#and will isn’t the horrible gay rep they say he is because his story isn’t finished yet either | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

all-this-panic-still-no-disco · 2 years

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I heard that you were putting out a new thomastair fic. Do you mind telling me what's it about?

ok lets go lets fuckin do this. bear with me here because it’s complicated as fuck.

so, we begin with alastair carstairs on a bright afternoon. he’s angry. cranky. just lost a case and is pissed at a client. about to smash his coffee mug. (alastair is a barrister, which is just fancy british for lawyer.) so, faced with the possibility of smashing his coffee mug or doing something about his Rage™️, he calls thomas and says, ‘can you get over here and fuck me, please’

spoiler alert! thomas and alastair have been hooking up for eight fucking years after accidentally ending up at the same uni.

thomas comes over, they fuck, it’s very cute and very sexy, but thomas has to leave the next morning as he has a class to teach. (he’s a professor of classics at london college university)

alastair goes back to work, stress and anger freshly fucked out of him, and takes up another case. a young uni student just inherited a fuck-ton of money from his grandfather is having his inheritance sued over the fact that his grandfather was unaware that his grandson was gay and if he did know, he wouldn’t have left him so much money. total bullshit, but the family is rich and they have some serious pull.

so alastair says fuck this, let’s get you your inheritance. he works his fucking ass off and halfway through the case’s first day in court, the prosecution brings up alastair’s ‘impartiality’ on the issue of him having a sexual relationship with another man.

surprise surprise! the daily mail just published an article on alastair’s ‘scandal’ of daring to take a case where a young gay man is targeted for being gay. the case is pretty high profile because of the family’s status. (alastair is also a fucking good lawyer.) pictures are included in the article of him and thomas kissing and getting pretty close to fucking in alastair’s living room. they’re both covered enough in the photos, but they’re a horrible violation of privacy and the whole thing is super shitty.

alastair freaks the fuck out and the trial is adjourned, and he runs home to find thomas in his apartment waiting for him, because years ago alastair gave him a key. (they’re totally just hooking up guys)

alastair’s ‘scandal’ soon becomes vaguely trending. all of their friends find out and it’s fucking chaos. alastair is trying his very best not to loose it but he’s not doing very well.

the worst part isn’t the homophobia of it all or the horrific mess of his private acts being posted online, it’s that his career is pretty much ruined. despite having done nothing wrong, even the slightest rumor of a barrister being not 100% bad rep free means he won’t get hired, or at the very least not as much. people don’t want a scandal-associated lawyer because it might sway the jury against their favor. why contract alastair when there’s plenty of other sex-scandal free options?

so alastair’s freaking out about his job when thomas presents this wonderful idea: fake date.

(i fucking know, right?)

it’s actually pretty smart. fake dating will turn the narrative around; suddenly alastair isn’t the barrister who had some torrid affair, he’s a man who’s private life has been grossly invaded, which is the truth. if they give the story the gloss of a committed relationship and hearts and rainbows, alastair won’t be painted as some overly sexual gay man stereotype. he’ll just be a man in love.

they both acknowledge how shitty it is that they have to do this, but agree. they’ll fake date until the trial ends, which alastair will probably win now that the prosecution has been exposed as cheating, homophobic fucks, and everything will be solved. thomas will also stay at alastair’s apartment through this time for totally ridiculous reasons that aren’t true and it’s just because they want to be near one another.

there’s only one problem.

alastair has been in love with thomas for years and despite knowing his feelings are somewhat reciprocated, (he’s a fucking idiot and thinks thomas’s feelings are a surface level crush and a side effect from fucking), he refuses to do anything about it. he doesn’t think he’s good enough for thomas and doesn’t want to wreck thomas’s life by dating him for real. (yes, he’s being self-sacrificially stupid but this is alastair, guys, what did you expect.)

to make matters worse, thomas, idiot and piner extraordinaire, has been fully in love with alastair since he was eighteen. he kept hooking up with alastair all this time because it was the only way he could be near him.

so we have alastair, in love with thomas but pretending he’s just interested in him for sex, and thomas, who’s fully fucking in love and really bad at hiding it. these two idiots are now fake dating and lying to all their family and friends for the sake of alastair’s career.

bomb, meet lighter. things are about to go boom. i swear, this fic has everything i could cram into it.

angst: angsted.

pining: cranked to eleven.

domestic fluff: sweeter then marshmallows.

sex: hot and dirty as fuck.

welcome to my fucking disaster golden egg.

so far, it has over eighty thousand words and it’s not even fucking done yet.

also, i lowkey think it’s the best thing i’ve ever written and i’m hella excited to share it with you guys. i’m gonna stop typing now bc my thumbs hurt and kudos to you if you read this far. 😚 my current plan is to post the first chapter sometime around august, so get ready!

lots of love,

liza💖

#thomastair #thomas lightwood #alastair carstairs #tlh #tsc #the last hours #the shadowhunter chronicles #chain of gold #chain of iron #chain of thorns #fanfiction

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constellaj · 3 years

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just ran into your art today and. would you like to elaborate on your gay lucky in love rewrite 👀

boy would i

as always shoutouts to @crystalfloe for pitching + workshopping w me on this, ESPECIALLY on this one since it was mostly her idea!

we open up with a shot of shadow circling through amity park, looking in the windows of various citizens. danny is face-down, fast asleep; valerie is repairing some gear; tucker is being a gamer; sam is watching a horror movie; paulina is also watching a horror movie. shadow passes by all these houses and gets more and more annoyed, until he peeks the window of a large, elaborate house:

dash has drawn the curtains, turned the lights off, turned a fan up. this is his deep dark secret. he’s sitting on his bed, face lit by the dim rose glow of his laptop. the volume is turned down so low but the viewer still sees and hears him whisper along to the movie: “but we could never be together, jessica...” “but... I love you...” he’s watching a HORRIBLY cheesy hallmark romcom.

but of course nobody can KNOW he’s into chickflicks and romcoms! he’s a tough football man and it would trash his rep if anyone knew he secretly craved those deep but silly romantic stories... the tenderness, the love...

shadow has specifically been looking for a romantic.

shadow slips in and ‘possesses’ dash. possesses in quotes, because, well, even though dash is dumb and therefore easy to possess, shadow is ultimately a glorified dog, and not a fully sentient ghost; he doesn’t have any total agency in dash, and the most he can do is mess around with his emotional and hormonal balance. shadow is DISMAYED, upon entering, that dash’s deep romanticism is so repressed, and so immediately gets to work digging it out of the recesses of his brain, putting it in the forefront.

(see, what danny and the audience will learn later is, shadow is a ghost that subsists off of love. romantic love especially. he first found a ‘host’ in johnny (before he died!) because johnny and kitty were madly, ridiculously in love, and johnny especially admired kitty beyond words. they still do love each other, of course! but like all healthy relationships, they’ve learned to take breaks, and they have a ‘break week’ once every few months.)

(this, naturally, drives shadow up a WALL; after a certain level, displays of romance become like dog treats, and shadow has been downright spoiled by the overabundance of love between the two. when they take a BREAK WEEK and aren’t constantly showering each other (and therefore him!) with affection, he needs to go find another host, because clearly they do not love him and have forsaken him. they kick miette.)

since shadow’s prime host for so long has been johnny, his understanding of a few... norms... are bleeding over. dash shows up to school with a leather jacket and a motorcycle (his family’s rich, of course he’s had one). his hair is slicked back and the cologne is overpowering. while danny and others think it’s just another asshole stage of dash, kwan (as well as the popular kids, but kwan especially) notices something’s wrong. it’s not quite... dash.

yeah, he’s happy-- well, he’s also strangely flirty with everyone (shadow is testing the waters, trying to find out who is the best match). and kwan LOVES that he’s happy. but he’s a little too daydreamy, he laughs a little too long. he is having horrible luck all day, but he just keeps taking it in stride. dash is concerned with appearances, but this is the first time he’s put in effort like it was for other people to see. he’s a little too suave. his eyes reflect just a little too much light.

and then-- luck of luck-- shadow finds the big name repressed crush.

fenton! of course!

danny did NOT want to deal with dash towering over him and slamming him into the wall, but he didn’t KNOW how to deal with dash leaning over him and telling him he looked cute. danny’s flustered! of course he is! well, yeah, dash is an asshole, he knows that, yeah he’s a stuck up rich kid, YES SAM, he knows this (sam is not fooled by a little hair gel and some high heeled leather boots), but you can’t deny he’s, well, built. and he’s weirdly suave? and nice. he’s actually being really nice. what no of course DANNY hasn’t had a crush on DASH this whole time or anything. shut up.

the fact that dash asks him to meet him in the woods at lunch (because sam, jazz, and even tucker are increasingly concerned with dash just making moves on danny, afraid it’s some new form of abuse; and lancer keeps perceiving it as bullying since that’s their dynamic and breaking it up) and he GOES is just. well. that’s unrelated isn’t it.

they kiss and danny is starting to maybe think dash just had a homophobic middle school experience like everyone else when- his GHOST SENSE GOES OFF. RIGHT HERE? RIGHT NOW??? (gee what could be causing it?) dash cracks a joke about him using too many breath mints and danny panics, bullshits an excuse, and runs off to transform and find the ghost.

dash thinks he’s been rejected and almost shakes out shadow’s possession from the sheer dismay, but shadow doubles down. no, no, we can find another crush. somewhere.

...oh hey! the ghost boy!

time to double down on the ghost aesthetics.

danny’s just finished fighting kitty (”where’s your boyfriend” “that’s none of your BUSINESS!”) when there’s a motorcycle rev underneath him. there’s... dash, again, but.... something feels very, very wrong.

danny lands, cautious. “hey phantom... you into biker dudes?” “don’t you have... a boyfriend...” “heee sorta dumped me in the woods”. and then danny gets close enough for his ghost sense to go off. and it clicks.

“dash, you’re possessed”

this is the ONE THING that shadow can’t have. this could be the perfect romance, and THIS GHOSTCHILD thinks he knows more about ROMANCE than SHADOW??? PSH. cue fight scene! dash of course is grappling with both not wanting to hurt phantom, but wanting this ghost out of his system, because of COURSE he’s possessed geez why else would he want to kiss FENTON of all people-- but shadow REFUSES to leave, slowly building more and more monstrous elements onto dash, darker eyes and claws, erasing his legs until it’s not dash as much as it is a large shadow monstrosity with dash at the center.

danny eventually realizes he needs a new strategy and runs for it. after a decent amount of bickering with sam/tuck, they realize that the only ones who would know how to tame shadow are.... kitty and johnny.

turns out, when shadow went missing, kitty NOTICED. (johnny didn’t! he was having a fun alone time working on his bike with loud music.) this is bad. why? well, johnny is NOT a very powerful ghost. in fact, he’s sort of the opposite. he and shadow have a symbiotic relationship of sorts; it’s shadow’s residence in him that gives him any powers at all, like the basic healing factor a ghost has, or phasing, or flying. without shadow he’s essentially a zombie, who can still be hurt in the ghost zone. NATURALLY, kitty decided to run off and retrieve shadow (because this isn’t the first time he’s run away on break week, always throwing a tantrum) before anything horrible could happen to Johnny; this is what she was doing in Amity in the first place

this is the part of the story where i reveal that the ending isnt fully fleshed out yet. in the rough conversation right it ended up with kitty and johnny trying to FORCE shadow back into johnny, and they’re getting annoyed by it, and kitty goes “well this wouldn’t be a problem if YOU weren’t so LOVING AND SENSITIVE” and johnny goes “well i wouldn’t LOVE YOU so much if you weren’t BRILLIANT and BEAUTIFUL” and they have a whole argument like that. its very funny. and shadow ends up still running away and possessing dash again.

ah, in typing this out, i have figured out an ending!

the above fight and run away happens, and there’s two endings: one where shadow possesses dash, and one where shadow possesses danny. in both, of course, the other party realizes the only way to get shadow out is through making shadow feel safe enough to leave, aka... flooding the room with romance. if dash is possessed, danny and co. realize that danny’s the prime candidate to... be the suave lil boy. if DANNY is possessed, sam and tucker begrudgingly explain that, uh, yeah, phantom might have a crush on you, he’s just really controlling of his emotions. (also kwan! kwan definitely plays a part if dash is possessed, maybe even in saying “uh... he has a bigger crush on Fenton. can you guys get him instead?” and danny. explodes)

blahlbahblah luring shadow out by being gay happens and shadow gets scooped back up by the 13s. as much as the previous argument is funny it might also be very funny if johnny literally noticed none of this, and kitty shows up like ‘you lost this’ and johnny is like. ‘...shadow? when did you leave’. anywho.

that’s the concept! the MAIN difference is that johnny and kitty actually have a very healthy and sweet relationship, and the conflict, ironically, comes from the fact that they love each other TOO much. i do love ‘dash finds out’ reveals but as far as an episodic romp goes, this might not be the best ep for him to discover the secret in. however in a oneshot or something of course you could slot that in there excellently i believe.

