#the first queer media i consumed was all wlw but (with one exception) it has all been cartoon/comics

[logosbot-tm]

Don't think this is a controversial take, but...:

I wish there was wlw stuff in a similar vein to OFMD, Good Omens, Heartstopper and Red white and royal blue. Like yes, Ik that in most there's a wlw couple, and yes I know that Good Omens is technically not mlm. But like...whenever there's a wlw show it gets cancelled, it's gritty/violent, or it has a tragic ending. I want to see more wlw stuff that is light hearted or just written as a romcom. I hope the fact that these lgbtq shows exists means that there will be a change, and that wlw media will (in the near future) be treated the same way as mlm. I genuinely believe that the popularity of these shows is a giant step forward, along with the fact that these shows even exist to begin with.

(Yes, I know that Ineffable Husbands isn't mlm, but they are (mostly) male presenting, which means that the ship generally read as such. Yes, there's wlw pairings, but they're mostly side pairings. Yes, I know that bottoms exists and that makes me so fucking happy. Also, I'm grateful for the cartoons with a wlw main pairing, I just want that in live action as well. Representation is matters, and wlw representation /should/ exist in live action as well. If anyone got any wlw centered shows/movies (that didn't get cancelled), please recommend them, I'm s t a r v i ng.)

[samandcheesewinchesterr]

Okay first I wanna go on record here and say that Psych is my favourite show of all time (tied with 911 but that’s not important right now).

HOWEVER I think it’s really important to look at everything you consume with a critical eye, even especially your favourite media. blindly consuming something means you fall susceptible to things like cop propaganda (brooklyn nine nine, psych) and you’ll end up supporting the bad with the good which is, needless to say, dangerous.

So I’m gonna go on a little rant here about some things that really bug me about psych. not relentlessly insulting it for no reason of course but just criticizing things that really should be criticized.

Okay first of all, as previously mentioned, it is cop propaganda, it is, plain and simple.

Sure the general theme of the show seems at first to be, two private “psychic” detectives work cases and solve them faster and better than the cops making them seem foolish in the process. However actually watching the show you see that they work with the police department more often than not, befriend (and date) the detectives, and you end up falling equally in love with the cops because of their characters. Not to mention the fact that they consistently search without warrants, ‘in the name of justice’, needlessly pull their gun on civilians, make arrests with insufficient evidence just so that they can say it’s solved, and in one episode Lassie even arrested a woman he actually believed to innocent. And they do all this with the underlying commentary of ‘this is okay because we got justice in the end’, ‘this is okay because i’m a little stressed right now’, ‘this is okay because _____’ Convincing people that police officer is a morally grey job where ‘everything turns out all right so it’s okay if we smudge the lines a bit’.

Next up, Juliet. This is gonna be a long one folks so buckle up.

First of all there are two main female characters, and one of which essentially has two lines throughout the show which are ‘spencer you’re not on this case, get out’ and ‘spencer you’re on this case we need you’. That’s it. And the other one is Juliet O’Hara.

Juliets character, as countless other people have pointed out, pretty much exists as a love interest for Shawn. The first time they ‘kissed’ made no sense to me as there was nothing to suggest that she had feelings for him at all. before that, she had more or less the same opinion of him as Lassie did.

Her character only got worse as the show went on, she stopped having major scenes that didn’t envolve Shawn, her personality disappeared, and at this point she was pretty much, ‘The Girlfriend’. Now the breakup. After she found out Shawn wasn’t actually psychic, she was pissed (rightly so) and they broke up. But only for a couple episodes. They showed none of the mending of the relationship, they were just suddenly back together, and they made Jules forgive Shawn way too quickly.

All in all they did her character really dirty.

Ah and next up of course we have, lgbt representation. This ones surprisingly short though. (like their list of queer characters)

“Gray it was 2006 lighten up.” No. No I will not.

First let’s talk about Woody. Canonically queer as he’s talked about being in relationships with/being attracted to both men and women, though only shown on screen with women. Also the fact that they made the one(ish) canonically queer character the ‘weird pervy coroner guy’ is just very uncomfortable.

Next up for the representation catergory we have Carlton Lassiter himself.

In a tweet in 2010 the writing team confirmed that he is pansexual. Great right? Not really. You see 2010 was four years before the show ended. Four seasons, 41+ episodes, AND a movie released in 2017. They had all those chances to confirm it on the show and did they? Of course not. He too has only been shown dating women, except unlike Woody he hasn’t even alluded to being attracted to anyone other than a women. (so you can guess my hopes for LCH are unbelievably high and uncatergorically low at the same time)

Yang is also canonically wlw and i have nothing to say about that actually she’s an icon and i love her just thought we needed a little good news here. But alas we now must return the bad side of Psych.

Anyways now we have racism in general. White washing, lack of non-white people, etc. (btw i am white so if any of this is insensitive or phrased poorly please let me know and i’ll change it/delete it)

So James Roday is latino and identifies as latino yet they made Shawn white and constantly remind of us of that fact.

And of course the glaring problem that the show is entirely white characters except for a single black guy. Sure they called themselves out for it (“gus don’t be the only black lead on a major cable network show”) but they still did it.

