#Maybe the queer coding is also just literally queer and subtext is a real part of a work

[hypermascbishounen]

Honestly I think a lot of people who think queer rep needs to always be literal and ditch the metaphors in order to be true canon, are missing that you can also just...have both? Lol.

Like, Xech's from last order being assigned killing machine at birth and abandoned by his creators to discover freewill and assert his true self in the face of a hostile world, is the perfect transhumanist backdrop for him also literally being a trans man, who no one bats an eye at transistioning mid-story using cyberpunk technology.

Alluka from Hunter x Hunter contains a mysterious alternate self her family is afraid of, and uses as an excuse to lock her away and deny her her humanity. When Nanika is told she has to hide in order for Alluka to be safe, it's akin to asking her to destransistion and recloset herself, and the character doing it realizes this and apologizes. While she is literally also a canon trans girl.

You can do both! You don't have to give up using complex symbolic expressions of queer experiences, just to have a queer character that's canon! It's fine if you don't want to do that, but the concepts aren't at all opposed. I think it should be pretty natural, that you could reinforce queer themes with a queer character, rather than having to abandon them.

[deancasforcutie]

hi, I’ve just seen your posts about references to queer cinema in spn and I would absolutely DIE to hear you talk more about that- and also maybe explain some of the ones in the posts bc there’s a few I couldn’t catch. hope ur doing well! toodles

(In reference to these two posts)

First of all, thanks for the interest; I feel like I owe a lot of influence to prominent meta writers who've discussed this over the years, which I've reblogged in the #dean is bi and #spn is queer tags, so I feel honored to be asked about this.

It just so happens I'm about to do a full series rewatch and hopefully come out with a long (much more coherent) meta series later this year. The basic thesis: Supernatural's queer narrative emerged both organically as a result of the early seasons' genre influences and deliberately on the part of writers constantly commenting on/transforming the series' foundations. The early seasons started as a critique of toxic masculinity, the nuclear family, and the American Dream, which invariably involves a critique of heteronormativity, but due to their tragic structure never fully proposed solutions to these problems; later seasons, through the writers' good-faith groundwork designed to circumvent and comment on their own external constraints, specifically situated the solutions in queer love and found family.

I'll argue that much of the queer coding and subtext of Kripke era was not so much "accidental" as a result of the series' genre heritage. Being influenced by the Gothic, a genre all about unveiling counternarratives to master-narratives like the American Dream, queerness emerges in the text implicitly as something outside of that paradigm; look at episodes like 4.05 Monster Movie and 4.14 Sex and Violence for some examples of old-school cinematic queer coding. Then you have Dean as a bisexual character, which essentially started with his inspiration from On the Road's Dean Moriarty (likely also James Dean and other figures that reveal the disillusioned American "bad boy" archetype was always more queer than initially advertised). Later seasons, in actively, deliberately queering this text, both transformed it and revealed/made explicit what was already there. And -as exercises in audiovisual audacity like 15.07 Last Call and 15.10 The Heroes' Journey attest- they consciously leaned into well-codified queer cinematic conventions to reveal (and subvert!) how they were made to literally tapdance around it. What results is a critique of heteronormativity that requires the audience to jump through hoops to maintain it as a critical lens, scathingly lampoons their choice to do so, and situates queerness as "what about all this is real" - "[happiness is] in just being", and in queer ways of seeing/reading.

I really enjoy it, in case that's not clear.

Not sure which examples in my posts to highlight, so here are some links to further reading:

Pink Flamingos: x, x, x

Porky's II: x, x

Thelma and Louise: x, x

Rebel Without a Cause: x, x

My Own Private Idaho: x

Ben-Hur: x

Rent: x, x

Reservoir Dogs: x

Brokeback Mountain: x, x, x

Lost Boys: x

Project Runway: x, x

Sesame Street: x, x

On the Road: x, x

Will & Grace: x

Halt & Catch Fire: x

Freddie Mercury: x, x, x

Orange is the New Black: x

The Sandman: x

Hellblazer: x

"Let's Misbehave": x, x, x, x

Thanks again for the ask! I hope this answers your question; I look forward to exploring this in much more depth in the future.

[variousqueerthings]

Daniel LaRusso: A Queer Feminine Fairytale Analysis Part Three of Three

(another massive, massive thank you to @mimsyaf​ )

part 1

part 2

8. Queerness and femininity and masculinity and the colour red and *record breaks*

If we spin the record aaalll the way back to this paragraph: “…looking at what it is girls and women in fairytales have/don’t have, what they want, and how they’re going to get it. It’s about power (lack of), sexuality (repressed, then liberated), and men.” Reading Daniel as a repressed, bisexual boy in a society that doesn’t accept his desires it’s interesting looking at how he moves through the world of the Miyagi-verse, at how threatened other men are by him, at how obsessed they are with him.

He’s out in the symbolic woods and these large boys and men see him and decide for whatever plot reasons to come for him. And they are large and violent and attractive and apart from Johnny again, they don’t have the nebulous excuse of fighting over a girl and even that excuse dies by around the midpoint when Johnny kisses Ali just to get a rise out of Daniel. He’s not trying to “win her back,” he’s not even really looking at her. He’s just trying to get a reaction. They don’t have any of the fighters in Rocky’s excuse either of Daniel being a macho opponent. 

You can read whatever subtext into TKK1 and TKK2 (which becomes especially tempting once CK confirmed that the guys he fought at seventeen have been thinking about him ever since – for thirty-five years), but TKK3 is where it’s really At in terms of obsession and lust and forbidden desires.

Silver is presented as both a handsome prince who saves Daniel and mentors him (where Miyagi is undoubtedly cast in a fatherhood role) and later on becomes twisted into a dark secret that Daniel has to keep, while he turns that thing that Daniel loves (karate, it’s… it’s karate… it’s also men, but it’s definitely karate, because karate makes him feel… things...) into an abusive, violent version of itself.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But he’s also offering him something liberating. Whatever is going on in that nightclub scene is about something other than breaking Daniel down. Even the bloodied knuckles aren’t just about revenge. It’s about giving him something that he isn’t, in the end, willing to receive, at least not from Silver. In that roundabout, strange way of these feminine fairytales, it’s exploring hidden desires through the metaphor of karate.

Daniel wears red because it’s his colour. In the movies he wears red a lot. Often in scenes with violence in them (the beach/the hilltop in TKK1 and the date/the destruction of the dojo/the final fight in TKK2), but he also has a variety of shirts (and in TKK3 pants) that pop up all the way through the narrative. He wears a red jacket when he accepts Terry’s training, when he punches a guy in the face, and when he tries to get out of the training again (as badly as that goes).

Did anyone consciously think about red’s link to desire, obsession, and violence when they made these? Eh. But is it there symbolically? When he meets Johnny, when he fights Chozen, when he’s in emotionally fraught situations with Terry? Hell yeah.

Probably the most lust-and-violence infused red is that aforementioned punching-board-until-knuckles-bleed bit – not that I thought Terry was going to pull him in for a kiss, because I knew, logically, of course he wouldn’t right? There’s no way… is there? Or later on when Daniel punches that guy and ends up with blood all over his shirt and Terry once more grasps him, euphorically. Blood is violence. Blood is also desire. Red is Daniel’s colour, even though he doesn’t acknowledge it come Cobra Kai. (Maybe he just needs someone else - cough Johnny Lawrence cough - to inspire it in him again).

Daniel LaRusso’s narrative is exploring that most feminine of fairytale tropes: To want and be wanted by monsters and having to hide those desires.

“Maybe this time that strange churning in my stomach that feels like a mix of anticipation and fear will turn out good for me.” - Daniel’s mind.

At the end of the story, Daniel saves himself, with all of the strange mixed narratives around it, and the acknowledgement that the end of The Karate Kid Part Three isn’t satisfying and its aftermath will likely be delved into in the next season of Cobra Kai.

Nevertheless, he saves himself. Not from Silver or Kreese or Barnes, and not entirely, but he makes a decision not to give in to fear (and he continues to try and live by that decision, making it over and over again for the next thirty-five years, even when the return of Cobra Kai makes that difficult for him). 

He doesn’t do it by being the strongest in the land or even through a lucky shot (although that too). He does it by refusing to be like the male antagonists that surround him, by telling them they have no power over him. The narrative isn’t just his getting lost in the forest and all the monsters he finds there, it’s about how he redefines power for himself within that forest. 

He’s a man who isn’t violent, whose victories include helping out a girl whose ex-boyfriend just broke her radio, successfully doing the moves to a cultural dance he’s trying to learn, sitting with his father figure while he cries over the death of his own father, telling a girl that she’s just made her first friend, and breathing a sigh of relief that a tree that got broken has healed. 

Daniel LaRusso is a good boy is the point!

Karate is a metaphor. It can turn into many things: A series of lessons learned about how to be his own man and take care of his own house, a respect for the history of the father teaching him and sharing his home and story with him, fear, desire, masculinity (and the different forms that can take). 

When a tall, handsome stranger offers to teach him karate in the dark, without Daniel’s caretaker knowing how to help him, and twists that karate into something that hurts him - when he reclaims that, over and over, that means something too. 

This man is fine and definitely isn’t carrying the weight of buried karate-based queer trauma - could a traumatised man do this? *stares blankly at a former tormentor as blood runs down his forehead*

9. In Conclusion Daniel Has Kissed Dudes… Symbolically… But We Can HC Literally:

So there’s Daniel and his coded feminine fairytale narrative. It’s all a series of fun coincidences.

