#then yeah you probably do have some internalized misogyny to examine

[tacticalgrandma]

I love how fandom and ao3 are gay gay queer utopias right up until someone mentions how these environments seem to replicate the misogynistic patterns of the societies they come from, at which point all writers are cishet women.

[sometimesrosy]

I wonder why it was Monty to help her in her mind space. For the show runners it was probably for nostalgia purposes, we love and miss Monty as does Clarke. But in the actual show, why? Why not bell. Or her mom. Or madi? Or wells? Or her dad? Why Monty?

First, I think it’s a mistake to separate the show from the showrunners, and say that the showrunners purpose is not the show purpose. They’re the same thing--unless you mean Doylist analysis vs Watsonian analysis, meaning the storyteller’s perspective vs the in narrative character’s perspective. Now that I think about it I think that is what you meant.

All right. So lets examine that.

Doylist (as in arthur conan dole who wrote Sherlock Holmes) analysis looks at a story to see the storytellers narrative purpose, how narrative choices are included so that the story can move forward, or create a feeling in the audience they want them to have, or even how fandom or society can affect their choices. While Watsonian (as in John Watson, Sherlock’s partner and friend, a character within the story,) analysis would look at a story to see how it is explained WITHIN the narrative or world of the story. Character feelings and motivations, social mores of the culture in the story, psychology of the characters, ships, world building and how it all fits together to make a fictional world.

So, what is the purpose of the showrunner’s use of Monty in the dreamspace. I do not think nostalgia is the top reason. I think more likely it’s because Monty has been the moral center of the story for a long time, so for Clarke to internalize that makes sense. Also, her dad WAS there, right when she woke up. And it makes sense, because he was Clarke’s original moral center. Come to think of it. Maya was a moral center, too. With this cast of her mindspace, Lincoln should have been there too, and Wells. They wanted Wells, but the actor was unavailable. And they probably didn’t even try for Lincoln because JR ended on bad terms with Ricky.

Also, Monty told her to do better. So he’s the one calling on her and correcting her understanding of doing better. Oh, but I think we’ve moved into Watsonian.

Clarke’s subconscious brought Monty because she is interpreting his directions and giving up and giving in to Josephine was the incorrect choice. She gave up because of guilt and probably exhaustion and narratively some suicidal urges. Internalized Monty said no. 

Why not Bellamy, Madi or her mom? 

Because I think Clarke was not ready to face her guilt over what she had done to them. This was narratively stated when she faced Octavia. He’s not there because she’s afraid that he hasn’t forgiven her and does think she’s a monster. And the drawing with Clarke shocking Madi was shown as three different drawings in three different places in her cel. ALSO was referenced as child abuse by Josephine. She also sacrificed her mother quite a few times. So why Octavia? Maybe because she feels she deserves to be attacked for what she did, and that’s why Octavia showed to be mean to her, but not Bellamy because she couldn’t deal with him being so angry at her. While we DID see Maya attacking her, which was WILDLY out of character for Maya. Even mindspace-Clarke seemed to realize this because the angry Maya couldn’t manage to remain, and soon became a helper figure rather than an enemy. 

So the people in her mindspace were: Jake (helpful), Octavia (antagonistic), Maya (antagonistic then helpful), and Monty (helpful.) She faced her guilt and kind of decided that it wasn’t useful in fixing the situation, so moved on. Josephine, however, was NOT part of her subconscious, and was continuing to manipulate her until her subconscious Monty came to tell her to knock it off. That’s the part of her who knew Josephine was manipulating her. 

You know. You can essentially look at all those mindspace actors as Clarke dressed up like them. Because that’s who they are. 

If however you don’t mean Doylist/Watsonian analysis and instead you mean a concept that I’ve seen in fandom where the writers hate the characters and audience and are creating a story simply for the purpose of causing the most anger and upset and pain in the audience... which, as a writer I simply don’t understand. Do y’all REALLY think that’s what writer’s do? I mean, yeah, we want to jerk on your tears and anxiety and joy, but any good writer is not going to HATE their audience.

Read a GOT rant after the break in which I admit the possibility that this could be what happens

Okay. Okay. This DOES happen. And I hate it. It especially happens with genre stories, where showrunners go for the surface glamour, the hollywood flash and dazzle, the cheap and trite tropes, the unearned twists, the shockers, the blockbusters. But they often don’t respect the genre itself, and intend to use it just to make money. Often they don’t understand the genre, the purpose of it, the meaning of it, the need the audience fills with it. I think this is the way D&D treated GOT, and it’s why I call them bad writers. 

