#this episode is so queercoded lol

[teartra]

Never thought a gay relationship between a French gorilla and a German cyborg would make me cry today

[ocelotlesbian]

i've been thinking over this aspect of his character for a while now and i think i have enough material to make a post about it, so...

> genderqueer mitsuba!!

an analysis on mitsuba's peculiar gender expression and queercoding! ( ´∀ ` )

full post under the cut!!

before i begin, a disclaimer: mitsuba is canonically a boy, and i'm not trying to say he isn't!! he can be a boy and also genderqueer. genderqueer folks can still identify with the "binary" labels of girl or boy, since being genderqueer doesn't require anything aside from having a queer experience with gender. and as i'll explain in this post, his gender is pretty damn queer!!!

also for the record i myself am genderqueer. lesbian flavor

now, to start off: the immediately obvious.

it's pretty obvious that mitsuba is the most gender non-conforming character in the entire manga. from his medium length pink hair neatly tied up in a little ponytail, to more subtle details like his hands being drawn similarly to that of the female characters & his occasionally drawn bottom lashes, which no other male characters seem to have.

along with his general "you should not ask me to lift heavy objects" demeanor, all these more feminine details serve to make him distinct from all the other male characters in the manga, putting him in a kind of seperate category consisting solely of him.

and this idea of him being in his own seperate category ties in with other important aspects of his character as well!

for sousuke, it ties into how he was ostracized from his peers for standing out too much, and for no.3tsuba, it ties into how he feels alienated from humans & other supernaturals and feels as though he doesn't belong anywhere. if you think about it, it's all pretty analogous with the queer experience!

and going further with sousuke specifically, the turning point of his character arc was his conversation with kou on the stairs, where kou essentially tells him that he didn't have to try and fit into a polite box to make himself more likeable, and he can just express himself the way he wants to. ...i don't think i need to explain how this sentiment could easily be tied in with his queerness and gender expression lol

now i could go even deeper into how queercoded mitsuba's character arc is, but i think i'll leave it here for now.

another thing i wanna go over is the genderswap episode of the after school hanako-kun anime. now, the events of this episode including him didn't actually happen in the manga, so the canonicity is rather dubious. but i still think it's worth going over!!

this episode deviates from the manga by having mitsuba join hanako & sakura in the genderswap shenanigans. in the episode, mitsuba gets hit with the gender reassignment surgery beam and... well, basically nothing happens.

the joke here is obviously the fact he already looks like a girl, so you wouldn't really have to change anything in a genderswap, but the part i find the most interesting is how he himself didn't notice a change whatsoever.

i'm not sure how the specifics of the genderswap robot work, but i'd imagine he'd notice something was up, right? so to me, this scene just hammers in the fact that he's just kind of unnaffected by / outside of most things relating to gender. he's in his own gay little corner, he's immune to this shit!!

so in conclusion, mitsuba's gender is in fact very queered!! his queerness & gender expression is extremely interlinked with his character arc and motivations of feeling othered from the rest of the world, and i just felt like this needed to be discussed. and also i love him lots. <3

end of post!!! thank you for reading my autistic ramblings ^_^

[syn4k]

What's Mianite?

Mianite was a Minecraft roleplay series started in 2014 by Tom Syndicate and Tucker II_JERIICHO_II! It had two seasons, the second of which started late in 2015 and ended in 2016, and one spinoff series called Mianitian Isles that started in pandemic-era 2020 and ended sometime in 2022 IIRC. It also featured Jordan CaptainSparklez (yep, that CaptainSparklez) and Sonja OMGItsFirefoxx.

The premise of Mianite is that there are three gods: Mianite, god of order, after whom the series is named after, Dianite, god of chaos, and Ianite, goddess of balance. Each god has a champion (or champions), a player who carries out their will on Earth. A main point of tension present in all three series was that the champions were often caught between the bonds they had with each other and their loyalty to their gods, which made for some really damn good moments in all three series.

If that sounds interesting to you, good news, you can totally jump into this blind! I recommend starting with Jordan CaptainSparklez' POV first, since he's a central figure in s1 and involved in basically all the main plot points in s2. He also edited down his livestreams (the entire series was streamed live on Twitch) into shorter episodes with only the relevant clips sticking around. You can find his s1 playlist here, his s2 playlist here, and his Isles playlist here.