1. Ralph Macchio is just Like That

2. Red. All the red. 

3. large portion of his storyline is about lack of power. Yes, he regains that power by the end of the first and second movie through A Fight, but generally he is framed as powerless opposite these almost monstrously physically powerful boys/men. And in the third one it’s barely even about physical prowess (he’d still lose a real fight against Barnes or Silver) and more about regaining lost autonomy off the back of a manipulative, abusive relationship with an older guy.

4. The third movie in particular is narratively a mess, but if reimagined as a fairytale makes a lot of sense (because it’s secretly all about how karate is bisexuality and Daniel gets manipulated through that desire to be better at karate).

5. Queerness and femininity and themes about hidden desires that can only be approached sideways through couching those desires in symbolism: Handshake meme.

6. The fact that the more I think about it, the more feral I am for a Labyrinth AU.

7. To sum up over 5000 words of text: The inherent homoeroticism of wanting to be slammed against a locker by a bully, but extended over three movies and ever-more inventive ways of hurting pretty-boy-Daniel-LaRusso.

Johnny’s not going to be happy when he realises Daniel’s got other ex-rivals buried in his closet...

10. Some Other Stuff Aka The Laziest Referencing I’ll Ever Do

Further reading on trans Matrix

Further reading on masculinity and rape narrative in The Rape Of James Bond

Youtube Video from Pop Culture Detective (Sexual Assault Of Men Played For Laughs)

Some film/TV references in this: Dracula (Coppola), Princess Bride, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Labyrinth, The Matrix, Rocky, Princess And The Frog, Cinderella, Enchanted, Shape Of Water, Swamp Thing, Phantom of the Opera 

Some fairytale references: Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, The Wolf And The Seven Little Kids, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Company of Wolves (Angela Carter), Through the Looking Glass, Princess Bride

Also referenced is Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel and the subsequent musical Funhome. Further thoughts on this by @thehours2002​ and @jenpsaki​:

https://thehours2002.tumblr.com/post/650033577171533824/daniel-larusso-and-fun-home-click-to-enlarge

https://jenpsaki.tumblr.com/post/650530225997971456/cobra-kai-fun-home-inspired-by-goldstargirls

My list of Cobra Kai meta posts

I wanted to delve into fairytale movies more, but then I was like “fuck, I have actual work to do,” but I was interested in the ways male and female characters are written in these stories:

The Last Unicorn, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, Legend, and Stardust.

The Last Unicorn is an interesting one because she’s not really human, until she is. It’s more like The Little Mermaid (the fairytale, not the Disney film) in tone, and of course there’s a pretty substantiated rumour that Andersen wrote that one as a metaphor for falling in love with another man (who eventually got married). 

Andersen in general is just fun to analyse as someone who popularized so many fairytales and exists as an ambiguously queer historical figure – might’ve been modern-day gay, bi, ace, but we’re just not sure. All your favourite fairytales can be read through the lens of queer loneliness and ostracization. Just like horror.

Anyway I didn’t go into the whole Little-Mermaid-Last-Unicorn transformation bit so much as the Monstrous-Desires bit, but I think there could be something to that too, with monsters representing otherhood and all. Stardust is a kinda-almost-this, except she sticks to her human form and all is okey-dokey by the end, she’s allowed to marry the handsome man and be a star.

The Never-Ending Story has Atreyu and Bastian and because of a lack of female characters, an interesting bond between the two of them, but mainly Atreyu is absolutely a go-gettem Hero Type and it’s just interesting to see how Bastian relates to him as both an audience insert, but also eventually as his own character in that world.

The Dark Crystal contains certain… androgynous elements of feminine and masculine coded characteristics in the main character because of how he’s not human, but also they do have a “female” version of his species that he needs to go save (and bring back to life) by the end, so in a way it’s both more and less heteronormative in its characters.

Legend sees another example of a monster (literally called Darkness and looking like a traditional devil) trying to seduce a princess through promises of power, and she “goes along with it” in order to trick him and succeeds in that trick, but is ultimately saved by the male lead. 

In conclusion: I don’t even have Shrek in this.

[queerfables]

Would y'all like some Supernatural Lore dropped on you that I assume was common knowledge at some point but which, as a new fan, I haven't really seen talked about? If so, settle in to learn about the origin of the phrase "The French Mistake", and some cinematic history on fourth-wall breaking that hits real differently in light of season 15.

We all know "The French Mistake" as the title of That One Episode where Supernatural goes so meta the real world becomes part of the show (also Misha Collins gets murdered?? I might as well confess now I haven't actually seen this episode, I'm still working my way through to it. Hopefully that doesn't become a problem...) Anyway, what you might not know is the title comes from the movie Blazing Saddles.

With some caveats, Blazing Saddles is an absolutely incredible movie: it's a comedy western made in 1974 about a Black man who becomes the sheriff of a racist town, defeats capitalism and gets a cute sharp-shooting boyfriend. The "boyfriend" part is subtext, but it's pretty damn loud.

So where does "The French Mistake" come in? It's the name of what might be the movie's most iconic scene. In the middle of the climax, a big western shoot-out turned brawl, the camera pans up out of the town and onto an adjacent movie set. The brawling cowboys burst through the wall of that set, out of their own film and onto the new set where they continue to fight. This is why the episode of Supernatural is named for this scene. Just like in Blazing Saddles, Sam and Dean stumble out of their fictional world and onto a film set.

Here's the part that takes this from good to GREAT: in Blazing Saddles, the set they burst onto is a musical, being filmed in the style of a Busby Berkeley number, and before our cowboys break through that fourth wall, we see a staircase lined with chorus boys. They are dancing suggestively, thrusting their hips and singing a song called The French Mistake.

Throw out your hands. Stick out your tush. Hands on your hips. Give them a push. You'll be surprised, you're doing the French mistake.

Look. Guys. It's a song about anal sex. It's being sung by a group of gay men. When the cowboys break the wall and stumble onto the set of the musical, one of them starts out fighting with one of the chorus boys and ends up walking off arm in arm with him. Two other chorus boys go for a romantic swim in a fountain.

"The French mistake" is a reference to the breaking of the fourth wall but it's also literally a euphemism for queer sex. Blazing Saddles makes breaking the fourth wall intrinsically tied to queerness breaking into the heterosexual narrative (I could write an entire essay on how that plays out in the relationship between the leads, Bart and Jim. Suffice to say they trade their horses for a limousine and drive off into the sunset together). Worth considering: are the metanarratives and fourth wall breaking on Supernatural also intrinsically tied to queerness manifesting in the narrative?

For a whole host of reasons, Mel Brooks thought Warner Bros would bury Blazing Saddles rather than release it. He told everyone working on it to just go wild and do all the things they wanted to do but never expected to get away with, because the chances were good it wouldn't matter. He had the right to the final cut - meaning that the execs couldn't force him to make any edits - but he didn't know if the film would ever see the light of day. It did, though, and ended up being a major hit. Brooks talked about this, and in particular the French Mistake scene, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

That was dangerous because I was asked by Warners — they said I can do everything you said, but they kept saying, “Don’t do the gay scene. Don’t break through the walls and do the gay scene. You’re crossing a line there.” I said, “Don’t be silly.” There’s always these musicals being shot at Warner Bros. with top hats and tails and dopiness, you know. I said, “It’s a good mixture of cowboys and gay chorus boys.” So I kept it all in. I had final cut.

There's something kind of familiar about that, right? Don’t break through the walls and do the gay scene. Queerness and metanarratives bound together, threatening the status quo. This scene in Blazing Saddles was so threatening to Warner Bros that above everything else in a very boundary-pushing movie, this was the one they wanted to cut.

One more thing that hits different after season 15, from another really meta episode... Yeah, I'm referring to the famous "why lamp?" scene. Other people have already talked about how the way Dean's dancing sequence in The Hero's Journey recalls the Hays Code and deliberate queer-coding in classic Hollywood. But I want to go further and say that it also specifically recalls the scene I've been talking about, Blazing Saddles' 'The French Mistake' scene.

Maybe this is just because it's drawing on the same frame of reference, or maybe it's more deliberate, but either way, the parallels are there, down to the suggestive song playing (We're all alone, no chaperone... let's misbehave). It's really telling to me that this dance sequence so closely parallels a scene that was almost censored for being too gay.

[infinitecrime]

What are your thoughts on the whole bisexual Bucky Barnes discourse that's been unfolding the last day or two?

Controversial, but I don't really get the drama, to be honest. I'll start by saying that I've always headcanoned Bucky as gay (but closeted in the 40s, going on dates to keep up appearances etc), or maybe bisexual. But I also recognise that this is a headcanon, and it has no basis in canon or reality beyond my own interpretation of subtext. I've always viewed Bucky's strong bond and love for Steve as romantic love, and evidence of his sexuality, but I'm able to recognise that that's just my interpretation. Many people don't view it this way, and the cast and crew have said time and time again that they were intended, played and written as brothers. The little we know about Bucky pre-fall paints him as a ladies man, who was attracted to and pursued women, so TFATWS continuing this theme and bringing some of his old personality back is great and makes total sense.

So it's disheartening to hear the writing of Bucky in TFATWS be called "homophobic" and "straight washing". These are words that mean things, and they don't mean "character who has literally only ever been represented as a ladies man continues to be represented as a ladies man, harming no one". It's extremely trivialising to reduce homophobia down to "my headcanon/ship didn't come true" and I personally find it a bit offensive as a queer woman. It's also frustrating to see people tearing down ships with WOC in and hiding behind a shield of social justice because "that ship is part of the homophobia/straight washing!". Plus, flirting with women does mean he isn't bi, and to my knowledge Kari never actually said the words "he's straight" so it's still as open to interpretation as it's ever been!

