#queer merch discourse

[finalhaunts]

Lesbian flag discourse set us back like 20 years for real

[lestcat-de-lioncourt]

God forbid we have clothes now at all apparently (parents are boycotting target for lgbt+ friendly clothing after also hating us wearing “cis ppl clothes” as well). Ppl are like omg don’t wear NIKE MY PRECIOUS SPORTS WEAR VRAND EVEN THO IVE NEVER WORKED OUT IN MY LIFE!!!¡¡ don’t drink MY BEER Can! Bad influence on The Kids to See trans people on my Alcohol products! No one can Go To My Beach! Don’t use the Toilet! Are you HEARING YOURSELVES!

They apparently found tucking swimwear in the kids area/are daring to sell pride stuff/lgbt+ products, n I’m laughing bc there’s literally bras and shi sold normally right next to the kids section and dumped in it regularly by cis customers all the time bc some ppl trash the shop. Swimsuits/goggles/etc. are sold next to each other in sports centres that have a pool if ppl turn up without one. Are you kidding me.

The Real Deal Of Parenting, a pro life Christian conservative platform are making whiny posts about it obviously and ppl are actually taking this seriously but kids can’t even have books read to them anymore by bigot logic.

Like ok maybe you should make some time to read to your kids instead of projecting at the LGBT+ community for helping you and ur kids out, rather than palming them off to everyone else/the TV and iPhones n ignoring them, whilst wearing the most boring clothes you can possible find bc ur too scared to express yourself all bc everyone told you that you have to dress boring or get bullied even tho you’re going get it in the neck by someone whatever you do/look like.

Honestly anyone that lets their kid watch someone dressed up as Big Bird but has an issue with a drag queens gotta be quiet.

(If there’s anything I’ve missed pls add in comments, n I will quote them in my post edit)

[akajustmerry]

I wanna say from very bottom of my heart that I deeply truly rabidly despise Taylor Swift and the glamorous black hole of immorality, gracelessness and lack of integrity she represents. I truly hate that I have to witness her 2-chord mediocre stream of consciousness high school ballads win the highest accolades in music. I hate how there's not a single discourse - from sports to fucking queer theory - that's free of her. I hate her white feminism, how she's never stood for a single thing that didn't ensure her wealth. I hate how she's credited and praised for things marginalised artists did before her. I hate how she latches onto new artists so they serve HER fame, like remoras to a shark. I hate her phony humble beginnings narrative that people parrot without acknowledging she's a nepo baby. I hate what she did to olivia rodrigo and how no one talks about it. I hate the waste her concerts, lifestyle, and merch create and that a young girl died from heat illness at her concert because the swift team prioritises exclusivity and profit over safety. I hate how she and her fandom popularised the idea that critiquing a woman = misogyny. I hate how she's in her mid 30s and still writes songs like she's a teenager and that songs written by a woman in her 30s acting like a teenager are inescapable. I hate she deliberately re-releases songs and records so other artists can't chart. I hate how she regularly and openly associates with bigoted people but somehow is always given the benefit of the doubt. Most of all I hate how she does and continues to do all of this and so much more and her fans will always have a, "but!" always have an, "anyway!". she's openly and uncritically supporting a presidential candidate who's administration is enacting genocide, but because she made a joke with her cats, we're meant to be like, "yay!" I truly despise Taylor Swift and the black hole of neoliberal white feminist mediocrity she is in popular culture.

[littlestickfish]

"Queer" was always our word

Don't trust anyone who tries to tell you otherwise, it's a trap

Your forebears did not march through hostile streets chanting "We're here, We're LGBTIA+, Get used to it"

Your forebears marched through hostile streets chanting "We're here, We're QUEER, Get used to it"

That is why you have the freedom to be out enough to hold this stupid "discourse" in the first place. Those who have gone before us chanting QUEER, our word, the word we have always owned and will always own, are what you owe your liberty and security to.

Show some goddamn respect.

[aristotels]

people legit believing that online queer discourse bullied usa companies out of selling pride merch and that the reason they stopped doing pride shilling is online queers being mean about pinkwashing. Insane i mean neurodivergent

[plaguedoctormemes]

One of my biggest pet peeves/hyperspecific beefs lately is how little artwork or goods involving trans/queer allegories and symbolism exists with the Death tarot card symbolism.

I always see The Fool (makes sense), The Lovers (also makes sense), The Magician (doesnt really strike me as a very queer card but like lots of queers are creative types with anxiety so like sure whatever) and for some reason The Devil a lot but i very rarely see Death?

Now I may be biased as a goth trans plague doctor dude whose favorite number is 13, but Death is an extremely good depiction to create pride merch around. I think it’s because the original depiction of Death is pretty grim, but the Death tarot does not actually explicitly represent death, but rather transformation, change, and rebirth. Letting go of the past and accepting change and looking for the future. Letting go of the bad things and looking for the things that will actually help you or make you happy. Death upright is pretty external, and Death reversed is very internal. It can represent holding onto negativity or refusal to accept change. But it can also represent private, internal change.

