#find a new queer icon

[punksocks]

Astro Observations No.19

(Thank you so much for the support everyone! I appreciate you following my blog c:)

*Just based on my experiences, only take what resonates

-Starting a new relationship during Venus in retrograde is guaranteed to teach you a karmic lesson with a probably karmic partner (I’ll never forget mine oml)

-Under developed Venus ruled men/ Men with heavy Venus placements are a nightmare. Underdeveloped ones choose to be chaotic with charming energy. Like f-boys or like vampires. They just tend to run through people and use them for validation. Sometimes they grow out of it and become better. A lot of times they just get too big of an ego and get narcissistic in this energy and are just destructive.

-The house your Juno is in could be an indicator of your soulmate’s placements (ex if your Juno is in Aries your partner may have Juno in first. Or if your Juno is in 5th they may have Leo in Juno. If your Juno is in Libra they may have Juno in 7th.)

-Libra/Taurus/Venus in 1st house people can get away with such criminal behavior lol, people will never blame them or they will always want to see the best in their actions. I feel like Leo Asc/Sun in 1st can get through a lot of actions with confidence but they usually do face blow back at some point if they’re behaving badly.

-Neptune 1st house/Pisces rising will have a more erratic sort of filter applied to them. Like usually they’ll get like subconsciously softened and idealized by others but they’ll also get certain traits like air head or spacey applied to them. Basically getting elevated and infantilized the most imo.

-Having North Node in Pisces can be a murky karmic placement. I’ve found that North Node in Pisces can manifest as anything from spiritual devotion and detachment from others to lifelong addiction and reliance on substances, any path that has heavy Neptunian themes which feels like a roulette since Neptune rules over confusion.

-Mars MC can be a sex symbol placement for any gender, someone known for their body or having a striking presence.

-Venus MC is definitely someone that’s known for being a charmer at best and a player at worst. Still very good with people either way.

-MC in Scorpio can manifest as someone that’s seen as constantly going through transformations and tribulations in their career and public life. Alchemy or catastrophe, always at an extreme.

-Venus can show where you are the most appealing to others (Venus in 1st would be seen as charming and probably having a very pretty face, Venus in 2nd would been seen as luxurious and having many resources and having a pretty body, Venus in 3rd would be a very charming speaker and likely have a voice that draws in others, etc I can make a whole post on this if anyone’s curious)

-Aquarius Venus/Venus in 11th fall in love with someone unconventional, or someone they met in an unconventional way (online dating, penpal programs, stuff like that)

-I find all fixed moons have really intense emotions, they just express it in different ways (yo if you’ve ever just disagreed with an Aquarius moon you know they can get touchy if you’re not on the same page with their logic)

-Aquarius is not a great way to figure out if someone is queer imo. The connotation of being lgbtqia+ being essentially strange/out of the norm is … something already but plenty of queer icons that live with their careers/lives revolving around the queer community have no Aquarius in their charts at all (I was looking at Elvira’s chart after this Matt Baume video on YouTube about how she’s a queer icon that was elevated by the queer community and was a closeted lesbian and she turned out not to have a single Aquarius placement, a Virgo stellium and Leo placements stood out the most to me). Sappho is the asteroid to check out for wlw I’m not sure for mlm but I’m sure Greek mythology has given us a great asteroid for the mascs

-Squares to north node can present “delays” with your destiny (more so having to hone aspects of your personality, having certain experiences beforehand, and coming into your destiny later in life, Joe Biden is an interesting example of this lots of squares and harsh aspects to north node and he ran for president like 7 times before he won, even became Vice President before, so interesting)

- (TW scars, harm) Scorpio can show where you have organic scars/birthmarks (Scorpio in 1st birth marks/freckles just appear on my face) where as Pluto can show where you get scars through experiences (I have Pluto in 2nd and I got burned on the lower third of my body when my dad left me in a hot water bath as a baby :/)

[idesofrevolution]

Never Sleep with Your Phone On

Throughout recorded history, humans have been terrified of the dark. They created stories of sordid creatures of the night that would creep out from beneath your bed and drag you to some subterranean lair to languish in your final moments; or slither out of your mirror if you left it uncovered when your lights were extinguished to steal your soul from your snoring lips. The tales and cryptids across all cultures were all effective in terrifying their communities once the sun set on the horizon. Though that is not necessarily to say that every tale was crafted from pure imagination.

When technology bloomed, humans believed that the horrifying superstitions of yore were long behind them. They had evolved past the primitive fears of what lurks in the shadows, where in reality they had become complacent, arrogant, and lulled. Certainly some of the eldritch creatures had subsided, as all creatures do eventually. Though for every dead legend, a new myth sprouts, and each of those grew and evolved right there along with us. Which, of course, brings us to Asher.

Asher West was, by all accounts, a fairly normal guy. Graduated from high school, going straight into college on a modest academic scholarship. He played frisbee golf with his friends on the weekends, studied hard from 9 to 5, and was seldom seen without a cup of Starbucks in the mornings. He had a sizeable social media following, as was expected for someone with a traditionally handsome visage and adequately charismatic personality. Every day he'd happily post a quick selfie, posting for his thousands of admirers a run of the mill shirtless pic, often without so much as a filter. It'd almost become muscle memory for him: tap the camera icon, snap the pic, post with some benign emojis as the caption, and boom. 900 likes as the day meandered on. Did it provide him with a momentary burst of endorphins? Yes. Was it satisfying? Somewhat, at least he thought so. Years of his staggeringly average life had been all but usurped by this second life online, where he was glamorous, exciting, and adored.

It was so much easier to live in that fantasyland than to truly be present in the real world around him. He, as many of us are, was living his life as someone else- and a life that spectacled easily caught attention. It was easy to come across him in the sea of countless names and faces. It was easy to stumble upon that pretty face. It was easy find, attracting more than just starry eyed fans. Skulking in the void between lines of 1 and 0, buried deep in the infinite cosmic vacuum of the world electric and technological, another pair of eyes would befall him.

It had slinked into his vast sphere rather quickly, and it had begun to watch. Watching each and every 'tasteful' selfie, every vapid thought that he'd post, and every like and pin he'd make, it watched him with empty, expressionless black eyes from within a fragment of his phone's memory. It studied him, curious at first. Things of its nature were always curious, always inclined to watch and analyze and replicate. Even as he slept, his phone siphoning it's charge from it's cable, it would read. The more it saw, the more it had learned about Asher. In fact, it knew more of Asher than perhaps he himself was aware of, if not able to admit.

It had seen those intimate moments he'd taken careful measure to hide from the vast majority of those watching eyes. Second accounts under pseudonyms, gave way to countless of hidden alternate lives he lived: Tumblr blogs dedicated to bad-boy thrist traps and queer erotica, Twitter accounts cataloguing pictures and videos of his closest kept kinks, a well used and well loved Chaturbate account with his face tastefully cropped out of frame... all these lives immortalized in the endless archives of the internet. And after all it's patient watching, all the hours of analyzing, all the months of consuming his information, it had grown an attachment.

Asher had come home late one night. Not unusual for him, as the occasional party wouldn't derail his real life ambitions. After a few libations, and no small amount of cannabis, he'd made his way back home to his small apartment above the corner store. Just as he'd done numerous times before, he stripped himself of his shirt, pulling his camera from his jeans pocket, and snapped a slightly inebriated picture of himself. It'd be enough to boost his ego the next morning, enough to power through the long haul of his draining daily agenda.

SNAP. The flash of the camera went off, and his beloved face was shared for all to see. Though, that night, he mis stepped. Perhaps it was the booze, perhaps it was the toke, perhaps he was simply too tired to notice that he'd left the screen on. By the time he'd hit the bed he was out like a rock, collapsed onto the bed and quietly drifting to sleep. There on the brightly lit screen, in the darkness of the unlit bedroom, it saw its opportunity.

From it's perch on the nightstand, the phone began to spark. Small sparks at first, a quick fizzle and quiet pop. Then more: louder, brighter, faster. It began to rumble against the wooden tabletop, sizzling and sparkling as it danced before the screen went black and dead. Slowly, electric crackling gave way to a bubbling sludge. The glass subtly started wave and bellow, as if it were liquified, not taking long to begin to spill over the edges of it's metal frame. The black sludge fell like oil onto the hardwood floors, collecting in a growing, bubbling pool.

