#a longass dialogue box

[sassytail]

ok so confession i actually never played undertale before(just. wasn't ready for it) and ive never watched a playthrough bc i wantd to play it relatively unspoiled as i could be after so many years of exposure to it culturally.

which means i get the absolute joy of getting hit blind with the fucking instant noodles gag.

I love it.

[incarnateirony]

*Pulls a post out of another post like a magic trick*

So anyway I wrote a longassed general meta while boxing up the LGBT discussion until the end, because frankly, there are elements worth focusing on beyond that -- but at the end I did leave a note and, frankly, as I don’t know who all will read that far after the meta, it feels worth putting into the general air.

I thank 15.07 for the display of performative absurdity. It’s not the first episode to rip open and expose fandom’s dirty underbelly and intersectional marginalization forces wearing an LGBT Activism Suit -- 14.03 also did so loudly by Bobo (eg read: “The Problem with Dreamhunter” [A post that points out what people will accept for canonization when there isn't a rival ship or excessive projection of antis specific to a ship which is *SPOILER ALERT* nowhere near what everyone pretends is needed when they want to argue just to argue and some intersectional WLW vs MLM issues]) -- but it was the first to approach it directly with Dean, much less so textually.

The ridiculous redefinition of words, of “what *I* think canon means” whipped completely out of fandom generated buzz and no dictionary on the face of the planet -- the demands, and the active erasure of existing LGBT text because it wasn’t *visible enough* -- really does show a seedy side of fandom that wears a nice Representation Warrior dress sometimes, but betrays a series of issues:

Most points boil down to “I won’t acknowledge any text unless it is loud enough to argue down any idiot I ever meet”, putting the focus not on representative resonance and value of quality of text, but on personal vindication for raw argumentation. A world where trolls and their personal agendas have actually taken *greater importance* to people than the representative text, and is an absolutely abysmal motivation or bottom line for any discussion and yes, if you recoiled and feel ashamed or called out about that, rather than patching over your pride and doubling down, maybe skim the reblog tags bisexual people have left on my several dozen posts about the damages of them being actively deleted is doing.

If you care about representation, you’ll think about that. Even if it’s not the loudly visible version of representation you *want*, it is what it is, and well--it is. Pretty simply. There is no perfect fantasy world where everybody understands and wants the thing you do. And I’m not just talking about LGBT rep. I’m talking about the people you pretend to need to argue gay canon with still being absolutely flummoxed by canon itself, like them saying “family don’t end with blood” and “found family” are “fanon concepts”. The same people that pretend there’s a fair canon reading that Sam and Dean never cared about Castiel in any capacity or wilder, the people who pretend it’s a fanon idea that he ever did. People that are confused where demons go when they die. People that rebuke literally many-times textualized non-gay things just to suit their personal agenda. And shockingly, they have a personal agenda about the gay content too.  

I’m talking about Rowling having straight characters married with kids and then not actually owning their canonicity beyond the fourth wall. I’m talking about straight pairings like mulder and scully that got no romo’ed around even after they kissed and got pregnant and the whole nine, because bawww that’s not what the show is about so *allow me to build elaborate theories that make no sense and pretend they have standing in canon equal to the straightforward read*. 

Cuz that’s where we’re at right now. Our fandom is just particularly bonky, and has been allowed to go so far off the edge of the map and away from center GA-resonant discussion that the bog standard antis have literally come up with body-mutilating necrophilia as an answer to avoid the gay, and somehow... *shruuuuug?* people act like these people not only are of equal worth but like... deserve... any consideration long term? Or that it these people have any bearing on GA discussion which I literally have two years of stat based blogging to disbar even if TVG calling it like they see it is a nice GA flagpost? But we’ll whip up a GA that exists in no known modern metric and throw up what we think the GA thinks, instead of reading major news publications and *reading* what the GA thinks.

 Which is when we lean into the next point on MOTIVATION.

So ask at what point arguing with tinhats beat out your actual interest in representation and LGBT rights and media issues. Ask at what point you surrendered your focus on feeling resonant with a character that has been textually acknowledged, and traded that for implying you suddenly can’t relate to the character until he performs [X] exact function, exactly how you want, and when you want. Hell, I have even gotten an anon that literally said they would have acknowledged it if SPN had given them what they want when they wanted-- so basically, too late, not enough.

That’s not how text works. Whether the text came ten years ago or now, the text is the text. Your personal fulfillment aside, text is text. And I highly urge people to stop demanding tokenism above demographic-targeted representative types (eg bisexual, raised in the 80s in a patriarchal/power/grit based society and its own associated dogmas, fairly masculine identity, and so on) or demanding characters perform as if they were from another demographic (be it age or gender) because that’s your demographic.

Once you start removing elements of the represented demographics (LGBT, male, age, origin, etc) and wanting it to perform by way of *your* demographic’s behaviors or base line needs/wants, that’s when we’ve left representation. That’s when we’re demanding tokenization. And when you’re demanding tokenization to win internet fights with people who don’t even believe what they say, you have long left the representation wheelhouse. That’s what we call troll wars.

Do not let LGBT media representation be kidnapped into troll wars. Do not let content be degraded or removed just to engage in troll wars. And if you want to engage in troll wars, and you value the arguments more than the discussion *of* representation intersectional issues, and methods, and all around it -- then just... stop. Stop saying you want representation. Don’t.

As always, you’re free to want more visible text, but unsatisfactory text is still text, and what is unsatisfactory to you may be perfectly welcome representation to the target demographic.

The fact that if we scoured this whole digital fandom we may pull like 2 active people that match Dean’s demographic, with most in hiding and needing to be lured from the shadows *coughBencough* -- usually avoiding the fandom *BECAUSE* they get buried, and avalanched when they say, “no he’s good representation for me.” So the fact that be they LGBT but women, or male but not LGBT, or LGBT male but two generations separated from Dean -- the fact that this is the communal voice box discussing this while essentially ironically talking over an LGBT creator?

That’s bad.

And yeah, y’all are doing it.

Bobo is a middle aged LGBT male, who has written sociopolitical commentary about how to get queer media representation platform via moderate incrementalization  *long before he ever came on SPN*, and yet nobody cares about his voice or his take. They’re mad he doesn’t give them enough material to *argue* with, without considering, perhaps, he doesn’t want to be argued for from the angles fandom insists on vying after. Instead, these voices that are not part of the central target demographic that people say they want representation for? They yell queerbait -- because... well -- because most of you want to win arguments that like 95% of the time, the people you’re wasting your breath and kilobits on don’t even believe what they’re saying. But the argument -- that’s what matters. Not the LGBT male creator. Not his sociopolitical voice. Not the LGBT text in the show. The argument.

And that?

That there’s a problem.

While about 20 people decided to hashtag #spnqueerbaits after last episode of all episodes, I sat, fingers splayed over my face, trying to keep myself from staring in mortification and secondhand embarrassment at the screen with my only consolation that many of them by their style and dialogue on their profiles seemed very young, and probably haven’t thought of any of the above, much less being predisposed to “getting it” for another 5 or 10 years. But like. Y i k e s.

Thankfully this being the final season it’s unlikely to do the significant damage that was done on a similar path 6 years ago, and I can only hope it tapers off.