#danny phantom #dash baxter #fic #ish... sort of. not really i guess LMAO #ask #dashposting #lucky in love #johnny 13 #kitty 13 #Anonymous #adpRewrite

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crossdressingdeath · 3 years

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to continue off of the anon talking about jc stans downplaying jc’s canon homophobia, i wonder if it’s partly because they view the homophobia present in the plot and in character behavior as a flaw of the novel rather than an integral part of the romantic conflict and character motivation

like, i’ve seen plenty of takes in this fandom around the idea that cql is ‘better’ because its world exists without homophobia (which they never acknowledge is because of censorship 😬). i’ve even seen people pass around edited versions of the translation “without the homophobia” as if removing those scenes doesn’t actually affect anything at all in the story and in our understanding of the characters.

i don’t think all jc stans or only jc stans have this take but law of large numbers there is definitely some overlap and i really think these attitudes contribute to each other. a person already predisposed to ignore the flaws of jc also gets it into their head that his homophobia isn’t even his flaw but the author’s. just another instance of horrible mxtx showing her biases :///. then they absorb this weird idea that jc’s flaws are actually a result of bias from the author and that jc himself (as if he is anything more than a literal construct made by the person they are determined to dislike) is a victim of her just truly awful thoughts :////////

Yes! It’s a big problem, where people fail to realise that a work containing something is not the same as that work supporting something. Personally I suspect that with MDZS in particular the issue is that the people making this argument have come to the conclusion that JC is the “hero” and so always right and correct; if JC is always Right And Just in the narrative and JC is homophobic, clearly we’re supposed to conclude that homophobia is Right And Just! This is, of course, incredibly stupid, but here we are. And as you say alternately they’ve decided that JC’s homophobia isn’t his flaw, it’s the author’s, because there’s no way an author could give a character a belief they don’t share or anything. There are of course other explanations for why people would hate the canon gay couple and stan the only openly, violently homophobic character who doesn’t learn better by the end of the novel while calling him their “homophobic gay king” and insisting he’s the only good gay rep, but... well, let’s not get into that.

With CQL in particular it’s... almost funny, because the subtext makes it very clear that unlike in the novel (where LWJ is punished for, y’know, treason) CQL’s LWJ is beaten for... having feelings for WWX. Meaning homophobia is in fact real and present in CQL’s universe. In fact it’s more present, even with the removal of all textual gay content meaning that all textual homophobia is also cut; remember that the Lan sect canonically isn’t homophobic, or at least is not-homophobic enough to take zero issue with their heir marrying a man beyond “Wangji why that one”. Meanwhile in CQL they’re straight-up beating him for it! And yet CQL has no homophobia in its setting? What, because it changes it so that JGY just accused MXY of harassing QS instead of going for the triple whammy of harassing his married half-brother? Because JC doesn’t outright call WWX disgusting for hugging a man? That is not how it works. Cutting the gay from everything except subtext is not the same as the setting not being homophobic!

People really do fail to realise that... the antagonists being homophobic or using homophobia to achieve their ends isn’t the same as saying that that’s a good thing? Yes, the MDZS universe contains homophobia, and it’s fine to not really enjoy a work that contains homophobia at all. But it never appears as a lasting trait in characters we’re supposed to root for, and when it appears at all in those characters it going away is an important part of their development. See JL; him going from being disgusted by WWX’s flirting with LWJ to demanding that if WWX is going to be Like That he should at least stay loyal to LWJ to just grumbling a bit over seeing his uncle being lovey-dovey is basically giving us a clear metric for his growth as a character! Honestly I’d take a work where homophobia exists in the setting but it’s clearly set up as a negative trait that only shows up in the heroes as something they need to grow out of over a work where homophobia supposedly doesn’t exist but people still seem weirded out or disgusted by gay relationships any day.

#mdzs #cql negativity #anon #asks

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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(WLW anon) I really don’t like the “bad rep is better then none at all”. I hate that. We should want good rep, because bad rep has been used time and time again by homophobes as to say we shouldn’t get representation. To me it’s not “gay can have the same flaws as het”, it’s “fix the flaws in the het”. Also I know Renora being independent was a good, I was just saying in comparison BB. Also, yes, they were separated, but also didn’t stop thinking about each other. Especially bad with Yang.

Indulge me for a moment because I want to take a trip down memory lane and list some—just some—of the queer rep that has been important to me over the years:

Ellen comes out both as herself and as her character… years later, she’s a hated millionaire who is criticized for how she treats her staff

The wildly influential Buffy gives us two women entering a loving relationship… except then Tara is killed off, Willow goes evil for a time, and Buffy comes under fire for Joss Whedon’s everything

The beloved and respectable headmaster of one of the most popular book series ever published is revealed to be gay… except it doesn’t count because it wasn’t in the text and now all of Harry Potter is cancelled because JKR is transphobic

Kurt is an unambiguously gay teen in a hugely popular TV series, acting as one of the first overt representations a generation has seen… except he’s way too stereotypical and Glee is a joke now

Orange is the New Black gives us a number of queer women, including one of our first trans characters… but isn’t it problematic that they’re all criminals?

Brooklyn Nine-Nine hosts an out gay captain and gives us a bisexual coming out story that resonated with many, myself included… except now we’re supposed to hate all the characters on principle because they’re cops

Korra and Asami walk off into the spiritual sunset together… but they never kiss or anything, so that doesn’t count either

Steven Universe gives us a queer relationship and a wedding… but it’s an issue that this is just a kid’s show and, really, does it count when the rep is embodied by space rocks whose entire species only creates a single gender? Feels like a cop-out

Same with Good Omens. Yeah, Crowley and Aziraphale clearly love each other… but you never see them kiss or declare their intentions. It’s great ace rep though! Unless you want to level the criticism that asexual characters are always nonhuman

A character intended to be a minor guest becomes a show staple and eventually declares his love for one of the two main characters… except then Castiel immediately dies, Dean doesn’t respond, and they never meet on screen again

I finished Queen’s Gambit the other day and the main character had a one-night stand with a woman! … but everyone is talking about how bisexuality is used to represent her lowest point, so that’s bad too

I could go on for literal pages. Some of these arguments I agree with (Dumbledore), others I’ve pushed back against quite strongly (Crowley and Aziraphale), but all of them are valid criticisms depending on what part of the queer community you’re in and what your expectations are. My point here is that it’s all “bad rep.” I mean that seriously. If anyone reading this is scrambling for the comment section to say why [insert media title here] is actually fantastic rep, I guarantee that someone disagrees. Or if they don’t, give it some time. Just wait until the characterization becomes offensively outdated, or another part of the story ruins the relationship, or it comes out that the author did something truly horrific, or the terminology changes and it’s labeled as “problematic” now… just wait. At some point, any rep we feel is good rep now will be criticized, cancelled, and dragged through the mud. The rep that I personally haven’t seen much push-back against—like the beloved Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, or Schitts Creek that just won a ton of awards—is wrapped up in the criticism, “So it’s all just about able-bodied, cis, (mostly) white dudes, huh? :/” Even the argument that queer characters need to be written by queer authors doesn’t hold up. I absolutely adored Sense8. “Wow, a gay main character in a loving relationship with another gay man, both of whom enter a loving poly relationship with a woman, another lesbian trans main character who marries the love of her life on screen, an entire cast arguably queer due to them sharing orgy scenes centered around the emotional intimacy they share, everyone survives, and this was written by two trans women! Great, right?” Well, not according to the wealth of opinions explaining how Sense8 is horrible rep, actually. Every piece of rep we’ve got is either currently flawed or will become flawed in the future.

So what do we do with that?

That’s where my “I’d rather have bad rep than no rep at all” comes in. For me, that’s not waving the white flag. That’s not an oath that I won’t expect better rep in the future (I do) or that I won’t criticize the rep we get (BOY DO I), but rather just an acknowledgement of reality. The vast majority—if not the entirety—of rep is “bad rep” in one way or another, but I’d still rather have it than nothing at all. Because I’ve lived just long enough and studied media just enough to know what nothing looked like. It was watching all queer characters meet untimely deaths. Before that it was watching queer characters be derided and treated as jokes. Before that it was nothing but coding, where queer characters didn’t exist except in our own headcanons and interpretations. Obviously “bad rep” covers a very large range of issues and “They haven’t even confirmed this relationship yet” is a bigger issue than “This queer character embodies one or two, mild stereotypes,” but ultimately I’d take any of it over nothing at all. And enjoying what we’ve currently got doesn’t mean I’m willing to settle for it indefinitely.

To use an iffy analogy, imagine there’s a factory. This factory makes plates. So. Many. Plates. Big plates, small plates, plain plates, decorative plates, plates for every possible occasion in your life—and everyone with a steak for dinner is pleased as punch. You though? You’ve got soup. You need a bowl. Your entire life you’ve been struggling to eat your soup off a plate (it doesn’t work) and listening to friends and family claim that the plate with a slightly raised edge could be a bowl if you squint (it’s not). To say it’s frustrating is an understatement.

But then, one day, the factory starts producing bowls too. Hurray! Except as soon as you get your hands on one, you’re told you really shouldn’t be using it, let alone praising it. Look at the state of that bowl! It’s cracked right down the middle, ugly as hell, shoddily made all around… you’re not really going to settle for that, are you? And no, you obviously still want the factory to produce better bowls, but at the same time, this is a bowl. You’ve never gotten one before and you can finally enjoy your meal, even if the soup leaks at times. Sometimes a lot. But you’re still feeling better about your meal than you ever have before. And what you then begin to realize is that lots of the plates are a mess too. They also have cracks, they’re also ugly, many are also shoddily made. The difference is that the factory is producing so many plates at such a rapid pace that every steak eater is able to get by. One plate breaks completely? You’ve got a thousand fallbacks. Don’t like the look of this one? A thousand other options. You disagree about what “shoddily made” means? Luckily there are enough plates that everyone can find what they prefer! But the bowls… there’s only a few. Some are really expensive. Others are only available for a limited time before they suddenly disappear. Your bowl breaks and you have to wait months, years sometimes, to get another one. You’re constantly told to go buy this one obscure bowl no one else has heard about and yeah, you like it... but you’d also like to buy one of the bowls everyone is already enjoying. You find yourself looking at the plates and thinking, “I’d like that. I’d like to have so many options that the flaws, while still a problem, are much more bearable.” You’re still going to demand that the factory get its shit together, you’re still going to (rightly) complain about the awful quality of your bowl… but it’s still nice to have a bowl, period. There are still things you like about it, even if it’s a mess: the color, the size, the beauty of the shape of it. Its potential. You’re still pleased you have something to enjoy and that helps serve the need you’re looking to fill, even if that something is imperfect.

That’s “bad rep is better than no rep.” To bring this very long response back to Blake/Yang, I don’t think their problems negate their benefits. Is their relationship currently non-canonical and filled with a number of writing issues everyone has a right to be angry about? Yup. I express that anger a great deal. Are they still half of a team on a very popular show that is (presumably) set to be canonized as queer? Yup. I’d much rather live in a world where big shows like RWBY try to include queer rep and fail in a multitude of ways—with the expectation and hope that they’ll continue to improve—rather than in a world where authors a) don’t care or b) are too scared to try. Because that’s where a “good rep or no rep” stance leads. The danger isn’t homophobes because they’re, well, homophobes. It doesn’t matter if the rep is good or not, they hate it on principle. But if queer authors writing for other queer identities, or allies writing queer identities, or even queer authors writing their own experiences (like in Sense8) continually come under non-stop fire for their attempts… there’s a good chance that many people won’t ever try. We’re already seeing that here on tumblr with young authors admitting that they wouldn’t touch [insert topic here] with a ten-foot pole because just look at what happens when you get it wrong. And authors will get things wrong because authors are fallible people forever unlearning their own ignorance. So though it might sound strange coming from a blog that has turned into such a RWBY critical space, I am glad that RWBY’s queer rep exists, despite all the frustrations that I share about it. I think a RWBY with various types of “bad” queer rep is better than a RWBY with no queer rep at all, particularly when “bad” or “good” is so intensely subjective. There’s a middle ground between passively accepting whatever we’re given, and tearing into rep with such ferocity that we end up rejecting it all. There’s a space where we can be critical of rep and embrace the parts that work for us, simultaneously.

I hope and expect the het rep will get better too, but… that’s never going to happen instantly. To quote RWBY, there’s no magic wand we can wave to fix all our problems. Rather, it will take slow, plodding, meandering, lifetimes’ worth of work to see that change occur and I personally don’t want to spend the one life I have waiting for that perfect rep to show up. Because it’s unlikely that it will. While we work, I’d rather find the good in what rep we’ve already got.

#rwby #queer #mymetas #Anonymous

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lassieposting · 3 years

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Bit late and random but it's the anon you leave food out for here to give away I am also bi and I think exactly the same as you about bi val pretty much, every time Derek offers me representation my reaction is to slowly, hesitantly take it and say "thaaaaaaaaanks..." while rolling my eyes, in much the same way one accepts their least favourite flavour of sweet from an annoyingly enthusiastic uncle-type-individual. Ironically I feel I had more in common with her before the bi shit started up.

What I find really amusing is that Landy actually did reasonably well at representation when (and only when) he wasn’t trying.

Oh god, this got long, anon, my ass rambled.

tldr; I'm glad actual bi people dislike bi val (or how Laundry handled bi val) as much as me, this will probably offend at least one person but i don't really care, Dirty Laundry wrote better rep when he didn't mean to write rep at all, and if he ever starts trying to "represent" groups I'm part of I'll take him out back like a dying horse and shoot him.

Like, yes. He had stupid and potentially offensive shit - I say potentially because what offends one member of a group won’t necessarily offend all of them. His attitude to mentally ill people is, frankly, disgusting. We’ve had “Skulduggery can’t be abused, he doesn’t have feelings”. We’ve had “eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY”. We had Ping, who seemed to be pretty much universally offensive. And that's what's always going to happen when a straight, cis, white, wealthy, male author tries to write marginalised groups he doesn't know shit about, because inevitably he's going to fall back on stereotypes.

But we also had:

SEXUALITY REP: Phase One's nonstraight characters were treated like the straight ones, and like, isn't that the whole point? There was no need for a massive Coming Out Story TM to grab for those sweet sweet Woke Points, because sexuality isn't supposed to be important to mages. I never understood why Val needed that whole Coming Out Panic storyline. Like...Des and Melissa are ridiculously supportive, encouraging, loving parents. They accepted you dating a ~19 year old when you were ~16. They accepted you revealing you could do fucking magic and that you'd been lying to them for like seven years. They took your undead buddy in stride and the most pressing question your dad had was whether magic toilets exist. There is zero reason to think that "I'm bisexual" is gonna be the thing that makes them flip and throw you into the streets in disgrace, Valkyrie. Come on.

