’d faced but Eddie’s mind had never been able to conjure a creature that would match the true beast before him. 

Steve was doing his best to keep the creature at arms-length. A rotted wooden branch cut at the palm of Steve’s hands and had gone straight through the thing’s body.  Eddie scoured his brain, trying to remember everything he’d been told about the creature. Heat. They hated heat. 

Eddie had grabbed Steve’s bat as he followed him. He’d wanted to be the kind of person who could give Steve space but every fibre of his being had told him to chase after the boy so he had. 

He dropped the flashlight to free up a hand and searched the pockets of his jacket, thankful he always had his lighter handy. He knew Steve would be pissed if Eddie torched his favourite weapon, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He’d rather have Steve pissed than not have him at all. 

He set fire to the bat, throwing more hellish shadows over the wicked tableau of the snarling beast and the desperate boy pinned beneath its grasp. The smell of burning wood and flesh hung heavy in the air. He had the element of surprise on his side. 

The flaming bat collided with the creature’s skull sending it reeling. It let out an inhuman whaling that scattered the nightbirds. Eddie readied the bat to swing again, expecting the beast to charge. Instead, it ran off into the blackness of the night. It’d finally happened. What they all knew had been inevitable. The Upside Down, and in turn Vecna was back. Though for now, he and Steve had brought themselves time. 

Eddie watched as Steve sat wide-eyed but seemingly unharmed. He guessed Steve Harrington had more lives left in him yet. Thank Christ. 

“Please tell me that looked as badass as it felt,” Eddie breathed trying to alleviate some of the tension between them. 

He dropped the bat, snuffing out what was left of the flame and moved unthinkingly to pat down Steve’s body, checking for wounds. He had a gash on his forehead and a split lip, but he’d live. 

“It looked pretty badass,” Steve confirmed and froze as Eddie’s hands raked through his hair. 

“You’ve got something in your...” Eddie’s voice trailed off as he pulled a leaf out of Steve’s hair, holding it aloft in front of his face. 

Steve’s eyes glanced from the leaf to Eddie before tentatively reaching out, his hands searching the planes of his body, dancing cautiously over the barely healed wounds that’d once littered his side. Steve was checking him over.

“I’m okay. You okay?” Eddie assured holding up a hand before reaching into the back pocket of his jeans. 

He pulled out his bandana and inched forward to wrap it around the gash on Steve’s head. The boy cringed beneath his touch. Eddie muttered an apology. 

“I’ll live,” Steve confirmed leaning back, trying to get some space between them. 

Eddie hadn’t realised how close they were. He shifted back, remembering with sudden clarity that Steve had practically begged Eddie to give him a second alone. He wasn’t willing to do that, given they’d already run into one hell beast that night. There could be others. He did something uncharacteristic. Eddie Munson sat with Steve in silence. 

They sat in stillness for so long that the birds and insects returned to the woods around them. 

“I’m sorry,” Eddie spoke when the silence was too loud. He didn’t know what he was apologising for, but he couldn’t think of anything better to say. 

Steve looked up at the boy with alarm. 

“What’re you sorry for?” He asked, feeling as though he was caught in another echo of the past. 

He remembered a seemingly endless car ride to Nancy’s house, trying to find ways to apologise for some transgression he wasn’t sure he’d committed. He’d wanted to apologise because he’d loved Nancy and he’d been scared of losing her. 

He wondered what motivations were behind Eddie’s apology. He worried that The Upside Down’s strange relationship with time had leaked into Hawkins, that some pasts were destined to repeat. 

“I don’t know,” Eddie admitted after a breath, letting out a nervous laugh. 

“I’m sorry for doing whatever I did to make you go all space cadet on me. Tell me what I did, and I can tell you I’m sorry,” he continued. 

Steve was certain at that moment, Eddie loved him too. It was already too late to change things. They were trains on a track, their futures seemingly already locked in place.

“You know if you want someone to talk to about whatever’s going on in that head of yours, I’m here Steve,” Eddie kept pushing, unable to take Steve’s silence as an answer. 

His tone was so soft, sincere and unlike anything that Steve expected from the boy that he couldn’t help but speak the words out loud, despite his better judgment. 

“I love you.” 

Eddie had thought he’d been prepared for anything, but he hadn’t been prepared for that. It was then that Steve let out a strangled sound between a scoff and a groan. 

“And it's screwed now. I always mess it up.”  

Eddie could hardly hear the boy’s voice over the rush of blood in his ears. His heart was a high-strung choir, singing the same repeated tune, ‘Steve loves me’. When his common sense kicked into gear, he noted the panic in Steve’s eyes and knew he needed to say something. 

“I love you too,” Eddie managed, feeling both heavier and lighter. 

He’d never said it before. He sure as hell hadn’t pictured a world where he’d admit he loved a boy before they’d started dating. Steve was moving at a breakneck speed and Eddie was desperately trying to catch up. To his surprise, Steve hardly stirred at the confession. 

“I know,” Steve admitted sounding broken as his eyes met Eddie’s. He gave the boy a tight-lipped grimace. All of Eddie’s momentary joy fell just as it’d begun to soar. 

“Please tell me that was a Star Wars reference,” Eddie whispered, earning a real smile from Steve. It was soft and fleeting as freshly felled snow on a warm palm. He knew despite all of Steve’s posturing, he was a huge nerd when it came to science fiction. 

“Eds, my track record...” Steve’s voice trailed off. 

Eddie realised the thing Steve had been dancing around. They were still talking about Nancy goddamn Wheeler in the woods. 

“Stevie,” he breathed, for once at a loss for words. 

He was a storyteller, but he didn’t want to give Steve a story. He couldn’t promise him a world where everything was perfect. They lived in a land of blight and monsters, a time of trouble. The town was still after Eddie’s head on a pike and Steve was running out of goodwill with those that’d once called him king. He wanted to show Steve what they were. 

Damn the past. Kill all possible futures. All they had was the brief and infinite present. 

Eddie wanted to show Steve what they could be at that moment. 

He crossed the space between them, pausing for a breath, leaving room for Steve to push him away. When no such protest arose, he placed one hand on Steve’s cheek, the other cupping the nape of his neck. 

“I’m not good at this either,” Eddie admitted tentatively. 

He’d kissed guys before. It’d always been desperate and sloppy. He didn’t want loving Steve to feel like an afterthought as it had with the other men. 

“But I think it’s worth a shot,” Eddie concluded. 

He’d laid everything out on the table, all that was left was for Steve to pick it up or turn it down. 

Steve didn’t surge forward. Instead, he moved achingly slow. One hand landed on Eddie’s thigh, the other tangled in his hair. He gave a gentle tug to pull him that last inch closer. 

Eddie’s lips were wind-chaffed and cool, melting ice on bare skin, shocking and a good kind of painful. Steve’s face had the faintest hint of stubble, it was rough as the rocks, and forest foliage beneath their bodies. He smelled of wet earth, blood, and faded cologne. Their hands traced each other’s topography with fingers, lips and tongues, toppling over in the process. 

When they pulled apart the whole world seemed to hold its breath. The wind was still. The night was silent. An invisible audience waited with bated breath for a conclusion. 

“Christ,” Eddie choked, hand fluttering dramatically to his heart. It was a kick drum in his chest. 

Steve’s hand followed, sliding beneath Eddie’s shirt. 

“Christ,” Steve echoed with a goofy grin. Eddie loved him. The thought came easily. It was the only thought populating his mind. 

“We should probably, you know, shelve this and try to stop the world ending... again,” Eddie proposed, trying to think straight. 

“Only if you promise to take me on a date after,” Steve countered. He pulled himself to his feet and extended a hand to Eddie. 

“Me take you? You’re meant to be the ladies' man with the killer dates,” Eddie argued, falling into step with Steve easily. 

“Exactly. It’d be nice to be the one getting the flowers for a change. Technically you’re the one who wanted to give this a shot. I’ll get the second date.” 

Eddie scoffed disbelievingly. The cocky bastard.  He’d never picked Steve as someone who liked flowers. He’d give Steve a garden, a forest, a kingdom. 

“Alright, save the world. Buy you flowers. Go on a first date. Go on a second date. Seems like I might actually have a plan for the next few days down pact.” 

“And after that?” Steve prompted. 

“If you want me to say six nuggets and a Winnebago you’ve gotta buy me dinner first.” 

[aaa-battery-not-rechargeable]

about a month ago, my uncle asked if I had a significant other. I appreciate his gender inclusivity, of course.

I'm used to the question. it's not like it's something outrageous that he's asking. so I simply said no, that's not for me.

he looked at me and said "well, someday." not someday maybe, just.... someday.

of course I'm not quick to anger, but there's a part of me that's a little more defensive about my aroace identity. so I jumped to my defense.

my uncle isn't a bad guy, he's quite nice and tries his best to be respectful in the current political shit storm by supporting queer people. but apparently that does exclude me, an aroace.

