#it wasn’t explicitly about a murder but it didn’t take much to see it implicitly Was.

[fated-normal-767]

god I just remembered how I realised I was probably aromantic. I was talking to an aromantic guy I know who said he’d never really got the concept of love and asked if I could explain it, and I said I probably couldn’t but I could write a poem and he said yeah cool. Anyway turns out I didn’t get it at all either and I wrote about a confused man beating someone to death and eating them. Summarised it pretty well from my perspective I mean. It be like that. Though apparently it does not “be like that” so that started some wheels turning in my brain and now I’m aromantic.

[bettycooperoutfitwatch]

2x08 Chapter Twenty-One: House of the Devil

The time has come to get into some shit. You might not like it. It’s gonna be uncomfortable. 

This triangle necklace is new! Given the events of this episode I’m inclined to think a triangle is intentional. 

Before you start to threaten to burn down my home, I’ll just say I like the raglan details of this pink sweater. 

This skirt is somewhere on the line of red and pink—it’s a true bright raspberry. We haven’t seen Betty in pink-and-red since the pilot, accompanying Archie to the dance (she wore a pink dress and a red clutch):

Is this foreshadowing to the moment at the end of the episode, the glance Betty & Archie exchange through their bedroom windows? Maybe. Maybe it’s just a bright pink skirt. (What I’m saying is don’t give me shit for interpreting, I’m just here to have a good time). 

A new coat, an old bag! This little gray bag is a Betty Cooper stand-by. The cut of the jacket is very moto—kind of like the pink suede jacket from last episode.

A knit blue sweater—this is stuff we’ve seen before (conceptually speaking). You can see the difference of the front and rear hem lengths really vary. It also has a bit of a sheen (?) when she moves, so perhaps it’s woven with some metallic thread. 

She’s wearing her B pendant. 

We see this look for but the briefest of moments, but it comes very soon after another sweater/a-line skirt combo, the outfit she started off the episode with. 

Her baby blue high-tops. This is like a ghost echo of the outfit she wore in 202. 

Peep the homecoming snapshot.

I’d like to point out, the last time Betty found herself in a situation in which she felt she needed to utilize her sexuality in a performative fashion, she also wore a sleeveless denim shirt. 

Let’s take a moment and agree with Jughead, Betty indeed looks incredible. That hair, the pink a-line skirt, and just look at how many buttons she has undone on that shirt?? She popped one more open between the time she was at home and her arrival at the Whyte Wyrm. Betty ‘Cleavage’ Cooper is back, and on a mission. (Isn’t Betty Cooper always on a mission?)

Okay. Let’s get uncomfortable. 

Let’s get it out of the way and say, yea, she looks fucking amazing. Ms. Reinhart is a gorgeous woman, and therefore Betty Cooper, too, is innately and often intentionally gorgeous. 

This moment is supposed to be uncomfortable to watch—for the viewer, and for Jughead, and probably for a fair amount of those in attendance at the Wyrm (alas, not all of them). The Serpent Dance is a gross institution. But gangs are gangs for a reason. Riverdale is not a realistic show, and its depiction of gang life is (thankfully) not a realistic portrayal. This is a tamed-down version of an initiation into a misogynistic and patriarchal culture. That it involves the sexual exploitation of an initiate (and a minor one, at that)...checks out. 

What I find an interesting exercise, is to think about this event in the arc of what appears to be the story of Betty’s nascent sexuality—while being clear that Riverdale either intentionally or unintentionally muddies the complexity and nuance that exists between individual sexual agency and sexual exploitation. 

Riverdale has been exploring Betty’s sexuality, and how to express that sexuality, from the very beginning. It’s even been brought up recently, explicitly (Kevin calling out her apparent interest in BDSM in The Watcher in the Woods) and implicitly (see: Betty in her boyfriend’s bed, in his clothing, in Tales from the Darkside). The show appears to be plodding towards a deeper exploration of these things, but it often seems to pull back just when it’s about to get interesting (imo). This will happen a few more times this season, and we’ll chat about it when they do. It’s really interesting, because historically women and girls are not afforded the license for complex emotional and sexual exploration in fiction that men and boys are, but I’m not sure it’s a story well told. 

All this said—Jughead breaks up with Betty. And while it’s indeed his attempt to push her away from the dangers of the Serpents and Penny, it’s not wild to imagine that she—as a teenage girl taking steps towards greater expression of her own sexuality and receiving feedback in the form of a break-up from the person she wants to explore that sexuality with—could also read this as a rejection of that very sexuality. 

That she then seems to want to regress to pilot-era Betty—who pined for Archie, who didn’t have to solve a murder, who wasn’t being stalked and tormented by a serial killer—doesn’t seem all that wild to me. Riverdale perhaps does not execute this arc well, but it’s clear what they’re trying to explore. 

A n y w a y. I’ll just say you can’t reverse time, but that wanting to in a moment of pain is a universal instinct. It’s also usually a desire that (hopefully) wanes as we begin to heal and repair and accept our reality again.

Onwards, you still have many chances to get angry with me and I don’t want to miss any of them. 

Recall Alice threatening FP that if she sees Betty in a Serpent jacket, she’ll have his head. Behold: Betty in FP’s jacket. 

Note how uncomfortable she looks. Also, from interviews, we know this was apparently a very, very cold filming night—it looks like they put her in tights as a mercy, but still tried to kind of hide it by making them skin tone-ish. They have a bit too much artificial matte-ness to truly get away with it. 

Me too, girl, me too. 

Betty wore these sleep shorts in 205—the last time she and Jug broke up. She last wore a tank top like this one (but blue) when she and Jughead got back together in the following episode.

Summary: 7—if we consider her lingerie its own, individual outfit, and I do

Key necklace appearances: None!

That backpack?: Yes, Backpack is around.

Best outfit: Her ‘you look incredible’ party outfit

u @ me

[rockofeye]

Hello! I have learned so much from your blog and the resources you’ve provided. Thank you for maintaining this space. For a while, I’ve been grappling with belief or faith in the existence of deities, spirits, and other spiritual beings. If it’s not too intrusive or personal, could you share any examples of supernatural occurrences that really demonstrated to you: wow, these things are really real? I apologize if my request is inappropriate or poorly phrased. I’m just searching for answers.

Hello!

I’m glad you have found the blog helpful–beyond just writing about my own experiences, that’s kinda been the whole point!

Faith is a hard thing. There’s no easy on and off switch and we can’t just have it transplanted into us or magically just show up. It’s something I struggled with for a long time because I am a natural skeptic and sometimes a bit of a pessimistic skeptic. I had to learn for myself that faith was a muscle that I needed to exercise to make it work. I think that’s a hard thing, especially in a world and (often) culture that has us explicitly or implicitly looking for proof of things that can often be unseen. 

