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janeirl · 2 years

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a stream of consciousness on what i see as mike’s queercoding in st401 specifically bc i need to ramble ab it since it’s been deteriorating my brain

in episode 1 the first second we see him he’s reading el’s letter. i’ve ran this damn detail into the fucking ground but there’s, of course, his open closet behind him with a “one-way” sign pointing directly to it. i have so many thoughts on this bc first of all the people in charge of decorating the rooms have gotta be on point (and this is a period piece after all). they need to put things in there that they believe the characters would throw in there too. what kind of choice was this if not to see where mike’s mind is?; this is the how i personally interpret it: there’s only one way for mike to go, and it’s the closet (smth smth forced conforming that’s what’s killing kids). but despite this, at school, he’s shown to be growing more comfortable in his own skin. he’s finding clothes that he likes (more of a grunge style; black jeans, black converse, the “hellfire club” shirt topping it off). he doesn’t care anymore that he’s seen as a freak or an outcast, he’s embracing who he is. he seems to be enjoying himself in the hellfire club, and it’s clear that mike feels he can express himself for who he really is when with them. filming choices were MADE when the camera lingered on mike’s expression while watching eddie put on a show in the cafeteria, as most of the bg slightly blurs around mike (i poke at this scene here). he clearly sees him as a role model and it’s interesting since eddie is really vocal on going against society’s expectations. but why would they make this choice to focus solely on mike’s reactions? why not dustin, where he plays more of a role being associated with eddie, as he’s one of the (if not thee) main person trying to help eddie and clear his name? when trying to find subs to fill in for lucas for the campaign, one of the locations mike goes to is a wrestling room to persuade them to join hellfire for a night. now why the fuck would they do that bc that’s umm let’s just say random. idk it’s just the fact that it’s a room filled w all boys working out so why make him specifically go there of all places (to be silly? girl..)?? honestly this is all over the place and i probably missed some things and i’m probably reading too into some other stuff here but it’s been making me sit and think and it’s been a ringing in my ear all month so far. i need to lay down seriously

#twyla’s #it’s my (blog) and i get to (rant ab my favs)#this was in my notes app but im bringing it here 💀#mike wheeler

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beepboop358 · 2 years

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I feel like maybe you don’t realize just HOW MUCH rainbows were used as decor in the 80s. Everyone had rainbow everything back then. It didn’t necessarily symbolize someone was gay. It was just a style of decor, and especially for kids. I feel like the set designers, costume designers, etc. are trying to stick to authentic 80s decor, and that just happens to include a lot of rainbows. No disrespect intended. I just don’t think this is a great example.

hey anon!

Yeah I can understand what you’re saying for sure. Obviosuly I didn’t grow up in the 80’s, but this is a piece of media being put out in the 2010’s/2020’s so they are very aware of how things will be percieved in todays world. They have to be or the show won’t come across as well to viewers. And, rainbows were used as a pride symbol in the 80’s same as they are now, so there’s absolutely no historical reason for us to assume a rainbow in the show can not be queercoding. And rainbows are still a pretty popular trend right now, just you know, stylistically different than the 80’s, but also retro is in right now so 🤷‍♀️ Anyways, I think where the difference of the significance of the rainbows from just styles of the time period to intentional coding is how its used. The rainbows used for Mike and Will are extensive, but also subtle…which is suspicious. Like…if its just a style of the time and means nothing, why make it subtle for them… 👀 there’s no point to making it subtle if it doesn’t mean anything.

Mike and Will are the 2 characters who are consistently framed around rainbows the most, thats hella suspicious… We definitely see other characters around rainbows, but much more scarcely, and we should be picking up on it thinking “hey why are mike and will constantly associated with rainbows, but the other characters aren’t as much?” They’re trying to tell us something 😉

(Max is also seen wearing rainbows frequently but I would argue that may also be queercoding bc like in the case of Max’s rainbow bedsheets, thats a direct reference to Wet Hot American Summer, when we see that pattern on a flag right before a gay wedding) And then ofc the rainbow room rainbow significance is entirely different.

Take Richie in IT for example - thats set in the 80’s and we see Richie with subtle rainbows on his clothes, but the other characters besides Eddie slightly, aren’t associated with rainbows, and Richie turns out to be gay, and Richie had nowhere near as much queercoding (in the movies) as Mike/Will do 😀

thanks for the ask! I hope you’re well! xx

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variousqueerthings · 3 years

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Top Ten (eleven) Favourite Queer Film/TV Characters

So on this previous post, I figured, why not make lists. And invite others to make lists. You do not have to go into things like I just did, or even at all, but I love knowing Stuff and Things about people and the queer narratives that speak to them.