But I’m not just calling them that because I don’t like them or the way the story ended or that my ship didn’t end up together because he murdered her. (I had to stop and shake my head at that ending because of how poorly done it was, but I could have accepted it if it had been told well.) The problem is that they didn’t follow the story, dropped important storylines, ignored the magic system, the political systems, the cultural systems, the religious systems, and the prophecies that had been set into place. This is the essence of the genre, and they just shrugged and ignored it. This, to me, shows disrespect to the genre and the audience. Then, they ignored the character development and narrative development, and this showed disrespect to the characters, story, and audience again. Then, they ignored the real world social and political issues like racism, misogyny, domestic abuse, and this showed that they were just complete and utter assholes who preferred the world the way it is, full of injustice, and want to keep the underdogs under the thumb of the lords and masters. Jackasses. ANYWAY enough about GOT. Fine, fandom is right. Sometimes this is the case and we can leave the possibility that JR will pivot and head the same way as D&D.... but I DON’T THINK SO.

I trust JR because of the narrative choices he has been making. I do NOT think that he hates Bellarke, because the narrative has been bringing them closer and closer together. I do NOT think that he will betray the story he has been telling, because he has systematically been wrapping up various storylines... not always happily, but always in a way that is consistent with the world view presented in the story. Yes, some characters have terrible endings, but it doesn’t seem to me to be useless torture, but rather an exploration of the TRAGEDY of the world that does ACTUALLY sometimes show that people cannot overcome their traumas and weaknesses. It’s sad but it’s true. And he has enough characters with endings that show their strength, even in death, that I think it is not about torturing them. He also has enough characters that learn from their failures and are growing and making better choices. And THEN he gave Harper and Monty a happy ending, and brought Bellamy to the completion of his hero’s journey, and gave Memori an honest and unflinching love story, and HAD the discussions about what it means to do what someone else says even if it’s evil, because you’re following instructions. There’s just too much about BEING a better person and transforming your world for me to believe he’s going to trash the slow development he’s been building.

But I admit that I might be wrong to trust him. The only way to tell is to watch the rest of the show. So we’ll see. 

[incarnateirony]

as an emerging lgbtq+ (i'm 'BT') guy i am so glad you're making the point you made in your last post. I've always gravitated towards Dean because he is so 'imperfect' in his queerness, like me. but he's not a uwu soft queer so apparently that bothers a lot of ppl on here? Especially younger queer women, I've noticed. But a lot of guys, cis and trans, struggle with being attracted to men so much in a way that is simply different (not better or worse) than (1/2)

being wlw, especially depending on one’s generation and region, etc. basically what i’m saying is a lot of the few queer men that there are in the fandom stay quieter as it is almost completely queer women dictating what is and what isnt, and not quite empathizing with the unique struggle many queer men have with internalized homophobia/being Unmanly for being attracted to men. hope this wasn’t too all over the place, ive had this on my mind for a Long time and i’m glad you brought it up. (2/2)

ps: I’m not trying to put down queer women for being a significant part of the fandom. I just really wish the environment of the fandom felt more like somewhere queer men’s voices can be heard better, considering the largest pairing is, needless to say, mlm

Well, first of all, welcome Nonnie. I take it you’re addressing this untitled post addressing intersectionality, representation vs tokenization, represented demographics and just general motivations of those in discussion, yes? (x)

You’ll find this is a longstanding topic of my blog, be it excavating creator commentary people have buried for their own motivations and talked down and around, or dual faceted issues. 

(If you haven’t read the crosslinks on the post you’re addressing, you may want to read The Problem With Dreamhunter (x) It discusses exactly this issue, even if it was written over a year ago at that point, showing just how cyclic this issue is. It talks about MLM/WLW intersectional issues, migrating goalposts, a bunch of show stuff and some of Bobo’s sociopolitical commentary from 2003 about advancing LGBT representation through moderate incremental methods being proven effective at expanding the media presence/platform exponentially above liberal, or more severe/extreme styles)

But when it comes down to it, basically: Yeah, you right.

I didn’t just arbitrarily develop this opinion. I didn’t… just magically tune in to what the LGBT men that literally dodge fandom, for exactly the reasons you say, and know it’s because of the reasons you say – like that didn’t manifest. It came from leaving fandom (un)”safe” spaces. It came from engaging a great variety of LGBT males in real life, many of which engage the content. From observing how they spoke of the content in multifandom servers, or even *why* they chose to avoid speaking up.