Fair warning: Seasons 1 and 2 but especially 1 are very much products of the time they were made in, and while they're pretty chill, some of the jokes and references made come off as dated and off-color today. The R slur is also dropped a total of like, four times over the span of the two seasons but I thought I'd point it out anyways jic. Season 2 also handles themes of abuse, torture, and is just in general a Little Bit (very) Strange.

is it worth watching it? i don't know. i don't know you. however if you can handle the format and the longevity of it (jordan's s1 and s2 povs combined are 200 episodes long), it tells a pretty damn compelling story about how uhhh [checks notes] divinity is found in the most human of places, how morality is farther from black and white than anything you could possibly imagine, and how and why it's important to pay attention to the way people present information and what motives they may have behind not only how they share it but behind why they might share it at all. it's also a testament to how humans will always find ways to stay silly no matter how serious things get around them. and last but certainly not least mianite is the forerunner of queercoded as FUCK characters interactions etc its just So Very, in more ways than one, All The Time.

but also ive had a raging hyperfixation on it for the past several months so who knows if any of that is accurate lol

good luck and have fun, anon :]

[culpeppercheckers721]

Alr I'll bite what are your thoughts on Abe's bi coding. Personally I do read him as bi but I do think it's the inevitable queer reading of 18th century characters rather than intentional

LMAOOO thank you for allowing me to yap about this for a sec my friend 😭

100% get the inevitable queer reading of 18th century characters thing, since I do love having headcanons just for fun even in situations where there was no intentional queer coding because it just makes things more entertaining!!

But when it comes to Abe, honestly the more I’ve watched the show (which is a lot, so I understand why causal audiences also might not see it lol) the more things I see make me go 🤔 I wish I was already done with my massive Google Slides project on the Townhull subtext because I find it so compelling and am convinced it was not ALL a COINCIDENCE 😭 However, to put it in short:

I think considering how Abe’s essentially made to be something of an Everyman character, how he’s always in the MIDDLE of things, how he describes himself as living a DOUBLE-LIFE (don’t get me started on what that means when he does it in this episode 😭) and always seems to be in a GREY AREA as a spy, in between a solider and a civilian, well— I think it’s understandable that his sexuality is meant to exist in a similar ambiguity, and for there to be just enough undertones for him to be “Not Straight”, more than the “normal”.

This is not super coherent since my brain is kind of a mess right now but as a bi person even the subtlest of subtext such as Abe’s means so much to me, and I could go on about specific examples for even longer, and yes, about the Townhull subtext because I’ll never consider it COMPLETELY delusional to say that they were queercoded lmao.

In this case, I’m gonna take a page out of Robert Rogers’s book because I rather love his logic in this scene ;))

[totheseafront]

Hey, are you still an mi high fan? What are your head cannon's and thoughts behind them? Tom is so queercoded/into Dan

I'm totally still a fan and I'll always love the show! :D

I headcanon Tom as gay and autistic (possibly asexual as well tbh.) And I definitely see Dan as bi. I do agree that it's implied that Tom really really likes Dan. As in one episode, it seems like Tom gets jealous because Dan getting all the girls. But in my eyes, Tom is jealous because he's not the one getting Dan's attention. I could also talk about autistic Tom but I won't do it in this post.

Also! I can't remember if it's canon or if I made it up in my head- but Tom being jealous over Keri/Zoe when they're with Dan?

Tom is totally queercoded, yep. He never gets a love interest the way Dan does. Some does ship Tom and Aneisha tho, but to me their relationship is purely platonic.

I think I used to have more specific hcs but I can't think of them rn- I also did start writing a Dan x Tom fanfic once, maybe sometime it will see the light of the day. Here I have my original hcs for some M.I high characters

To finish this post, I'll self promote lol. I post edits on TikTok here and I do have a few M.I High edits 👀

[disasterbijamietartt]

So, in my venture to prove that this show is queer as fuck I’m at a point where I’m definitely reaching, but I still felt like sharing this, since it is such a interesting coincidence I just want to throw it out here for everyone who needs fanfic ideas lol

(Also, in the very unlikely case that I’m actually onto something 🤣)

For my queercoding Jamie post (which I decided not to finish, since I already feel like the Pepe Silvia Meme brought to live) I looked at some of his pop culture references.