I’ve had this post in my drafts for a while just in case i wanted to add anything to it but i’m pretty sure this is everything. these things just really bug me and i wanted to make a post about them.

[simonjadis]

"Subverting expectations" should be something akin to what it adds to the story and not outright replaces. In addition, a writer should employ it based on what they feel in right for their characters and story with deep consideration. It seems like with recent examples that need no introduction do it to "please the audience" when they should write the sort of the story they'd want to read and/or watch themselves. It should come from the heart if you don't mind cheese.

I had not heard of that cyborg incident, anon! That sounds great.

(And I’m behind on DuckTales – the last episode I saw was Della’s first episode; I love Paget Brewster as her voice almost as much as I loved Paget voicing Poison Ivy)

I totally agree with you!!

Sometimes, I am horrified when I learn that feedback has convinced a storyteller to go in a different direction, even if I 100% understand why. Other times, it’s a great thing.

1. Good Case: Griffin McElroy is informed by fans of the Bury Your Gays trope, and his narrative returns two Tragic WLW as dryads (I’m not there yet in The Adventure Zone; I’m so nervous about continuing The Suffering Game)

2. Bad Case A: video game creators listen to disproportionate outrage from entitled forum bros and yield to their demands to include less queer content and fewer characters of color in the next game, or to sideline that content and those characters

3. Bad Case B: Joseph Morgan is a handsome, talented actor, but his desire to go forward with the story of Klaus Mikaelson on The Vampire Diaries should not have changed existing plans. I know that this is Extremely Writer Of Me but, to my mind, that’s like putting on a puppet show and one of the puppets whirls around and tells you to not kill him off. I’m not mad that the spinoff happened or anything, I just think that Klaus is a terrible person who deserves to die, however sympathetic aspects of his backstory may have been.

Anon, you wrote “a writer should employ it based on what they feel in right for their characters and story with deep consideration“

the line about with deep consideration is especially good, and something that many of us forget to express

because I’m gay, I’m going to pick an example – there are stories I might write in which the word “faggot” appears a great deal. it’s a slur, but it might be appropriate for characterization or setting. that doesn’t mean that it needs to be part of the story that will be consumed by an actual human audience, some of whom may have heard that word yelled at them at the worst moments of their lives

I could also write a fantasy setting in which that words holds no particular meaning, and someone’s name might happen to be that. it’s not like the fantasy character speak english or have that slur – the name just happens to be that, and exists within that world’s context. BUT again, this is going to be consumed by an actual audience, and I can just … not do that

in a previous post [X], I discussed worldbuilding and narrative choices, and used a domino/marbles analogy. another analogy might be baking – you choose the recipe and the ingredients and how they’re introduced and combined, but once placed in the oven, it all has to work naturally – you can’t force a cake to rise

if you do that in a story, people will know that something isn’t right

but choosing the recipe/ingredients and how they’re combined isn’t an excuse to do whatever you want.

you can choose to, as you note, set things up so that a woman who might have been fridged will instead be in a position to become a cyborg. (I don’t know a good baking analogy for that)

there are ways to include bigotry, death, and horror in your worldbuilding without focusing upon these elements for shock value, and that’s because the storyteller also controls the perspective

for another poor analogy, let’s say that you’re using your phone to record a video tour of your house – a walkthrough. you can use camera angles to avoid showing that place where the carpet just isn’t the same as it used to be, or that side of the couch that the cats chose as a scratching post, or that place where your drunk buddy decided to throw food onto the kitchen ceiling to see what stuck and now it’s discolored. storytellers can do this by choosing who (first person or third person limited) is telling the story, by choosing an unreliable narrator (usually just someone without the social awareness to realize what’s going on around them), or by taking the story in other directions

which means, and I know that this is a tangent but you reminded me of it, that stories can avoid gratuitous depictions of sexual assault or domestic violence and focus on fun things, like werewolf violence or whatever. it doesn’t mean pretending that those things don’t exist, it’s just prioritizing what gets “screen time”

that’s another place where deep considering comes into play. what things need to be part of the media experience, and which things can’t be left aside? for example, with very rare exceptions, i recommend against following the story of anyone experiencing gastrointestinal distress and related symptoms. someone can have a stomachache and then stay in bed with a time skip or someone else’s POV for a while. with rare exceptions, we don’t need to follow that person into the bathroom. the same is true with sexual assault and domestic violence, only this time we’re adding potential reader trauma to the list of reasons to tilt the metaphorical camera in another direction; if a character says that their ex was “a bad man” or warns someone away from X tavern, I believe them

obviously, sometimes stories do include horrifying elements; there are very few absolutes in writing

[barely restraining myself from talking about showing-vs-telling and some discourse I’ve seen about it]

I absolutely do not mind cheese, anon, and I agree that stories should metaphorically come from the heart

I do think that a lot of television writing has less of that because it’s, well, a job. the story should still make sense, and ideally everyone in the writer’s room feels passionately about some aspect of the project, but any mercenary writer is going to have some things where they just do their best and then call it a day. the story needs to make sense and engage audiences, but it doesn’t have to be a passion project

if a writer does a good job of entertaining themselves, they’ll usually do a decent job of pleasing the audience. there are exceptions.

not everybody has a foot fetish, Joss