The Death tarot, personally, is a very cool and very raw allegory to my own experience of finding my sense of identity and accepting myself and the changes I have experienced all throughout my life as a result of being trans. Implications and discourse surrounding things like deadnames and “killing your daughter/son” aside, I have a hard time describing how I’ve felt about my identity and my transition outside of what the Death tarot card describes.

To me, being trans is accepting that I needed to let go of the things that made me scared or unhappy about my body from a young age and seek the agency to determine and carve my own path and reclaim my own sense of identity and allow myself to change for myself. Not remain stagnant and seek a type of perfection that does not exist. I’ve always been afraid of change and loss, but accepting myself and accepting that my true self was going to lose me a lot of opportunities, experiences, friends, family was worth it if it meant I could attain a form of belonging, happiness, and self-satisfaction.

And other applications! Death and being transgender works together as a symbol of societal and social change.

[magicalshopping]

supporting queer people?? in MY pride month??? absolutely not. pride is when queer ppl DON'T make money 😤

So let's talk about this for a minute.

First of all, how do you think Pride events fund themselves and stay free for attendees? O.o Vendor fees aren't all of it - a lot of money comes from sponsors - but like... we paid $1300 to vend at Seattle Pride this year. That's the money that pays the people who work to make Pride happen. That is not free. Pride as an event does not just magically happen. A lot of people work really hard to make Pride happen and to clean up after it.

We're a small trans-owned company and 100% of our employees are trans & queer. We jokingly refer to Pride as "Gay Christmas". The money we make during Pride means we stay open, Pride events get vendor fees, and our employees get paid for the rest of the year. This company does not exist without Pride events. The only reason we survived as a company during COVID is because my wife has a stable, good IT job.

This shit isn't free to do. It does not just magically happen. Performers need to get paid. Tech crew needs to get paid. Equipment needs to be rented for performers. Stages need to be rented. Electrical services need to be paid for so food can happen. Ice and water cost money. Trash pickup costs money.

A lot of people volunteer and donate, but festivals and big community events? They cost money, and the money we pay to be able to vend is part of how Pride events happen. Without that, small queer businesses like @nerdykeppie don't survive and the only people putting their money in to make this happen, AND MONEY NEEDS TO CHANGE HANDS FOR EVENTS TO HAPPEN, are Smirnoff and fucking Wells Fargo.

For fuck's sake. Y'all want small queer businesses, but you really don't want us to actually survive, do you?

[autolenaphilia]

God i hate that v*spider blog showing up on my dash. Like he is such an obvious pride merch grifter. That's the obvious motivating factor between all the discourse he gets into, like the time they created controversy around Emily Gwen and her lesbian flag so he could sell his own ugly flag design. And it's equally true about him pushing "transandrophobia."

It's also why they add so many vacuous additions to popular posts, it's so he can advertise his blog and his store by hooking into a viral post.

It's the same type of grift as Alex Jones and his useless brain force plus pills, or any other far-right influencer grifter, except v*spider is targeting tme queers instead of cishet white men.

Like most other transandrobros her on tumblr I do think have at least something sincere behind their bullshit, even if that is just a virulent transmisogyny. But v*spider's guiding principle is the almighty dollar.

[olderthannetfic]

While the other anons are wrong about why Pride flags are useless, they ARE useless. They're just colors. They don't really do anything for me. I've been rejected from queer spaces all my life for being intersex, being a trans man, and being aroace. I have been lectured many, many times over the past 40 years about how other people have it harder, I've been felt up and sexually assaulted and called a tease, I've been told my orientation isn't real by other queer people, and every queer event around me has always been some variation of "drink and fuck" or "drink and march and possibly also fuck". A rainbow flag does nothing for me. An aroace flag does nothing for me. They don't serve a purpose. I guess corporations makes money off of slapping some flags on merch but past that, they're just... nothing. Colors. Stripes. And all the discourse about if the stripes on this flag are ugly or the stripes on that one go together is baffling because they're not relevant to anyone's lives. If every flag on Earth vanished overnight, no one would be negatively impacted in the slightest by that.

In the words of George Carlin, "Flags are symbols, and I leave symbols to the symbolminded."

--

"no one would be negatively impacted in the slightest"

Incorrect.

[asexual]

How can I tell if I’m aceflux or just have a sex drive? Sometimes I’m really allo and have sexual attraction to strangers. Sometimes I’m really ace and don’t even have sexual attraction to my partners. Sometimes I’m something in between. Is it ok to call myself aceflux? Or is that wrong? And I know you said no discourse but is it discourse if I ask if aceflux counts as queer? I’m queer anyway cuz I’m pan and nonbinary. But don’t know if aceflux is queer too or if only “full” asexuals count.

So before I answer your actual question I wanna acknowledge your no discourse comment — ALL asexual or aromantic spectrum identities are 100% queer by default. When I say no discourse, what I mean is I don’t want anyone coming in to my inbox with Aphobia or trying to argue with me over whether or not a certain orientation is queer enough or not. Like, I’m here to validate aspec people’s queerness, but I’m not here to argue about it with exclusionists. So to answer that…yes, aceflux is queer and if you do feel you might be aceflux, that’s just as queer as you being pan and nb is!