From the primordial ooze burst forth a long, slender arm; it's taloned fingers scraping as it braced itself on the ground. A second arm clawed it's way out, and with an echoing slosh, it had begun to pull itself out of the sludge. It's long, emaciated torso and thick muscled legs had slithered out, landing on two massive, clawed feet. It towered above Asher's bed as he slumbered, bent over so as not to hit it's back onto the eight foot ceiling. It stood there, looking at the person it'd observed and studied for so long. The image presented in the world it'd pried himself out of was nothing of what lay before it. From what it had gathered from his more clandestine dealings, it had noted that he was far from the archetypes he'd collected on Asher's behalf.

He did not have the tattoos like those he'd pinned on Pinterest. He was not wearing the dark, heavy clothes like those he'd saved on Instagram. He wasn't well endowed like the video's he'd favorited on X-Tube. He didn't give off the aura of some rebellious casanova like the stories he'd reblogged on Tumblr. To a creature of symmetry and consistency, this was an error to be corrected; a dichotomy requiring integration.

It crouched down above his drooling maw, gently caressing his head to face it's clenching claw. The talons pressed ever so tenderly past his lips and over his tongue, becoming the very black ooze it had crawled out of once more. It flooded down his throat as it's second arm made it's way into his mouth, as if it were being sucked into Asher. He was drinking it's essence, it's aqueous body slurping down into his core. It's torso compressed as it wriggled down his gullet, ringing out splashing squelches as Asher gargled it down.

As quickly as it had entered, it's long legs slithered into his mouth, leaving only its large feet thrashing about in the air. Asher's stomach was bubbling and undulating under the sheer pressure from this invasion, growing to a large gut spilling over the waistband of his jeans. One loud slurp and a crisp pop, and the feet slipped into him, leaving his writhing body squirming on the bed. It expanded within him, incorporating itself into every fibre of his being. Pressing into his arms, his legs, pushing up his throat until it met the top of his palate. The pressure began to mount, black goo dribbling down the corners of his mouth, until a wet crack sounded in his cavernous head, and it flowed into his skull.

It took mere seconds for it to reach his brain, which it flowed freely into throughout the grooves and nooks. Entirely coated, imbued and inoculated with it, the deed was done. Asher opened his eyes, tiredly sitting up in his bed. He looked over at his phone, tapping it with his finger: 3 AM.

At first it seemed like a nightmare. He could recall moments here and there, though the majority of his 'dream' was a blur. From what he could remember, it was nothing visual he could recollect... but it he could recollect the sensations. Wet, slimy, invasive, and cold- much like he felt drunkenly sleeping in his cold sweat. He brought himself to his feet, dragging his feet on the slippery floorboards to his bathroom.

Flipping the switch, the harsh fluorescent light flickered to life above him, as he turned the nozzle on his shower. Immediately, his jaw nearly dropped to the floor. In the mirror, Asher finally caught a glimpse of himself: strange black bruises and undulating bumps were scattered across his body. That pristine, smooth skin was now covered in sprawling web-like lesions from head to toe. He had mere moments to process the horror reflected in front of him before an immediate pain in the gut had him doubled over the counter.

His stomach started to bubble and groan, and through the foggy haze of his blurred vision he saw his feet begin to ripple and swell. He could feel the slick sweaty soles slide across the tile floor as they expanded and grew. As they reached a substantial size 13, the swelling crept it's way up his calves and into his thighs. Asher wobbled on his feet, as if they were filled with gelatin beneath his slippery skin while his knees began to buckle. He collapsed into a crouch, the fumes of sweaty footmusk bellowing up to his nostrils as his legs cracked and stretched above. He'd never truly experienced scentplay as he'd so dearly fantasized about throughout countless hours of edging to such content, nor had this funk ever emanated from his own soles. In the moment, he felt something within him prod into his brain. As if poking the individual folds of his cerebrum with thousands of tiny needles, causing cascades of thoughts to enter his mind- all of which telling him to embrace. In his mind's eye, he could see himself burying his face into his sweaty sole, between his long toes, lapping up every droplet of sweat that was spewing from his pores. The thought was buried deep in his subconscious, pried out with expert measure, by something now within him.

Grasping for anything to steady himself on, Asher gripped the edge of the sink, pulling himself upright once again and now towering above the countertop. He hung his aching head low, watching with strange newfound fervor as his cock began to feel heavier and heavier. Drool started to drip from the bottom of his lip, landing square onto the lengthening shaft. Like a sandbag, his balls dropped and swelled while he got harder and harder. Another onslaught of pinpricks in his head brought forth another command: stroke.

Steam started build in the bathroom as the hot water continued to fall from the shower, intensifying the scent wafting from now both his feet and his pendulous sac. Each breath of hot, wet musk hit like ecstasy, and with bated breath, he softly grasped ahold of his python and began to pump. Each knead of his engorged member was accompanied by a change. His fingers grew long and sinewy, smooth and slick with precum. His arms remained thin but toned, growing longer and packed with lean muscle. His torso lengthened, topped off with a firm pair of pecs above his sinewy abdomen.

As pressure began to build in his balls, his mind began to feel the needles one last time, imbuing his brain with one last injection of a single trait: pride. He didn't need the approval of anyone else, he was aware of how fucking hot he was. He didn't need to heed the rules that society had straddled him with, he always forged his own path. He had no fears of recompense for his attitude, his ego, his spirit- the world would either stand with him, or he would step on top of them. Either way, what bliss. As the last of his inhibitions and fears had gathered in his groin, he cried out in elation as he erupted. Rope after rope of black sludge shot from his cannon, washing him with a sense of relief he'd never before known. He released his grip on his softening cock, hanging at an obscene eleven inches. He smirked at the sludge coating his mirror and pooling beneath his toes. A sight like that would have shocked and terrified the old Asher, though as he stood before his reflection, devoid of any tension, he relented to the entity within him. It had delivered onto him a new self, a new image, a new viewpoint. As tattoos both vulgar and delicate began to sprawl across his skin, he happily admired his new likeness.

The entity had bestowed a gift to him; throughout the horror, throughout the fear, he was becoming the true Asher that had only ever peeked out from the abyss of his psyche. He leered, bringing his thumb and middle finger together before snapping loudly. From his pores, the black sludge began to spill across his body until he was nearly covered from the neck down in what appeared to be a rubber suit before it began to become a bit more defined. A plain white tee shirt, classically fashioned with a black and white varsity jacket from his college. Skinny, weathered black jeans barely containing his sizeable commando bulge beneath it's thin fabric. On his feet, a pair of white socks and tightly tied high top Chucks, quelling the ripe stink of his soles within the sneaker for some sub to pry off and enjoy.

He grinned, posing and modeling for himself, before he finally turned off the steaming water. After the long, arduous, painful process, the entity had incorporated itself entirely within him- now completely indistinguishable from parasitic to symbiotic. It had rewritten him, completely remade him in the likeness of who he had shown the vast virtual world. There was no cognitive dissonance, there were no lies, there was no deception. All that remained was the Asher he had created in his fantasy, now ready to fuck the real world and all within it.

Thus, as our creature feature comes to an end, I leave you with a modicum of friendly advice. Don't leave your phone on as you slumber, for those that are watching, those that are waiting, those that have been learning are a mere sheet of glass away from finding their way inside. Take my counsel, or ignore it. But do so knowing the outcome, and whether or not you are prepared to weather such a storm.

[librarycards]

hello! i apologize in advance this is probably something that you get asked a lot. but do you have any recs on literary magazines to submit to? im a trans poet, ive been writing for over a decade but never shared anything and ive been wanting to try to send my stuff to get it published somewhere. obv ive been google searching but theres so many big and small publications and i was wondering if you have ones you like especially and/or tips on how to choose a magazine/journal to submit to. thanks a lot! <3

no worries, thank you for reaching out!! i've been publishing for like 8 years + an editor for almost 4, so i always appreciate the opportunity to help people new to the world find ethical publications that will treat their work with the care it deserves.

first and foremost: there are going to be pubs out there that are awesome and i don't know about. you may be the one to discover them for yourself! one aid in finding the best mag for your work is the wonderful, writer-created chillsubs. it's a fantastic platform that keeps a huge list of mags and presses and their relevant stats, and lets you create an account and bookmark those you're interested in. everyone i know uses them, and it's very worth it given the sheer volume of mags out there.

i also have some recs of my own, ofc. i'm going to list them below. if they pay (which i prioritize) I'll mark them with a $. some are trans/queer focused and some aren't, but all are pubs i've either edited and/or published with and can confirm their ethics + respect for writers.

manywor(l)ds - my mag! i'm co-founder and eic. break genre _ shapeshift with us. ($)

Sinister Wisdom - old, well-regarded lesbian+ lit mag, now open to everyone who is/loves a dyke. I'm guest-editing an issue on Madness with them, now open for submissions!

fifth wheel press - run by a beloved friend and comrade of mine. i've published here. excellent transparency, care, great for first-timers. ($).

kith books - headed by trans literary icon kat blair. a mag/press/community centered around bodymind non-conformity and noncompliance.