Like, Stevie Nicks and Tina Turner were quite obvious—they are gay icons and it is such a cliché that queer guys love female singer-songwriters (and love arguing about who’s the best).

Next I looked at his dialogue with Ted in “Lavender” and since Jamie mentioned Ted Danson, I started to dig a bit into him and his work, to see if there is any interesting nuggets to find.

I have to admit, I’ve never seen “Cheers” or any other show with Ted Danson, so my first instinct was to google “Ted Lasso Ted Danson” and I found some connections to Cheers, especially Sambecca seemed an interesting nod to the series, so I looked up if there was anything queer about Cheers, and learned Ted Danson advocated for a gay coming out storyline on “Cheers” in 1983 (!), which by todays standards is apparently pretty cringe in execution, but for the time was groundbreaking and a risky move for a sitcom that had just started.

And now, just take an educated guess what this episode was about!

breaths in

The episode “The Boys in the Bar” is about a retired pro baseball player’s coming out through his memoir, that disclosed his double life as a womanising athlete and closeted gay man.

Well, we have someone writing a book and a retired football player and …

… make out of this whatever you want 🤡

[south-park-meta]

You think Stan and Cartman are queercoded?.

So with Stan it's a little hard cuz my only endgame ship for him is Style lol. I don't think he's specifically queer-coded or meant to be anything beyond the way that the majority of the characters will operate outside of the hetero-normative mostly based on if it's funny. Adult characters are, on a whole, relatively fluid in their sexuality based on whatever the story needs them to be.

I think it could sort of be argued for that there's some degree of 'coding' based on what the characters recognize in Stan. His masculinity/sexuality is what he gets insulted about the most by characters like Cartman or Randy who see him operating outside of a hypermasculine role. Pussy/fag/etc are generally the ways he's targeted. Spring Break is actually the clearest episode in this regard in recent seasons. There's always little bits of Stan being seen as 'gay', as indicated by Randy's limp-wristed gesture, because of his behavior.

But it's also pretty typical of the show that when this happens, the characters calling him out for this are projecting or are pissed at him and targeting behavior that isn't typically masculine, but also isn't particularly exclusively 'queer', just not in the hypermasculine stereotype. It could equally be argued that the characters think Stan should care about 'seeming gay' because, just how fandom often stereotypes him as a bro jock, there's a big chunk of his outward perception that is sports, that is dating Wendy, even if he has more interests and relationships. BECAUSE of this outward perception of things like, spending two years off dating Wendy and being nervous about her opinion; and having a room full of sports items, liking sports teams, being actively interested in sports, it becomes easier for people who want to bully to try and target when he's acting outside of the heteronormative stereotype.

This is something that could be queer-coded but isn't explicitly queer-coded to me. It's EXPLICITLY bullies targeting things to make a person insecure about. It's possibly but not explicitly connected to these bullies picking up on Stan's not-yet-recognized queer attractions etc.

I personally don't read Stan as the writers intending for him to be queer.

Cartman...I wouldn't call anything with Cartman subtextual lol, so I wouldn't call him queer coded but I do think he's explicitly queer. He has explicit sexual interest, and behaves in explicitly sexually dominating/humiliating ways towards other male characters. He's not good representation because his behavior is consistently tied up in manipulative/abusive behavior (such as blowing Butters/trying to trick Butters into blowing him, making imaginary Kyle blow him in Imaginationland) and is related to him wanting power over or wanting to humiliate other characters rather than anything else. But I do think Cartman has been shown to have controlling and sexual behavior towards other male characters.

[gayofthefae]

I have spent the past weeks randomly, probably every Tuesday? seeing a massive inflow of posts about 911 from you and you've got me. It's happened, I'm here and I'm caving in and I'm asking what is this show?????

What is going on???????

Is this a supernatural magic type show? Is this just a normal drama about firefighters? Is this a slowburn romance show? What is going on, what is this, what is happening?