To answer your actual question, I’ll get right to the point of saying there’s nothing wrong whatsoever with identifying as aceflux if you even SOMEWHAT possibly relate to the label. Even if you end up being “wrong” and it’s “just your sex drive” — you haven’t, like, harmed or appropriated actual ace-specs, you know?

but I would say you sound like you could hypothetically be aceflux. While “sometimes fully allo” and “sometimes fully ace” absolutely counts as aceflux, a lot of aceflux ppl will flux ALL around the spectrum — having allo days, ace days, demi days, lith days, gray days, cupio days, aego days, so many things I am forgetting! Is that also a thing for you? I would definitely do some internal searching to see if “fully ace” and “fully allo” are the only things you experience. If there’s more, you can almost definitely claim aceflux. Even if there’s not more, and you truly just switch between ace and allo, you still can call yourself aceflux of course, I just wanted to give more context!!

Differentiating between libido and attraction can be really difficult. Generally I’d say a libido is about IF you’re experiencing desire at all, and sexual attraction is about WHO you’re attracted to. So for example, someone who’s completely allo will, generally speaking, ALWAYS experience sexual attraction in SOME way. Even if they don’t actively want sex at the moment. I’m not saying allos are horny 24/7 or anything, and Im not implying aces are never horny. But a general rule of thumb is that an allo person is always capable of feeling sexual *attraction* even if they don’t actively want it all the time. so based on what you told me you could likely fit the aceflux label if that’s what feels right to you. even if you’re still unsure — why not just try it out? :) Publicly or privately identify as aceflux for awhile, maybe get some pride merch or at least something in the aceflux flag colors. See if it feels right to you. And if it doesn’t feel right, is it because the label is wrong, or is it because you possibly have internalized aphobia? Which if you do — no shame, as we all deal with that in some way, sadly. But I would recommend trying on the label and seeing how you feel after publicly or even just privately identifying as such.

[twig-tea]

Lately I’ve been feeling like Thai bl is truly all over the place with so many shows airing at once and some of the best ones flying under the radar while discourse is focused on a couple of the big messy ones. I think you’re the only person I know who is actually watching ALL of them and has been here for the whole evolution of the genre, so I’m curious what stands out to you about this current moment. Do the shows feel different to you? Is the way fandom is interacting with them changing? And what are your current favs?

I ended up writing a thesis, sorry friend lol To be fair to me there are 3 questions in there, all of them meaty! I've done my best to give a sense of where I'm at with Thai BL and how it feels like it's changed over time.

Caveating all of this: I am just one fan who I'm sure has had specific experiences that will colour my opinion, also a lot of this is just vibes so I'm open to being told I've forgotten something major or misremembered what it was like! If you are reading this and your opinion or experience is different please share, with stuff like this I'm always interested in hearing about differing opinions because the fandom experience will depend at least partly on where you hang out. For years, my main fandom space for BL was the YouTube comments section (RIP me).

Overall feel

Honestly, things overall don't feel all that different to me in Thai BL in particular, even though I'm about to talk about a lot of changes and ways it actuallyd does feel very different below lol And after reflecting about it, I think it's because these things still feel very much in flux, in a way that they've felt in flux this entire time. Producers are still figuring out the best funding and distribution models and merch models to make money; creators are still calibrating how queer these shows can be and still be popular; actors are still figuring out how to do BGP (business gay performances) without having fans interfere in their private lives off the clock. Writers are still trying to figure out how to write 12-episode arcs that don't drag in the middle or fumble the ending (which is also not new). The tension between established ships, fan expectations, and genre requirements has honestly been there almost the whole time, though the reverberations of missteps is louder now because of the larger fanbase that is (comparatively) more plugged in to live viewing. The core question in BL has always been 'how do we make this marketable', and that unsurprisingly hasn't changed, though the answer to that question has over time, if that makes sense?

Shows

Do the shows feel different? As a whole, I'd say yes. The biggest differences are of course total quantity and overall quality, but the actual distribution of % of shows that have high(er) production values (i.e. quality) feels close to the same--it was close to 50/50 in the late 2010s and now is maybe more like 40/60 with a higher percentage coming from more smaller production companies. But the numbers we're talking about are something like 15 shows in e.g. 2018 and something more like 50 shows in 2023 (being vague because there are shows that people could argue over whether they should count). The quality overall has increased, even the pulps look better, sound better, and tend to feel a little bit more put together than the pulps of even 2020 (please note that these are all relative qualifiers, most of these shows are still not objectively good). 2020 in particular was a watershed moment for high production value BLs; we get colorists and special effects artists, and sometimes decent sound production now!

There has also been an improvement in terms of what is depicted and how certain subject matter is treated very generally, though I think that's still in flux. Things like evil ex girlfriends are less common than they were and the women in BL are more likely (in general, still not always) to be treated as realized characters. We've gotten more and better femme representation in ensemble shows, and the "gay for you" trope is much less common. Consent is now considered sexy and is much more common than it was; non-consent as "sexy" has eroded and is much less common. Things that used to happen in almost every BL now happen in a much lower percentage. I also feel a little bit less worried about some of the actors on pulp sets because there is more general scrutiny about things like minor actors, intimacy coordination, BGP (business gay performance) expectations, and sexual exploitation. Overall, show recommendations these days come with fewer caveats.

