#i will die mad about the lack of lgbt rep | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

incarnateirony · 5 years

Note

Why do you think so many people in fandoms of tv shows, movies, games and pretty much anything have such a strong resistance to a character being revealed to be LGBT? I've seen it so many times, and I know you've seen it a lot as well, and it's just so weird to me how offended people are by this. A recent example is in the fandom of a videogame I'm in, were many are just outraged by the notion some believe that a main character, a white, male soldier that exists since 1997 could, maybe, be LGBT.

The fight over this crap is kind of intersectional. Everything from homophobes to our own. This is heavily tied to (America, since this is intersectional with an american show, but also global) opinions shifting on things like oh, gay marriage. (x) Such as modernly 15%~ of citizens are homophobes and think The Gay Sexinating should be illegal. Which sounds shitty as all kinds of fuck until you scale that against 43% in 77′, and 77 was actually *before* the AIDs epidemic really became central or anything so you can imagine what those numbers realistically became then.

We’ve made progress, and there’s still progress to be made, but it was literally less than half a century ago – two generations ago – here, in many of our lifetimes, or at least in the lifetimes of people the younger reading audience here *knows* – that this landscape wasn’t even *recognizable*

So socially speaking this works in waves of conversation– be that the gays being cursed by god yadda yadda and thus deserve to die of AIDS and be treated like lepers – down to “Why do they even need included in anything” following shortly after, with a mindset of “perversion” still heavily steeped in the population that would plague children of the 80s and 90s heavily. You wanna deal with some internalization, there’s some internalization.

Keeping a thumb on the fact that the needle *has* shifted is a great deal of it, I think – obviously not “OK! WE’RE DONE NOW!” but being aware there’s not a 50%~ chance someone you walk by thinks you should be arrested or killed anymore, that more than 1 in 8 douchebags are going to be whole thundergeese about it, and that it is what it is, and it sucks, and we’re waiting to get further-again. Also there’s whole other issues WRT MLM vs WLW and what earns what kind of resistance but that’s a WHOLE other rant.

The thing is, when people grow into an environment of being *disadvantaged*, if they don’t as much take time to celebrate our *progress* as much as rant about everything that *isn’t going perfectly right*, we lose our scale. It maintains this feeling of being the completely 100% hated unseen minority that the whole world still hates, when we can’t look back and go, you know what, in 2019, 83% of people don’t think it should be illegal, 2% have no opinion. That’s just a very congealed residual screaming mass of assbags and subconsciously we all know it, but continuing to gear the conversation as if we’re fighting from the pits of the 60s or 70s is??? really weird???

But at the same time understandable?

So on the one hand you get The Gays arguing from being an angle of being incredibly more disadvantaged than they are. And then, you get people from this shifting demographic – be it the 15% remaining douchebags congealed into a screaming lot, or the 40% slide that have come to realize we’re just minding our own business and loving who we want between 77 and now – that, still lost *in* that dark history and frankly propaganda hold onto *resistances*. So if we’re talking about a character that, say, probably straight white guys have attached to since the 90s, if they attached to that character in the 90s, odds are, they were fairly developed and at least 15 years old if not more already. And odds are, they were subject to everything from the impact of the epidemic to just older nonsense clouding their vision, and whether we like it or not, these people *will* have likely resistance.

Because we may not like that chapter of history, and we give no excuse for homophobia, but in perspective when an entire country’s homosexual population was ravaged by something ignored by government and hospitals, and dismissively packaged as a curse by evangelical america in a country about 75% christian, just how *much* that *completely* fucks up people’s internal understanding. It’s the same dehumanization that was used against anyone else genocided, in other major historical moments we all know about. It doesn’t make the passivity right, but welcome to how literal propaganda can fuck up entire populations.

So to roll back to the Nonnie: These fights in general seem to strike me as a mix of intersectional… lack of understanding. Young Gays that don’t really get what the world was like 40~ years ago or even 20~ are absolutely baffled why anyone would get so reactive to an idea. Old Gays do want better representation, but some have had a hell of a time *from* internalizing those ideas. The Straights of the time have a WHOLE other mess of shit to sort out in their heads before coming around to being open and understanding. Everybody’s talking across each other, instead of talking with each other, and some have unfortunately entirely convinced themselves they are still as hated as they were back then, which turns into more circular representation visibility fights, which turns into another circus, yeehaw.