Anyway without further rambling:

1. Pike Dexter - Big Eden

In general Big Eden is just a lovely movie that deals with ideas around shame and love and community and creates this environment that’s free of hostility and homophobia, but most of it? most of it is down to Eric Schweig:

““I just thought, ‘Oh well, you know, it will probably be the first and only ever gay role I’ll ever get to do, so I’m just gonna go, you know, rock it at the audition, cuz I really wanna do it’ […] I think at the time, I just liked the material because it didn’t have any sort of… racist dialogue that I was so used to, and when you’re a Native American actor, you’re pigeonholed into doing certain types of roles. You sort of get used to doing period piece after period piece, and it’s no fun. And they don’t write gay characters for Native American people...”

This movie and this role in particular is a unicorn in terms of the kind of gay (and queer in general) stories and characters that’re allowed to exist. Subtly iconic.

2. Marcus Keane - The Exorcist

There’re several queer characters on The Exorcist and if it hadn’t been cancelled you know it would’ve gone even deeper, but Marcus Keane is such a beautiful, beautiful character whose motivations partially relate to this part of him. Not to mention I’m a sucker for stories about religious trauma for... reasons.

He’s intense, he’s impulsive, he’s like a stray alley cat that enters the life of our other (queercoded) protagonist and the two of them engage in a passionate partnership in which they exorcise demons and have gorgeous dialogue about belief and how much they mean to each other. Also he’s played by the irl gay actor Ben Daniels, who is a fucking delight.

I miss this guy so much, because while he’s got these surface-level aggressive masculine traits he is also so passionately loving, and respectful, and giving. His interactions with women are some of my favourite on the show, as well as with abuse survivors (which he is as well). He’s a priest I would trust.

3. Anne Bonny - Black Sails

Honestly this was a toss-up, Black Sails is not only full of great queer characters, a substantial part of its story is dependent upon the telling of queer lives.

The reason I chose Anne over Max or Eleanor or Flint (and that’s not counting those characters who were written as subtextually queer in a way where that also means something around ideas of how we can’t label people from the past so neatly) is just that I love angry women who stab people. Maybe not the deepest of reasons, but I had to choose one person according to my own rules and that juuuust tipped her over the edge for me.

Every character on this show straddles these fun historical lines where you can’t define them so much using modern vernacular - is Flint bi or gay? is Jack in love with Vane and therefore bi (no, Jack’s a lesbian, we know this)? Is Silver in love with Flint and therefore also bi?

Is Anne a lesbian or bi or trans or...

In some ways that doesn’t matter. What matters are these squiggly lines showing us how our histories intersect, how people engaged with sexuality and gender and how that affected society. And it matters that Anne has... possibly? my most favourite badass scene in the show.

4. The Pose Women

Lol okay I’m not going to choose.

Every lady on this show is astounding. You can feel all that creative energy that’s not been able to find outlets previously being unleashed here - history, community, all those stories that have built up both for the actresses personally and within the general community. To reiterate what everyone else has ever said about this: Where are you going to find a cast with this many trans women in it? Anywhere? What does that do to the narrative that’s being told? Who gets the power?

This isn’t so much about the show, despite the broader picture I’ve just written about - I have my issues with some of its construction and from the sounds of things the amount that the trans creatives have been paid, but purely in terms of characters -

They’re allowed anger, they’re allowed mistakes, they’re allowed sexuality and passion and cattiness and sadness and fear and hopes and aspirations. They’re people in their own narratives and the questions they get to pose (heh, pose) are pretty much unheard of in media, still.

They’re also hot af. Just in terms of general attractiveness of casts on TV this show sure hit the jackpot.

5. Joe Buck - Midnight Cowboy

I recently read the book and it destroyed me. I’ve seen the movie twice now and it destroys me. Joe Buck (and Rizzo) destroy me. I am destroyed.

Joe Buck approaches masculinity not unlike how I approach masculinity (minus the trauma of sexual assault). Also he’s ND-coded as heck, which might be why we approach masculinity in a similar way... much to think about...

He looks himself in the mirror and talks to that image as if he’s an entirely different person. He walks around pretending he’s an alien, because he’s so dissociated from others. He’s going through the motions of gender and sexuality, while not having the context to understand why what is expected of him doesn’t work.

