#it’s shallow and reductive both to queer rep and the concept of gray morality
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i think that we need to get over the narrative that you can’t have gay villains because that’s a harmful stereotype because there’s a huge difference between “this character is gay and a bad person” and “this character was written specifically to equate being gay and being evil/depraved/degenerate”. it’s just such a narrow minded view of fiction that leads to people afraid to write queer characters as anything less than morally perfect and then to a bunch of palatable but bland and boring queer characters that are arguably worse representation than a gay villain because they are not allowed to do anything wrong. while it is important to write all types of gay characters a work isn’t instantly “problematic” because the villain is queer and the hero isn’t. I think this is also related to the idea of subtext vs text in gay media and how I see a lot of people get mad bc the homoerotic subtext isn’t made canon without considering the context of it at all—sometimes creators make artistic decisions for reasons other than that they didn’t want the gay people to kiss because they’re homophobic. well written queer subtext can be better than a canon gay couple with no personality or relevance and a queer villain can be a better queer character than a gay hero because the characters in-universe morality isn’t inherently tied to how much care they are written with and the quality of “queer representation” isn’t determined by the amount of times they kiss on screen.
#mainly this is brought on by mgs discourse surrounding vamp and volgin and ocelot#I was telling a friend who isn’t into mgs about how ocelot is gay and a sadist and they asked if there were any good gay characters in mgs#and I was like um well no one is really a good character in this series. but yeah I guess#and they said ‘then the game is redeemed’#that was pretty disappointing to me im not making a callout for my friend or anything but like. you cant judge a work on its rep#by weighing the number of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ queer characters mathematically#it’s shallow and reductive both to queer rep and the concept of gray morality#never mind that ocelot is one of the most important well written and beloved characters in the franchise. hes gay and evil so that must#make him a derogatory stereotype and ‘bad representation’#anyway I think ocelot should torture and kill more people for fun#queer#lgbtq
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