#is a repressed self loathing bisexual

[spectrum-color]

Being a RotE fan is so fun because the way we talk about Fitz legit must seem to outsiders like we hate him, but we actually collectively adore him and he’s our special boy

[godlessondheimite]

there’s something so insidious about insisting clearly closeted/repressed/self-loathing gay men are bisexual (especially historically) just because of a perceived imbalance of representation. like you personally are invested in a specific guy being bisexual that you’re just gonna ignore like, the conversion therapy and forced marriage of it all. “he’s bi, he was married to a woman!” ok but like…did he want to be…(this isn’t about anyone specific btw)

[tomlinfonda]

Anyways.

I interpret Ted Lasso, as a character, to be a deeply closeted and repressed bisexual man, and I think that, firstly, there are quite a few hints in the show about this (bi triangles come to mind), and secondly, that this interpretation adds a new layer to the tragedy of his ending.

Through this lens, let's look at these two shots:

Plain, boring, isolating suburbia vs. Vibrant, lively walkable neighborhood where people can find community.

Which represent (or are represented by):

The midcentury American dream of a house in the suburbs with a lawn, where a polite white heterosexual couple can form a nuclear family and raise a child. vs. A diverse community, where people from all walks of life can meet, celebrate and find family in each other.

What Ted went back to vs. what Ted left behind.

The box that Ted has once again put himself into vs. the possibility of being fluid and free

the spinning suburban house vs. the rainbow

heteronormativity vs queerness

the manipulative, cold and mendacious mother who convinces him to go back to Kansas vs. the gay man who is clearly in love with him and is willing to offer him love in London

We see in all of these screenshots the perfect visualizations of the two choices that were offered to Ted.

And he chose wrong.

And so, he represses himself further. He is cruel and dismissive to the man who is clearly in love with him, and in a dissociative haze of self-loathing, he boards that plane and dreams that the people he rejected will be better off without him.

And back he goes into the box of heteronormativity, into the suburban house, to play the role of a father and nothing more. And the man he could have become in London, the man who could have tried something new and broken out of his box and found real love with someone who was so excited to be around him...He's been pushed far, far down. He had to be. And so, Ted Lasso succumbed to the constraints put upon him by society and by himself.

[polaroid-petals]

A hypothesis

(This isn't meta, this is a headcanon)

The idea that the sexualities mismatch between the real world characters and their headspace sleep paralysis demon version stuck with me so I wanna explore it more.

Sunny is the most clear-cut out of all four. He's embarrassed when people imply he has to like a close friend just because she's a girl and then proceeds to have night terrors about her being in love with him. His escapist fantasy world is one where he ignores all her advances. He has been holding hands with the same boy since he was seven, and he can't quite define how that makes him feel. Creative as he may be, he lacks the words to express himself and the social clues and internal knowledge to fully define his feelings and identity, so his sexuality is probably a mystery even to himself for the longest time, if he ever does figure himself out amid all the other things going on in his psyche.

Basil is a simple boy. He sees boys, he blushes. He sees girls, he blushes. His heart is a little too big and now he's giggling and averting his eyes.

Omori is where it gets interesting. He's meant to be a defence mechanism, a way to stray from the truth of the real world and live in a fantasy—and by every metric, part of that 'being normal and loved by everyone' is being straight and conforming to his friends' expectations. Omori represents trauma, fear, and shame, and while the shame over his identity may be less visible or imminent than his trauma over Mari, it still is floating around somewhere in that pool of insecurities and self-loathing. However, as it turns out, there are certain feelings that Omori is really upset about feeling that no amount of repression can bury, and why do they have to be aimed at the thorn in Omori's side? When even the part of you that represents aggressive performative heterosexuality is bisexual and in a situationship with another guy, you know you've got some more soul searching to do.