His story is tragic, but there’s something about him that makes me feel safe and seen, even though his character ultimately ends up afraid and alone. He’s a look into the kind of unexplainable queerness that millions of people must have felt throughout time.

6. Mercutio - Romeo + Juliet

I read a review of this film that lambasted Perrineau’s portrayal of Mercutio as a drag queen, whereas it was so much better for him to be merely subtextually in love with Romeo. The terror that In Your Face queerness strikes in the hearts of people who believe they’re liberal.

I am forever amused by the kind of queerphobia that accepts queerness as long as it’s not too obvious and it’s exactly the kind of review that underlines just how right this portrayal of Mercutio is to me.

Obviously Mercutio doesn’t make it, but it’s not because of being queer. In fact everything about him is celebrated by the boys (who honestly just dress like me and my transmasc friends - the Montague Boys all the way). He gets to be camp and masculine and flamboyant and aggressive and complicated and it’s all too damn intoxicating.

Methinks that reviewer doth protest a tad too much. It’s okay buddy, I’m attracted to genderqueerness as well.

7. Bubs - Space Sweepers

Trans Robot! Trans Robot! Trans Robot! It’s been so many years of robots coded as trans (which, of course robots are trans!) But in this case she actually is a trans robot. Textually. She’s saving all of her money to get synthetic body and voice (slight spoilers for that gif, but I can’t help but celebrate that she succeeds)

Space capitalism scifi that incorporates notions around AI and gender in a way that speaks to transness without being merely allegory?

It’s all I ever wanted!

8. Hannibal Lecter - Hannibal

I love villains. I love operatic violence. I love the reclamation of tropes that were once a trap in the representation of queerness, now a fun romp into the mind of a terrible no-good people-eating serial killer. I love obsession.

I love his suits.

I love the turnaround from Silence Of The Lambs in which Hannibal was hypnotic and seductive in contrast to Buffalo Bill’s monstrous “unintelligent” queerness - well this time Hannibal’s queer and just as seductive as last time around (actually, going by the internet... maybe moreso, I respect y’all thirsting for Mads Mikkelsen).

What a dramatic bitch, I love it.

9. Vanya Hargreeves - The Umbrella Academy

This is one of those “I am excited to see where the queerness will go” kind of favourites and a part of it has to do with this being Elliot Page’s current project and just wanting to see him take it Places.

I actually was disappointed in s1 of this series for depicting Vanya in a relationship with a guy, because it felt so inauthentic. The chemistry was off. The moments felt... uncomfortable. The guy seemed like a dick (and he was). Elliot at the time was out as gay so why write another in a long line of heterosexual narratives?

I told my partner that it looked like someone in the closet not knowing what their own desires were going for the first guy who was nice to them.

And then s2 came along and it was... kind of exactly that, yeah. Reevaluating s1 from that perspective makes Vanya’s story much more powerful to me - messy, full of decisions that hurt [herself] and others, traumatic even. And I love a messy coming out story - I love uncontrollable superpowers as a metaphor for queer identity and the rage of not understanding oneself and the mistakes one can make because of that, and how the real life coming-out of a growing number of people is being reflected in the parts they’re playing onscreen.

And I am dead excited to see how that narrative continues.

10. Jennifer Check - Jennifer’s Body

Alright so Jennifer’s Body isn’t as canon as the others on this list - is Jennifer in love with Needy (and vice versa)? And where does the kind of passionate connection between girls who are friends become... kinda gay?

Ah, a question asked by many a queer girl and transmasc.

I might be getting really obvious here, considering earlier entries on this list but:

1. Villainous

2. Messy af

3. Violent

And then that interesting deconstruction of weaponised toxic femininity, even if I believe if it had been made today it could’ve gone much, much further and I remember there were some issues around intersectionality, but I cannot put my finger on exactly what. Maybe it’s time for a rewatch!

oh and

Bonus: Megan Fox!!!!

11. Bill Potts - Doctor Who

Actually by the time the show had gone on this far I had stopped watching, because of a variety of things. I got back into it because I wanted to see Jodie Whittaker’s doctor and suddenly Bill Potts was there, reminding me of a more personal, more intimately driven version of this show.

