#I'm going to log off for awhile before I get certifiably angry because me being angry helps no one least of all myself

[musical-chick-13]

I think what really Bugs Me™ about all this D*stiel discourse™ is that y’all refuse to go this hard for...literally any other demographic.

Every single fandom I have ever been in has involved a wide range of ugly misogynistic comments about at least 90% of the female characters and widespread harassment of people who call that out or even just...don’t share that opinion. I am asked to keep up support for what are considered “bad” or “mediocre” shows just because they have white queer (male) rep in them, but never for imperfect/less-than-stellar shows that have other types of rep such as neurodivergence, disabled characters, trans characters, or people of color. I am consistently told that the only part of me that deserves representation is the part of me that is “visibly” queer. If I end up with a man, I’m not “really” bisexual. If I end up with no one, I don’t deserve to be represented at all. Yeah, having neurodivergent characters is great, I guess, but shouldn’t we be focusing on (cis) queer characters first, isn’t that more important, why are you getting so upset about this neurodivergent character’s treatment, it’s not like they were gay.

When I saw an overwhelming amount of characters who were mentally ill get killed off (usually by committing suicide) in the space of the same year and a half, I saw little to no discussions about it. (The only exception to this was Quentin on The Magicians, and I really have to wonder if that would have gotten the backlash it did if he hadn’t been explicitly confirmed as queer.) I didn’t hear “boycott Netflix” when they cancelled a slate of shows focusing on wlw and people of color. I didn’t hear “boycott the CW” when Black Lightning was cancelled VIA TWITTER. TWITTER, Y’ALL. (Especially since that one was achoice explicitly made solely by the actual network and not the writers and...you know, also had canon queer rep in it...but it focused on people of color so it doesn’t matter, right.) With all of the terrible treatment John Boyega and Loan Tran faced, I never saw anyone say, “Boycott the sequel trilogy” or the writers involved in it.

People are out here acting like D*estiel single-handedly invented slash pairings or is the last bastion of canon queerness and Important Representation™ on TV. When your show had canon queer female characters (who, surprise, surprise, were killed off), and a canon deaf love interest (who, surprise, surprise, was also killed off). Yet every discussion that wasn’t exclusively about D*stiel I saw about this show until the final season were takes about Just How Inexplicably Unlikable all the female characters were. 

I understand that seeing a queer character confess their queerness and then get sucked into the lowest level of hell for doing so is incredibly distressing. I absolutely understand the outrage and would have a similar level of outrage at any work that pulled this shit. As a fellow queer woman, I am appalled that anyone decided this was a valid attempt at “representation,” and I am appalled that anyone would look at this and go, “Yeah, that seems like a good idea, let’s write that.”

That doesn’t change the fact that I see this EVERY. TIME. I have yet to see the same backlash against the trope of Bury Your Disabled that I have around Bury Your Gays. I have yet to see the same discussions regarding pervasive racism and whitewashing in fandom as I do about homophobia. The overwhelming majority of widespread discussion I see of misogyny in fandom is almost solely related to people who ship popular m/m pairings (maybe, occasionally, a popular m/f one), or whether or not certain pockets of the Internet deserve to criticize people who like Twilight. Other than discussions about Stephanie Meyer and Bella Swan, very little of it actually involves female creators and characters. The amount of hypocrisy I have seen in the last few months in regard to how we talk about representation is a level of astounding I never thought I would see.

You wanna talk about representation? Then you include every marginalized group in that discussion. You can’t just pick one underrepresented group and say, “That’s it, there are no other discussions we need to have, that’s the only one that matters!”

If you aren’t willing to be this outraged about other poor forms of representation and the way minorities are treated in fandom, then your feelings aren’t actually about representation, you’re just upset the creators didn’t do a better job with a ship you like. If you don’t care about fighting this hard for queer female characters or queer characters of color, your feelings aren’t actually about queer representation, you just want to be able to gush over the prospect of hot cis white dudes kissing. If you only care about seeing yourself in media without being willing to go to bat for other marginalized people, you don’t care about representation, you care about yourself.