I reiterated that I'm just not interested in a romantic or sexual partnership, and I really do not ever see that changing.

and he said something to the effect of "it's okay if you don't want that now."

and I said, "no, it's just okay that I don't want that."

and he said that I was pessimistic. as if I was secretly searching for a relationship or a partner, but was rejecting love because I could not find one.

I calmly (with all the rage in my veins) told him "no, a life without love or sex is something optimistic for me."

he had the gall to look horrified.

I'm sick of aroace people not being seen as normal human people when they don't want the outcome of their life to look like everyone else's. I'm sick of the white picket fence, I'm sick of the assumption that everyone has another half out there.

I'm whole on my own.

[paraphwrites]

so obviously the time period a character comes from impacts them. but i adore the analysis of dbda and loneliness so now i want to analyze the characters + their time period + loneliness

edwin. so, edwin is from the 1900s. he was raised with the knowledge that he would join the military, that he would get married. this was an accepted part of life. now, i do not wish to analyze the full scale of edwin's relationship with violence (at least, not here), but i do think it's interesting that edwin goes out of his way not to inflict harm on others. this is potentially because he was raised in such a way where that was the norm, and he always knew he did not fit traditional male standards. he has always preferred knowledge and books to fighting and sport. this would have been incredibly isolating, especially as a young boy in a school for children of military members. additionally, as a queer person, edwin would have been entirely socially isolated from his peers. whether they picked up on it like simon or just thought he was un-manly, the point stands: edwin would not have fit in with his peers and seemingly had no friends when he died. which is very sad. and very lonely.

crystal. crystal's parents neglected her for their work. she lashes out. she lashes out and pushes people away (or in front of traffic). she is volatile and destructive and she is like this because she lives in an age when parents are expected to care for their children, and her parents still actively chose not to. crystal is especially traumatized because even tho she is in upper class which may have a higher rate of willful parental neglect, the expectation is still that parents love their children. moreover crystal is psychic, and that's never really been fun. she'll be completely different from all her peers in a fundamental way which she probably never talks about with any of them! so, like, of course when david, a demon, comes along, she lets him in - she's finally with someone who understands and makes her feel less lonely. someone else who's weird and angry and pretty and supernatural. and then he, too, betrays her. there is also almost certainly a race element, which may further disassociate her from her peers, seeing as the upper class is usually very white.

jenny. so jenny grew up as a lesbian in the 90s. now, i don't know much about washington state, but i do know that they legalized gay marriage in 2012. which means for over half of jenny's life, she was living with the knowledge that she would never get to live the same type of life as her peers; though the white picket fence americana dream may have been less prevalent by the 90s, it still was very ingrained in american society - especially small town society. i wonder if part of jenny's gothic fashion is to distinguish herself from other people - if she cannot have the same lives as them, then no one will make the mistake of assuming she will.

so the night nurse is lonely in a very unique way. she is lonely because she does not have a proper conception of an actual human life. she has no friends or relationships - nor does she want to; she does not know what they are like. and, i think, because she exists so outside of time and removed from society, that it makes her inherently lonely. she is lonely because somehow she was created and somehow someone convinced her that her only purpose in life is to collect lost children and she is satisfied with this but she is also alone. she has no time period to be contextualized in, and that in itself is the context.

niko is lonely because her dad is dead and her mom lives in a different continent. and i think that because she is able to utilize manga and cartoons as a form of escapism, it allows her to fill that void of devastating loneliness a bit more. she lives in a world where if she doesn't want to think she does not have to. she is not obligated to be courageous. however, she also lives in a world where she is able to choose to self-isolate, even if that isn't good for her. so when she is sad she hides away because she can and it's scary and she doesn't want to do it alone but she doesn't want to do it with her mom. i've seen people saying crystal is such a teenage girl but niko? niko wants her mom to comfort her but doesn't want to talk to her mom. niko is horribly lonely and it's only a gay victorian twink who can get her to smile again. niko is lonely because she exists in a world which allows her to be and it takes someone who is not from this time to help her move past this

charles. god, we all know how lonely charles is. biracial, abused by his father, probably bisexual, good with people yet killed via hate crime, morally upstanding. charles is the epitome of loneliness because he grows up in such a particular moment of time. he lives in the 80s. feminism and queer rights have been radically shifting in the past two decades. the 80s have huge amounts conservative pushback from these movements. so, yeah, being gay isn't a crime anymore, but gendered expectations are being reestablished in a new harmful way. so, yeah, charles is growing up in a time of progress, but he's also growing up in a household which will absolutely be anti-progress, and ergo charles is stuck in this dichotomy of he could hypothetically have everything but that would mean losing everything, too. he's lonely because his dad beats him. he's lonely because his mom doesn't say anything. he's lonely because he has a piercing but his dad locked him in his room for three days after it. he's lonely because he attends a boarding school which rich racist pricks. he's lonely because never once in his life has he admitted how the intersection of all his identities puts him in a situation where he is completely alone. and he isn't alone -he's got edwin- but their experiences with loneliness are vastly different.

as i have said a stupid number of times, dead boy detectives is a story about loneliness. and the writers made these characters so damn brilliantly because they all make so much sense in the context they were raised in.

we are all shaped by the context's we're raised in. everyone is raised at a different moment in history in different environments with different families. human experiences are so unique that everyone is inherently lonely. but lonely does not mean alone and lonely does not mean forever. it means when you were fourteen you cried yourself to sleep but now you're twenty and know how to play cricket and your friends come to all of your matches. it means you were raised in a world that was cruel and unforgiving, AND it means that because of that you don't have to be. dead boy detectives teaches us that we're all horribly lonely, and maybe that makes each other a little less lonely

i'll take some of your burden if you'll take some of mine, and whatnot

[illdowhatiwantthanks]

hii! i love your casey x autistic!reader fics and i had a request. you know how in a lot of the episodes where the men get sa’d, they think it means they’re gay and they blow up in the interrogation room shouting slurs and everything? i’ve always wondered what it would be like for a queer detective to be in the room seeing someone say that in front of them. could you do something like that where a suspect gets defensive and starts spewing homophobic stuff in the interrogation room where detective!reader is interviewing them and casey is watching from behind the glass? pre-existing relationship if possible and maybe some fluff as well :)) these are just some ideas you can really do whatever you want - i give you full creative freedom 🙏

Hey, friend! Hope this is what you're looking for! Much love to you! 💕 –illdowhatiwantthanks

Interrogations

Casey Novak x autistic!fem!reader Warnings: homophobic comments, threats of sexual violence, autism times, police (duh), explicit language (let me know if I've missed anything!) Word count: 1.2k

Summary: A threatening, homophobic outburst from a victim has you overstimulated and panicked. Casey is there to help calm you down. That is, if she can calm down herself.

“Sir, it’s in your best interest to be honest with us,” you said, rubbing your temples.

Round and round you’d gone with this man. This married man with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. He’d been assaulted at a gay club, and the implications were clear. You sat down across from him. Your partner, Resendez, leaned against the back wall, letting you take the lead on this one. As the only out, queer detective working special victims, you were often the one they chose to interview queer victims or even suspects. There was a level of relatability; you were better than most at getting them to open up.

This man–clean cut, button-up, eye swollen shut, split lip–you felt sorry for him. You felt sorry for anyone who wasn’t out, wasn’t free to be themselves for whatever reason. It had taken you a long time to come to terms with your own sexuality, even longer to be comfortable in a relationship. But you knew the cognitive dissonance it took to lead a “straight” life while trying desperately hard not to be gay. He’d given you some bullshit story about being drugged and dragged to the gay club, but there had been no drugs found in his system. He was clearly just trying to come up with an excuse for being there.

“Mr. Berg,” you started again, softening your voice. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying sex with men. We just need to know what really happened so we can catch the person who did this to you.”

Suddenly, he exploded, standing and throwing his chair against the wall. You nearly fell out of your seat as you backed toward the wall and Resendez surged forward to cuff him.

“I’m not a fucking faggot, you bitch!” he spat. “Maybe you like pussy, but that’s not my problem! You just need a dick in you! I could do it, too, I’m not a fucking fag!”

You kept your eyes fixed on a scratch on the wall, trying not to react. You were used to people saying ignorant things. You were used to perps saying all kinds of disgusting things to you, but this outburst had rattled you more than usual.

“Just go, Y/L/N,” Resendez said, nodding toward the door.

You didn’t need to be told twice. You let the door slam shut behind you, leaning against it and exhaling shakily.

“You okay?”

You jumped a bit, then calmed when you saw it was Casey. She’d been watching the interview.