And she was gay. Just casually this-is-a-part-of-her-and-there’s-an-important-bit-of-narrative-dedicated-to-this-facet a lesbian. Flashbacks to RTD’s Doctor Who era having to fight for every bit of queerness it got and here’s a gay companion.

Kind of like Martha I feel like she’s not appreciated enough - she exists in this filler space between the big things that just happened and the big things that’re going to happen afterwards.

In a way I think that might be part of why I think she works so well, because she gets to be a person who goes on some adventures and it’s not a grandiose finale piece every time. She feels real.

No pressure as per usual about doing this but: @mimsyaf , @thewintersoldiersboyfriend , @mimupf , @likethegardensofbabylonn , @arorocanada , @elsonambulo , @wantedtourist, @deputychairman , @cobraking , @inadequate-nefelibata , @phantomcomet , @ted-imgoingmad , @banzai-larusso

okay this is like. off the top of my head. pleaaase do feel free and tag me to let me know? I’m always on the lookout for queer content that speaks to people!

#well see now it's like I'm doing a survey #no I'm not i promise i'm just inchrested #queer media #queer culture #queer cinema #queer tv #i should do one for books as well... hmmmm........#long post

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sidecharacter-purgatory · 4 years

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I just finished watching The Untamed for the first time (there will undoubtedly be multiple rewatches) and I am just…overcome. There’s no other word for it. I’ve been in tears for upwards of an hour. I don’t think that I have ever in my life been so affected by a piece of media and I’m struggling to put into words why this show has made me so emotional.

I think it comes down to dignity. The dignity with which this show portrays the love between Wei Ying and Lan Zhan. I read something similar on a different post, the post that made me decide to watch The Untamed and if I can find it I will certainly reblog it, but right now, in western media in particular, there’s so much gay tokenism. the background same sex kiss, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “his husband” line, the queercoding that turns into queerbaiting that turns into “just kidding they were completely hetero the whole time and you’re stupid for believing otherwise”, the bury your gays trope, the “gays don’t get happy endings” trope… It’s insulting and infuriating and heartbreaking. There’s nothing stopping anyone in Hollywood from giving us good queer stories, happy queer stories, stories with queer characters that don’t just revolve around queerness. We have no laws against it, this is just motivated by homophobia and greed.

And then there’s The Untamed. The production team, the actors, everyone involved, they knew this was a queer love story, and they knew they could not show that explicitly on screen. They would be censored, period, end of story. But they did it anyway. They did everything possible to show us not just the love between Lan Zhan and Wei Ying, but a cast of queer characters and an array of love stories both queer and straight. Love stories that are precious and pure, twisted and terrible, beautiful and tragic…

That dedication, in the face of censorship, to giving such variety and dignity to queer love…the fact that people are willing to make a show like this, to say “no, these stories deserve to be seen, to be respected”…it means everything to me as a queer person. I can’t imagine what it must mean to the queer people living in China.

Thank you to everyone who made The Untamed possible. And to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, please do. It’s nothing short of breathtaking.

#the untamed #mo dao zu shi #wangxian

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oldtvandcomics · 5 years

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I've seen some posts going around about Crowley/Aziraphale being queerbaiting in the Good Omens series. I'm afraid I will regret writing this, but I have OPINIONS, said opinions being less about Good Omens and more about Tumblr not necessarily understanding the way audiovisuel storytelling and the queer community work, and maybe it's worth taking a moment to think closer about these things.

Spoilers for Good Omens (2019) and some allusions to the Discourse below the cut. Also, long post. You have been warned.

I probably should say here that I liked Good Omens, am myself aro ace, and am of the opinion that Crowley/Arizaphale is canon. So yes, personal bias exists, although I am going to do my best to be objective. Also, I haven't read the book yet, so am only going to be talking about the series.

(Ignoring hereby that they are supposed to be agender. It is a very good series, but they really, REALLY should have found a way to include that piece of information.)

This is a surprisingly complex question, that can be boiled down to three different problems: First, the way people analyze audiovisuel stories (in this case, television, but the argument also stands for movies), second, the term “queerbaiting” not being clear enough and also used too broadly, and third, people's still too narrow view of what is and isn't queer.

In this order, I am going to start with the way tv (and movies) work. It is the least controversial.

