#homoerotic subtext and tropes my beloved

[miusmusings]

Kiseki: Dear to Me ep 1 aka we have several kitties in our hands

Ok let's start~

Ai di? Eddie? Which one are we gonna follow? I'm not immune to pretty faces, I'm gonna protect him with my life now. Also are they a couple? Sorta ship it oeo

Okee guess not. Hmmm Picking up someone out of the blue, and Ai di scratching his back like that, very cat-like of him. A meow =w=

Why is Mr. I'm-The-Only-One-Not-Wearing-Black just standing there like a statue? Where's your concern for a friend. Oh, they're supposed to be old acquaintances as per mdl? That explains it the smile.

What's that red thing on the photo? Lemme guess, blood? It is a mafia (can we call this mafia?) setting.

Zhong Yi is a brave, brave person for not screaming when he saw a bloody hand on the road all of a sudden. Kudos to him. Could never be me :')

Oh oh oh (nooooo) they're using the same remedies. Does ql drama world not have not other, more effective medicines for woundtending? That looks like a gash too deep for home treatment, if you ask me. But ig he'll be saved by ql logic ahaha (I love ql logic. Why can't we have ql logic irl huh)

For once there is no (not felt by me atleast) homoerotic subtext in woundtending. Shocking.

(Anyone know what are the names of the books? Ig they're all books related to studying medicine and such, but I'd still like to know)

Ze Rui, my boy, blackmailing is not how you woo the love of your life. But it's effective here, so owo

Ze Rui is dramatic af. A bread isn't gonna break your ribs, chile. He reminds me of our cats throwing a concert of shame whenever mealtime is late by like half a second.

Zhong Yi keeping tabs. Finally a character who makes (tries to make) financially sound descisions. Like love ain't gonna fill your stomach (not with your sugar kitty mooching off you u.u)

Ze Rui, my boy, you're sus af. I'd have taken away any valuables before leaving you in my home, too. Scamming alert u.u

"It's your karma then." 👏👏👏👏👏

My meow meow is back. He's got some claws. And He looks great in pink! And he has a (potential) boyfie too, good for him!

Knowing your hookup form the night before didn't go home with you for your rizz but for your decade old rice cooker.... that must hurt.

OH? Is Xong Yi snapping finally?

Nvm false alarm. the intimacy tho. Which other surfaces do you wanna shove him against, Ze Rui? BUt threatening is bad flirting technique smh

I don't wanna say it but - poor husband working his ass off to earn money and feed his other, lazy ass of a husband. Also Zong Yi looks so meow meow here? He looked Tired, I feel bad for him :\ Ze Rui take care of your man sometimes, too! Don't make him be the only caregiver in the relationship, it won't work out

Ze Rui is so Kitty Coded that they had to add cat noises jajaja

Oh so Ze Rui does have some brains. His friends (?) did call him the brains of the group hmmm. But ZR lookis so smug, is it cause he made a fool of ZY or cause he has ZY on his (technically ZY's) bed

Ok we need a list of Bread in qls. Bread as a metaphor, bread love (also hate) language yeye

Oh tragic pasts time.... How expectations can go both ways, huh? Too much too little, atleast it seems like ZY still has a good family? (I'm jinxing it-). Seeing that this is Taiwanese drama, and after reading a lot of danmeis, I wonder if ZR is an illegitimate child? As they call it in the danmeis, a 'mistress's' child?

Ok ok I have a theory - Ai di is an ornage kitty (the kind who're always too excited and wants your attention 24/7 or they'll wreck havoc on your room), Ze Rui is a fancy long haired high maintenance kitty (a calico?? Let's not look at the sciences of this), Zong Yi is a black-white kitty, not totally a void but def wiggly and also got the coldness of a white kitty.

Putting clothes on your (future) lover, a beloved if new trope :3 (ye i'm looking at loa)

I want a piece of that cake too, so hungry ueueue

ZR is three cats in pyjamas confirmed. Cats never ever finish their meals cause they too 'eat in small portions'. smh

They're not using the there was only one bed trope?