Who are these dudes I keep seeing on my dash and why do you love them so much lol?????????

Haha, happy to answer! They have the trauma levels of a supernatural show FOR SURE lmao but the show is called 9-1-1, it's a regular-world procedural drama about first responders, mainly focusing on a group of firefighters (but it also has a 911 dispatcher and a police sergeant). And it is VERY much a found family show.

The romance has not gone canon yet but it is VERY popularly shipped and widely believed that it will go canon (there are lots of in-show parallels to other couples on the show, queercoding, and subtext as well as just - unlike many past queerbaits - their general relationship being repeatedly plot central and above all: they have MOMENTUM). Overall, the two are very much treated as life partners by the show and its cast). (Of course, if you don't wanna risk it, I would understand).

I love them because I love a good slowburn, I love friends to lovers, and these two are just adorable in general. They are wonderfully communicative, attached at the hip, and they've built a sort of life together as life partners, like I said, frequently being treated like all other life partners (couples) on the show narratively as well as directly paralleling them (and even being the source of parallels the other couples make to them).

I can't really describe my love for them except by saying they're a hyperfixation, lol, but they check all the boxes of criteria for me to be one: slow burn, communicative, just generally adorable. It's just THE VIBES okay.

This show does a great job at fleshing out individual characters' and their trauma and arcs very well and the two are both wonderful individual people as well as incredibly complimentary in their personalities and mental health arcs (oh yeah, mental health arcs are a BIG thing with this one and they are incredibly supportive partners through it, although there is some angst it isn't contrived). So they really just have an ultimately very sweet and healthy relationship while simultaneously working through things like abandonment issues and such.

Really it's just -GAH!- [note: I want it to be known that I initially mistyped "gah" as "GAY!"]. As far as character arcs go. This ship is "man who wants to be loved x man who wants to allow himself to love". The general state right now is that "not knowing what you've been searching for has been slowly building and under your nose the whole time." Also, the really great general romantic thesis of the show is "you don't find [love], you make it" aka you find a person you're compatible with and then you choose every day to love them by putting in the work and grow with them.

tldr: They are incredibly complementary to one another's mental health arcs, they are a slow burn, they are best friends to lovers, they are life partners, they are communicative and great representation of healthy relationship behaviors not only when you're at your best (but still realistically flawed, just not to a contrived extent), and most importantly, they are just visibly happiest together (Eddie has repeatedly smiled immediately literally just from seeing Buck's face))

Also, if you start watching this show please tell me and post about it for entirely selfish reasons because I love living vicariously through people's first watches. (Warning though if you do watch: Eddie is not introduced until episode 1 of season 2, the 11th episode of the show)

To close out, here is my favorite gif of them:

[alma-screenies]

"jinpei is queercoded", i say into the mic

the crowd... shrugs, to be honest

"he is."

in the last row, raimu ashiya himself

"he is", raimu says, gripping his seat so hard that if it was able to, it'd be bleeding

PREV

NEXT

NEVER trust cats with blue hair and pronouns

and who am i to doubt the best opening in the series?

how come raimu knew about/was interested in jinpei. like was that ever explained or was it just his super atlantian catboy senses?

i keep mentioning him, for some reason!

anyways the way i pronounce his name is "asoogi" instead of "asogi" and i know that's not how you pronounce it but it's too late now. he's asoogi forever

matching pfps for you and your boyfriend, who is not dying, but he's going to leave you to go to space with his mom and a bunch of atlantians AND HE'S GONNA GO "OH I'D BE SO HAPPY TO SEE YOU AGAIN" BUT HE'S NOT GONNA SEE YOU AGAIN SO NOW ALMA HAS TO WRITE FANFIC ABOUT IT BUT SHE DOESN'T FEEL LIKE IT BECAUSE TO REUNITE THEM WOULD BE A BIT COMPLICATED UNLESS I GO WITH THE "time passes way slower in space so like barely a year went on for the atlantians but it's been like centuries on earth" EXCUSE BUT LIKE. WHAT WOULD I DO WITH THAT.