How I worked through a lot of that for myself was really ‘fake it ‘til you make it’. I acted as if things were of course absolutely one hundred percent as real as the person sitting next to me on the Subway, and, for me, that opened a door for those things to really manifest. Like, I am stubborn and I decided to be stubborn in that way and it worked for me. It was like I was meeting the spirits at least halfway and it gave them something to work with. For me, it worked. The spirits sort of kicked that door in and here we are. YMMV, of course, but really looking at things with open eyes can show you what there is to see. We often say in the religion that Ginen is open for all those who have eyes to see it….a lot of starting out in Vodou is learning how to see.

I am always happy to share a good story. Sharing makes me happy because it fulfills my idealistic desire to give people what was and continues to be given to me: when I was just starting out, people spent hours telling me stories about how they came to be where they were with their spirits. Now stories teach me specific things about the nature of spirits, the nature of spiritual work, and how I operate as a priest.  Story-telling is a huge way we learn things in Vodou, since it is a primarily orally-passed religion, and it is how we connect with each other and form bonds. 

On the other hand, stories can be incredibly personal, and some of the meaning of stories can get lost without personal context, so don’t hold what I say as the be all end all of faith. That being said, the faith I have developed in my spirits over time has become the foundation for my life and I hope it can give a little hope to others.

On with the stories! Not all are distinctly Vodou-related, but most are. Have three:

When I was a small child (no more than 5 or 6), I had a nightmare that I woke up screaming from. I had it a few times, but it stuck with me. I don’t have a lot of clear memories of my childhood, but I have always remembered this dream:

I was playing in the backyard of the house I grew up in and my father was doing yard work. Behind a sort of stone platform was this grinning skeleton who looked at me and laughed, and that terrified me because I was young and scared of scary things. My father was near me, and all of a sudden, the skeleton took out a gun and shot him in the stomach. I watched the blood spread on my dad’s tshirt and he asked me to go and get him a fresh tshirt to wear (normal request for him).

I woke up absolutely terrified from this and it stuck with me basically forever, without me thinking much more of it….until a fete just before I went to Haiti the first time. It was a fet Kouzen and Gede showed up randomly while Kouzen was eating, and I was tending to Gede.

All of a sudden I had this world-crashing-on-my-head moment of clarity and I looked at Gede and said ‘it was you in the dream, wasn’t it’. He started cackling and patted my cheek and told me I had always been his child. Gede had protected/saved me from my father, who has never been a good person. He watched over me while I was small and kept me as safe as was possible.

–

For a long time, I worked third shift in various human services settings. At one program, I worked with a co-worker who I came to know pretty well, and we had a good rhythm to our shifts: for the first four hours, I sat upstairs monitoring the clients while they slept, and she stayed downstairs. We would switch halfway through the night.

One night, I am sitting upstairs and everything is quiet. Co-worker is napping, I am reading, clients are all asleep. All of a sudden, there is this enormous, deafening crash down in the kitchen. I call down and ask my coworker if that was her and if she was okay, she says it was not her and goes to investigate. Nothing is out of place, except a locked cabinet that she left locked was now unlocked and wide open. I didn’t unlock it, she didn’t unlock it, and she is freaked out. 

When I come downstairs for a moment, we hear footsteps on the opposite side of the house (same floor) that we are on, but there is no one there--we can see where we hear it. At this point, every light on the first floor is on and we have checked every door and window on the first floor. They’re all locked. More strange sounds and coworker is very unhappy. She’s from a traditional culture and is on the phone with her sister in her home country talking about how to cast the devil out.

We switch spots for the night, and I go to take a nap on one of the couches in one of the living rooms. It’s post 3AM and as I am falling asleep, I am jolted away by a creepy male voice in my ear and breath on my cheek saying ‘are you ready?’. I leap off the fucking couch and flip on the light, and there is no one there (of course). Like, I am not easily frightened but I expected to turn the lights on and find a man with a knife standing over me. What’s worse is that I could feel the presence of a gross man. I lay there the rest of the night with the lights on.

Around 5:30AM, the first person for the day shift came in. She usually left us alone and had her coffee another room. At about 6AM, I hear what sounds like one of the clients overexuberantly crashing down the stairs. It’s too early for them to be downstairs, so I go to investigate...no client to be found, early coworker saw no client, and upstairs coworker confirms no client is out of their bed. Everyone heard it, but we have no idea where it came from. 

As I am crossing the landing at the bottom of the stairs, I can feel someone looking down on me from the landing above where the stairs turn, and, out of the corner of my eye, I see a large dark figure. Of course when I turn to look, there is no one there...but this huge sense of malice was sort of hovering and I know for a fact, if I had been coming down those stairs right then, I would have fallen and broken my leg. 

Early coworker confirmed that she thought the place was haunted like a motherfucker, and talked about the shadowy figure she has seen and the fact that any clients that were placed in one of the back bedrooms always went a little nuts, because there was something definitively wrong with that bedroom.

I went back the next night and had a ‘look, motherfucker’ conversation with Mr. Murder and told him that if he didn’t leave me alone, I would evict him and it would not be fun. I had no more problems there, really, but it shook me up because it was so tangible and so damn nasty.

--

When I was preparing for kanzo, a lot of unexpected things happened including me packing to leave my apartment the day before I left for Haiti. It sucked quite a bit, but it was definitely for a reason and I don’t regret it.

It was about 1AM the night before I was scheduled to leave, and I had spent the day bringing stuff over to a friend’s house since I was using their basement as free storage. I realized that I had not brought any of my clothes over to storage. Like, two giant garbage bags sitting in my room full of all the clothes I was not taking, and I nearly had a breakdown. I had sold my car that same day, and I had to get across the city with very little cash and two giant contractor bags full of clothes. I called a cab, and it never showed and so I sat on the curb outside my apartment trying not to cry, and I called an Uber. 

Happily, the Uber came. A cute little silver car pulled up, and out jumped a Haitian man dressed in jeans and a blue plaid shirt. He grabbed my two giant bags like they were nothing, tossed them in the trunk, and away we went. We chitchatted and I told him I was going to Haiti the next day, and he was SO EXCITED, particularly when I told him I was going to Jacmel...because that’s where he was from! He kept saying over and over, ‘oh, you are going to have a great trip..it will be just what you need!’. 

When we got to my destination, he grabbed these two giant heavy bags of clothes and basically levitated them up the stairs to the front door of the house I was dropping them off at. Big grin and superhuman strength, and I knew Kouzen (who comes from Jacmel and wears denim and blue and plaid) had come to rescue me. 

That’s what I’ve got!