It's totally fine to be upset that Kari shot down the Bucky is bi/tiger pics theory, and it's totally fine to be mad that Marvel has fuck all LGBT representation, and it's fine to be mad that they aren't utilising Bucky to give that representation when he would be the best candidate. I'm mad. But homophobic and straight washing mean things!! Things that aren't this!! I wish people would support actual existing queer made and led media with the same energy that they apply to trying to force their headcanons to become canon, but they don't, which always makes me question whether the demands are actually about representation at all, or whether it's more fetishism and ship-based for some people 🤷‍♀️

On to queerbaiting: I think it's one of the most incorrectly used words on this site, up there with coding and gaslighting. The thing that makes queerbaiting different to subtext is that it is intentional. It requires the writer to have thought "how can I trick queer people into watching this by making them believe a straight character will be queer?". That doesn't seem to be the case here (I personally believe that for the most part, this wasn't actually the case with Stucky either, but that's a whole can of worms I'll leave closed for now). The only real hint of queerbaiting was the tiger pic situation. I said when that ep came out that I believed it to be the result of TFATWS being written by an older, married man who has never used dating apps, and had heard of tiger pics as a crazy 21st century thing but didn't know any details (i.e. that it's mostly male; I'm young and I didn't know that). That belief turned out to be correct based on Malcolm's recent interview, and I genuinely don't think that moment was intentional or that he had any idea that people would latch onto a throwaway line the way they did.

The only thing that has me raising my eyebrows is Malcolm's interview where he's asked if Bucky's sexuality will be explored and he says "just keep watching". This was dubious, because he was leaving the possibility in the air in order to get people to keep watching, but I'm just about willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because:

a) "keep watching" is a Marvel stock answer to avoid spoilers, even spoilers that deny something is happening. Wyatt gave a similar answer when asked if he'd ever met Chris Evans, and the Wandavision team did this a coulple of times with stuff that ended up not happening.

b) If you consider Bucky flirting with Sarah evidence that he's straight, than his sexuality was explored. Therefore "are we going to explore Bucky's sexuality?" "Just keep watching" is not misleading at all from this perspective, which I imagine was what Malcolm was thinking.

So TL;DR I continue to be mad at Marvel for their lack of representation and I think Bucky would be a great candidate to fix that. But I don't think his depiction in TFATWS was in any way homophobic, straight washing and barely even queerbaiting (although Malcolm should definitely think through his interview answers more!), and I don't really see what all the fuss is about.

[bannock-freak]

Ok this is really hard to put into words but

I know that the history of queer coding villains and predators is long and prevalent but I feel like we’ve hit a new and even more insidious stage. Maybe it’s not that deep. I think that if you frame it carefully it could even be a good thing. But. This guy preys on literal children. His entire thing is breaking them mentally and physically. He is a grown man who gropes teenagers and grooms elementary school students.

So why is he the coolest character on the show?

His lines are fire. His moves are fire. His outfits and drama? Fire. Everyone else is a little more brought down to reality but Adam is Rule of Cool 100%. A big part of that is his “Hello Fellow Kids, looking at you my fellow LGBTQ+s!” dialogue. We’re still really thirsty for rep so it’s easy to latch onto anything that so much as acknowledges textually (not subtext, FULL text) that we exist. 

I don’t have a problem with that as part of his character. I think that, considering again that he’s a child predator, it honestly makes sense that he’d talk in a that’s ripped straight from the highschool GSA, a virtue signal sans virtue, the light dangling in front of an angler fish’s mouth.

Where I take a problem with it is

Why did the show REDEEM this fucko?

“Oh he grooms and gropes children because he had a horrible childhood” shut the fuck up, show. “Oh, the kids showed him the light and he’s better now!” shut the fuck up show. “ALL HE NEEDS IS FRIENDS so we gave him friends!” Among the demographic that he’s spent who knows how many years preying on?!

The show gives him zero consequences in every area of wrong doing. I take issue that he wins. Not only does someone else take the fall for his fraud but now he has access to the kids that he’s been manipulating and bad touching LITERALLY the entire show ?????? He’s FRIENDS with them now? THAT’S the finale? And the context clues say it’s a HAPPY ENDING?

Sk8. 

R u 4 real rn.

This man needs to be on a list where he can’t be within however many feet of schools, not given a happy ending where he’s directly within the sphere of influence of teens and preteens. That on top of the rule of cool that guides him? So the most dangerous dude on here gets a pass but also is written in a way to directly appeal to the LGBTQ+ demographic?

It’s insidious as fuck and it makes me seriously wonder what the hell was going on in that script writing room.

We see this again and again. Hisoka from HxH is another example. Preds on kids, rule of cool by spades, debatably queer-coded, lifted up by the narrative instead of punished by it. And I know there's more but I’m braindead af so they’re not top of mind right now. 

So. Anyways. I can’t watch SK8 anymore, or even finish it properly, because that honestly makes me kind of sick, and I think it’s really fucking dubious that this keeps happening in children’s media, just now it’s getting less heterosexual like it’s been before (IE basically every teen drama ever focusing on a student/teacher relationship). TF are we trying to set our kids up for? Can we stop?

[raptured-night]

Hi! I’m part of the lgbtq+ community and Severus is my favorite HP character and I was wondering (if you have the time and feel obliged) if you could please give me a few examples of how he’s queer? It’s been a few years since I reread the books, and def before I came out, so I’m a little in the dark here lol Thanks!!

First of all, I just wanted to apologize for how long it has taken me to properly respond to your ask. I’ve been dealing with some ongoing health issues that have turned me into something of a moody writer. I’ll get random spurts of energy and inspiration and then hit a wall of absolute writer’s block assisted by a major case of executive dysfunction every single time I try to respond to the multiple asks languishing in my inbox. Fortunately, I found myself involved in a discussion just today that addressed your ask so perfectly that I wanted to share it with you.  In the very least, that discussion has also managed to shake off my writer’s block temporarily so that I have found myself in the right head-space to finally be able to give this lovely ask the thought and attention that I feel it deserves. 

Although, in regards to the Snape discourse I linked above, I feel that I should warn you in advance that the discussion was prompted by an anti-Snape poster who made a rather ill-thought meme (I know there are many in the Snapedom who would rather just avoid seeing anti-Snape content altogether, so I try to warn when I link people to debates and discussions prompted by anti-posts) but the thoughtful responses that the anti-Snape poster unintentionally generated from members of the Snapedom (particularly by @deathdaydungeon whose critical analyses of Snape and, on occasions, other Harry Potter characters is always so wonderfully nuanced, thought-provoking, and well-considered), are truly excellent and worth reading, in my opinion. Also, as I fall more loosely under the “a” (I’m grey-ace/demisexual) of the lgbtqa+ flag and community I would prefer to start any discussions about Snape as a queer character or as a character with queer coding by highlighting the perspectives of people in the Snapedom who are actually queer before sharing any thoughts of my own.

In addition, I also wanted to share a few other posts where Snape’s queer coding has been discussed by members of the Snapedom in the past (and likely with far more eloquence than I could manage in this response of my own).

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Along with an excellent article in Vice by Diana Tourjée, in which a case for Snape being trans is convincingly argued. 

Importantly, you’ll notice that while some of these discussions do argue the possibility of Snape being a queer or trans character others may only discuss the way that Snape’s character is queer coded. That is because there is a distinct but subtle difference between: “This character could be queer/lgbtq+” and: “This character has queer/lgbtq+ coding” one which is briefly touched on in the first discussion that I linked you to. However, I would like to elaborate a bit here just what I mean when I refer to Snape as a character with queer coding. As while Rowling has never explicitly stated that she intended to write Snape as lgbtq+ (although there is one interview given by Rowling which could be interpreted as either an unintentional result of trying to symbolically explain Snape’s draw to the dark arts or a vague nod to Snape’s possible bisexuality: "Well, that is Snape's tragedy. ... He wanted Lily and he wanted Mulciber too. He never really understood Lily's aversion; he was so blinded by his attraction to the dark side he thought she would find him impressive if he became a real Death Eater.”) regardless of her intent when she drew upon the existing body of Western literary traditions and tropes for writing antagonists and villains in order to use them as a red-herring for Snape’s character, she also embued his character with some very specific, coded subtext. This is where Death of the Author can be an invaluable tool for literary critics, particularly in branches of literary criticism like queer theory. 

Ultimately, even if Rowling did not intend to write Snape as explicitly queer/lgbtq+ the literary tradition she drew upon in order to present him as a foil for Harry Potter and have her readers question whether he was an ally or a villain has led to Snape being queer coded. Specifically, many of the characteristics of Snape’s character design do fall under the trope known as the “queering of the villain.” Particularly, as @deathdaydungeon, @professormcguire, and other members of the Snapedom have illustrated, Snape’s character not only subverts gender roles (e.g. his Patronus presents as female versus male, Snape symbolically assumes the role of “the mother” in the place of both Lily and later Narcissa when he agrees to protect Harry and Draco, his subject of choice is potions and poisons which are traditionally associated more with women and “witches,” while he seemingly rejects in his first introduction the more phallic practice of “foolish wand-waving,” and indeed Snape is characterized as a defensive-fighter versus offensive, in Arthurian mythology he fulfills the role of Lady of the Lake in the way he chooses to deliver the Sword of Gryffindor to Harry, Hermione refers to his hand-writing as “kind of girly,” his association with spiders and spinners also carries feminine symbology, etc.) but is often criticized or humiliated for his seeming lack of masculinity (e.g. Petunia mocking his shirt as looking like “a woman’s blouse,” which incidentally was also slang in the U.K. similar to “dandy” to accuse men of being effeminate, the Marauders refer to Snape as “Snivellus” which suggests Snape is either less masculine because he cries or the insult is a mockery of what could pass for a stereotypical/coded Jewish feature, his nose, Remus Lupin quite literally instructs Neville on how to “force” a Boggart!Snape, who incidentally is very literally stepping out of a closet-like wardrobe, into the clothing of an older woman and I quoted force because that is the exact phrase he uses, James and Sirius flipping Snape upside down to expose him again presents as humiliation in the form of emasculation made worse by the arrival and defense of Lily Evans, etc.). 