You nodded, but your hands gave you away, shaking at your sides. Casey frowned and pressed one of your hands between hers, flattening it and attempting to massage the stress away. You were trying hard to stay calm, but Berg’s outburst–the force of it, the volume–had taken you off guard. Normally on the job, you went into situations expecting belligerence or violence, and your body and brain were primed for it ahead of time. But this had come so out of the blue. Your heartbeat was fast and loud in your ears, and you closed your eyes, the lights overhead too bright, too much.

You could feel yourself growing panicked, not because of what Berg had said, but because you knew you were getting overstimulated, and you couldn’t control it. Of course, your squad knew you were autistic. Huang evaluated you every six months to ensure you weren’t burnt out and were able to perform your duties. There were parts of solving a case that being autistic made you very good at, but there were also things it made hard for you. You hated for your squad to see you like this, to see the worst parts of being autistic. You wanted them to trust you, to believe that you were capable of doing your job and doing it well. But nobody else fell apart like this. Just you.

“Sorry,” you whispered to Casey as your breathing grew more rapid.

She wrapped her arm around your shoulder protectively. “It’s okay. Come here, come with me.”

She led you to the bullpen and knocked lightly on Cragen’s open door. Cragen looked up and was about to ask Casey what she needed when he noticed her gesture subtly toward you–hunched, eyes on the ground, fingers tapping the sides of your head as your body rocked back and forth.

Cragen gathered his papers and stood, squeezing Casey’s arm as he passed. “Take as long as you need,” he said quietly, leaving his office.

Casey pulled you into the office and shut the door behind you, turning off the overhead lights and shutting the blinds.

“Okay,” she sighed, wrapping her arms around your rocking body and squeezing you tightly. The longer she held you, the more your heartbeat slowed, the more even your breaths grew, until you were left shaky from the spent adrenaline, limp in her arms.

“I’m sorry,” you said again, lowering yourself into a chair and rubbing your eyes.

Casey sat next to you, taking your hand in hers again. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, honey.”

You disagreed, but you didn’t want to argue the point. Casey would win anyway. She was a lawyer, after all.

“I want to go in with you next time when you question Berg,” she added.

“Casey…” you protested.

“I don’t want him talking to you like that.”

You smiled softly at her and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Casey. Honey. I’m a detective. People are gonna say shitty things to me.”

“Yeah, well,” she grumbled. “If he threatens you again, I’m slapping him with an assault charge.”

“He’s an assault victim, Case. It’s your job to protect him.”

“Maybe so,” she conceded, leaning forward to caress your cheek. “But my number one job is to protect you.”

You melted into her touch. Usually it was you protecting people. Your whole job was protecting people, and you were good at it. But Casey? Casey looked after you. Casey made you feel safe.

You leaned in to kiss her lips softly, making sure to meet her eyes when you pulled away, so she knew you were feeling better, less overstimulated.

“I’m okay, honey,” you whispered. “I promise.”

The rest of the squad made it a point to be extra normal when you and Casey emerged from Cragen’s office. Someone who didn’t know you might think you and Casey had been in there for less-than-professional reasons, but the squad knew the only reason you’d lock yourself in there was for you to regulate yourself. And they never wanted you to feel embarrassed about it.

You made your way back to the interrogation room where Berg now sat handcuffed. Resendez observed him through the two-way mirror.

“Want another crack, Y/N?” he asked. “I’m getting nothing.”

“Might try good cop, bad cop with Casey,” you told him. “Or, well, I guess it’d be bad cop, worse ADA who’s pissed you threatened her girlfriend.”

Resendez shrugged and grinned at you. “Worth a shot anyway.”

Casey squeezed your hand before following you into the interrogation room.

“Alright, Mr. Berg. Allow me introduce ADA Novak.”

[shorthaltsjester]

if i ever have to see another thought piece on the description of the white picket fence outside of fjord and jester’s place in mighty nein reunited indicating jester’s unhappiness in the relationship i will burn the world to the ground.

a) heteronormativity doesn’t exist in exandria !

b) fjord isn’t your Typical Male Love Interest Guy. if i ever have to read someone say that shit again i’m gonna (correctly) assume they haven’t paid attention at all to campaign 2 and any of fjord’s character arc.

c) perhaps, jester lavorre, woman who was raised on the ideology of romance novels and sexuality as exchange, might just find it uh… not a terrible thing that the white picket fence is falling apart outside since… fjord explicitly does Not feel like those romance novels to her, instead he feels comfortable. the way that a brightly painted but rarely used house might, especially when the couple in question spends most of their time adventuring together… which is an essential part of jester’s motivations throughout the campaign.

d) the reason fjord and jester seem unhappy in the reunion might be because, well, uh, whereas everyone else was getting a “vacation”, jester and fjord’s life together (specifically the fact that Fjord Loves Jester Enough To Risk The World (Momentarily) To Save Her) was the inciting action for an apocalyptic demigod being released - they Were unhappy. who wouldn’t be given those circumstances. jester nearly died, and fjord felt like the god that once saved him had now abandoned him, i am so truly sorry that their romance was not satisfactory for your vision of atypical romance (which, by the way, is literally reinforcing the restrictive romantic tropes you think you’re criticizing, so good job i guess). i would be much, much more concerned if jester and fjord Weren’t clearly dismayed.

e) both fjord and jester are individuals whose entire lives and character are defined by the expectation (both external and internal) that they behave and emote a certain way. that they’re in a relationship with someone who they feel that they can show that they are frustrated with or disagree on the layout of their house with or have different ideas on how to deal with the looming threat of a demigod is incredible. jester and fjord are emblematic of a relationship in which the characters Aren’t meant to be, but they Want to be together and they want to understand and support the other person so they work at it. we wouldn’t have conversations like “you seem disheartened..” “i am very disheartened! you almost died!” if they didn’t take the time and care to communicate with one another.

f) if you want a honeymoon era joyful queer romance, yasha and beau are right there! they are explicitly horny and in love and bright about it! if queerness is your measure of “trope breaking” i am very sorry to tell you that queer people partake in white picket fences, and i’d actually argue that in terms of Lifestyle Metaphor, beauyasha are more adherent to the whitepicket fence, nuclear familyism. this isn’t a detriment to them, just, very literally, beau works a 9-5 where she comes back to her housewife who gardens and cooks dinner and their future includes explicit reference to children. comparatively, fjord wants to address some issues in his past, jester is an artist, and both of them are interested in adventure for the foreseeable future.

g) if you truly think that a single part of laura’s description of the part-time abode of fjord and jester overrides every interaction and choice that both laura and travis make towards fjord and jester caring for each other in a deep and meaningful way that goes beyond the weird fandom constructed Man/Woman characters being portrayed by a married couple i truly, Truly have no idea why you even watch the many hours of content that cr is when you could… play/write your own shit.

[distort-opia]

This might sound silly and i know bruce is bisexual and all but from a queer standpoint, the scene where he proposes to selina feels a lot like compulsory heterosexuality. "I love you. I HAVE to love you."

And considering the timeline, joker was HIDDEN INSIDE BRUCE'S BASEMENT my god the implications, the metaphor....

Yeah, the whole thing is... [clears throat] very interesting. These two panels, which happen relatively close in time, put it into perspective:

Batman (2016) #32 // Dark Days: The Casting

However, to be entirely honest, I don't think Bruce proposing to Selina, and that whole arc... can be boiled down to just compulsory heterosexuality. It's more complicated than that. Bruce is doing this after interacting with the Batman of Flashpoint, his own father, who begs him to try and be happy. And Bruce's idea of happiness, very much inspired by Thomas', is settling down with a woman and having a family. Gaining peace.

Tom King is the one who wrote the wedding arc, and the whole thing is permeated by this... typically masculine, American idealization of women as this isle of peace that a tortured man yearns for, but can never fully choose. I'm sure there's names for this trope or stereotype, but I'm too lazy to look this up. Think Michael Mann movies, think James Bond movies, think stories about criminals and agents and soldiers leading a dark violent life aspiring to put down arms, and the whole dream being entangled with a woman. A female character who usually isn't fleshed out beyond the representation of leaving a life of violence behind, having a nice wife and nice children in a nice house with a nice white picket fence. Tbh it's not surprising to me that King ended up writing Bruce and Selina with these undertones, because of King's infamous background with the CIA before he became a comic book writer.

