#if Van does turn out to be any flavour of queer

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

I don't care if this is a hot take or whatever I'm just going to say it.

All the "that's a lesbian" talk around Van makes me deeply fucking uncomfortable, and especially all the hate?? and hostility?? I've seen directed at her equally fictional husband as well as real life Siobhan Thompson for how she has chosen to build and portray her character after one singular episode.

I'll be straight up. It's gross. It's gender essentialist and anti-feminist. It's biphobic as hell and also reeks of a certain level of classism and ... naivety?? to the world and the variety of people in it. As well as my favourite fucking bugbear, American centralism.

I have met women like Vanellope Chapman. I have met many women just like Van. They're hard workers, they're gritty, they have histories and families and yes most of the time, they have husbands and or male partners. Partners who love them dearly exactly as they are.

Vanellope Chapman could not more clearly be drawn from a rich and deeply rooted history of the working class English woman. Real blue collar shit. A tradie. And she clearly fucking loves her husband and her husband loves her. They've built a lovely little life together.

This truly feels like reintroducing Feminism and Gender Theory 101 here but you cannot assume someone's gender or sexual identity by their appearance. But what if -- No, not even, and especially then.

That's fucking TERF logic.

It's giving "your gay and that's final."

We can make no assumptions about Vanellope and her identity and it's fucking weird that the majority of this fandom, which I've always experienced as a fairly open minded and left leaning space, seems so determined to deny and quite literally over-write what is clearly a large part of her character this early in the campaign so that she fits more neatly into a box that strips her of her roots and identity and makes her "easier" and more consumable to an American centric audience that apparently can't fucking conceive of a masc working class woman with a low, gravelly voice and sun-beaten makeup-less face having a husband who loves her and whom she loves in return.

When I write it out like that do you see it?? Do you see what I see??

Look, maybe Van is bi. Maybe she and Bert are in a polyamorous or open relationship. Maybe she and Marya and Comfrey were all in it together on the Zephyr twenty years ago.

We don't know.

And we will continue not to know until the Intrepid Heroes choose to show us, if indeed, there is anything to show.

Until then, I am actually begging you all to think about what you are saying and your own internal biases.

And why in a world of Gath, where you can be anyone you want to be if you have enough gumption, you are refusing to see Van Chapman exactly as she is, not who you would find her easier to be.