One of the things that I love about tv so much is just how complex and layered it is. There is what is directly said and shown to happen, but than there is the music, the acting, the costumes, locations, camera angles and editing, all of which have their own language and add something to how we will see a story. If you watch Good Omens, you'll notice that the exact nature of Crowley's and Aziraphale's relationship never is directly addressed or them confirmed to be queer. However, you will also notice the way they keep looking at each other, the fact that romantic music plays in the background for an awful lot of their scenes together, that they do and say things on a regular basis that goes further than the normal limits of a friendship, and the list goes on. This show is as clear about them loving each other very, very deeply as it possibly can be without directly talking about it.

This, of course, leads us to the question: What is and isn't text? What level of queercoding counts as representation? And this is where things get a little more complicated, because there IS NO clear line. People usually say that it doesn't count, unless the correct term is used. Which makes sense, given everybody's tendency to just... Idk, make a movie about somebody fighting his ex without ever telling us that he is, in fact, his ex, and than hope that they can get away with either the queer fans doing all the hard work of reading between the lines, or just write a couple of tweets about how they're totally gay and get credit for the representation.

Seriously, people, don't do that. If there is a way to use the terms, do it.

But there is a gray area. Welcome to Night Vale never labeled Cecil's orientation, yet we still know that he's gay. That scene they cut from Thor: Ragnarok of Valkyrie leaving the room of a woman? It never said that she was bi. I mean, I haven't seen it, but from what I know, I'd bet A LOT of money that, had they included it, people still would have complained about it not being clear enough. We still act as if including it would have confirmed Valkyrie's bisexuality. What about period pieces, set in times when certain labels didn't exist yet? And, finally, what if a relationship would actually benefit from being left vague and undefined?

There is no clear answer to this. It's a gray are, so feel free to just sit around and think about your own opinion on these things.

Which leads us to queerbaiting: Creators playing up the fact that they MIGHT have a queer character or relationship in their work for publicity, without ever planning to include it. It's a thing that happens both inside and outside of the story. In practice, this usually looks like putting in a lot of subtext between two same-sex characters, including suggestive scenes in the trailers, and going in interviews “well, they could be, it's an ongoing series, you'll just have to wait and see. ;) ”.

Queerbaiting is a VERY vague and very popular term, that is used very broadly, even in cases where it isn't exactly accurate. It is not exactly easy to tell what is actual queerbaiting, and what queercoding because Higher Powers wouldn't let the creators include openly queer characters in their work. Than there is of course the cases where queer characters are kind of there, but it's a blink-and-you-miss-it thing. I've heard the term “queercatching” used for that in a video. Also, queerbaiting is an accusation people like throwing around every time a show disappoints them by not making their OTP canon. (Stop doing that, PLEASE!)

In this context, it is understandably difficult to say if a certain ship is or isn't queerbaiting. However, I would argue that Crowley and Aziraphale are not. I haven't seen all the promotional things going on, so no idea how big of a selling point their relationship was. But I do know that everyone behind the scenes seems to agree that those two love each other very, very deeply, and the show itself isn't trying to hide it. On the contrary, it goes out of it's way to draw our attention to it. To anyone who is watching halfway attentively, it is going to be very, very clear that what those two have going on is NOT straight.

Which leads us to our final point: What is and isn't queer.

Oh dear. It is a topic that is still hotly debated within the community (at least on Tumblr), mostly by people trying to exclude certain orientations or keep other people from using certain terms.

Queer is an umbrella term used for members of the LGBT+ community, meaning “not straight”. It may refer to gender identity, romantic or sexual orientation, and things that don't quite belong in any of the boxes we have. The beauty of the term “queer” is exactly that it is so huge and so vague that it exceeds all boxes and definitions. A really handy thing to have, if you want people to know what you're talking about without needing to give them an hour-long vocabulary lesson first.

Please note here that so far, I have avoided using any labels for Crowley, Arizaphale, or their relationship. Please also not that while I did say that they love each other very deeply, I never used the word “romantic”.

Because here is the thing: I really don't think that they're gay. Or bi, or pan. Or anything else, really. They, and their relationship, like the term “queer”, fall outside of any predetermined categories. It is just, really, really, really clear that what's going on isn't heteronormative.

I have seen many aces being happy and feeling seen and seeing themselves in Crowley and Aziraphale in Good Omens. I've also seen many aros think the same thing. Because here is the beauty of it: We only know that they love each other more than anything else in the world. It is never said that that love is romantic.

I've also seen many allos completely miss this point.