am i the only one thinking that they got more expressive this season? they're using jinpei's ahoge more, that's for sure lol

i am willing to forgive this show's previous sins. because raimu is cute, yes

wouldn't be an episode of "can a cat be queercoded?" without ranto slander

he only says it's cool and he wants to wear one in this instance, so he might

would've been really cute if raimu lent him his uniform and jinpei lent raimu his since raimu said he felt like he stood out in his regular one lol

me too, matarou. me too

i just noticed this is the only post where all the screenshots are from the same episode. raimu is that powerful

specter subs i miss you today every day. you disappeared along with kumako. and i miss you both everyday

maybe your transformation was the friends we made along the way

a tldr of this livewatch from now on by the way

You Are A Child, Though

PREV

NEXT

[flaringgoosebumps]

I know this has already been said somewhere but Byler has already been Murray'd just not in the way he usually does it.

On the way to Alaska he says, "I'm not exactly an expert in parenting but for what little it's worth, I think you did the right thing. The responsible thing. Your children, Bless their mischievous souls, they like to get involved. This way, what? They play too much Nintendo, eat too much junk food, smoke some ganja, pound some beers, experiment sexually. I mean really, what's the worst that can happen."

It's very interesting that he said this because these are all things that mostly the boys on the show have canonically done (with some exceptions)

- Your children like to get involved?? Yes that's literally why anyone is still alive lmao

-Play too much video games? Not specifically Nintendo but s2 opens with Mike literally stealing money from Nancy to go to the arcade. Plus, the series opened with them playing a game that took ten hours and Mike still begged for more time.

-Eat too much junkfood? When El spies on Mike after their break up, there is a table full of junkfood trash beside them, and Mike is chowing down on some Doritos.

-Smoke some ganja? Johnathan and Argyle are stoned out of their wits and barely hold a conversation so that's already going on and usually it isn't long until younger siblings partake too.

-pound some beers? Nancy did that at this age, Lucas did that the episode before (I think)

-Experiment sexually? I was floored that he said this because the only time I've ever heard it was when someone refered to queerness and usually just as innocent as kissing. And I find it interesting that he said it because they left before Mike even tried to make up with El and the last thing they saw was her storming to her room, that only seems to point to Mike and Will since Johnathan and Argyle were almost too stoned to function.

Murray had Will on his investigation board so I can only assume that he looked into their lives quite a bit, at least enough to draw the conclusion that it was a possibility that Will could've been hate-crimed. And for this man, who was previously a total recluse that held nearly everyone that stepped on his doorstep at gunpoint to zoom over to California asap when there is just the mere idea that Hopper might still be alive and Joyce needs his help, means that he's developed an emotional closeness with Joyce. At least. Especially since he's willing to be on the phone with her for a long period of time and yell in a panic when she gets quiet. Which means, there is a possibility that he could know. He knew about J4ncy and J0pper, be probably picked up on Byler immediately but this is just a theory.

I won't even get into my biased perspective that Murray feels queercoded and seems to have no interest in women but russian men and that alone would be enough for him to know about Byler since it would be an experience he would have had as a gay man.

Anyway, the point is, Byler has already been Murray'd and I love that for us lol

[cutemeat]

What up I haven't watched any sunny for like 3 months so my mind is a perfectly smooth blank slate - what seasons/eps are you poking around at most rn, I'll go watch them too :)

!!!! OOO yes ok i have a few eps ive been specifically fixated on esp since s15 came out...

i have been dissecting "The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award" and "Gets Quarantined" because they really reflect the writing of season 15 and I think its probs intentional.. mostly the way the gang describes 'playing the game' in the Award ep with the bright lights, fun colors, and funny banter... reflects the visual/surface-level aesthetics and writing of s15 and the subtext of Gets Quarantined (I wrote up an essay on this but forgot to post it so hopefully ill get around to that soon LOL) is very useful when reading s15! so I've been rlly into those eps ... I ESP RECCOMEND COMPARING THE ENDINGS OF "GETS QUARANTINED" AND THE S15 FINALE IF U WANT.. the whole thing abt 'creating a visual harmony' and how the gang does exactly that w audio/visuals at the end of Gets Quarantined and how they Very Much Do Not attain harmony at the end of s15 despite the framing making it seem that way at first glance is just so... so good. mwah.

