#i have such a complicated relationship with my sexuality bc i cannot be ace without being aro but i can be aro without being ace if that

[lunimy]

i do have the weirdest coming outs ever i don’t really come out in the first place cuz i’m really open about saying i don’t like anyone but i usually don’t put a label on it bc i don’t believe i should have to but the other day i got ask by this guy he’s a little weird in general but the conversation went: are you gay? no are you straight? no are you bi? no are you asexual? yes (but actually i don’t really consider myself to be ace??? i actually feel more connected to the aro label or aroace but i’m not about to explain that to him)

[relaxxattack]

hi im asking u this bc u seem to be bee duo enthusiast so

ive been calling c! beeduos relationship platonic because i thought that was what their cc’s said, and i thought they had said that they were uncomfortable with ppl shipping the characters. But ive seen a lot of posts that say their relationship is canonically romantic? and i absolutely do not want to come across as homophobic by watering down a mlm relationship to just friends because that happens so much in media so.

what is the canon state of their relationship / ur opinions on the platonic thibg

dont worry abt answering if u dont want to!! i see a lot of differing opinions and i trust yours :)

aw it’s totally fine, im flattered you asked me about this!

let me put it simply: it’s a whole mess, lol.

first im going to talk about what’s happened fandom-wide that caused differing opinions, and then i’ll explain my own opinion/interpretation. :]

(this got really fucking long im so sorry)

ranboo and tubbo initially proclaimed the relationship was romantic, specifically in argument with the wiki editors who had set it as platonic by default. (you can see this in the vod where they decide they’re canonically married— it’s very funny. chat tells them the marriage is already on the wiki, they check, tubbo is jokingly offended that it says platonic and asks if he needs to up the romance).

tubbo also makes jokes about adultry, which sort of implies the relationship is not necessarily a platonic one.

(theres definetly more in that stream alone but it’s been a long time since i watched it so i don’t remember a lot of it.)

the wiki, because of this, suffers from going back and forth on platonic and romantic, seemingly unsure where the joke ends and the canon begins, or if its canonically a joke! a mess, as you can already tell.

this gets more complicated as the marriage bit goes on: outsiders, such as phil and scott, both at one point say “platonic marriage”, which then ranboo and tubbo agree with. however, when chat asks them if they’re platonic, they say the opposite. so there is a lot of confusion there.

there’s also the difficulty of being able to tell streamers and characters apart. ranboo and tubbo both don’t like being shipped irl, and that’s their boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. (they’re also minors, but tbh when they’re 18 in a year i will still be following their boundaries regardless of their legal age).

due to people not wanting to be accused of minor shipping, they started adding the platonic tone indicator to most of their drawings— basically a way of saying “no homo”. meanwhile, tubbo frequently on stream flirts with ranboo and makes quite a bit of nsfw comments towards him that are frankly hilarious.

this goes on for a while with nobody really sure what’s canon, but a lot of people assuming it’s probably platonic, until: the drama of the mods night. a few mods dmed all the wiki editors telling them ranboo wanted his canon character relationship officially set to platonic.

unfortunately for those mods; the very same day, a few hours later, ranboo on stream makes fun of puffy delivering him and tubbo “friendship flowers”. because, and i quote, “bruh. we’re literally married. this must be how the ancient greeks felt.”

in case you don’t know, the internet often jokes about how historians will call ancient greeks ‘very good friends’ when they are quite obviously gay. so in this context, ranboo is joking that people will call him and c!tubbo, who are married, “close friends”, when he doesn’t think they are.

basically, ranboo canonized romantic bee duo, the very same day the mods told everyone he’d wanted a platonic one.

chaos and drama immediately erupted everywhere. on tumblr, we were talking about how weird it was of his mods to do something like that without asking him first. we ALSO talked about how weird it was of them to assume that ranboo can’t make his own decisions, or assume teenagers cannot be in relationships without it being sexual. twitter did the same thing but in the opposite direction: called ranboo mods homophobic, or said they were mad ranboo felt pressured into making a romantic relationship canon ‘just so people could have mlm rep.’

i dont want to go into detail about the drama that happened that night because apparently official people follow me and i dont want to stir it up or have them come “clarify” things. im just saying what we talked about.

ranboo in typical ranboo fashion apologized quickly and seriously. he was deeply sorry for possibly offending anyone with how he’d portrayed his rp relationship with tubbo, and he also assured everyone the mod thing was just a miscommunication.

he said he would talk to tubbo and they’d decide once and for all whether it was platonic or romantic, and then announce so everyone would know.

it’s now been a few months and we've had no word from them on that development. we still have no clue.