Asexuality and aromanticism, as is to be expected from orientations that are defined by the lack of something, are still very invisible, both in RL and in fan circles. While we do have our own spaces and our own little community, mostly we are just there between our allo friends and... kind of stand and wait in a corner while they are busy with the sex and romance our society is constantly throwing at all of us. Being ace and/or aro is often confused with “being celibate”. We don't talk enough about what sexless or romanceless relationships could look like. No wonder so many people missed it when they saw one in Good Omens.

The queer community is STILL very strongly sexualized. And this is a problem, because while sexual attraction IS an important part of being queer, it is also not the only one. Queer people are still queer if they are not having sex. They are queer if they DON'T WANT TO have sex. They are queer if they don't enter romantic relationships. There is nothing straight about the close bonds aros can have with their friends. There is nothing straight about having a friend be the person you are emotionally closest to, close enough to openly beg them to run away together. Multiple times.

Queerplatonic or quasiplatonic relationships are the ones that are a bit difficult to define, because they are somewhere between “friendship” and “romantic relationship”. What they look like depends really on what the people involved want them to be like. Some live together, others don't. Some do things together that are usually considered to be romantic, others don't. Some kiss or have sex, others don't.

So far, I haven't really seen anybody really talk about the existence of queerplatonic relationships outside of ace and aro circles. And while I aggressively headcanon Sherlock Holmes and John Watson being queerplatonic, this was the first time that I've really seen an actual relationship onscreen that can be easily, or even best, read as being one.

But almost by definition, this means that it has to be vague, and subtle, and floating around somewhere around the lines separating friends from romantic partners. As such, I think that Good Omens did a really good job, giving us a relationship that is so obviously loving but also so beyond easy descriptions. However, this also means that it is easy to miss and end up feeling baited.

The problem is, I'm not sure that they COULD have done it better. Any explicit discussion about Crowley's and Aziraphale's relationship would have felt forced and out of place, and the term queerplatonic isn't enough known, they would have had to follow it up with an explanation of what that even is. And it isn't as if they could have made it any clearer how much they love each other as they did.

Some people say that they should have kissed onscreen.

Betty and Veronica in the Riverdale tv series kissed, and we all still know that it was only queerbaiting.

And isn't that, wouldn't that be, in the end, reducing queerness once more to the sexual bit in queer relationships?

I don't know. As I said, there is no clear answer, and in the end of the day, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

I suppose, the best I can say is that what Good Omens did with Crowley and Aziraphale is very beautiful and well executed and also undoubtedly queer. It is, also, not enough. We still live in a time where we don't have much representation, and therefore all collectively jump on anything we can find. As long as this is the case, people will always be unsatisfied with everything. We need more. More explicit, more sexual, more romantic, yes, but also more quiet and subtle and undefined loving ones.

Anyway. I just had to write my opinion on this, because I REALLY didn't like what looked like a group of people dismissing a queer relationship because it wasn't sexual. This isn't even about Good Omens, not really, more about Tumblr being generally Tumblr and not seeing nuance and not thinking things through.

So... Please learn how to properly analyze audiovisual stories. Please be more careful and think a little before you start throwing around the term “queerbaiting”. And, please, PLEASE take a minute to think through if what you are doing isn't in fact sexualizing queer people and excluding parts of the community because of a too narrow definition of queerness.

And finally, PLEASE leave Gaiman alone. One, he has no obligation towards you whatsoever, and two, this was originally a thirty year old book that, three, he co-wrote with a now deceased friend. Being critical of media is one thing, and obviously, Good Omens isn't perfect. But... Just think about what you're doing before you do it, ok?

#good omens #crowley/aziraphale #my opinion #long post #queer representation #queerbaiting #queerplatonic ships #asexual #aromantic #aro / ace relationships #it's not many people who said it #and there are always some idiots who don't agree with me #in the end of the day #it's up to personal interpretations #but this is a bigger and more structural problem #and good omens just gave me such a good reason to talk about it

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gaywitchtwins · 6 years

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irradiantsam replied to your post “eruthiawenluin replied to your post “not saying that a big reason I...”

*shows up 15 mins late with sam meta* i really dont think that powers as an allegory for queerness is obscure at all, actually. From a lit analysis perspective, characteristics or traits or actions perceived as dirty, unwanted, or evil are often queer coded (or at least can and have been interprered as such) historically. Also, I come bearing gifts http://samwinchesterappreciation.tumblr.com/post/96656678833/im-sorry-i-am-super-dumb-and-often-have-trouble

Yeah, I feel like the very common queercoding of villains and the way Sam’s storyline in s4 in particular was written made that connection extremely obvious, but also I’m writing my term paper about the fictional representation of queer (coded) men as villainous in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, so I’m sometimes unsure if I’m not just projecting on modern media - I’m glad to see it’s not the case! Additionally, this is… a very heavy topic, which I definitely didn’t want to start discussing without warning while drunk.