Stranger wasn't ever meant to have anything to do with romance, identity, and sexuality in the first place. He wasn't even meant to exist but came about anyway when Sunny's conscience battled with his immediate emotional and psychological needs. It is not within Sunny's nature to leave any of his characters unfleshed—and you an argue that everything in headspace, even the metapsychological representations of his mind, are original characters—and so, Stranger evolved into something more. Something with feelings, thoughts, and an identity. Sunny knows that the real Basil likes both boys and girls, yet Stranger very much mirrors headspace Basil in that in an ideal world, he only has eyes for Sunny, and his sexuality reflects that. It seems that Stranger is less interested in the dreamer himself, though, and more in the vessel that was given his own mind as time went on. As much as his heart hurts for the dreamer, Stranger and Omori have a special bond that supersedes anything else he knows.

[intertexts]

don't particularly have any major feelings abt this except my continual burning "telling everybody to go listen to more and better ap shows" instinct as always but i really do think that if u like pd & are getting antsy during the hiatus & also r hitting every single character w the transgenderism beam & such. please please check out eidolon playtest for the love of god. insanely good ap show. better on a mechanical level certainly. the vibes r very similar to pd. theres so many girl pcs including closeted tgirl latine pc with a coming to terms w/ her gender & finally shedding the miserable layers of repression & self loathing. there's a he/she/they detective prince with a guy they manifest who looks like a shaggy metalhead & can sense shame. there's awesome eternally head empty really kind nb pc with a turtle named dog & a scooby doo van. there r characters of color & players of color. there is lesbianism & bisexuality & incredible stressed out perfectionist horsegirls who want to be astronauts & lame scruffy skater dykes. there is a beautiful and charming and friendly beetle. there's crucially REALLY FUCKING GOOD STORYTELLING. and also they hate cops. it's like if persona & jojo had a cute awesome baby. it's a best-friends-solving-mysteries type beat. please for the love of God go listen to eidolon playtest season 3 DISCO/SKA it has an 80% chance of making u happier than searching for rep in the four cis white dudes ap show....... theres literally Zero fanbase for it that I've seen which makes me go crazy go stupid. go here. listen to disco 0 & ska 0 and maybe the first real episodes of them. thats a couple hours. come back here & tell me ur thoughts & ill draw u literally whatever u want. im bribing u guys now im so so desperate and feel so bad watching people trying to fix one show when they could be watching another that already has literally everything they want.....

[localcanadiancreature62]

Horacemine stuff

Horacemine: Horace grew up thinking that he has to be this tough,unwavering pillar that never falters or shows emotions lest he'd be seen as "weak" meanwhile Jessamine lived her whole life being defined by her gun slinging skills and troublesome reputation as her father made her think that anything else she did made her a failure. But when they're around each other,they don't have to live up to some flawless and invulnerable image or let themselves only be seen for what they're not,they can just be themselves and finally feel those feelings they've been repressing for so long. Anger,depression,self-loathing,passion,helplessness,all of it. And they won't get judged for feeling this time. The beauty of two people who repressed their entire identities due to the fear of being judged or punished for being themselves coming together to finally heal and rediscover their true feelings rather than what they've been forced to feel for years is so heartwarming,comforting even.

Horacemine and Wax'Pimm,things that both pairs have needed to hear their whole lives:

Horacemine - "You don't have to wear a mask or live up to others' expectations,you don't need to work yourself to death just to finally be seen as a person rather than a tool. You can just be yourself,and that's enough."

Wax'Pimm - "You're not nothing,you're not just a thing to be ignored or ruined beyond recognition and thrown away. You're not a worthless tool,you're a person worth loving and you should accept it instead of believing what you've been told your whole life."

(you see,this explains the similar arcs in their backstories and their parallels. im gonna fucking SOB. they make me feel so emotional. ough they're healing,they're healing).

