#not because it has a disabled queer character

[dimmadoome]

Yall will do anything but actually take responsibility for what you've created. Fanon is literally that. Canon crested by fans. They're all headcanons created by you, yes. Literally you, the person reading this that has written fanfic and drawn comics and posted your essays. You are the people writing stories and sharing art and making tumblr posts. Each an every person on here, commenting on my post outraged that I like the collicteve works of yourself had had a hand in creating fanon just by existing in the fandom. You all speak with such derison about yourselves and its actually making me laugh.

You actually can find fanon from people of color. Many many different ways. From discord servers to tumblr to twitter and beyond. AO3 Is just an archive for writers. It is not the be all end all of fandom. But, while we are talking about AO3.

It is not a streaming service. It is not youtube. The works there are not paid for. They are made by you and me and a billion other people who only want to share their art. THEY ARE YOUR PEERS, NOT A CONGLOMERATE. This whole response makes it sound like you're all complaining about the fucking disney channel queerbaiting you again. If YOU want more Babs stories. Write them. You dont want racist tropes in your fanfiction? Well howdy do you've already proven you can both write and post to the internet just by responding to this post. Write. Create. Build. Just like the rest of us normal people did when we added onto the fandom. If you want Cass to be more present in stories, write those. Jesus christ yall. This is YOUR baby you're trying to throw out with the bathwater.

At the end of the day, you need to step back and realize that if someone is telling you they like your work and the community you built with your own bare hands. Maybe say, hell yeah. Im glad you like it, instead of acting like you're above your own hard damn work.

Also. As a side note. Im an indigenous trans person. I understand what it means to desperately want to see representation for me and to know that i will likely never be able to make it a reality in any canon works. I find that fanon is more likely to be written by people of color, disabled people and queer people than canon will ever be. Fandom is a bigger and more diverse collective than canon. Which makes me love it more. Because I can have my voice heard. Because you can have your voice heard.

Its new and its beautiful and its ever changing and its so, so much better than almost 100 years of writers having to sanitize themselves for the capitalist elite who need every batboy to look the same and cant let gay characters exist without making it tragic or retconning it every two seconds.

In the end all I can say is this

Fanon is beautiful.

Fanon has more for me than canon does. Likely, if you are not white, not straight, not cis or not able bodied, it also has more for you than canon ever will.

You all deserve to love your community too. If there are racists. Well fuck man, do what everyone else is doing by drowning them out with your own, obviously not problematic the sligtest, content. So go. Fix what youre complaing about. But realize that you are part of the problem. You are part of the collective you are angrily decrying and nothing you can say will change anything unless you put your hands to paper and actually start working for the changes you want to see.

Hot take but I prefer fanon Batfam to Canon batfam because at least fanon does its best to give each of the batfam very distinct personalities and looks.

I love living in a world where blue eyed black haired white boy doesn't describe half the group, ya know?

[oldtvandcomics]

Happy Queer Media Monday!

Today: The Movement from DC Comics

Inclusive superhero group done right.

(The team sitting over their city at the end of the first story arc. From left to right: Vengeance Moth, Burden, Katharsis, Virtue, Tremor and Mouse.)

The Movement is a 12 issue comic book series published in 2013 and 2014 by DC Comics as part of The New 52. It is probably best known on Tumblr for featuring the heroine Tremor, who is canonically asexual, but it has so, so much more to offer.

The Movement is a group of disenfranchised teenagers in Coral City, led by Holly Ann Fields aka Virtue. The series can be kind of divided into three story arcs: Their fight against the corrupted police (issue 1-8), Batgirl visiting (issue 9-10), and Burden’s fight against his brother (issue 11-12).

Superheroes being used as a metaphor for oppressed groups is nothing new, but what makes The Movement special is that they really are an incredibly diverse group, featuring many different identities. We have:

Virtue / Holly Ann Fields, who is a Black lesbian,

Tremor / Roshanna Chatterji, an asexual Indian immigrant,

Mouse / Jayden Revell, who could be argued to have an intellectual disability, though nothing concrete is actually said,

Katharsis / Kulap Vilaysack, a Laotian immigrant,

Burden / Christopher, who is gay,

Vengeance Moth / Drew Fisher, a former addict and wheelchair user with muscular dystrophy

Here is an article from when the series launched, where the creator discusses the politics of it, and a lengthy one written at the end of its run about how it championed diversity in the superhero comic medium. 

Here are the Wikipedia and DC fandom wiki articles about the series.