(Sidenote, but the Romantics? Gay. Gothic? Very gay. Actually a lot of Victorian literature? Extremely fucking gay, subtextually. Also a lot of their porn is… well, if anyone needs recs, hit me up, because I’ve read a lot of Victorian porn at this point.)

The rest of this reply is just me rambling, because I think we can leave it like that and it stands for itself, but I kind of want to just poke at it more for the sake of it. CW for talk about homophobia, abuse, rape, and me continuing to use “queer” as umbrella term.

Supernatural is one of many contemporary pieces of media that draw a connection between some sort of supernatural or magical powers, however deliberately or not. Some do it better than others, and it’s especially an issue with powers like that, which both portray the person in question as dangerous and marginalised at the same time, with the latter often being a justified result of the former (I’m looking at you, Dragon Age franchise, you did this terribly; Babylon 5 did slightly better with the telepaths, but the same principle of them being excluded from society because they are supposedly dangerous to society applies here as well). Using them as an allegory or metaphor for queerness, then, should be handled more delicately than it usually is, but the connection is nonetheless obvious: queerness poses an inherent threat to heteropatriarchy, in a way these supernatural powers threaten the stability of society. The depiction of these powers as unnatural, as a disease or infection, can trace back pretty directly to the dominant discourse about male homosexuality in Victorian times.

Before I get too off topic, back to the psychic powers and the post you linked. I’m just going to take it and run with it, because there’s one interpretation in here that also suggests letting the queer coded character out of the room he was locked into because of the thing that coded him as such in the first place was partially responsible for starting the apocalypse, and I don’t know whether I should think of that as inappropriately amusing or as clumsily problematic. Maybe both. Man, I wish we could start the apocalypse and tear down the entire rotten system of oppression with our minds, but oh well.

I do want to come back to the Gothic, just briefly, because it allowed writers more so than other genres to represent the supernatural, an thus also the unnatural, either explicitly or encoded as such in the narrative. The genre was supposed to be disturbing to society and make people uncomfortable, and thus subversive in and of itself. I believe that there’s a link between these implicit queer writings then and the use of supernatural powers as a metaphor for queerness today, all of which stem from the what the discourse of these times deemed “unnatural”. Hell, it’s a discourse you still see today, unfortunately.

Up until the end of season 4, the only canon queer characters (that I recall, I may have forgotten one who was confirmed as such) are: 1. The gay teacher that gets killed in order for Dean to get healed in 1.12. 2. Lily, one of the Special Children, who’s very directly linked to the supernatural because of her powers, and, oh, accidentally killed her girlfriend with them. Not to throw shade, but why bury your gays if they can just bury each other instead? And of course Lily gets killed soon after. 3. Alan, the Ghostfacers intern, who is also killed and then turns into a ghost. There’s definitely not a trend here. 4. the dude Dean gets send to as a joke in 4.12. The tl;dr of that is that four out of five queer characters are dead, and the only one who is not was included in a joking manner, whereas the other four are all linked to the supernatural by either their powers or by their manner of death. I don’t want to claim that the writers did this deliberately – I don’t think they did, actually, most characters in this show get killed off, after all – but it’s interesting to consider within the larger context of homosexuality in the Gothic.

...there’s also something to be said about it being the only one of the Special Children who’s not white being the one who kills Sam, but if I get started on that, we’ll all still be here tomorrow.

Essentially, I’m interested in how there’s a part of the Gothic tradition that allowed the representation of the Other, including queerness, through the lens of the supernatural, and what the implication of Sam’s psychic powers being inborn, rather than caused by the demon blood, would mean for that. If that is the case, then his demon blood addiction and detox in season 4 with subsequent “disappearance” of his powers, despite them not actually not having been caused by anything (see where I’m going with this? I think I’m so clever.), is very much allegorical for going back into the closet (Bobby’s panic room) and being forcibly silenced. We still deal with the temptation of the demon blood in season 5, and the decision to embrace it one more time in order to be powerful enough to lock away Lucifer and himself in the process is considerably more painful to me now. Oh well.