@aria-greenhoodie @chaseerr0rcode You have seen the gays,the lesbians,now here's.. *drumroll* straight (passing) people (bisexuals)

[reinvent-and-believe]

do you think roy always knew he was into men or was he repressed until he realized he was into jamie?

oh anon. i started to answer this, then got inspired and started writing a fic in answer to it instead, then the fic turned into a bigger fic that's going to take me months to finish so i think it's best if i just answer the question. 😅

so thanks for asking, anon, i DO have some thoughts!!!! they are scattered and messy but i'll give it a go.

i don't know that roy has always known he's into men, but i think he's known quite a while. maybe not when he was younger - he might have known in the back of his mind that he liked boys, but he knew he wasn't gay because he definitely liked women, so that's that, no need to think about it past that, it's squared away. even if intellectually he knew about the existence of bisexual people growing up, he wouldn't have considered it an option for himself (and to be honest, i don't think it's a given that he did know it was really a thing. it was the 90s. bisexuality wasn't widely talked about. if you liked men, you were gay, and roy wasn't gay).

roy was born in 1982; he was in the academy and going through puberty and trying to figure out who he was in the 90s. things were not great for us in the 80s and 90s. i'm 8 years younger than roy kent would be, and the way i learned about the existence of gay people was aids and the rhetoric surrounding aids. and that was formative for me; it provided the only frame of reference i had as a kid of what gay people were. that was how i internalized that my queerness—the queerness i couldn't even articulate or understand—made me sick, dangerous, unclean. obviously that's not a universal experience, but it's also not a particularly uncommon one for our generation, and it takes a shit ton of work to unlearn. it would have been worse at roy's age, and i can see it being something that would shape his perception of what it means to be a queer man.

listening to roy talk about himself is fucking devastating and so telling. "sometimes i get concerned that i've been infecting you with the worst parts of me," he tells phoebe. infecting is a pretty loaded word, and it speaks to the deeply rooted shame that roy carries at the very core of his identity. we see over and over throughout the show that there's something about roy that he seems to truly believe is...rotten, repulsive. unlovable, maybe. a lot of people read roy as completely lacking self-awareness, and i get where that comes from, but i don't really read him that way. i think roy's sometimes plagued with self-awareness when he doesn't want to look, and he loathes the things he sees. he knows how he is. he knows the parts he hates about himself. and i think his queerness plays right into that.

ted lasso is, among other things, a show about masculinity, and roy's character arc throughout the show is, among other things, an arc about masculinity, so i think it only makes sense that his sexuality is tied up in that. because in his world, what could be more fundamental to your masculinity than heterosexuality? there's a shit ton of homophobia in football, and it certainly wouldn't have been any better during roy's formative years.

there's a lot you could say about La Locker Room Aux Folles and roy kent's sexuality, and i won't because this is already stupid long, but seriously, have you watched 3x09 while considering that the episode is about roy's repression as much as it is colin's? that it might be colin's coming out episode, but it's roy that functions as the episode's protagonist? that the message colin understands at the end when george hearn croons "i am what i am" is one roy can't let himself embrace by the end of the episode, not even by the end of the season ("i'm still...me"/"wait, did you want to be someone else?"/"yeah. someone better")? that colin may have escaped la cage by the end of the episode but roy's still in there?

the last thing that roy kent wants is to be what he is, and that kind of fundamental, foundational shame reads as very queer to me, feels very queer to me.

so, anyway, i do headcanon that roy sleeps with guys sometimes, at least by the time he gets to chelsea. i don't think it's particularly frequent and i don't think it's particularly healthy and i don't think he lets himself develop anything like a genuine connection, but i think it's what he's allowed himself. i think that's basically where he starts the show, occasionally sleeping with men, refusing to acknowledge it says anything about him. (i could also see him not having fucked a guy, although i like that less. regardless, i do think he recognizes he's attracted to men, even if he doesn't necessarily accept it.)

i definitely think that, when they finally get together, jamie would be his first boyfriend.

anyway, dear anon, you didn't ask for a 1000-word response to your 20-word question, but thank you for coming to my ridiculously rambling and likely incoherent TED talk about roy kent's internalized homophobia 😂

[tomwambsgans]

just want to say your insight into Tom's sexuality is very validating and a much-needed perspective in a fandom that appears to overwhelmingly read him as bi.

