#super heteronormative despite trying to queer up the show but whatever

[monsterfuckermilligan]

love is blind midam au….

[pinktwingirl]

Ok but just think about this for a second, guys: can you imagine how the Loki series’ little genderfluidity queer baiting publicity stunt must have made genderfluid/non-binary/trans Marvel fans feel?

Imagine how excited they must have been when the series first came out and Kate Herron and Michael Waldron were giving all these interviews promising to portray Loki as a gender-fluid character and talking about how “important” that representation was to them. They must have thought that this was finally their chance to see their identity represented and normalized in the mainstream media. And in a huge, mass-marketed Disney+ series, no less! They must have been thrilled that little kids would watch this show and see that it was perfectly ok and normal to be trans or to be non-binary. Because if a super popular character like Loki could do it, why couldn’t they?

…Only for the creative team to turn around and be like “lol, jk, we’re not ACTUALLY gonna show Loki as a gender-fluid character! That’s all ‘up to interpretation’, whatever tf that’s supposed to mean. Instead, we’re gonna have all the other Loki variants be shocked at the very idea of a female Loki and put Loki in a gross, incestuous, heteronormative relationship with his female self, because apparently, Sylvie’s only defining character trait is that she’s a woman.” (Yeah, I read your “feminine energy” horseshit, Michael.) It’s like a slap in the face - like the creative team is saying, “no, you’re never actually going to be represented! You’re too much of an ‘other,’ too much of a liability. We can’t have you costing us money from China and Russia, after all!”

Can you imagine how utterly devastating that must have been? If Kate Herron and Michael Waldron never intended on portraying Loki’s genderfluidity, they could have at least been honest about it from the start. But no. They lied about it because it sounded good for PR and they wanted the brownie points despite having done nothing but slapped the words “Sex: Fluid” on a piece of paper. It’s disgusting and beyond offensive. And now, because people are rightfully calling them out on it, they’re trying to save face by doing damage control in every interview and scrambling up whatever bullshit excuse they can. I’m cishet, and even I’m tired of this crap. And if you are genderfluid/non-binary/trans, I can’t even imagine how hurtful this whole thing must have been for you. All I can say is, I am so, so sorry. You deserved so much better than this.

[c-is-for-circinate]

On Good Omens, queerbaiting, and heteronormative bullshit

Theory: Good Omens the miniseries and the way it treats relationships feels maybe a little weird and hits some of the same mental buttons as queerbaiting not because Aziraphale and Crowley are insufficiently gay, but because the entire rest of the show is.  In this essay I will actually write this essay, because no, really, I think it’s A Thing and I might even be able to prove it.

There’s a lot of nuance to both sides of the whole queerbaiting/not-queerbaiting argument, and I don’t want to neglect any of it, but I think my big takeaways have been as follows:

On the ‘this is uncomfortable and queerbaity’ side:

Good Omens the miniseries ramps up the emotional relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale to be the heart of the entire show.  Both demon and angel are coded as gay in a number of different ways, both individually and in terms of how their relationship is portrayed as a romance.  And yet despite being the core of the show, they never make any of it explicitly romantic.  There’s not a kiss, there’s not an ‘I love you’.  The entire relationship is built from implications rather than explicit statements.

Years and decades and centuries of storytelling have given us gay relationships that we have to look for.  That we have to find in implications rather than explicit statements.  Sometimes stories were written that way for plausible deniability, so that content creators could keep mainstream/straight fans happy while also luring queer fans with crumbs and promises.  Sometimes stories were written that way for plausible deniability, so content creators could slip hidden gay messages past censors.  Sometimes stories were written that way for plausible deniability, so content creators could stay literally, physically safe.  But either way, it’s exhausting.  It’s been so long.  We want to see ourselves on screen.  We want somebody to admit out loud to what we’re seeing.  We’re tired.

Also, when things get heated: the opposing side are apologists and boot-lickers, ready to bend over backwards to defend their Precious Author Faves in hopes of receiving whatever crumbs they can get.  (Please note: this is an ad hominem argument with like ten different logical fallacies in it, and also it’s just mean.  We will be assuming that all parties in this discussion are attempting to act in good faith with a healthy dose of frustration, and largely ignoring this point.)

On the ‘no, this is Good Representation, really’ side:

Aziraphale and Crowley are in a queer relationship--it’s just not a gay one.  They are two genderfluid beings who mostly present as male out of preference or convenience, surrounded by additional similar genderfluid beings who may present as male, or female, or both, or neither.  Their relationship is both romantic and asexual.