And no, I personally didn’t get a read of you, like, insulting LGBT women for their part in fandom. Women engage social media for primetime TV fandoms at an exponential rate above men, so it’s almost unavoidable and it’s nobody’s fault really, but that says nothing for the perpetual habit of drowning out their voices to the fact that– well, they literally abandon engaging.

I’ve seen it enough times it *hurts* me. I shouldn’t *have* to pull my gay writing buddy out of holes to face this, and him still hide silently. I shouldn’t *have* to be the vein of news and information on the show to the bi male friend I have that refuses to touch this fandom. I shouldn’t *have* to even speak up about this. I really do want *you all* to speak up about this, because I can only speak so far, because you’re right: OUR JOURNEYS ARE DIFFERENT.

Hell, even a cis lgbt male vs a trans lgb(t obvious) male have entirely different journeys even though they’re both validly men. These battles are not the same. One community can speak up to defend another, and help hold them up and amplify them if there’s just not enough of them to project the way they need to, and this is something *greatly under respected* in this fandom. Nobody’s holding up the LGBT male voices when actually talking about representation. And you’re right, it’s mostly women, and you’re right, our path is different and our struggles and needs and wants and lives are different. But unless you take a considerable amount of time talking and sharing and learning personally the perspective of the LGBT male community, you’re not… really… helping them speak.

And let it be said, “holding up LGBT male voices” does not and should never equate to “despite having multiple LGBT men saying one thing, I found the one LGBT male saying the thing that matches what I want, who may or may not even actually be in the targeted demographic set of the character we’re discussing representation about, because it’s more than just being bi, it’s entire lives, paths and challenges– but you know, I found the ONE, so fuck the others.” That’s using your friends as tokens and cards. If you want to genuinely add to the conversation, what you do is you introduce your male LGBT friend to the other male LGBT friends and let them have a long conversation to talk out the sources of their disagreements before engaging in conversation.

But drawing a pretty base line collective from all people in the represented demographic, respectfully learning the majority wants and needs and struggles, and helping voice those is pretty key.

Women can sit here all day, and pass around things they’ve been told by other women are woke points, or things that sound progressive and good, and often sort of decontextualized from their purpose (be that the dresswear mentioned shortly hereafter, or what LGBT want/expect/SHOULD want or expect – but in the end, if you’re not sitting down and having dialogues – not just with one, or two, or even three LGBT men – but large handfuls and subsets, able to actually critically examine the differences in LGBT males of gen X, Y, or Z and their lives and stories – if you’re not doing that… If *that* isn’t the core of your discussion values, rather than pass-along buzz vibes– then you’re really not talking representation. You think you are. But you’re not.

There’s the uh. Thing. You noticed. About how women expect the men to engage.

When it comes to young queer women, I’m going to risk pissing some people off, but the long and short of it is (I could probably dig up the link but it’s been an eternity) a while ago they ran a psychological study to figure out why young women were attracted to yaoi, and gay porn, especially what is essentially stereotypical force-role type gay porn. It has to do with blooming attraction, primal fear, and trying to make the men more appealing in a way that does not intimidate them. 

This later manifests into feminizing them, setting twink/bear roles that go beyond into top/bottom, and conflating it with penetration, position, power, dom/sub, fork/spoon, sometimes served with a dose of internalized misogyny being projected into the vessel of whatever twink/sub is positioned, and generally— like, kink culture. Often this is passed with narrowly progressive-masked arguments of “Men should be allowed to be feminine if they want!” rather than a genuine answer to, “Why do you perpetually heterosexually resize, or reframe, and enforce heterosexual structure onto characters that do not meet this mold, and why is that a personal gain to you?” because in the end– it’s a personal gain. And again, at that point it’s not about representation.

Now again, I’m not… shaming anyone for having a kink. But kink/fetish needs/wants have blurred themselves in as if to hedge on equal territory to discussing canon content. Or sprinkling the quite literal fetishized art (power to you if that’s your thing, I guess, even if I do bear discomfort over fetishization of any LGBT demographic, even by another LGBT demographic) and reasoning with dialogue that implies it as being representative, and inserting that into the representation discussion, which *literally* just makes the entire bog muddier, makes the LGBT men trying to speak more easily dismissed in a vat of “just women/fetishists”, it just– it’s Not a Good. I’m… personally not a fan of it. Like at all. A lot of it makes me angry tbh. So I don’t engage. I don’t browse fanfiction. I look at very little art. 