-

now, here’s my opinion:

i want to take ranboos word for it that it was a miscommunication with his mods, but... we had it on good authority from people on the wiki team and people in the discord with the mods that (while it was happening) they were really going after the wiki admins, and also made some weird comments about it. that combined with the way ranboo seemingly had no clue (considering he canonized their romance that very same day).... it’s very. sus of the mods.

then there’s the canon we’ve got since then. although occasionally adults in the room have called it a “platonic marriage” and tubbo once (back when it first started) called it a “plankton tectonic” marriage, in roleplay it’s been... kind of not that. tubbo and ranboo make nsfw jokes about each other in character, and their characters also share a master bedroom and bed in the mansion. there's also the way c!tommy really thinks it’s a romance between them as well, and they agree with and play off that— for instance confirming that they “fell in love” when he asked, or ranboo confirming that they “make out on occasion”.

people will still put platonic on their art and posts, imo, because they’re worried about breaking ranboo and tubbo’s irl boundaries by looking like they ship them. or even just being accused of shipping real life minors. and that’s a valid fear to have.

the thing is though: c!bee duo are not cc!bee duo. they’re roleplay characters. cc!bee duo are not okay with being shipped, but they made their characters get canonically married, and call each other “husbands”. so it’s okay to write the word “husband” in your comic without adding “platonic” to it, i promise.

telling the ccs that their characters have to be platonic is... weird. it comes off as not only babying them, but also as saying teens can’t date without it being gross. which isn’t true.

(this is why seeing people overuse “platonic husband” so much bothers me. like, they ARE husbands. you can just say it. what are you trying to hide...?)

-

do i think they’re canonically romantic? ehh, its likely. it’s still okay to interpret them as platonic, because again, it’s hard to tell where jokes end and roleplay begins. like, maybe it’s jokes in the rp too, and c!bee duo are just friends. friends can and should be allowed to make jokes like that with each other! aro & ace marriages exist!

or, maybe it’s actually part of the rp, and they’re very much romantic. we don’t know!

some people say they could be a qpr (queerplatonic romance), which i could see. (a qpr is a relationship that fluctuates between, or can’t quite be sorted into, “romantic” and “platonic”. people in a qpr can do romantic things while having platonic feelings for each other). in my opinion this is a very valid interpretation as well!

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CONCLUSION (sorry this got so long omfg):

are c!bee duo romantic?

its likely, but you can still interpret them however you like!

should i put /p on bee duo content?

ehhh? i find it annoying when it’s overused (as do others), but if you’re worried you can. its up to preference. putting it too much is weird though

should i put /p on things cc! bee duo do?

no. you’re not the one saying it so you can’t decide the tone tags for that. imagine you said something to your friend and a random stranger came up and was like “haha but that was /p right...?”

can i ship c!bee duo?

mmm. i’m not sure on this one. they are canonically married and very flirtatious, but the ccs don’t like being shipped and they’re close enough to being the ccs that actively shipping might be against boundaries.

can i treat c!bee duo as romantic?

yes. literally just don’t be weird about it. it’s not that hard! you can understand that two characters are husbands without making it weird

here’s the most important thing: boundaries. cc bee duo still haven’t told us what their preferences and canon is about this whole thing.

right now, i am assuming based on what they already show us they’re comfortable with, but! the second they give us any more info! all these opinions will change!

i am only going off what they do. i would never want to cross boundaries at all. i just wish they would make theirs a little more clear.

..... i hope that helped anon, i went way off the rails... i need to go to sleep.

[ouyangzizhensdad]

As an aroace person who enjoys qlc more than the novel, mostly bc its more ambiguosly romantic and thats more apealing to me as a somewhat romance repulsed person. I also find so frustrating that a lot qcl-only western fans are just... unwilling to engage with qcl and perhaps more importantly mdzs as chinese media, made in china by chinese people. And this is an issue in most if not all non-western media fandoms, bc western fans (mostly from usa and europe tbh) just cannot stop imposing their own cultural views/values/etc.

They are consuming non-western media through their own western (and often time priviledge, bc living in the global north/1st world is a priviledge, even if you a marginalized) cultural and historical context and assume their views/morality/whatever to be universal.

Their refusal to understand that cultural relativism is a thing actually, is annoying at best and harmful at worst.

Hi anon,

I mean I think I just need to reinforce that my response was not about whether aroace people can't prefer or choose to interpret the relationship in cql as queerplatonic etc., it was just about the fact that "asexual" has long been used as a descriptive without reference to "asexuality, the identity label" and that this was how the author was clearly using it in that quote. If you've studied in the social sciences or humanities you likely have encountered the word used as a descriptive, and being offended every time it's used in that manner is going to make for a very exhausting time, in my opinion, on top of making it more likely to misinterpret what the author is actually trying to convey.