Tanith had girlfriends and it was just mentioned casually, because it's normal.

China had massive UST with Eliza. That was an opportunity right there to not only include a f/f relationship, but also to bring back one of the few precious surviving characters from Phase One, using characters and a relationship that already had several books' worth of setup and tension and interest from fans.

The Monster Hunters have a casual conversation about which one of the Dead Men they'd date.

Ghastly has a conversation with Fletcher about the pain he's been through being in love. He never uses any pronouns.

It was confirmed at one point re: the Dead Men that at this point, after 300-odd years, everyone's been with everyone else at some point.

Thrasher is gay, and while Scapegrace's...everything...is treated as a joke/comedic relief, Thrasher's love for him isn't. He's completely devoted to Scapegrace, and that in itself is not played for laughs, even though the rest of the scene usually is. Thrasher's description of their first meeting is essentially a love-at-first-sight situation for him.

"ABNORMAL" RELATIONSHIP REP: Age gap relationships are normal for mages. Off the top of my head, using only canon, canon-implied or almost-canon ships:

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

If you include fan ships, there's also things like Mevolent/Serpine or my Mevolent/Vile, which are both ~600 year minimum age gaps based on the timeline, or Valdug (and its variations) which is ~400 years.

Now, whether you consider this kind of rep positive or negative is up to you, but it’s there.

MENTAL ILLNESS REP: more like "Which characters in this series don't have a mental illness or a personality disorder?" I have some of these issues, but not all of them, so this is just how I read it, but:

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

Schizophrenia (or similar): Valkyrie & Darquesse, Valkyrie "seeing" Darquesse's ghost thing in Phase Two

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

Trauma/PTSD/CPTSD: Skulduggery, Valkyrie, China, Ghastly, Erskine...pretty much everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. People struggling with trauma are spoilt for choice of characters to see themselves in.

TRAUMA REP: This series is a trauma conga line, but everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. I see little bits of myself in more than one Phase One character.

Childhood Abuse (of varying degrees & types): Skulduggery, Carol & Crystal, Omen, Fletcher, Ghastly, China, Bliss, Sanguine...

Estranged Family: Skulduggery abandoning his crest, Fergus & Gordon, China & Bliss

Bad Romantic Relationship: Skulduggery is also very clearly an abuse victim. He’s got a solid history of romantic attachments to women who manipulate, use and gaslight him for their own agendas. There's a whole paragraph in SPX about how Abyssinia broke him down, isolated him from his friends and preyed on his desperate need to be loved, all classic abuse tactics.

And I’m personally a huge fan of this backstory for two reasons:

1) Society likes a plucky victim in media. The "My suffering made me stronger" type of victim. And it's not always like that in real life. Not all survivors come out of their abuse stronger or kinder or more understanding. Some of us come out cold and fucked up. Some of us end up as emotionally stunted, bloodied-nails-and-bared-teeth survivors, broken in ways that can't be fixed and sustained by enough rage to power a small sun. But society doesn't like to tell the story of that kind of survivor, because we're not usually a likeable protagonist. When we're shown in media, we're usually the sympathetic villain, or maybe the antihero. But Skug is someone who's done awful things and lost pretty much all his faith in humanity and been burned more times than he can count, and he still makes the conscious choice to try and be the good guy when he could so easily go Evil Supervillain on the world, and I don't know about any of y'all, but I've modelled myself on him in that. I've made the choice to do something good when all I really want to do is just become a horrible, shrivelled ball of nastiness and revenge. And that's because I saw him do it and realised that I could do that too.

Skug is an incredibly capable, strong, masculine Man's Man. He gets in fights all the time, and he usually wins. He's military, an industry that's Really Bad for stigmatizing weakness and mental illness, and he's right up at the top of the hierarchy. Almost everyone is afraid of him. He's a straight up cold-blooded killer. Skulduggery Pleasant is precisely the type of person who's not normally portrayed as a victim of anything. Nothing about him screams "victim" at all. But his abuse history is insidious. He's so conditioned to respond in a certain way to abuse from the women in his life, probably from a very young age, that despite all that strength and capability and stubbornness and ego, he just goes along with it. And it's an established pattern going back hundreds of years. He keeps going back to China, even though he knows she's bad for him and his friends keep telling him to stay away from her. Abyssinia latched onto him when he was traumatized and vulnerable and weaponized it against him to make him easier to control - and when she reappears, hundreds of years later, she jumps straight back into using, tmanipulating and gaslighting him and not only does he let her, he doesn't even seem to realise that behaviour is abusive. He thinks it's normal! That's how he's always been treated by his long-term girlfriends, with the notable exception of Wifey. Even when Val is being fucking nasty to him in the first couple books of Phase Two, sniping and lying and blaming him for everything under the sun, he just takes it. There's no attempt to tell her she's being unreasonable, no telling her to fuck right off and give her head a wobble, no defending himself even when she's bitching over something that isn't even his doing. And this is a man who has an absolutely gleaming steel spine the rest of the time; Skug has no problem saying no to anybody else, but he can't get past the way he's been taught to treat the important ladies in his life. Skug is a walking reminder that anyone can be a victim of abuse, even the ones who seem least likely to be susceptible.

GENDER REP: This one is the most iffy out of the bunch and definitely was not done very well in the eyes of the people who matter most, but I'll include it anyway because it mattered to some.

So there's Nye, who's...agender? Genderless? And uses "it" pronouns? Nye was generally considered horrible rep because it's also a war criminal and experiments on people and I've seen people say "Well I don't want to be seen like that" but? It's still possible to be a war criminal and also genderless. I never saw the two things as being related or relevant to each other.

There's also Mantis, who's in exactly the same gender/pronouns boat as Nye and always seems to be forgotten about, which sucks because Mantis is a war hero. It fought for the Sanctuary during the War and they never lost a battle when it was in command. It's called out of retirement to fight for the Supreme Council in LSODM, ends up fighting alongside Skulduggery during the Battle of Roarhaven, and ultimately dies attempting a very brave, very risky strategy. Mantis is, unreservedly, one of the good guys. It was also my introduction to sentient beings using "it" pronouns, and did it in a way that felt natural, so when I met my first person online who used "it" pronouns and hated to be referred to as he/she, it was...weird, but not as weird as it would otherwise have been, because I was like, "Oh yeah, like the Crenga. Okay."

And then there's the Scapegrace sex change plotline, which...I might have an unpopular opinion on this one. From what I’ve seen, trans people don’t seem to think was handled well or with any sensitivity at all. I’m not trans, so if the trans community says he was being offensive to them, I’m not going to claim otherwise. But...I first read the Scapegrace plotline as a young teenager in a tiny rural school with zero diversity, going through a period of being deeply confused about my own gender identity. He was more or less my first introduction to the idea that genitals =/= gender. I was relieved, at that point in my life, to read someone having a lot of the same thoughts I was having about being in the wrong body. So while it may have been badly done and yeah, the series would probably have been better without it, it did make at least one kid suspecting she might not be cis go “Huh! So there are other people who feel like this.”

Thrasher is also implied to be legitimately trans/gender-questioning, and that's not played for laughs either.

So? Phase One, while it absolutely had faults and issues and things that were just "Oh god why", was actually full of rep, at least compared to the other series that I read as a child/teen. But? As soon as Dirty Laundry started trying to be woke? He fucking sucks ass at it. Aside from confirming Phase One's hints that Skug has a background of abusive relationships, every single attempt at shoehorning rep into Phase Two is Bad.

The painfully OOC, forced, badly-written awkwardness of Val suddenly being rabidly horny for women out of fucking nowhere. The stilted, forced cringiness between her and any of the women she's flirted with - contrast that with Sorrowscorn's interactions, full of natural chemistry that had us all like 👀 I mean, I never shipped Val/Melancholia, but I could always see why people did - they had miles more chemistry than Val/anyone in Phase Two.

The fucking mess that is v*litsa, because if someone says "I'm really not interested in friendships/relationships right now", clearly the route to true love is to bulldoze their boundaries and forcibly insert yourself into their life and proceed to treat them like a delicate soft uwu flower, completely ignoring the horrible things they've done, while gleefully damning their best friend as an irredeemable monster for the exact same things, which is. You know. Gonna affect your so-called love's self-confidence and self-esteem because she knows she's no different to him. Y'all know I love an angsty ship, an unhealthy ship, a ship with fucked power dynamics, but I literally cannot roll my eyes any further back in my head at this shit. I never read Demon Road, but from what I've heard from friends who did, it does seem like every time Laundry tries to write an f/f ship, he comes up with a cringey abusive/manipulative caricature and tries to call it rep, and he needs to Stop.

Val's Mental IllnessTM arc. It's funny how he wrote Skulduggery as a wonderfully complex character with deep-rooted psychological damage and long-lasting trauma, but believes he wrote a character with "no feelings" - but when he tries to delve into the damage the world of magic has done to Val, he turned her into a weak, whiny drug addict who treats everyone around her like garbage and is so selfish and dislikeable that I? Honestly can't even reconcile Phase Two val with Phase One val. They're two completely different people. He's shown on Twitter that he doesn't have any respect for mentally ill people, and it shows. Other mentally ill people might see it differently, but the whole thing just makes me go "yikes".

Never, who has no personality outside of being genderfluid, and whose pronouns make no sense. I'm sorry, I have never met an nb person who insists that you change from male to female pronouns multiple times in a sentence, every time you refer to them. It's confusing as fuck. Now I have been told that Never has apparently received some character development in the last couple books, and if so, fair play, but I quit reading after Midnight, and Never and the rest of the personality-less new characters introduced in Phase Two who just seemed to be 2D Stereotypes to snag Woke Points were a big part of why, so. Development too late, I'm afraid.

(Now, if anyone is looking for a well-written genderfluid character, I recommend the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb. I have a lot of issues with her as a writer, and unfortunately I hate her POV character which puts me off the series as a whole, but she wrote the Fool/Amber/Lord Golden and their gender identity/approach to sexuality with so much more respect and realism. That is the kind of rep nb people should be getting: 3D, complex, realistic characters whose gender is only a tiny fragment of their personality, not the be-all-and-end-all of their existence. You know. Like cis people get. Nobody wants to be represented by a 2D cardboard cutout stereotype.)

Anyway idk how much sense this makes it just really amuses me that Laundry would include all this rep completely unintentionally and then go on Twitter and remind us all that actually he's a massive asshole via insensitive/offensive tweets about the groups he'd actually done a fair job of including (i.e. Skulduggery has no feelings, mentally ill people should find another series to read, the bullshit about Val being "heteromantic bisexual" on Twitter and then spouting all the "the woman she loved uwu" shit in the books (proving he has no idea what he's talking about), eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY. He can only write half-decent rep when he's not trying and he inevitably outs himself as having a really shitty attitude towards those people anyway, proving that ultimately it's all either unintentional rep or performative wokeness.

#skulduggery pleasant #sp meta #derek landy hate blog #Anon #fire message #anti valitsa #anti val #anti phase two tbh #phase two fans will not enjoy this post

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pigtailedgirl · 2 years

Video

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This is THE scene of The Shield for me. The essense of the Vic and Shane relationship. What makes them both horrible people and cops and my OTP bad pair. Is buffered before and after this scene, in the history of the show’s story, but is poetically distilled and displayed right here.

In that Vic willingly goes to meet Shane alone, even if he thinks this is an intended hit job. In that Shane also must face and seek out Vic alone to explain. In that the strike “team” is divided between Ronnie and Lem knowing things but having no emotional control or any influence, any say, on how far Shane and Vic will go. Stop Shane themselves, protect Vic themselves, do anything themselves? Nope. The duo of Vic and Shane’s decision always drive this bus .

Meanwhile Vic is both at once able to get ready to face and murder Shane for his betrayal, just end him without any thought to the consequences for others until after the deed is done...and ultimately can’t because it’s Shane. Because Shane reps and verbalizes the Vic Mackey weak spot. I would never pick him over you... I need you.... you hold all the power over me. It’s the perfect butter to Vic’s control and self image sociopathic tendencies. It’s damning to his “ethics” as a cop and friend and husband and self-interest though which says a whole lot of something that he lets it in. Vic is a guy who parades a believed self-image, good cop or family man and isn’t. Cheats with Danny. You know, everything the strike team and he has done. But with Shane? A willing break of illusion.

He willingly let Shane that close? To see this!? They are so personal and weirdly bonded.

Shane’s instinct and drive is never really to go against Vic either. His rebellion is attention and approval seeking. I’m as good a cop, a hustler, a father, a husband, a killer, a man as you. I can be just like you or better is really, no...I ‘m good enough for you right?

What explains this partnership driven in need?

100% serious sometimes I think they fucked and are repressed about the boundaries and implications of that. I mean this is not normal cop partners or father/son or friends imo. And these two in show have very good reason to view a benefits type romance as not a romance or not unacceptably gay, even being in a climate that’s homophobic and doing and reacting in real shitty ways.

They both aren’t loyal to married or romantic partners aka do not view outside or extra relations sexual or not on the side immoral. They both unhealthily equate sex with release and expression of violence or pent up emotion. They both make offensive innuendo about gay sex, but also both interact through their jobs with people they know having had or engaging in gay or taboo sex and then empathize or relate, not in public, but in person alike. WHAT WHAT WHAT?

#the shield #vic/shane #murder husbands

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im-the-punk-who · 4 years

Note

Hi! I’m new to the fandom and I’m simply curious (not trying to start a feud or anything), why don’t you like Steinberg?

Hello dear anon! And welcome to the fandom!

Oof. That’s a question. xD

I’m going to try and stay as uh. neutral as possible. Because I’ve already written the post I know I failed but, the intent in answering this is also not to start a feud or hurt anyone’s feelings.