I think people simply underestimate how deeply fucked up Tom's relationship towards sex and socialisation is, how truly unbelievably repressed and self-loathing he is, and how much this ties into the show's overall male ideal and themes of sexuality+emasculation. things like when he's trying to get Shiv pregnant in s3 (and saying sex without trying for a baby is pointless), or the Tabitha storyline, show that he clearly has issues separate from and preceding Greg (and even Shiv). and it's interesting how tomgreg leaves people less inclined to consider the character's orientations discretely and in fact often leads to adoption of the baffling fanon trope of 'middle-aged conservatively socialised man is secretly comfortable in his bisexuality'. it also just seems shallow to me when people act like his being gay would somehow invalidate his love for and romantic attachment to Shiv, which are things often regarded as the only 'real' aspect of their (exceptionally compelling) relationship. so many fics insert a clarification to the effect of 'Tom is bi, not gay, he did love Shiv, don't worry!' that just comes across as reductive to me. like I promise this fandom the gay male experience is not an easy one-size-fits-all and closeted men do date/love women. sometimes they even marry them! and impregnate them! (hi, Greg's dad?)

I could go on forever so again, just here to say that I really appreciate your posts about this. I don't think Tom was originally 'intended' as gay but that's simply how the show evolved through the writing and acting. there are plenty of characters I read as bi or repressed bi (I think it's not uncommon in media), Tom just isn't one of them lol.

printing out this message and eating it oh my god thank you SO much

you basically said it all. and specifically on the point of (fandom) ppl being inexplicably convinced that a gay man can't have ever loved a woman is so insane like... what do you think the closet IS lol. i don't know a single gay man who was at some point closeted enough to date women who would say that they didn't feel ANYTHING about those women. the idea of "he clearly loves shiv so he can't be gay" honestly just betrays a naivety about... most aspects of life, lol. the nuances of emotion and constructing the self and repression, and of all the things that go into love and desire (something tackled imo pretty well by the show itself so it's kinda insane to be so off the mark while a fan of succession), and tbqh of tom's motives period. and i mean also, of course, about male homosexuality. i can't necessarily blame anyone, at least individually, like for just not being a gay man or knowing enough about gay men, but the sheer lack of it is... yeah a little frustrating lol. i can vouch quite personally for the fact that sometimes gay men, even WHILE knowing that they're gay, can date women and love them. deciding to pursue what you really desire rather than what creates a certain image for yourself is then a matter of self-love.

anyway. i recommend reading like literally any gay man's memoir for anyone who wants to make an effort at a deep understanding of all the stuff I say about gay tom. i'm reading this one rn by paul monette called Becoming A Man that feels SO uncannily tom to me and i kinda wish everyone would read it so I'll use this opportunity to put it out there lol

finally I wanna say that maybe I'm a little too wishful but with some of the lines in the script that didn't make it to the final cut I do lowkey suspect Closeted Gay Tom to have been the intended reading from the beginning. like "shall I be mother"? "all girls here"? js

[ao3feed-destiel-02]

Holy Roller (Roll Over Me)

Holy Roller (Roll Over Me) https://ift.tt/U5OfMbz by all_american_hips A witch slips Dean Winchester a love potion. But, there’s a small complication in the witch’s plan: the first person Dean sees is Castiel, a former angel of the Lord, and nothing changes. It’s a whole big mess of repressed emotions, but eventually, something becomes evident: Dean had feelings for Cas before he was even slipped the potion. It takes Dean a few tries to be honest with himself about this. And it takes a few more tries for him to use his words about it. Things work out in the end, though. OR I vaguely autistic-coded Cas, wrote a character study that reads like manic poetry about Dean, and Sam is the poor innocent bystander who doesn’t know what to do with either of them. Words: 6850, Chapters: 2/?, Language: English Fandoms: Supernatural (TV 2005) Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Categories: M/M Characters: Castiel (Supernatural), Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, various OCs Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Castiel & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester Additional Tags: Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester Loves Castiel, that's it that's the fic, Case Fic, but only for the first few chapters, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Gay Castiel (Supernatural), Trans Male Castiel (Supernatural), In a sense, he was once deemed genderless like all angels, but he's not, i transed his gender, Human Castiel (Supernatural), Season/Series 09, Oblivious Sam Winchester, because he hasn't seen all that we have, he was too busy with the apocalypse(s), to notice his brother making heart eyes at an angel of the lord, How Do I Tag, Eventual Smut, Self-Loathing, Miscommunication, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Love Potion/Spell, but it doesn't work, Gender Identity, Canon Compliant, But also, stepping on canon with my hot pink stilettos, Alternate Universe - No Mark of Cain (Supernatural), Alternate Universe - No Abbadon, lets just pretend their only problem in s9 was metatron, Autistic Castiel (Supernatural), it's not explicitly said but they're all so fucking autistic, Other Additional Tags to Be Added via AO3 works tagged 'Castiel/Dean Winchester' https://ift.tt/ejCZlLc November 13, 2023 at 11:57PM