As for the silencing… I want to quote something I recently read in Marianne Constable’s Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law here (which I was actually reading for my Introduction to Sociology of Law class), because it’s fitting for both the analysis of Victorian culture and for Sam’s situation:

"Subjects' silence in the face of powerful (or obfuscating) official institutions and texts or silence in the face of a powerful and discursive law indicates the absence of power. Absence of words - the absence of stories and voice, the absence of history, as articulation of a past ... constitutes absence of power.” (55)

In the late Victorian times, this could be applied to male homosexuality – the love that cannot not speak its name, if you want to be cheeky about it – and how they had to hide from the law and were not protected under it, how they had to be forcibly silent as the only protection.

With Sam, there’s to consider both the subjects of the psychic powers as well as the themes of rape and abuse. Marian M. MacCurdy wrote about silence in The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing about Trauma, which I’m also going to quote, because I’m over a thousand words into this post so I might as fucking well.

“Silence perpetuates trauma and the same and guild that often accompany it … The list of “whys” is as long as the list of traumas that can afflict us.” (p. 2) and “[S]ilence equaled powerlessness; story telling equaled power. … Writing can be an act of power, a way to break the destructive silence that perpetuates oppression.” (133).

MacCurdy’s work is about therapeutic writing, technically, but I think the psychology behind it is also very applicable, so I’m going to try and explain what I’m trying to say.

There has been a lot of silence surrounding Sam’s powers. John knew way more about them than he told Sam, not to mention that he deliberately kept Sam’s own history from him. “The absence of history, as articulation of a past” (Constable 55) is the lack of knowledge Sam has about Mary, to a point where he was not even allowed to ask about her, and, on a grander scale, the implicit engagement of the forces of both Heaven and Hell in the history of both the Winchesters. On the other hand, Sam himself only told Dean about his visions when he absolutely had to (which is understandable, of course, but still). Especially in the last few seasons, Sam has not been allowed to react much to anything in a visible manner. A lot of people have talked about it already, so I won’t drag that up again, but: if “story telling [equals] power” (MacCurdy 133) and Sam, as a character, is no longer allowed to tell that story. The writing itself takes that very thing from him. Equally, his powers have been taken – not just in the metaphorical sense, although that certainly as well, but his very literal powers. The law, in this sense, would be Dean, and the hunting community to an extend, with the dominant discourse being that demon blood is evil, and the powers resulting from them are evil.

And… the issue with this is just. Reading these powers as queer, in both meanings of that word, makes sense, but it carries an uncomfortable, problematic, even horrifying implication with it. The source of them is bad, so Sam is not “clean” and deserves to be locked up and die in the attempt to cleanse him. (And isn’t it interesting that when Dean makes the decision to forcibly detox Sam, it’s fine, but when Sam takes on the Trials and decides for himself that his purification and resulting death are acceptable, both for himself and the greater good, Dean disagrees? Oh well. Well. Not the point, but there we are with the bodily agency thing again.)

I guess what my conclusion of this is, wrapping all the way back to what I originally said to Eru: Sam’s powers as a metaphor for queerness work wonderfully, and it’s a reading that would become significantly more powerful if, after being forced to lose them, to repress them – deliberately or unconsciously – and struggling with the supposed source of them, it would turn out that it’s not just the demon blood, it’s maybe a catalyst helping their development, but not the cause. It’s just who he is, as a person, nothing to be fixed or cured or evil, nothing to be silent about. Sam is very easy to see as queer – the reading of his powers aside, he does not have a canonically stated sexuality, and in fact a relationships of ambiguous nature either joked about or implied with several male characters which he never denied – but the powers do add another layer to that. In an ideal version of the show, Sam would reclaim his powers, gain a voice, and be openly queer. I expect none of these things to actually happen, nor do I trust the writers to get it right, mind, but there is a lot of potential here that would make for a good narrative.

He just deserves to have a voice without his family members trying to oppress his sexuality psychic powers until it gets to a point where he silences himself. He deserves a narrative that doesn’t punish him for who he is.

(This entire thing is just... what my brain came up with on the spot, I kept going back and adding more paragraphs and then doing other things, so it’s super disjointed and not well thought up, lmao fuck I’m so sorry Rose.)

#irradiantsam #replies #And here you have almost two thousand words insight into my hellbrain. I'm so sorry.#I realised it was getting away from me the moment I began downloading jstor articles related to the silencing on trauma victims

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