Honey Literary - QTPOC-centered, unabashedly pop-culture + social justice oriented. the vibes are simply immaculate.

Whale Road Review - not queer/trans focused, more oriented toward....'grown up' poetry/prose/pedagogy papers. Katie Manning (eic) is a fucking gem.

Graphic Violence Lit - just had my first experience publishing with them, and their care + consideration for the whole writer is amazing. they publish boundary-pushing work.

beestung - one of the brainchildren of Sarah Clark. nb/gq/2s SFF. I just edited a few guest issues w them and have published with them. amazing work. ($)

A Velvet Giant - genrequeer work. the editors are experienced, enthusiastic, and amazing at promoting writers long after publication. it's a family! ($)

Ethel Zine + Press - handmade with love by Sara Lefsyk (as you can see, trans/nonbinary/2s sarahs dominate indie publishing, as well we should :3). Sara is a sensitive and care-full editor and bookmaker whose every publication is a work of art.

Protean - pro- as in proletariat. awesome left mag with a mix of politics and culture and everything in between. they take reprints! ($)

Mudroom - publish your work along with a picture of your mudroom/shoe rack. very responsive editors who will hype you tf up. ($)

The Institutionalized Review - for psych survivors. the editors concreteness of vision and dedication to their community know no bounds.

Just Femme + Dandy - queer and fashion-focused! led by the inimitable Addie Tsai. They pay *handsomely*. ($)

In addition, there are also some "big" mags I have had excellent experiences publishing with and wanted to shout out. These are harder for a beginner to break into, but worth keeping on your radar + have been fantastic to me as a writer.

Electric Lit

Split Lip Magazine

The Offing

Nat. Brut

Santa Fe Writers' Project

Bodega

New Orleans Review

Augur Magazine

I hope this is helpful to you + others! the literary world is ever-changing and this is just a snapshot. Hopefully you find some that you like!

[initforthelolzz]

No one does queer representation quite like One Piece.

Allow me to explain in great detail.

I’m going to talk about the queer rep in Impel Down, and you’d best buckle up cause it’s rant time.

Impel Down is one of my favorite arcs because I love the story line, it’s downright hilarious, and Luffy’s struggle to rescue Ace is incredibly compelling.

But there is another reason why I love Impel Down so much, and that’s the queer rep that utterly knocked me off my feet.

Now, I’ve come to accept that queer representation in anime (not touching on any other media in this rant) is generally nonexistent or extremely rare… if you’re watching anything other than a BL.

On the rare occasion that we do find some LGBT rep it is usually extremely subtle, and shown exclusively in convoluted subtext and minuscule details that are easily overlooked. While this representation is so incredibly meaningful to everyone who’s able to pick it out, the subtly makes it all the more easy for homophobes to argue that it was never in the first place.

Keeping all this in mind, I finally picked up One Piece several months ago after refusing to watch it for a long-assed time (It was too long and I thought the art style was weird. Dear god have I eaten my words.) I’d heard on social media that One Piece was big on trans representation, but I wasn’t prepared at ALL for what I’d find in that department.

I had NOT expected to find One Piece’s treasure trove of LGBT characters in Impel Down of all pleases, and the shock factor made it so much better.

The arc had already been chaotic as fucking hell by the time Luffy reunited with Bon Clay, and their reunion made me tear up. Like dude!

I hadn’t been particularly attached to Bon Clay before but THIS ^ was it. This scene right here, he wormed his way into my heart istfg.

Can we appreciate this scene please?! The sparkles in the background?? The leg lifting?! The REUNION HUG?!?! I love this so dearly not just because it’s fucking ADORABLE but because of what it *says.*

Bon Clay is an outwardly queer character, and Luffy absolutely adores him. Those two are best friends and we treat queer people with respect and they are good people. We can be friends with them and allies with them and they aren’t something to shy away from just because they’re different.

Be fucking for real. The representation is so positive, and it never ceases to blow me away.

If you thought that this representation was enough YOU WERE WRONG because this BARELY SCRATCHED THE SURFACE.

Iva. Emperio Ivankov. The Queen of the Queers. He is a gender fluid ICON and a literal drag queen. His special attack is a wink that blows shit up. His Devil Fruit ability is quite literally hormone therapy.

Do I need to say more?

THATS RIGHT, I FUCKING DONT

Now, this is One Piece we’re talking about, so naturally characters are going to be wildly exaggerated but ARE YOU KIDDING

IVA’S ABILITY IS HORMONE THERAPY. HE CHANGES PEOPLE’S GENDER AS AN ATTACK. HIS POWER WORKS THROUGH SYRINGE NEEDLES THAT POP OUT FROM UNDER HIS ACRYLIC NAILS.

I love Iva so fucking much words cannot describe 😭

Oda didn’t just say “look, I made a queer character” he really said “fuck it, nuclear option it is.” It is literally impossible to ignore the fact that Iva is LGBT, and One Piece’s queer rep is SO IN YOUR FACE, especially in Impel Down. It’s impossible to ignore, which is the stark opposite from the usual business with “implied” queer characters in anime.

Implied? HAH.

There is a kingdom of gay people living INSIDE THE WALLS of the biggest prison in the world. They are led by a gender fluid drag queen and run a strip club bar in the middle of a fucking prison, where they drag new gays through the cracks in the walls to join them.

Dude.

I love One Piece so much.

All joking aside, the introduction of Iva and his kingdom of gays drove me to tears. Like deadass. The representation literally drove me to tears, I was sobbing.

Why? Because it was so positive.

Do you know how meaningful that is?

It made me fucking cry, man.

Iva’s speech introducing his gay kingdom, like goddamn. I can’t even remember exactly what he said because I was crying the whole time.

“We’re here and we’re queer.” That’s a quote from fucking One Piece, dude. I can’t, I can’t.

It wasn’t just the introduction of Iva’s kingdom or the LITERAL LESBIAN COUPLE SITTING AT THE BAR, it was the way the sense of community was presented.

We’re called the LGBTQ Community and I don’t know if Oda’s a member or not but HOT damn if he doesn’t know what it means to be a part of it.

I’m talking about the Luffy situation. He fought the Warden and got his ass handed to him. He was poisoned to all hell and about to die at 17 but Bon picked him up and carried him to Iva’s Kingdom. He’s wanted to meet Iva his whole life but by the time he did he was more worried about Luffy’s condition than anything else.

And then we find out that Luffy had insisted that Bon get medical treatment before he did. What a guy. When Iva got Luffy, he said that it was a lost cause to try and overcome the poison. But he was willing to give it a try anyway.

Let’s discuss.

Iva injected Luffy with hormones to help him beat the poison. Luffy underwent hormone therapy. (I will cling to this tidbit of information forever, YOU CANT TAKE IT FROM ME.) When Bon woke up, he demanded to see Luffy.

Iva warned him about what he would find, but brought Bon to Luffy at his request. When Bon found Luffy, he found his friend chained up and screaming in excruciating pain. We didn’t see Luffy in full at all during this time, but when Bon looked through the door he was horrified.

He got defensive. He started yelling at Iva, saying that the person inside that room was not the Luffy he knew.

Iva was firm, and told Bon that Luffy was going through a tough challenge, and he would be different afterwards, but he was still the same Luffy.

Do you see it? Can you read between the lines? This exchange made me sob all over again. Why? I urge you to think about it, to see the underlying message here.

Bon broke down into tears, realizing that Luffy was fighting for his life. He apologized and took back his harsh words.

Then he spent hours outside Luffy’s cell, screaming till his throat was raw and cheering him on. He couldn’t do anything to help Luffy, Luffy was fighting this battle on his own. But he could be there for him.

I ask you again, do you see it?

As the hours passed, others in Iva’s kingdom trickled out to see what Bon was doing. They told him to stop screaming, that it was useless. They mocked him, told him he was being a fool.

