#versus rewatching arcane and seeing all those subtle beautiful ship-launching signs

[tseecka]

We started watching Castlevania: Nocturne last night (2 eps left) and it kinda coalesced something in my brain wrt the wank about Jayce and Viktor in Arcane.

Like, fandom and media in general has progressed to this point where I feel like we are no longer really living in an absolute dearth of representation. Like I see videos on my TT algorithm breaking down "are these shoes worth watching just for the lesbian/gay/GNC content" and there are just. So many thumbnails in the background. And certainly there can always be more, and there always SHOULD be more, but it's not nearly as dire as it was when I was growing up; using Brokeback as the watershed when "gay stuff" entered mainstream media consciousness, it's been less than 20 years and absolutely exponential growth.

So I no longer find it a moral failing on the part of creatives when explicit queerness doesn't appear in every place you might expect it; in many cases there is still queer rep present, besides.

All of this to say: once, knowing that creatives behind a project support or even champion readings of characters and their relationships as queer, but are unwilling to depict it on screen, is something I would have categorized as cowardice. Now, though, I don't find it carries the same weight.

I don't NEED Trevor and Alucard (or Trephacard tbh) to be explicitly canon. I don't need that level of commitment from the creatives to know that they are on my side. Was it hinted at excessively in OG Castlevania? Yep! Did the depiction of Alucard as bisexual, and participating willingly in a threesome during a period of loneliness and separation from Trevor and Sypha, imply a whole host of things (and launch a thousand fanfics)? Absolutely! Was I hoping to get some sort of explicit canonization in Nocturne? Yeah, I definitely was!

But it's not there, and I don't mind; and the reason I don't mind is because I know the creatives behind Powerhouse's Castlevania adaptations are on my side. I know Sam Deats ships the hell out of them. I know that when Alucard says things about being in love before, or about the cost of erasing names from the narrative, it's intended to grant permission--not needed or looked for, but appreciated nonetheless--to superimpose Trevor and Sypha onto his words.

We aren't being admonished and told, "It's not canon, it could never happen, you are interpreting it wrong!" It's a wink and a nudge; it's maybe not explicitly canon,but it's also not NOT canon, and it's being done in a way that makes clear it is not cowardice preventing them from making a bold statement.

It's something Castlevania has done really well, and something that I think some individuals on Arcane fumbled. We aren't necessarily living in a world, anymore, where failure to confirm and canonize queer relationships on screen is inherently homophobic or dangerous or rooted in archaic ways of thinking. No one had to come out and say Jayce and Viktor were 100% in love. They just had to not say they absolutely weren't.

(And maybe I'm reading way too much into the Deats' support of Castlevania fans and the Trephacard shippers, and I'm projecting; but at the end of the day that's still the image presented to me, and it makes me feel very safe while watching the show and crying every time Alucard mentions "Trevor" or "Belmonts", because while permission to ship or interpret has never been necessary, it's still nice to have.)