The assumption that if you worked with someone on a BL once you would stay with them as an established pairing was surprisingly early in BL; I don't know if it's just because there were a few shows that had side pairings then get main shows, so the actors did work together on a few shows in a row, which made them feel established, or whether it's because the BGP started early to build hype both before and after shows aired, or whether audiences just made homophobic assumptions about how if two actors had chemistry they had to be gay for each other, and otherwise nobody would want to "play gay" more than once, or would want to have to kiss too many other men....in any case, there were huge scandals and blow-ups around this in BL on even the earliest shows, and some early shows were snubbed because of the pairing alone. Similarly, it was established very early in BL (i.e. 2016-17) that an unhappy ending for a pair would result in your show being panned; cheating was also a guaranteed flop in BL circles (though some ensemble shows that had gay relationships in them such as Friend Zone did fine with cheating plots and unhappy endings). Overall it feels like some things were only depicted in early Thai BL and creators have avoided them since due to the audience reception at the time. I will say, generally, that there have now been enough examples of people in a "branded pair" moving on to a new pair or multiple shows, that it feels less like a death knell to a BL career if one of the actors says they no longer wanted to make BLs, or if they switched companies.

I pay a lot of attention to queerness in BL, and that has changed a little bit too, though not in the way I expected. I had been expecting a more clear and steady trajectory in BL, but we've instead had real swings, and I've realized there will just always be shows that feel more or less actually gay or queer than others, and that's ok. Early Thai shows really spoiled us for good queer content, GayOK Bangkok and Diary of Tootsies are still shows by which i measure what we get now, and both of those are from 2016. I would say that more "mainstream" BL (i.e. by one of the major production companies) hit what turned out to be queer saturation around 2020 and that's where I was most surprised not see a more clear trajectory; rather than things getting more queer from there, I'd say a greater percentage of shows overall feel more queer, but we haven't (and I now suspect won't) reach the queerness we had in Thai tv in 2016. That being said, my secret running list of things I want to see in BL gets shorter every year as entries get crossed off, so I would say the range of queer experience is slowly getting captured as more content continues to be made by a wider range of production houses (PrEP being mentioned in a mainstream show is my white whale).

I know some people assume that shows are higher heat now overall, but I don't think that's true. I do think Thai television producers and directors have overalll gotten better at capturing sensuality, and acting workshops have improved chemistry-building overall too. But from what I can tell the ratio of high head and low heat content is still pretty similar to what it's always been, maybe slightly higher (e.g. at a quick glance I'd guesstimate 30% of shows had a sex scene in 2018 vs 40% in 2023).

Fandom

The main differences in fandom from the really early days and now are the ways we, as international fans, are able to engage with each other, with thai audiences at the same time, and with content creators, and the entitlement that comes with that. In the 2010s we were almost always watching after Thai airing, with either fansubs or, later, official subs, trailing online releases by days or weeks, which themselves may have trailed the Thailand airing date by days or weeks or sometimes even months. That became less true around 2019ish, and especially in 2020 when I think Thai producers were desperate to reach audiences during the start of the pandemic (and when audiences were desperate for something to distract us from what was happening in real life).

As a fan in the mid-late 2010s, watching something was either unofficial via a fansubber, or you were wading through hundreds of Thai comments to find anyone else writing about the shows in English. Now, it's actually rare we don't have immediate international distribution, though it may be paid. If the subs are not up at the same time as the official upload, even on free sites, fans get furious. It's a bit surreal to see people complain about waiting a few hours for subtitles, especially on YouTube, when we sometimes waited months for a series to finish being subbed (not to say people didn't complain back then too, because they sure did! But there were fewer international fans overall, and it wasn't an expectation that there would be subs, so fewer people complained when it happened). This meant that a lot of people only watched shows when they were complete, and people were not watching with any kind of synchronicity.

With international fans moving into simultaneous watching with Thai audiences, we suddenly had the chance to talk about shows as they were airing and affect the conversations about them and even, sometimes, the decisions. Folks seem to have differing opinions about what makes a BL, and what makes a BL good, and they are vocal about when a show doesn't meet their standard. This has always been true, but the strong opinions have more of an effect on the discourse when they're expressed in real-time to the show being aired. Also, when we have literally 3x the number of Thai shows being aired (nevermind other countries which have also increased), it seems so much more egregious to me to complain if a single show doesn't meet your particular taste. Just go watch something else! That was less possible in 2016, but now nobody has any excuse lol Please note here that I'm not saying shows should not be criticized. But when you have one loud faction saying shows should have nothing but innocent kisses if any skinship at all and showing more is distasteful and possibly homophobic, and another faction saying a show should be panned if they don't have at least one sex scene and if there is no good kiss it's homophobic, I don't know where that leaves content creators but I see the tension and how it sometimes results in my least favourite tropes like "blushing maiden" even after a couple has canonically had sex. These factions have always existed in BL fandom, this is not new, they just both seem particularly silly now with so much content to choose from.