Queer Media Monday is an action I started to talk about some important and/or interesting parts of our queer heritage, that people, especially young people who are only just beginning to discover the wealth of stories out there, should be aware of. Please feel free to join in on the fun and make your own posts about things you personally find important!

[stellerssong]

ok sorry the OTHER thing about lucienne is like. as previously stated she is dream's handpicked emissary from the waking world to the dreaming she's the diplomat in chief she's the translator she's the bridge. because the dreaming is, in a very real way, dream's own psyche, this is tantamount to giving lucienne a tremendous degree of access to his interiority and by transitive property also tantamount to entering into a deeply emotionally intimate relationship with her (unimportant for the purposes of this post whether that relationship is platonic or romantic).

now, in general, looking at the pattern of dream's close emotional relationships—dream doesn't share himself with people as a rule (beyond the access that all things that live have to the dreaming; but i'm talking about his self here, the one he doesn't like to acknowledge he even has), but when he does share with people, it's with people who have some shadow on the soul, so to speak. just looking at attested relationships in show canon, his deepest emotional connection seems to be with death, who embodies the duality of light and dark even better than he does himself. calliope is the muse of epic poetry—heroism and tragedy—and also bears the sort of divine pride that led her to cut dream off for hundreds or thousands of years when he wronged her. the less said about that other guy, the better, but he's no sunshine-rainbows-unicorns type—he's a soldier of fortune, a bandit and a killer, a man who profits from the sale of human life. even best bird matthew, in comix canon, had a sordid past that will maybe be partially retconned for the show but has still been gestured at.

dream likes the complicated ones. he's drawn to them. they speak to something in him that he won't acknowledge in himself (he has to be Whole, fully integrated, without reservation, because he is the king and he is the dreaming and if the dreaming ain't whole then the universe is in trouble—but he feels that ache nonetheless).

all that is to say: when people try to portray lucienne as dream's Designated Well-Adjusted Neurotypical Friend, i begin to harm and maim.

[butnobodycame627]

why didn't peridot stay disabled… it would've added to their whole message of being different being okay and diversity and…. sigh….

[dazzlerazz]

Saw your tags, incredibly based I do the same of unintentionally intentionally making my OCs start off as bi ace unless smth suits em otherwise/better. Loved reading the tags tho :0 fun plot trope u got there

AIOHDSGFJ9-FUGIOHGI9-0FOIHJGI=es()OXFIG=soiXFH9isFG0[S OH GOSH HI

It's very easy to fall into "this oc is just like me fr" island because of self projection lol

I genuinely don't think I have any straight ocs, and that's a very weird thing to see compared to how I used to write my ocs when I was like 8-12, but it's not a bad thing! I enjoy it!

Thanks for the ask lol I love to talk about ocs

[uncanny-tranny]

It's very funny how different the reactions to The Shape of Water were when my dad watched it versus my reaction to watching it

[moredifferentthanusual]

I hate this attitude so much! This argument is stolen from disability and poc activists who have been asking for a long time for people playing disabled characters or characters from a particular ethnic background to actually be from these groups. You'll notice this actually makes total sense!

While not having scarjo play your poc is a good starting point, casting a chinese actor to play a vietnamese character because "its close enough for the white people in the audience" is still a problem. And casting accurately solves many many problems. Eg when your writer/costumer/set designer messes up the actor knows and corrections can be made. When they need to act vietnamese can.

Same goes for disability. So many autistic people hate shows about us because allistics are really bad at playing us! They can do stereotypes and act kooky enough to satisfy allistic audiences but like in the above example that means using us as objects while ignoring us as part of the audience. You have any idea how often we see mobility aids used dangerously wrong on tv? Or how often characters are supposed to have an illness but they don't have any of the symptoms! A disabled actor has symptoms! Their aids are real! And when things are depicted as real then we exist

But we don't have these same reasons for queer characters. Sure there is a queer culture, but crucially not all queer people are part of the community. There is no way to act queer the way there is to act muslim or italian, because the only thing we all have in common is being different. We come from everywhere, and we act every way. Some of us try to fit in with our communities of origin, some of us try to fit into the queer community. Neither way is right or wrong. Anyone can be queer and we can be anyone.

There are times when casting queer actors might make sense, like for a visibly trans character, but if they're not visibly trans cis people can do that. And I always like it when queer people are in things because give us money, but we can be anyone so anyone can be us

[rowenablade]

Okay. I’m going to wait to do a second watch before I articulate most of my other feelings here, but I want to address one thing.