OH OH THAT LOOK WHEN ZY starts eating. I see you I see you. I feel food was very important in today's episode like, it's used as a method for establishing who's controlling the situation, then it's used a bridge for communication and negotiation, and it's used to show economic differences (like ZR can bother wasting food and eats in small amounts, definitely not smt a person coming form a less privieged section of the society can do)and finally this look. I'm not gonna analyse this cause ye- but.... food.... maybe I'm just too hungry XD

This Zhang Teng would right in a drama of supernatural genre

I like the ending ost u.u

OK there was some INteresting power dynamic. A injured gang member who probably kills at sight and is rich, is now under the care of a impoverished, seemingly harmless (when are doctors, potential ones included, ever harmless) student with barely any way to defend himself from violence. But Zong Yi may refuse to treat him. Then we have the knife. Doctors are gain power from their skill, but is it enough to counter a the power of a criminal gang? And the gang member depends on the (aspiring) doctor for his life, while the doctor's life depends on the gang member's life. Ze Rui constantly uses words like "brat", "kiddo" etc to further demonstrate the power dynamic at play (cause in Asia seniority = social power and respect), but Zong Yi hardly ever argues about the use of these words. Like, he isn't even trying to establish that he too, has some power over the situation. Is he truly so accepting of others' holding power over him or is he just unbothered cause he treats Ze Rui's words as completely irrelevant to his life? Hmmmm. Who exactly has the upper hand rn? I'd say it's Zong Yi rn, but then again Ze Rui can successfully overturn anything Zong Yi does (like the locked door) and force Zong Yo to do his bidding soo...fd

[airpodrat]

THERE IT IS!!!! THE SCENE WHERE PERSON A LOOKS AT THE OTHER PERSON'S BACK AND SHOULDERS. If he didnt have such broad shoulders then the description would be "it was the first time i noticed his back was so thin. Such small shoulders hold unbearable weight"

This description was left out of the comic. Instead it just shows a picture of his back as he walks away

[cabeswaterdrowned]

top 5 characters with your zodiac sign (stolen from you), top 5 wlw pjo/hoo ships, top 5 tropes that you love and top 5 that you hate

top 5 characters with your zodiac sign (stolen from you), top 5 wlw pjo/hoo ships, top 5 tropes that you love and top 5 that you hate

5 characters with my zodiac sign I could only think of three canon Taurus chars I love so the last two I counted headcanons for, and neither of those characters has a canon birth date

canon taureans

•Hope Mikaelson (TVDu) ((I do see the arguments Ares sun fits her better but I think Taurus sun with other fire placements also fits her quite nicely and again I don’t have a lot of favorite characters with my sign let me have this lol)•Dan Wilds (Aftg) and we share a birthday!

•Emily Fields (technically in the Pll books she’s a Taurus and going off her show bday she’s a Scorpio but I do think that Taurus sun fits show Emily better overall too and Ik when we discussed this you agreed with me :))

And then two characters I’ve always seen as Taurus are Blue Sargent (Trc) and Marina Andrieski (The Magicians)

Top 5 wlw pjo/hoo ships

 Pipeyna

Pipabeth

Reynabeth

Rueguard

this could be one of a couple ships depending on my mood but I’m going with Thalia x Zoe rn because it’s very underrated imo

Top 5 tropes I love (didn’t want to agonize over ranking these so bullet points again) •enemies to friends to lovers or any iteration on these things (lovers to enemies, friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, reluctant allies to friends to lovers etc.) •doppelgängers, shadow selves and dynamics between a hero and their shadow selves can be a romance can be enemies etc. •anything to do with parallel worlds •the overachiever girl from a seemingly perfect (and this mean different things) background who struggles to fulfill familial expectations, is actually very unhinged at times and has some sort of spiral where she ends up off her original path at least for a while, and part of the subtext is usually about her repressed sapphic ness a la Spencer Hastings / Annie Edison / Julia Wicker