but also s3 as a whole i have been rlly into the past few months! it's just so great cuz I think s3 perfectly captures most of who these characters are at their core, obv not EXACTLY cuz they were always hiding shit but its so so close... esp when u watch s3 then jump to like s15 u can see so clearly the kind of ppl they're PRETENDING to be in later seasons compared to who they really are in earlier seasons... but also how frank is basically the opposite cuz while the younger half of the gang builds up their facades over the years, frank's facade fades away!!!

and ive also been rlly diving into s13 lately... like oh my god there's so much to that season that I feel like I never see anyone rlly talk abt?? like.. i think its just a time thing. like an episode from season 7 is gonna be a lot more beloved than an ep from s13 by default I think cuz we've just had more Time with it... but man s13 has some rlly good depth in a lot of places. also I just have a good tolerance for 'bad writing' ig so I don't care </3

and lastly ive been obsessed with 'Mops Twice' !!! I've been trying to rlly get a good reading done on that ep... currently, I'm rlly fixated on the ep's use of the color red and esp how its used on the lips of both female characters?? wondering if its sort of a play on the concept of a 'red herring' esp since the color red was used in that kind of way in The Sixth Sense which mac n charlie make a big deal over in s5... idk I just feel like that's another instance where newer seasons don't get as deep analysis but there's a lot there to pick apart!! (my main theory is charlie is an extremely unreliable narrator who makes himself out to be the underdog/hero/victim in a similar fashion to how the narrative of Fight Club can be read... n he makes everyone else out to be the villains in very stereotypical ways complimenting noir tropes.. like deetress being the sorta femme fatales.. macdennis being queercoded villains... idk there's just a lot LOL)

TL;DR... "The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award" & "Gets Quarantined" from S9, Seasons 3 & 13, and "Mops Twice" from S14 have been my main focuses as of late!

[jellybeanium124]

I watched the first 8 eps all in one go after being thoroughly convinced by tumblr gifs (9 and 10 hadn't released yet). I remember during one of those first flashbacks in ep 1 when we see baby stede pick flowers I was like "oh so he's gay lol. not actually of course they don't really mean it but they are coding him so hard right now. do they even know they are queercoding him?" and then in the "you wear fine things well" scene I was like "lol wut if they kissed sadbvgjlfh they'd never go there." and then on the DAY eps 9 and 10 dropped I open tumblr like a dumkopf because I thought the season ended with episode 8 and the first fucking thing on my dash is a gifset of them kissing and I'm just like "NO FUCKING WAY. NO WAY. ABSOLUTELY NOT." and rush to finish the season. incredibly unreal experience. I believed with my whole heart that it was all somewhere between unintentional queercoding and maybe queerbaiting but it was INTENTIONAL and REAL and the show runner made them gay on PURPOSE!!!! fucking historic.

watching the kiss scene in 1x09 and feeling my heart come close to exploding all over again. like. aughhhh. nothing can ever ever ever change the feeling of watching that happen in march 2022 and not quite believing the show you've been saying "haha gay" to the whole time is actually serious gay.

[4x01]

Is there a real reason why i think of ben edlund as the one who mostly queercoded dean(like before 4x01 and after) or am i just a fan and took note when he wrote episodes its kind of driving me bananas hopefully this isnt a lame ask i just have noone to talk to about spn cos even tho my partner watched 9 seasons he hates television lol

bedlund stated in commentary once that dean could be bi! and is the only writer/producer to ever have said that! he didn’t use the exact word but he was talking about the scene with aaron and said that his flustered response opens an opportunity for dean for “love in all places” so you know. code for bisexual

he’s one of the writers that’s consciously aware of gay subtext when it’s there and he’s included gay people in a good number of his episodes + i believe some things outside of spn? so i do like to think it was on purpose, and if not then he certainly isn’t against the idea. i mean he drew a little destiel doodle once after he left the show🥺

[chasingfictions]