I’m seeing a lot of posts like, “I related to Izzy because I am also queer and older/disabled/depressed. By killing him off, the writers are saying that I deserve to die.”

Guys.

I’m not saying your feelings aren’t valid. I totally understand grieving a character that you relate to. But speaking as a writer, I just want to point out that trying to write with the shadow of “what is the absolute worst and most harmful way a reader can interpret this” will smother your ability to create. Twisting yourself in knots, trying to think up the worst-faith takes possible and scotch-guarding all your writing decisions against them is exhausting to the point of making you just not want to write anymore.

And we’ve seen the writers deliberately choose not to do this in Season 1. Remember all those terrible “Izzy is racist” takes that the writers and cast seemed completely blindsided by? That happened because the writers and directors and actors weren’t going over every scene with a fine tooth comb, ferreting out every shot or line of dialogue or micro expression that could possibly be interpreted as racist, and scrubbing it off. Because there comes a point where your story is what it needs to be, and you have to accept that some people will interpret it in ways you didn’t intend them to. And if you can’t accept that, you’ll never find the courage to put your work out there.

The point of diverse casts and writing teams isn’t to achieve a state of, “Nothing bad ever happens to a character from a marginalized demographic ever again.” It’s to achieve a status quo of these types of characters just being people in the world of the story. Not symbols, not representation boxes to tick, not tokens that you can point to so that you can say, “Here, we acknowledged this type of person exists, now where’s our woke points?”

OFMD is full of characters of color, queer characters, older characters, characters of differing body types. And in stories, things happen to characters. Some fall in love. Some make the same mistakes over and over. Some turn into birds. Some die.

Izzy’s character represents a lot of things, but he does not represent every older, disabled fan or fan who has struggled with suicide, any more than Jim represents all genderqueer fans, or Olu represents all black fans. That’s not how the writers were handling him. They were handling him like a character, because that’s what you have to do.

Again, I understand being sad. I am so, so fucking sad. But this idea of, “Any time something bad happens to a character I relate to means that the writer thinks I deserve these bad things to happen to me,” will poison everything you engage with eventually. Because stories are full of things happening to characters, and they won’t all be good things. And the more representation we get, the more often bad things will happen to characters we relate to.

But good things will happen too.

Queer couples get married. Disabled women run off with their favorite husbands. Middle-aged characters change careers. A multiracial polycule finds a home at sea. A fat man covered in tattoos stars in a drag show and all his friends cheer. All these things happened in the same show as Izzy’s death. This is what this world is.

Anyway. I know emotions are running high and I’ll probably get blocked or unfollowed by a few people for this. But I’m just trying to find my peace where I can, and if anyone else finds this useful, cheers.

[demontobee]

Good Omens is queering TV/storytelling - part 1: GAZE

I would argue that part of why Good Omens is so refreshingly queer is because it does not cater to the male gaze (which centers around the preferences - aesthetic, romantic, sexual, visual, logical, emotional, political ... - of mainly white men in positions of power):

no oversexualization of groups or types of people: Women or characters that could be read as female presenting are not overly sexualized. In fact, some of them are shown to be grimy, slimy and not sexual at all. All of them are real characters and not just cardboard-cutout on-screen versions of male misogynistic fantasies. They portray real people with real people problems. They are human, or exempt from our categories when portraying angels or demons. There are no overly sexualized bodies in general (as has so far also often been the case with young gay men, PoC, etc.), no fetishization of power imbalances, and not exclusively youthful depiction of love and desire.

sex or sexual behavior is not shown directly (yet): All imagery and symbolism of sex and sexuality is used not to entice the audience but is very intimately played out between characters, which makes it almost uncomfortable to watch (e.g., Aziraphale being tempted to eat meat, Crowley watching Aziraphale eat, the whole gun imagery).

flaunting heteronormativity: Throughout GO but especially GO2, there is very little depiction of heterosexual/romantic couples; most couples are very diverse and no one is making a fuss about it. There is no fetishization of bodies or identities. Just people (and angels and demons) being their beautiful selves (or trying to).

age: Even though Neil Gaiman explained that Crowley and Aziraphale are middle-aged because the actors are, I think it is also queering the idea of romance, love and desire existing mainly within youthful contexts. Male gaze has taught us that young people falling and being in love is what we have to want to see, and any depiction of love that involves people being not exactly young anymore is either part of a fetishized power imbalance (often with an older dude using his power to prey on younger folx) or presents us with marital problems, loss of desire, etc. – all with undertones of decay and patronizing sympathy. Here, however, we get a beautifully crafted, slow-burn, and somehow super realistic love story that centers around beings older than time and presenting as humans in their 50s figuring out how to deal with love. It makes them both innocent and experienced, in a way that is refreshing and heartbreaking and unusual and real.