Okay, so I got fairly negative in this chilis tonight, so I want to start by saying that even in light of the opinions I’m about to express, Black Sails is one of, if not my number one, favorite TV shows of all time. Certainly in recent memory - I’ve been hyperfixating on this show for 18 months with no sign of stopping, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for everyone who worked on the show - even Steinberg. (The one exclusion is Michael Bay, he can go twist.)

AND I think Stienberg is an incredibly talented writer. Black Sails is one of my favorite shows because it does such a wonderful job of weaving stories, creating characters, and melding things in a way that is both unexpected and makes sense narratively. I have changed as a person because of the show, and they will have to pry James McGraw and Thomas Hamilton from my cold dead knives-attached-to-them hands. None of what I’m going to say is meant to detract from that.

I will also say that a lot of these issues are not particular to Steinberg and are in fact a systemic problem with American TV + Film. And I’m not leaving Robert Levine out of my criticism, it’s just that Steinberg had the biggest hand in the pot(he wrote a full half the episodes) and a lot of what I’ve heard as far as talking about the show comes from Steinberg. So, he gets the brunt. But it isn’t that I think Steinberg was the only problematic element of the show.

Also, these are all my opinions and are colored by how I interact with my fandoms. I am not only a fandom veteran, but I work and pretty much live in the entertainment industry. I work in indie film and theatre and am surrounded by artists and creators of all walks of life, like, constantly. I know what is possible, and when I see something that can be improved, I want to note it because it is important to me to always be striving forward. Like Miranda says about Thomas, this isn’t out of malice, or out of hate. It’s because I genuinely love this show, and I love entertainment as a whole, and I think in order to get to a better, more inclusive industry we have to have hard conversations and look critically at the media we consume, and it is frustrating to me to time and again see the same faces in the room.

But if that isn’t your cuppa, that’s fine! Fandom isn’t meant to be stressful and if all you want to do is watch a show about gay pirates that is your tomato and I applaud you. Have at it you funky motherfucker.

OH! One more. At some point I’m going to talk about Silverflint. When I do, it is NOT meant as a ‘you shouldn’t/cant ship this’ or ‘this pairing is bad’ or any negative attack on the people who ship that pairing. My criticisms in this post are exclusively about what it means for Steinberg as a writer and Black Sails’ representation of gay and mlm men. While it’s not my cuppa, this is a sail your own ship blog.

OKAY! SO!

My main criticisms of Steinberg & Co boil down to:

The homozygosity of the writers and directors shows a complete lack of desire to include marginalized people in the writing of a show that is about them. Which leads to:

The centering of white men while choosing a historical setting and time period that was in fact dominated by people of color and specifically a black woman,

The gratuitous inclusion of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, and again, that the female characters are often sidelined for the central male characters.

SO.

Black Sails is a show centered around queer, female, and black leads, and yet there were only two non white-male directors (one bi-racial man and one white woman) and only 7 female writers - one of whom was Latina. The entire rest of the major creative staff was white men. I’m not going to comment on sexualities but none of the writers or directors are out as queer according to a quick google search.

Let me reiterate the important bit there.

In Black Sails, where the last two seasons specifically feature around a real, actually-happened-in-history event that shaped black history in the Caribbean, there was not a single black writer on the entire show.

This is the main difference between inclusion for inclusion’s sake, and actually centering marginalized voices. Black Sails has a ton of gay, POC, and female rep in front of the camera but practically zero representation behind it, which leads to storylines and implications that Steinberg and his writers, as white men, simply would never realize.

It’s like why Silver and Miranda never realized the true reasons James was waging war on England. They just did not have the life experiences to realize they were missing a piece of the puzzle, and so they filled in their own without even realizing they’d done so.

Because no one in the room of Black Sails was a part of these marginalized identities, nuances get lost or mistranslated, motivations get muddled through a white man’s gaze(or a straight person’s) and implications that someone within those communities might think is obvious won’t even come up.

And again, because there were no writers or directors of color in the last two seasons (the biracial man directed episodes 2x02 and 2x04 - WHICH MAKES SENSE IMO) the entirety of the historical lore that the show bases itself on in its latter half is filtered through a white man’s lens. And so there is no discussion of how changing something changes the meaning, how leaving someone out or changing their role to be more minor might affect people for whom that is their heritage. How the entire story they’re telling might change with one simple exclusion or addition.

So, how does this relate directly to Steinberg, you ask? Well, simply, because it was his show.

Steinberg(and Levine) were involved in every major decision about the show, from its conception, to the script, to choosing the writers and directors. They chose how they wanted the show to look, to think, what stories to tell and how they wanted to tell them. Their decisions(and the biases that formed those decisions) are woven into the show.

And look. I don’t for a second believe any of this was willful or malicious. I don’t think that John Steinberg and Robert Levine sat down one day and said ‘you know what would make the gays really angry? If we locked the only two canonically gay men up in a prison camp.’

But the decisions that were made in the show were based in ignorance in a way that shows more than just simple negligence or laziness(especially given the attention to detail in everything else). The things they leave out or change in the Maroon War plotline for instance are not small details easily missed. They are big, giant waving flags. They are things that are irreplaceable to still have the same events and stories and tell them respectfully.

It shows an insane amount of privilege to, for instance, write a show airing during a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the American conscience, include black characters and black storylines, and yet not include a single black voice on their creative team.

In a show that centers a gay man’s love and his journey in attempting to process the horrible things done to him and his lover because of it, we are given just forty minutes of the entire show dedicated to their relationship - and just fifteen of those minutes actually feature the lover!

(Relatedly, the entirety of the gay romantic rep is two kisses, and a forehead touch. That’s the entirety of your gay intimacy representation. And yet there are in the first two seasons alone - because that’s all I’ve clocked so far - something like twenty seven minutes of scenes involving a naked or half naked woman. Five minutes of that is explicitly wlw sex.

Again, I just want to reiterate this because it’s important in recognizing bias.

There is fully twice as much female nudity in the first two seasons, as the entirety of the time the two gay characters have together on screen. )

Steinberg is a perfect example of how a lack of understanding why the diversity you are representing is important, matters. I dislike Steinberg because he, just like every other straight white cis man I have known, profited off of marginalized voices without including them or creating with them in mind.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot create something - especially something as back breakingly, intensely a labor of love as Black Sails - without putting several pieces of yourself into it. But those pieces color your narrative. They will expose things about you that you don’t even realize. And it’s in these places we are weakest, and why a diverse group of writers with a diverse group of experiences can help a piece be stronger. But for whatever reason, John Steinberg thought that he could make art with only people who looked and thought and experienced like him.

The lack of representation behind the camera in Black Sails was evident in front of it and yet Steinberg is out here getting to pretend like he created the most inclusive groundbreaking show that ever existed. It is important to me, personally, to acknowledge that. And that it kind of makes my skin crawl in the way all media made by straight white (cis)men makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn’t have to feel that way about my favorite tv show just because it was created by a man of privilege, but here we are.

SO. I hope that helped? Feel free to take what you want and leave what you don’t!

Below the cut is a more in depth look at things that I think show what I’m talking about, but that up there ^^ is the gist. <3 |D

SURPRISE!

The Maroons and the Maroon War

So the first thing I want to point out is that the Maroon War was a real thing that happened. It lasted ten years, and resulted in the most substantial victory the Maroons ever achieved against the British. Not only that, there was in fact a KICKIN’ badass female leader of the maroons named Queen Nanny, who is to this day honored as a national hero in Jamaica. While they weren’t able to drive the British out, the outcome of this war led to a mostly self-governing Maroon population in Jamaica from the mid 1700s on. This was a long term fight that had a very tangible and real outcome, even if it didn’t end in the destruction of colonialism.

And what is this war turned into in Black Sails? A white ‘madman’s revenge’ that is doomed to failure after six months.

That, my dear pirates, is a problem for me. (And those familiar with my brand of spiceyness know that I do not ascribe to the ‘Flint is a Madman’ trope, but that IS what Steinberg ascribes to, what he seems to have written the show thinking.)

There was no narrative reason to include the Maroon War in the narrative of Black Sails. The Maroon War didn’t happen until a decade after the Golden Age of Piracy, and aside from Silver’s wife being a black woman there is no mention of Silver ever having contact with them. To me, this feels like the choice of a showrunner who found a cool historical event and saw a chance to up the stakes of their white male heroes while getting in some sweet sweet POC rep.

Except that they then took the major events of the Maroon War and gave them to their white characters, Flint and Silver.

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to take a piece of culturally important history and use it for your show, you NEED to have sensitivity writers. You need to have people who are at least familiar with those events and who care about them to do them justice. Have an expert come in and read your script or go over your ideas. Or just like. Hire a black writer. Hire ONE black writer. As a treat.

The important Maroon figures, Nanny, Cudjoe, and Quao, all get sidelined or ‘sexified’ and then used as plot points for the white characters. Nanny gets split into two women - the older mother queen and Madi, the young naive warbent visionary. Quao(Mr. Scott is the closest, or Kofi possibly) gets killed off because the writers realized they didn’t exactly have a place for him in their writing. Cudjoe(Julius) gets a few scenes and one good speech but his entire role in the war gets given to Silver. And THEN. That sexy Queen Madi figure gets used as emotional bait for Silver and then has to learn he has betrayed her and destroyed the hope and freedom she had wanted to bring to her people.

Gross, pirates. Gross.

Anne Bonny/Max/Mary Read - a heads up, this section includes a semi in-depth discussion of both Max and Anne’s sexual assaults. If that bothers you, the paragraphs talking about that begin with a ***

COOL NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT LESBIANS. Words my 20 year old self would never have imagined coming out of my mouth.

Specifically, I want to talk about Max, and Anne, and their backstories both involving extreme sexual trauma at the hands of men. And then Mary Read and the once again sexification of female characters.

(Actually while I’m here another criticism I have of Steinberg is that his writing does not seem to recognize how queer people existed in the past - again, likely because he didn’t have any gay historians to be like ‘actually buddy that doesn’t make sense also why is Anne not dressing as a man? If you want to fuck with anything and insert modern day terminology and ideas into this show, make her non binary and REALLY piss off the hetties.’)

(This same ficitonal gay dramaturg who is definitely not me has also questioned John Steinberg repeatedly about where Mary Read is, unsatisfied with the answer ‘well we wanted her to be hot so we made her a sex worker and then had Anne have to rescue her but then we realized it would be weird not to include her actual character so we gave her a five second cameo at the very end of the series and also made her like 13.’)

Anyway! So my main point in bringing up Anne and Max is the sexual trauma they are exposed to in the show, particularly being that they are the two primary wlw in the show, who Steinberg has said he views as being completely gay, and what THAT whole unexamined idea looks like.

***Max. My dear Max. There was literally no reason to have her be repeatedly r*ped(and for the love of god there was even less reason to make it that gratuitous and graphic). Max being assaulted like that did not add anything to the gravity of Eleanor’s betrayal. The traumatic event was being tossed aside by Eleanor, and that could have been just as emotionally damaging without the sexual assault. And the only reason for her to be continually assaulted was to bring her and Anne together.

***The reason imo that Max’s r*pe plot was added was because it was the only thing these white straight men could come up with that felt emotionally damaging enough to them. The act of betrayal itself wasn’t enough, the act of being thrown away, of having a lover put your life in danger because of her own ambitions wasn’t enough, they needed her to be r*ped to really drive home the point.

***Anne, on the other hand, is never shown being sexually abused, but we are given an explicit account of her own traumatic history and how Jack saved her from this vile beast who was passing her around to his friends.

But here’s the thing pirates - that never happened. According to every account we have of Anne Bonny, she chose her husband, and married him against her father’s wishes. They were probably relatively happy until her husband started being a pirate spy and Anne started cheating on him with Jack.

And yes, when they were found out. Her husband had her beat. That’s not fucking cool, and if they really wanted to go the damsel in distress route they still could have had Jack ‘save’ her from that. But at no point was she sexually abused by her husband(at least not in any accounts I’ve read.)

You know who did likely sexually abuse her or at least manipulate her and Mary for his own benefit? If you guessed our Rat man Jack Rackham, you would be correct, because when he found out about Mary and Anne’s (supposed, but probably real) relationship, it’s implied he extorted both of them into fucking him to keep their secret from the crew.

The addition of sexual abuse to Anne’s past isn’t done to be true to her character and was in fact explicitly untrue. Now of course I don’t know the reasons why they chose to do this, but I can guess. Just as with Max, the most traumatic thing a male writer can think of for a female character is for them to be sexually abused.

And the most disturbing part of this to me? The parallels it has to the real world of why straight men think lesbians exist. These characters who would be called man haters in present day are given these incredibly traumatic man-centered histories. It brings up something very uncomfortable in me about particularly wlw sexuality being viewed as a reaction to trauma at the hands of men. It’s just gross, I dont like it, and honestly there is no fucking excuse for it besides a room full of white straight men writing this bullshit. A room that Steinberg chose, because they fit his ideas.

In Fact heck, the women of Black Sails in general

***I honestly struggle to think of a single female character who I think was treated fairly in Black Sails. Miranda and Eleanor are killed for taking sides and not understanding their partners, Madi is betrayed in the worst way possible, Max is given a pseudo empowering ending but has that fucking terrible start. Idelle ends off fairly well, but tied to a man she may or may not have any actual feelings for, in what is essentially a political marriage. And Anne has her entire identity tied to a man who will be dead in two years as she is robbed of any agency whatsoever without him. (Oh, and the whole r*pe thing. And also her support for Max’s r*pe or death until she started having fee-fees. Who wrote this stuff. >_>)

Even though the characterization of each and every one of these women is PHENOMENAL - and again I will repeat that I absolutely LOVE these characters as they exist in a vacuum. I think they are well rounded, real, feeling people given motivations and drives and FEELINGS and they SHOW THEIR ANGER and i LOVE THEM.