The shows that get attention and the shows that get snubbed feel the same too, in all honesty. You can ask yourself the following questions:

Is the show a little slower paced?

Are the story beats less melodramatic?

Do its characters feel more human?

Do they feel more queer?

Is it a comedy?

Is there any risk of an unhappy ending?

Do people not think one of the lead actors is hot?

Do people ship one of the lead actors with someone who isn't his costar?

Do people have to do anything other than go to YouTube to watch it?

If the answer is yes to any of those questions, and especially to the last one, fewer people will be watching, even if the show is good. That's always been true. [Shows I'm thinking about when I say that: Make it Right, He's Coming to Me, My Ride, You're My Sky, Oxygen (though the sides in this one are also at fault), YYY, Something in my Room, Ghost Host Ghost House, Dear Doctor I'm Coming for Soul, Cooking Crush.] All this is to say, there have always been shows that have been ignored, though I agree with you OP that with more shows airing, more are being ignored at any given time.

The other thing is that when a show is good, it doesn't necessarily invite discourse. The messes are often what encourage people to dig in, fill in gaps, linger in the adrenaline. The part that does feel different is also related to the increase in genre BLs; genre stuff in general tends to get more attention in fandom spaces, and the way people are functioning as fans feels different in that they're bringing the way they interact with genre content to BL as BL has started having larger and better funded genre content. I'm thinking about those early genre BLs like He She It, My Dream, Love Poison, Golden Blood, So Much In Love, Why R U....we started getting genre shows in BL in I think 2017 and basically had 1-2 a year until 2020ish and then it increased from there; and the ones that had funding and decent distribution got engagement until they started going off the rails, and then they had even more engagement and then fell off. I don't think it's a coincidence that the shows last year that got people to write meta were La Pluie, Be My Favorite, and I Feel You Linger in the Air. When a show is building a world, there's more to say and interrogate about it, and when a genre show fails, it can fail more spectacularly than a regular romance story. The most popular BL shows used to all be straight-up BL bubble romances, but I think genre shows really started to take over a greater percentage of the popular spots in 2022 and 2023. Again, the main difference here is that there used to be 1-2 stand-out shows per year, and now there are closer to 6+ per year, and as we got more stand-out shows the variety of what type of show stood out as popular has expanded. I do think the overall percentage of shows that are more standard romance plots has reduced, partly because Thai production companies are running out of popular y-novels to adapt. So I'm anticipating we'll continue to get more genre content going forward, and maybe a higher percentage of original works too.

Shows I'm Enjoying Right Now

Right now, the Thai shows airing that I'm watching are:

Cooking Crush

Dead Friend Forever

Cherry Magic Thailand

City of Stars

The Sign

Playboyy

PitBabe

7 Days before Valentine

For Him

Of those, I'd currently most recommend Cooking Crush as a generic BL recommendation. Dead Friend Forever is very good, but is not a romance and is difficult for some to watch (there are a lot of dark themes in addition to the gore and scary bits).

Cooking Crush is doing so many things I love. I've written about the way it's set up its major conflict to be amongst the friend group here, and way the show is depicting communication between the two main characters and how they improve their communication with one another as they get closer here. Two of my biggest BL pet peeves are a conflict for the sake of a dramatic penultimate episode that ignores or retcons a character's growth or the building of trust that a couple has already gone through in the series, so the fact that this show is working so hard to establish strong communication between its leads and then setting up the significant drama to actually about friendship rather than romance is something I cannot overstate my excitement about. To tie this back into what I wrote above, this reminds me of Diary of Tootsies and I mean that in the best possible way.

Dead Friend Foreever is, like I mentioned above, not a romance; it's a slasher horror melodrama with a very well established mystery, an ensemble cast of mostly hateable characters (which I admit isn't usually my thing, but since they're likely all going to die as a result of the genre they're in I'm finding that more tolerable than usual, and there is at least one character I like). DFF did a great job of structuring the story for the ultimate payoff of information reveals. There are a lot of shows that have been messing with non-linear storytelling recently, Cooking Crush being one of the ones that actually does this poorly in my opinion, but Dead Friend Forever effectively uses non-linear storytelling so that we find out important pieces of information about particular characters at a time when that information will have the most emotional impact on what is happening in the "present" of the storyline. Every time there is a reveal, it informs what we've already seen, recontextualizes it, and means we understand some of the character motivations and actions differently from when we saw them the first time. I mentioned above that there are dark themes in this show; one of the things that I really like about this show is that the impact of class is not glossed over, and that the consequences of these events feel very real for the characters; people do terrible things in this show, but these actions are not treated lightly by the show itself.

You'd think these two shows would have nothing in common, but there are things that they share that put them both in my top category. Generally, in both of these shows, the character arcs are clear and logical; when a character does something, even if I don't like the action itself, I can understand exactly why they that and can see how it matches where they are in their arc at the time. The shows show change in characters as a result of what they experience, and the relationships in this show really matter. When characters start acting in ways that feel out of character or against their own arc because they have to in order to drive the plot forward, I struggle to remain invested; that's not happening with either of these shows. Both of these shows also treat serious topics with seriousness, and consequences for actions are real and felt by the characters in the show (and if someone gets away with something, the show is clear that this is not just). Nothing has happened that hasn't been signalled or implied earlier. Both shows also have clear class consciousness and represent the disparity caused by classism in a critical/harsh light.