•the mean girl character who is originally set against the protagonist but as the story progresses she’s shown to be sympathetic and layered in her own right, and her relationship with the protagonist is allowed to develop into at least respect maybe friendship that’s usually pretty homoerotic. honorable mention to this specific flavor of opposites attract dynamics that’s like ‘on the surface we could not be more different but we can relate/connect/are actually more similar than anyone else when it comes to very specific things that aren’t obvious. And not really a trope which is why I didn’t include them but I love fantasy stories about witches and/or vampires. Also I can’t lie I do love a magical school setting. Codependent relationships in general. Sister stories!!! LOVE those. Bottle episodes and bottle episode adjacent episodes my beloved!! I have a lot of favorite tropes actually Top 5 tropes I hate

insta love I have exceptions and these exceptions are like, reincarnation stories such as dosab where there’s a reason for it and Rue x Jules because they simply had the range/chemistry. But usually I hate it. Also combining this with any fated/pre-destined/other forces or people are always telling the audience this pairing is meant to be without doing the work of showing/developing the relationship to be appealing/seem to work well together

mystical pregnancy, most pregnancy and baby story arcs in general

media concerned with parental/familial issues where all the mothers are demonized while the fathers get to be complicated parents like tm tended to do. Something I found refreshing about watching pll was that it was a total reverse of this with all the fathers being irredeemable monsters and the mothers being more complex 

I ranted about this recently re: the va show but I really dislike when a fantasy work has this aspect of metaphorical bigotry as a theme and the characters who voice said bigotry are usually poc

Ik this is solely a fic thing but fucking hate abo lol

Thank you! (Ask me too 5 of anything)

[gascon-en-exil]

Lords and their Knights: When FE Chivalry Goes Gay

@mwritesink prompted me to write about my favorite tropes in FE and how they evolved over the course of the series. I already crossed a few others off in an earlier post, but this one is a particular favorite of mine where M/M romance in this series is concerned and one I felt had enough examples to constitute a piece of its own. Let it not be said that this is merely the gay variation on the well-worn heterosexual romance trope of a lady and her knight (ex. Eirika/Seth), because negotiating the fundamental power imbalance in this type of relationship takes on different dimensions when both parties are male. I draw a closer comparison to courtly love, which in the traditional sense is also socially transgressive (being adulterous) and not consummated via marriage or other public means...which in FE terms means an S support and possibly a eugenics baby. A vassal in love with his lord rather than his lord’s wife is not only cutting the female intermediary out of what can already be a very homoromatic scenario, but it’s directly tangling together a kind of martial romantic love and ideas about what knighthood/vassalage even is or ought to be - two topics FE loves to explore. I’ve therefore compiled a few of the most notable examples of this trope across the series to talk about in more detail, because if one is willing to be liberal with subtext there’s surprisingly quite a few to pick from.

(And yeah, this is also in part because I like hot rich men who take orders, and this series already has plenty of gay or otherwise ambiguously non-straight mages, thieves, archers, and their ilk without my help.)

The Sad Gay Knight: Quan/Finn

This one I’ve talked about before in a fair amount of depth, from my hopes for how a Genealogy remake will treat Finn to speculation on just what Quan got out of this relationship besides a devoted retainer and (we may assume) a nice piece of ass. The summary here is that Finn’s love for Quan supersedes anything he’s shown to feel for any of the various women he can hook up with and quite frankly astonishes in its ramifications for the future of Leonster and Thracia as a whole. It’s poignant, adulterous (but Ethlyn’s probably ok with it?), and messy as all hell once you factor in whatever’s up with Glade and whatever Lachesis wasn’t feeling about the whole situation. It is also, naturally, very sad; Finn loses his lord when he’s only around eighteen, and with their kingdom collapsing around him and the entire continent consumed by war he dedicates the next twenty years of his life to raising Quan’s son to be the king Quan himself had wanted to be. And for all his labor he apparently derives no lasting satisfaction, spending his epilogue wandering around the Yied desert and at last returning only to (possibly) pen the history he’s helped to make. 

Finn is the embodiment of knighthood loyal unto and beyond death, and that paired with all the romantic and erotic subtext surrounding the two of them - Finn as Quan’s treasured favorite, his catatonia after Yied, the obsessive polishing of the brave lance that Quan gave to him, his inability to satisfy women in some vague way - makes them the defining example of this trope in Fire Emblem. I look forward to seeing how remakes will handle them; Finn’s presentation in Heroes is definitely cause for hope there. As for the issue of yet another story in media of gay men beset by tragedy and death, I did draw up a long headcanon on the technically crack pairing of Diarmuid/Tristan that specifically plays into the lord and knight trope while also allowing Finn a chance to pass his experiences on to a later, happier generation. IS is free to take notes, just saying.