And thing is, I don't think it's inaccurate to portray Bruce this way. Bruce has lead a long life of violence, and he wants to want to stop. He wishes it didn't define him as much as it does, he wishes there was another path for him-- and this wish drives his attempt to settle down with Selina. "I have to love you" is less about "you're a woman and I should marry a woman", it's more about "if I love you I am more of a human being, and I need that." Yes, it's compulsory heterosexuality too, in the sense that Bruce is drawing from the heteronormative idea that happiness can only be achieved through normality, and normality = wife and retirement. But it's also a sad, desperate attempt at salvaging himself through Selina, whom he does love... but the things he loves about her are less about her, and more about himself. In the end, his own subconscious acknowledges all of it, during the Knightmares arc:

Batman (2016) #69

[sigh] It's all quite sad. And I've said it in a different post, but this is partly why -- in a seemingly paradoxical way -- a relationship with Joker has the potential to work. "You can't love anyone but the Vow, but the Bat," Selina (a figment of his own mind) tells Bruce. And Joker is part of the Vow. In many ways, over the decades, Joker has become the endgame of the Vow, the incarnation of all the things the Bat is supposed to defeat. It's fucked up and makes me want to chew on glass, but the Bat could allow loving Joker, because loving Joker would be a part of the Mission.

Anyway, I went on a bit of an unncessary tangent, but yeah! I do agree, Anon. So many implications.

[nectar-cellar]

what was your inspiration to create your main oc?

thank you for sending me this ask @drawing-way-outside-the-lines @tau1tvec 💞💞

i wrote a really long response below i won’t blame you if you can’t read the whole thing lmfao 😭 but i had fun thinking about my ocs and writing it!

i made amir way back in april 2020 (3 years ago!!!!). his appearance was at first loosely based on some attractive guy i saw on instagram, then i kept tweaking and refining his features based on a handful of other face claims until he took on a more unique look of his own. i always wanted to keep the strong straight brows, deep-set tired eyes, and sharp pointy nose, those are his defining features to me.

personality-wise, at first i did not have one in mind for him. i just thought he should be a serious, intense kind of guy, to match his appearance. he reminded me of some of the male protagonists in YA novels i read, so that was what i associated him with: a guy who would have to go on a journey of some sort.

the more pics i took of him, the more he kind of reminded me of someone i knew, and i thought some aspects of that person’s personality would really fit this character. actually, a handful of people i’ve known/met. so there’s definitely a real-life influence there. a lot of my ocs have borrowed character traits from people i know/knew irl - is that weird? i feel like it’s the easiest to imagine an oc with certain traits/behaviours when i can draw from real observations, feelings, relationships etc. it makes them more “real” and personal to me.

i wanted a character who would struggle with himself, who was flawed, but who would still strive to do the right thing as best as he could. he had to be a good person, at heart.

i also thought it’d be interesting to see how a masculine character from a strict and traditionalist background would struggle with accepting his own queer identity, and with dating another person who was visibly queer in a small town where they’d both stick out like sore thumbs. 

which brings me to dani (she/they), birth name daniel. at first, when i made dani, i just had the idea to create a sad, lonely and dejected young person who lived in sunset valley, who hated the seemingly idyllic and sunny suburban town, who wanted more than anything to leave and never look back. i can definitely imagine sunset valley to be a strongly conservative, traditional white-picket-fence kind of neighbourhood and i felt like it could be the kind of oppressive place a queer and closeted person would hate. that was where i got the idea that dani was a trans person who could not be out (yet) for the sake of their own safety and survival (in their story, not in these studio pics). the shortening of the name is one small way she tries to take back some sort of control over her self-expression and identity. i think dani’s background is a pretty familiar story for a lot of queer people and it was inspired by a lot of coming out stories i’ve read. as for dani’s face claim, i’ve tweaked their face so many times that i can’t even remember if i had one to begin with...

i thought that amir and dani would actually make an interesting couple because they have a lot in common: they’re both introverts, outsiders to sunset valley, in the middle of their journey of self-discovery, lonely, and 2 hopeless romantics yearning to be seen and accepted and loved.

so yeah that was my inspiration behind creating them and making them a couple. this idea of two people who find each other by chance and they just get each other and they can hardly believe it and they think they’re meant to be forever.

[dr-lizortecho]

Inspired by @ajna-eye-cogitations and written for @rnmafterdark day three: white picket fence

It had been months of secret rendezvouses and stolen kisses. Keeping their private lives under wraps from the town’s gossip mill- and therefore their loved ones. Which had been nice, giving Max time to breathe and explore without his siblings prying into his reasonings and emotions. Allowing him a moment to decide what he wanted for himself.

Which was coming home after good and bad days alike to find Kyle’s car parked in front of his place, to wake up to good morning texts sent between patients at the ass crack of dawn and buying keto friendly beer while at the supermarket.

Max smiles to himself as he opens the door to his house, more than pleased to find it already unlocked. It was something he was growing more and more accustomed to since Kyle made himself at home shortly after their relationship came out. Now three or more days a week Max could expect to come home to Kyle cooking in the kitchen or asleep in his bed. More often than not wearing Max’s clothes.

The door closes with a soft click as Max hangs up his keys, his smile falters at the realization his hat isn’t on its hook. It was department issue, meaning the Sheriff would have his ass if it went missing.

“Howdy,” Kyle drawls, voice thick with a fake southern accent.

Max turns, shoulders relaxing as he finds his hat. Kyle is lounged across the couch Max’s hat tipped low on his head, arm draped over the back of the couch and shoulders bare. A laugh falls from Max’s lips at the absurdity of the situation. Kyle has been perfecting his southern slang since he started reading Max’s manuscript, all while insisting the outlaw and the sheriff had homoerotic tension. Saying something about Max writing the first queer great American western.

“Good afternoon,” Max says with a laugh, making his way around the couch.

He sobers up fast- blood rushing south as he takes in the sight awaiting him. Kyle’s fully naked. Or rather wearing black leather assless chaps with nothing underneath them.

read on ao3

[battle-of-alberta]

hypothetical comic where calvin goes to therapy for being a bisexual disaster among other things.

so like. i deliberately don’t say one way or the other where on the platonic-romantic spectrum ed and cal fall on because of a lot of reasons but mostly just because i think the tension and ambiguity is 1. most interesting/funniest and 2. most accessible for multiple readers who want some room to imagine, particularly because being aroacespec i get that romance repulsion Happens sometimes. It happens for me occasionally so I don’t want to lock anything in stone, at least for the main duo the story centres around.

that said i do have a whole hypothetical mental image of “if it was a romo/sexual relationship, this is how the characters would theoretically react over this range of time/historically.” because I love hypotheticals that don’t have to be “canon” and because I am interested in queer history as a queer person myself, especially in this province where... well. if you know you know.

Now that i am getting paid real money to actually research queer history locally? I think about it way more.

on to the hypotheticals if you are interested...

- i think calvin would have had an awareness of his slightly-fluid sexuality at the very least from the 70s on, especially because sexuality was such a huge part of white collar oil man culture in some of the worst most misogynistic ways but also for other reasons. I think he definitely would have started questioning what was “normal” and “acceptable” at that time, but I think he learned very quickly not to ask too many questions. He did grow up on Bible Bill’s radio show in the 30s, which set this tone of repression, eugenics, and hostility that we are still reeling from.

- his victorian upbringing combined with this 1930s ethos plus all the nostalgic romanticism built up in the 1910s is the emotional soup that makes calvin hallucinate that he’s actually a normal person who CAN have the job and the wife and the white picket fence and 1.5 kids occasionally. He tries not to overthink it most of the time.

- i expect this conversation didn’t take place until the 2010s. despite calvin’s cushy workplace benefits i think mental health, therapy, etc. especially for someone in such a traditional conservative environment was just not considered even if it was available earlier. and talking about sexuality? forgetaboutit. that said, I think calvin is more progressive than we give him credit for sometimes and I actually think he would be most likely out of any of them to seek this kind of stuff out

- likewise i think after his falling out with ed he does a bad job of patching things up, but once he puts his mind to using his knowledge and skills of being a people person and being genuinely interested and excited about organizations in his city, he figures out how to talk about it with people in his own way. i think when people think about queer history they tend to think of the bar/club scene and it’s more than that, especially after certain events in canadian, american and international queer communities. so by the time he goes looking, there are already resources that have been operating for decades! I don’t know much about the specifics of calgary queer history (yet) but i know that these things absolutely exist to this day.

- eventually some therapists have to learn to work with immortals which they definitely did not cover in their certification.