does not (exclusively) center around romantic/sexual love: I don’t know if this is a gaze point exactly but I feel like male gaze and resulting expectations of what a love story should look like are heavily responsible for our preoccupation with romantic/sexual love in fiction – the “boy gets girl” type of story. And even though, technically, GO seems to focus on a romantic love story in the end, it is also possible to read this relationship but also the whole show as centering around a kind of love that goes beyond the narrow confines of our conditioned boxed-in thinking. It seems to depict a love of humanity and the world and the universe and just the ineffability of existence as a whole.

disability as beautiful and innate to existence: Disability is represented amongst angels by the extremely cool Saraqael and by diversely disabled unnamed angels in the Job minisode. Representation of disability is obviously super important in its own right, but is also queers what we perceive as aesthetically and ontologically "normal". Male gaze teaches us that youth and (physical and mental) health are the desirable standard and everything else is to be seen as a deviance, a mistake. By including disability among the angels, beings that have existed before time and space, the show clearly states that disability is a beautiful and innate part of existence.

gender is optional/obsolete: Characters like Crowley, Muriel and others really undermine the (visual and aesthetic) boundaries of gender and the black-and-white thinking about gender that informs male gaze. Characters cannot be identfied simply as (binary) men or women anymore just by looking at them or by interpreting their personalities or behaviors. Most characters in GO, and especially the more genderqueer ones, display a balance of feminine and masculine traits as well as indiosyncracies that dissolve the gender binary.

Feel free to add your own thoughts on this in the comments or tags!

[bougiebutchbitch]

:lies face down on the floor:

Things Izzy Hands can canonically survive:

Being held at knifepoint

Talking to Stede Bonnet

Raiding a Spanish warship

Calling Lucius daddy

Being in a duel

Rowing miles on his own to the nearest shore

Watching the love of his life fall in love with someone else in the span of like two weeks

Interacting with the British as a wanted pirate

An attempted mutiny 

Choking/suffocation

Getting his toe cut off without anesthesia

Being forced to eat said toe

Walking, raiding and fighting effectively without said toe

Losing two more toes

Getting knives thrown at his head

Being extremely overworked while missing said toes

Being shot in the leg

Getting said leg amputated without anesthesia

A WHOLE ASS SUICIDE ATTEMPT

A storm on an unmanned ship

Walking hours/days after being shot/amputated to shoot the love his life and save the crew

Several days on the open sea with no fresh food/water

Eating raw seagull

Being sentenced to execution

Alcoholism 

Being (presumably) tortured by Ned Lowe

Being captured by the British 

Having a conversation with no nose Ricky 

Running from/killing British soldiers with one leg

Things he can't survive, apparently:

Getting shot on the left by Some Guy

[sassydefendorflower]

I want to talk about something. I want to talk about ableism in fandom. And sexism in fandom. Oh, and racism in fandom.

Mostly though, I wanna talk about how the discussion about these things often gets derailed because people don't understand what trends and typical behaviors actually are.

Whenever a Person of Color, a woman, someone disabled, someone queer (or an intersection of any of these groups) points out that certain fandom trends are bigoted in some shape or form, half the replies seem to be "but they are my comfort character! Maybe people just like them better because they are more interesting!" or even "people are allowed to have headcanons!" - the very daft even go for a "don't bring politics into fandom" which is a personal favorite because nothing exists in a vacuum and nothing is truly apolitical. But alas~

What most of these replies seemingly fail to understand is something very, very simple: it's not about you.

You, as an individual, are just one datapoint in a fandom. You are not the trend. You do not necessarily depict the typical behavior.

When someone points out that there is racism in fandom, that doesn't mean every fan is racist or perpetuating racist ideas*. By constantly mentioning your own lack of racism, quite often, you are actively derailing the conversation away from the problems at hand.

When someone names and describes a trend, they don't mean your headcanon specifically - they mean the accumulated number of headcanons perpetuating a harmful or outdated idea.

I am not saying this to forbid anyone from writing fics about their favorite characters or to keep anyone from having fun headcanons and sharing their theories and thoughts - quite the opposite actually. A critique of a general trend is not a critique of you as an individual - and you're going to have a much better, and more productive, time online if you can internalize that. If you stop growing defensive and instead allow yourself to actually digest the message of what was pointed out.