The fact that those ‘explicit milestones’ of kissing, sex, etc are absent from the show is in fact part of the point.  Not only does it make sense for the characters themselves, but it means so much to see a relationship that is obviously romantic, that is the center of an entire story, where the key turning point is about something other than sex or marriage.  A relationship can be super important, can be important enough to build an entire life around, without sex, without kissing, without wedding rings.  It’s so good to see one that is.

Also, when things get heated: the opposing side are aphobes and probably transphobes, whiny babies who don’t really care about representation, they just want their kind of representation.  (Please see above note about ad hominem attacks and logical fallacies.

There are a few points that everyone can agree on.  Crowley and Aziraphale follow the plotline of a romance, and their relationship is the core of this show.  They do not kiss, or have sex, or explicitly fall into any behavior that conventionally says, ‘yes, this human couple is dating’.  Other characters in the show mistake-them-for-dating, but those characters are always uninformed about the real complex nature of this relationship.

One side says: it all comes so close to being a thing we so rarely get to see, to reflecting ourselves on screen.  Why promise and not deliver?  Why come so close and then shy away?  Aziraphale and Crowley, with all they are to each other (with Aziraphale’s shop in Soho and his time in a discrete gentleman’s club, with their so-religious families that will disown them or worse for this relationship, with everything they are an have been) are a metaphor for gayness that refuses to commit past the point of metaphor and just admit it already, and it hurts.

The other side says: it has exactly hit the nail on the head of being a different thing we so rarely get to see, to reflecting a different portion of ourselves onscreen.  It just so happens that the thing it’s reflecting is by nature a little confusing and undefined, is close to the kind of queerness you’re expecting without getting there.  Crowley and Aziraphale (who’ve been alive for six thousand years, who have seen so many different ways humans love each other and swear to each other, who are not bound by our conventions or definitions and maybe show us that we don’t have to be either) are a metaphor for nothing.  They parallel a lot of familiar narratives of a lot of kinds of queerness, without trying to be anything but what they are.

Two sides, everybody so starved for representation that they’ll grab for it and name-call and scrabble desperately when they almost get it.  One relationship.  One divided fandom.

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Look, it is obvious by this point that this is a case of everybody fighting over our one specific instance of representation because there isn’t enough to go around, right?  If gay relationships were more common throughout fiction, it wouldn’t be so important that Aziraphale and Crowley were among them.  If ace relationships and alternative relationship dynamics were portrayed as frequently or given as much weight as sexual ones, it wouldn’t be so important.

And it’s not just about what’s important, it’s about what’s noticed.  If there were gay relationships--or if there were ace relationships, or other kinds of queer relationships!--all over fiction, then being explicit would matter so much less.  It is important, in this world, that queer relationships in fiction announce what they are out loud, because in this world they are so often brushed over or ignored.  They have to clear a much higher bar than conventional straight, sexual relationships.  If there were more representation in the world, everybody would be primed to notice Aziraphale and Crowley as a romance.  We wouldn’t need it spelled out--one, because we’d already know, and two, because it wouldn’t be such a big deal if somebody else didn’t.

Of course, there’s more representation these days than there used to be--little dribs and drabs of it all over.  There’s just enough out there that somebody can say, ‘look, we’ve seen basic gay romances, let us have this thing here, let us have this nuance’.  And meanwhile half the audience (who may be gay, or bi, or ace, or transgender or genderqueer themselves in all sorts of ways) is gaping, because...okay, maybe gay romance exists in some places, in corners, but there’s still so little of it.

We’re all living on crumbs.  It’s hard to appreciate nuance when you’re just a few steps past starving.  It’s hard to appreciate the grace of ambiguous and open endings when you’ve seen them twisted against you again and again, and you just want something that’s yours.

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Here’s another thing, an important thing.  Humans are used to seeing patterns and we’re used to seeing stories.  It can be very hard to tell whether a storyteller is trying to give us something new and strange told well, or something more familiar told badly--especially if we’re used to seeing the familiar thing told badly.

And: if the audience cannot tell whether an author is portraying Thing A well or Thing B badly, at a certain point it doesn’t really matter which it is.

And: sometimes the only way to tell if a story is trying to show you Thing A and succeeding or Thing B and failing, is to look around the story to see if you can spot Thing B done right, anywhere else.

In other words: How do you make a difference between an audience that is collectively sure that Crowley and Aziraphale are some specific, slightly-hard-to-define but very definitely queer thing (and sometimes being hard to define is an intrinsic part of queerness), versus an audience divided amongst themselves over whether or not they’re just a bad, cowardly approximation of ‘gay’?

