#i want more people of all faiths in spec fic i want more queer people of all faiths in spec fic

[asterdeer]

not vagueblogging in a mean way but in a "this is tangentially related to a post i saw but not nearly enough to leave it in the tags of the post", but it's like. so fucking incredibly important to me that the cemeteries of amalo is not a series where the main character loses their religious faith and finds new faith in a secular source. like of everything i care about in literature right this moment, at the very top of the list is "thara celehar not being beaten and bullied by the narrative out of his faith in ulis." this was not even a concern to me at first because it seemed unthinkable but the longer it takes the tomb of dragons to come out, the more the possibility scares the ever loving shit out of me. like no one is allowed to be religious in spec fic even though that's the easiest place to have religious characters, much less religious AND gay AND mentally ill and none of those things are like, canceling each other out -- they are all braided together and inform each other and build his character and like. to me the whole character falls apart if you take faith out of that braid. i know that people fall out of faith and that's valid and fine but can i please have one character. ONE. one character. who stays. pleeeeeease katherine addison i'm begging you. let me keep this one.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Hi again! It’s the same anon from earlier. Thank you so much for your answer!!

That was super ignorant of me to ask about the queerbaiting - I’m so sorry for that! I definitely haven’t looked into the show enough to say anything like that. I also didn’t know there were canon queer characters!!!

I actually started watching the show not long after sending the ask and am already completely hooked. I agree that a ship doesn’t need to be canon for you to enjoy it (I’m a massive Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker shipper and that will never happen lmao)

Thank you so much for taking the time to write out that answer for me. And thank you for your patience with me. I’m realising in retrospect that if one of my favourite shows was accused of queerbaiting when it’s decidedly not, I probably wouldn’t handle it as well as you.

Don’t worry about answering this - I just wanted to apologise :) And I’ll look into your 911 spec tag, but having checked AO3 and realised there are 18,000+ Buddie fics, I’m more than happy to have them not be canon and make up for it by reading all of the fics under the tag.

Thank you and sorry again!!! I hope you have a good day :)

You’re okay nonny dear. I hope that my tone came across in the way it was intended, which was firm but not angry. I understand that the life of a slash shipper means to often be faced with queerbaiting or other forms of disrespect from The Powers That Be, so one is often wary of getting into a new show/ship. I just want to nip any accusations of queerbaiting in the bud, since the more people ignorantly harp that Buddie is queerbaiting, the harder it is for us to be taken seriously when we ask for representation - and frankly the more likely it is that TPTB get understandably upset and don’t want to listen.

I’m delighted that you’re enjoying the show already, and that you’re excited to dive into the fanfiction. I hope that you continue to enjoy it. It was very kind of you to reply and apologize (although not necessary) - it was a very sweet thing to see in my inbox and helped me to restore my faith in people a little.

[enbies-and-felonies]

hey felony i've been following your blog for a while and you are a really amazing person and I appreciate you a lot!! I was wondering if you would be willing to kinda go into/discuss your personal journey with faith and queerness? it's something i've been struggling with recently and would really appreciate hearing your thoughts <3 (for real though, please don't feel obligated if youre not comfortable. I know this is a pretty hot topic, so please only if you're ok with it!!!!!!!)

first of all, thank you so much!!! I’m absolutely willing to talk about it, and afterwards if you have any questions (like, about specific aspects of it) I’m completely open to answering them :))

~~ Full thing under the Keep Reading, warnings for a lot of talk about God, Christianity, (a LOT of) homophobia, faith, and so on~~

I would like to start by saying you are completely valid, both in your faith and in your sexuality/gender, no matter what they are, and I am so proud of you.

okay, now about me laskdlsj

I have been raised as a Christian my whole life, and have gone to church everywhere I have lived, and my whole family has been very active in the Church body. It was church Sunday morning, AWANA on Wednesday evenings, and when I was old enough, youth group on Sunday evenings. (For awhile I even did a second youth group at a different church on tuesday nights)

My whole family is Christian (immediate family, that is) and because of that, I was raised surrounded by Christianity. The first two things when moving to a new place were (and are) 1. Unpacking and 2. Finding a new church.