Whew! I think I got to everything you asked. Thanks again for the extremely interesting question!

[guilty-gear-hot-take-hellhole]

Ya know, I was procrastinating on reviving this old blog instead of lurking through Tumblr for a while, and I can’t believe that Bridget discourse pushed me to do it. VERY long rant ahead because boy do I have some opinions.

The other day I saw a tweet (I don't remember where) saying how glad they were that a queer character was getting a bunch of spotlight in regards to the new Bridget figure; then after that I IMMEDIATELY saw someone punching down on people asking for other characters and bringing up Anji specifically, and it's like holy shit, either you're genuinely ignorant or an idiot.

There are 3 other canon queer in Guilty Gear, yet people only want to focus on Bridget, and I could honestly go on about it.

Testament obviously suffers the least from this, but it’s still noteworthy how people will ignore them being queer since 1998, and before anyone says, "They used he/him and were only GNC." 1. That was a botched localization, & 2. There’s a queerness in gender nonconformity, which makes it devastating that Baiken has been made less nonconforming for the sake of sexualization.

In a similar vein, Anji's queerness is often ignored by a good chunk of the fandom, which is in itself a can of worms considering he's a GNC man who is treated normally (unlike Bridget who was essentially a gag character while she still identified as male) and bisexual, which seems to really stir up shit when said bisexual character shows attraction to the opposite sex, which is probably why people don't acknowledge him.

Lastly, there's Venom, and I'm gonna preface this by saying that I'm a lightskin before I'm queer, so I find it very interesting that they wrote out an explicitly gay POC out of the story. Don't get me wrong, I love this series, but once I noticed that fact, it didn't sit with me well, especially since Venom being gay is an integral part of his character that can't be hidden.

And that's what pisses me off the most, the fact that people aren't realizing that the reason Bridget is the only being pushed because her queerness isn't blatantly obvious at first glance and she fits the mold of a popular, fair-skinned, and cute that figure distributors love. I want ya'll to realize that Bridget being trans is overshadowed by her being a white girl, which is a real shame because it means other queer characters won't get attention because they don't fit this standard. The worst part is that people just ignore this, which makes it painfully obvious that they don't care for queer characters; they care for Bridget.

I this isn't everyone, but I ask that Bridget fans slow down on mindlessly buying merch of her because all it does is show distributors that you guys are cashcows ready to be used at any moment and PLEASE don't punch down on people asking for other characters. Seriously, some of ya'll are way too comfortable mocking other people because you got what you wanted. As for the other characters, show them some support and buy their merch if you have the means to (god knows I don't). Even just picking up the character can show that people care about them and want to see them more. I know it's little more than delusion on my part, but it’s at least something.

Tl;dr: Don't be pretentious about a queer character getting merch if you only care about Bridget and support other characters. Sorry about this being so long.

Yeah I think I may know the tweet you’re referring to…

Another tweet I saw on the topic also featured a family guy meme about thanksgiving

Anyways ON GOD !

[hussyknee]

do u really not see the difference btwn writing fanfic on the internet and buying a game whose storyline is actively being written by white supremacists and having the money go directly into the pocket of the most vocal & influential terf in the UK? that's not even touching all of the other racist and offensive bs in her series inc her antisemitism, appropriating first nations cultures, her asian racism, etc? i guess thats why you dont have 'antisemitics dni' on your blog

First, let me be clear – I do not give one single shit about Harry Potter. They are the best memories of my extremely shitty adolescence, I still read fanfic from time to time, but other than that, if I never hear the word "Harry Potter" again it will be too soon. I care about the fact that you clowns are

encouraging bullies and endangering mentally ill marginalized fans

leeching the air from leftist and queer discourse

fuelling a Western culture war that distracts from combating systemic transphobia

making suffering Black and brown communities, who mostly see white and Western trans people, think that trans people don't have any real problems beyond video games

Now, on to your ask:

I said never said not buying the game was the same as writing fanfic on the internet. I said that the furor over buying the game is leading to everyone who had anything to do with Harry Potter, including just writing fanfic, being bullied. I've had to unfollow so many people for reblogging posts attacking people for being in the *fandom*.

Asking people to refrain from doing something to prove that they care, especially demanding that they don't, has never in the history of activism worked. Black people have been speaking out against copaganda shows forever and STILL get harrassed. Indigenous people have been asking people to boycott Avatar and gotten nothing. Some people comply, but more do the thing simply out of contrarianism, and the entire issue becomes a culture war divided along political affiliation. People on the right go out of their way to do the thing, the people on the center and center-left won't really care, and people who identify as leftist divorce themselves even more from the rest of the left as being no better than the right, which eventually devastating results when it comes to actual elections and agitating for political change.