Hell most of the people around here don’t even realize it’s actually a *minority* of LGBT men that choose to engage in penetrative sex, but it’s become a topic of outright obsession around here. There is so much simple… lack of awareness and discussion of the lives LGBT men lead, even by LGBT women because again – we don’t have your path. We can only listen to you. (And BOY have I gotten earfuls from my LGBT male friends absolutely going apeshit banana bonkers over fandom’s obsession with penetration culture, gender role enforcement while feigning it as liberation, and all kinds of other stuff. And that’s what I base most of my talking points on.)

Because if I’m going to talk representation, I’m going to talk about representing the demographic the character is supposed to represent, not molding him into a tokenized wash-over of every single person’s wants. If you’re an LGBT woman that can resonate with Dean Winchester, that’s great. Sometimes representation can be shared. But a character’s origin determines what demo he represents and not all of any given representative’s character’s attributes, methods, functions, anything – not all of it is going to meet any one person’s goals collectively, but the target demographic is inevitably closer to it.

Another point to raise is that it feels like people have lost track of *what* the representation battle is about. It isn’t just about any one person attaching to any one character. It’s about developing a TVscape that looks more representative of the real world, with a fair presence of PoC, of women, of LGBT people of all types, of the disabled community, of people that are even more than one of these, of people with different stories: people. About, well, normalizing it, because it should be normal. About saturating television enough that one day, and that day will not just be tomorrow per convenience, that people won’t be desperate for representation even vaguely in their wheelhouse, that they can turn on and see people of any intersectional type and go– wow, the world finally realizes we’re real. And that in that wide, realistic menu, yes, being able to turn a channel and eventually see someone *just like you*. A day when any show turned on has at least *someone* in your wheelhouse because every show eventually should have some sort of realistic spread, but if you find the *right* show, *there you are.*

That’s how it’s built. We don’t start by footstomping and tokenizing everyone to be vaguely representative of everyone or it doesn’t count because it didn’t work for *them*. We start by sharing truly diverse narratives, each unique to their own, just as diverse as straight stories are, maybe even more. That’s the only way you’re actually going to end up with a TVscape full of The Gays, and full enough to find *explicitly yourself* in there.

Deleting normalized, non-sensationalist text for lacking either visibility or flavor, even if you weren’t the intended demographic for it to speak to, is quite literally contrary to the entire fight.

and tbh?

This shit is why I hate shipping culture.

And I say that as someone who presumably “ships” Dean and Cas, if it’s shipping to address canon bullshit happening in front of you and just watch the show as it folds out without going into denial for *whatever* personal reason. 

There’s a lot of well intended people, most shipping fandom is full of good beans, but as a collective group – skewed by sociopathically manipulated dialogues we can literally track the origins of – have been driven into much of the above while genuinely believing they were doing the right thing, in a long chain of being told this was what and how to fight for, without really stopping and critically examining the nuance of the conversation. Because why would you? Seems to be the popular gay thing to do – while a lot of bisexual people currently hide their commentary via reblog hashtags or hedge awkwardly into an anon box sideways.

That all said, it continues to be my focus. It will never change on this blog. I will never surrender to being pressured, be it by antis or bitters or people just wanting to argue, into pretending things that were text are subtext. I will not move that goalpost. You are real, and you are valid, and you are welcome in my inbox any time, Nonnie, confidentiality guaranteed. Like, DM too.

but lmao like shit, dawg. There’s a reason the LGBT guys I’ve had as writing partners as Dean literally refuse to play with another Cas. That’s not just because I’m a *super aweSOME auTHOr*, it’s because they recognize I do not come from the wing lost to fanfiction, to troll wars, or even to shipping culture, love of a ship be damned. I don’t try to force gender roles on them. I listen when they speak, and often, surprise many with the angle I ever enter discussion or listening from to begin with, because of spending so many years listening to begin with. It’s an intrinsic understanding of why they resonate with the content, not what I can pull some transformative art stuff on or wanting to *make* it into anything else to fit *my* molds. It’s because of being someone engaged to the male perspective, without the need to twist or change a character to be content with it, and being WILLING to hold those challenging conversations.

Listen first. Talk later. But never in front of or over the people you claim to be talking for.