I am saying this to encourage some critical thinking.

Allow me to offer up some examples:

Case 1: A DC blogger made the daring statement that maybe Tim and Jason were such a popular fanfic focus because they are the only two undeniably white batboys. Immediately someone replied saying "no, it's all the fun traumatic situations we can put them in!". Which is an insane statement to make, considering the same can be said for literally ANY OTHER DC Batman and Batfam character.

The original post wasn't anything groundbreaking, they didn't accuse anyone, didn't name any names... but immediately there was a justification, immediately there was a reason why people might like these characters more. No one stopped to take a second and reflect on the current trends in fanfiction, no one considered that maybe this wasn't a declaration against people who like these characters but a thesis depicting the OVERALL trend of fandom once again focusing on undeniably white (and male) characters.

(don't get me started on the racebending of white characters in media that has a big Cast of Color and the implications of that)

Case 2: A meta posted on Ao3 about ableism in the Criminal Minds fandom caught my attention. A wonderful piece, very thoughtful, analyzing certain characterization choices within the fandom through the lens of an actually autistic person. The conclusion they reached: the writing of Spencer Reid as an autistic character, while often charming and comforting, tended to be incredibly infantilizing and at worst downright ableist. They came to that conclusion while CLEARLY stating that the individual fanfic wasn't the problem, but the general fandom trend in depicting this character.

Once again, looking at the replies seemed to be a mistake: while many comments furthered the discussion, there were quite a few which completely missed the point. Some were downright hostile. Because how dare this author imply that THEY are ableist when they write their favorite character using that specific characterization.

It didn't matter that the author allowed room for personal interpretation. It didn't matter that they noted something concerning about the entire fandom - people still thought they were attacking singular people.

Case 3: I wrote a fic about abortion in the FMA(b) fandom (actually I've written a weird amount of fics about abortion in a lot of fandoms, but alas) and I got hate comments for it. Because of that I addressed the bias in fandom against pro-choice depictions of pregnancies. I pointed out that the utter lack of abortion in many omegaverse stories or even mpreg or het romances, painted the picture of an unconscious bias that hurt people for whom abortion was the only option, the best possible ending. The response on the post itself was mostly positive, but I got anon hate.

(which I can unfortunately not show you since I deleted it in the months since)

And I'm not overly broken up about it, but it also underlines my point: by pointing at a general problem, a typical behavior, a larger trend... people feel personally attacked.

This inability to discuss sexism, ableism, racism, transphobia, etc in fandom without people turning defensive and hurt... well, it damages our ability to have these conversations at all.

Earlier I said YOU are not the problem - well, i think part of this discussion is acknowledging that: sometimes YOU are in fact part of the problem. And that's not the end of the world. But you can only recognize yourself as a cog in the machine, if you can examine your own actions, your own biases, your own preferences critically and without becoming defensive.

And, again, this is not to keep you from finding comfort in your favorite characters and headcanons. This is also not to say that I am free of biases and internalized bigotries - I am also very much a part of the system. A part of the problem.

This is so you can comfortably ask yourself "but why is there no abortion in this universe?" or "why are my favorite black characters always the top in my slash ships?" or "why do I write this disabled character as childish and in need of help?" - and sometimes the answer is "because I am disabled and I want comfort", and that's fine too.

There is no one shoe fits all in fiction. There is not a single trope that captures all members of a group. There is no single stereotype that isn't also someone's comfort. No group is a monolith, no experienced all-encompasing (or entirely unique).

There is never a simple answer.

But that doesn't mean you should stop questioning your own biases, your own ideals.

Especially, if you grow defensive if someone points out that a certain trend you engage in might be racist. Or sexist. Or queerphobic. Or fucking ableist.

*this does not mean negate the general anti-blackness perpetuated by most cultures as a result of colonialism and slavery

[rheakira]

I've come to temporarily break my hiatus to bring up something deeply important. Because after a recent event, if I have to go another day without talking about it, I don't know what I'll do.

Fandoms have an enormous issue when it comes to bigotry and people feeling comfortable enough to be openly bigoted.

And I want to make it clear: everyone is capable of it. In fact, most people do it more often than they don't. But because this strange myth has been built up that if you aren't "blatantly saying slurs" or "killing others" it can't possibly be bigotry, we have done nothing but become dangerous behind closed doors.

If your friend has odd beef with a person of color in the fandom and holds them to standards they don't hold their white friends to, that is bigotry. If your friend feels some sort of way about the trans person in your friend group and tries to come up with reasons for why they specifically can't stay, that is also bigotry. If your group insists that a person with a personality disorder is making it up just for attention and uses that as a reason for why they can't be around them, that is bigotry as well.