Which sometimes even turns into striking down their own representative work (be that SPN here or the goblins we all know on this hellsite that tear down anything that looks vaguely like representation because it isn’t XYZ enough). Because in the interest of arguing with *maybe 15 percent of the population that doesn’t think you have the right to exist* about *fictional content* being made to *represent YOU, not them*, we ironically do a lot of damage to our queer canon by just stomping on current incrementalization and expansion without minding the history and steamroll it. Which frankly makes us all look like disorganized lunatics trying to Make Everything Gay™ even if that’s not what it is remotely.

And because I know this will be misunderstood I’ll continue to frame this point from a few angles before it’s misrepresented: Wanting rep/seeing queer narratives wherever you go is fine and the nature of the fight, I’m just trying to explore the divide between r/NiceGuys that get mad at the gay vs the modern LGBT comm and frankly the general bloated, inflated relevance they have that the community at times lets, or even invites dialogue of, their heteronormative framings, often rooted back from times of REALLY DARK PROPAGANDA AND GENOCIDE and how it affected culture – to damage and bury their own content, generally in the logic “if they don’t see it, then it doesn’t count!” when, if-and-when queer coding or open in your face textual coming-out canon or even just low-visibility text is conscious, that is content for *you.*

And it’s not saying “stop and settle” to put this into perspective. It’s “don’t piss on the work everybody else did before you – or worse on what they’re doing right now – just to argue with the couple of assbags left in the universe.“ They’ll go away too eventually. It doesn’t happen overnight. And they’re not going to stop happening overnight. No matter how many gay video game soldiers you find at this type, no matter if Dean Winchester just quietly voices his repeat encounters with men in a way that landmarks it so loudly you NEED to break out alt-right dialogues those same 1 in 8 have that I have beaten to death – to choose to interject that kind of long-ago-addressed conversational edge is literally to choose to interject homophobic dialogue into conversations of how LGBT rep should work and honey if you need an indicator that you may be leaning in the wrong direction, there’s your sign.

But it can be hard to unplug and stop thinking the world is still as bad as it is back then, BECAUSE you run into those assbags that resist it loudly. But like many things, numbers show they’ve died off into a minority. We still have a way to go, but this is a weird ongoing self-inflated fight that seems heavily unaware on WHY people react like that (as per the original ask) much less how ridiculous it is to keep dragging dialogues born in the AIDS epidemic days into these discussions.

Simple point? If you aren’t able to really mobilize on content (yelling online generally ain’t it, chief), ignore them. Enjoy your content if it’s yours, because there’s a lot of effort in simply erasing normalizing queer content because if it’s not EXTREME enough to win against THOSE GUYS *POINTS AT* then NYEAAAAAAAAAH.

It was never gonna be enough to win on those guys, even if it was full queer cinema canon LGBT stories and not stories that just include LGBT people normally.

Look I don’t even know what soldier you’re talking about, and I don’t care. Enjoy your shit your way and remember how easy it is for a minority to be ruthlessly loud when they can connect themselves across the wholeassed internet.

But until people really learn the history of why certain mindsets cropped up or how they invaded conversation or what rattled entire generations to their core, prople are gonna have a hard time fucking communicating with each other instead of just talking over each other. And sometimes even talking over their own within the community/engaging in deletion/the carousel runs in a circle.

But *why* that mindset exists? It’s not difficult. It’s because this nation got saturated in propaganda that warranted letting the homosexual community suffer and die in numbers that would make your head spin, where everyone knew someone with it, as coffeebrainblog has said, where we were treated like lepers, or “cursed by god”, or as lesser, inhuman things and climbing out of that hole has been a hell of a ride, but the community has to also de-internalize that propaganda and realize WE’RE PRETTY MUCH THERE. Like the road isn’t over, the war isn’t 100% won, but if the statistics alone don’t get you, if you *really* sat and read this reply, maybe where the din and eternal upset has buried our *progress*, you’ll realize that progress has dramatically pitched that into being the minority.

But it keeps everybody arguing from disadvantaged levels and even some choosing to self-handicap by creating their own definitions, rules, boundaries and almost states of the universe they’ll accept, because 1 in 8ish people hate them, but they’re still stuck in a world where 1 in 2 might want you dead, somewhere in your headspace. It’s like setting your own handicap bar which… is kind of the opposite? Of what we’re supposed to do? We’re supposed to knock down those cages? And point out we’re the same as everyone else? Running to prove things to people who still think we might carry God’s Plague And Be Judged that haven’t listened to decades of correction so far, just to dissect and dismantle your own contents or enjoyments – it’s a really, really weird backwards pedaling thing to aim for.

I *get* why people think it’s the right way, again, as per all of this, but it’s… it’s pedaling backwards and thinking it’s moving forward.