Overall, the “queering of the villain” is an old trope in literature (although it became more deliberate and prevalent in media during the 1950s-60s); however, in modernity, we still can find it proliferating in many of the Disney villains (e.g. Jafar, Scar, Ursula, etc.), in popular anime and children’s cartoons (e.g. HiM from Powerpuff Girls, James from Pokemon, Frieza, Zarbon, the Ginyu Force, Perfect Cell, basically a good majority of villains from DBZ, Nagato from Fushigi Yuugi, Pegasus from Yu Gi Oh, etc.), and even in modern television series and book adaptations, such as the popular BBC’s Sherlock in the character of Moriarty. Indeed, this article does an excellent job in detailing some of the problematic history of queer coded villains. Although, the most simple summary is that: “Queer-coding is a term used to say that characters were given traits/behaviors to suggest they are not heterosexual/cisgender, without the character being outright confirmed to have a queer identity” (emphasis mine). Notably, TV Tropes also identifies this trope under the classification of the “Sissy Villain” but in queer theory and among queer writers in fandom and academia “queering of the villain” is the common term. This brings me back to Snape and his own queer coding; mainly, because Rowling drew upon Western traditions for presenting a character as a suspected villain she not only wrote Snape as queer (and racially/ethnically) coded but in revealing to the reader that Snape was not, in fact, the villain Harry and the readers were encouraged to believe he was by the narrator she incorporated a long history of problematic traits/tropes into a single character and then proceeded to subvert them by subverting reader-expectation in a way that makes the character of Severus Snape truly fascinating. 

We can certainly debate the authorial intent vs. authorial impact where Snape’s character is concerned. Particularly as we could make a case that the polarizing nature of Snape may well be partly the result of many readers struggling against Rowling subverting literary tropes that are so firmly rooted in our Western storytelling traditions that they cannot entirely abandon the idea that this character who all but had the book thrown at him in terms of all the coding that went into establishing him as a likely villain (e.g. similar to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Snape is also coded to be associated with darkness/black colors and to represent danger and volatile/unstable moods, while his class status further characterizes him as an outsider or “foreign other,” and not unlike all those villains of our childhood Disney films which affirmed a more black-and-white philosophy of moral abolutism, such as Scar or Jafar, the ambiguity of Snape’s sexuality coupled with his repeated emasculation signals to the reader that this man should be “evil” and maybe even “predatory,” ergo all the “incel” and friendzone/MRA discourse despite nothing in canon truly supporting those arguments; it seems it may merely be Snape’s “queerness” that signals to some readers that he was predatory or even that “If Harry had been a girl” there would be some kind of danger) is not actually our villain after all. 

Indeed, the very act of having Snape die (ignoring, for the moment, any potential issues of “Bury Your Gays” in a queer analysis of his death) pleading with Harry to “look at him” as he symbolically seems to weep (the man whom Harry’s hyper-masculine father once bullied and mocked as “Snivellus”) memories for Harry to view (this time with his permission) carries some symbolic weight for any queer theory analysis. Snape, formerly portrayed as unfathomable and “secretive,” dies while pleading to be seen by the son of both his first and closest friend and his school-hood bully (a son that Snape also formerly could never see beyond his projection of James) sharing with Harry insight into who he was via his personal memories. For Harry to later go on to declare Snape “the bravest man he ever knew” carries additional weight, as a queer theory analysis makes it possible for us to interpret that as Harry finally recognizing Snape, not as the “queer coded villain” he and the reader expected but rather as the brave queer coded man who was forced to live a double-life in which “no one would ever know the best of him” and who, in his final moments at least, was finally able to be seen as the complex human-being Rowling always intended him to be. 

Rowling humanizing Snape for Harry and the reader and encouraging us to view Snape with empathy opened up the queer coding that she wrote into his character (intentionally or otherwise) in such a way that makes him both a potentially subversive and inspiring character for the lgbtq+ community. Essentially, Snape opens the door for the possibility of reclaiming a tradition of queer coding specific to villains and demonstrating the way those assumptions about queer identity can be subverted. Which is why I was not at all surprised that I was so easily able to find a body of existing discourse surrounding Snape as a queer coded or even as a potentially queer character within the Harry Potter fandom. At least within the Snapedom, there are many lgbtq+ fans of his character that already celebrate the idea of a queer, bi, gay, trans, ace/aro, or queer coded Snape (in fact, as a grey-ace I personally enjoy interpreting Snape through that lens from time-to-time). 

Thank you for your ask @pinkyhatespink and once again I apologize for the amount of time it’s taken me to reply. However, I hope that you’ll find this response answered your question and, if not, that some of the articles and posts from other pro-Snape bloggers I linked you to will be able to do so more effectively. Also, as a final note, although many of the scholarly references and books on queer coding and queering of the villain I would have liked to have sourced are typically behind paywalls, I thought I would list the names of just a few here that I personally enjoyed reading in the past and that may be of further interest should you be able to find access to them.

Fathallah, Judith. “Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC’s Sherlock.” Television & New Media, vol. 16, no. 5, 2014, p. 490-500. 

Huber, Sandra. “Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or How to Speak With The Dead.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, p. 15-25.

Mailer, Norman. “The Homosexual Villain.” 1955. Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, edited by Sipiora Phillip, Random House, 2013, pp. 14–20.

Solis, Nicole Eschen. "Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater." Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, p. 115+. 

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “The Essentialist Villain.” Jan. 2019,  SBN13: 978-1-4384-6966-9

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

“After the disappointment of the Andrew Garfield-led Amazing Spider-Man movies, everyone’s favorite wallcrawler has been having a renaissance. Entering the Marvel cinematic universe in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, the webslinger fully redeemed himself with well-crafted live-action film in Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

 Yes...okay...that was definitely what Homecoming was....

 “and a wildly successful spin-off film Venom, ”

 I mean financially successful sure...

 “In the midst of all his success, Spider-Man has quietly become one of the most inclusive and socially conscious superheroes of today.”

*raises eyebrow*

 Okay...go on...

 “Last week, it was announced that Spider-Man: Far From Home would feature two out transgender actors playing trans characters, the first big-budget superhero film to do so. Spider-Man: Homecoming also featured a queer character, as well as numerous people of color.”

  Wait who was the queer character in Homecoming?

 “It’s also worth mentioning that Spiderverse included a Jewish version of Peter Parker, who is typically portrayed as either secular or Christian.”

 ....ehhhhhhhhh....yes and no.

 In media adaptations barring maybe one (the 1994 show cos I do not remember where he got married) Spider-Man is portrayed as...I guess secular but really it’s more that they just don’t say anything.

 It’s not that the character is not a believer in a faith per se, especially if you go by older adaptations during times when hardly anyone was secular. It’s just that they, understandably, aren’t saying anything.

 In the comics Peter is some kind of Christian but probably a Protestant (unless you go by Amazing Grace where he is an atheist but that’s hot trash we don’t talk about) but we don’t really talk about it that specifically.

 We just know that he and his family celebrate Christmas and very, very occasionally Aunt May references going to church and that she, Peter and MJ believe in a monothetistic deity they refer to as ‘God’.

 And really apart from the Church thing there is no clue to Peter’s religion and Marvel probably (wisely) would rather keep it that way. He even got married in a civil ceremony!

 However in the SUBTEXT...he’s Jewish. And it’s basically an open secret that he is and always has been Jewish.

 “The Spider-Man video game also featured a wonderful easter egg for queer fans by having a giant rainbow flag, as well as several smaller ones, scattered around the game’s fictionalized New York City map. ”

 I mean that’s wonderful but I wouldn’t call that an Easter Egg so much as...it’s just what you’d find in modern NYC.

 “Even the Venom film got in on the fun, with fans shipping Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and the titular male alien-symbiote after the two kissed in the film. Sony even encouraged the pairing, releasing a romantic comedy-esque trailer for the film to promote the home release. While some complained of queer-baiting, most felt that it was all in good fun and included queer people in on the joke, instead of making us the target.”

 Again, good for them but I don’t think that was the movie actively trying to be positive towards queer people.

 Brock and Venom kissed when Venom was bonded to Brock’s ex-fiance and had a pronounced female form, being an adaptation of a character literally called She-Venom.

 And it was based upon a script written in the 1990s so really it was more the movie did it and then people took it as a thing that was shipping Venom and Brock (even though Venom is sexless). Brock and the symbiote have been shipped numerous times in the comics but the subtext has always been that the symbiote, if any sex, is female. In the Spec cartoon it is referred to as Symbi (a pun on Cyndi) and in the Spider-Girl comics it is marked out as female (granted this happens after it’s bonded to a woman).

 And again, headcanon away but like...that probably wasn’t intentional at all Sony were just being goofy or unintionally made something people took a certain way.

 “Indeed, even in the comics, Spider-Man has always been a fairly inclusive hero. Miles Morales was introduced in the early-2000s, taking over the mantel from Peter Parker for several years. ”

 Okay, this is so weird for me to be correcting such a praising point but lets really look at this.

 First of all Miles didn’t take over Peter’s role for several years he did it permanently.