I've never been upfront about it because... why do I, as a human being, need to be upfront about my identity when people randomly decide what I am? But I am in fact a person of color who is queer and disabled. Whenever I join a fandom group that is mostly white people, I am liked until this is discovered. And then I watch as people get brutal about things I do or say. Things that they don't do to other people in the group, and I also watch as they take my words and either twist them for convenience or ruin my reputation for it.

As a marginalized person, both in fandom and out, you are held to a unique standard that does not apply to other human beings around you. It makes doing what you love very difficult, because unfortunately as a marginalized person, people will always subconsciously side with the person trying to oppress or attack you. This has happened to me my entire life, from school to work spaces to even internet spaces claiming to be safe places.

People will say that they care about you and like you and even form a friendly bond with you, but the moment a person of privilege decides they do not like you very much, they can and will side with the other person even without proof of their issues with you. It's exhausting and ruins lives in places that should be fun and safe.

I am on my umpteenth experience with this exact cycle and I would be lying if I said it didn't make me feel like I couldn't live or breath in places I should be allowed to be involved in. It's a very real problem that refuses to end because no one has the courage to challenge it. I am speaking not only on my own experiences, but for the many other people of color or queers or disabled people who simply cannot join these so called "safe spaces" because of our identities conflicting with people who have been taught that we are lesser and not worth love or care.

If this is a problem you face, please know that I see you and I love you. It's hard to keep surviving in a world that wants to hurt you and leaves you abandoned and alone. I want you to know that the world is scary, but we all exist. You should be allowed to experience joy and fun without feeling like you're being suffocated and wanting to die.

You matter. The people around you that make you feel like you don't are nothing by comparison. You matter and I truly hope that we'll one day find each other and become the safe space that we deserve.

The marginalized people in your fandom are more important than your fictional characters and plotlines that you put above us. We're here and we're not leaving. Learn to live with us and protect us.

If we're truly your friends, you would care when your privileged "friends" want to remove us.

Additionally, please do not take this rant and make it only about white people who are part of these marginalized categories. This is a post about EVERYONE. Including the people of color around you. Do not remove us from this conversation. Care about ALL OF US if you support this at all. Thank you.

[heliza24]

I want to talk a little bit about Daniel in the Interview with the Vampire show, because the new trailer material has me stuck thinking about him, and also I’ve never written about how meaningful he is as disabled character to me before.

I don’t see many people thinking about show!Daniel in these terms, but he’s a canon disabled character. And I think the way he is written is just SO good. The acerbic wit, his relationship to doctors and his medication, his rueful acceptance of the way his disability has changed him. It is all so correct!! It’s really incredibly rare to have not only a disabled character written this well but specifically a chronically ill character written this well. His illness is always present; it doesn’t get forgotten about by the story. It gives Daniel insight into the vampires (more on this in a min), but it also gives Louis and Armand leverage over him. When Louis triggers his Parkinson’s symptoms? Deeply not ok. But that’s what made it such a great scene, and really made Louis feel dangerous and threateningin that moment. Armand and Louis arranging Daniel’s meds is a sign of great care and also great power over Daniel. It’s the perfect way to communicate the complicated power dynamic in their relationship.

I also just fucking love that this show takes place in 2022 and doesn’t erase the pandemic. Covid is a very present concern for Daniel and I cannot describe how validating that is for me as someone who is clinically vulnerable to Covid and who has had to really limit my life and take a lot of precautions because everyone else has decided to stop caring whether they pass on Covid or not. The fact that Daniel gets on a plane to Dubai is a BIG DEAL. He’s risking his life to talk to Louis and Armand before he’s even in the room with them. He really wants to be there. I have to make a similar calculation every time I travel, and trust me, getting on that plane knowing getting sick could spiral you into even worse health or kill you is really hard.

I think making Daniel disabled and including the pandemic is kind of a genius level decision on a thematic level. Of course Daniel is now facing down his mortality, which gives him a whole new lens on the vampires and the fact that he once asked them to turn him. And the pandemic further highlights his fragility, and is also possibly being used as a cover for drama that’s happening in the vampire world. But I think it also really sets Daniel up as a foil to Louis.