Pretty Blond Twinks and the Men Who Love Them: Perceval/Elffin and their lasting influence

Moving on from Jugdral, I’ve got to say that I’ve really been sleeping on the original gay Elibean duo. Before Raven and Lucius (but chronologically after, because these games are out of order) there was another feminine young man with long blond hair beloved of a severe-looking warrior. Binding Blade gives us the bard Elffin, who in another life was Etruria’s Prince Mildain and Perceval’s liege. The Knight General takes Mildain’s alleged accidental death about as well as Finn takes the death of his lord and lady; he turns grim and humorless, and without a dying dream to guide him he follows the command of the corrupt revolutionary faction of Etruria with little protest. It takes learning that Mildain is alive and in Roy’s army for Perceval to drop the halfhearted Camus routine and switch sides, and the strength of his fealty not to his nation or even to his king but to the prince he’d thought dead is absolutely touching in the moment not to mention incredibly useful since the guy is one of FE6′s best units. 

Binding Blade doesn’t give anyone but Roy and his harem paired endings, but there’s still a fair bit to be gleaned from their support lines, both what is in them and what isn’t. Perceval and Elffin each have supports with women, but nothing remotely romantic - Perceval’s support with Larum is particularly amusing since he clarifies that her, ahem, dancing does nothing for him. Also worth noting is that neither of them can support with Clarine, even though one would think they’d make fine romantic choices for her given their statuses and physical resemblances to her beloved brother. Their own support line is quietly intimate. Elffin has changed since his near-death experience, and Perceval is still struggling to accept that their relationship can’t be as it was, that in fact for the time being they can’t now be a knight and his prince. Perceval also frets over Elffin’s refusal to see his father the king, and he later extracts a promise from Elffin to come home to Etruria after he’s done traveling the world as a bard, in one of the series’s several instances of writing what sounds like a marriage proposal in ambiguous terms. Per Elffin’s ending, he’s only gone for a few months after the war, so their promised reunion isn’t long delayed. I’m interested to see what a remake would add to their relationship, because as it stands Perceval/Elffin has an established romance arc that deserves a paired ending or at the very least more suggestive epilogues.

Further compounding their underrated signficance, it’s not too difficult to trace a line from Perceval/Elffin to a number of other M/M pairings in the two later GBA games and in Tellius that present some variation on this theme:

As mentioned above, Raven/Lucius is physically similar and performs a nearly identical gameplay function, with the pretty blond waif again responsible for recruiting his surly but protective boyfriend from the ranks of the enemy. 

Gerik/Joshua meanwhile borrows the character of the end of their support line and turns it into a genuine paired ending, with a prince incognito recruiting a swordsman to come work for him. They being who they are however, it’s all handled a bit rougher, with Gerik being impressed by Joshua’s “swagger.” Take that as you will.

Ike/Soren may be the defining seme/uke dynamic in Tellius’s overflowing fount of queer subtext, but Tibarn/Reyson smashes that trope together with this one and FE’s power couple unit archetype plus a dash of whatever the avian equivalent of furries is for wholly unique results. Although both of them are technically royalty, only Reyson is a prince by heredity whereas Tibarn presumably became king of Phoenicis by beating the crap out of any rival contenders as most laguz prefer to do. One can therefore read shades of a courtly relationship in Tibarn’s decision to zealously take up the cause of justice for the Serenes massacre in Reyson’s place. Combine this with Reyson’s characteristic edge that even Tibarn is forced to rein in at times and their relationship comes off as surprisingly more egalitarian than the sum of its parts. Oh yeah, and blond waif dancer + premade OP unit with ludicrous physical stats and movement again.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the conflict of the Tellius games Zelgius -> Sephiran explores what would happen if a gay Camus archetype chose instead to dedicate himself to an antagonistic lord. Sure, you can still recruit Sephiran via a convoluted and unintuitive process, but Zelgius is doomed no matter what.   

They Can Say It, But They Can’t Do It: Awakening and Fates

Ugh. If I must....