All of this lead to me being more familiar with Christianity and the Bible than the average person. It also meant I had this... unspoken pressure to be Christian. So at a young age (around four I think?) I accepted that Jesus was the Son of God, that I was a sinner, and that by dying (and then coming back to life) Jesus had redeemed me from my sin. All well and good right.

I continued going to church two to three times a week, memorizing a few Bible verses for AWANA, and praying before every meal and sometimes bedtime. I grew older, moved, joined a new church, helped at a food pantry run by my church after a few devastating tornadoes. 

I saw God work in the aftermath of those tornadoes. I saw Him in the way we got donations for the ice maker we desperately needed to provide for disaster relief workers down to the cents of what we needed, and the way we were able to have meals for people who lost everything and the people who were working day in and day out to rebuild houses, clean properties, and overall do anything in their power to help the people affected.

My faith had never been stronger.

A year or so later I began to get really invested into BBC Sherlock, and with newly acquired access to the internet, I searched out the fandom on pinterest and wattpad. I was disgusted by all of the gay art and headcanons that came up. Didn’t they know that being gay was gross and a sin? it was repulsive and disgusting.

But I couldn’t avoid it. I was too far into the fandom and I ended up coming across more and more content with johnlock, crossovers with destiel, there was trans and ace sherlock, dean working through internalized homophobia (back when I didn’t even know who dean was, and I was still homophobic myself). Eventually I stopped clicking away whenever I saw a picture of john and sherlock embracing.

It was like... when you tell a kid they aren’t supposed to know about something, and they immediately want to know it all. I slowly began searching it out, because surely if people shipped them so much, there had to be something redeeming the fact that it was gay.

it started an interesting cycle of seeking out gay content, hating myself and the content because gay is BAD, loving the content because so much of it was loving relationships and heartfelt things, and then seeking out more gay content. eventually i accepted gay being okay, and after that (and a particularly moving trans!sam fic) i ended up accepting trans people.

and then came the hitter.

I started questioning myself.

I started relating to liking guys and girls, realizing that *maybe* finding girls that pretty wasn’t just platonic, and so i did a pro-gamer move (/s) and immediately became homophobic again. i couldn’t be gay, or bi, or anything, because that was WRONG

but it wasn’t. and eventually i was able to admit to myself that i wasn’t straight. I identified as bi at first, and even though i didn’t tell anyone about it, i was still happy that i was finding myself. (even though i still looked away when i noticed a girl was pretty)

then i realized that pan was just, a better fit for me? so pan it was!! and thus began the questioning!! since then I’ve come to id as ace, aro-spec, pan, and polyamorous, and eventually (after a severe gender-crisis) genderfluid.

throughout all of the questioning... I’ve really struggled in my identity and my faith. i often feel like i have to choose between the two.

i’ve been raised to think that if i accept my identity as a queer person, i lose my identity in Christ. and that, if i want to accept my identity as a child of God, i have to reject who i am (and that is partially correct, since i have to reject my sinful nature, but that’s not the same)

but that’s not how it is!! once you believe in God, and accept that Jesus died for your sins, you are irrevocably a Christian, and NOTHING can stop you from being a child of God and going to heaven. Not any sin, not anything you think, or say or do, for the rest of your life.

the thing is, the bible that we *think* condemns homosexuality, actually condemns incest, pedophilia, and adultery. God made people in His own image, and when he saw what he had made it was GOOD. He made me the way I am for a reason, and He LOVES me the way i am.

I still deal with a lot of internalized homophobia and transphobia. but,,, I also know that God is love. He is never-ending, overflowing love. and He thinks of me as His kid. 

My faith has struggled a lot since I started accepting my queerness, but... it’s not God that’s condemning me, it’s the Church (and not even all of the church!!) and my queerness doesn’t mean i can’t follow God and obey Him.