What works a lot better is harm reduction. Pirating is harm reduction, asking the HP fandom to offset JKR's fuckery by making their own merch, promoting indie games and donating to trans healthcare funds is harm reduction. People won't stand for being policed, but they like giving and also not paying for stuff with a clear conscience. You would have raised so much fucking money and promoted so many different things in all this time you've spent giving the game negative engagement clicks and keeping it trending on social media so long after its release.

You keep insisting that people shouldn't be fans because JKR equals her fandom with her own influence. This is called buying into the right-wing narrative. The woman is delusional (I can't think of a non-ableist word atm, and I honestly think that she's not all stable) and you're enabling her and her terf cult. We created the online HP fandom ourselves back in the aughts, before there was any merch, before movie rights were ever sold to WB, a full decade before her advertising machine ever woke up to the fact that an internet fandom existed. JKR has lost relevance for HP fans a long time ago; imagine the slap in the face for her if the fandom starts countering her bigotry by very prominently engaging in trans activism? The JKR terf cult in the HP fandom are a minority, like TERFs themselves (they're only so loud because the right-wing promotes the shit out of them). The vast majority of fans are just the kind of vaguely well-meaning cis people who don't agree with transphobes but are pretty ignorant about trans issues. And I do mean the vast majority, because literally a billion people grew up on her books and only a bare fraction is on social media at all, and even fewer even see the leftist drive to boycott the franchise.

Let's talk demographics. Because of the aforementioned vastness of consumers, the majority of HP fans are cis het, abled, neurotypical Millennials. Because of the way internet penetration works, the majority of HP fans online and even in fandom are white or Western. Leftist spaces mostly attract young and marginalized people, and transformative fandom is full of neurodivergent women and queer people. Which means the majority of people you're reaching are young queer neurodivergent people who have limited economic power themselves. And the people most vulnerable to and impacted by policing and harrassment are trans, Black and brown, Jewish, mentally ill, poor. Do you see the problem? You're policing the very bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder on the off-chance of maybe influencing a privileged few who might give a damn.

This is literally why we say that boycotts, especially over social media, don't fucking work. Firstly because they penalize the most disenfranchised consumers, it's hard to reach enough people to even explain why they matter, it's hard to keep up with the constant discourse and changing information, and it relies entirely on performance. Someone can stay quiet or nod along furiously to whatever you're saying and then just...go out and buy the thing. Social censure doesn't work when you have the option of not having to face the consequences. Contrary to hellsite opinion, the Fantastic Beasts franchise died because it sucked, and Harry Potter is dying because it's fading from relevance and JKR is being an embarrassment. The wider market doesn't even know y'all exist.

As for the game being racist and antisemitic...you come on my blog, a South Asian who has been in fandom for twenty years, and try to tell me about racism in media???? NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF ALL MEDIA IS RACIST AND ANTISEMITIC YOU ABSOLUTE CLOWN. I'm from South Asia, our children grow up on books written by colonizers! LORD OF THE RINGS is white supremacy! NARNIA is white supremacy! Disney and Marvel is one of the biggest figures in US military industrial complex that razed the Middle East to the ground. It's so ubiquitous that we have to accept the racism and white supremacy as a matter of course to engage with any Western media! And even then fandom is so racist it's hard to even exist in it! We get run out of it when we try to talk about it. You suck on white supremacy every single day you live like it's your Mum's teat! Do you know what it's like to hear whiteys ranting that people who consume this one game they hate are being antisemitic and racist??? While still fawning??? Over cop shows???? And Disney???? And sending Black people??? Death threats??? Over a game???

I don't say "anti-Semites DNI" for the same reason I don't say "racists DNI". Nobody identifies as a racist or antisemite, that's not how systemic oppression works. Radfem and Zionist and Communist are political identities. Radical feminism is underpinned by transphobia and racism, Zionism is currently entrenched in Palestine occupation, Western communists refuse to acknowledge USSR and Global South genocides. See how that works?

Bitch, you didn't just come at me about JKR's indigenous cultural appropriation when I was among the few who were trying to discourage people from supporting Fantastic Beasts back in 2016 and literally got flamed for it. You people did not give a single shit about Natives back then, and you don't give one now. Just like you don't actually care about Jews and never did. I literally never heard about why and how openly alt-right people keep getting this kind of power and position in the gaming industry. Conversations about antisemitism in gaming and antisemitic tropes in entertainment haven't gotten this much traction. No wider revelations about how entertainment media directly funding and promoting social harms. But sure, it's about antisemitism and racism and has absolutely nothing to do with a mess of white queers realizing they can weaponize it like a cudgel against anyone they believe are against them. We know you whites. You care about excuses to take the moral high ground without having to do any self-interrogation or cost to yourself.

Finally, to give y'all one example of where the current discourse around this stupid shit is at:

Fuck you.

[toytulini]

[Image description:

screenshot of text reading: "So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia,and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what's going on right now over in Conservative World, but it's a hell of a wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from "Oh no! the left is sexualizing our children!" to "Oh no! the left is asexualizing our children!"

End of image ID]

Not gonna comment on the post but I hate this logic I'm sorry. Bigots don't have a logical inner reasoning for their bigotry.