I’ve made no secret of my ambivalence toward FE13 dragging the series into open acknowledgement that same-sex attraction is a thing that exists, handled as it was with a lot of explicit homoerotic denial and an assortment of cheap gay panic jokes and...whatever the hell Victor and Vincent are supposed to be. Chrom/Frederick, hot though it may potentially be in fanon, is one of those jokes, making a parody out of a knight enamored of his lord and leaving it to mean absolutely nothing since Awakening’s relationship endgame is invariably S supports for time traveling eugenics babies. FE has taken cracks at the overly dedicated knight before - see just about everything involving Kieran from Tellius, up to and including his overzealous devotion to his superior officer - but Awakening plumbs the depths of Frederick expecting Chrom’s nude image to raise the army’s morale. Just..what do you even say to that, apart from the awkward sputtering that comprises most of their support line?

FE14, for all its stumbling steps toward something less completely offensive, fares little better in this particular regard. Leo/Niles is a deeply troubled albeit thought-provoking callback to the subtextual lord/knight relationship, one where it’s hard to imagine them finding a healthy way to navigate the power differential. Then there’s Ryoma/Saizo. It’s nothing special in localization, but the never-localized festival DLC involves Saizo’s ardent desire to warm Ryoma’s clothing in his cleavage. That sounds like absolutely normal behavior for a servant and not a rehash of Frederick’s shenanigans, uh huh. Fates may indeed be said to be slightly better about playing palpable homoerotic tension for drama rather than comedy...but only slightly.

Paving the Way for an OT3: The Deliverance

This is, incidentally, yet another reason to appreciate Echoes for doing so much to redeem the 3DS games in the realm of (male) queer content. Yes, there’s a large and unaddressed divide between the openly gay and very modern Leon and the heavily subtextual faux-historical queerness of the Deliverance, but taken independently the two presentations work for what they’re each separately aiming to be. Among Clive’s gay entourage are not one but two men who’d dearly love to be the knight to his lord, and Forsyth’s strong desire to put Clive on a pedestal evokes the earlier spoofs of this kind of relationship precisely because Forsyth is that kind of vassal, the kind that would read Ribald Tales of the Faith War and cry like a heavily erect virgin bottom getting his first taste of dick at the brief interludes of tender manly love between Quan and Finn. He’s played for comedy just as much as Kieran or Frederick are, and yet Echoes comes across as less down on the concept as a whole for several reasons, being that

1) Python’s snark over Forsyth’s attraction to both Clive and Lukas is genuinely funny, much more so than when it’s the object of these affections quietly groaning his way through them,

2) Lukas is also there, and his desire to be Clive’s beloved knight is not played for comedy at all but is allowed to be unrealistic and unsatisfying because Clive will never get it,

3) everyone wants to screw Clive for some reason, not just his subordinates but also his sister and the estranged BFF who dies in his arms...and the guy is shown to be unworthy of all of them, and

4) all the characters involved are allowed other avenues for romantic attraction outside of a lord who’s just not that into them. Forsyth has Python, Lukas has both of them as friends and possibly more later, Clair has Gray (...at least he’s not her brother?), and Fernand has a bad rebound that goes to hell in the manner of Zelgius and Sephiran but at least ends with him getting to reconcile with his former friend before he dies. 

The setup for the Deliverance’s overarching queerness is a bit strange as it rests on all these characters somehow finding Clive attractive, but nonetheless it makes for an unexpected and refreshing critique of the lord and knight trope, given a situation where the lord just isn’t that into it and in fact doesn’t seem to realize that he can be into it. It’s a good reminder that this isn’t a particularly good dynamic for a stable and lasting relationship, and that as hot as it can be it takes more than impassioned one-way devotion to make it work in the long term.

The good news if you’re into this kind of relationship like I am is that it’s a trope with some life in it yet. Echoes came at it strong, and prerelease information on Three Houses suggests a few possibilities for this dynamic in that game. I’m especially keeping my eye on Dimitri and Dedue, whose relationship appears to contain echoes of the original duo of Quan and Finn. I highly doubt there will be anything on the level of S supports acknowledging this type of attraction, but I’ll settle for some suggestive A supports.