[loki-zen]

i mean like

i’m not gonna die on the hill of ‘Homestuck isn’t ableist’ but it’s certainly more true that what’s going on is that characters (and whole societies they were raised in) in Homestuck are ableist. And i will also say I’ve rarely seen something so popular that has multiple complex protagonisty disabled characters like that!

I find the claim that Homestuck 'is homophobic' even harder to defend. Homestuck depicts those of its protagonists who are extremely online 13 year old boys from earth a decade or so ago as saying homophobic things a realistic amount. The one who does it most turns out to be a repressed bisexual raised on toxic masculinity by his brother who is probably a closeted self-loathing gay guy himself and is also possessed by an evil puppet.

I have never really understood the claim that Homestuck is racist. I've seen various justifications for it but they all seem either way too minor to mean This Work Is Racist or just to have been misinterpreted or analysed in a way i don't agree with to begin with. e.g.:

there are people who say Gamzee's behaviour and speech is supposed to be reminiscent of black americans. Gamzee is obviously intended to be a Juggalo.

there are people who find it racist that the artist left the skin of the human characters uncoloured-white, and then said they considered them to be of no defined-by-the-comic ethnicity; they could be whatever they wanted to you. There are some unexamined assumptions inherent in white=neutral there, but i am pretty sure this genuinely did just come from the minimalist starting art style (the decision to say theyre unspecified-race coming later, when someone asked Hussie what race the characters were and that was the first time they'd thought about that question. Which again that's arguably pretty white of them but im not sure it means the comic as a whole deserves to be called racist.)

probably the strongest argument: there are moments where you have a bit of ‘light skin=good guy, dark skin=bad guy’ stuff going on, in the fantasy-typical way where nobody involved has an actual real person skin colour. This crops up with the chess people (the black chess people kingdom is villain-coded, but the most beloved and admirable of the chess people that’s actually a main character is a black one, and there’s no real sense that the people are actually bad - they are just designated ‘bad guys’ by the video game they’re NPCs in.) It also crops up with a character turning drow coloured when they go superpowered evil mode. This i agree is in poor taste. I don’t think it’s what you’d be thinking of if you were just told ‘this webcomic is racist’ but yeah it’s not good.

a minor character is an orientalist stereotype maybe? i’m neither a dancestors fan or an anime fan enough to have an opinion on Damara; Homestuck does have a lot of inspiration from anime so i kinda assumed she was a reference i wasn’t getting.

literally every time i hear people talk about homestuck it makes me want to read it less and less are you people okay ?

[pechebeche]

my Hot SPN Take Of The Day is that part of the reason dean downplays johns flaws so much is that dean came out to him in the 4-year stanford gap, Well before coming out to sam, and john was actually like...really good about it, and assuring dean that it didn’t matter. and that the relief of “oh thank god my dad doesnt hate me for being bi” overshadowed all of the other abusive awful shit he put them through.

idk. i do understand why people are compelled to read dean as someone who represses his sexuality for most of his life. but for me i think there’s something very real in a dean who is Out since pre-series, but isnt out to sam until well into it, and the dual meaning that gives his early season themes - the ‘you got to goo have a normal life for a few years and i cant,’ the defense of his dad, the secret-keeping, the refusal in religion. i think there’s something to be said about the process of coming out, and about family.

[hunter-and-halo]

Cas: I have a crush on you.

Dean: Okay but as a friend right?

