#just questioning mb's pronouns got me a response of 'don't be disrespectful'

[the-ghost-of-jason-todd]

i’ve been trying to put my thoughts into words for a while and i think i might have something.  this is based on nothing but my own experience, and invokes pretty much nothing but my own emotions, so read it or ignore it i don’t care whatever.

because truly... honestly.... if there is a canonically queer character and people are taking it and using it to explore different QUEER identities i just straight up don’t feel the need to care.  like it does not matter to me if you 100% retain the make-up of it’s canonical identity or not.  when people say that rep HAS to remain static and ONLY one tiny subset of queer people can write their own experience into the character and anyone who doesn’t do it exactly as it’s written is “stealing” that representation... it’s splitting hairs, man. 

i've said before that i can’t change canon.  because it’s... true.  that’s why it’s a transformative work, that’s why it’s FANon.  the fact that i can see myself in a character that isn’t 100% like me and i then use my own ‘bias’ for lack of a better word--it isn’t a bad thing.  i think it’s actually healthier to see more similarities than differences, because we’re stronger when we’re working together.  the queer community is so divisive these days and i just... don’t care for it.  i spent so long fighting truscum and transmeds and exclusionists and radfems and terfs and it’s exhausting.  so if someone is using different pronouns for a character, idgaf.  they have their reasons.  if it really rankles me i’ll curate my own experience. 

the real meat of this whole thing, i feel, is the fact that people contextualize canonical queer representation as “ownership”.  when a gay character appears in media, the gay community ‘claims’ them.  the problem, then, is that while you can claim a character in canon, you can’t really claim ownership over the way someone else experiences that character.  you can’t take an experience away from someone just because you don’t vibe with it.  not in a “oh i’m gatekeeping you’re not ALLOWED to do that” way--more in that you literally can’t scoop out someone’s memories.  so you may see yourself in canon, and that’s fine, we all understand that part, that’s not the problem.  but if someone who is different from you ALSO sees themself in canon, but maybe in a different way or through a different lens... well, you can’t really say they’re wrong, because you have no control over how they are experiencing something and also no idea what it is they DO see.

which sounds like a whole lot of meta nonsense, really, but it’s something that a lot of people talk about.  the whole “if a book has been read by a hundred people then there are a hundred versions of that book” idea comes to mind.  and also... fandom is SO varied.  people use it for SO many different reasons.  if i’m over here writing found family fics and someone else is writing PWP they aren’t “stealing” the found family from me.  two things can exist simultaneously.  and if, for instance, it’s hard to find canon stories that scratch EITHER of those itches i’m not going to get mad at the PWP writer for taking a canon about found family and using it to write smut.  because the found family still exists.  it isn’t an override.  existing in a different way does not automatically disrespect someone else.  ESPECIALLY when, after we peel off the metaphor, we’re talking about two people who are using two slightly different flavors of genderqueer non-gendered pronouns.  we REALLY have more in common than we do different, and i would be proud to share a character that could fulfill both of our needs at once in slightly different ways.  like... forget for a moment that i’m talking about murderbot, and imagine i’m talking about uhhhh *spins wheel* *spins wheel again* *spins wheel a third time* i’m actually seriously blanking on any they/them characters not in tmd right now.  i thought that one character in oitnb was non-binary but the wiki just uses she/her and i’m not going to keep digging. 

has a minor crisis about the fact that the only they/them i can currently think of is davepeta from homestuck  ah nuts and now maybe stevonie from SU ANYWAY the point is that i think it’s powerful when people use different pronouns for characters based on their own experience.  i think it shows the breadth of the human experience, and lets us rally behind what little queer rep we get.  it reminds me that human experience can be fluid and varied, and that we should all be able to see a little bit of ourselves reflected back when we look at others.  it doesn’t feel bad to me when people change a they/them characters pronouns to something else, because for the most part, i can still see part of myself and my own experience in that iteration/headcanon/experience, and i’m glad another person is able to find something to relate to in a character i love.

and THAT is what i’m talking about when i’m talking about sharing crumbs.