 Second of all Miles is from 2011 so that’s not the early 2000s, that’s the early 2010s, but okay maybe that was a typo.

 Third of all, is it really all that logical to say this franchise that began in 1962 has always been fairly inclusive and then cite a character from 2011 as proof of this? Wouldn’t examples from during the FIRST quarter century have been more apt?

 Fourth of all...eh. Has Spider-Man been fairly inclusive from the start? Yes, no, its complicated.

 Look there were exactly 0 LGBTQ+ characters in Spider-Man until maybe the 1990s and even then I couldn’t off my head tell you who they were. Felicia Hardy is bisexual but we didn’t find out until the 2000s and it was most prominent in an AU. Really the most significant LGBTQ+ character who’s had the fact that they are queer be more than a one off reference was Max Modell and he debuted 2011 and IIRC wasn’t established as queer until 2012. In defence of Spider-Man the Comics Code literally FORBID any character be anything other than straight until the 1990s and even then it was relatively rare, even in X-Men which you’d think it wouldn’t be.

 If we’re talking POC again this one is a bit complicated Glori Grant, Joe Robertson, Randy Robertson are frequently appearing POC characters but not in every run and they aren’t usually as prominent as like Jameson, Aunt May, Harry Osborn, MJ, etc. Characters of other ethnicities are even less frequent and I don’t even know what we should make of Puma/Thomas Fireheart. I mean A for effort, they wanted a Native American character who wasn’t really a villain and wasn’t exactly a sterotype so there is that I guess.

 Again though...most other Marvel franchises decade by decade weren’t much better with this and we should give credit where credit is due to the same guy who created Black Panther writing a nuanced scene where 2 black people in the 60s separated by age discuss different approaches to civil rights with neither being proven right or wrong.

 When it comes to disabled people, outside of evil insane villains, forget it, there is nothing before Flash Thompson in 2008 unless you count Aunt May’s chronically poor health.

 “Spider-Gwen quickly became one of the highest-selling female superhero comics. Spider-Woman was a prominently featured bisexual character, and the female Asian-American hero Silk also had LGBT supporting characters, Rafferty and Lola, who were in a healthy relationship. Additionally, many view vampire villain Morbius, who is getting a spin-off film starring Jared Leto next year, as a metaphor for those suffering during the HIV crisis of the '80s. ”

 Again...Spider-Gwen and Silk are 2010s characters so that’s not ‘always fairly inclusive’.

 I don’t even know if Jessica Drew is bisexual, I’ve never heard that but I don’t think she is.

 Morbius as a metaphor for HIV...MIGHT be true if we are specifically talking about his 1990s solo-book which I’ve never read. But the character as originally created 100% was never about that because he was created in the 1970s before HIV was known about.

 “Unlike his Marvel counterparts Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, Spider-Man’s world has accurately reflected real world diversity for years.”

 ....Not really.

 I’m not even saying Spidey maybe haven’t been comparatively better at it than those guys but he’s deffo not been accurate.

 Plus to be fair to the other guys, Captain America and Iron Man have had at least one major black supporting cast member and in Cap’s case he was fairly candid about social strife and issues.

 And with Thor it’s not that fair to throw shade at him for not reflecting the real world given that 90% of this characters and stories are literally pulled from fantasy and myth. I don’t even know if there are any queer figures in Norse myth let alone poc.

 “While it’s a seemingly simple idea that any of us can be a superhero, it’s sadly still a radical concept in a endlessly growing film genre that has predominetly centers straight cisgender white men. ”

 Well that’s mostly because the comics the movies adapt are about those types of people.

 “That is because relatability and inclusion has always been core to Spider-Man’s appeal and message. It’s why the late Stan Lee decided that, unlike other superheroes who expose parts of their faces, Spider-Man had to wear a full-face mask.”

  Stan Lee only speculated that that was part of Spider-Man’s appeal, he never had any input on that design choice it was all Steve Ditko...who frankly was unlikely to have been thinking about that...

 “Even further, Spider-Man isn’t the king of a country, a billionaire, a woman out of a Greek myth, or a brilliant scientist. He’s just an average high-school kid from Brooklyn who always strives to do the right thing even while struggling to balance his everyday life and hiding a secret identity.”

 WHOA there buddy...Spider-Man isn’t routinely ‘a kid’ nor is he from Brooklyn.

 MILES is from Brooklyn but Peter, as evidenced by that great big caption in Captain America: Civil War, is from QUEENS.

 “And it’s the idea of balancing a secret identity with everyday life that has always allowed Spider-Man to connect with queer audiences long before comic writers were allowed to explicitly include LGBT characters.”

 ...I’m not denying this necesarrilly but whilst i’ve heard stories from poc who connected with Spider-Man I’ve never heard this about LGBTQ+ fans of Spider-Man.

“Indeed, perhaps the strongest part of Spider-Man’s inclusivity is the subtlety to which it has been done. While Black Panther, Black Lightning, and Wonder Woman rightly put issues of identity front and center, Spider-Man’s quiet diversity allows audiences who typically cry “SJWs are ruining my favorite characters” to actually see diversity showcased without it being overt.”

 Errrrrrr...sure....*represses memories of when Miles Morales was first announced*

 Lets um...wait and see what happens when those trans characters show up in the movie this year okay.

[sugdendingle]

Everyone keeps saying they think Billy is going to die in season 3 but I just don’t see that happening. There’s obviously the stuff that was in the trailer with Billy having some kind of infectious looking bite on his arm, then there was the monster but I don’t think the monster is even Billy it seems more to point towards the guy with blonde hair.

I’ve read some people think another reason Billy might die is because his name starts with B and Barb died first season and Bob died second season but both Barb and Bob were only one season characters who we didn’t even know all that much about. Both Barb and Bob weren’t very complex characters and we the audience were simply meant to see them as good innocent people without any real conflict from the beginning. They were part of what was supposed to make us root for our heroes and hate the monsters.

Billy is different he’s got a lot more layers to him in my opinion. Sure some just see him as a bully but I think he’s a young guy with a lot of problems. His behavior with Max, Steve, and Lucas isn’t okay but I do think that he lashes out because of what he’s dealing with at home. What he’s probably been dealing with since he was a kid. It’s obvious he has lot of rage and pain.

The Duffers actually made the point to let us know that Billy comes from an abusive home and have brought him (and Neil) back for season 3. It would have been easy enough to just have Billy be season’s 2 human antagonist and be done with him. They could have just used Billy as a way to give Max more depth considering Max is the one who was brought in as part of The Party. They could have just had Billy be Max’s asshole older brother, the typical 80′s bully, Stranger Things own version of Billy Zabka but instead we got all the queer coded scenes with him and Steve and a serious glimpse into why Billy is the way he is.

It wasn’t just some random fight with his dad either. We have this character (Billy) who is so domineering with everyone he comes into contact with and then there is such a complete change in him when he’s around his father. We see Billy get defensive, shrink back, get visibly upset, and finally look scared. It’s obvious Neil is physically violent but more so he has serious psychological control over Billy. We also heard Neil call Billy a fag and Billy not deny it. Now I know it was a word that was much more a product of it’s time but still the Duffers didn’t have to pick that word especially coupled with how much other subtext they used to code Billy as gay. 

My point in bringing all of this up is it’s clear Billy wasn’t mean to be just a side antagonist like Tommy who we know pretty much nothing about. The Duffers purposely showed us a glimpse into an important part of Billy’s life and allowed us to see this usually hardass character extremely vulnerable.  I can’t help but feel like there was a reason for that especially given we didn’t see it until almost the last episode and it happened right before the fight. Like the show was saying look this is why Billy is behaving this way.

I think there is still so much room for Billy as a character to get fleshed more. There’s still so much more we don’t know about about him. What was his life like in California? What happened to his mom? What made them move to Hawkins? What does Billy truly care about?

There is also still plenty of ways for Billy to get a redemption arc. Steve made a lot of mistakes and for all intents and purposes was a giant dick in season 1 but the Duffers turned him around quite masterfully in season 2 to the point that he became almost universally the favorite character of Stranger Things. Nothing Billy has done has made him so awful that he’s completely irredeemable (despite what haters will tell you). So Billy got into a fight with Steve (where Steve threw the first punch might I remind everyone). So Billy has been an ass to his sister (his sister who his father seriously favors) and his sister’s friends. Season 3 could see Billy helping them fight whatever monsters are attacking Hawkins again. Season 3 could see Billy apologizing for his actions from season 2. 

All of this together is why I don’t think Billy is getting killed off. Billy has way too much potential as a character for the Duffers to just axe him. They can literally go anywhere with him. They can redeem him, they can have him taken and used for experiments and he has to be rescued in season 4. There’s also the fact that whatever they do with Billy Max’s storyline will be impacted. Dacre is also really popular even if Billy isn’t with a certain portion of fandom right now so I think it makes sense to keep him around. There’s also no saying the Duffers couldn’t or wouldn���t pull another Steve type redemption with Billy and have Billy be the hero of season 3. There’s plenty of other characters they could kill off too like the new mayor or Robin. I also think if they were going for an impactful death something that was a surprise and pulled at the heart stings it wouldn’t be Billy it would be someone like Hopper. Not that I want him to die at all (I love Hop) I’m just saying.

I don’t think Billy is going anywhere. Obviously I could be wrong but as of right now I’m not worried. I definitely don’t see them killing off Steve either. He’s like one of the most popular characters on the show next to Eleven. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking but I think our boys our safe for now.