[pomegranate-salad]

Seeds of Thought : Wicdiv #28

Oh wow, I am so incredibly late for this ! Courtesy of – you guessed it – law degree stuff. Also French elections. And possibly impending apocalypse. But hey, I made this one extra-long to make up for it. And since I managed to stick with these analysis pieces of mine for an entire arc, it’s opinion time ! Let me know if you liked reading them, if you found them helpful, if there’s a topic you’d like me to tackle… Basically, tell me what you think. Or don’t, and keep your mystery (that was the title of the pamphlet Christian fundamentalists gave away at the entrance of my high school back then. Yes, it refers to what you think it does and it remains the most hilarious thing I’ve ever read in my entire life).

Anyway, analysis and opinion under the cut, spoilers for issue #28.

FAIR GAME

 When the solicitations for Wicdiv issue #28 came out, I was intrigued by the fact that for the first time, the description came with a “mature themes” warning. Because, well, it was Wicdiv we were talking about : sex and violence have been tagging along since issue 1. Upon reading the issue, I’m not quite sure which of the depictions it contains are materially more graphic than the previous ones ; and yet, they definitely feel more “mature”, more explicit.

 And the reason, at least to me, is that if I had to describe this issue in one word, it would be “invasive”. Not just from a reader’s perspective, but also thematically. All throughout the issue, we see characters massively overstepping their boundaries.

The issue opens with Cass literally breaking & entering Blake’s home, then confronting Woden about his identity in public, to which Woden responds by referring to Cass’ pre-transitioning life. Cass oversteps again by mentioning Amaterasu’s dead father to her – as an orphan myself : don’t do that people, don’t psychoanalyze us, we’ve got it covered – then we switch to Persephone forcing Baphomet to talk to her, which leads to Baphomet mentioning the Morrigan’s controlling behaviour toward him. During the orgy scene, it’s visually that this violation of privacy manifests itself : nudity, sexual acts, up to the crude depictions of Sakhmet’s victims’ open throats. And we end with a look at Ananke’s letter, the content of which brings us very little in terms of plot but is still given to us in its entirety, because it wasn’t built to satisfy our need for information but to communicate with someone dear to her. Symbolically, we even get to see her without the lace mask that estranges her from the world.

 In my SOT for issue #26, I talked about the different way reveals about the characters were handled in this arc compared to the previous ones, and noted that our characters didn’t actually know that much about each other and that the heavy-handed feeling that accompanied each revelation were symptomatic of people getting to know and getting closer to each other. After all, isn’t it always how it feels to learn about someone at first ? Like a guessing game in which an infinity of answers is possible, in which each player tries to make themself look as good as possible to others, precisely because there’s not enough information to go around and anything is believable. This is how we form connexions : take in, hold it in, rearrange, and finally let in.

 However, in this issue, we’re in the other side of the mirror. In a move the Wicdiv team is decidedly fond of, this is where we assess the costs of getting close to someone : to get to know them is to get to hurt them. Even without necessarily having your privacy being invaded, allowing proximity of any kind makes you more vulnerable to someone’s words and actions. How many times has each of us ended up saying something hurtful in an attempt to figure someone out ?

This topic is mined explicitly in the issue : Woden warns Cass of the dangers of seeing others like “puzzles to figure out”. Because the gods are just starting to form a genuine group, it is unclear for each of them what can and can’t be said. Especially for someone like Cass, who’s not very good at being tactful, it can be tempting to get ahead of the curve and treat others like the sum of their personal information. But these pieces of knowledge each come at a cost for both parties : if you’re letting someone know about something, they might hurt you with it ; and if you’re let in on something, then you have to do with a degree of intimacy that you might not have asked for. Cass might not like Woden even the tiniest bit ; but when she invaded his life, she implicitly agreed to treat what she would find out with respect and decency, and even to be touched by his story.

 There’s of course a pretty clear meta quality to this subject. We’ve reached a point in the comic at which the fandom is self-sustaining. We know have our own codes, catchphrases and theories - it’s interesting to note that the majority of wheel title cards in the issue are inner references. We spend hours speculating about the intimate lives of the characters, and we do so openly because they are not real. But reading this issue feels like a direct message to the fandom nonetheless : if those were real people, what we’re doing would be massively inappropriate and hurtful.

 But Wicdiv characters being Wicdiv characters, they are no better at this than we are, and you’ll find no better illustration than this issue. And while it might seem anticlimactic to bring up such a topic at the end of an arc that’s all about the gods getting mad with power, it makes perfect sense : intimacy is power. And this issue does everything it can to link those themes.

Amaterasu’s gibberish threw me off for a little bit, but what I got from her “evil Muslims” line is that being responsible for something means you have power over it, a logic she inverts to conclude that it’s the people representing the biggest threat for something that would be the most efficient at protecting it. But that kind of responsibility for something is one you acquire by simple virtue of proximity. Having a relationship with someone, even a tenuous one, gives you power over them, the power to hurt them. Whether you do it or not is your responsibility, but is it inescapable.

The topic is even more explicit in Sakhmet’s mouth, when she compares the dynamic of human relationships to those of predator and prey. Of course, for Sakhmet it means that someone WILL get hurt, the only question being which one. It’s interesting to note that while Sakhmet’s characterization revolves around being so emotionally closed off you apparently cannot be hurt, Sakhmet herself doesn’t deny that she can be hurt ; she adopts the role of a predator because she knows she’s just as vulnerable as anyone else otherwise. Even more interesting is the turn taken by the issue with the orgy scene. Sakhmet being angered by not having been let in on the lie can seem offsetting for the long-time reader : we know she would have had no problem with Ananke’s murder being indeed murder. But once again, this isn’t about what we know of her : it’s about the weight of every relationship. Despite her best efforts, Sakhmet is still part of the group formed by the Pantheon. This infinitesimal relationship between her and them still give them the power to violate her trust. The rage she displays subsequently is a way to counteract this violation. The parallel drawn between Amaterasu “refusing to go down on her” and them being oblivious about including her is a little cringy, but still makes sense : just because the degree of proximity she offers is shallow doesn’t mean it’s worthless to her. We know she doesn’t care who gets killed, we know she doesn’t care who she sleeps with. But she’s still part of the group and she still let you go down on her. For someone as closed off as Sakhmet, these are pretty much the sum of her interactions with the world : she is a hedonist, part of the pantheon, and she will demand your respect on both accounts. It’s not important to us, precisely because typically our interactions with others run much deeper, but it’s important to her. If you’re part of the pantheon, or you want to have sex with her, then you’re part of her private life. You have the power to hurt her. You better not.

 But while this issue makes this point in a chilling manner, nothing is ever black & white in Wicdiv. Yes, it’s better to be respectful and even somewhat distant when you’re not completely familiar with someone. But sometimes things are more complicated. Sometimes there’s a duty to be invasive. When you find out one of your sorta-friends is the victim of an abusive relationship. Even if you end up doing harm, one thing you cannot do is quietly retreat, because the basis of abusive behaviour is to cut your victim from all interactions so they lose all standards of a normal degree of intimacy, something that’s crushingly explicit in Baphomet’s words when he says “this” is only about he and the Morrigan.