There’s a lot of analysis of the vampire chronicles that reads vampirism as a metaphor for queerness. But I would actually propose that it’s a much neater parallel for disability and illness in a lot of ways. So many of Louis’s initial experiences after being turned resonated with me, as someone who became chronically ill in my 20s. My appetite and relationship to food completely changed, much like Louis. My relationship with the outdoors and the sun changed, because of dysautonomia and allergy reasons. I was very mad, and very depressed, and I too have missed out on birthday parties and big life events like Louis did because I was too sick to go. Hell, you can even say that the way that Louis is treated as evil by his family, that the way vampires literally can’t be a part of society during the day, is reminiscent of ableist exclusion and ugly laws. (Ugly laws were laws that forbid disabled people, especially those with visible differences, from being out in public, and they were on the books in many American municipalities until the 1970s.) You can look at Lestat being an out and proud vampire in the first few episodes on the season and imploring Louis to leave his shame behind as a queer thing, but you can also view it as a disabled thing. Disabled people are portrayed as monstrous so often (and in a way that has gone relatively unexamined compared to say, the queer coded villain trope) that sometimes it’s just easier to embrace that label: I’m the monstrous Crip, but at least I’m not ashamed of or disgusted by who I am anymore.

I do think the real strength of this adaptation is that while you can find parallels between queerness or disability or other forms of marginalization with vampirism, ultimately it’s not a one-to-one parallel. It speaks to the real world but ultimately it is a gothic horror story about supernatural monsters. So I don’t mean to say that vampirism directly equals disability, because it does not. But I do think that making Daniel disabled was an intentional choice to help draw out some of those parallels, and I think the text is richer for it.

So Louis and Daniel have had these kind of parallel experiences of uncontrollable and difficult things happening to their bodies. It sets them up perfectly as foils, and even, I would argue, as the A plot and B Plot protagonists. This is one of my favorite ways of kind of examining the structure of a TV show (or maybe it’s that most of my favorite shows seem to be structured this way?). When TV was all episodic, it would be common to refer to the A plot (mystery of the week), B plot (interpersonal drama happening as the mystery gets solved) and C plot (any overarching plot tying the season together) in an episode. Now that stuff is serialized, there’s often a main protagonist, who has the main dramatic question and the most agency, and then there is often a secondary B plot that explores similar themes and mirrors the A plot, or presents a second main character who is the ldifferent side of the same coin” to the main protagonist. (My favorite example of this is Flint and Max in Black Sails, and I’ve also made the argument that Wilhelm and Sara fit this pattern in Young Royals.) In IwtV, Louis is obviously the main protagonist of the show, especially in the A Plot, which is the stuff taking place in New Orleans/Paris. But I would argue that Daniel is the protagonist of the B Plot set in Dubai. At the very least they’re intentionally set up as mirrors of each other:

They are both unreliable narrators, who are struggling with the way memory contorts (through memory erasure, illness, deliberate obfuscations, and just the passage of time). The most recent teaser trailer, where we hear Louis saying “I don’t remember that”, with panic in his voice, further underlined this similarity between Louis and Daniel to me. I don’t know if it means that Louis has also had his memory tampered with, as I’m assuming Daniel has, but I do think it means that Louis is going to be struggling with feeling out of control of his own narrative more in season 2, a thing that was already starting for Daniel in season 1.

They are also both locked into power struggles with people more powerful than they are. The fact that Louis is under Lestat in the flashbacks and above Daniel in the Dubai scenes in terms of power/status makes it all the more interesting. And, if we want to go ahead and assume that the Devils Minion’s years have happened in the past by the time we get to Dubai— it’s possible that both Daniel and Louis are united in being the less powerful partner in their own respective fucked up gothic romances.

They’re also both the audience’s entry point into their respective stories. Louis’s narration guides us into the world of vampires. Daniel’s questioning satisfies our human curiosity in Dubai.

I think one of the things that makes the show so special is the way that these two protagonists interact. In a lot of shows the a plot and the b plot stay pretty separate. I love talking about Black Sails for this because I think it’s such a good example; Flint and Max never exchange dialogue the entire show, even though they’re so clearly affecting each other the whole time. But the way that Louis and Daniel clash in Dubai is so exciting. We see them both wrestling for control of the narrative. It’s thrilling to watch and it just hammers home the theme of how complicated and changeable stories can be.

I am SO excited to see how the Dubai scenes play out in season 2 because of it. I really can’t wait. I’m really hoping we’ll see Daniel and Louis’s relationship evolve in surprising ways, and I’m holding my breath that we’ll get a lot of Armandaniel material to work with. (I have a whole other post drafted that’s much less smart than this one and is just me waxing poetic about Devil Minion’s theories which I may post at some point. You have been warned.)