Hi sorry i so desperately want to send this from my sideblog babygirlgiles bc I already went insane about your edit in the tags which gives some Hashtag Context, but I just saw your Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong edit and I’m losing my mind over it omg. Like please feel free to interpret this as free reign to like share any and all thoughts about it or how you made choices for it or anything, but I was also curious how you interpreted the line about mistaking these walls for skin? I’ve always read it as kind of constraining (if that makes sense?), walls being something hemming in the “you” being addressed, it just feels almost claustrophobic. But the way you did it complicates that a lot more I think and gives it so much more nuance!! I’m going insane thinking about it and could probably ramble for ages about all the different readings your edit opens up for me (especially bc the pairing of “the room with everyone in it” as the walls, and then the walls being in that final moment of Chosen) but instead I thought I’d ask you if you wanted to ramble about it lol

Sorry if this is deranged :) and if this is a truly “the curtains are just blue bc they’re blue” moment then whoops :)

hi hello i love this ask!!! also both ur urls fuck

ok But basically I think the way I was interpreting that line in my post -- and obviously there are many different ways to interpret it! -- is that for the speaker, they’re viewing their body as a kind of structure, as a hodge podge stitched together of various different elements. like going from “the most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother’s shadow falls” to “here’s the house with childhood whittled down to a single red trip wire.” Or later the repetition of “the most beautiful part of your body” again directly abuts where the speaker describes a room. and that distance from the physical form exists again at the top of the poem, with the bit about how the spine won’t remember its wings. and that being linked to the father’s role in the speaker’s bodily makeup sort of by the transitive property makes it also about the house, because the speaker’s mother is linked to the house.

which I think is really true of buffy as a show— the idea of the self being made up of many different pieces. like I think you can read the whole show as a map of Buffy’s psyche — which is an idea I’m sure I got from somewhere else but I can’t quite remember where. most likely from @impalementation’s meta though . like in restless, with the core scoobies literally being represented as Buffy’s mind, heart, and spirit, which then becomes a metaphorical framework you can apply to the rest of the show. or how buffy keeps acquiring shadow selves in other characters — notably cordelia, faith, and spike. or how someone like dawn is literally stated by the narrative to be a part of buffy. “normal again” plays with this too — the idea that the scoobies and sunnydale can be read as a metaphorical map of Buffy’s psyche . they’re her insides. Which isn’t to say I take normal again to literally mean that buffy is imagining the whole show. rather that it’s just another sheet of vellum you can lay on top of the rest to deepen the reading

so the “here’s the room with everyone in it,” is like, buffy is the room with everyone in it. The show and the person. all those people in that room, in that shot from family, they’re pieces of her. tara and anya have less clear roles, but I do think that by being the partners of her spirit and heart, they become a part of that framework. and even, again, the episode, the line "we're family," ties us back into the mother and father of it all for this poem, right? and it’s not just that buffy has a fragmented self for no reason!!! i think it can be directly read in conjunction with her queerness, right? Like, being the slayer is so queercoded all over the place . BUT, in the context of this poem, I think the queerness at play here is largely in conjunction with parental reactions to queerness. Buffy comes out to her mom and her mom kicks her out of the house. Buffy is taken to a world where her friends are literally figments of her imagination, and in that world her mother and father still love her and are still alive. Buffy’s mom institutionalized her when she first heard buffy talk about being a slayer—and that’s a huge part of queer history and queer tragedy, is that same thing happening to our community when we’re found out. it’s also this post from @slayer-pride-parade — diversity win! Buffy’s metaphorical heart mind and spirit are all attracted to women! — and it’s also the fact that her shadow selves all can be read to represent that repressed attraction. which I’m not gonna go in depth here about bc my entire blog is about how her shadow selves are a representation of her queerness lmao. that’s basically my whole btvs meta tag.

SO, long story short, I feel like the “mistake these walls for skin” is about like, buffy being able to accept that she isn’t just a bunch of pieces stitched together all wrong, she isn’t just a self who needs to be fragmented apart into separate pieces because the whole of her is too dangerous, too queer, wants too much. and this happening at the final moment in chosen when a) she's just changed forever the status of what it is to be a slayer, both for herself and for future slayers. she's taken the loneliness out of it and replaced it with queer community. and b) she's just had this reconciliation moment with the latest in a long line of her shadow selves -- one of her last acts on the show is to tell spike, her shadow, i love you, and that shadow's last act is save the world. (which kind of takes us back to the joyce of it all. spike being there at that first coming out, spike being embroiled in motifs of home). but that's why i chose that moment to end on -- buffy is obviously a show about a thousand things but one of those is the journey to self acceptance, self understanding, self love, at the risk of sounding buzzwordy. which is why i love that the show goes past 5x22, which is why the show couldn't go past chosen. because this was the central narrative question we've been circling around from the beginning: how do we get buffy to a place where her body isn't just the terrifying haunted house she lives inside of, but where it’s her. and it is. it finally is.

