#my squee cannot be textually rendered

[greyias]

A wee little Grey and her Master for @greyias!! This was so lovely to draw and I 100% appreciate being given free rein with the setting, gave me a chance to do a landscape I haven’t tackled yet!

[mild-lunacy]

One thing that bothers me is something I *think* is part of what some people in fandom call the 'fetishization of gay people'. Really, it's sort of like how you like the color blue so much, suddenly you painted the whole world blue. That is, suddenly every suspiciously cute thing boys do is gay. Which is fine, 'cause that's enthusiasm in a nutshell. I like blue too. The problem is twofold: 1) sometimes people call queerbaiting on the basis of purely subjective projection, which they cannot tell apart from reality; 2) this queering and/or slashing of male characters' homosocial or vaguely feminine behavior is essentially reinforcing antiquated gender norms.

Like, for example, I wonder if some fans fully realize that Ronan and Gansey dressing up and looking dashing side by side isn't actually gay. I mean, I'd be more comfortable with squee that's... self-aware, I guess. But I'm not sure if it is. Even if Ronan thinks of a friend (say, Gansey) in admiring terms, that's not necessarily about being gay. You're allowed to admire your friends looking dashing, even if they're male friends and you're gay. Obviously, we wouldn't want to stifle actual romantic feeling under a cloak of endless heteronormativity. However, I feel like some slash fans tend to instead go in the other direction, and simply reinterpret every tiny sign of deviation from the manly-man gender norm as a sign of 'Teh Gay'.

Like, it's one thing to do it to a heteronormative text where there is no textual representation to choose from. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with *shipping* non-canon ships, obviously. This is just about how a lot of the shippers frame the text. This is about queer-positive texts with a mixture of actual queer and straight male characters, who're never allowed to just... be normal, just be guys being guys in fandom. It's just... kind of exhausting, I guess.

It's awkward 'cause it's hard to separate many proclamations of behavior being 'gay' from the kind of stuff that gets you labeled a sissy in middle school. Like, you look at a good friend too long? Gay. You dress in something other than jeans and tshirts, let alone in each other's vicinity? Gay. You show casual affection to other males? That's like the absolute stratosphere of gay. I mean, at this point who needs to actually want to kiss someone. That's almost gratuitous, isn't it.

I'm not trying to make a big statement about how harmful this is, Tumblr-style. And I realize that a lot of people are simply projecting their own perspective and experiences as queer people onto fiction, which is fine and quite normal. Of course, just going from my own experience as a bisexual, I don't literally interact with everyone I care about and/or think is considered attractive like I'm about to swoon over them. I dunno how to put this, but like, this really gets me in the Raven Cycle fandom 'cause everyone's supposed to be DTF at the slightest provocation except Ronan and Blue, 'cause that's verboten. Not only is that really far from canon fact, that's also just really far from any reality I'm familiar with as far as having cute friends goes-- even cute friends I kinda had a crush on once. Like, these are teenagers *and* they're Romantics, if you're talking about Ronan and Gansey. Even on Queer As Folk, it was way more complicated, and attraction to one's other gay friends wasn't some kind of sure thing by any means (let alone talking about Gansey, who's open and affectionate but not even canonically queer, which is what reminds me of the gender policing).

This seems vaguely unnatural for me to say, but I guess I wish we'd get to the point where the pushback could be over, and there'd be nothing inherently superior (let alone morally superior) about queer romantic vs platonic affection. Obviously, society is still hugely heteronormative, and pushback is definitely necessary. However, I'm also concerned about how the queering of the narrative repeatedly comes into conflict with a genuinely progressive and/or mature view of male or female gender norms. For some reason, what's essentially toxic masculinity is considered okay when you're implicitly relegating it entirely to the realm of straight men, whom we can dismiss as hopeless anyway. If no male character we like is actually straight, what does it matter, in the end?

This way, the good male characters that we *like*, whom the queer characters are fond of, get to also be queer. The queerness can then obscure the fact that every open, flexible and relatable quality is more or less rendered impossible for straight male characters like Gansey. The upshot is, surely he *can't* be straight, because then how could he have close friends who're devoted to him without pining for him? Surely his usual conspicuous lack of a dress sense could be... overlooked. Ironically, this is exactly the question Kavinsky didn't get in 'The Dream Thieves', so it seems disturbing to me that a lot of fandom doesn't know the answer any more than Kavinsky did.

In the end, a lot of this is probably about nothing much more ominous than the extremes of youth and the nature of bubbly, expansive fannish enthusiasm. On the other hand, this doesn't mean the cultural norms behind toxic masculinity don't play a role. You start to see a lot of weird (and increasingly old-fashioned) ideas about gender norms baked into innocuous stuff people like when you start paying attention, which is probably not surprising. It's not *unrelated* to the stuff other young people say to mock rather than celebrate. The culture is still the source, and the culture is messed up. There's not much I can do, or even feel I *should* do, but I still wish I knew how to encourage self-awareness more effectively.