[such-a-fellow]

You can't just drop "oh my queer theory read of Breaking Bad" and then not elaborate

Oh I will gladly elaborate! This is mostly compiled from thoughts I had while discussing Breaking Bad with my partner while I watched it for the first time recently. [NOTE: this is VERY LONG and disjointed, it ended up being almost a whole shittily structured essay. I have no idea if it makes any sense and I have edited nothing. bear with me.] anyway, i am so sorry, but here you go:

Because Breaking Bad is such a conventional tragedy with Walt's relationships (and how he wrecks them) as the series' emotional core, it's easy to read into the "why" of the choices he makes and consider if other unseen factors could contribute to his whole.......everything. Walt sucks, right? He's shitty and snappish at best and manipulative and abusive to the point of literal murder at worst towards pretty much everyone in his life; his enemies, his associates, Jesse, his kids, and most centrally Skyler, are CONSTANTLY on the receiving end of this stupid man's destructive spiral and rancid personality. Obviously, nothing excuses the depths the guy descends to, but his surface motivations are simple enough. He's terminally ill! His career has fizzled to a depressing dead end! He has an accidental baby on the way! Being embittered by the run-of-the-mill suckiness of him and his family's circumstances has led him to chase this grand unattainable ideal of perfect, conventional family life that he never can really achieve. The harder he tries to force his life into that perfect shape, the more he hurts those around him.

This is the first point of my idea that reading Walt as a closeted, very unhappily unaware bisexual can add a really interesting depth to the show. It would be easy to interpret Walt as gay and miserably closeted. He’s dissatisfied, he CLEARLY isn’t really in love with his wife, and he keeps pursuing this life of crime represented by the men he's caught up with (Jesse and Gus in particular). However, I think that simply reading him as gay misses an opportunity for extra complexity. Textually, Walt is caught between two lives and is never satisfied with either. No amount of money or accomplishment is ever enough for him. His white picket fence delusions and insistence that he loves Skyler even though it's extremely clear that what he loves is the idea of Skyler is one side of the coin. That's the ideal of conventional heterosexuality, which he always falls short of. The other side of the coin is his fight for power in the criminal world and his attraction to men, which I think is best analyzed through his all-consuming jealousy of the power and perfect security of Gus, who is known to be gay, and his relationship with the heavily queer-coded Gale.

This is mostly symbolic/subtextual interpretation, but again bear with me. In my mind, the narrative of Theoretical Bisexual Walt goes something like this: Walt begins to realize he's attracted to men through his initial partnership with Jesse. That relationship, however based in manipulation and overall shittiness, is one that Walt is drawn to because he sees Jesse as a gateway to the criminal world he wants to enter. It’s also his gateway to this new possibility of attraction which he had never considered and cannot avoid, even if he doesn’t want to confront it. Indeed, he's only forced to confront it later, specifically when Gale (artistic, scientific, opera-loving Gale) extends a hand of understanding to him. Gale is happy and content! HE has reconciled any parts of his life that might be disjointed. He deeply admires Walt, and openly presents him with the promise of friendship or more. Central to this, obviously, is his close association with the poetry of Walt Whitman and gift of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Walt. Walt Whitman is believed by most scholars to have been bisexual, as evidenced both by the relationships he had in life and by his poetry where he praises the beauty of men and women alike. The lightness and freedom and wonder at the universe expressed in the tones of his poetry fits Gale perfectly, and this is what Gale is offering Walt. Choosing to reject Gale is ultimately the thread which unravels Walt entirely in the end, because he’s rejecting not only Gale but any option to find joy in his new work beyond what money it can make him. This extends, in my opinion, to rejecting anything positive he could gain from his attraction to men.

As Walt is going through this slow realization, part of what drives him to despair is his persistent belief that what he really wants is still the same secure, middle-class, heterosexual family life with Skyler. More specifically, the thought that if he is attracted to men, then he cannot possibly HAVE that. This is why I like to analyze him as bisexual rather than gay; the way he can’t be happy anywhere at all, with either part of his life, is at its most complex and tragic when (like the Walt on the surface of the show) he absolutely could have had both if he hadn’t pushed so hard, if he hadn’t been so selfishly caught up in his own tragedy. If Walt is bi and accepts that, he CAN be happy! However, as we know all too well, Walt is a narrow-minded disaster. Internalized homophobia compounded with his “main character syndrome” hold him back from even trying to give himself space to explore his newfound attraction. Throughout this section of the story Walt is clinging harder and harder to that crumbling façade of happy heterosexuality. He’s more and more abusive towards Skyler and refuses to cooperate when she tries to divorce him. He even flounders through a lame attempt to have a heterosexual revenge fling when she cheats on him. I’d hesitate to reduce this to compulsory heterosexuality, because I think any percieved choice between the two here is entirely in Walt’s mind. To Walt, everything is binary. He can have a family life without deception and die in obscurity, OR he can stop at nothing to become the world’s most powerful druglord. He can be attracted to men OR he can be in a happy straight marriage. Like I’ve said, this is NOT a man who could ever concieve of both. This is where Gus becomes a bigger factor in Walt’s terrible horrible no good very bad sexuality crisis.

To even things out and to really drive home trajectory he’s set himself on, Gus has Gale killed. I think there’s definitely a portion of this that is escalated by the presence of Gus in Walt’s mind. Gus is everything Walt wishes he was in more ways than one. He’s rich, powerful, successful, clever. He carries himself with awe-inspiring gravitas. Now, as the audience learns, Gus’ primary motivation in becoming all of those things is vengeful grief over his lover’s murder. It is made clear to the audience in Breaking Bad (and expanded upon in Better Call Saul) that Gus is gay. For this unaccepting Bisexual Walt, the presence of this man who he percieves as above him in power and influence and who is also perfectly obviously gay and entirely secure in that is completely impossible to cope with. He’s past the point of letting himself consider options here, of course. He is jealous of Gus. All-consumingly jealous, just as he’s jealous of the Schwartzs’ wealth and happy marriage. Walt’s drive to remove Gus from the picture, then, becomes a conflation of not only his lust for power, but also of his self-imposed sexuality impasse.

In the end, the discovery of Gale’s Leaves of Grass gift—that quiet, friendly offer to Walt from a man who understood a part of him that he could never bring himself to try and confront—is what undoes the whole charade.

[theperrylleluniverse]

In the show, we mostly see Perry in “work” mode where he’s very focused and serious and his eyebrows are all scrunched up like this >:/ but in the little snippets we see of him before or after a case (or even in the few moments where his Serious Business demeanor cracks during the investigation) it’s so clear that he’s actually the biggest softie of the trio.

There’s nothing this man loves more than matchmaking his clients unless it’s reuniting/reconciling estranged family members haha. He just sees two young people who clearly are interested in each other and he’s like hehe I will solve your case AND your love life and then he does!

He’s always taking Della and Paul on fancy dinner dates! We see that he takes Della or Paul to basically any event he gets invited to (we see him take Della to the theater several times!). He visibly melts anytime he gets to dance with Della or when Paul does something particularly chivalrous.

I’m personally still gagged that in Weary Watchdog Della asks him for $25,000 (that’s like $250,000 in today money!) for vague mystery reasons and Perry just whips out his checkbook, says a devastatingly romantic line, and then gives it to her no questions asked. Even his face when he does it!! So soft and adoring! I’m insane about it. He loves a big romantic gesture!

In summary, Perry is secretly a big squishy Romantic and I’m obsessed. My head canon is that Paul and Della know this about him and recognize that Perry had Romanticized Internal Notions* about like gender roles in a relationship (even tho he’s literally in a queer poly relationship this silly man) so they conspire so that Paul regularly sweeps Perry off his feet with cute romantic gestures and then Della contrives situations in which Perry can sweep her off her feet with cute romantic gestures even though I think both Della and Paul are more pragmatic in general when it comes to love and romance.

For example, Della doesn’t especially care about getting flowers but she never objects to the insane bouquets that Perry gets sent to her on special occasions (and sometimes just because 🥺) and she makes a point to either display them on her desk or at her apartment so he can see how much she appreciated his gesture. On the flip side, Paul (and sometimes Della because she can’t resist the sweet soft face Perry makes) will bring Perry like a single rose or a couple of wildflowers he found while on a stakeout and Perry will be all embarrassed but secretly pleased and sometimes he’ll put the flower in his lapel or on his desk and just smile every time he looks at it and Della and Paul would buy him the moon if it meant he kept smiling like that 🥹🥹🥹

*I headcanon that Perry lost his parents when he was very young and was raised by his grandparents. Partly because of this and partly because of his personality plus the effects of growing up as a bisexual man in the early 1900s, I think Perry has very specific and deep seeded ideas about what a Family should look like and what a Romantic Relationship should look like and to him that’s very white picket fence, 2 kids, etc. and very focused on the external appearance of things. It’s such a deeply embedded idea for him that I don’t think he even consciously think of that as what he wants/strives for but it’s definitely something Paul and Della challenge him on and he has to work through.

[buckee]

yuletide 2024 letter

Dear Yuletide writer,

Happy Yuletide! Thanks for being my writer this year! <3 More under the cut:

Hi Yuletide writer, thank you so much for your patience! I haven't had access to my personal computer for a bit, and I've tried uploading this from my phone, but I don't think it's been visible (?) until now. Anyways, apologies for the technical issues!