So while I don’t know what soldier you’re talking about, it was a chance to address A) why there’s resistance in some generations B) what that did to us, as a community C) where sometimes we lose track of ourselves in a carnival of competition.

EDIT:

This note by @amitywho rings home:

Excellent analysis. I’m extremely ancient - I was a grown-ass adult in a flyover state back in 1980 when the first whispers about “the gay cancer” in New York and San Francisco began to make their way to us. I had to drive 150 miles to find a bookstore that carried any kind of gay-positive literature. We parked across the street to watch and see who might be loitering in the neighborhood - if they had baseball bats, no one would be coming to help.

I’ll also add there seems to be OUSA influence, but I centered on the american demographic of an american show; but it still impacts online worldwide net conversation. That OUSA influence varies between highly oppressed countries having heartier ala-80s POVs on LGBT, to on the exact opposite OUSA fans not really having their heads wrapped around the American side of the history beyond what it means in a few articles if they came from more progressive countries that didn’t, like, genocide their gays. So even older LGBT OUSA people look at it from the disembodied angle of a few headlines they remember, not being in the blast zone and resulting fallout.

Also to drift to another topic of LGBT exploitation: If you want to know why CW has “dare to defy” as a slogan just behind the idea that they have PoC or gays on their channel, I really need someone to sit and think about that. Welcome to a bunch of older people that remember these days that see it as *DEFIANT* to do at our current intersection. Nevermind them now exploiting that to try to find a new center for their network after CBS fucked them WRT Netflix, but hey. Yeah. Put that in scale. Why does it need virtue signal marketing, and moreover, what are they “defying”? This. This kind of mindset. Which is heavily sourced in an age demographic likely to be the core of CW Exec boards and marketing.

If you want an idea how deep rooted in our psyche stunted dialogues are, the fact that few people even blink at that says a fuck of a lot to me. No, we dared to defy decades ago, you’re just trying to profit on what you still run through marketing and demographics and ho-hum but think you can pull money from. There’s a difference. But it does betray the minds behind it. It should be more like “DARE TO LOSE 15% OF OUR PROFIT MARGIN AND HOPE WE GET THAT 20-30% OF GAYS INSTEAD” – it’s profiting off of the work the LGBT community did and acting like they’re brave for doing it at a point that they actually risk more losses to NOT start. It’s signaling themselves as heroes in a battle they had nothing to do with. And it’s pretty standard fare.

(And, ON that aside, it spins me out how often I’ve seen in misc fandoms fans acting like queer content that is canonically queer doesn’t count if it’s not overtly marketed and shopped explicitly as LGBT content, rather than content that happens to have LGBT elements – why are you BEGGING to be exploited before you consider yourselves valid, I’m confused. We’ve already had our big grand coming out stories and tales of struggle and there’s a whole queer canon history I’ve posted about this. The whole point of our current junction is getting content everywhere that reflects how normal-and-everywhere we are, why are y’all like this)

14 notes · View notes

roses-foxes · 5 years

Text

What happened in the last 2 episodes of GoT, a fiction by moi

Jaime was on his way to stop Cersei (no concrete plan yet) but Dany’s forces didn’t believe him, thought he was gonna help her, and captured him

Tyrion talks to him and they figure out that Cersei is actually not pregnant since it’s been 6 fucking months and she’s not showing at all. He frees Jaime when he hears his plan, they have their cute emotional goodbye

Dany attacks KL but never ends up killing innocent civilians. She goes straight to the red keep while Jon and Grey Worm fight the Lannister armies and the Golden Company in an epic battle that actually makes us feel connected to the characters

Dany also burns Euron like the crispy useless piece of bacon he is

The hound kills the mountain, lives to tell the tale, eats a fat chicken

Jaime gets to Cersei in the midst of the chaos. She wants to kill him still but nobody’s around to do it for her and she’s a coward. He explains to her that she has no way out of this. Option 1) She tells him that she wants him to kill her rather than die by someone else’s hand. He does it not too painfully because he’s not a monster. Think Olenna Tyrell’s death. Option 2) she kills herself, goes out like a badass 3) Jaime teams up with Arya who uses Qyburn’s face. 4) basically anything that could be cooler than a ceiling falling on top of her while she cries over a child that 100% doesn’t exists. I don’t buy for a second that she’s afraid of death, she’s smart enough to know she had it coming. The best villain this show ever made gets treated with the respect she deserves.