Then Iva stood up for him, and told them to see Bon for what he was doing. He couldn’t help Luffy, but he could cheer him on. He could be there for him.

Within moments, the entire kingdom was outside Luffy’s cell. Cheering him on. Encouraging him. Supporting him. They didn’t know who he was but they saw him fighting and immediately backed him up.

It isn’t just representation, merely the presence of a queer character or even an entire kingdom of gays that makes it meaningful. It’s how those characters are shown, how they behave.

Oda could have thrown in a queer character here and there and left it at that, but he went out of his way to show the incredible support system that this community provided. They jumped to Luffy’s aid. They were so supportive and cheered him on until he beat the poison. They fought alongside him… and you know what else?

When Luffy woke up, he accepted them in a heartbeat. He didn’t question anything, just saw a bunch of people and thought “huh. New friends!”

Oda’s representation is exaggerated as much as it is painstakingly accurate in nature and positive to a tee. Obviously it isn’t perfect. Iva and the squad were still mocked, called “freaks” and “weirdos.”

But it’s about Luffy. How Luffy behaves. How Luffy reacts. Even in the face of how the rest of society views Iva and his kingdom, Luffy sees them as friends and allies and doesn’t give a singular shit if they’re gay or not.

Luffy accepts everyone, and he doesn’t draw the line at queer people. The aroace king himself. You heard it here, Luffy is the ultimate ally.

Of course I’m not even scraping the surface on this topic and Oda’s representation is in no way perfect, but Impel Down remains the greatest example of queer rep that I’ve seen this far.

You gotta give credit where credit is due ✨

[aziraphales-library]

Hi! I was wondering if you had recs for something longer that has a lot of exploration of queer themes? Love your blog!

Hello. We have #long fic and #queer themes tags you can check out. Here are some that have both...

The End is Where We Start From by tiresius (E)

“Aziraphale, hello. It’s er, been a long time.” “Yes, dreadfully long. You look different.” He immediately coloured in evident embarrassment. “I mean, of course you look different, as do I of course, I didn’t mean bad different, that is to say…” Something inside of Crowley, something that had been in a deep freeze for several eons, was starting to thaw. It was letting little bits and pieces of familiarity break loose to float back into their rightful places in his soul. One of those pieces, those round, blue eyes, suddenly snapped into place, and he felt a corresponding wave of long-forgotten feeling wash through him. Aziraphale is anxious. Make Aziraphale happy. “Yeah,” he interrupted. “D’you wanna… get a coffee or something?” *** Crowley and Aziraphale meet by chance on the street. They've met before, in their youth, in a different life. Some difficult things have happened since then. Will they be able to find their way back to each other and to themselves? A Good Omens human AU.

Orbit by altsernative (M)

"It was like they were in orbit with each other. Locked into their paths. Circling each other. Coming so close for golden snatches of time, then dragged away again. Again, and again, and again." Literature instructor Aziraphale and Astronomy instructor Crowley have been best friends for eight years whilst teaching at Agnes Nutter College, a subsidiary of Cambridge. If they ever wanted something more than that, well, they certainly hadn’t said anything. Just as they start to come to terms with their feelings for one another, Aziraphale is promoted to department head and out of Crowley’s life as part of the college's strict non-fraternisation policy. Neither is willing to give the other up, and with the help of a few familiar faces, a pub called Taddy’s that only plays four specific types of songs, Tracy, an enthusiastic B&B owner/community queer icon, and a hidden garden everyone seems to have forgotten about, they risk everything to try and find their way back into each other's lives once more.

An Absence of Stars by mllekurtz (E)

A.Z. Fell is a famous (well, in his circle) Soho bookseller whose selection of volumes is the epitome of respectable (and boring) literature. One of his favourite authors is the renowned science writer A.J. Crowley, whose books on astronomy have popularized the subject — and also sell very well. Mr Fell is overjoyed when Dr Crowley accepts his invitation to do a signing of his new book in the bookshop, but their first conversation is a disaster: for some reason, Crowley does not share Fell’s distaste for romantic literature and acts very cold when the bookseller berates the author of one of the most popular romance series of the moment, Madame Ashtoreth. Little does Fell know that his favourite writer and the one he hates with a passion are the same person…

I Knew I Loved You by AppleSeeds (E)

In September 1999, when his family gets connected to the internet, prospective Marine Biology student Crowley discovers an online forum where he can actually talk to people who share his passion for saving the whales. He begins corresponding with a kind stranger he knows only as Ocean_Angel, and is incredibly excited when the opportunity arises to meet this mysterious person in real life. As their friendship develops, Crowley shares things with Angel that he can't talk about with anyone else, and Angel's insights help him to explore and embrace his own identity. As Crowley works towards finding a place in this world where he feels like he really belongs, he realises that a big part of the answer to that question might actually be right in front of him. What if where he belongs is with Angel?

secondhand smoke by PaintedVanilla (T)

you're second hand smoke, second hand smoke i breathe you in, but, honey, i don't know what you're doing to me mon chéri the year is 1990, and anthony crowley is looking for a church in london that might be tolerable. the one he winds up attending isn't exactly such, but he decides to stick around for one reason. said reason happens to own a bookshop that crowley begins to frequent, much to the surprise and delight of anathema device and newton pulsifer, who seem quite convinced that crowley could use something else to focus on besides gardening, their campaigns, and visits to tadfield.

Sit Tight, Take Hold by nieded (E)

The summer of 2022, Ezira Phale is a rookie Formula 1 driver out to prove he's one of the best racecar drivers in the world, but everything gets turned upside down when he falls in love with his real-life idol, AJ Crowley. Or: The one where Crowley does not go too fast for Aziraphale. _____ This story uses a multi-media format with CSS and HTML. It's best read using the workskin so please make sure that you are enabling user workskins. If you do not want to use the workskin, I will also be posting a .pdf of each chapter and a final .pdf once everything is posted! I’m not so cool as to know how to do podcasts, manips, and videos, but this will feature scripts, news articles, text messages, tumblr, and race programming! So strap in and put your seatbelt on! This is going to be one fast ride of romance, competition, and over-indulgence.

- Mod D

[absolutebl]

Hi P'ABL. Not sure if you have answered something like this before, I couldn't find it with search, but what are your favorite "Oh" scenes? Either "Oh I'm (or he's) gay" or "Oh I'm in love with this person". Asking this question after rewatching Ep 4 of Bad Buddy and watching Qian's reaction to seeing BL novels in Zhi Yuan's room.

Light Bulb Moments in BL!

Ooooh, good question. And no I haven't answered it before. You mean specifically the viewer coming to this realization?

My Favorite: Oh HE V GAY!

Takara just looking at Amagi.

A reading K's mind in the elevator in either Cherry Magic.

The New Employee at the dinner party across the table from the boss with the two queers being like: "Us? Dating? Are you cray, we hella rainbow."

This moment in Jun & Jun:

And then the "not instantly moving away" utterly flirtatious response.

City boy finding the hot farmer's little box of Pride on the shelf in Some More

To My Star - surprise robe flashing moment (I also love Addicted's execution of this one but it doesn't count as an ah-ha moment, just a big fat tease - pun intended)

This character's admission in Nobleman Ryu's Wedding:

MinSung on that train with the earbuds in Wish You.

Solo walking into that cafe in Oxygen.

Fighter meeting Tutor in Why R U?

Step by Step at the gay club, I mean FINALLY.

I'll just call him my wife in SOTUS.

This scene in I Feel You Linger in the Air:

My Favorite: Oh I'm in love with him

Eternal Yesterday, that damn look in the rain, holly hell (the cool thing about this one is ... it's mutual)

Aoki climbing into the plastic bag in My Love Mix-Up - I mean, COME ON, how gay is that? "oh no! I'm into love with him, I am trash, must be ultra dramatic about it"

Unintentional Love Story the agony of realizing he's in love with someone he has to deceive and betray - those EYES

Mark running after the Taxi in Love is Science?

Ai's "what is going on" in Love By Chance

Pete's AH HA moment in Kiss Me Again

Pretty much most of Love Sick. It's kinda the point of the show. But you can never get away from this one:

Possibly one of the most iconic moments in all BL.

Anytime the character starts swearing and is mad at himself when he realizes he is in love: Semantic Error, The Eclipse.