[deanwasalwaysbi]

Matt Baume did a video on Divine and John Waters. and their breakthrough film, 'Pink Flamingos'

The movie has at least two references in Supernatural, in Seasons 2 and 10. I could have SWORN I've done I post on who these two are, but maybe I actually had just talked about how they were used to queercode ash on the @escapingpurgatorypodcast and never published it. In case you ever wanted to know wth Ash meant by "on it like divine on doggie dookie" - Matt's deep dive on Pink Flamingos starts at the 5 min mark.

Who is Divine? Why was she picking up dog dookie? & WHY WAS ASH REFERENCING HER?!

When you start to notice the queercoding of Ash yet they still called us clowns:

What does it all MEAN? I was lucky enough to be invited to discuss the queercoding of Ash in Episode 2x02, Everybody Loves a Clown this week with the lovely Amy and Annabelle from @EscapingPurgatoryPodcast

and really - who doesn't love a Heller Clown 🤡? (Sam, the answer is Sam) Listen Here!

[wigglebox]

also, like, the queer rep on tvd was non existent??? there was maybe like one gay witch once and then they killed him off??? (i think, dont remember to clearly tbh). oh, and caroline's gay dad who also was villainized and killed off in such a weird way wherein he tried to save/kill vampire!caroline despite the fact that vampirisim is basically a well-known metaphor for otherness/queerness, yet he, a gay man, couldn't accept his daughter. i mean, the show was full of ancient vampires yet nobody ever seemed to experiment with their sexuality, smh, that show would be so different if its first season was being written right now. actually, klaus and stefan should have made out during stefan's evil arc, that would have been like his drowley summer of love era

but anyway, that writer should be very familiar with what the cw does/does not allow in terms of queer characters, especially on its older shows. yeah, roswell does have a gay couple pretty central to its show, but that's also a show that premiered in, like, 2018 and started its pilot with the audience knowing both characters were gay/bi (idk what they identify as, I only ever watched like the first three episodes). its a completely different ballgame from what spn had going on and is, like you were saying, a relationship built on continual drama, rather than being a slowburn built up over a decades long interplay of queercoding and subtext.

i just dont get trying to flex on the supernatural writers like, "oh if i had been doing it..." without actually watching the show or knowing the context of 15x18. smh, so annoying

so i learned who this person was [not anon but the person i was complaining about] and it turns out they're a bros before halos bros-only former spn fan, probably why they are 'seasons behind' on the thing and have a bad take lol.

but yeah like, the only knowledge i have of TVD is that Jenny Nicholson video on it and yeah i think she higlighted how the father was gay but you never saw his partner and then his arc with caroline was basically a conversion therapy plot and then he refused to be a vampire in order to save his life. and then the two witches who blow up in their car, and then some other dude who saw a guy named 'david' once but we never see his partners on screen.

so like TVD is pretty shitty with rep — and yes, SPN had the 'lol no homo' jokes especially in the earlier seasons and certainly doesn't get a pass from the queer rep critical eye, but damn. like you said, roswell is a NEW show. its queer characters have been crafted from the beginning. SPN's /destiel/ stuff really was organic and was built up on — and dean has been a character since the beginning of the second president bush administraetion like —

i do find it egregious this person, who seemingly didn't give two shits about destiel in the first place, is trying to sounds smart — when she was booted from roswell anyway xD

anyway. her take is stupid. i get some frustration with it being at the end, the love confession, but people already know that i personally found no fault with that because i wanted it to be at the end. the thing that CW fumbled was that ending. THAT was the act of cowardice, not 15x18. Thanks Carina MacKenzie.