[estelofimladris]

Queerness and Death in The Magicians by SE Fleenor (The Removed Syfy Article)

[ NOTE: This article is being reposted in its entirety because it was removed by the Syfy website where it was originally posted. I (estelofimladris) did not write it, but still had it open after its removal. Please read and enjoy - send the writer, S.E. Fleenor, some love if you can. ]

by S.E. Fleenor

SPOILERS FOR THE MAGICIANS SEASON 4 FINALE!

By now you already know that The Magicians’ Quentin Coldwater died in the Season 4 finale. Yes, D-E-D, dead. There’s no resurrection in the works and no trick of astral projection or Niffin state of higher being can bring sweet, depressed, narcissistic Quentin back.

The decision to kill off a major character — the major character, if the Lev Grossman novels still mean anything (they don’t) — is almost always controversial. But we live in the day and age of Game of Thronesand The Walking Dead and Thanos snapping half of the Avengers (and the universe) into nothingness. Any character could die at any moment (and sometimes all of the characters could die at any moment) and that’s the brave, new, kill-happy world our media is made in.

So, why does it matter that Quentin is dead?

Well, my friends, let’s revisit a little trope we like to call Bury Your Gays. Throughout media representations of queer folks, reaching back to 19th-century Victorian novels, the formula has been about the same: An LGBTQ+ character is introduced, they reveal their sexuality or an attraction to a specific person, and then they die, die, die, often horrifically. This trope is also called Dead Lesbian Syndrome due to the overwhelming number of queer women who have been slaughtered onscreen — not exactly the representation queer women have been begging for.

Back when archaic censorship laws ruled the page and the screen, writing about queer characters was taboo and the only way queer writers, or folks who wanted to create queer characters, could include LGBTQ+ characters was by portraying them unfavorably. Queer characters could exist, but only as a warning of what a “perverted” life would bring you. So, in order to get some kind of representation, LGBTQ+ characters had to suffer.

Sounds a little rough, huh? Like who would really bury their gays? Oh, just Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The 100, The Walking Dead, The Expanse, Jessica Jones, Xena, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Hex, Torchwood, Hemlock Grove, Teen Wolf, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Dracula, The Vampire Diaries, Arrow, Salem, American Horror Story, Ascension, Lost Girl, Scream, The Shannara Chronicles, The Exorcist, Van Helsing, Doctor Who, Gotham, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Purge, and last but not least (and not for the first time): The Magicians.

Let it be noted that I have only included science fiction, fantasy, and horror TV shows on this list and only those that I know about. The list is much, much longer when you include non-genre TV shows and film. (Autostraddle has a very complete list of queer women on TV who have been killed off, for those of you who feel like being sad.)

Oh, did you recognize a bunch of queer-friendly shows in that list? Does that somehow feel like a violation of the promise made when a series goes out of its damn way to present itself as queer and feminist?

EXACTLY. And, that, my sweet babies, is why people are pissed about the death of Quentin Coldwater, generally speaking. We’re sick of seeing queer characters die over and over again. But, what specifically about the death of Quentin is so frustrating? I’m so glad you asked.

Full disclosure: I'm not going to get into the creators' rationale for killing off Quentin. I've read all the interviews with the creators and with Jason Ralph, who plays Quentin, and they all read like a whole lot of familiar BS. (At least Hale Appelman, who plays Eliot, gets it.)

In the first season of The Magicians, Quentin, Eliot, and Margot have a threesome. It’s the first time Quentin has sex with a man, as far as we know, and it’s the first time we see him start to confront his queerness. In Season 3’s “A Life in the Day,” Quentin and Eliot end up in a different Fillory, from before they were born, where they must solve an unsolvable puzzle. As they spend a lifetime working on the mosaic, they fall in love, raise a child, and make their queer family work. Upon returning to the main timeline, barely a word is spoken about their encounter, and queer folks everywhere braced ourselves for that experience to be treated as an anomaly from another timeline. (Another weird queer trope where characters get to be LGBTQ+, but only elsewhere or else when or, or, or…)

Season 4 brought unexpected twists and turns, such as Eliot being trapped inside his own mind by the Monster. With that, many a fan prepared to let Queliot rest. And, then “Escape from the Happy Place,” took us into Eliot’s mind and — after exploring a lot of deep trauma that has a particularly queer flavor to it — back to the day Eliot and Quentin came back from their lifetime in Fillory. As they sit on the steps of the throne room, Memory Quentin and Memory Eliot talk about what happened between them. Memory Quentin asks Memory Eliot why they shouldn’t try to be together, saying “Who gets proof of concept like that?”

Eliot kisses Memory Quentin hard on the mouth and then walks through the door that will allow him to take control of his body for a moment. In the real world, face to face with Quentin, Eliot gets a signal out that he’s still alive. He looks at Quentin and repeats the question Quentin had asked him, following it with, “Peaches and plums, motherf*cker.” When he realizes who he’s looking at, Quentin hesitates, a look of surprise and longing washing over his face.

This deeply emotional and compelling storyline appeared at the same time that Quentin finally officially rebuffed Alice’s advances, telling her he no longer wanted to be together, that he could never see her the same way again.

Then, after all that work, after all the maturation the characters undergo, the series undoes everything, shoehorning in a last-minute declaration of love between Quentin and Alice and killing off Quentin when he uses magic in the Mirror Realm, without ever seeing Eliot again. Quentin then goes to the Underworld branch of the library and meets with Penny 40 while reminiscing over his life and pondering over whether or not he died by suicide. (The treatment of suicide in the episode is problematic and deeply offensive.)

There are probably as many critiques of this ending as there are people who watched it, but I’m going to focus on the main issues that stood out to me.

The series has gone out of its way to confirm Quentin as queer and tease the possibility of a queer love story.

Queer viewers are used to surviving off subtext and tend to be fairly generous in what we’ll accept. Seriously, many a queer considers Thor: Ragnarok to be part of the queer canon when it’s not even implied onscreen that anyone is queer, and have you seen people shipping Carol and Maria in Captain Marvel? Maybe it’s because we’re used to being served scraps that the Bury Your Gays trope feels so pointed. Oh, you’re not happy with the almosts and the could-haves and the alternate timelines of queerness? Well, then we’ll make your characters queer and just murder ‘em right up.

After Season 3, The Magicians could have never acknowledged the relationship between Quentin and Eliot that takes place in another timeline or they could have shrugged and been like, “Must have been the opium in the air!” They’d already done as much with the threesome in Season 1 and all but ignoring Quentin's queerness in the episodes that follow. The series didn’t have to confirm that Quentin wanted to follow his attraction to Eliot and give being together a try. But, The Magiciansdid. The series took the time onscreen to show Eliot and Quentin kissing again, to show Eliot declaring his love for Quentin in their own code, and to show Quentin dedicate his time to helping Eliot get free.

Furthermore, how messed up is it that the series spends a significant amount of time dredging up the trauma of Eliot’s queer youth only to make him realize his biggest regret is how he treated Quentin, just for Quentin to be forced back into the closet? An episode that was deeply evocative and affirming of queerness smacks of voyeurism when taken in the context of the finale.

At the last minute, after confirming his queerness, the series forces a relationship between Quentin and Alice.

It’s hard not to see the last ditch shoving of Quentin and Alice together as an attempt to shove Quentin himself back in the closet. Season 4 shows Quentin rejecting and wanting to be apart from Alice, only for him to decide that he loves her and wants to give their relationship another try because? Honestly, I’m not sure what rationale he uses because it MAKES NO SENSE. And, what the hell does he think of imprisoned-in-his-own-body Eliot while making this decision? To judge from the series, not a whole hell of a lot.

It’s totally cool if queer or bisexual characters date people of different genders — that’s not the issue. The issue is that without a moment of hesitation, Quentin whiplashes from his lover who he knows is trapped by the Monster and cannot see, hear, or reach him to his ex-girlfriend who he has distanced himself from due to her selfish behavior.

In the context of his death, I like to call this particularly messed up turn of events “Bury Your Gays and Stomp On Their Graves” because all the work that had been done to show Quentin’s coming to terms with his own sexuality is undone shortly before he dies.

There are other ways to write a character off a series.

A lot of people fall back on bad faith arguments like: what is a show supposed to do when an actor no longer wishes to appear in the series?

The answer, of course, is: ANYTHING ELSE. They could have done literally anything else to write Quentin out of the show and release Jason Ralph from his commitment. The Magicians takes place in a world WHERE MAGIC EXISTS, where characters leave the main story to go on their own adventures, and where average human beings can become gods. There’s no excuse for falling into lazy storytelling and reifying a trope that has been well-documented and mourned for a long time.

In the novels, Quentin gets kicked out of Fillory and decides to use his discipline, minor mendings, to build a new world for himself and Alice. He essentially walks through a door and never comes back. THAT WOULD HAVE WORKED and it wouldn’t do the work of retraumatizing queer audiences.

It comes down to this: To ignore the wider implications of making a character specifically queer, having him return to his prior unhealthy relationship with a woman, and then killing him off is a disservice to queer people everywhere. It is, at once, a declaration of the meaninglessness of the queer experience and an unforgivable reminder of the expendability of queer lives.

Series like The Magicians (and before it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) trade on their reputations as queer and feminist shows. We watch them for their powerful women and their kickass queer characters and their storylines that affirm the power of survival. And what do they give us in return? They bury their gays.

Does that mean that all LGBTQ+ characters should be immortal? The rational response would be: of course not. Up until today I may have agreed with that argument, but right now I’m feeling a little less generous. It’s 20-f*cking-19 and there is no excuse for Bury Your Gays to pop up in a progressive TV show. Maybe until series and creators who make their money off queer characters and queer fandom take responsibility for how they use the lives and bodies of queer people, maybe until then, all LGBTQ+ characters should be immortal.