Pretty much all 3 leads swapping both of these "ah ha" moments back and forth in Light On Me

Honorable mention: Someone ELSE in the story's "oh HE'S in love with him?!"

PitchBank, need I say more? (Golden Blood)

Takara's bestie just focused in on Takara's actions around Amagi for the whole day at school and then being like, "Oh I was teasing them but my friend is IN LOVE. Activate WINGMAN mode."

Are we surprised Suzuki Jin appears twice on this list?

Also no shocker this list is full of JBL, they very good at this kind of thing since a lot of it is eye work and thirst.

(source)

[whomstwedointheshadows]

I am howling at the sky for the look tonight that Harvey Guillén staked to death, spat on, and made it beg on the red carpet. Instead of just ranting to my queer fashion/fandom retail friends again, I took our collective slobber and tears to outline my plea to the fashion gods.

Why doesn’t this man have a ‘mens’wear line in every American mall? There is a gap in the market for adventurous, queer friendly suiting available through a retailer like Macys/J C Penney. Yes, retail is dying and wedding industry more so, but that’s particular to what’s available for consumers as well. Suiting is turned from off the rack into iconic by proper tailoring, but let me tell you from working all sides of the bridal salon, even up-scale clothing lines are getting rude as hell about quality and assembly to prevent tailoring and longevity.

This kid’s Disney charm would be perfect for introducing a plus size, inclusive line of fashion-forward pieces which include, say a QR code video about taking your own measurements, how adjustments work, with pieces designed to be sleek, with enough allowance for tailoring, and minding the lines in the garment to make the adjustments for plus size bodies easier. It’s no more adjustments than are made on straight size bodies, it’s just straight size bodies have more options to find a line which works with their natural shape.

But in my experience, it’s gender non-conforming folks and plus sized folks who get pushed out of finding pieces they can actually use for celebrations or work, much less pieces with actual personality that spark joy. This man has been killing it for years, really getting some clutch looks for events and invites in the fashion world. He’s showing proof of concept every time he steps in front of a camera.

Watching Harvey’s fashion evolution, I trust his fashion team and judgement to create a mid/high line for workwear to events suiting embracing a gender nonconforming audience. I can’t think of anyone better situated to become the ambassador of a brand with *the* formal wear for queer events and special occasions. I was tickled to see he sells his own merch and hope this experience convinces him of the joy working with artists and connecting their visions to a wanting public, dipping toes into the new ethical, sustainable trends in fashion. His looks alone shows he’s done his homework over the years about timelessness and early adopting trends.

For the years I worked selling/tailoring wedding dresses, there was the prophetic ‘someday… along will come the man who revives men’s fashion for events again’ to save the David’s bridal/men’s wear house lines who keep dropping plus sizes like mine and dying off. As the pet butch in the bridal salon I pleaded to the sky for better suiting options. Add that to my butch lezzy ways and trans masc circle of friends I legit spent this past Friday night drunk in a bar with a seam ripper adjusting jackets and darting pants in an unplanned sewing circle for a bachelorette until it was my round of karaoke. This isn’t the first time I’ve spontaneously started tailoring for the queers, I can’t keep up with the demand! Y’all we are in our twenties to mid thirties there should be better options than this that don’t require a vacation to LA/NY!!

I have ethical, sustainable fashion preferences about slipping in a retailer versus an online brand. But for the vision of accessible clothing to the masses pushing the envelope of the kind of quality only vintage pieces are affording the general public, this is the only celebrity really posed with the image, high energy, and bona fides to be the face of it. His connections in the fashion game are only growing as WWDITS wraps up.

If this man opened a pop-up suiting/fashion shop I’d take my limited time and resources to really dig in to the designers he promoted. I’d be howling in the streets for my celebrants to go get a Gullién. There’s no shortage online pattern makers, but there is a shortage of queer friendly shops to really get pieces that pop and it feels safe to enjoy in a retail environment. For average people wanting to engage with fashion that affirms their identity on their special day, there’s too much fucking compromise. Honestly it’s nice that I have a side hustle sewing to pattern, but I’d give it up in a fucking heartbeat for there to be actually sustainable and approachable options. I wish there was an in between of being ‘affordable’ gnc suiting in an American mall but add plus size availability and it gets sad for your most thrifty, creative friends. Someone needs the step in the gap, and why not someone at the top of the game?

Even if it was just a pop up line every few years, I’d fucking salivate over every image in that catalogue two thousand miles away for what it can teach home sewists just by virtue of curating those artisans with the express goal of queer, fat friendly designs playing together. Just the existence of vintage shops like Proud Mary creates a boom across the inter-webs of new sewists per post. Could anyone really imagine if there were actually accessible stores in key cities/supported by an online catalog with a personable, rising star as the brand face?

Please feed us more fashion, Harvey. Keep those stylists and designer friends close. Please. I cannot stress how many mascs/nb-bebes keep dropping your name every fitting consultation across this nation and it’s for good reason.

[genericpuff]

I was wondering, what are some things about LO that you included in LR that you regret including, be it minor or major, if at all?

Krokos and Withy, not the characters themselves, just like, their names LMAO Because I really don't think there's any logic behind why they have those names in the original comic, the name Krokos was clearly derived from Crocus who was a male lover of Hermes and it uh... wouldn't be the only time Rachel's taken a queer character and genderbent them or changed their characters entirely just to "write the gay away" (ugh I hate that I just wrote that lol). I'm not the judge of whether or not she was deliberately trying to straightwash queer icons from Greek myth, but I do think it's at least a pattern of behavior that's worth examining and discussing (and I've definitely discussed it here before) because... yeah, it keeps fucking happening.

But alas, I kept their names as is because there's only so much I want to change from the original comic before I feel like I'm straying too far from the point of retelling it in the first place, it's the double-edged sword of taking on a project like this, I'm not just inheriting what could have been, I'm also inheriting what is and that includes some of Rachel's odd decisions that I then have to work around. Many of them I dropped entirely, there are some ideas and decisions she made that even I can't be bothered to try and work with, but Krokos and Withy are strongly intertwined with the Act of Wrath plotline which was the BIGGEST one I wanted to tackle and do justice in Rekindled. So, their names stayed. I don't know if I regret that per se, I'm just kinda more like grumble grumble "Rachel whyyyy" LOL

That said, I'm hoping to at least include Cyane down the road as she was a nymph who actually existed in the text and played a role in some versions of The Hymn to Demeter.

Other than that, sort of TGOEM, and again, not even its purpose, just its name, I could have come up with a new name for it, but it's yet another one of those things that I wanted to find new ways to work with while still keeping it familiar to the original source material. So I'm working with that one as best as I can as I plot out the story and scripts.

So yeah I think that's it! If I think of any more worth sharing I'll definitely edit / reblog but honestly most of the things I kept from LO I kept for good reason with a greater plan in mind so anything that I wasn't comfortable with keeping or couldn't find a way to work with I just left on the cutting room floor. So there's very little so far that I've 'regret' keeping in, anything that would meet that criteria just isn't there, period.

[just-emerald-star]

My Thoughts on James Somerton [RANT]

Before I begin this post, I highly recommend watching Hbomberguy's new video about Plagiarism. It's the main reason I'm discussing James right now & it provides a more detailed breakdown of what he did.

So for those of you unaware, Queer YouTuber James Somerton has recently been revealed to be a full on plagiarist, having done so for SEVERAL of his videos and isn't exactly the nicest to other queer creatives in the same video essay field as him. Got it? Good. Again, watch the vid.

Upon watching the video and learning about what James did, I was in such shock. My eyes widened. I had begun to see other essayists I follow "feel vindicated" about him being called out. Unbeknownst to me, it's the second part of the video where he's called out.

Having finished the video, I'm not angry. No, I'm PISSED. When one of my best/trusted friends recommended James' videos to me back in 2021, I was immediately hooked. I was inspired by him to further my own craft as a queer video essayist at the time.

To now learn that James is nothing more than a plagiarist who steals other people's content and doesn't even have an original thought to begin with? I'm hurt by this. In my rant video about queer rep, I referenced & linked one of his videos.

I can't even look at this video anymore. I don't even make essays anymore but I can't even look at one of my favorite essays in good faith anymore cuz the man I referenced may have plagiarized in said video I referenced. Do you have any idea how angry I am about this??