Cas: ...no Dean, I'm deeply in love with you.

Dean: Haha right, but as a bro right?

Cas: ...

[deancasforcutie]

#every day i want to commit stabbings #why is this reading so popular #he has been having torrid affairs with men since at MINIMUM 2004 and that's canon (via @ilarual)

#he is a (canonically) bisexual man who knows he’s bisexual. #if you don’t know how to watch things just say that #you think dean is repressed?? skill issue. #love and light but that’s the exact opposite of canon! #Dean’s whole thing is being incredibly self-aware #and that’s very obviously true about his sexuality and relationships as well #and his vibe is ‘if you think I’m straight that’s your problem not mine’ #he has been fucking men and crushing on men and breaking men’s hearts for the entirety of his adult life! #I’m sorry if you like trauma porn and repression narratives but you should maybe unpack that #because Dean’s life may be filled with a lot of trauma and angst but none of that is about him being bi. #sex with other people including men is a source of joy for him #he’s had messy relationships including with men that are so messy and emotional precisely because of the depth of feelings involved. #which informs the levels of hurt. and you think he doesn’t KNOW THAT? #Dean knows himself very well. again it’s his whole thing. #if and when he denies himself things it’s with eyes wide open. which is far more interesting if you ask me #Dean is bi #supernatural #Dean #very happy to see so many other people are also tired of the bullshit (via @charcubed)

#dean's got 99 traumas but his bisexuality aint one #also dean is the kind of person who ruminates for days he Knows who and what he likes #you cant be as self loathing as he is w/o a lot of navel gazing #dean thinks he's poison that's why he doesnt think he deserves the boys and girls he has loved #😭😭 (via @curioussubjects)

every day i see “dean is so repressed lmao he thinks he’s straight” content and every day i am so so tired.

[daedalusdavinci]

Returning to your inbox again to ask for more TwoBruce headcanons: what do you think it was like when Bruce and Two-Face first kissed?? Like, I'm sure Two-Face has that niggling thought of "he's only doing this because I'm an extension of Harvey/he doesn't know I'm not Harvey" and all that lovely stuff that comes with internalised ableism, but like...Bruce knows it's him?? And is kissing him because it's 2f, not in spite of it??

well first we have to define first, here. like i think there is a good chance bruce kissed 2f at some point when 2f was pretending to be harvey and had absolutely no idea, and 2f was very self-loathing about it. but, if were talking about the first time bruce kissed 2f knowing it was 2f, on purpose (on purpose ill love you), ohh man

the first time bruce kisses 2f because he wants to kiss 2f is the first time anyone kisses 2f like that (at least in this little verse you and i are setting up here, anon), and 2f has a really hard time believing its not just because bruce is madly in love with harvey. its actually kind of hurtful because hed finally started to believe that bruce saw him as a friend outside of harvey, and now bruce is kissing him, and bruce cannot possibly want to kiss him, so it must just be because of harvey. and hes 2f so hes not very subtle about being upset about it like he gets really pissed at bruce

but, you know bruce. he really takes the time to drill it into 2fs head that no, its him, and it has nothing to do with harvey whatsoever. he spends like the whole day just kissing 2f stupid, making sure that 2f knows hes loved. so its the first kiss but its also like the next hundred kisses, all one after the other until 2f is sitting there like, oh fuck im going to be in love with this man for the rest of my life (and then he was). bruce works very hard to make 2f feel loved and most of the time he does a very good job of it (2fs standards are low but also hes TRYING, he really is)

(also side note i think 2f comes to terms with his bisexuality long before harvey king of repression does so while harvey is still no-homo making out with bruce 2f is just like yeah no i think this man is the love of my life. i think im just fucked forever now)

[captain-lovelace]

The Harry Dresden internal state faux-surrealist play is up! Check it out if you like self-loathing, self-compassion, implications of repressed bisexuality, themes of love and grief, narrator as character and audience, and scripts that would be functionally impossible to perform!

[moralorelconfessions]

before nature i kinda related to clay cause i fit the whole repressed bisexual - coddled only child - self loathing / destructive combo too but good god. he is vile