You put actual, explicit gay somewhere else in the story.

And that’s where we run into problems.

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The problem with Good Omens the miniseries and how it does queer representation, how it does Crowley and Aziraphale and their romance, is the same problem that Good Omens the miniseries has across the board.  The problem is that half the writing team is gone, and so is half the story.

In the miniseries, Aziraphale and Crowley are, hands down, the main characters.  This is their story, and everyone else around them--Anathema and Newt, the Four Horsemen, Heaven and Hell, the Them, and even Adam himself--are just bit players.  I don’t fault Neil Gaiman for that, exactly.  I’m sure he did his best, and his best meant he poured the heart and soul of the story into these two characters and the relationship they share.  He gave them as much richness and depth as he possibly could.  (That’s part of why we all love them enough to fight over them.)  But the fact is, the rest of the story around them suffered.

Adam and the Them, Anathema and Newt, even Madame Tracy and Sergeant Shadwell--humans, all of them, and very much the people who actually stop the apocalypse.  Considering the way Anathema kick-started Adam along his path towards Armageddon, they’re even the people who started the apocalypse.  Very, very fundamentally, Good Omens is a story about how humans don’t need heaven or hell--not to be evil, not to be good, and not to keep being human.  Except that the miniseries wrote the humans off to the side, and that cracked things a little.  In some places, it cracked things a lot.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the miniseries.  I love Crowley and Aziraphale at the heart of it, and the richness and depth of their relationship.  I love the story about how an angel and a demon are so very very human, even though they think they aren’t.

But it’s a story that only works with enough of a contrast.  We can only appreciate Aziraphale and Crowley as an angel and a demon who’ve become very-nearly human if we know what the differences are in the first place.  We can only appreciate their similarities if we see enough humans acting the same way: with want, with fear, with desire, with pettiness, with love.

The difficulty with the miniseries is that we see a great deal of Crowley and Aziraphale being full of very, very human emotions and reactions.  We see their worry and desperation and how much they care about each other.  Nothing we see from any other character in the whole show comes close.

Anathema lives a life in service to (a prophecy, not a Host, but is it so different?) a thing she doesn’t quite understand and nobody can explain to her, that she just has to trust--but we see Aziraphale deal with Gabriel and Heaven again and again, and we see so little of Anathema’s fear and doubt.  Newt is fired from (a nothing job, not God’s endless love) a world he vaguely understands but isn’t good enough for, and finds himself in a strange, confusing place where he’s probably smarter than his boss and everything smells a bit weird and it might technically be his job to hurt people except maybe he doesn’t want to--and we get none of it, compared to what we see of Crowley, six thousand years post-Fall.

Adam is human and not-human, full of powers that can bend the world around him to his whim, that can make things how he thinks they should be.  He decides not to, because of love and selfishness, because he’d rather be human.  He makes the exact same decision Aziraphale and Crowley make.  We just get so much less of the weight of it.

The thing about telling the story this way is that it turns Crowley and Aziraphale into the only real people in the whole show, with everyone around them in silhouette and abstract.  It stops being a story about how this angel and this demon are, effectively, exactly the same as everyone else--oh sure they’ve got some differences, powers and abilities and age and shape-shifting (and mutable gender, and vague non-existent sexualities), but hell, people in general are full of differences in all of those things anyway.  

All of a sudden, the differences between baseline human and celestial being start to feel weird and cheap.  If Aziraphale and Crowley are the only real people in the story, and they’re not reacting in the way most people would react--it’s not just because they’re individuals, with specific individual wants and needs and reactions.  It’s either a statement or a weird error.  If the only real people in the story aren’t people, everything starts to fall just a little bit apart.

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And so we come back around to sexuality once again.

A deeply, deeply unfortunate side effect of the Good Omens miniseries fleshing out Heaven and Hell and neglecting the humans is that all of the queer content--all of the nonbinary characters, our one shining non-heterosexual relationship, all of it--went to characters who were not human.  It makes so much sense, on one hand.  That’s where all the new depth came from, so of course that’s where all the new queerness went.  And why should non-human characters subscribe to human definitions of gender and sexuality?  Of course they wouldn’t.

Because, right: the idea that sexuality is in and of itself a primarily human thing, which most non-humans lack but some experiment with for fun (and that is Word of God and that is explicit in the text of the show and the book)--that idea’s not actually inherently bad.  The idea that sexuality is a requirement of humanity, that it comes part and parcel with love and ‘becoming more human’ (which is, after all, the best thing you can do according to show or book)--that idea is in fact bad.  But if all of your desire for sex goes to your humans AND all your queerness goes to your non-humans...that gets real unfortunate, real real fast.