That being said, while I think "queerbaiting" is a complicated term to use when talking about danmei adaptations, I do see a conflation between "this relationship could be interpreted as queerplatonic/aroace" and "you can't call this queerbaiting/gay subtext because it's queerplatonic/arorace". By this I mean that unless a story confirms that characters id as aro/ace (either by using id terms or by describing what underlines these id terms) or by having them discuss their relationship in a manner that in some way explicitly confirms it, it is open to interpretation every possible way: close friends, friends with benefits where the benefits are not confirmed on-screen, gay romance that is not confirmed on-screen, gay romance that includes sex that is not confirmed on-screen, queerbaiting, queerplatonic, etc. etc. If people prefer to interpret cql!wangxian as aroace and enjoy cql because they can project themselves into what is shown on screen, then have fun with it. The origin of the Bechdel test was that it allowed her to be able to interpret or extrapolate a relationship between two female characters as a romance: everyone except straight people have some forms of implicit or explicit criteria by which they find themselves able to lean into certain interpretations or extrapolations. But that interpretation needs to be divorced from larger discussions of context of the production of the series as an adaptation in relation to the Chinese media industry and censorship. In that context, the intentional removal of explicit references to the romance and the sexual life of the two characters is relevant.

[izzyovercoffee]

I'm sorry if you've already answered this, but what's the deal with Mandalorian society and sexuality? Would a larger portion of the population be of one sexuality than others? Would sexuality be the same as we know it since they don't recognize gender? etc

I’m sorry for the delay in answering this !! I haven’t actually answered / addressed this topic quite just yet, bc they’re both easy and difficult questions to answer, if that makes sense. 

So I’m gonna do the short/long again. 

The Short Answer to the three questions is this: Mandalorians don’t care about your sexuality inasmuch as, within mandalorian community and society, specifically, it’s not a big deal — or any deal, at all. And because there is no compulsive heteronormativity, and because mandalorians as a society have a heavy emphasis on adoption and sharing the burden of child rearing with the entire clan, the population’s sexuality should not skew in any specific way. 

If I had to guess, I would suggest that the society leans more bi/pan, if only because there’s no stigmatization to be tied in with a gender binary that doesn’t exist to them. Ideally, though, I would think that there would be equal representation of every combination, and every iteration, of relationship under the sun — so long as everyone involved are consenting fully-grown adults. 

The long answer is … it’s complicated.

The thing is … uniquely, as a society, mandalorians don’t recognize gender in the same way that we do. So, it’s safe to assume that sexuality is dependent entirely on each individual’s personal frame of attraction. Procreation via popping out babies (crude, I know but u kno) would not take such a strong focus or precedence or moral imperative because mandalorians don’t just accept adoption as an option — mandalorian society strictly enforces the legal equality of adoption.

That is, the negative attitudes surrounding adoption just don’t exist. And because they don’t exist, the societal pressures tied up in maintaining a blood line disappear. 

Our society’s understanding of sexuality is, in part, highly contingent on the framework of the gender binary and the nuclear family. I would even go so far as to suggest that a heavy skew towards a cis-centric heterosexual population is, at least in part, due to the homophobia inherent in a heteronormative society. And none of these things exist in mandalorian society.

Thus it’s hard to say if sexuality would still resemble sexuality as we know it, or if it would take a completely different definition or range, or if it would be somewhere in-between. After all, mandalorian society is not one that is wholly isolated, as it’s hard to be so when so many societies are interconnected by necessity and diplomatic allegiances across the known galaxy — and the rest of the Galaxy Far Far Away seems to have the machinations of sexism and homophobia still in place (whether or not you want to chalk that up to writers imposing their internalized sexism / homophobia on the material, knowingly or otherwise, is up to you). So even if these terms and way of thinking aren’t natural to mandalorians, that doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t be present at all.

That said, I’m of the opinion that the general mandalorian society may actually skew in the direction of pansexual/bisexual.

Explanation going under the cut, because this got … very long.

So. Why Pansexual? Because pansexuality is generally defined as an attraction either in spite of or without consideration to gender. The distinction of gender does not actively exist in mandalorian thought (or language) and so attraction becomes something that does not actively consider gender.

Why Bisexual? Because bisexuality is defined as an attraction to same and other genders, and the logic that follows is that all mandalorians should accept all genders, aka all genders are recognized. In a society that doesn’t stigmatize any gender, everyone has their personhood recognized (heteronormativity has no place and thus little to no influence) and thus celebrated.

Either way both bisexuality and pansexuality encompasses the full field / range that would actually, actively, exist in mandalorian society.