 And even without mentioning these extreme cases, in a way, aren’t all feelings for someone based on invasiveness ? Other people’s feelings is something that we didn’t ask for and that we still end up having to deal with. And it might be tempting to try and block all emotions so you gain the right to ignore those of others. But Sakhmet herself proves in this issue the futility of this attempt. Indeed, someone’s always going to get hurt. And if we weren’t the prey from time to time, we wouldn’t have such a strong need to be the predator. Human interaction is built on invading each other’s world with our own emotions ; at every moment, we are both predator and prey. And it’s this simultaneity, this reciprocity that saves us. The only way to make others’ intimacy acceptable is to make it so it goes both ways.

Here in France we give each other kisses on the cheek as a form of greeting. In high school I had a philosophy professor who explained to us the sociological meaning of this practice : by letting someone kiss us we expose our necks, one of our most fragile parts, as a sign of submissiveness. But by reciprocating the kiss, we re-establish equal ground : we both expose our weakness to the other. We build a link based on mutual vulnerability instead of mutual protectiveness. And humans are not the only species of expressing consented vulnerability by offering their necks ; so do big cats.

   WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE

 Look, with so many stakes and such tension hovering above this issue, this was never going to be a perfect run.

 Issue #27 was such an impeccably constructed juggernaut of a tension-builder that it was left to issue #28 to tie up a dizzying number of plotpoints and planted twists. And the result, at least for me, is that some work and others… not so much. Moreover, this issue had to go over each of these plotpoints one of after the other while still building up the momentum to its “big finish”, which gives to this issue a bit of a “catalogue” feel. Granted, Imperial Phase (part I) as a whole gives out the same impression. This is the first arc that really revolves around an ensemble cast instead of a designated protagonist, where it be Laura or the rotating figures of Commercial suicide. I don’t need to have written comics to guess that ensemble pieces are hard to do, and I think it’s no accident that the best issue of this arc, issue #27, was the one explicitly using abundancy, superficiality and rapid succession as its main formal device.

I’ll try to dedicate a similar post to the arc as a whole, so for now I want to focus on each plotpoint of this issue and weigh on their effectiveness, because for once I think this issue is more its parts than its whole.

  Let’s start with the David Blake/Cass/Woden storyline. I’m in a particular position on that one, since I’m the person who came up with the “David Blake is Woden” theory. I can’t tell you how much it makes me smile to see more and more people supporting that theory right at the moment when it seems Wicdiv is confirming the “Jon Blake is Woden” theory. It’s really a testament to Wicdiv’s ability to fool us that any information they give us would make a plausible red flag.

Here’s the thing about my theory : even when I came up with it, I was never convinced that it’d be a good thing in terms of plot if I were right. I think it would be interesting, as it would make a good point on the danger of older men “taking on” youth culture, as well as the white male privilege of being able to maintain a childishness that’d prove deadly to another demographic. But on the other hand, we would lose the interesting conversation on the self-reproduction of sexism and male entitlement from the fathers to the sons, and more largely a good part of the stakes that’ve been building up around Woden’s character. One thing I dislike about modern media is its tendency to pile on plot twists until the story is so unnecessarily convoluted that all meaning is lost. Sometimes simplicity is the best way to get a topic across. And as we progress on the Woden story, I think the straightforward explanation of his character has gained enough interest on its own not to warrant an additional layer of meaning.

And it’s that same simplicity I liked in the “revelation” on the subject in the issue : the fandom has been dwelling on the “Blake’s son is Woden” theory for so long (to the point that weirdoes like me have created spin-offs of this theory) that there was no way of including it as a “revelation” without it feeling artificial. So the very offhanded, toned-down way they handled it seems to me like the right choice. What really amped this moment up is the inclusion of Cass in the storyline, as both a good researcher and yet one who cannot help looking a bit risible and arrogant when gloating about a finding the fandom’s been holding as semi-canon for more than a year at this point.

Oh, and David Blake could still be Woden I guess. But if that comes up, there better be a damn good layer of subtext associated with it to make up for what we’ll lose.

 And now I have to talk about Amaterasu. It’s weird to remember that everything in Amaterasu’s introduction in the comics seemed to destine her to be special among the cast : she was the first of the pantheon to appear, the first to perform, the first to be the object of the protagonist’s obsession… She was explicitly singled out by Laura as the best in term of “star power”. And yet, three arcs later, Amaterasu had completely slipped in the background, due to Luci immediately taking the stage and then Ammy being present only episodically. So it feels both logical and a bit surprising to see her suddenly come back to such a central position. Moreover, unlike most of the cast Amaterasu has seen no progression in her character : what we know about her – her father, her connexion to Japan, her immaturity, cultural appropriation – is still just as true, and unlike even the most stagnant characters like Sakhmet, Amaterasu doesn’t even look like she got worse. It simply looks like what she is now is what she always was, and only her lack of presence in the comic prevented us from seeing that. So having Amaterasu serve as a trigger for the deadly chain of events is a clever move ; we either expected her to keep pissing us off in a non-harmful way or to go haywire, but not necessarily to trigger something by the simple virtue of being annoying to the characters themselves. Speaking of annoying, I’ve long predicted that at some point one of the gods will get enucleated and I’m increasingly convinced that god will be Amaterasu, but at this point it may well be wishful thinking.

But yes, as a whole I love the whole concept of Amaterasu’s portrayal. Aside from the whole “desperate to find meaning in tragedy” aspect, which is nothing new, I like that it gives us something quite different in terms of having a character who’s… well, not very smart. While she does have a few lines here and there that clearly aim at using her lack of intelligence for comedic purposes, this is not the crux of her personality, or even necessarily what makes her dangerous or scary. Amaterasu is not smart, but she’s also driven, a grieving orphan, immature, narcissistic, profoundly spiritual. She’s a fully fleshed-out character with a certain level of intelligence, and she’s treated with exactly the same level of respect as the others.

As for the possibility that it all may be an act if it turns out she’s the one working with Ananke ? Well, once again, I think we would lose a great characterization in favour of a cheap plot twist. “Clever manipulative woman pretending to be dumb” has been done a million times. I’ve never seen a character like Amaterasu before.