But the show punishes them for it. Miranda is essentially fridged to move Flint’s storyline along, and to make room for Silver. Eleanor is killed for the emotional damage it will cause Rogers. Madi is placed at the center of a conflict she explicitly says she is willing to die for and then not only is her entire cause taken from her, but when she tells Silver to fuck off he - in possibly the most predictable white man move ever - says ‘no i will stay until you change your mind. I will never leave you. I don’t care about your choice in this matter, I will wait forever for you. I’m your biggest fan. I’ll follow you until you love me. papa, - paparazzi.’

And I touched on this before, but I want to talk in more detail about what is possibly my hottest take to date, the sexification of Mary Read and Queen Nanny, as they are presented in the show.

Max is to Anne what Mary Read is, historically. She is the lover that Jack Rackham discovers with Anne, and then he joins them in their bed. They form a triumvirate that upholds Jack at the expense of the women. But for some reason, Steinberg didn’t want to just include Mary Read as an actual character. For some reason he needed to make Anne’s love interest a sex worker who was in need of saving (and who, coincidentally, we never see working the brothel after she becomes lovers with Anne, because she is now a madam. :) Gross.)

And Madi. My dear sweet fucking Madi who didn’t fucking deserve any of this bullshit send tweet.

So, historically, Queen Nanny was the Queen, spiritual advisor, and the military tactician of the Windward Maroons. She would have filled both Madi and the Queen’s character roles(and Flint’s, but who’s counting. A BLACK GAY LEAD? Inconceivable. I digress.) But, I guess, because they were wishy-washing with Silver’s sexuality or felt they needed to give him a female love interest because of Treasure Island, or because they were leaning a bit too hard into the gay shit and needed to backpedal, they took Queen Nanny and split her into a character who is for all intents and purposes powerless in the war and Madi, who is young and naive and does not have any real world experience outside of the Maroon camp.

Because that’s sexy, or something. They could have had the Maroon Queen be a fucking badass lady who works and fights alongside Flint and Silver and one ups them and teaches them shit and has her own ideas about where the British can stick it, but instead they made her into the perfect caricature of a female monarch, letting the big strong men handle the dirty work or something. Because white male power fantasies.

Just let women be powerful and not nubile and let them have character arcs over fucking thirty and let them be CENTERED in their own. fucking. narratives.

God damnit Steinberg.

James Flint, mlm extraordinaire

Oh, my love. My most amazing child. The light of my life. My purest cinnamon roll.

~~And now we’ve come to the dreaded Silverflint criticism part of our programming. Please please know and remember this isn’t a criticism of people who ship Silverflint. As I said up top, Your Tomato Is Not My Tomato and that’s cool. Please don’t take this next part as an attack on Silverflint as a fandom ship.~~

My criticism of Steinberg as it relates to Flint is related to:

What a romantic/sexual relationship with Silver being the basis of the tension and plot means for Flint in particular as a gay or mostly mlm man.

Refusing to confirm Thomas and James being alive at the end and honestly the whole finale in general but like I’ll try and focus.

The major problem I have with Silver and Flint being coded as in love with each other is the implications there in terms of gay men’s relationships to other men.

From every corner, men are inundated with the idea that any close relationship between them must be gay. That intimacy cannot exist unless there are sexual feelings involved. That a relationship cannot be close, deep and soul shattering and life altering, unless one guy secretly(or not so secretly) wants to bone the other dude. That two men cannot value each other as partners or friends or truly know each other unless they are gay.

Seeing both of the meaningful relationships Flint forms with other men be sexually coded feels a bit the same way as Anne and Max’s sexual assault plotlines does vis-a-vis being wlw. (Even with Gates, Flint never spoke about Thomas or his plans - Silver is absolutely the closest person to Flint besides Thomas and Miranda.) And this is just as true for Silver. Having both Flint and Madi - the two people he trusts - both be people he’s in love with also just feels. I don’t know.

It feels like a confusion between male intimacy and male love that is so so familiar to me as a gay man I could choke on it. Where they wanted these men to have a deep and really lasting connection, but could only figure out how to do it if they were in love. Friendship wouldn’t have been enough - only romantic and sexual love is enough for the gay man(or men, at all).

Just because it isn’t queerbaiting doesn’t mean it’s good rep, and I would have liked to see truly deep male friendships that did not center on sexual attraction - particularly for Flint as a confirmed mlm(and Silver too, if you’re counting him. The same arguments for why I dislike Flint being paired with Silver are also true in the reverse.)

Even if both Flint and Silver were confirmed mlm I still would have LOVED to see a platonic relationship between them. In fact I would have loved that EVEN MORE. Men! Who fuck men! Not needing to fuck each other to be important to one another! Who made this. Very delicious.

But because there weren’t any queer writers on the show, writers who understand this kind of struggle that gay and mlm men face, they thought ‘oh, let’s also have them be in love with each other. More gay rep is better gay rep, right?’ False. THOUGHTFUL gay rep is better gay rep.

Okay and here’s my last thing. The fact that Steinberg refuses to say whether or not the explicitly mlm men are alive at the end of the show - that the words he specifically uses are ‘up for interpretation’ is. Fuck, it’s gross, okay? It’s fucking gross.

I have been around enough men, enough people in power, enough people with leverage who also know how to play the field, to know that when someone wants a group’s support but does not agree with them, their go to phrasing is that it is ‘up for debate’ or ‘up for interpretation.’

Say the gays are alive. Steinberg refusing to acknowledge the reality of the ending of his show to maintain his own sense of artistic integrity is what, honestly, really sets me off about him and I don’t care if this is a nuanced take.

Like yes, death of the author. I honestly don’t care if he thinks they’re dead or alive. What I care about is that he thinks he can get away with being clever and leaning hard into a story is true/untrue’ - doesn’t realize what the implications of that are, and didn’t when he was writing, and didn’t have anyone else in the room who would think about it either.

ANYWAY. So this is....my long drawn out explanation for why I do not like Steinberg. Uhhhhh tune in next week for more of my totally unpopular opinions!

#good....fucking lord #i am so sorry #how many opinions can milo fit in one post #i mean i have more but yknow lmao #black sails #behind the black sails #milos black sails meta #long posts #my increasingly devoted attempts to find tumblrs word limit #Anonymous #john steinberg #js critical but the js is jon steinberg

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viviae · 3 years

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can you like. tell me a little about dragon age. seeing your posts about it has got me interested in playing but i have little to no clue what it actually is

Boy can I explain nonny <3 This is a bit long so strap in and im sorry

Dragon Age is (currently) a three game series composed of Dragon Age: Origins (PS3, Xbox 360/Xbox One, PC), Dragon Age: II (PS3, Xbox 360/Xbox One, PC), and Dragon Age: Inquisition (PS4, Xbox One, PC) and its really unique because of its selling point that your actions impact the games as you progress. Like if you kill one character in one game they’ll stay dead through the rest of the series which makes you feel lived in the story and that your actions matter. Dragon Age is also an RPG so a roleplaying game kind of along the same lines of DnD where you get to make and play your own character. And yes there are romances and you can be gay.

The First Game of the series is Dragon Age: Origins where you choose from a selection of six unique (technically seven) origins or backgrounds for your character. You can be anywhere from a human noble or a Dalish elf, the unique elven culture in Dragon Age of nomadic clans dedicating to reclaiming their past. But eventually, from the events in your origin, you wind up a member of a secretive and elite order known as the Grey Wardens whose duty is to protect the world from the Blight.

The Blight is this spread of a horrible disease known as the Taint but is characterized by the presence of Darkspawn, a kind of zombie like creature who exists only to destroy the world. Grey Wardens take the heavy duty of protecting the world from the Blight, which have nearly wiped all of humanity multiple times, at all costs. And currently the country of Ferelden is under going a blight and due to events you wind up the only Grey Warden with your companion Alistair to save the world and reunite Ferelden which had fallen under a civil war.

Along Origins you meet many interesting characters. Alistair is your friendly co-warden who has a mysterious parentage that he hides under his happy go lucky attitude. In contrast to Alistair is the witch Morrigan who is your favorite goth swamp queen who would insult you and you thank her. In addition you meet your chaotic bi rogues Zevran and Leliana. Leliana is a nun who is on the run and hiding from a dark past and she is suspiciously good at murder. And Zevran is not at all hiding his aptitude for murder as an Assassin for hire who tried and failed to kill you but who can ignore that charming bastard?

Dragon Age II follows a much smaller story of a Ferelden refuge who had escaped from the Blight to the city of Kirkwall named Hawke. Unlike in origins where you get to pick your background 2 limits you to Hawke but fear not, Hawke is a loveable bastard and you can still customize them. Throughout DA2 you get to experience all the delights Kirkwall has to offer: Demons, crime, corrupt cops, and fighting your way to survive in this city and make a name for yourself.

Where Origins sets the stage for the world DA2 you are the actor in that play - literally the game is divided into 3 acts that take place over a span of 7 years. DA2′s main conflict is the argument of Mages vs Templars, as in DA’s lore while there are those who are born with magic they are forced to live in prisons policed by the Templar order and the church. You explore the more political arguments of; are the Templars right in their fears of magic as Kirkwall is filled to the brim with corrupt mages or do Mages deserve the chance to live and prove themselves freely from their prisons.

Your romancable companions in DA2 are all bisexuals as the true theme of DA2 is: be gay do crime. You have the foils of Anders: the runaway mage who fled from the prisons the mages are housed in and is determined to bring mages to freedom, and Fenris: the runaway escaped slave who curses magic for only inflicting pain and suffering in his life and wants his warnings to be heard about the dangers magic bring. In addition you also have Merrill, your cute but terrifying Dalish mage who would probably murder you with a cute smile and then go oops. And of course, my pirate wife Isabela, who lives a life free from commitment and is dedicated to the idea everyone should have a good time no matter the cost. Also while not romancable Hawke’s bff Varric deserves every ounce of praise he gets as never before has the energy of “two idiots sharing a braincell” ever been so well adapted.

Then finally we reach Inquisition. After the events of DA2 it triggers a full on war between the Mages and Templars that is destroying the land and causing severe damage that neither side can handle anymore. Desperate for an end to the conflict the Divine (err... fantasy pope) calls for a meeting on both sides... only for the entire thing to literally explode. Killing everyone present and causing a hole in the sky which now means demons are raining like cats and dogs you are the only one to survive. In Inquisition you can once again return to pick between unique backgrounds like in Origins but you don’t get to play through those backgrounds sadly.

You now possess something on your left hand which gives you the ability to patch up the hole in the sky that is pissing demons and due to being the only survivor everyone is incredibly confused about you. Eventually the Inquisition is formed around you, the character they are calling the Herald of Andraste (Andraste is fantasy Jesus) due to your ability to seal the holes. The mystery unfolds as over the course of the game you learn what caused the explosion, how you are connected, and what exactly the mark on your hand is.

DAI has the largest numbers of romance options so I’m gonna give a quick bullet point list for them all

Iron Bull (Pansexual, All Races): A Qunari (think Tiefling but big and beefy) mercenary who is far more clever than he lets on, as well as being the rope top dom of your dreams. Literally! Bull’s romance is a really healthy bdsm relationship if you are interested its very well done

Josephine (Bisexual, All Races): Your loveable ambassador and advisor for the inquisition. She is a workaholic noble who is a tried and true classic romance. Sweep her off her feet and duel for her hand all while navigating the nobility

Dorian (Gay, All Races): The flamboyant pariah rock star mage, he demands attention whenever he walks into the room. Although he wants to be all talk and no emotions make no mistake he is making puppy eyes at you the entire time and gets deeply offended if you say he is. Also not going to lie Dorian is the best piece of gay male rep in gaming history.

Cassandra (Male-only, all Races): Your stern warrior wife who is all serious no funny business... expect she is a bleeding heart romantic who reads horrible smut for fun. You wish to COURT HER?? I mean... if you want 👉👈 she won’t say no...

Blackwall (Female-only, All Races): Your weird dilf who wants desperately to prove himself every step of the way and help people. He is a constable for the Grey Wardens, but all the details on him seem murky... Ah well I’m sure its nothing, the Grey Wardens are a secretive order after all.

Sera (Lesbian, All Races): My wild child, monster chugging, beer guzzling, arrow shooting lesbian. Sera is here for a fun time and not a serious one, she’ll always make sure to keep you humble and ensure you aren’t getting to big for your breeches.

Cullen (Female-Only, Human and Elf only): Cullen’s the Inquisition’s commander who oohh boy is steeped in a lot of trauma. Cullen’s actually a character you get to know through out the series and see just all the horrible nonsense he’s been through. But he is your tragic self loathing... he isn’t princely but he is your adorkable charming

Solas (Female-Only, Elf Only): The humble apostate who joins the Inquisition out of curiosity of the breech, he is an expert on what the hell is going on with that hole in the sky. However, he holds a wisdom that goes far deeper than your typical apostate. Smooth talking and refined he carries a heavy cloud over him.

I left out a lot and all the nonsense with books and what have you but this is the easiest overview of the series I can offer. It’s main selling points is the deep story and characters throughout the games. And of course who doesn’t love the ability to make and roleplay your own character as a bonus? The games are bit of a flawed gem and Origins in my ugly child but they are truly a delight if you are interested

#eren.txt #eren.asks #anonymous #long post #not putting this under a readmore im sorry #im just lazy #i can answer more questions if you have them #Anonymous

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ace-trainer-risu · 3 years

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omg i would like to know the hated author...

OH thank you for asking I was. of course secretly deeply hoping someone would ask so I would have an excuse to go off.

The author [dramatic pause] is VE Schwab!

Now I will pause (again) to say that I just spent like two hours writing a six page long essay on exactly why I dislike her as an author (I don’t know anything about her as a person so no feelings there) but then when I reread it I started to feel worried that it might hurt someone’s feelings who really likes her as an author, so this is a slightly redacted version.

But basically there are three things I hold against her.