In a time where it's getting harder to be openly queer and to not feel scared by literally everything around me, James was that light in darkness that gave me hope. A queer creator who seem to be well-spoken and knew his shit. Come to find out that was never the case. I feel betrayed. He was the sole reason I kept making video essays in 2022. I almost stopped after The Glass Scientist vid but kept going cuz his vids inspired me to keep pushing to be a better creator. I donated money to his fucking production company. I was even one of his patrons for a short period of time. I left the patreon after he got into two different conflicts that pushed me away for the second half of 2022. He made some...not so great comments about Beyonce and her place as a queer icon.

And then he made a whole stink about not being a creator on Nebula. These two reasons, among other minor things, are what pushed me away from James for a good 6-8 months. I only returned to his content literally last month. Last. Fucking. Month. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could give him one more chance. His video on Red, White & Royal Blue was great...and then we get to Hbomber's vid...where apparently he plagiarized in that one too. I was suffering from second-hand embarrassment as Hbomber clocked everything James plagiarized and all of them happen to be videos I watched or took a look at. I felt cheated, betrayed and hurt. Cuz I thought James, at the very least, came up with his own shit. And as someone who works very fucking hard to write/rewrite their own works to near perfection & and takes writing very seriously, I was pissed off. I'm still pissed off now. I got sleep but struggled to stay awake cuz this was weighing on my brain. To now know that James is nothing more than thief who can't write his own shit, I'm disappointed. I pointed to him as one of my inspirations to push for more queer rep. No, he's not the reason I made Roomies...thank fuck for that. He didn't taint my one good thing. On the topic of Roomies, which has a lot of queer POC, I now question if he actually gave a fuck about other queer poc that didn't benefit him for a video. Cuz if we're gonna keep it a buck, most of his queer analysis has been mostly about yt folks. And let's not forget how this man regularly shat on women, both queer & straight. I know there's a discussion to be had about gay men being fetishized, but looking at it now, his views on women in general seem to be very...narrow-minded.

To wrap this up, I no longer support nor stand by James Somerton. Easy thing to do since I barely got back into his shit last month. To say I'm disappointed in you is a fucking understatement. No amount of apologizing is gonna fix this shit.

Good riddance.

[grassbreads]

I’d love to know about Yulma and how important it is to representation in shounen manga

This has been sitting in my askbox for a couple months (because I am incapable of punctuality), but anon sent this to me back when I was talking about Yulma over on my vnc blog. For those unaware, Yulma refers to Yu Kanda and Alma Karma from the manga D.Gray-man.

So the thing is, to be honest, I don't know if you can say Yulma is/was important for representation. They don't tend to get brought up as an example of representation (except by diehard d.gray-man fans like me, lol) in shonen, and their whole thing is complicated enough that I feel like the queerness of it all flies over a lot of people's heads.

However! They're very important to me personally, and I do think it's kind of remarkable their story came out in like 2010. Because even though their queerness gets overlooked a lot, it's like. really there no matter how you interpret it.

The short version of their very complicated story is that Kanda and Alma are a couple who were resurrected into new bodies. Alma was a woman when they were originally together in their past lives, but is physically male in the present. Kanda is still very much in love with them by the end of their story, which, depending on the reading, makes Kanda very bi and/or Alma very trans.

This sound like something you want details on? If so, let's talk about how D.Gray-man's fan favorite edgy badass toughguy character briefly became the star of his very own heart-wrenching tragic queer romance.

Here's a brief crash course in Yu Kanda and Dgm for the uninitiated:

D.Gray-man is a manga about a group of exorcists (in the loosest and most anime sense of the term) in the 1890s fighting a holy war against mechanical demons powered by the souls of the dead. There are two things you need to understand about this plot for me to explain Yulma:

The Black Order, the secret branch of the church that exorcists work for, has a long history of committing horrific human experiments to further the war effort.

Due to complications of world building, only a tiny number of people can become exorcists, and tracking down new ones is extremely difficult.

Yu Kanda is one of the exorcists, and though not the actual main character (that's the lad in my icon), he's a very important secondary character. Arguably he's the most important secobdary character, since he's the main guy's biggest foil and the first character to play deuteragonist in a major story arc. He's also a huge fan favorite. The character popularity polls that Jump used to do always had him and the mc going back and forth over who won #1 most popular.

Kanda was also a classic edgy toughguy character. His first two scenes are him almost murdering the main guy because he thinks he's an intruder, then complaining about people grieving for their friend too loudly. He never smiles. He argues with the righteous mc about wasting time/energy protecting civilians. He threatens (and delivers) violence on anyone that annoys him. He looks like this:

TLDR; Kanda was an adored-by-fans mean badass archetype in a 2000s shonen manga. Not generally the guy you peg for starring in a piece of queer romantic storytelling.

And for the entirety of the original anime adaptation's 103 episode run, for the first 188ish chapters of the manga, you do not learn a single thing about his early life. You learn he joined the Black Order very young, and you meet the mentor that took him in at that point, but although there are little hints, a couple cryptic mentions of him searching for a certain person, his early origins remain a complete black box.

Then came the Alma Karma arc.

This is the point where I start getting into spoilers.

To make a very long story short, the Alma Karma arc reveals that Kanda is one of the Black Order's human experiments. The Order ran a secret project 9ish years before the start of the series in which they essentially tried to re-use dying exorcists (since finding new ones is so hard). They took the bodies of dying or recently deceased exorcists and harvested their brains, implanting those brains into new magically grown child bodies.

Key to this project—the second exorcist project—is that these newly grown second exorcists were not supposed to remember anything from their previous lives. Kanda, however, recovered a few hazy memories from his past self. Most importantly, he can recall an unclear image of the woman that his past self was in love with. This memory gradually becomes Kanda's reason to live. He wants desperately to find and meet that person.

Now, aside from Kanda, there was one other successfully revived second exorcist. This was a boy named Alma Karma.

Over the course of their brief shared childhood, Kanda and Alma become extremely close. However, due to a series of horrible events that I'll spare you the details of, Alma is eventually driven to murder-suicide. He wants himself and Kanda to die together to spite the Order, and Kanda almost lets him do it.

The one thing that keeps Kanda from letting Alma kill him, the thing that drives him instead to kill Alma, his most beloved and only friend, is that he can't bear to die without finding that woman again.

Have you figured out the twist yet?

9 years later, in the present, Kanda discovers that he didn't actually quite kill Alma. The Order kept Alma secretly half-alive in order to do more dubious experiments. And, more importantly, when they meet again, Kanda discovers the truth. The woman that he's been searching for his whole life, the woman he's in love with, the woman he tried to kill Alma in order to find, was also killed and made into a second exorcist. And her brain was placed into the body of Alma Karma.

After quite a lot more violence and tragedy, Kanda and Alma end their story arc by running away together on their deathbeds. Alma dies, for real this time, in Kanda's arms, and his last words are to tell Kanda he loves him. These words are presented as something Kanda hears from both the boy and woman versions of Alma's soul.

So! At the end of a very long and complicated story, one thing holds true: Kanda and Alma are in love. As passed down from their past selves, they are specifically in romantic love. They were a couple. And to speak as a fan, the sheer absolute devotion to how Kanda's love for Alma is presented is seriously intense and moving.

Now, given the absolute hell that is Alma's life, gender identity is frankly the last thing they have time to worry about, so it's hard to say how the whole "literally a woman's brain in a male body" thing might have settled for them if given time to think about it. But that is inherently a pretty trans narrative. And given the whole Alma gender situation, there's simply no reading of their whole situation where neither of them is queer.

If you take present day Alma as a guy, which is more or less how he's presented in canon (though again, who knows how he would've felt about that male body in different circumstances), then congratulations! You've got mlm in your shonen manga. They were straight in a different life, but now one of them's a dude, and they are still deeply in love with each other. They've even got not one but two "let's forget it all and run away together" scenes, just as every mlm couple seems to have.

On the other hand, if you go with the angle that Alma's still a woman based on her mind/soul, even in her new body, then Kanda may not be canonically queer, but Alma is inarguably trans. Again, literally a woman's brain in a male body. It may not be how most people end up trans, but that doesn't change the facts of her situation.

You see what I mean about how they're undeniably queer, but also kind of easy to miss? There's so much other insane shit going on in their story that Alma's whole gender situation can get passed over. Plus, you can look online to this day and find people arguing that Kanda's not "technically" explicitly in love with the present day male version of Alma, since he doesn't 100% unambiguously say as much. I love reading comprehension.