 And for this issue’s most uncomfortable topic, we’ve got Baphomet and the Morrigan. You know, as a fellow goth, I’ve always felt kinda bad about not liking the Morrigan, because it’s not like we have a large amount of mainstream representation written by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. But as it turns out, boy did I have the right idea. I’m sure there will be much to say on this storyline as it develops, but for now I’m going to focus purely on how “holy shit, the Morrigan’s straight-up abusing Baph” plays out narratively here. What I really admire about this whole scene is how it manages both surprise and obviousness. I don’t know if there were diverging opinions on this, but personally I’ve been holding the abuse for a certain fact since the chess scene in last issue, and yet when Baph dropped his glasses and I realized one second too late what I was going to see on the page turn, it still managed to knock me out. And I think the key to this success is gradation. The first time we heard again from the Morrigan was in the magazine issue, and in that she still presented that perfect picture of gothic romance ; nothing to see here, same old Morri. Then in issue #26, the new information was conveyed in a way that could find another explanation (Morri is simply trying to get him to show respect toward the dead) or could elicit humour (Morri is voting for him, ha-ha). Then in the next issue we jumped into something that would read as abusive only if you were already uncomfortable toward the whole relationship, and that scene was counteracted by another scene “showing” Baph cheating again with Persephone, painting him as a “bad guy”. So when we arrive at this issue, the fact that their relationship is abusive is something that one could have theoretically missed, denied or chosen to ignore.

Giving us such undeniable proof can seem sudden, and one can’t deny the pure shock value of Baph’s bruised face – the issue’s real Most Valuable Panel as far as I’m concerned – but the flagrance of this scene gets its strength from and reinforces the vagueness of the previous ones. Because after all, if we weren’t able to realize what was going on sooner, who can tell when the abuse really began ? Has this been going on only since Morri leaned of Baph’s infidelity ? Since she started suspecting it ? The beginning of the comic ?

However, for all this construction to work, we had to be able to believe Morri would actually do such a thing but not be able to anticipate it. The problem I had with the Morrigan from the start was her lack of personality beyond her premise and the fact that she didn’t seem to have any drives or goal of her own. And if the reason for that curious underdevelopment was that they intended knock it out of the park with this little bombshell… Well, I don’t really know what to make of that. On one hand, I want to say that if the reason a character development works is because you haven’t really given them any character prior, then there’s no glory in that success. On the other hand, I was the one who argued that Sakhmet’s lack of characterization worked because the deficit of information about her was in and of itself a characterization for it was of her own making. Could something similar be said of the Morrigan ? What I hated most about her was the vampirisation of her personality and storyline by her relationship, in a way that couldn’t be called a subversion of the trope. Does the evolution of her role in that relationship allow us read the relationship not as something hindering her characterization but as the mirror of her characterization itself ? I’m not sure. For now, the connexion I have to the character is too small for me to really feel it. She’s still essentially a cardboard for me, only one that has been painted with very scary colours.

In the end, this storyline works better from Baph’s perspective ; he’s the one holding its interest together because he’s the one whose personality has been explored at length in the comic, he’s the one we have a connexion with, even if many of us do not really like him. And because we possess that additional information, placing him in the position of a victim does not take away his agency the way it often does female characters in a similar position. Wicdiv doesn’t make the infuriating move of inciting us to side with the abuser to then try to make us feel bad about it when we get the full picture – as they did with Tara and yes I’m still bitter about that. No, when the information breaks out, we’re already on Baph’s side, may it have been ironically. And yes, there might be something to say about having the only abuse situation you’re depicting being a woman-on-man relationship when it’s by far the least common of all possible abuse situations, but hey, representation has to start somewhere for each of them. And as far as concepts go, having Baph’s aviator glasses, the very symbol of his perfectly constructed virility, serve the same purpose as the cliché inadequate sunglasses women wear to hide bruises in a billion TV shows is pretty amazing.

 Now while I did like all 3 three aforementioned storylines, it’s toward the end that the issue starts to lose me, because neither the Sakhmet finish nor the Ananke addendum really convinced me.

To start with, the juxtaposition of these two storylines is just a weird way to finish the arc.

They’d both work as individual closers, but they’re so different in their narrative construction I think they work against each other.

Let’s start with Sakhmet. Her rampage was pretty much everyone’s first guess to the question “what could go wrong at the party at the end of Imperial phase ?“

In fact, it’s a closer I’d dismissed as a possibility because it would have been too obvious – I had something even darker in mind, like maybe all the gods waking up the morning after to find their guests dead, but not knowing who among them killed them. But anyway, Sakhmet going haywire is something everyone had on their checklist. We just didn’t know when it would happen and why. And while I do think the trigger they chose made sense and is convincing from a conceptual point of view, I’m not sure it works in the context of the story. Sakhmet losing it because she wasn’t included in the Ananke cover-up was a complicated payoff to set up. Basically, the story could not ever remind us she’d missed this piece of information because the entire plotpoint relied on the gods – and us with them - forgetting about it. So they could only plant tangential information and reminders : the fact that Sakhmet doesn’t like to be mocked or lied to, the fact that she indeed ate her dad… But it didn’t make the payoff come more naturally and it only reinforced the absence of surprise when what everyone knew was going to happen at some point happens – only a bit sooner that we might have thought. I think that may have been their way of using the “cover-up” plotpoint without being too straightforward about it (the gods were so afraid of public reaction they didn’t expect the danger to come from inside the pantheon) but ultimately in my opinion this is still a cheap plotpoint, no matter how you turn it.

 As for the Ananke addendum… Well, the entire problem’s here, really : it feels like an addendum. Sakhmet’s storyline is still thematically connected to the issue and the rest of the arc. Promiscuity, isolation, increasing madness… This is an arc that sees the gods eating themselves up. Meanwhile, the Colombo-esque revelation that someone is still following Ananke’s lead comes out of nowhere in the bad way : the way that seems superfluous. It feels as if the creative team wasn’t sure how to finish off the arc and threw another revelation in fear that the Sakhmet closer wouldn’t be enough to maintain interest for the next two months.

Now despite its memorable surprise closer to Fandemonium, Wicdiv’s arc conclusions do tend to be somewhat expected. I wasn’t surprised by Luci’s death, as painful as it was, and I was awaiting Laura’s divinity, the announcement of Persephone’s return at the end of Fandemonium and Ananke’s death at the end of Rising Action. So it’s not like Wicdiv forcefully tries to surprise its audience. But they always found a way to compensate the expected ending with a twist of some kind. Luci’s death comes with Laura’s small miracle. Laura’s divinity comes with Ananke “murdering” her. Persephone’s comeback appears simple at the end of Commercial suicide to find a more complicated explanation later. Ananke’s death turns out to be straight-up murder. That’s clearly that kind of dynamic that issue #28 is trying to reproduce : the Sakhmet massacre is the logical climax of the arc while the Ananke revelation is the twist that makes the junction between this arc and the next. But this combination doesn’t work as well here because of the lack of connexion between its two elements. It ends up looking like a curious mix of previous arc conclusions, somewhere between Rising Action and Commercial suicide. By the way, is it intentional that the characters take centre stage in this issue in the exact same order as the Commercial suicide issues (Woden / Amaterasu / Baph & Morri / Sakhmet) ?