Asexuality is not Acceptable Queerness Lite™️ and it's super weird that a bunch of people on this webbed site seem to think it is. It's not a logical inconsistency for conservatives to oppress us. Conservatives don't like asexuality because asexuality is not anything like celibacy or "waiting until marriage" or sex negativity or whatever else you've convinced yourself it is. Conservatives don't like asexuality because deviance is deviance is deviance and it's all worthy of brutal violence in their eyes.

Hope this helps.

[glngrbred]

the ace discourse is stupid and some of you are being assholes

I have been treated poorly for having an interest in romance, but not wanting to date people. That's it. Literally just saying "No, I don't want to date" Has gotten me in trouble with assholes. I cannot imagine how frustrating it is to have your community try to push you out because you don't experience sexual attraction. cuz "that's not gay enough." I'm kind of shocked. Instead of getting in fights to protect each other, members of the community decided to just go out into the world and harass and bully each other?

You sound like a 4chan user, leave people alone. Queerness is not the Wiktionary definition, it is the community you end up in, and the community people make safe for EVERYONE. I dont think queer spaces should exclude anyone. There can be more local protected zones where only X person is allowed but "Queer spaces" are not a monolith that you get to gatekeep. Within the entirety of all queer spaces, we have room for everyone, we can include everyone. There is space for everyone, even Cis/Het ppl can come. the only exceptions are Assholes. End of story.

The ENTIRE POINT of having an organized and public label to identify with is to build unity and combat those horrible people who think queerness is a crime. Its not for your fandom bullshit where you make comics about flags, its literally because of -human rights- and -keeping ourselves safe-

go make your comics and coin phrases to describe yourself. that's wonderful. Just know that this community we are a part of is not about the merch or the fan cams. Its about the Human right to exist. don't you dare attack other people because they don't fit YOUR definition of queer.

[homophyte]

it is interesting to me that ive seen lately (n yknow this is subjective and likely not any real social force just what ive seen) many queer people simultaneously talking about taking back and embodying unpalatable and ‘unmarketable’ queerness (the recent return to the terms faggot and transsexual come to mind) which i think is pretty evidently shaped by the conservative moment were in of demonizing queer ppl and especially gnc and trans people as predators--it reads as a return to queer isolationism in the face of external hostility, imo--while at the same time ive seen a lot of rallying around the “original” 6 stripe rainbow flag as opposed to any of the purportedly ‘factional’ flags of different queer identities, with the assumption being different identity flags divide us while the rainbow flag encompasses everyone and its kinda fascinating to me bc the rainbow flag is probably the single most marketable and palatable and uncontroversial symbols of queerness which has been seamlessly uptaken by those who wish to sell it back to us as gets pointed out every pride month with all the cringey pride merch.... i dunno you could maybe take that as a point of hypocrisy and claim the queer community is itself in a conservative moment rn where its returning to a sense of history and historical continuity (perhaps even out of that sense of external threat) or even that the queer community has for some time been in a conservative moment given the like, decade of identity discourse and lashing out at any people deemed to not have a sufficiently established history or however we should categorize the bihets/ace discourse/transtrender-tucute discourse/pan discourse/bi lesbians discourse (because lets be frank its essentially all the same discourse just keeping up its momentum by leapfroging from one target to the next) which i think is, like, SOMEWHAT true but not entirely? its more interesting to me, in any case, as an expression of a conflict the queer community is facing given that current state of affairs RE antitransness and that very recent history. like, the simultaneous need to retreat to a safe sense of community which is welcoming to the very things the outer world is demonizing ie mutable gender, complex or contradictory experiences of gender, gender expression which is hostile to the cis binary, but also the ways in which it has to grapple with those discourses which have largely defined the community infighting for again the past decade. its queer people begging the question ‘how can we make the queer community welcoming to the girlfags and genderfucks and tboys who are being threatened when we have spent so much time making the queer community a hostile place for anyone with a non-conventional or not easily (or even just palatably) sortable sense of queer identity’. and the answer it seems to be grappling with at the moment is like, welcoming all that diversity of experience but being absolutely averse to naming it. yes we love all the fuckery with gender and sexuality never be marketable but like, ew, why are you calling yourself [insert microlabel here]. you can be genderweird but you cant call yourself genderweird. you can only exist as queer in the broadest possible way (the all-inclusive gay pride flag!) but if you try to name the specifics or use those identity labels weve been fighting over for years youre doing it wrong (the progress pride flag is now ugly and cringey and ‘too much’). i think theres something also to the way (at least on this site) transmisogynistic discourses have really taken hold as legitimate (though yknow i wont downplay how much a problem transmisogyny has like. always been in queer spaces no matter what) in the name of protecting n defending trans people. like its just regurgitated transmisogyny but its being mobilized supposedly in the service of helping trans people. idk its definitely getting a little late for me to string this together fully coherently but theres a throughline there, in the ways certain ideas are being consolidated and reified as ‘yes were more progressive now!’ when i think theres definitely something to question there in terms of like...are we? are we actually? are we doing better by the people were trying to help or are we setting strict standards and forcing ppl to adhere to them again?