Dany burns down the Red Keep and only the Red Keep in her rage (Jaime makes it out just in time). She doesn’t want the throne anymore when she realizes that she came close to complete madness. She doesn’t want to end up like the Mad King or Viserys, and thinks maybe ruling a country that doesn’t want her isn’t her destiny. She comes to terms with the fact that her nephew doesn’t want to fuck her. She goes back to Essos and finds herself a home and a lover not related to her by blood. Drogon flies away into the sunset somewhere, like idgaf about the lizard but the mass destruction weapon has to go somehow

Everyone wants Jon on the throne but he doesn’t want it. He declares that the kingdoms will be be working together, each represented by one lord or lady. Sansa Stark for the North, Samwell Tarly for the Reach, Gendry Baratheon for the Stormlands, Bronn for the Westerlands (wait, I’ll explain myself later), Yara Greyjoy for the Iron islands, and whoever else for the Riverlands, Dorne, the Vale and the Crownlands

Red Keep is rebuilt, Kings Landing is still standing

Jon joins Tormund like he said he wanted to. Maybe they fuck or something, maybe not, I just think lgbt rep is lacking. Jon gets to sleep and nobody asks him to do anything else in his entire life.

Samwell, Gilly and baby Sam live happy ever after, baby Sam will inherit the Reach someday

Jaime gives up Caterly Rock to Bronn. He doesn’t give a shit about being a golden lion anymore and doesn’t want to live in a castle with the phantoms of his past, same for Tyrion

He comes back to Brienne, explains to her in detail how and why he’s the stupidest Lannister. He spells out his feelings loud a clear. She forgives him

They go to Tarth, get married, have 2 kids: Catelyn and Arthur. Pod is their 3d child. Jaime’s the best version of himself. He’s now known as an honorable man who cares about doing the right thing, because he knows what doing the wrong thing can cost you. They still carry their twin swords around

Tyrion goes to Essos, lives a happy life, maybe comes to Westeros to hang out with Bronn and Jaime from time to time

Sansa finds someone very nice and handsome, is happy and loved by her people

Arya travels to places she always wanted to see, like the free-spirit she is, because being a lady isn’t her and that’s fine

Bran stays at Winterfell and keeps doing whatever he’s doing bc he’s glorious and unproblematic. He does get a bit of his personality back tho and apologizes to Meera for treating her like shite.

Grey Worm and the Unsullied go back to Essos, they all live a long happy life and stop fighting wars that aren’t their own for white people

Davos advises Gendry because it’s homeboy’s first time ruling and he doesn’t have a clue. Davos is basically a dad to him.

THE END. Bittersweet, satisfying, not soul shattering :) Ignoring everything else the show has to offer from now on, I’ll headcanon this as the real ending ✌🏻

#i accepted everything up until 8x04 as canon #thats just what i wished to see maybe i was too hopeful but i dont care #got

52 notes · View notes

edwardamcullen · 7 years

Text

can i make a disclaimer real quick i know i like to talk about how stephenie meyer hates me personally and wants me dead and has a dartboard with my picture on it but like...i know she doesn’t and i don’t HATE her, am i mad she called her renesmee? am i mad there are inconsistencies? am i mad at the lack of poc and lgbt rep? am i mad at jasper fighting on the damn confederate side? yeah! but also i love twilight i love those books i love that world it’s made me so happy for years and has provided me with a comforting little fantasy/escape and i would DIE for the world she created

24 notes · View notes

roxilalonde · 7 years

Text

so here’s the thing about queerbaiting right

it’s really easy to say “don’t criticize creators for not canonizing your ships,” which, fine, let’s put aside the fact that queerbaiting isn’t about pairings themselves, but the dynamic between two characters. put aside the fact that getting mad at creators not canonizing your ship is legit, seeing as it’s the viewers’/readers’/listeners’ patronage which keeps the media afloat, and if same-gender relationships are treated poorly, fans have the right to react. put aside the fact that even people who don’t like the main gay pairing have and do speak out against queerbaiting happening between the main queerbaited leads, because for most people, the desire for accurate representation is what drives complaints, not a petty concern for “ships.”

the thing is: an adept, competent writer cannot be unaware of their own queerbaiting. up until recently -- think early 90′s -- hollywood, the most popular source for widespread pop media distribution, had strict codes in place about LGBT representation. these were instituted out of a desire to attract evangelical homophobic viewers, to try and boost the industry’s profit margin. this kind of censorship would later be eroded as the gay & trans rights movements developed, bringing with them newfound ideas about the so-called “adult content” of LGBT narratives, but for the time being, LGBT content creators were caught in a bind. if they created explicitly gay & trans characters, their ratings would be automatically elevated, losing younger demographics (who were some of cinema’s largest patrons) and making it more difficult to turn a profit. so censorship didn’t just make LGBT kids’ films rare -- it actively drove them out of cinema.