For context, I’ve only actually read one book by her, A Darker Shade of Magic. But it’s not just that I didn’t like it. It’s that it left me angry. I read it a year ago and I still get furious when I think about it. It is, in my opinion, a profoundly toxic and hateful book.

While at the same time also being a very boring and bland book.

So that’s point one) I just don’t get the hype. I read ADSM b/c I saw it recommended everywhere, but I really don’t get why? It’s not very well-written. Purely on a technical level her writing isn’t bad, but it’s not good either, its very...okay. The world building was really disappointing (it’s about four alternate worlds but they’re all almost. exactly the same. which was super disappointing. and also she seems to be under the illusion that london is like the most important place in the world?) The characters are bare minimum sketches, they basically feel like she came up with an initial concept and then never went any further. The characters aren’t particularly likeable or compelling, either, except for one character who...I felt like you weren’t actually supposed to like, lol. The pacing was actively bad. The plot doesn’t really start till around halfway through the book. I actually started ASDM twice and gave up on it the first time b/c it was boring. when I tried again the second time, I thought I had only read maybe the first quarter of it on the first try b/c I couldn’t remember anything happening, but it turned out I had actually read about half, its just that nothing happens in the first half.

to be fair, I have read reviews of a different book she wrote which specifically praised the writing, so maybe she just did a shitty job on this book and she writes better in her other work?

point two) if you only pay attention to the text of the story, it’s fine! again, its not particularly compelling but its fine. but if you pay any attention to the subtext, its...really misogynistic and queerphobic. its incredibly pervasive through the whole text.

for one thing, the female protagonist is introduced and is immediately like “Oh. I hate all other women.” (No one asked!) which is not necessarily bad in and of itself, except that...not only is her sexism never called out or contradicted, its actually actively supported by the text. there’s only one other important female character, and she’s Evil(TM), and also gets killed. the very few other female side characters are either someone’s mom or are portrayed as being extremely shallow and vapid and silly. they act exactly how the female protag despises women for acting. so...I don’t think its intentional but you’re left with this weird impression that the female protag is completely justified in her internalized misogyny b/c apparently all other women ARE bad. also, the female protag likes wearing boy’s clothes, which is great, but there’s this weird vibe that girls who don’t wear boy’s clothes are like, dumb and bad and sexist. I think the author is trying to critique repressive female clothing in the past (female character is from regency era england) but she does it really badly and instead accidentally(?) implies that girls who wear skirts are like. dumb sluts. a very weirdly sexist take. like it literally feels like this book hates women and specifically hates them for wearing “women’s” clothes. *also not the point but it’s really funny that of all the time periods to critique for restrictive clothes, she picked regency england. ah yes, the torturous constraints of...empire waisted dresses and minimal or no corsets. dastardly!

for another thing, the queer rep is just...so so bad. there’s one explicitly multisexual person (bi or pan isn’t specified but something along those lines) who gets tricked by a manipulative man older than himself heavily implied to be gay (bad) and gets horribly injured and almost dies (bad) basically just so the straight male protag can have angst (bad!).

the manipulative guy implied to be gay is in turn being magically controlled by...a different! manipulative older man (bad) and is strongly implied to be sexually abused by that man (bad) and the straight main character literally never tries to help him in any way (bad) and ultimately kills(ish) him (bad) but it’s revealed that he basically chose to die (bad) because it was like, the only way he could ever escape his suffering (very bad!!) and the main character then! uses! his dying body! in a spell! to save his own fucking life! and basically disposes of his still alive! body into hell like he’s garbage (so bad I’m literally still fuming of it over a year later)

and then there’s the guy who is manipulating that guy, who is an older man heavily implied to serially abuse and assault teenage boys and young men (bad!!). he also dies too which is fine and good in and of itself...*

except for the fact that of our three queer-adjacent characters, two die and one is horribly injured and almost dies. two are abused and one is an abuser. two are used as angst-fodder for straight characters and one is literally sacrificed, coldly and selfishly and without his consent, to save a straight character’s life. they’re all closely associated with injury and death and trauma and abuse and it’s suggested that death is the only escape.

subtextually speaking, this book hates queer men and punishes them for existing.

*note: I want to specifically say that “enjoying abusing teen boys” does not automatically make a person gay or queer. that’s not what being gay/queer means. HOWEVER, there is a long and ugly history of gay men being portrayed as predators who deliberately prey on and abuse younger men, and this character plays directly into that stereotype, and that is why I included him. not b/c he’s positive queer rep but exactly because he isn’t

thirdly) about a year ago there was a bit of buzz about ve schwab writing a book with a canon asexual character...except I looked into it and a) it’s not actually canon at all; the book only says he’s disinterested in sex, which is by NO MEANS the same and it’s shitty to conflate the two when there’s a vast spectrum of asexual experiences (to be clear, it would be one thing if the text said he was asexual AND disinterested in sex. to say he’s disinterested in sex and that equals asexuality is a whole other thing, and is wrong), and schwab then confirmed on her twitter that he’s meant to be asexual. That’s not the same its not the same and we all know its not the same. b) this character is in fact a villain, which is frustrating when asexuality is FREQUENTLY and harmfully associated with people being heartless and unfeeling and evil and like, literal serial killers; to be fair, as I understand it the majority (all?) of the characters in these books are villains, so that’s less bad, but to be fair again, apparently this specific character is also portrayed as being, like “a sociopath” which is ableist AND goes back to all the stuff I said above. and c) what really annoys me is that in her tweets at the time she was very smug about this and fully patted herself on the back. she did half-assed, unresearched “rep” which wasn’t even actually canon and then acted like she was doing ace ppl a favor. excuse me, I didn’t actually ask to be represented by you.

SO YEAH that’s not the...medium and short of it. the long and short is reserved for a Cursed(TM) google doc filled with my rage. but the tl;dr is that I think she’s an overhyped writer who wrote a profoundly misogynistic, homophobic book and trumps herself up over rep she didn’t actually do a good job of providing. and I would definitely never read another one of her books. The End!

#things you didn't care to know about veronica #negative #veronica reads things #I don't want to tag her name in this so it doesn't come up in searches since i'm being mean #should i censor her name? please let me know if i should censor her name and i will happily do so #the ask and the answer

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nicostolemybones · 4 years

Text

Queer As In Fuck You

Alternative title: the fuckening.

Basically: the fic where Nico is gay and angry and punk (also the title is a song)

Tw: homophobia, mild violence, reclaimed slurs

Nico had decided that today was forever going to be referred to as the fuckening. To say Nico was nervous was an understatement to say the least- because today he'd decided that he was finally gonna come out to everyone officially. It wasn't necessarily because he was ready to, but because there were rumours flying around everywhere about him. The first was that he was having an affair with Annabeth and that's why he was avoiding Percy. The second was that whilst travelling with Reyna and Hedge he'd tried to kiss her and that's what they refused to talk about. The third was that Jason had a crush on Nico and Nico was waiting for him to break up with Piper. And the fourth was that Will was obsessed with Nico and stalking him. The fourth annoyed Nico the most- because it framed Will as some kind of predator, and of course, Will was the only openly gay camper at this particular point. And the fact that just because he made the effort to spend time around Nico and actually cared about his health was being twisted.

Nico could handle rumours about himself. The rumours about girls kept him closeted and whilst it pissed him off that people thought so low of his morals that he'd cheat, he was used to being painted as the bad guy, and besides, everybody thought he was too weird to ever be loved. But it was hurting others too. It was hurting Annabeth and Percy and Reyna and Jason and Piper, even if they knew the truth.

But Will? Will didn't need this. It rubbed Nico up the wrong way that they'd accuse his boyfriend of being a stalker or being predatory or obsessed towards Nico, especially as it was convenient that nobody slapped the same label on anyone else at camp who showed interest in somebody in some way. No, because only the gay guy could possibly be a predatory person.

So Nico was going to announce his sexuality and his relationship to camp, because he could see that the rumours were starting to get to Will. At first it was small things- Will stopped leaving good morning texts when he woke up at 5am. Things like Will waiting for Nico to sit at the Apollo table rather than waving him over. And then it was the big things, like Will only seeing Nico after campfire so people couldn't comment on the amount Will called him into the infirmary, and the way Will had asked him if he made Nico uncomfortable, to the time he'd seen Will shaking with anger and on the verge of tears when a 'concerned' camper tried to warn him off.

So Nico was going to come out. Because the rumours were too much and it was hurting the people he cared about. And he knew- he knew there'd be more vicious rumours afterwards, but at least he could control them, correct them, shut them down. He wanted to be in control of the situation, and he couldn't do that from in the closet.

Nico wouldn't have chosen to come out just yet, not if the rumours weren't there. It was a shit situation, which angered him, because it shouldn't have to be. He should be able to come out comfortably, but instead, he'd be coming out so he could take control back of his own narrative. It angered him because he'd been painted this picture of this progressive society where people could be openly gay and gay marriage was legal and people could come out without fear- except that wasn't everyone's reality. It wasn't Nico's. And he kept seeing this push to silence his experiences- to cut them out of fiction and cut them out of discussion because society was progressive now and nobody needed or wanted to see the struggles when they could show a happy life. Except Nico did. Nico needed to see people struggling like him, laying awake at night feeling scared and alone and rejected and wrong to know he wasn't alone, to know he could come out the other side. He needed to see the pain to see that it wasn't a tragedy. It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows and it certainly wasn't for Nico.

So Nico was angry, because he'd been sold an image, a faceless image, of this amazingly accepting place where he could feel safe, except he didn't, and that made people uncomfortable. It made him feel guilty for his struggles with his past, his struggles with microaggressions, his struggles with internalised homophobia, because when he created, vented, his experiences were reduced to a tragic trope doing more harm than good. Nico felt silenced. He wondered how many like him, venting and speaking up about lived experiences through art and writing, were shot down for doing so.

Nico was angry because he'd been introduced to this amazing community only to find the beginnings of toxicity and identity policing rooting in the fringes online. Nico was angry because he'd been told the world was accepting to find out some still paid the price with their lives or their freedom. Nico was angry because the only rep he could find was dead, on screen for two seconds, stereotype, unnecessarily sexualised, predatory, or bootlicker. Nico was angry because he'd grown up in a time where he learned fear, to be then told of the wonders of modern society, to be shamed for his learned fear, to then find out that the reality was still scary and unsafe for many.

He was happy for those who were accepted and comfortable, for those who were open and free, for those who could rise above the hate, for people like Will who felt able to freely express their identities. Of course he was happy, and of course he wanted their stories to explode across the media and give others hope. Of course he wanted to get away from Bury Your Gays. But he wished that wasn't at the expense of people like him telling their realities. He wished you could have both side by side, not at odds. Because experience was diverse, and the push to homogenise the portrayal of the gay experience into either perfectly happy or tragically horrible was seriously tearing the community apart and leaving people feeling frustrated and silenced on both sides.

Nico was angry because his reality right now was uncomfortable and his reality was one of pressure. He had to come out because he had to take back control of his own narrative. He was angry because he wasn't the first and he wouldn't be the last. He was angry because he knew if he spoke about how he was violently outed, he'd hear the whisperings of shared experience amongst kids too young to be facing prejudice. He'd have year round campers look to him for advice on how to be like him, how to come out and be happy when their own situations were bleak.

The first thing he'd tell them was that being gay isn't a tragedy or a death sentence. The tragedy is the existence of prejudice. The next thing he'd tell them is that yes, for some, it was gonna hurt and it would be hard. You'd feel like a newborn deer balancing dangerously on thin cracking ice with no guidance. He'd tell them that yes, safe spaces could be invaded by arseholes and you'd cry and rage and question. But he'd also tell them that that didn't mean they couldn't be happy and comfortable. He'd tell them that they didn't have to come out. He'd tell them that it was okay if all they could do was turn the closet light on to see themselves. He'd tell them that it was okay to exist in your own space and your own head whilst you learned how to navigate the world. He'd tell them that nothing could take away the labels they chose or chose not to take. He'd tell them that they could find power in simply existing. But above all he'd tell them to sing their truths, to create, to vent, to put into prose the pain or the joy or the duality of experiencing both at once. He'd tell them to delve deeper and learn and reach out and accept. He'd tell them to tell the stories they needed to see to feel heard and to heal, whether that be fairytale or tragedy.

Nico would tell them that even if they felt like their hand was forced, that their cards were ripped from their hands and laid bare for all to see, that they could still take back control. They could do what they needed to feel safe, hide if needed, or spit in the face of oppression with a 'so what?'. He'd tell them to fight back if they could fight comfortably, to protect those who couldn't fight for themselves, to find allies and comrades who would boost their voices.

And Nico realised that yeah, fuck it, he'd never been more ready for the fuckening. Because yes, he was still in pain and he was still scared. But fuck the people who made him feel silenced. He refused to be. He was fighting back. He was gay, he was a man in love with a man, a man who held hands with a man, a man who kissed a man, a man who would one day live with a man and fuck a man and unapologetically marry a man. And loving men wasn't all he was, but it was damn important to him and he'd be damned if anyone tried to strip it from his identity. He was scared and he was struggling and he was shamed but he wasn't ashamed to say that he was different. You know what? He was the fuckening and that was a fucking threat.

So yes. Nico's narrative was never going to be sunshine and rainbows. It had been fear and persecution and shame and war and oppression and pain. But now? Now it was a fire, the embers of self-acceptance and self-love glowing in his soul, the sparks of rebellion and pride igniting the flames of passion and rage and all things fuck you.

Things had to change. Nico refused to be silenced and spoken about in a way that he didn't want to be. They'd learn soon enough. Respect his existence or expect resistance. He'd control the rumours now. They wanted something to talk about? They could talk about this.