But while Commercial suicide was moody and nostalgic, Rising Action self-indulgent and ironic, this arc’s general mood has been more challenging to pin down, between vain and existential, tortuous and restless. Ending on Sakhmet’s bloodbath, on this desperately obvious conclusion to an arc that felt like it couldn’t wait to end and yet closed it eyes in fear wouldn’t have made the upcoming months of wait pleasant, but it would have been a fitting bitterness. No evitable cliffhanger – just the chronicle of a death foretold.

[mild-lunacy]

The Deconstruction of John Watson

I've been thinking about the John characterization in Hubblegleeflower's post-S3 fic 'In the Dark Hours', in the context of S4 and specifically The Lying Detective. It really seems on-point, even prescient. I was also thinking about what Ivy said about John's inherent violence, how "when John is bad, he is terrible", and how disappointed in himself he was in TLD. The fic makes me think about what John must have wondered about himself *before* Mary's idealization to have the dissonance hit him *so* hard, that he'd have to punish himself and Sherlock and lash out so extremely. In the fic, a younger John sounds like shades of Sherlock-- wondering if there something 'wrong' with him for being addicted to danger, for getting off on the rush, enjoying these things to make himself feel alive. That tendency to say and act the right way in order to 'seem normal'-- he actually has that in common with Sherlock, except that (of course) John is much better at it.

On the other hand, I agree with John's own conclusion in the fic and with Ivy that John is actually not 'like that'. He's definitely not like Mary (as per all those endless debates post-HLV); he *is* a good moral compass after all *because* "he knows exactly what it means to be pointed the wrong way". At the same time, the fact that he'd wondered about himself seems realistic. Seems *likely*, even. If Sherlock is someone who has tried-- and ultimately failed-- to make himself into a high-functioning sociopath after Eurus, as I wrote recently, John is coming at his persona from the other direction. Trying to be *normal*, trying to do good, trying to be someone he thinks-- he knows-- he's not.

A lot of people depended on John to be Series 1 John even after Series 3, essentially, even though Sherlock told us in HLV that John is addicted to a 'certain lifestyle' and 'abnormally attracted to dangerous situations and people'. John is not surprised, he just says *Mary* wasn't supposed to be 'like that'; he's not happy about his attraction to all these things but he was *aware* of it, and he wanted to get away from it. It seems to be that instead of an arc, what we have here is a sort of deconstruction. We started out with John and Sherlock in opposite corners in Series 1, and they're in opposite corners again in Series 4, except they're the flipside of each other. Sherlock is the 'good man' even though he'd shot someone to protect someone else, and John... John is a bit 'not good', but he has a heart. He's still human. On the abstract level as well as implicitly, being truly established partners in TFP, they've met in the middle.

I know I've said yesterday that my problem is that Sherlock's arc encompasses and sort of *consumes* John's role, with John not really being able to match Sherlock's growth due to being the deuteragonist. I agree with @plaidadder's comment on @ravenmorganleigh's post, about the growing fannish consensus that "John and Sherlock's emotional arcs are no longer intertwined" in Series 4. I do still disagree that this means Sherlock's growth in Series 4 is somehow more about Eurus and Mycroft (and Mary!) instead. Certainly (but more subtly), John's arc also didn't suddenly become about Mary either, if nothing else then because everything (but everything!) in this show has always been about Sherlock. Although this means Mary's not the *point* in TLD, in many ways it also means that unfortunately, John is not the point either. I do agree with the analysis in that the plot of TLD is essentially *all* orchestrated by Sherlock (including John's beating, which was demonstrably part of Sherlock's plan to stop Smith). The only bits Sherlock didn't predict were to do with Eurus, and more broadly the fact that Mary was shown to be wrong, because she didn't know John the way Sherlock did. As I said, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is because everything is about Sherlock.

I think lot of this confusion has to do with a misreading of Mary, and Sherlock and John's relationship to her, or a sort of... overcompensation, I think. Like, a lot of us thought (or rather, hoped) that it's all going to go to hell after S3, in a way that would justify the fandom's suspicion and dislike of Mary as well as the fandom's resistance to the surface reading of HLV. In other words, she's going to pay, somehow. We were so deeply polarized by HLV, with such a long and bitter fandom divide forming on Mary, that virtually no one actually took the time to synthesize a Mary characterization that actually *included* the facets of devoted (but unfortunately unsuitable and unhappily married) wife and the cold assassin. People were *so* certain that either she *couldn't* have shot Sherlock if she truly cared about John, or the whole attempted murder thing was genuinely nothing, simply 'surgery' as Sherlock claimed, because what's a little murder between friends? Neither option made sense by itself. And so, Series 4 broadly made no sense to people (without really extreme rationalization) because the answer was always 'both', and TST went as hard in the direction of sacrifice as HLV went for armed assault and implied threats. There was no bridge, and so a lot of connections were just never made, it seems.

I'll admit that HLV set things up in a way that was (in retrospect) difficult to fix, and I agree with the other point that S4's characterization issues started in HLV. I just don't think that Sherlock's acceptance and forgiveness as well as John's intense anger (and projected guilt) at Sherlock about Mary are meant to whitewash absolutely everything about Mary's behavior, *including* things like her abandonment and drugging Sherlock in TST. As TAB showed clearly, Sherlock has *issues*; he has severe self-esteem issues in terms of relationships, and specifically in regards to John. Obviously, we can't just take him at face value when he says Mary's actions 'conferred a value' upon his life; I don't know, I think it's obvious that this isn't rational or somehow deserved. Anyway, the kindest interpretation is that she *shot* him but wanted to atone, to do better, to do the right thing in the only way she could. Otherwise, this is about Sherlock and John and their existing issues, although the narrative simply focuses on Sherlock's agency... to a fault, really.