Pan-normativity / Bi-normativity, I guess. Lmao.

I would also suggest that the nature of a population’s sexuality (and guessing at the population percentage of x sexuality) becomes difficult to discern, because it’s heavily dependent on the population and where they’re located, and how many are adoptees — and how many of those adoptees were adopted when they were children vs. already socialized adults.

How deeply has a mandalorian diaspora or ethnic enclave’s community participated in assimilation with whatever society they find themselves in? Communities that are located in, say, Coruscant under the Empire might skew towards a heterocentric human focus due to the pressures of the surrounding environment — or they might go in the complete opposite direction and raise a vibrantly rainbow one finger salute right up the Emperor’s nose. 

It’s hard to say lmao.

TBH like … I want to backtrack a little bit to talk about the nuclear family. 

So. Family is a HUGE part of what being a mandalorian is about. Raising children is being mandalorian — but we’ve seen that the children don’t always have to be “their’s” inasmuch as a parent to a child relation. They can be nieces/nephews, cousins’ cousins, even friends’ and friends’ family’s. The focus has always been on a community raising children together, rather than any conceptualization of a nuclear family.

Frankly, nuclear families have no place in mandalorian society anyway. Any society that engages war as a supposed common export would also have a high percentage of casualties — parents never coming home, parents severely injured in the line of their profession / duty, parents away for long periods of time. In the wake of absent parents, other members of the clan/community are expected to do their share and raise the children as if they are their own — and are ultimately treated and regarded as their own.

“Why are you so focused on children and child-raising when this is a question about sexuality?” Not that I think you would necessarily ask me that, but I think it’s an important question to be answered.

How we view sexuality, how we define it, how we see it expressed, how we criminalize that expression, how we victimize and marginalize people … is all tied up in other forces and expectations our society is built on. IMO, in order to understand what sexuality is to mandalorians, it bears repeating what mando society is not and does not have.

Example: I’ve noticed that people who are homophobic view homosexuality as a deviation from a perceived moral expectation — and it is a violently enforced moral compass that is hyper-focused on a “woman’s” (ciswoman’s) capacity to bear and raise children, and only devote her life to that one role.

Because mandalorian society is completely without that expectation, the foundations that would otherwise exist to enforce marginalization completely disappear. Can’t have children? Adopt, or help raise the kids in your clan. Don’t want / want to deal with children? Offer assistance to those who have / want to assist in raising children so they are free to do so more easily.

Because mandalorian society doesn’t recognize gender roles, the framework that misogyny and transphobia is built on ceases to exist and so anyone of any presentation is not someone to then be brutalized until they return to a gender binary, bc mandalorians don’t have a gender binary. 

Because mandalorian society encourages communal raising of children, the capitalistic forces contingent on the survival of the nuclear family structure cannot be found here. There is no two parent household — everyone works and lives together, or works and lives in large groups, supporting each other.

Romance, in general, is built on an assumption of the nuclear family’s goal: two people to a household to raise children, alone. Complete co-dependency between two people for all romantic and platonic emotional and interpersonal support. You don’t need friends nor family when you have someone to share your bed — but specifically someone to share a bed and produce children with.

And tbh … because mandalorians don’t HAVE an arbitrary moral system built on a foundation of misogyny, homophobia, and capitalistic ideals of a nuclear family, I wonder if monogamy is something that would be as heavily tied with morality as it is in ours — would it really be so expected? Less so? Would polyamory be more acceptable (bc let’s face it, it’s still in unacceptable territory)? Would single-parenting also be more acceptable (bc, again, single parenting is still viewed as unacceptable, as if there’s something wrong with the parent)? 

Identifying as anything not-hetero doesn’t come with a death sentence, however oblique or immediate or realized. 

What I’m saying is this: there are inherent pressures in our society that we don’t think about that affect us on a personal level, every day. Being gay, being bi, being ace, being pan, being trans, being gender nonconforming — even if we don’t actively think about it, we know on some level that our status in our society is ostracized at some level, if not every level. The subtle ways in which society treats and regards us ultimately has an effect on us — and how we perceive others, and can affect how we structure sexuality and our sexual identities.

The absence of those pressures would lead to a radically different society and social understanding of gender and sexuality. Both on a micro level, and a macro level.

And that’s really interesting, imo. These are great questions to ask — it’s a great topic to address and to try to write about and build upon — and I have no idea if any of my answer is adequate, because of how difficult it is for me to conceptualize sexuality in a society that isn’t burdened by a heterocentric gender-conforming monogamous hegemony focused on procreation. 

God I hope I answered your questions lmao. Sorry I’m so verbose !!