General likes: Dead dove content, darkfic content (any & all, I have no qualms with anything re: non-con, incest, underage, violence), NSFW stories, romantic comedies, character studies, sympathetic villains, unlikeable female characters, fraught relationships (platonic, romantic, or sexual), stories where two characters are isolated from others (e.g. quarantined, stranded on an island, etc), lovers to enemies, bittersweet endings, queer homoerotic toxic best friendships, one-sided love, fleshed-out backstories, villain/corruption arcs, power imbalances, age gaps, canon divergence AUs.

General dislikes: Stories about weddings (if the plot revolves around this topic), kidfic, single parent AUs, soulmate AUs, heavy-handedness, SFW stories, slice-of-life, coffee shop AUs, maternal abuse (if the plot revolves around this).

FANDOMS + potential prompts

Challengers (Art, Patrick, Tashi):

A post-canon fic exploring Tashi coaching Patrick while Art retires to be with Lily would be interesting–how does Patrick integrate himself into that family? How awkward and painful is it to discuss the years that went by, and what happened in-between? Do they have rules for intimacy?

Patrick and Art exploring a romantic & sexual relationship while Tashi mostly removes herself from that part of their dynamic would be really appealing–she’s part of their throuple, but in a remote way. I’ve always seen her as kind of their…coach? And also, that she’s aromantic, but not asexual. I think Art mourning a part of his relationship with his wife but gaining a new partner is really interesting. Art/Patrick have the most interesting dynamic to me, ESPECIALLY in the context of the throuple (no Tashi erasure), because Tashi has never seemed intensely invested in romance or commitment, even if she is involved with the both of them. And since she’s a parent and someone who could have a career comeback, this would be cool to see!

AU where Patrick & Art are Gen Z/zoomers who come of age in a time when gay marriage became legalized in the USA/queerness has a different connotation than it did even in the early 2000s. What would their relationship look like if it had started a lot earlier? If they had been involved in the queer community as a couple/in their young adulthood? And what would their relationship look like once they met Tashi?

The Acolyte (Qimir, Mae):

I really want to see a tense, psychosexual exploration of their dynamic while Mae was training under him. It’s fascinating that he becomes fixated on her twin afterwards–they’re identical, which means he had to find her face superficially attractive at the very least. Wouldn’t mind it getting darker on this end, especially with crossing boundaries in a mentor/mentee dynamic. How did they meet? Why is she so interested in his good opinion? Why does she stick around if she is afraid of him?

Push (Nick, Cassie)

Nick and Cassie blurring the lines between brother/sister as she grows older is always fascinating. Would love to see them be codependent and inappropriate and odd with one another, without realizing why until it’s too late. How do they handle being lovers? How does Nick deal with the conflict of self-hatred and desire? Does Cassie ever realize that no matter how much she loves him, he still groomed her? Do they ever try to make it work, white-picket-fence style? Do they live perpetually on the run? Do they grow tired of each other? Do they try to separate at all?

Alternatively, their romantic/sexual relationship starts at the age they both are in canon. Feel free to get dark here, so long as Nick remains horrified and conflicted and resistant to what he wants to do. Cassie can be coerced into increasingly inappropriate behavior, or she can instigate out of a childish crush. So long as it isn’t a vaudevillian, mustache-twirling event on Nick’s end, I’m interested in all ways this could go down!

Thank you so much! I'm so excited, and appreciate your time. :)

[sleeponthephone]

I had a friend named sam. he was nice, for the most part. he loved to bake. his favorite thing to make was cheesecake, especially because his mom had loved it. he had this incredible fudge recipe, all from scratch. he made it a couple times, while I was still living nearby. we had one of those if-we’re-both-single-by-35-let’s-get-married kinda deals. he kept dropping the number. he talked about building me a computer, building me a house, all from scratch. he had a plan to survive the apocalypse. he liked guns and wanted to join the military. he made really good fudge though.

he was down to 25 by the time I moved away, talking about how his job would require him to travel a lot internationally and he’d take me with him, put us up in nice hotels and let me vacation it out all the time while he worked. he’d be happy to do the cooking, to spoil his little wife, to build me a beauty-and-the-beast library. he wanted his wife to have the opportunity not to work, wanted kids and dogs and the house, the whole deal. I’d told him I didn’t want to date him, but the deal seemed to be his cop-out. and I was seventeen, it didn’t sound so bad to have a backup plan. and I didn’t know what to do with my life, and working didn’t sound all that attractive, and he was two years older than me. love a man, have his kids, be guaranteed a nice life. my grandparents were certainly on board with that plan.

he visited me that year. my new friends didn’t like him. he called something gay (derogatory) in conversation while sitting in my room with my rainbow flag behind us. I didn’t like that, was maybe overly sensitive about it, and he apologized. he’d always known I was bi; I think one of my reasons for turning him down when he first admitted to having a crush on me was that I was still getting over my first queer relationship, and he accepted that. it was wired into him still, white desert man named sam. he had a self-pitying laundry list of reasons why he would never find love, had three exes who had “turned” bi or lesbian after dating him. he’d come an awfully long way out to visit me.

I saw him again in the summer. I asked him to do something, I don’t remember what. he would say he’d do it if I’d kiss him. he picked me up at one point, bridal-style, tried to lean in a bit. I laughed to keep his face away. I think he had it down to 22.

in the winter we were driving through a town next to ours at night, an area I didn’t know. I asked if we could drive up to the mountain. he said we could, if I was willing to do a friends-with-benefits thing. I said no, tried to convince him we should drive up anyway. he said that was the only way. we didn’t go. after he dropped me off home, I didn’t hang out with him again.

I blocked his number and his snap and his instagram in march. when I was sent home for the pandemic two weeks later, I was paranoid for months that he would just show up to the house one day, demand an explanation.

when I’d put most of the country back in between us, I tried to make fudge one night from scratch. I didn’t have his recipe, it’s still written down on notebook paper somewhere in my old room, but I found one online. I didn’t have the canned milk, so I had to find an “alternative” thing, and that’s probably where it went wrong. I can make microwave fudge perfectly, with canned milk and the right ingredients, but it was late and I just had what I had.

a few months earlier, I had been feeling awful and cold in that new place, wondering if it would work, to call him up and say okay I’m ready, let’s get married let’s do the whole thing give me a new life, give me security, give me all the shit you want for your picket-fence wife, let’s build that house, I can pop out a couple babies if you get me pregnant in vienna. I’m sure his life couldn’t possibly be going in the exact successful way he’d planned, but it couldn’t hurt to find out, keep that door cracked a tiny bit? he was desperate to be loved. we could chalk it up to dumb teenage drama, pandemic panic, whatever. it had been two years.

I didn’t call him. I stuck it out, and then I was in a shitty little kitchen making bad fudge late at night. I remember thinking it was closer to brownie brittle, that it couldn’t be too far off from the oreo recipe actually.

so I was sitting there, and I was nibbling on this crumbly burnt fudge- because it was one of the most interesting things I’d ever tasted and I made it, I wasn’t going to completely waste it- and all I could think about was how I wanted to send a picture to him, to say “hey, I tried to make fudge, I was missing yours, it’s awful”, and I couldn’t. and I couldn’t talk to alec, and I couldn’t talk to aric, and I couldn’t talk to a whole string of boys who made a friendship fun until it wasn’t, until we were thrown into the stark light of the something-more they always wanted. and I don’t want kids that way and I probably don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a man, and I definitely don’t want to be completely financially dependent on one. and I thought about the generations of women in my family who had settled for exactly that, found a nice enough guy with a nice enough salary and a dedication to a life together, and had gone “fuck it, I’m not in love but I can love him into a backyard, I can hold this into wrinkles and grey hair and dust”.

I sat on the floor of my kitchen until my roommates came home. they could smell it, asked what I was making. I said next time I would do better, and we could all have some. I haven’t tried to make fudge since.