So Nico pulled on Will's pride vest, and pulled on his own black and pink jeans heavy with chains, and pulled on his biggest angriest boots, and pulled on the black leather waistcoat he'd taken the time to paint and sew with patches and slogans, and he put on his skull necklaces and his black lipstick and raccoon eyes eyeliner and he ruffled his hair until it looked like a bird's nest and he put on his playlist full of rage and gay and shouty lyrics full blast knowing it could be heard through his earbuds and he stepped out of his cabin with his best murderwalk because yes he would stomp on you if you dared say anything, because he wasn't a doormat anymore and he refused to be. He was gay and angry and he'd ripped off the duct tape society had glued to his mouth and he was screaming with confidence and radiating death because fuck society for making him feel like this.

"I'm only gonna say this once," he began firmly. People listened because he made them listen for once. He wasn't done talking and boy would they know it. "If anybody dares to accuse Will of anything ever again, I will come for you, and I will damn you to Tartarus, capisce? You do not get to make rumours about me and my private life. How dare you use me for your sick entertainment, how dare you drag my friends into it. You should be ashamed of yourselves! I am not some article in a gossip magazine for you to fawn and speculate over. I'm not some kid you can poke fun at. Will isn't some uwu gay best friend you have and he's not some butt sex obsessed fiend. And neither am I. We're just two pissed off queers who are sick of your shit and from now on if you've got something to say about it you say it to my face, you got that? You put your money where your mouth is and you face me you fucking cowards. See if it's still funny or exciting to call us slurs behind our backs when an angry faggot is done being scared. Shout at me what you like because I've reclaimed it all. You do not get to silence us, you do not get to control our narratives, you do not get to police our identities and our relationships. Respect our existence or expect resistance, you got it? Good. You wanna learn how to be an ally? Listen to us. Will's happy to educate you and so is Google. You're an ally to all or an ally to none. You don't get to pick and choose which parts of the community deserve respect. So yes, I'm fucking gay as fuck for Will Solace and if you got a problem with that then tough!"

An Ares camper rose to his challenge. Walked to his face and spit at his feet. Nico elbowed his face and kicked his nuts and shoved his face into the dirt. "I wouldn't do that, pretty boy," Nico warned, resting his boot on his cheek. "Anyone else wanna try me? No. Good." Nico let him go and walked straight over to Will, who was staring with his mouth open. Nico was terrified of the crowd still watching but fuck them Nico was feeling brave and bravery wasn't the absence of fear. He was gonna live and living meant pushing through it all.

"Wow," Will managed, "gods, just kiss me, fuck, that was- just wow!" So Nico did. Nico kissed him there and then, in the middle of camp, in front of everyone, because dammit he was a man who loved men and Will was his man and he was pissed off and living off spite. He had a point to prove and that point was that his existence was not up for debate. And boy did he intend to make it loud and fight for others who needed it.

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colorisbyshe · 4 years

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everyone ofc immediately started speculating which one is the gay character™ and THEN people, even worse, started passionately theorising how rmadden was purposely being papped in la w justin from 13rw to like, suck up to marvel & show he'll come out officially or something to increase his chances of getting the role. idk, it was deranged and incredibly stupid. but as you mentioned, he did play that gay in sirens uk, but also in the fucking rocketman? and i think a few more, why would this - 2

why would this mcu one be special to require coming out? and ofc some twitter dumbass gays had their own brain rot takes. but my point is he's likely not straight (has another bf now apparently) but also not like publicly out but also in like a glass closet as ppl like to say and just showcases how dumb some of those convos about who is allowed to play gay characters. the end. sorry for the long message.

people really just need to learn how to be like... normal? like i have a friend that’s into richard and like we’ve seen the pap pictures that are like... clearly with a boyfriend (we’re not blind) and privately we’re like “uwu gay” or whatever

or like i’ll see an actress take like 15 gay roles in a row and be like “i see what’s in your heart” or whatevre

but creating elaborate conspiracies about how they’re gonna come out or like whether or not they’re more appropriate than actors who aren’t half out the closet is just so fucking excessive

there are some celebrities who (to gay people) are extremely obviously gay (or to avoid pissing people off, seem likely to be gay) who are never, ever gonna come out cause they don’t think it’s anyone’s business.

nor should they have to come out to take a role. gay roles aren’t comparable to trans roles or roles for people of color in that they require out gay actors. it’s sort of like how gender bending a role (not in fanart, which gets more complicated) isn’t the same as race bending. joan watson isn’t the same as “now maria hill is white in the mcu.” making the bond girl a bond boy also wouldn’t be the same as a cis man playing a trans woman. etc etc

different standards, different roles.

just like a white author writing stories just about people of color feels more exploitative than a straight author writing a book like love simon.

it’s just... people learn their morality from places like tumblr and think the one rule they’ve learned kinda applies equally. or that it needs extreme justification to apply differently.

gay content... is just different than other content when it comes to who can create/play the roles. often because there’s a smaller “shift” in knowledge when it comes to the representation. it’s just a straight character... who kisses the same gender, you don’t have to change that much unless you’re creating a piece specifically about gay culture. there really aren’t as many intricacies or pitfalls. just like men create content about women alllll the time without comment.

things just... apply differently in different circumstances, even with gay and womanly rep. ie a man can probably write a comic book about a woman... fine-ish, maybe even well, but probably shouldn’t be writing a story about woman’s oppression.

sometimes it feels completely arbitrary and maybe it is but

yeah

“we shouldn’t publicly speculate an actor is gay just cause they played a gay role” can easily coexist with “trans characters should only be played by trans actors” because the implications of a cis man playing a trans woman are INFINITELY different than that of a straight man playing a gay man or whatever. just like a trans woman playin a cis man has different implications than a gay man playing a straight man.

it’s so funny to me when these debates happen cause men are CONSTANTLY writing women’s stories, sometimes even horribly, and there’s zero comment. straight people create gay movies we love.

but then there’s a gay movie directed by a gay man adapted from a book written by a straight woman who used sensitivity readers and everyone shits their pants. an mcu actor is rumored to play a gay role and suddenly it’s conspiracy time cause “uwu gay roles are only done by gay actors” or whatever

like PLEASE JUST BE NORMAL AND REALIZE THINGS HAVE NUANCE AND VARYING CONTEXTS

#Anonymous #i really wrote a lot saying the same thing five different times

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curestardust · 4 years

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if you want: one half sports anime (soft tennis) and one half character drama

I really liked “Hoshiai no Sora”. Why? Well, I really am not sure.

We’ve seen many sports anime by now and they usually fall into 3 categories: ones that focus only on the sport with minor character drama, ones that focus on both but entangle them so the issues are kinda “solved” by playing the sport and the ones where the sport and the characters’ issues are almost completely seperate. “Hoshiai no Sora” falls into the latter category. The sport in question is soft tennis and our characters are predictably the boys’ soft tennis club. The anime has quite a big cast, I believe 8 club members, their manager and a female side character.

The boys’ soft tennis club is a big failure. There isn’t much of an explanation as to why most of the characters are still even in the club. Their club president is Shinjo whose big brother is an alumni of the club and was one of their top players. He is presented as one half of the 2 main characters, the other being a transfer student called Maki who has no interest in sports. I say presented, as his character is quite weak. He doesn’t change or grow much until the finale. Maki on the other hand is a refreshing character; he is smart and tactical, picks things up extremely fast and knows how to work around people. Despite this he isn’t cocky, isn’t focused on winning but improvement, knows when to back down or step up.

We do learn quite a bit about soft tennis and there are multiple episodes simply focused around matches. While the sport isn’t the most exciting visually (ball goes woosh, ball goes woosh again), the way they’re shown with quick cuts and well done animation makes them fun to watch... somewhat. Even that can get boring after a while but the reactions of the club members and the pairs interacting spices it up a bit.

Now for what I mentioned in the beginning: the character drama. This is half “damn you have some family issues boiiiiii” The Show but with EVERY character. Well, okay 2 of them have decent parents but everyone else’s family life is insane. At first we’re only presented with Shinjo and his distant relationship with his mother (not unusual) and Maki and his... dad. I’m not going to go into detail here because the first time you see it it’s very shocking because it’s such a stark switch from the lighthearted tone of the anime. But that’s it: shocking. The more horrible family dynamics we see (ranging from “kinda uncomfortable” to “holy shit call the police”) the less impact they have and just made me annoyed.

// Also, obligatory “there’s a gay (potentially) non-binary character whose personality isn’t hinged on this, gets treated respectfully and his/their issues are actually discussed in one great scene” comment here. Good job! Gay rep is rare enough but gender issues talked about in a serious context, wow, I don’t even know if I’ve ever seen that before. But anyway, back to the review. //

“Hoshiai no Sora” is a 12 episode anime with a big cast, most of whom have big fucking problems and there simply wasn’t enough time to settle the majority of the things introduced. Soft tennis is cool but dude I’m really worried about these characters and want them to feel safe, okay?! But we don’t get that. That’s right it”s: SIN TIME!

Cliffhanger!! Or more or less. The implication is there and it can be looked at as a legit ending. The worst of the issues have had some minor conclusions but most very unsatisfactory because they felt like temporary solutions to problems that needed a lot more work. I can’t even tell you to go read the manga; there is no manga! It’s an original production!

So why did I give this such a high score? I actually had to sit down and think about this as just based on my review it’s mostly just the negatives, isn’t it? After some pondering, I realized, I wanted to see more. I wanted to see these characters happy, their problems solved, I wanted to see more story, how their homelife would affect their matches, how they would evolve to overcome or succumb to their struggles, what the consequences of their difficult decisions are. I did enjoy the anime while watching it as well but I had problems with it as well. But just as I mentioned in my “Granbelm” review, an anime making me think “I don’t want it to end” is so rare that I have to give credits where it’s due.

I’ve no idea whom I would recommend this to. It’s an interesting anime with a lot of faults and I do think, with this one, it’s 100% up to taste.

[8/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

#dusty reviews #Stars Align #Hoshiai no Sora #wow this turned out LONG #long post #to save y'all

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sea-chief · 4 years

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A friend of mine is looking for comics that have representation for gay people, and I know they're a weeb so I'm thinking about recommending Killing Stalking. But I've heard about Killing Stalking being problematic and showing an unhealthy relationship, can you plz elaborate bcs I'm not too familiar with the anime genre

Oh woof. Before I get into this I want to say a thing

If this ends up in the KS tag and you want to defend your love of KS or whatever I don’t want to hear it and I will block you. I’m not going to discourse this again, leave me alone. KS fans have been shitty enough to me in the past

Anyway, anon. KS is a psychological horror manhwa, and afaik it isn’t even supposed to be a portrayal of a healthy relationship. The plot is that the main character, who I’ll to as YB to try and keep this out of tags as much as possible, is stalking a college student (SW), and at one point breaks into his house while he’s gone to find out he’s a sadistic serial killer. SW gets back and finds YB, and then kidnaps him. The rest of the story just follows SW’s heavy abuse and torture of YB, who is still in love with SW. The story itself is about a toxic and unhealthy relationship.

The problematic stuff comes in later. Some of it can be debated (is it misogynistic vs is SW being misogynistic a character flaw) but my biggest problems are a.) the ableism and b.) the fans. Many fans, including ones I’ve dealt with in the past, romanticize the relationship a lot, and are just generally horrible. The ableism comes in in the fact the writer did not mean to write SW as being either bipolar or having BPD (I don’t remember which, sorry) but then being like “ah it fits him!” when making and/or coding abusers/villains as having bipolar disorder/BPD is an incredibly overused ableist trope that has rendered almost ALL characters with those disorders as being shit people.

Basically, I do think that it can be enjoyed, like most things, with a very critical eye because at the very least most of it’s issues stem from the “psychological horror” thing but to me it feels kinda torture porn-esque, and I personally can’t imagine reading it due to my own issues, but also I just? Generally don’t think you should recommend it as a comic for gay rep bc it’s not supposed to be good gay rep, it’s supposed to be a serial killer abusing the shit out of someone.

#ks tw #abuse cw

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asterbi · 4 years

Text

so I finished sally face

SALLY FACE SPOILERS (INCLUDING EPISODE 5) AHEAD

I played through the entire game two days ago (i had already watched both jacksepticeye's and gloomgames' lets plays for the first four episodes) and yeah, I know I'm a week and a bit late late, but I have some thoughts

Also I’m so sorry for how long this is, I know no one cares but I just started rambling and I couldn’t stop

First of all, criticism:

I'm getting real fucking tired of "ooOOooOOOoo a native american myth so scary and otherworldly" like dude shut the fuck up that's disrespectful as

Also (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I'm like 99% sure that the native american myth in question isn't real which. is somehow even worse

He buried his gays (tbh I wasn't that annoyed at this one because 1) at least one of the gays lived and 2) he buried pretty much everyone else too but I feel like it had to be said)

Now. Let me preface this by saying I loved travis' redemption, which I'll get more into later. However, I really didn't like the fact that travis' character played into the whole 'homophobes are gay' thing, which is a uhhhh vaguely problematic trope

The ending was unsatisfying. I'll get more into it in a sec

Larry was one of my favourite characters, and I know he's a fan favourite too. Considering the fact that he is a main character and he's been given a lot of attention and development, having him disappear at the end without any explanation and barely a reunion or a goodbye was an asshole move.

I would have loved to see some more worldbuilding and lore, especially getting into what exactly the red eyes plague did, why the cult wanted to summon red eyes, how the whole replacement thing worked, what happened with charley, and what exactly the whole mother tree thing was with larry

Ash's extremely triggering and graphic suicide. I understand this is a horror game. I understand that this sort of thing is expected and normal in horror games. But showing players imagery like that without so much as a content warning? That's not okay.