I’m pretty damn sick of watching every character who loves like me, who looks like me, who explores the bounds of their sexuality like me, die. I’m sick of watching characters bust down the doors of the closets that held them back only to have their queerness erased or elided through their deaths. I’m sick of watching relationships between men and women blossom onscreen only to see queer relationships torn apart by death.

Queer people deserve happy endings. We deserve them in real life and we deserve to see them onscreen and we deserve them now.

Until that’s the norm, you better damn well consider any queer character you create immortal. Because if you don’t, we queers will f*cking haunt your basic ass.

[kyashin]

Voltron: The Fandom of You

Soooooo, hi. I want to talk about Voltron fandom, because I have some positive things to say about it. But first, I want to talk about due South.

due South is one of my favorite shows, and the fandom produced some of my favorite fan content. All around, it was a fantastic contribution to the universe. Well done, humanity.

For the uninitiated, the show is: Canadian Mountie Benton Fraser, the most upstanding and honest (and sarcastic) person imaginable, first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of his father; and, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, he remained, attached as liaison officer with the Canadian Consulate. It was a buddy cop show, and for seasons one and two, his cop buddy was an Italian-American dude named Ray Vecchio. Some people shipped it.

The show was canceled, and then, after enthusiastic fan campaigning, lovingly revived for two more seasons with Paul Gross––the actor who played Fraser––at the helm as executive producer. Unfortunately, David Marciano was unable to reprise his role as Ray Vecchio, so yikes! Now what? The entire premise of this thing was “sincere Canadian Mountie and cynical American cop shenanigans”. The solution was to replace Ray Vecchio. Literally. Like...in the show.

The first episode of season three has Fraser arriving in Chicago after a vacation in Canada to find this hot blond dude with a way different accent claiming to be Ray Vecchio, who is dark-haired and different-accented and just...you know...an entire different human being. Aaand let’s skip to the end of the episode where it turns out that Actual Ray Vecchio is undercover with the mob, so this new dude is gonna pretend to be him ‘til Vecchio gets back. New dude’s name is Ray Kowalski. People also shipped that.

But the fans who’d like, worked feverishly to get their show back on the air weren’t counting on having half the duo they wanted back erased from the show. !!!!!!!!!!!

Enter the Ray Wars. (Seriously, there’s a whole thing about them on fanlore.)

And a disclaimer: I wasn’t in the fandom for the height of the rage and fury, but I did saunter in as things were winding down, and even then some of the wreckage was still smoldering. That whole kerfuffle was Fandom Infamous for a super long time––and people who’ve been in Fandom long enough definitely know the Ray Wars by name AND reputation. For years, I’d see the Ray Wars held up by others as one of the ultimate examples of “intense fans” and just how Not Good a Look fandom can make for itself.

Here’s the thing though: the Ray Wars took place in the late 90s. No social media, no widespread understanding of fandom throughout the population. Fans were, like, on mailing lists and shit. The people who created AO3 were posting fic on web hosts like Geocities and Angelfire. Some people still called the internet “the web”, AOL was the gatekeeper to the internet things for a lot of people, and fans were figuring out that we could do ~*~*~*this*~*~*~ to make our user names look super unique and cool (not that I did that, just to be real, real clear). In that time, fandoms were very, super insular worlds with very tall, very robust fourth walls separating fans from creators and actors.

And for decades, these niche-occupying fans were accustomed to consuming very heterosexual content––shows and movies and comics and video games––and then writing whole-ass essays about how you could interpret this same-sex ship as legitimate within canon if you tilted your head 23 degrees, closed one eye, ignored the heterosexual ending, and stared long enough at these four screenshots from that one scene in episode 13.

You’d see flinches of contact between Fandom and The Established Source Material Creators sometimes. but it was rare. Anne Rice, for example, haaaaaaaaates fanfiction, and she’d go to great lawyery lengths to erase all she could find of it from the internet. Generally speaking, though, creators lived over there, and fans lived here, and we didn’t have much of an opportunity to interact with each other outside of, like, letters and conventions. There were still disrespectful fans, but you had to, like, make an effort to be a direct nuisance to the cast or crew.

Also, admitting to liking “slash” fanfiction as a woman back then got you “you just like slash because you’re too jealous to imagine your favorite male characters with women” at best and “that’s disgusting” at worst. ...Eh, there was probably worse, let’s be real.

So you can imagine the reaction many of us had when Paul Gross was interviewed about due South’s upcoming third season in 1997 and said of Callum Keith Rennie, the actor who’d play Ray Kowalski, “I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He is really good-looking and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic.” THESE WERE THINGS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER SAID. IN 1997. KNOW WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN 1997? ELLEN DEGENERES CAME OUT. AND THEN LOST HER CAREER BECAUSE OF IT FOR A LONG-ASS TIME. WILL AND GRACE WASN’T EVEN A THING YET (1998). NEITHER WAS THE ORIGINAL UK VERSION OF QUEER AS FOLK (1999).

Like, holy shit???

And the thing is? He wasn’t baiting. The show intentionally included a LOT of subtext between Fraser and Ray Kowalski, to the point where the last episode of the show showed Ray having a literal identity crisis because he could tell Fraser wanted to go back to Canada permanently and like, “who am I without him” and then the series ends with the two of them sledding into the actual sunset no I’m not exaggerating that happened WHAT EVEN WAS THIS BLESSING IN 1999.

Were they canon? Eeeeeh. Kinda? It was 1997, I’d call whatever they were groundbreaking, at least for me. And the reason I say it wasn’t baiting is because all Paul said was, “Slash fans will like this,” and many of us did. So, y’know. Truth in advertising. Well done, Paul.

AND NOW IT IS THE YEAR OF OUR QUEERS, 20gayteen, and SO MANY THINGS have changed for the better for LGBTQ folks in the last two decades. Like, Voltron fandom is WILD to me sometimes (in a fantastic way) because some of the fans are actually young enough to have been born after the AIDS crisis, after Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered, after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell––after all these horrible, devastating wounds were inflicted on our beautiful queer family. There are actually fans in Voltron who believe, without a sliver of doubt, that a same-sex pairing can and will become canon.

That’s bananas to me. That there is hope like that! Belief like that! Because I was born at the very end of the AIDS crisis and I didn’t hear the word bisexual until I was, like, twelve, let alone have enough of a support system around me to embrace that label for myself. B A N A N A S.

So of course––of course––there’s a part of me that hopes a same-sex pairing will happen in Voltron. Just thinking about how Dreamworks almost made Miguel and Tulio a canon couple in The Road to El Dorado in 2000 makes my heart twinge with disappointment. (Yes, Chel is great, but.)

See, I’m super attached to Voltron even when the writing is clearly stifled and bridled in by the people whose job it is to sell lots and lots of Voltron toys. I read klance fic and reblog VLD fanart and I have one (1) friend who also watches the show. We talk about it sometimes, and I throw fanart of Shiro at her because he’s her favorite. She doesn’t ship anything, and I am a cheerful little klance-shipping demon. I am in a fandom of two, and it’s pretty great in here.

But.

Voltron’s a lighthearted kid’s show about humans and aliens piloting mecha lions in space to save the universe from space colonialism, and while I will be dizzy with glee if a same-sex couple becomes canon in this show, I want it more for the intended audience of Voltron: kids.

I met a kid last year at Osaka Pride whose mother said, “He came home from school and told me, ‘I don’t feel like a girl or a boy,’” so this young mother brought her child to Pride to learn more about the community that her baby might belong in. And that lovely little human stayed on the fringes at first, apparently shy, until their mother told them, “Go on,” and then they spent the next ten minutes literally jogging around all the booths and beaming at everyone: the trans women in neon dresses cooing at how cute this little sunbeam was, the booth folks selling rainbow-themed merch, the couples hand-in-hand without shame or fear. And when they came back to their mom, they were completely carefree. And I thought, I wish that had been me.

And maybe it could’ve been, if every single cartoon I consumed as a child wasn’t coding gay men as villains, overtly implying that LGBT people had a direct link to actual pedophilia, and aggressively promoting heterosexual romance as The Only Acceptable Way of Love. If I’d grown up in a world where Ruby and Sapphire were on TV being happily in love every week, I might’ve realized what was in my own heart sooner than college.

So there is part of me who understands why people are so emotionally connected to the possibility of a ship like klance becoming canon. I’ve felt that urgent hope, that wild hunger, again and again and again and again in my life, and the only time I’ve ever had that hope realized in canon was in 2016 watching Viktor and Yuuri skate together in Yuri!!! on Ice. I cried. A lot.

I understand the emotion fueling the very, very bad decisions being made. In the simplest possible terms, the people who repeatedly harass the Voltron cast and crew are people who want a thing and are prioritizing getting that thing over the mental health of real people. I think it’s a symptom of internet detachment. When one is flinging words into a void, one doesn’t have to see how they’re received. Their actions––if I haven’t made it clear––are objectively harmful, and I don’t condone them.

But what I want to say––what I wrote this whole thing to say––is that Voltron isn’t a terrible fandom, and it isn’t the first fandom to have loud, overzealous fans who cross the line and make people inside and outside the fandom alike think, Yeesh they’re/we’re all lunatics. Voltron fandom is not The Worst, because I guarantee you if The Ray Wars were happening today, there’d totally be people on Twitter attacking Callum Keith Rennie directly for daring to replace David Marciano. It could have been so, so much uglier than it was, and it was already Bad.