I have bad days, and I have good days, and even when I feel disconnected from God, I know that He loves me and that He is proud of me.

and the same goes for you, okay?

you are not disobeying God for being queer, and being proud of your faith doesn’t mean rejecting your queerness. He loves you and made you the way you are, and He is so proud of you. <3

[jemariel]

Sherlock, Supernatural, and How I Am Trying to Take Shipping Less Seriously

I want to tell my story. 

(tl;dr: I have a lot more fun with shipping when I don’t worry about whether or not it will ever be canon. OR: Never put that much faith in the hands of showrunners. It always ends BAD.gif)

I wrote most of this post months ago and it’s been rotting away in my drafts since maybe March? It seemed like a good time to actually post it. This is my own personal perspective, where I’m coming from on this. Obviously everyone’s feelings and opinions are 100% their own and I respect that. We’re all coming from somewhere.

Soooo. I’ve been lurking in various fandoms for a long time. I started in 2001, when I was 14. I’ve seen a lot of changes in fandom and the internet and how we interact with our favorite media. Now seemed like a good time for me to sort through this.

My first OTP was in Highlander. It was, for all intents and purposes, a dead fandom when I arrived. The show had been cancelled 5 years before I even discovered that other people wrote and posted their fanfiction, and one half of my pairing was dead for the final series. The pair I read about maybe shared half an hour of screen time through the whole three seasons they were both in the show? They had very little plot interaction at least.

I didn’t care. It didn’t stop me from reading about them. Didn’t stop me from wanting to put them in the same room and see what happened – usually them getting on like a house on fire.

The point is that we were under absolutely no impression that they would ever become canon. There was literally no possibility for it. But that didn’t matter. We could do what we wanted. We were just having fun.

After Highlander came Harry Potter. Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. I don’t remember if I started shipping them before or after the 4th book but it was definitely long before the 5th book. This was the first time I had the inkling that maybe, possibly, JK Rowling might have actually intended them to be read that way. This is where I read my first meta, before it was called that – someone who went through the books and pulled out excerpts that made a person think. Wow that eye contact really did linger, I thought. Maybe that embrace wasn’t strictly brotherly, I said to myself.

At the time, queerbaiting was not even a word in the vernacular. So when the 6th book came out and Tonks and Remus became the most eyebrow-raising pairing I’ve ever encountered, I just shrugged and went on with my life. Sirius was dead anyway so this really changed nothing. I liked Remus the gay uncle werewolf, but bisexual was fine too. I mostly wrote and read about them during their school days anyway. So this was fine.

Eventually I moved on, and where I landed after that was in the grand daddy of all slash pairings, the first fandom in our current fanfiction zeitgeist: Star Trek, the Original Series. Kirk and Spock. This was still a couple of years before the 2009 reboot movies, so all I had was a cheesy 60s TV show with a venerable back catalogue of fanfic. What’s better, this ship could never be sunk! Of course they couldn’t ever be canon, it was the 60s. Times were different. I could ship them with fervor and never be disappointed because of course it was just our interpretation. … Wasn’t it?

Oh, Gene Roddenberry. You idealistic sonuvabitch. You created the Vulcan word “t’hy’la” specifically for Spock to use for Kirk, and you made it mean friend, brother, and lover? Was that really necessary or were you trying to tell us something?

Here I found more fledgling meta, and I went through the novelizations of the movies with a highlighter devouring every piece of evidence I could find. But while this ship was unsinkable, it would also never fly. Even if Roddenberry had intended this, or supported it after the fact, prejudice surely had kept his intentions in the background. Subtext was our friend. We could work with subtext. The subtext wove a gay love story the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ancient Greeks. I was happy with that.

But then.

2010. Sherlock.

I knew going into it that Holmes and Watson were the greatest love story never told. I figured it would be a fun pairing for a while. But oh. I was not prepared. And oh, be still my beating heart, the Angelo’s scene! If I recall correctly I actually sat up straighter in my chair at “so you’ve got a boyfriend then”/”No.” Could they… could he? Did they actually…? Was this written for… me? For us? Could we, the weird little corner of the fandom be right for once?? The slash shippers, the queer kids, the ones who had been peering between the lines for decades to try and catch glimpses of ourselves in our favorite stories?