Some of the characters were left really underdeveloped. Sal and larry were great, and ash saw a lot of development in the last episode, but todd, neil, and travis, who were given a fair bit of attention as well, were pretty 2d (not so much travis, but still)

And now for things I enjoyed:

The entire game

Despite everything I said earlier, this is still one of my favourite games, and I really really loved it

Sal was a f a n t a s t i c character. 0% toxic masculinity, 12/10. I love the fact that he was so kind and calm towards everyone, even those who were rude to him, but still knew where to draw the line and wasn't a total pushover. I especially love the fact that even though he likes feminine things and wears pigtails and whatnot, he is a cishet guy. While more lgbt+ representation (particularly trans people and wlw) would've been great, I also like that the game shows that you don't have to be lgbt in order to be gnc, especially since the gnc person is both a man, and the main character, which is really uncommon. Also disabled representation!! That's really fucking awesome

Larry was also brilliant!! Loves metal, loves art, has a criminal record, cries during sappy movies, does drugs and dabbles in illegal activities, wants to go to college, is openly and unapologetically affectionate towards his friends and unafraid to tell them he loves them

Ash was not one of my favourite characters but I really love how she developed from sceptic to believer and the way she changed and faced her own problems, and to some extent had her own story (although it did rely fairly heavily on sal’s, which was :/ but then again everyone’s story relied on sal’s)

Okay so back to travis - I loved his redemption arc so much, because he was a redeemable character. I see so many characters who get redemption arcs that absolutely do not deserve them, but travis was a good person born into a horrible situation, and I’m glad they explored homophobia and abuse (although I’m not happy about the homophobes are gay thing like I said) and made him a hero at the end. I’m also glad that we got foreshadowing that it would happen, and it didn’t come totally out of left field

Speaking of which, props to steve gabry for not pulling an endgame and just throwing things in for shock value. Sal coming back in ep 5 was hinted at, travis’ redemption was hinted at, and of course the events of the first four episodes were hinted at because they were memories. Even ash and neil’s involvement in fighting the cult despite being a sceptic and someone totally ignorant about it respectively made perfect sense, and though the parallel universes thing and larry’s reappearance was a surprise, it still sort of fits with how the lore of the game works

The different game styles in episode 5 were absolutely out of this world. All of them were fantastic (although fuck you 3d sal you were Not fun to play), and I thought that was a really cool interpretation of the parallel universes thing

The writing was consistently really good throughout the whole game, and it genuinely makes you so attached to all of the characters, which makes the ending all the more upsetting

This is more personal but I really loved like. The Aesthetic of the game? It was so grungy and out there, and little things like the necrolight guitar and the super gear boy just added to this whole vibe of teenagers-trying-to-do-good-in-a-messed-up-world and I can’t explain it but it was great

The game really didn’t shy away from any aspects of horror, but it also did it in a really well written way that creeped you out without relying on random jumpscares, which was awesome. I mean they had e v e r y t h i n g - mass cannibalism, demonic rituals, cults, prophecies, murder, human sacrifices, suicide, nudity but in the creepy way not the sexy way (the random gory scene in ep 5 where neil and maple were hanging naked and dead upside down really startled me because I just didn’t expect it from this game and it just freaked me out more), aliens, creepy puppets which reminded me of dhmis, the list goes on

The main part in episode 4 where larry and sal are working together in different dimensions?? Poetic, amazing, 12/10

Final opinions: I absolutely loved the characters, the story, the general aesthetic of the game, and the art style and writing. Episode 5 was probably my least favourite episode, because I found the ending really vague and unsatisfying, although I absolutely loved all the different game styles. I also found that a lot was left vague and unanswered, and not really in a good way???? Also the representation and stuff was great (especially disabled rep, because that’s rare), but there were a few things that rubbed me the wrong way :/ Still, sally face is one of my favourite games, and I’m so sad that the series has come to an end :(

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paunchsalazar · 5 years

Note

hey!! bro ur my number #1 source for lupin III content so can I ask like how in the hell I go about watching all the series / movies / etc for it in order??? I’m really pumped for the live action so I wanna at least dip into all the other stuff. thanking ya kindly //tips hat

hello!!! what an honor!! oh my… ok I’m so sorry in advance… I’ve gotten a few similar asks and I started writing out a list and it was getting over 1500 words long so I had to try to chill out…so…

LUPIN III CRASH COURSE

I’m sorry that this is so long.. and consider I cut it down! but here is my intro because I know this franchise is huge and confusing!! (I’ve had multiple instances of friends being like ‘I tried to find that Lupin thing you like but I could only find the third one?’)

I kind of liken it to Scooby Doo? it stretches some 60 years and has been handled by many different writers, directors, and animators across very different eras? most important to know! the order doesn’t really matter and things aren’t really sequential (save for where the three most recent shows) so you can jump in and explore whatever seems compelling! it’s overwhelming because there is so much but also nice because there’s something for everybody! if you like fun and pure, edgy, etc. etc.

feel free to disregard everything coming… I will say my personal priority order is

- Castle of Cagliostro

- some episode of part 2

- part IV, ideally all of it! there’s filler but it’s hard to know which ones

- part I (or some episodes of it? up to you!)

- Fuma Conspiracy

- part V

- part III (it’s great too!! just not as sequential as IV and V)

- First Contact… truly indulgent but its so cute!

(below I broke down a little about each and my favorite episodes, where to find them, etc. and there’s so much more but just doing everything below is a whole lot)

TV (All the shows except for The Woman Called Fujiko Mine are on Crunchyroll!)

Part 1 (1971) - crunchyroll!

The beginnings kind of a weird feeling because the first half was directed with one vision vs. the second half being co-directed by Takahata and Miyazaki, there’s a shift in Lupin’s personality and most significantly they sought to shed his ‘sense of apathy’ and make him more of a hero? something that’s echoed later on! honestly, I don’t think the transition is as dramatic as some people find it? but it does shift across the episodes and end on a sweet note!

truly they all have something to enjoy but I made note of

episodes 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 23

for some reason? really really suggest watching the last episode! but get a bit of the first and second half beforehand!

Part II/Red Jacket (1977-80) - 155 episodes - on crunchyroll dubbed and subbed

there are a lot so I tried to narrow it down to a few of my favorites/ particularly noteworthy ones? I bolded my absolute favorites! I’m sure I missed a few but save for a few two-episode arcs you can jump in anywhere and it’ll be fine.

episodes 1-79 are dubbed on Crunchyroll! In my personal opinion the script makes it worth it!! there are a bunch of non-dubbed episodes anyway if you want to get a feel for both

(these episode titles are often hilarious, misleading, and/or horribly embarrassing?)

1 - ‘The Return of Lupin the Third’ - just a good starting point!

5 - ‘Will the Leaning Tower of Pisa Be Standing?’

6 - ‘Tutankhamen’s 3,000-Year-Old Curse’

7 - ‘Venetian Super Express’ - I want to say this is a cute little road trip episode? it’s been so long

9 - ‘Steal the FIle M123’ - this dub… madness. very strange Christopher Walken impression for absolutely no reason?

10 - ‘Bet on the Monaco Grand Prix’

15 - ‘Crude Reproduction, Perfect Frame’ - Lupin keeps committing strange and uncharacteristic crimes, but he has no memory of doing so!

29 - ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ - Lupin has some mysterious Levitation Technique and everyone is after it

32 - ‘Lupin the Interred’ A famed hitman is after Lupin!

34 - ‘But Your Brother Was Such A Nice Guy’ - this episode is one of the zaniest ones and that’s saying a lot… Vampires? Jesus? Really really funny moments though especially in the dub

42 - ‘Cruisin’ in Drag’ Lupin infiltrates the ship of a wealthy bachelor disguised as a woman

45 - ‘Diamonds and Minx’ kind of a mess of people stealing from each other?

46 - ‘The Island of Dr. Derange’

57 - ‘Alter-Ego Maniac’ - Inspector Zenigata goes criminal

62 - ‘Church of the Poison Mind’ - Jigen and Goemon stumble into a religious cult

69 - ‘Zenigata Getcha Into My Life’ - this title is awful but this episode is great.

78 - ‘Ice, Robot’ - an inventor has made a machine that can cry diamonds!

79 - ‘Baton Death March’

81 - ‘Fujiko, Men are a Sorry Lot!” - Fujiko gets engaged to a Prince, the rest of the gang goes after the monarchy’s Golden Bell

96 - ‘Lupin’s Gourmet World’ tbh this is a vore episode but there are some great gang moments here and a really fun third act

99 - ‘Fighting Jigen’ - first anime episode (I think like in history? but I could’ve misread) in stereo! And I believe the first to air of the TMS staff’s work, you can tell because the style shifts to a more Miyazaki/Cagliostro look and this will keep happening for the rest of the show

101 - ‘Fervent Love at Versailles’ - a crossover episode with Rose of Versailles!

103 - ‘The Wolf Looked at an Angel’ - Goemon is an angel I can say little else

104 - ‘The Most Dangerous Golden Bed’ - debut of perhaps the best opening! I love this episode?? so much?

112 - ‘Danger! Goemon’

122 - ‘An Unusual End to an Expedition for Napoleon’s Treasure’

143 - ‘The Miami Bank’

145 - ‘Wings of Death: Albatross’ - ah yes, one of the famed Miyazaki-directed episode, truly so worth it

151 - ‘To Arrest Lupin, the Mission at the Highway’ - another not exactly Miyazaki episode but a lot of the people he trained? They depart from the part 2 style(s) again but its a good bit of fun all around! Really lovely character animation

152 - ‘Jigen and the Hatless Pistol’ - Jigen loses his hat and thus his ability to shoot

155 - ‘Thieves Love the Peace/Farewell, Dear Lupin’ - the finale episode! Miyazaki-directed as well, and just beautiful

Part III (1984) - 50 episodes - crunchyroll!

I’m still very early in this one so I can’t say much yet! But it gets a bad rep? Perhaps for being more inconsistent stylistically and a bit on the zanier end! But I really like it!! these drawings are such a blast! I think each bit has its merits and this one is no exception. Plus with all their freedom animation-wise they can do a lot of fun stuff!

The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012) - 13 episodes - on kissanime for certain and I think animetake?

this is the most dramatic departure from the rest of the shows/films/specials. Fujiko Mine is the star of this part! It definitely has less obviously plot-important episodes but it’s one narrative from start to finish. I must note that it’s by far Lupin’s edgiest, I think it’d be safe to deem this part as R-Rated. There’s sex, violence, sexual violence, abuse, bodily mutilation, obsession… a gay character who gets a pretty tragic fate (at first I was excited by the very existence of an LGBT+ character but he really goes through the wringer and never gets a resolution.. I don’t want to spoil). This is probably Lupin at his ickiest? I do like Jigen’s personality here! And his dynamic with Fujiko, but it’s a lot more disjointed than the other parts. She meets each of them separately and towards the end, Lupin and Jigen interact more but there’s barely a time when they’re all together. That’s not meant to be a deterrent but personally, I’m a sucker for their friendship and love them as a group so it’s a bit of a bummer. Sequential plot-wise though! This one is definitely captivating, a bit disturbing, and there is a plot-twist that really got me. The villain design is really cool too!

Part IV (2015) - 26 episodes - on crunchyroll, also dubbed on Funimation

This part is narrative-based and sequential! It still has some more standalone episodes but there’s definitely an overarching story throughout! I think they’re all worth watching and might leave little important bits that’ll be confusing later on. Essentially this part takes place in Italy for the most part and starts with Lupin getting married to a multi-millionaire heiress/model/celebrity who wants to get into the thief business. This one feels like a good combination of old and new, it’s not quite as silly as the earlier parts can be, but it’s full of nostalgia while still feeling original. I really had a good time!

This dub isn’t bad but!! It comes with a different opening and soundtrack, I guess Lupin’s pretty big in Italy and perhaps there were licensing issues? I’m not sure? But it’s a bit of a bummer to be without the Yuji Ohno soundtrack. The alternate opening feels more like a collection of stills and footage found throughout the show? It’s not horrible, just different! Regardless, the Part IV Japanese OP (vs. the Italian/US one) is worth a watch!

Part V (2018, airing on Adult Swim right now, summer 2019!) - 23 episodes

I’m actually not done with this part but its good fun! more directly tied to part iv then the others are to each other. It’s more sequential as well with a few sub-arcs and since it fell on the franchise’s anniversary it has callback episodes with Lupin in various jackets in various tones. Interesting Lupin characterization here… he seems… sadder, wistful? and we get hints of Lupin lore! Lots of fanservice but… I love it! I still think they could’ve pushed it more? it feels somehow more reserved than part IV in some ways, which is already different from the 70s and 80s, but it’s got a lot of lovely moments!!

Films/TV Specials

From 1989 to 2011 they had a special every year!! So much!

Castle of Cagliostro (1979) - Available on Netflix!

perhaps the best-known piece of media in the Lupin franchise? And rightly so. This film is Hayao Miyazaki’s directing debut and a blast from start to finish! This characterization of Lupin is definitely Miyazaki’s more than Monkey Punch’s but that seems to be the strange nature of the Lupin franchise! I could really go on forever… please watch it!

The Fuma Conspiracy (1987) -

perhaps harder to find, but it’s on Kissanime! Goemon is getting married but before the ceremony is over the bride is taken by the Fuma ninja clan and the gang helps him to get her back as well as learn the story of a family heirloom? Really great stuff from everybody! Adorable Zenigata, the fluffiest and most handsome Goemon, cute Jigen, Fujiko, and Lupin interactions, a really really incredible car chase! Even with Cagliostro’s fame, this one has got some serious pizzazz

Episode 0: The First Contact (2002) - on Kissanime as well!

A journalist asks Jigen how he met Lupin III, this is probably my favorite TV special? And features one of my favorite opening scenes in the whole franchise. The instrumental!! Perhaps each member of the gang at their purest, whatever that means, really great moments between everybody and peak Lupin and Jigen meeting and somehow signing up to be life partners

#oh my god #i'm so sorry #please.. feel free to ignore this #lupin #lupin the third #lupin iii #lupin the 3rd #diggitydamnsebastianstan

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