( - not quite what belongs on this blog but then again it is about love. this is a love shot over and over in the water. there were a lot of good times with him, plenty of good things about him, I promise, but I forgot most of them because I can’t think about him too often. and it’s really not my worst experience with a man, it just sucks. he was my friend.)

tw: nsfw, implied

i don’t have as lengthy a response for you, on account of my lack of experience with people in general, but i have been thinking about Peter Pan a lot. partly because the actress in the ballet that played peter was my bi awakening (well—mostly), and partly because some boys just never want to grow up.

they don’t want to grow up, and they’ll make their objects of affections bona fide Wendy Darlings. i keep finding ways to sprinkle freud would love this generation! into lighthearted conversations. oh, you wouldn’t catch a lot of them dead saying “make me a sandwich”, but they’ll waste no time expecting you to parent them. and that’s precisely the thing you can’t do—fill that miserable void of love that they never received and that you’re not sure if you ever will either.

poor lost boys with lost-er mothers, lost-er fathers, losing their sanity and losing their children. but there’s a happy ending to this story, right? and you will make that ending so, you owe him that, because after all, he taught you how to fly. he gave you a bit of an escape from the way the world weighs you down like a block of cement, you got high together and he cooked you dinner and because he couldn’t afford flowers he picked them for you off the side of the road. and he wrote you one (1) love letter. and you love him enough to say yes I’ll marry you someday yes I’ll be your wife but then you call your best friend one night crying and you babble to her i feel this weird pressure to keep being a girl, for him and he said something while you were sitting on his chest about how the queer community has gotten all too complicated and you don’t understand why you feel so uncomfortable having this conversation, because he should be safe, because he’s two out of the four main letters of the acronym, but you don’t feel safe right now, you feel pretty fucking invalidated, and how in the almighty hell do you tell that to the only person who you’ve ever really loved?

i spent a life time wishing i was more grown up. i was an eldest sibling, so certainly i needed to act older than my age, and on top of that, i was accelerated by a little bit, academically. doing schoolwork a grade ahead kinda fucked with my social development. another time, i talked with him about getting intimate with someone nearly four years my senior (a legal adult by a huge margin) while i was still underage, and i felt so childish opening up about that. we both agreed, that was a little bit fucked up, but technically not illegal, because i didn’t disclose my real age.

and when you’re wendy you’re going to feel horribly behind, and horribly tied down, and only the fun girls get to go to neverland, and you want to be a fun fairy girl so desperately that you’ll trap yourself in drawers just so he’ll let you out. and you want to be fun, and you want pixie dust, and you want to be cool, and it’s all because of peter, who’s going to age but won’t grow up. so many lost boys with their lost ambition and lost purpose, and you are the one magical girl that can make them remember it again! but oh—one catch—you have to grin and bear it, feel their cold hands on you and in you and never sleep with a shirt on.

i can’t fix my lost boy, and i’m not trying to, but i hope when reality hits, we land gracefully and on our feet. and i’m trying to shake off whatever of Wendy rests on my back, i don’t need her and i don’t need to be her. and out of the several relationships i’ve had with men, i’ve got hope for this one yet. he is by far my best.

—(yesterday i talked about insecurities surrounding my hair and he touched it gently and said: stop it. i love you just the way you are. it’s kind of the bare fucking minimum, but hey—we’re getting somewhere with this.)

[tiddiebyebye]

my notes on this:

I love the idea of Omega Art with Beta Patrick and Alpha Tashi the most.

Alpha Tashi is a no brainer to me. She's the duncanator. Astute, beautiful, talented. The perfect Alpha with the perfect future perfectly laid out for her. She's used to being chased by Omegas, Betas and even other Alphas, they fight for her attention and make a fool of themselves, so Art and Patrick coming to her as a pair is enough to pique her interest. (Alpha Tashi who dates a cocky Beta that sometimes seems to think he's more Alpha than her yet he doesn't take anything half as serious as she does) (Alpha Tashi who trains her Omega husband, trying to feel that phantom sense of greatness, that should have been hers, through him. Meanwhile said husband just wants to retire and live that white picket fence life with a baby and a Dog...)

I like to think of Art as a vessel for Tashi's and Patrick's fire/passion. I think of his misguided subservient nature and his failing attempts to use guile to break Patashi really go with the Omega label. Art being an Omega ties in with his need for constant touch and reassurance, how controlled(repressed) he is, just always trying to act the right way and do as he's told bc that's how his omega grandma (bless her soul) raised him. we can include his relationship with Lily too((if we go into the deeper side of a/b/o maybe he even sired Lilly idk))

Now, Beta Patrick who struts around like he has the biggest knot in the world. Patrick who is always the center of attention, sure of himself and cocky even in the way he plays tennis bc if he acts like the top dog really who's gonna question his dynamic? He's a beta but everyone thinks he's an Alpha, because that's what he was supposed to be, like his father and his grandfather and yadayada. He's a disappointment to the Zweig name. Down on his luck tennis player, no business degree, not interested in manning the family business, (queer?), cosplaying being poor and cosplaying being an Alpha

anybody has any thoughts on the challengers characters' a/b/o dynamics? who's an alpha? who's a beta or who's an omega?

[darkshrimpemotions]

The reason SPN is both quintessentially queer and quintessentially homophobic is because it's a straight man's fanfiction of a queer text. That’s really it. It's a straight man seeing the isolation and liminality and impermanence of queer life in the mid-20th century as told in On The Road and romanticizing it, and wanting to claim it for himself.

Which of course doesn't work, because in positioning his main characters as protectors of the middle American heterosexual nuclear family, he has already fundamentally misunderstood them. Their very existence is something middle America views as a threat, and middle America is to these characters a trap, a prison, a slow death rather than a quick one for which they nevertheless yearn because we are all taught to do so. (Perhaps what they truly yearn for is to want that life, but I digress.)

The American road story, the drifter’s story, is (among other things) a queer story. It is not compatible with the white picket fence, in fact the white picket fence's primary purpose is to shut it out. The white picket fence is a symbol of stability, comfort, prosperity (conformity, stagnation). The road, on the other hand, is a symbol of upset, disquiet, transience (freedom, transformation). Adventure and uncertainty are the cornerstones of the road story. It simply makes no goddamn sense to take characters from the road story and position them as protectors of the middle American nuclear family behind their white picket fences when these characters' very existence is positioned as a threat within the cultural context of middle America.

This plays out in the show, over and over again! Who are hunters? Well, they used to be “regular people.” They used to be part of the American Dream, the nuclear family, the white picket fence. Until a monster came along, came in from the road, and destroyed not only that state of existence, but all possibility of its return in the future. Hunters are what Reagan-era scaremongering rhetoric thinks about queer people.

Over and over, the show hammers home that hunters are never children, or are “broken” as children, hunters don’t get to retire, hunters don’t get happiness, hunters can’t just quit. Hunters die horribly, and they die young. Even those who try to leave, try to be “normal” are drawn back into it, one way or another, always, until it kills them.

Despite their humanity and their uh, particular aesthetics and their (predominant) whiteness and all the other things that seek to mark them out as belonging to a particular vision of middle America, hunters are also positioned in the narrative as Other, as monsters themselves. Hunters become the things they hunt eventually, literally or figuratively. They become unsuited to “civilian life.” They become incapable of living peacefully with “regular people.” They become the threat.

This happens with many hunters, but we need look no further than the Winchesters themselves. John, Dean, Sam, and even Mary destroy lives by mere proximity, despite good intentions, over and over. Sometimes they simply follow the trouble into town, but sometimes--and increasingly more often as the show goes on--they lead it there. Their presence is always a threat to the families they seek to help, so much so that the audience learns fairly early on not to get attached to the latter. Even the boys themselves accept it as somewhat inevitable.

And Castiel, the third lead of the show and the boys’ longest-lived ally, is possibly the most blatant example of this acceptance, not to mention another particularly egregious example of the show being both super queer and super homophobic.

Castiel is, for the first two seasons he appears in, possessing a man named Jimmy Novak (and the implications of that for his relationship with the Winchesters is something that needs a lot of unpacking but I’m gonna play the Mulaney card for now and move on).

Jimmy is the idealized version of a Midwestern family man. He’s a cis, heterosexual white man, a devoted father and husband and a Christian. He has a steady white collar job and lives in a nice house. He’s doing everything right, by a certain standard.

Then Castiel comes into his life, commandeers his body, and takes it to perform his holy duties (duties he eventually abdicates in favor of, you know, being gay and doing crimes, as you should). But one of the first things he does, before going to meet Dean Winchester face to face for the first time? He removes Jimmy’s wedding ring. He removes the symbol of Jimmy’s heterosexual marriage, tells Jimmy’s daughter “I’m not your father,” and then embarks on the simultaneously queerest, best, most homophobic, and worst love story of all time.

Let me just...restate that for you. The decade-plus-long queer love story starts with--no, actually necessitates--the dissolution of the American nuclear family.

That’s. That’s some extra spicy homophobia.

Then there’s the fact that Claire, Jimmy’s daughter, grows up to be--you guessed it--a hunter. A hunter, which is an inevitable metaphor for queerness given the show’s inspiration and despite Eric Kripke’s worst efforts. She’s subtextually queer and also canonically, textually queer. She falls in love with a woman named Kaia who can dreamwalk to alternate realities.

Something something preying on our children and turning them gay. Because there are always going to be people who see queerness and go looking for some traumatic source, because to them queerness is inextricably linked to trauma (hm, wonder who’s to blame for that).

Ahem. Like I said. Extra spicy homophobia.