Also! As a possible extra reason for why people don't talk about them much, the official English translation of the manga translated Alma's final "I love you" very differently. There's always a lot of nuance and argument when it comes to translating "大好き" into English, but given the full context of their relationship and the scene it's in, Viz's handling really sets off the censorship bells in my head.

Here's the different versions (Japanese then fan then official), if you want to compare:

Nothing more classically queer than censorship by way of questionable translation 🙃.

At the end of the day, Kanda and Alma are in kind of a strange middle ground. They're each in love with the other one, but the whole second exorcist brain transfer situation makes it complicated enough that people argue their feelings aren't explicitly romantic (and thus not gay) in the present. Alma is literally a woman's brain implanted in a male body, but we don't have time to dwell on the gender complications of all that because of the hell that is the rest of their life. They're canon but not canon—queer people whose stories don't have space for them to be queer.

However, given that all this messy, tragic ambiguity was published in a fairly popular shonen manga back in 2010, it still feels kind of remarkable to me. Alma is somewhat an antagonist (it's complicated), and he dies at the end of his arc, but once again, Kanda was/is the fan favorite! And when he re-enters the main story after Alma's death, he's more important than he's ever been, and his history with Alma continues to be a huge part of his character.

Katsura Hoshino took the much-beloved edgy toughguy character from her long-running shonen series and, after keeping his origins secret for such a long time, confirmed that his whole life has revolved around love this entire time. Almost every facet of his character can be traced back to his love for his lost best friend or his yearning for his past life's missing partner. And then she reveals that the best friend and the partner are one and the same.

You can go back and forth about the degree to which they work as representation, but in any case, I think their story is something people ought to know about. It's romantic and it's heart-wrenching and it's fucking wild, especially given the context in which it was published (a Shonen Jump spinoff in 2010). I never see anyone besides the few remaining hardcore dgm fans talk about them, and I think that's a shame.

So anyway, that's tale of one of the most insanity-inducing romances I've ever seen put to paper. I love queer people.

Here's some choice pages if you want to cry with me (the last two are a sequence):

[rebelpeas]

dee rebelpeas is on her patreon arc

hi! do YOU want to support a fellow overachieving queer disabled artist for the low low price of $1USD per month? WELL fantastic news: you now can give me money!

in addition to behind-the-scenes patreon-exclusive posts sharing wips, speedpaints, and monthly art dumps, you will also be able to see the process within my beautiful mind as i hop from one artistic endeavour to another. because, yes, this art is not limited to exclusively drawings. you’ll also find creative writing, poetry, maybe an essay or two, textile arts and patterns, video game development, minecraft coding, skin design, and custom modeling, and literally anything else that may catch my interest for the next three months.

this also includes plenty of cool sick free downloads for you. wallpapers, game demos, modpacks, those icons for custom iphone homescreen layouts… you get the idea.

but wait, there’s MORE?? you also get first dibs on deciding what i draw: drawing requests, commission slots, and anything where i ask my audience for advice/suggestions will be opened on my patreon first. remember when i made dress-up games and picrews? when/if i make another one, my patrons will be able to suggest hairstyles, clothing pieces, and other accessories for me to add!

all that for JUST $1?! yup! but if you really want to, there is also a $5 tier. there’s no extra benefits, and all my patrons will be loved and adored equally. but if you want to give me five times the money out of the very goodness of your heart, who am i to stop you?

thanks everyone for all your support! bits aside, i appreciate you all so much and im so grateful for each and every one of you 🫶

[mintharaworshipper]

BG3 headcanons (modern AU)

My brain is full of headcanons and I need to get them out!

Shadowheart: She’s an English teacher. Always advocates for her queer students, who see her as a refuge. Loves sweets and pastries and is always carrying a snack in her backpack. Dyes her hair once a month, different colour every time. Chronically online, Tumblr and Twitter user, has the best taste in memes out of all the gang. Writes poetry and fan fiction. Grew up in a cult and lives with religious trauma, but she goes to therapy and does her very best.

Astarion: He’s a lawyer, of course. Has an impeccable aesthetic in his instagram profile, with a defined palette. Very good taste in clothing. He was physically and emotionally abused by his stepfather when he was a kid and hasn’t really worked through this trauma (Shadowheart always encourages him to go to therapy). Very close friends with Shadowheart.

Minthara: Lawyer, but has specialised in finance and has rapidly climbed the financial ladder via questionable methods. CEO of a major company. Impeccable taste in fashion. Vegan. Has a section in her closet filled with BDSM paraphernalia. Everything she owns is expensive. She’s the daughter of a powerful senator who was very emotionally abusive to her growing up. Staunch defender of capitalism. Wakes up naturally at 5 am. Does yoga and tai chi.

Lae’zel: She’s in the air force, has wanted to be since she was a girl. She’s in the spectrum and has only recently realised. Her special interests are planes and meteorology. Wakes up very early to run 10k. Extremely mindful about her eating, every meal is perfectly balanced for her specific nutritional needs.

Karlach: Non-binary. P.E teacher, works at the same school as Shadowheart and that’s how they met and started dating. Loves large dogs. They are a personal trainer on the side. Loves going to the gym and is very supportive of new people. Friends with Wyll since high school.

Jaheira: Anthropologist, environmental and anti-gentrification activist. Has lived in her neighbourhood forever and hates that it’s getting gentrified. Being a local icon and leader, a few political parties have tried to get her to run for office but she always refuses because she doesn’t trust the establishment. Has been arrested multiple times at demonstrations. She’s so devoted to her activism that she has neglected her children at times. Chain smoker.

Halsin: Environmental lawyer. Has worked in multiple NGOs. Has been to therapy. Single, not for a lack of suitors, but because he wants to find a life partner. Has been a vegetarian for decades. Has a bear tattoo.

Wyll: Entrepreneur. Devoted to The Grind™. Has taken classes on gender politics. Goes to the gym with Karlach and uploads mirror selfies. Has asked Minthara to be his mentor but she keeps refusing. Has also been to therapy.

Gale: Successful academic. Has been going through a terrible divorce with another famous and powerful academic. Excellent cook, makes his own sourdough bread. Likes the finer things in life.

Bonus: My OC, Ramona

Literature major but has no academic ambition whatsoever. She does know a lot about it and runs a literature club for troubled teenagers with Shadowheart.

Was working as a barista when she met Minthara and was immediately enthralled.

Has shared a flat with Shadowheart since uni, and they’re best friends.

She’s easily the funniest one in the gang.

Always manages to get free stuff or discounts just because of how nice and persuasive she is.

Excellent liar (white lies, mostly).

Wears recycled clothing almost exclusively, which Minthara hates.

Everyone hated Minthara when they first started dating but over time, as she changed, they managed to put up with her, even growing fond of her (most of them).

I’ve been trying to write some fics but I can’t seem to find the courage to. I enjoy coming up with headcanons more

[itsclydebitches]

I'm preparing myself for the personal disappointment of Ted going back home to Kansas (even though I don't believe that's his home anymore) and that Trent will see him off in a ruby slippers shirt, especially since Lance has worn one before and we now know a lot of Trent's shirts are coming from his closet:

But in writing another meta I've been thinking a lot about Ted Lasso's clothing, particularly how it is used to connect with others and showcase growth. Sometimes that attempt is a failure and the growth is a detriment to the character, such as Nate trying to copy Roy's all black suit, and sometimes it's a success and the growth is something to celebrate, like Roy finding a compromise between his and Phoebe's tastes with his dark-colored, tie-die t-shirt. Beyond the issue that I don't want Ted to go back to Kansas at all (not unless the intention is to have him realize that Richmond is his true home now), a Dorothy shirt would fall flat for me because there's no in-universe connection to Ted. We as the audience understand the allusion because we've been picking up on hints since Season 1: Ted makes a quip about not being in Kansas anymore, he holds high scores on a Wizard of Oz pinball machine, he's surrounded by other allusions such as an emotionless man in need of a heart (Roy), a scared lion who rejects being a panda (Rebecca), and the comedic, presumed idiot who does in fact have a brain (Jamie). But all of that exists on an analytical level. In-world, Ted hasn't identified with Dorothy and what few connections there are -- such as that acknowledgement that he feels out of his depth in a new world -- are no longer accurate three seasons later, after a hell of a lot of growth. Unlike the suit and the shirts that exist overtly on screen as a way to say, "These characters are sharing a connection," Trent talking to Ted in a Dorothy shirt would feel too removed from textual!Ted and textual!Trent to have the same impact. This shirt totally sums up his story!... provided you've done the work to interpret all the easily missed hints and ignored the ways in which a Wizard of Oz ending would (imo) be a regression for Ted.