It's true (I think) that Sherlock genuinely tried to include Mary because he liked her, and I even think Mary honestly did like him (though of course that didn't mean she wouldn't shoot him), but it was always about John. As Ivy said, John is the central figure in both their lives, so both of them have had to accommodate the presence of the other. They've *both* done that. I know it requires a certain kindness to Mary to accept this, which may not come naturally, but I think you really cannot parse John or Sherlock's motivations anymore at this point without accepting that point. To say that Mary (or Mycroft) *replaced* John's place in Sherlock's narrative is going much too far, although I do think Eurus did take over and expand on *Moriarty's* place as Sherlock's Shadow and antagonist. Anyway, the problem is indeed that Sherlock and John's arcs are clearly not intertwined in Series 4, which is why John doesn't get a full, explicitly shown climax. But this is because as I've said, John lacks an arc (as deuteragonist), not because it's now remade in Mary's image. If he had an arc with Mary, we'd see an actual resolution *through* Mary; instead, Sherlock’s actions and reactions make the difference. That is not to say Mary (and Irene, and Eurus) haven't mediated and acted as conduits for both characters' development. Of course, I still agree with @delurkingdetective's response to Raven's post. I just think there's a big difference between a conduit and a focal point. Mary may be a *motivation* for John or Sherlock's actions, but that doesn't mean she's the underlying *reason*. It's one thing to critique the show for using women as conduits, or Moffat and Gatiss for being too conservative to write this arc between two men explicitly. It's another thing to mistake a conduit for a character of true importance, a character whose agency truly makes a difference rather an *obstacle*, even if it's not about Mary or Irene being *romantic* obstacles. They are definitely still treated by the narrative as something for the male protagonist to deal with and ultimately defuse or overcome.

Unfortunately, although I'd like to use the Mary of 'In the Dark Hours' for insight, the fact is that she is something like a dark conduit herself, a presence mainly felt through her absence from John's life. In that sense, she is similar to S4 Mary, although I suppose most readers would say it's very different because this fic's version is clearly an emotionally abusive character who's *labeled* so. The truth is, of course, Mary is just as problematic in Series 4 as ever, and John's relationship to her never improved while she lived (and in fact, he cheated on her, just as he did in the fic, although it was always indirectly). It's more satisfying to see Mary labeled and understood as abusive, but at the same time... I don't know if it's realistic. More importantly, I think this is the flaw of focusing so entirely on Sherlock, and avoiding a truly joint arc and/or canon Johnlock. If Mary *was* abusive, John would need an independent arc to deal with it; more realistically, Mary would have to actually stay longer on the show. In the fic, Sherlock tried to heal him emotionally just as he tries in TLD, except this goes a lot deeper, and they talk a lot more (and it involves touching, claiming, binding John to himself). Not that I'd ever need or expect the show to go there, but my point is that Mary's impact *couldn't* be too deep because then you couldn't hand-wave it by Mary simply giving her blessings by TFP. In Series 4, John's issues are more about his self-image, his conception of himself as a moral man, as someone who's capable of being his 'best self'. Sherlock doesn't *clearly* say it's John who makes him better, but Mycroft already said it as far back as ASiP. It's obvious. It's also obvious that it's *Sherlock* who makes John better and he always had. John is just doubting that; doubting himself, doubting Sherlock. He's ashamed, lost, angry at himself, wishing he could have been the kind of man who Mary had envisioned (even though he's already the right man for *Sherlock* and is exactly what Sherlock needs-- as he implicitly recognizes by TFP). I just think the show expects us to know that implicitly, to understand that without spending the time to spell it out... and they also use female characters as tools to communicate all this, unfortunately. It doesn't quite... work.

Anyway, the John of 'In the Dark Hours' struggles very much with that sense of shame, with all the guilt issues. Even if TLD John had somewhat different motivations for it, I still think it's a source of ongoing fracture for John, and it seems critical to all his worst, most violent and stonewalling behavior in the show. Remember in HLV, John exploded into violence (frightening Mrs Hudson) when he assumed Sherlock was implying Mary was his *fault*. He clearly has a severe reaction to that idea, a violent reaction, and specifically with Mary, with his choices. He thinks everything is always his *fault*, and then, of course, he also thinks Sherlock is brilliant, superhuman, can do anything. Could have saved Mary if he wanted; he promised. So, that was Sherlock's fault. An excuse, as Martin Freeman said. An excuse to let all the anger out, to succumb, to dissociate. And Mary's hallucination is a sign of dissociating, isn't it? Not that she's literally a split personality like with Eurus, of course, but she's always saying the things John thinks but can't or won't say: monster. Posh boy. One of reasons I do think John has progressed in S4 ('cause even if it's not a full arc, neither is it a *retread*, in other words), is because of this new insight into John. Series 3 was about Sherlock's Dark Night of the Soul, and John's S4 version is a bit condensed: sparked by Mary and mediated by Sherlock. We see John's darkest corners, but in the end they are simply accepted and integrated because they always have been, by Sherlock. With Sherlock, John is always safe. With Sherlock, John is contained, and even his worst violence is both expected and accounted for.

I think I just continue to struggle with the execution, in part because of the differences between written work and film, as well as issues of genre. 'In the Dark Hours' is a supremely internally focused fic, in a way that the show could never be. Everything had *always* been mediated by metaphor and external action on the show, from the very beginning. Women were used as the markers and conduits since the start-- not just Irene in ASiB, but Soo Lin Yao in TBB, who's a really blatant Sherlock mirror. Perhaps... as much as I wish we could have continued on track with TLD, and as much as I accept the many valid critiques of the execution and Moffat and Gatiss's self-indulgence and narrative conservativism in Series 4, this is what fanfic is for, in the end. These conversations.

[violet--minds-blog]

Why Bisexual Rep Is Important

Piper Gibson | March 17, 2017 (Note: This was written on September 23, 2016, so anything that has occurred in the shows mentioned in terms of representation may be missing. If so please let me know and I’ll correct it!) In honor of Bisexual Visibility Day, I wrote a little something. And if you’re curious why this day is named for visibility, not celebration or appreciation, then just read on.

So, it’s not that I didn’t know gay people existed when I was a kid.

I knew. I grew up watching Friends, after all; Ross’s ex-wife Carol and her partner Susan were lesbians. I watched Ellen with my grandma. When Glee first aired I was in eighth grade. I knew that there were people out there that were gay, and we had family friends that are gay that I’d met once or twice. But I had no fucking clue about anything else, and I definitely didn’t know what the hell “bisexual” meant until I was in my teens.

I don’t have a specific memory of learning about the word, but there was certainly a few years of a gap between gaining the knowledge and applying it to myself. I figured it out somewhere around junior year of high school, and came out to my parents in the winter of my senior year. All that time I’d liked girls and hadn’t accepted it, hadn’t let myself feel it. The first time I was suicidal l was twelve, and it was because I had a crush on a girl and didn’t know what to do or how to feel about it.

This is why bisexual representation matters. Because even though I’d seen representations for lesbians and gay men as a kid, I’d never seen me on television. I’d never even heard the word bisexual as an identifying word on tv or in the movies before. (I still haven’t.) Sure, I’d heard the word-- like in Glee, when Blaine is questioning his sexuality and says he might be bisexual, and Kurt, a gay man, replies angrily, “Bisexual is a term that gay guys in high school use when they wanna hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change.” That was the first time I heard the word bisexual on television, is still the only example I can remember, and that’s the message I got about who I was. I was fake. I was a lie. In fact, the word wasn’t even applicable to me-- I wasn’t a gay guy, I was a girl and I was confused and looking for validation. And the media spit in my face.