Then there’s the way Castiel literally steals a child heavily hinted to be a savior figure from the Devil and his Republican mom (in all fairness, she was on board with the kidnapping) and raises him in a queerplatonic household of hunters, demons, and the occasional monster.

Because by this point in the story, the line between hunters and “monsters” has blurred so much for Sam and Dean that they readily count many of the latter as their allies, friends, and family. At final count their circle includes (or has included at some point) a family of werewolves, the Queen of Hell, the King of Hell (RIP), a ghost, a former ghost, a dreamwalker, an archangel (RIP), a witch and his resurrected sister, a seer, a former vampire, a former werewolf, an undead former Man of Letters, another archangel who’s wearing/cohabitating with their half-brother, and like...God’s actual sister. And tbh I’m probably forgetting someone.

They have not only accepted, but embraced their place as the Other. They’ve even found power and heroism in that identity. And again, it’s not perfect. It’s messy and inconsistent and self-contradictory, because predominantly straight people are writing a story that’s meant to be queer. They’re trying to write about finding yourself outside of your blood origins when those origins reject you and forming communities and support networks through shared adversity when they don’t have any idea what that fucking means.

Sam and Dean will mourn the death of a demon or hug it out with their friend the werewolf and then kill a couple of vampires that were drinking from blood bags and tell their abusive shitty father he did his best! And they grapple with zero cognitive dissonance for this, because the writers fundamentally do not understand the material they’re working with. The presence of one or two gay men doing their damnedest is not enough to fix it! If anything, it unfortunately just serves to make the homophobic parts of the show worse by making their queer subtext more adamant.

Finally, there’s the fact that for several seasons now, Sam and Dean’s story has been less about saving the world in and of itself, and more about just...healing. Fixing their own mistakes, overcoming past traumas. Defining a life for themselves outside the expectations and demands of their parents. Coming to understand their parents as flawed people who didn’t hold all the answers. Healing from the trauma and violence of their childhood indoctrination into a very on-the-nose metaphor for Christian fundamentalism (hey, more mess! Hunting functions as a metaphor for queerness but also John raising them as hunters functions as a metaphor for fundy Christianity because *pats Eric Kripke on the head* this baby can fit so many contradictions).

And in a well-written story, crafted by someone who understood the themes they were playing with, the resolution for all these threads is obvious: the only harmonious, satisfying resolution to Sam and Dean’s story is the one where they achieve self-actualization, where they accept not only themselves but that the people they are and the lives they want don’t quite look like what their parents might have imagined for them, or what they’ve been conditioned to want.

For Sam, it’s a life as a hunter that actually integrates who he is as a person (studious, a bit supernatural himself) rather than making him feel like a freak. It’s using knowledge and information and organization and leadership to build community among hunters and make hunting a less dangerously isolated and isolating way of life. It quite possibly also means seeking to find solutions to supernatural problems that don’t go straight to murder and bloodshed. A hunting that admits and embraces the similarities between “monster” and “hunter” and seeks harmony and cooperation between the two wherever possible.

And a relationship, not necessarily marriage, with a Deaf woman who is also a hunter, who understands his life and his past, and embraces both without reservation because in many ways they reflect her own. Sam’s childhood of isolation, Othering, being infantilized by his father and brother is turned on its head, traded for a life of community, inclusivity, and becoming not only an individual in his own right, but leader others can look up to.

For Dean? His perfect ending looks like settling down into a domestic life and a romantic relationship with an angel (current or former) who is also a man. No more world-saving. No more putting his own happiness on the back burner for the sake of everyone else around him. No more denying who he is, no more subtext. No longer a soldier or an instrument, just...a man, who gets to be in love with another man and be loved back, and who gets to live.

The parts of himself that he’s always felt were liminal, dangerous, Other...seamlessly integrated into a version of happiness he never thought he could have. If we wanted to get into nitty gritty details, this would probably also include an occupation or hobby/ies that centered around creating and nurturing, rather than killing and harming. More inversions of the things he was taught he was made for.

Both their endings the opposite of what they expected, what they were conditioned to want or chase or be. Neither of them what their father intended, nor quite what their mother hoped for, and definitely nothing God had planned.

Neither of them typical “straight” endings, either (whatever some dumbass on Twitter might think, two men falling in love is simply not straight), which makes perfect sense because their stories aren’t straight stories.

And that’s not only why the ending falls so flat, it’s also why the show never quite works even in the best of times. Because the heart of it, something that’s interesting and important and revolutionary, the story of queer people seeking and finding fulfillment and happiness in a world that wants to kill us, is constantly being pushed and pulled and overshadowed by the fact that the show is written predominantly by straight men who refuse to accept that the story they’re trying to claim for themselves is a queer one.

So you get the main characters disrupting and destroying the American nuclear family, dirtying the white picket fence, queering the straight Midwestern dad, stealing children from abusive parents, breaking free from the burden of parents’ expectations, building a found family, defying God’s plan...and being called heroes over and over even as their actions are somehow also painted in a horrifying light, spattered with blood, and hurtling toward an apocalypse over and over again. They’re being hailed as the protagonists and God’s favorites, but simultaneously being punished textually and subtextually by the narrative just for being who they are. Always. Constantly. For fifteen seasons.

Because they are both hero and villain. Man and monster. Savior and bringer of damnation. Dean, Sam, and Castiel. All three of them embody this duality in different ways, and more strongly at different points in the story, but they all embody it. And they are all punished and killed for it with an ending that undercuts everything that came before and insults the intelligence of every viewer who was paying the slightest bit of attention. The final message of the show seems to be “defy God/the status quo and die pointlessly,” which is...an interesting choice for a show that’s ostensibly been about humanity and free will and romanticizing the American road story from the get.

The real mindfuck is that if you’re a queer viewer a lot of this is still weirdly empowering! Watching the heroes create chaos in middle America and create home in the midst of chaos is empowering! Because where the SPN writers or “general audience” may see dissolution, predator, threat, we see freedom, possibility, hope...room for different types of people and families and existence. Because that white picket fence is a symbol of oppression, that nuclear family is where many of us suffered horrific abuse. That apple pie life is a trap, and it comes at the sacrifice of us, and it’s not freakin’ worth it.

There’s just this constant tension between the two stories: the one the writers are trying to tell/think they’re telling, and the one they’re stealing from/actually telling. The queer origins and experiences and themes stubbornly shine through even when covered in layers of toxic masculinity and homophobia. There will be all of these rare, shining moments where the story understands itself and what it is before being dragged back down to what some unimaginative little straight man wants it to be. And both the queerness and the homophobia only serve to drive more attention to each other in a seemingly endless cycle of revelation and obfuscation.

And it’s so frustrating.

[munvermaniac]

i really love the potential around jason's clearly fucked up religious upbringing. he seems so repressed and conflicted. i wanna see situations where they have to take breaks from making out because jason gets super pent up easily and isn't ready for anything serious quite yet. until recently he was convinced he was straight and waiting until marriage. (with supportive bf eddie obviously, always double checking boundaries)

Definitely. I saw a post that said something along the lines of “from Jason’s viewpoint Stranger Things is religious horror” and I definitely agree with that. As someone who was raised very Catholic myself (not oppressively so, but I hated going and made it very known to my parents) it really just, doesn’t leave you.

It would take a lot of work to even get to a point where he could realize and admit he’s queer, and much more to accept it. I think he’d have a mental breakdown when he realized he likes Eddie, a satanist, a boy. He’s spent all this time thinking of Eddie as the freak when really he’s exactly like him, maybe worse.

He always thought he’d settle down with a nice girl, get a white-picket-fence house in the suburbs, and have a few kids. None of that can happen. What will his parents think? His family? His team? His entire community would abandon him if they found out. Not everyone can be as accepting as Steve.

When they’re dating, they definitely have to take it slow, because there’s always that little voice in the back of Jason’s mind that calls him a sinner, an abomination. These feelings are disgusting and unnatural, he’s been told his entire life, and he believes it. It’s quieter now, but there’s times when it gets really bad and he almost can’t even look at Eddie.

Eddie, of course, is very supportive and tries his best to help Jason through it, but it’s really hard on his wellbeing too. He gets that Jason’s trying—they both are—it’s just that sometimes when Jason has his freak outs it reminds him of the times before they were dating when they hated each other.

But over time (and probably a good bit of therapy) they can have a happy relationship and maybe move in together. I personally headcanon Jason as being really good with kids, so I think he’d so into childcare of maybe become a teacher. Eddie, of course, holds DND sessions at their apartment weekly, and when he’s not planning for his players, he’s working on his breakout album with his band!

I’d like to think that Eddie would also become a huge activist for queer rights, but I feel like Jason would always be hesitant about coming out publicly. Maybe Eddie can eventually convince him to go to a pride parade with him!