I do have two wishes for Daniel in the new season, and they’re 1: that he gets to have romance/sex, because disabled (and older!) characters are so often seen as unworthy of being desired, and I would like to see that challenged and 2: that he continues to refuse to be turned/is not offered a vampiric cure for Parkinson’s. The magic cure for a disability or chronic illness is probably my least favorite disability trope, because it serves to erase disabled characters and representation from the narrative, and I want to see my experiences continue to be reflected in Daniel’s. That means that whatever ending Daniel’s story has will probably have at least a bit of tragedy baked into it, but I’m ok with that.

[flowers-poetry-poc]

Why does Marvel have this amnesia towards their projects pre Disney plus? Every year they’re talking about “gayest tv show yet” or “first gay character” like they didn’t have Karolina and Nico from Runaways in 2017 in an explicitly canon lesbian relationship.

And the fans are just as bad. The incels calling everything woke DEI nonsense when marvels shows c.2013-2019 were probably the best tv marvel has put out while also having quite diverse stories.

Now they purposely rate any female lead project poorly, purely because they expect less from women. But shows like Jessica Jones, Agent Carter, Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D were really popular when airing.

Marvel used to focus on Black stories, have disabled/ neurodivergent characters, explicitly queer charcters, conversations about rape and PTSD and more! So why have they forgotten that they made these high quality shows? And why are the fans now having such a negative reaction to anything that’s not white male lead?

[buckysoldatbarnes]

Not only does House being autistic and queer make sense, it thematically and emotionally fulfills the heart of the show. Firstly, almost every aspect of House's character makes more sense through the lens of him being on the spectrum, and the fact that they literally pointed this out in the autism episode but refused to commit to confirming it is emblematic to a misunderstanding and disrespect to what autism is (the show thinking oh house has autistic traits but he has to be his own unique thing, or that an autistic character couldn't be as complex as him). But we knew that.

The thesis of House MD is, what happens when someone refuses to follow societal rules? When someone is brutally honest, goes against authority, has no filter, and does everything their own way? House tests this in every episode- when the stakes are high, will he still push the boundaries? Will he self destruct? Will he get away with it? and also in every episode, the PATIENT is also outside social norms in some way. They have an unusual lifestyle, career, personality, or sexuality, and usually their "difference" is making them sick, or they have an underlying medical condition that is causing it. It usually destroys their personal lives, but ultimately the "thing" they commit to is what makes them happy.

This is the medical, or "main plot" core of the show. The emotional "B Plot" answers the question- When someone (House) refuses to follow societal rules and can never be "normal" (his addiction and disability), can he still have a lasting relationship? Can he still be happy? Every single season tries to answer this question. For a while Cuddy is the answer, until the show disproves this. But from the first episode to the last, Wilson is there, always emotionally pushing house to be vulnerable, to improve his life. Every season tests their relationship, but wilson always comes back. Just like House, he's not normal.

Being queer and autistic explains much House's  difficulties with conventional norms and conventional (heteronormative) relationships. When we do see House have sex, it's a weighty moment of emotional vulnerability, because most of the time sex is a mechanical act for him. He rarely has a girlfriend, never dates. We barely ever even see him have sex, but he makes a big deal out of hiring hookers for companionship (and comphet) because he cant form a meaningful lasting relationship with anyone but wilson.  The thesis question of the show is "Can House be happy?". Wilson is the answer.

[xx-slug-xx]

Really happy that Ang got some sort of justice, even if it is due to the exposure of an actual predator. Kyle has made my blood boil since the day I read up on Ang’s situation, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth that he was the dangerous child predator he claimed Ang to be all along. It’s discusting that someone who worked on children’s animation, who blacklisted a disabled queer person from the industry over r34 Invader Zim art, was the one who we should have been worried about. It was all projection. Not wanting to be associated with Ang and their nsfw was just Kyle trying to keep himself safe the whole time.

The fact that many of the other people who harassed Ang and/or defends Kyle are coming out and saying shit like “I always thought he was wierd” really rubs me the wrong way. The same people who were giving death threats and using racial slurs over cartoon porn. They defended a man who had actual CSEM. Sadist CSEM might I add. Not saying they should have known better, because you can’t accurately predict a predator all the time. But what I am saying is that it feels like they still got away with what they did and are trying to make themselves look better.

This is why I can’t stand it when the fictional character porn is more of an issue than REAL children being abused. Predators keep getting away because people are more concerned with internet drama and morality.