I buried the thought for a few years, devouring Johnlock fanfic like it was my job, my civic duty, my vocation. I waited patiently for each new series. But I never actually expected anything to come of my hopes until after season 3.

Bet you guessed it. TJLC had caught me like a spark in dry grass. The few analyses I’d read before were NOTHING compared to this. Suddenly it all seemed so possible. So real. After The Abominable Bride it seemed like there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to go but up. We were right. WE WERE RIGHT! For a whole year, we got to relish the thought that it might actually happen.

…………….. Season 4 was… tough. It felt like a slap in the face, all of our hopes thrown back at us with ignorance at best, cruelty and direct malice at worst. If it had been a good season on its own without canon Johnlock I might have been okay, but as it is….. It was not the first time I’ve had my heart broken by a TV show, and probably only seems like the worst by virtue of being recent. But I would very much like it to be the last.

A few months before diving head-first into the pre season-4 gear-up, I watched a few seasons of Supernatural. Just enough to meet Castiel and lay the groundwork for a Destiel obsession as a contingency plan for if season 4 of Sherlock went all pear shaped. I’m glad I did or I don’t know where I would have found my refuge.

But I started to notice something. From my earliest wading in the Destiel end of the tumblr pond, I shied away quickly from any discussion of evidence, subtextual clues used to make predictions, or whether or not Destiel could or should or will be canon. I still take all meta and spec I read with a healthy pinch of salt. I am trying very hard not to care about whether or not it becomes canon, because honestly? I miss the days when whether or not a ship was canon or had a snowball’s chance of ever becoming so had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I shipped it.

Fandom is just one of many echo chambers that the internet has molded around every one of us. It is so easy to become convinced that our way is right and everyone else’s way is wrong, because we only hear our own voices and those of people we agree with reflected back at us.

We are not the arbiters of what happens in canon. The showrunners are NOT obligated to listen to us. Not everyone can be right, and the showrunners cannot listen to everyone. Nor should they. They are, for better or for worse, creating their own story. Not ours.

We can always write the story the way we want to, over and over in countless different ways. These days I see a show almost more as a set of toys to play with than as its own impermeable whole. I can believe that Dean and Castiel have been slowly falling in love over the course of the last decade. I can decide when and where I want them to have first admitted it, to themselves or each other. What’s more – I can change my mind. Some days I like believing that they’ve been together since Cas’s hand print was still fresh on Dean’s shoulder. Some days I’d rather believe that they’re still pining and in various states of denial. Or anything in between – it’s all equally valid. Once it’s said and stated in canon, that’s it. That’s the show. That’s how it happened. I like the freedom I have when my ship is not explicitly canon. The best is when they are clearly aware of it and give us moments like the mixtape or the Fanfiction Gap of 9x06 – new toys to play with – but let us shape what’s actually going on. As I say in my tags sometimes: They clearly love us and want us to have nice things.

All of this is NOT to say that up-and-coming queer kids do not richly need and deserve representation. God, not at all. I beat myself up about this a lot, for what feels like a terribly selfish desire to just enjoy it and not worry about whether or not the up and coming queer youth could have it better than I did. They can and they should and I still believe that season 4 of Sherlock was the biggest missed opportunity in queer cinema history.

I just can’t take it so personally anymore. For the sake of my favorite hobby, I cannot stake my enjoyment of a pairing and a show on whether or not the showrunners want to take the risk. I cannot let them dangle me on that particular string. I cannot give them that power over me. 

So this is my manifesto, for me personally. If Destiel becomes canon? I will be over the moon. But I will not go hunting for it. I won’t expect it. I will cherish every gift that the showrunners give to us because they’re not obligated to give us a damn thing, so I can’t take what they do give us for granted. I will live my headcanons, write my fics, and I will love the show for what it is, warts and all. I will ship my ship, enthusiastically and with my whole heart, because it brings me joy to do so. Canon or no canon. @starsinursa @daughter-of-the-rain-and-snow