The problem is, just like the show neglected to give the full depth of human characterization and emotion to its actually human characters, it failed to give them the full depth of human sexuality and gender, too.

The humans in Good Omens are painfully heterosexual.  It’s not simply that the Newt/Anathema and Tracy/Shadwell relationships are straight--it’s that they fall into place as though straight is the only choice.  Both relationships are so very much a picture of no other options.  Anathema and Newt are facing the end of the world, about to probably die, and also have been prophecied to get together under these circumstances for centuries.  Shadwell and Madame Tracy are both very deeply alone, and getting older, and if they want to be anything but alone their only choice appears to be each other.  These four people appear to default their way into traditional m/f relationships, whether it’s falling into (under) bed or moving to the country to retire together.  They hit all of those ‘explicit markers’ we were talking about before, and they don’t do it with emotional build-up.  They don’t do it with any real exploration of the individuals involved or why they’re making these choices.  There’s barely any acknowledgement that these are choices.

The thing is, gay humans do exist in the world of Good Omens!  We spend time is Soho, and we hear about a very specific extremely gay gentleman’s club, and we know it’s there, somewhere, hidden.  We just never get to see it.  Crowley and Aziraphale (who are our only touchstone to those queer areas, which the other human characters never seem to encounter) are the Only Queers In The World.  And it sucks, and I think it happened completely by accident.

I suspect that the lack of human queerness was literally just a side-effect of the lack of human anything--Crowley and Aziraphale are in fact the only queers in the world specifically because they’re the only people in the world.  None of the already-existing human characters were given enough additional development to add much of anything, including any new gay.  The human world of Tadfield and the Witchfinder Army wasn’t given enough development to make it worth creating any new characters, let alone queer ones.

It just means that, all of the sudden, straightness gets accidentally equated with every single non-child human we spend more than two lines with, and queerness becomes exclusively the province of demons and angels.  That’s really bad.  It’s one of those unfortunate accidents that happens sometimes, because the world ain’t perfect, but it’s pretty not great.  And that’s where our problems come from.

In particular that’s where this current debate comes from, because if sexuality = human and human = straight, and nonhuman = asexuality and queerness = nonhuman, then we’ve accidentally said some pretty damning things about humanity and equated all queerness with lack of sexual desire all at the same time.  And it’s subtle, and it’s easy to miss, because it’s all about a lack of queer humans that’s all mixed in with the lack of humans at all, but it feels off.  So we go looking for reasons and we go looking for scapegoats.  It’s so easy to fixate on and blame the only queer relationship (the only developed, real relationship) we get at all, writ huge and impossible-to-miss all over our screen, rather than all the invisible ones we don’t.

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Here’s what I take away from all of this: Crowley and Aziraphale are, in every real sense, the most important characters in the Good Omens miniseries, and their relationship is without doubt the most important relationship.  It’s a well-developed, believable relationship.  It’s neither a straight relationship, nor an explicitly sexual gay relationship.  It is a different thing all its own, a thing that does not easily fit conventional human labels, that may or may not include sex at some point but certainly does not require it to be devastatingly important.

And I like that.  I, me, personally, who would rather find a reason to feel heartened than a reason to feel angry, am really glad to see something so extremely not-straight at the emotional center of a story I care about.  That’s me.

In the absence of anything that is an explicitly sexual gay relationship, this nebulous complicated thing at the core of this story looks an awful lot as though it’s trying to be gay and not getting there all the way.  And that sucks.  And for a lot of people, that hits some very specific buttons that have been made tender over many years of stories that try to be gay and refuse to go there all the way.  The flaw, though, is in the contrast and the context around the relationship--not in the relationship itself.

Stories are hard.  Telling stories, and making sure that they get heard on the other end the way we want them to, is hard.  Figuring out why certain things resonate the way they do, why some people feel connected while others feel alienated when we’re just trying to make our point, is sometimes the hardest thing of all.

I don’t blame Neil Gaiman for not magically figuring out that this would happen with the story he was trying to tell, partially because I haven’t seen anybody else in this great big argument of ours notice it either.  He tried to tell a story that was similar to but distinct from a story a lot of people wanted, and he didn’t make it clear enough.  I still really like the story we got.  I like all the slightly-different fanfic versions, too.  I like liking things.  That’s me.

If you’re still mad, if you’re still hurt: legit.  That’s valid.  But I don’t think arguing over this one specific relationship, what it Should Be and Shouldn’t Be, is helpful.  