In 1997, the fourth wall still more or less existed, and LGBT content––let alone respectful content––was scarce to say the least, so Fandom Discourse at the time remained generally contained to fan-on-fan unpleasantness. Today, that fourth wall is utterly gone, and I think all fandoms have to adapt to that and learn a whole new code of etiquette. LGBT rep is important, but there are respectful and effective ways to get it that don’t involve harassing the cast and crew. The voice actors and creators and crew of Voltron deserve basic human decency, and to be seen as people first and content creators second. It’s entirely possible for the majority of fandom to interact respectfully with the creators––it’ll just take time and patience, like most things that last.

So listen, everything’ll be fine. Try to have patience with each other. To quote a manga I’ve been translating: “There will be times in your life when you won’t be able to avoid being angry. Don’t make little things bigger than they have to be. Laugh and forgive.” Or, in this case, laugh and ignore. If you like a thing, awesome! Tell people! Or don’t! And if you don’t like something, carefully consider the consequences of what you do after you realize, I don’t like this. I don’t ship sheith at all, but for the last two years I’ve managed to leave alone the fans who do ship it and not send Shiro’s voice actor and his family angry, threatening messages. It wasn’t even difficult, guys. I just, like, read some klance fic instead.

I felt compelled to make this because I keep seeing posts from Voltron fans calling Voltron fandom a raging garbage fire and sure, there’re people playing near dry kindling with flamethrowers more than is advisable, but Voltron fans have created and will continue to create some beautiful content and friendships just for love of a show, and that’s lovely as fuck. If you’re feeling ashamed of your fandom and you haven’t done anything wrong, remember that you’re fandom, too. Keep being respectful, kind, and good. The terrible people won’t go away, but they won’t define the fandom for you unless you let them.

Be kind to each other, and things will improve.

And if anyone tells you your ship is bad, don’t talk to that person anymore, because that person probably has some dry kindling and a flamethrower.

And hey, if you’re at the end of this post and you’re like: Wow, this was way too short, and I would like to read more things this person has written, there’s always my Team Voltron-in-Japan AU. It has klance and Nyma/Allura and I enjoy writing it.

Wow, I’m hungry. Bye! :D/

[cupidsbower]

Hiding in the shadow of love

Supernatural 12x15, “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell.”

Hmmmmmm. <-- that is my dubious hmmmm, in case you were wondering.

You see, the cynic in me says that it’s obviously that time in the season -- time to ramp up the annual Destiel/Drowley/Wincest queerbaiting. Because no matter which way I read this episode, it’s all about thwarted male love.

On the other hand, the slightly-less-cynical-and-a-lot-more-queer me thinks this is delicious. ;)

Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, by Kiss

So. Kiss. It seems an unlikely source for the title of this episode, right? Yeah, that was my thinking too. Buuuuuuuut....

Let’s be real, if there’s ever been a character dying to have the stuffing kissed out of him in the most romantic way possible by a heartbreaker with a lock on Heaven’s door, it’s Dean Winchester. I mean... Once you think about it, the song just becomes more and more plausible. Just listen to those lyrics. “I’m so hungry.” Remind you of anyone?

*squints at the subtext like Castiel at Kelvin*

Okay, okay. I’m willing to concede the fact Kiss have a song with exactly this title, and not much else does according to Google, could be a coincidence given Supernatural does actually have actual Heaven and Hell in the show. Maybe the title of the episode is more directly related to show content and less metatextual.

Let’s go with that reading. In this more literal case, what exactly is between Heaven and Hell? We’ve been given two answers to this in canon so far:

Purgatory (ie. season 8, the most romantically queer-coded season of all), or

Earth (ie. Dean/Humanity, who certain people are “loaded pause” in love with).

Are you starting to get the picture yet? Is it rubbing off all over you??????

*makes the Drowley face*

And then there’s that. Drowley. We have Crowley turning up while on the phone to Dean, exactly as Castiel did back in My Bloody Valentine. We have Crowley and Dean flirting, and Crowley slathering on the innuendo so thick Dean will need yet another shower after that little exercise in Liam Neesoning it up.

Like, is there any doubt in anyone’s mind at this point that this is innuendo? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

*crickets*

Right. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the non-Kiss reading of the title. Didn’t get us very far away from the queer subtext right? In fact, I think it might be worse than the Kiss reading in that regard. Who knew that was even possible? They’re called Kiss! It’s right there in the band name!

Let’s go with the Incidental music next. While Castiel is being seduced by his very own Ketch, in obvious contrast to what went down with Dean last week, we have Ballad of a Truck Driver’s Wife playing in the background. I can’t find the full version by Lorene Mercer, but you can find a snippet of it here. Suggestive, yes? “When I need you so, that’s when you have to go. That’s how it is when you’re married to a truck driver man. Here today and gone tomorrow...” Not exactly subtle, in terms of the parallels to what’s happening in this episode. I mean we joke a lot about Dean and Castiel being an old married couple, but here the subtext is, basically saying exactly that.

I mean... casual watchers probably don’t catch the background music? Don’t remember the Kiss song? Didn’t notice season 8′s trope-fest? Assume Crowley is a queer villian who is just joking about wanting to rub off on Dean????

I guess.

Anyway, I was really interested in this plot point for Castiel for several reasons. Firstly, Kelvin has much better bait than Ketch did, and is much more successful at luring Castiel into at least listening to the full pitch from Joshua. I’m just as hooked as Cas and want to know more, especially the catch. Secondly, this sets Castiel up perfectly to have to make a deliberate choice about which family he belongs to, without being coerced, or the decision made for him. This is something I want to see very much, so I’m super keen to see how this plays out. Third, there’s so much emphasis on the murder of the nephilim now, that I’m increaasingly convinced it’s going to live, and we’re heading into season 13 with Three Male-Shaped People and a Little Nephilim as the main story arc.

A girl can dream.

*Imagines Dean, Castiel and either Crowley or Sam co-parenting the little tyke, who probably grows into a teenager in about three episodes and then wafts around exuding angst*

I want that sooooo much, you don’t even know. It would be the perfect way to continue to the nature vs nurture theme too. Also, with Mary back in the text, and Dean and Sam’s relationship shifting away from parent/child, the very obvious next life goal is raising the next generation. Will the sins of the fathers be visited on the children and all that. It could be so good. But I digress.

What am I even up to with this review? Ah, I know. The reading in which the title is actually about Sam. Because you see, Sam has never really wanted to be a hunter, he’s just wanted his family, and he’s always seen family and hunting as synonymous. He’s stuck between Heaven (his love for his family) and Hell (hunting), and lying about it. Enter our rescuee of the week -- Gwen -- and her speech to Sam about how lying to someone about not wanting the same things they want ends badly.

It’s a pretty pointed speech, and Sam does take the point, coming clean to Dean about the BMOL giving him info on hunts. But that is just scratching the surface, and there’s still so much more he needs to say that he’s still not saying.

And here we come to another favourite part of the episode. Dean is becoming more and more impatient with lies of all kinds. Including, one assumes, lies about what people want.

Dean is so deeply not okay about Sam’s choices, but trying to respect them. I’m actually loving how done Dean is with lies. That’s a genuinely interesting development and I want to see more of it.

Which leads me into my big question for this ep -- How is this going to resolve in a new way? I don’t want it to fall back into the rut of Sam and Dean just being on the outs, or of both brothers silently suffering to maintain the relationship. So how do they find a way to remain family and still both get the things they need?

The one way I can see this working at the moment, is for Sam to come clean about not wanting to hunt, and then basically become the US Men of Letters, assuming Bobby’s old job, and doing the research and that kind of thing, and Dean continuing to hunt with a new partner. I’d actually really like to see something like that -- to see hunting becoming more organised and safer, while not adopting the genocidal agenda of the BMOL, or the sexism of the original US MOL.

Okay, it’s ridiculous o’clock in the morning, so I’m going to wrap this up. I think I’ve talked about all the main things I reacted to. Oh, except that as I was looking around for potential sources for the episode title, I found this gem:

Between Heaven and Hell (1956)

This is actually a pretty good movie, but it doesn’t exactly decrease the queer reading of this episode. At all. Hahahaha.

(If you’re wondering, you can find the whole movie here.)

Overall, I liked this episode a lot, despite some clunky moments. But I really was serious at the start of this review, about the cynic in me looking at this ramp-up of the queer subtext with some suspicion. It always seems to ramp up at around this time in the season, and they never pay it off. I want to be pleasantly surprised with some overtly textual Destiel to wrap up this season, because it really is so close to maintext now it’s kind of hilarious.

I’m just tired of being yanked around. Give it to me or don’t. Sure, I love subtext as much as the next person, but I’m getting old here, dudes. And so are Cas and Dean. Just cross the rubicon already, and show us what kind of delicious drama is on the other side.

Hint: Three Male-Shaped People and a Little Nephilim.

I’ll just leave that suggestion there for you, Mr Dabb.

Previously:

The Ministry of Information vs Wayward Sons Carrying On (12x01)

My, my, how can I resist you? (12x02) and follow-up about Bohemian Raphsody

So what am I so afraid of? (I think I love you) (12x03)

I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy Down in my heart (Where?) (12x04) and a follow-up about the codependency and about Dean’s self-flagellation and issues with space

There can be only one! (12x05), and a follow-up conversation with elizabethrobertajones on Freud vs Schwartz.

They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes (12x06)  

Presenting the Immaculate Heart Reunion Tour (12x07)    

I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yogurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola. ~Alan Rickman (12x08, 12x09)

When the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men (12x10)    

in re (12x11)

Making the most of teachable moments (12x12) and an added thought, In-and-out-laws

Don’t fuck with the branches on my family tree (12x13)

To Protect and to Serve (12x14) and some more thoughts