#if Sarcean's relationship with Anharion was not love but actually all the things homophobes say about queer relationships

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Firstly, this isn't me vagueposting, just me gathering my thoughts (I feel passionately about these points).

If Sarcean and Anharion are a allegory for queer trauma and the collar is unveiled to be Sarcean's compulsion wholesale, it renders the Light's campaign against him as righteous regardless of how hypocritical the Light is revealed to be.

It turns his relationship with Anharion into something that was not a relationship at all. Not love at all. It makes it into a sordid sexual fascination. Just as the Light says it was. If the Light represents antiqueer religious and societal pressures within this queer allegory then the story cannot be a pro-queer narrative if that sentiment becomes something tangibly true.

Sarcean can be terrible to everyone else in the world but not to Anharion because their relationship, within this allegory, is what they are fighting to protect. A place to be, to exist. To surrender to each other. To love each other in peace. Without condemnation and judgement. Without constantly being besieged.

Is Will not looking for that very thing? An oasis. One person he can be his entire self with. Is James not as angry as their past selves? Not as vindictive? "I'll show them an abomination!" Perhaps, if that's the case, Anharion and Sarcean also liked to put on a show. Rub their relationship in the faces of the Light. They'll show them. Sarcean cannot be the sole puppeteer of all that queer fury without it becoming an abuse narrative. Once it becomes an abuse narrative, and the Light's campaign becomes a righteous one, the queer allegories start to fall apart.

If Sarcean represents the urges you suppress to conform to a cruelly narrow but socially dominant interpretation of 'goodness' then Will's triumph isn't in suppressing those urges, it's in embracing them. If Will becomes but another good boy suppressing his dark urges for the Light then he's buying into the dominant social narrative. The aforementioned antiqueer one. He may as well marry a nice girl from a respectable family, never once ordering her around.