As far as representation goes, bisexual people have it pretty rough. There is a theme in media, a very dangerous theme, that implicitly shows characters are bisexual and explicitly tells the audience they’re straight. I have example after example of this, files of queerbaiting I’ve stowed in my head for years.

Dean Winchester from Supernatural holds all of his long-standing emotional relationships with men, bonds best with men, is shown to be attracted to men, and only sleeps with/dates women. He is a “womanizer” and his relationships with women never last, whereas he works at his relationships with the men in his life. He cares deeply for them and sacrifices everything for them, but he’s not bi. He’s straight, he sleeps with women, see?

Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, has healthy, strong, intense relationships with men and women. He’s “not good with girls,” but he’s good with his absolute best friend Bucky, who he’s known since childhood and holds above all else. He falls in love with Peggy Carter, yes, and their brief relationship is important and real, but he also drops everything and flies into enemy lines to rescue Bucky. He becomes a completely different person from grief when he believes Bucky to be dead. When Bucky comes back as a brainwashed soldier and doesn’t know Steve, Steve won’t fight him, and is prepared to die rather than hurt this man who doesn’t even remember him. He drops the shield and stops being Captain America because the alternative is losing Bucky. The writers and actors and media all call Bucky and Steve’s arc a “love story,” but insist that they’re both straight. Peggy happened, right? Bucky slept with loads of women, right?

One of the biggest examples of queerbaiting, BBC’s Sherlock, shows John Watson have relationships with women but above all put Sherlock first, caring for him and supporting him and loving him like he would a boyfriend. He’s Sherlock’s only friend and confidant and they live together and share their whole lives together, but somehow this doesn’t matter because he has relationships with women. There’s even a scene where he yells that he’s not gay, which I remember watching and thinking, “you don’t have to be gay to like the same gender.” But he marries a girl, right? He’s not gay, so what does it matter?

I have so many more examples. Jessica Jones (from the Marvel show of the same name) and her best friend Trish act like ex-girlfriends, are treated by the show as ex-girlfriends, and the first season ends with Jessica saying something she never does-- “I love you”-- to Trish and embracing her. This by all accounts looks like them getting back together, but they both have male romantic interests, so none of that matters. Merlin and Arthur from Merlin have an epic love story and sacrifice life and limb for each other, but they both get girlfriends and eventually, wives. Harry Potter is very into both Draco Malfoy and Cedric Diggory throughout the books but dates only women and marries Ginny in the end. Even in How to Get Away With Murder, where Annalise Keating has explicit relationships with women and men and is very clearly bisexual, they still haven’t said the word out loud. It’s a very scary word, apparently.

Something dangerous happens when media implicitly grants a community representation but doesn’t give them explicitly stated, canon representation. We are told we are shameful. We are told we are bad and dirty and must be kept secret. And when we have the gall to point out how obvious it is for us that these characters are bisexual like we are-- because those in the LGBTQ+ community are taught to read subtext and interpret media for ourselves from a young age-- the general public laughs in our faces. They call us “crazy fans” (which, okay, is super dismissing and dehumanizing and ableist) and tell us that actually, we’re fetishizing these characters, and we need to stop.

It’s different for queer people. There is no explicit bisexual representation. But when I see Jessica Jones look at her best friend the same way I looked at female friends of mine when I was twelve? When I see Merlin and Arthur look into each other’s eyes and smile the same way me and my girlfriend do? It feels the same. It’s just not straight. And the writers of these characters know it. They know it and they use it, because we’re starving for validation and we’ll take anything. They write these scenes, these loving glances, purposely, then turn around and tell us our beloved characters are straight. Why would they not be? They have girlfriends and boyfriends, after all. Nevermind what that says to bisexual men who lean towards dating women and feel weird and shameful about their attraction to men, who watch Supernatural and wonder why they relate so much to Dean. Nevermind what that says to bisexual women who watch women on screen be physically affectionate and loving towards each other and who are told that this is strictly platonic; female friends are all like this, and it’s definitely not romantic.

Television does not seem to understand the possibility of being attracted to more than one gender. For me, someone who’s loved every gender since I can remember, it seems strange to only like one gender. I love boys and I love girls and I love everyone in between, and this isn’t taken away by me currently dating a girl. I wasn’t straight when I dated a boy in high school, and I’m not a lesbian now. But in television, you’re a straight woman if you date men. You’re a straight man if you date women. Nothing else matters, especially not your long-standing, emotional, loving relationships with the same gender.

There is a problem in the media with being afraid of this word. I’d like to know why that is. More and more shows are including gay characters now, giving them girlfriends and boyfriends and plotlines and interesting stories. (We won’t touch on the “bury your gays” trope here.) But there’s still so, so, so little explicitly defined bisexual characters. If they’re bi, this is shown, not told. We learn they’re bi from them kissing boys and girls, not by them mentioning it. This is a clear distinction, and it’s important to note. I can’t think of a single example of something I’ve watched or read where a character said themselves that they were bisexual. Self-identifying, strongly and confidently, is important. Not being outed, not just showing their identity by making out with multiple genders, and not saying a stupid cop-out like “well, sexuality is fluid” or “I’m not straight or gay, I’m just… y’know.”

No. Young bisexuals don’t know. Young me didn’t know. If I had been watching TV and heard someone call themselves bisexual, proud and clear, I’d have sat up. I’d have listened. I wouldn’t have had to watch show after show, movie after movie, read book after book and gone to my other queer friends, saying with raised eyebrows, “This is fucking gay, right? I’m not the only one?”

We see your implicit representation and we want better. We deserve better. We demand better, for us and for young bisexuals, their stomachs sinking every time they watch TV and a joke is made about two characters of the same gender being “too close.” My stomach sank when I was a kid and I watched Joey and Chandler hug and say “We do this too much, don’t we?” and break apart.

I didn’t know why then, but I do now. And I-- we-- deserve better.

And to not end this on a sad note, I do have hope. I am tired of queerbaiting and biphobia, but I have hope. When I was a kid I had nothing-- at the very least now, I have characters on TV who kiss people of multiple genders. Eventually they’ll be allowed to say that they’re bisexual out loud, but for now I have confirmation from show runners that I was right, that they are bi. For now I have amazing bisexual Youtubers like Dodie Clark and Chris Kendall and Alayna Fender. For now I have Korra from Legend of Korra and Jack Zimmermann from Check, Please! (READ IT HERE) and Annalise Keating from How to Get Away With Murder. For now I hold the little rep I have close to my heart and wait for a better time, a time when “bisexual” is not a scary word to say on television or in movies. After all, we have all these angry bisexuals with no representation and a fierce desire to see themselves in media. That’s just a recipe for shit to get done.