#i also vote out of spite it's a silly tournament you can do what you want

[just-some-guy-joust]

I'm a little worried people are voting for spite, after seeing how heated things have gotten. Like, someone's upset they're chosen characters lost to the current runners so they vote against the one who beat them

Like, we can't control each others votes, but we're here to have fun, not tear each other down :(

Honestly I don't think voting out of spite is the worst thing to happen, love me a little spite, but it's when you start actually like. attacking and threatening the characters and the people who are voting for them where you need to draw the fuckin line lmao you can be a spiteful petty lil bitch and that's fine. but don't be a dick

[fallout-lou-begas]

I think you're doing God's work by shining attention on the less popular humanoid companions. I adore Cass and Raul, and it makes me sad how many people brush them off because they're hard to recruit or not #GayRep

The Cass Sweep was about my love for Cass above all else. Spite turned it into what it was as the tournament attracted the attention of people who don't even care about Fallout, but even if the tournament was run by someone with nothing but positive feelings for Cass, I still would have rallied for her the same way because it was about shining attention on her. I even had a whole thing written up for my predicted grand finals about why i think she is worth it and why she should genuinely earn her vote over (who I thought would be) Arcade and Nick Valentine. The Mean Old Cowpoke Solidarity between Cass and Raul was just icing on the cake, I was amazed that Raul beat both gay companions back to back lmao.

I have absolutely nothing against Arcade and Veronica to be clear, and we joke about the sweep being homophobic (straight's rights!), but it does make me glad that these characters who are less popular than Arcade and Veronica, partly because they're so much less immediately relatable, got such a genuinely appreciative push in those silly little polls. The discourse over Cass' sexuality only makes it more interesting, really, because then it's like "explicit gay representation" versus "has a weird gay thing going on," and where the tide is turning on what people are appreciating now.

Because there's something I've been noticing (especially in my own curated social circle but also larger out) where I feel like we're moving past and away from a fixation on representation as the ultimate metric of a media or artwork's value, or at least stances on this issue are becoming more polarized. I think of everyone around me watching Succession, The Sopranos, Columbo, Breaking Bad, Better Caul Saul, etc., basically just a lot of these shows that aren't really providing "representation" but are providing these incredibly deep, complex, and smart stories and characters that people can relate to and chew on in more ways than just sharing identities with the characters (especially since, for example, The Sopranos is VERY MUCH a show about gender and sexuality). Part of this is just because the state of representation-forward media is, like, paint-by-numbers YA novels made for BookTok first, cartoons made for literal children, agonizingly twee television shows, or mainstream movies too afraid to let their gay characters be more than two out of three of explicit, interesting, and authentic. For the really good shit you just have to find independent artists telling independent stories because the way media is made at a major and mainstream level, what kind of gay representation is allowed is still just really limited. Especially for queer representation, this has an overlap with how much explicit sexual content is allowed in media, because we are in a post-Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny world, and people are more wanting for fucking and sucking on screen, especially when your sexual identity is inseparable from who you want to fuck and/or suck.

This has gone waaaay off track from your original question, maybe. But to quote the prolific gay filmmaker Gregg Araki: “Just because a movie [or a book, or a TV show, or a character, etc.] is gay or independent doesn’t make it good. I’d rather go see fuckin’ Coneheads than go see most of them.”