Basically: I don’t want to sit around getting angry at each other over why Crowley and Aziraphale didn’t get the same traditional markers of Happily Ever After as Newt and Anathema, as Tracy and Shadwell.  I want to know why those couples didn’t have to (didn’t get to) EARN their happily-ever-afters with all the feeling and wanting and fearing and deciding that Aziraphale and Crowley did.

[werelesbian]

I know with people coming up with new micro identities every 5 seconds, it makes me wonder if I’m just trying to make up my attraction to women and that I’m a straight girl just trying to be special for whatever reason. I know that multiple people tell me I’m not straight because of well like everything I say but there’s just multiple fears I have regarding everything since the realization of me realizing I do indeed like women hit me hard in the head this year. I know I have my own insecurities when it comes to my sexuality for I indeed worry it’s something made up for “wokeness” or whatever. Like I had no idea what non-binary was or other terms like that until this year. I’m just trying to figure out fully about my sexuality and trying to overcome internalized homophobia and I don’t need to shuffle myself under some micro identity in order to feel “validated”. I’m insecure. I know that. Am I forcing these feelings I have towards women in the sake of feminism or to push the narrative that I am attracted to every women on the planet? Also no. I have a type of woman I like that is true. I’m not attracted to every woman out there. I don’t get it when people say “oh I’m attracted to all woman and three men!” Like you don’t need to overperform an attraction to women in order to feel “bi enough”. If you have a specific type of woman you like, that’s okay. I personally have a preference for masculine women and that is fine.

Reality is that I’m insecure in this new realization about myself for multiple reasons. One is my family. They continuously make jokes about me “looking like a lesbian” and have made comments in the past about pushing that I must be bi and it’s okay to like women and men (despite me having reservations about them wanting me to be with men only). They also say that I may have not met the right man yet and saying I “need a good orgasm” from a man. It angers me that I’m told this because I buy into their bullshit and it makes me try and disprove my attraction to women and try and force myself to be more attracted to men despite it being pretty damn low. When I was closeted, aka buying into the narrative that “to be a proper adult” I need to be heterosexual and mature, I mainly focused on boys and became hesitant to write or make anything with gay or bisexual characters in the fear of being abnormal and dating women (also I didn’t know that it was a true possibility for me).

Another worry I have is that this realization about my attraction came so fast (thank you ex gf) that it literally just exploded out of me. Like, men basically went off my radar and I just only checked out women and focused on women. I also delved into lesbian shows and movies and I enjoyed them A LOT. I also finally realized that indeed yes, I want a relationship with another woman, I wanna kiss them and I wanna have sex with them. Prior to this, I had crushes on women and there were even a couple I wanted to date but never got the chance to and I chickened out of kissing a girl when I was 16 (this is also one of my reasons why I try and justify my attraction to women as “not real). I did get a chance to date a girl casually and have sex and kiss her and I really liked it. I was in my head a lot though with fears that I wasn’t going to like it, that I would realize that I am not attracted to women actually and that I wouldn’t have romantic feelings about her. In reality with men I was with, these things happened and I wasn’t really super attracted to the men I was with. The girls I was with though, both long distance and the fling I had, I was very attracted to and always wanted to be close to them.

A third thing is that I know that the acronym LGBT has basically gotten watered down into the word “queer” and that basically tears the community apart. I know that someone could take it as that wanting to peg your boyfriend is now considered “queer” or kink is “queer”. I don’t like using the word for myself because to me it means nothing. Telling me you are “queer” means nothing. Are you attracted to the same gender? No? Then you aren’t gay or even bi. Someone I know defines it as “not conforming to heteronormativity”, but it’s a slur that’s been used against the community and I didn’t even know the word was a thing until this year. I just don’t want people to assume that they’re automatically “queer” because they like pegging or they’re poly or something when they’re not attracted to the same gender. I mainly don’t wanna be associated with that. I just wanna date girls and eat some pussy in peace please.

Most of all with everything, I just wanna live my life being allowed and feeling okay to love another woman without the world telling me I’m a fucking freak for doing so. I just wanna spend my days (as of now) with another woman and eat pussy. I wanna hold another woman in my arms at night and not worry if my rights are going to be taken away because some damn politician with a stick up his ass says it goes against his belief. Biology isn’t fucking political. It’s a fucking reality and that goes for my sexuality. I’m biologically attracted to other women. That I cannot change. Society deemed it to be “wrong”, thus brainwashing generation upon generation to think it’s bad. Homosexuality and bisexuality can be observed in multiple animal species. I can’t help it! God forbid I crave pussy! Fuck!