the solution that LGBT creators came up with was called “coding.” it was the use of certain traits or qualities (usually stereotypical ones) to indicate that a character, while not explicitly LGBT, probably wasn’t the cishet norm. gay men have the most memorable examples of coding; flamboyance, slight builds, colorful wear, adeptness with fashion, and high-pitched voices were all ways that early LGBT content creators suggested to the viewers that their character was gay . . . without violating any of the censorship codes. the sophistication of coding developed with the industry. after some years of experimentation, being coded gay was no longer a matter of being loud, sassy, and colorful; it was subtler, indicated in hint-dropping and audience-winking moments. things that gay & trans people would recognize, but cishet audiences (and, more importantly, cishet censors) wouldn’t catch.

what this has to do with queerbaiting

eventually, the censorship codes were lifted (to some extent; in some places, gay or trans-suggestive scenes are still censored or banned entirely), giving creators liberty to have their LGBT characters come out. but the tropes established during that censorship period don’t just die out. disney villains in particular used gay-coding to more sharply contrast their baddie with the cishetero hypermasculine protagonist, using the idea of the queer “other” to better alienate the antagonist while not making him a completely unlikable brute. along with the contrast to the hypermasculine “strong but not too bright” aryan boy of the hollywood blockbuster, we developed the dark-haired, machiavellian villain archetype. thus, you never have to waste screentime on a character that your audience doesn’t like watching. everybody loves a sassy villain! and women are prizes for the hero to win, so of course the (usually male) villain wouldn’t have a girlfriend!

the thing is: coding worked too well. everybody loves sass, flamboyance, having fierce pride in oneself. (people are more reluctant to acknowledge that that fierce self-love is borne of society denying one’s worth to the point that ruthless self-validation is the only way to avoid crippling image issues, but i digress.) so cishet content creators start thinking: i can write sassy loner types, too! and you know what’s in? antiheroes. i.e., people who fit the villainous archetype, but are portrayed as the protagonist. hollywood, having relied on gay-coded villains for so long, now has to find a way to draw them into the spotlight while reconciling their inherent gayness with the typical protagonist-heterosexual love interest setup.

enter the ambiguously gay antihero and his male companion. no relationship is ever concretely established between the two, but there is a distinct lack of women in both’s lives (a lack of female rep which is not compensated for anywhere else in the film, notably) and at least one carries a few traits leftover from the gay-coded era. dark-haired, slender, brooding, lonely, calculating geniuses who notably “do not seek the companionship of the opposite sex” (guess what that line originally meant) and either deliberately or incidentally eschew gender-norms such as physical strength and masculine attraction? whether or not the creator realizes it, they are drawing on decades-old tropes used to code characters as gay. surprise, hollywood! all your antiheroes are queer.

but in the new age of lessened censorship, cishet creators using coding to bolster their popularity is not benign. by popularizing gay-coding traits, they are removing the ability of LGBT content creators to speak to their audience -- stealing a voice the we developed as a consequence of their bigotry and modifying it, stripping it of its origins, to fulfill the mainstream demand for a new kind of hero. and it taunts the LGBT viewer, because now, seeing as LGBT characters can and are explicitly portrayed, representation is not a lofty ideal. it is reasonable to expect that with the use of gay traits, the content creator will follow up on their subtextual promise and canonize the character’s queerness. when they don’t, anger is not the hypocritical butthurt of shippers denied their happy ending; it is the valid complaint of an underrepresented demographic whose ways of communicating with each other through the media have been appropriated and bastardized.

now, some might argue that creators aren’t necessarily aware of the history behind the tropes they use -- and i don’t doubt that’s true! in fact, i seriously doubt that half the cishet writers who make use of tropes born from LGBT coding realize what they’re doing. this does not alleviate them of blame. the consequence of their actions, their impact on fans and those seeking representation, is a separate entity from their intentions. if they don’t realize that they’re hurting LGBT patrons and content creators alike through refusing to acknowledge the source of their “original content,” they are irresponsible, not innocent. it is the responsibility of a creator to understand the tools they wield, to know and respect their predecessors. a failure to acknowledge the role of LGBT creators in shaping the hollywood villain and antihero demonstrates critical failing as a writer, and criticism of such is well-earned. queerbaiting is not some fictional construct invented by snubbed shippers, nor is anger at the phenomenon a product of “entitlement”; it is a rage borne of years’ erasure and manipulation by an industry that has not and does not appreciate our worth.

#lgbt #queerbaiting #long post #essay

111 notes · View notes