With an acknowledgment that I'm playing with all this through the assumption that Trent's shirt will have something to do with Ted, rather than us just getting an Overtly Queer shirt to show that Trent has fully embraced who he is, I've been hemming and hawing over what I'd give him instead. In some ways, Ted is notable for his lack of distinct fashion. He wears Richmond gear 70% of the time and the rest is plain colored long-sleeved shirts and collared shirts with polos. It's a distinctly Ted look to be sure (passionate and athletic vs. soft, comfortable, and mildly professional while still feeling approachable), but there's less material to work with than, say, Keeley's vibrate, quirky wardrobe; or Rebecca's preference towards outfits that emphasize her power as a kind of shield: wealth, beauty, her height; or -- of course -- Trent's move from buttoned-up journalist to queer bracelet, queer mug, queer style icon t-shirts. I can't think of anything Trent could wear off the top of my head that would a) be within his "vibe" and b) scream "I'M DECLARING MY SUPPORT AND/OR ROMANTIC LOVE FOR TED FUCKING LASSO."

Except, of course, for a "BELIEVE" shirt.

While I love and fully agree with Ted's speech about how belief needs to come from within and, thus, their sign is not actually necessary, a part of me is still disappointed that "BELIEVE" is no longer a visual part of the club. I'd be more willing to accept letting it go if we hadn't seen that Ted himself still relies on those visual reminders. Not only does he choose to put the sign up in the first place rather than simply telling the boys to believe in themselves, but back when Nate was doubting their chances in Ted's apartment, Ted sprints to his bathroom to retrieve one of mini signs he, obviously, keeps on hand and presumably sees every morning, soon as he gets up. It's important to him, not just the message, but the physicality of the reminder itself, so I've been expecting/hoping for the message to return in a new form by the end of the season.

Granted, that little moment was a while ago and it's possible that the writers didn't realize the implications it would have when Ted later ripped up the sign. However, another reason why I don't think my expectation is completely hopeless is because of the Season 3 promo, wherein all the Richmond family make their own BELIEVE signs. Forgetting a small gag back in Season 1 or 2 is understandable, but the promotion for the latest season? Why in the world would our advertising emphasize -- and celebrate! -- all the characters creating signs of their own if the message was meant to be, "Let the sign go. It's no longer needed"?

We didn't get this scene in the show proper, but it still speaks volumes that they filmed a moment where every character puts their own spin on the BELIEVE sign, using it to highlight their personality. Then, we end with a shot of Ted's touched approval as he talks about feeling seen.

Chronologically, Trent would have been around for all this. There's no need for the team to make their own signs until they realize the original has been torn and, obviously, Trent had become a part of the family by then. He's the one who discovered how the sign was torn in the first place. So if we read the promo as canonical, even if it didn't end up in an episode, why wouldn't Trent have joined in with everyone else? Thing is, he doesn't have a locker to hang a sign on, or even an office to put it in, and given that he's worn the same two bracelets and consistently used the same mug, there's really only one way that Trent shows his personality:

Shirts.

Some of which are notably brightly colored with blocky text referencing American-style learning.

I don't want Trent to walk into the finale with a Dorothy shirt whose importance only exists on a subtexual level and heralds Ted leaving the actual home he's worked to build. I want Trent to strut out in a bright yellow shirt with BELIEVE across the front, announcing to the world that, yes, he believes in the Lasso Way. Give me the implication that he had this made when everyone was personalizing their signs. Give me a fully confident "dork" who's willing to excitedly proclaim his love and support without fear of censor. Give me a BELIEVE reminder that's now tailored to the individual and can be worn or safely tucked away as needed. Give me the possibility (because it's not gonna be canon😭) that Trent is in love with Ted and he's going to display that in the most overt but-not-actually-saying-it way possible.

He sees Ted and he loves what he sees.

Dorothy and her allusion don't exist in the textual show proper and they're definitely not connected to Trent's relationship with Ted. What is though? The very first words Trent said about Ted that weren't an insult, accusation, snide remark, or disbelieving question:

"I can't help but root for him."

What better way to take Trent full circle than to let him literally wear his heart on his sleeve, shouting in bright colors and with a noticeable vibe that yes, he does believe in Ted Lasso.

[variousqueerthings]

A Smallish Masterpost On The Doctor And Asexuality/Aromanticism

Back in 2019 I apparently made this post about The Doctor and asexuality and aromanticism on my other blog and I have nooo memory of it. so, updated version that's got a bit more going for it:

A small masterpost of various people talking about The Doctor's "Asexuality" - feat. asexuality, aromanticism, demisexuality, demiromanticism, allosexuality, alloromanticism, and a whole squiggly set of queer concepts, as well as discussions about sexism

NOTE: additions are welcome, and forgive the rambles

So classic!who presented the Doctor as a type of asexual, in which the asexuality was a facet of alienness, rather than necessarily based in any community identification of the label -- in the real world, there's documentation of the word asexual since at least the early 1900s (so in tandem with the increasing use of homo, bi, and heterosexual, if not as widespread), as well as overlaps with other communities and labels, such as bisexual and lesbian communities (which both include/d ace people), dandyism, etc. -- so a rich, complex history bubbling beneath all of this (the most famous coining of asexual is in I believe a manifesto from 1978 off the top of my head)

this real world stuff was not what was going on in the world of Doctor Who when it was called Asexual as far as I'm aware - although, I mean... I'm sure there were actual ace and aro fans...? - but it's interesting to know that it was definitely going on, and so no matter what the intent was (alienness, the doctor intended as patriarchal/teacher-like, the doctor intended as for children, etcetc) there is some real overlap with actual asexuality at the time, including within the word itself

and then a bunch of people got really pissed off when the Eighth Doctor broke the rule that the Doctor must always be totally disconnected from romance- waaait but that's not asexuality. And yeah, that's the other thing. Asexuality is used interchangeably as being both aromanticism and asexuality and aroaceness, because people just don't know better- we'll try to make distinctions, but it can be difficult, with how others were conflating, so be Prepared for that in below

in Nu!Who the doctor seemingly got a bit friskier, so let's take a look at that as well

1. First some general Doctor Who – the first asexual Doctors:

The question of the Doctor's sexuality was a controversial one. It was fanon for decades that he was asexual; fans used the Fourth Doctor's line in City of Death that Countess Scarlioni was "probably" beautiful as proof. Sixth Doctor actor Colin Baker agreed with this theory, saying, "Love is a human emotion and the Doctor isn't human." (REF: The Television Companion) Both Matt Smith[6] and Tom Baker (DOC: Getting Blood from the Stones) have identified that their respective Doctors are asexual and clueless to human sexuality; both exploited this for visual humour

(note: Steven Moffat made the comment that the eighth doctor “hit puberty” which were very controversial, but Moffat has often made controversial statements in regards to asexuality, suggesting that he finds it “boring” to write in relation to Sherlock Holmest:

It’s the choice of a monk, not the choice of an asexual. If he was asexual, there would be no tension in that, no fun in that – it’s someone who abstains who’s interesting

(it's ironic that Sherlock Holmes is his other show considering Holmes himself as an asexual icon being sexualised more and more in recent iterations -- but also that arguably Elementary's Sherlock was kind of aromantic and allosexual, which is a Very Very Rare Thing To Write)

These gifs of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy pretty much sum up the idea of classic!who smooching People

CB: He's an alien, so what's he doing messing around with human women for? For heavens sake SM: You know Doctor Who had been very successful for 30 year without canoodling anywhere

Both of these have a tad of the "asexuality is for aliens" + "allosexuality as a whole is not for this show" (which isn't quiiite true, considering the objectification of several of the companions, who did canoodle with some people... just not the doctor)

This video is a great little rundown of the queer history of Doctor Who and includes this nugget from Steven Moffat back in the day of Discourse around the Eighth Doctor being a bit less Asexual than previous incarnations:

"What on Earth (or elsewhere) is the fuss about the Dr snogging his companion? Nowhere in the series does it *ever* state that the Doc is asexual (it's purely an assumption on the part of the fans) and the fact that he has a a grandaughter might lead the pedants among us to conclude otherwise (and no it wasn't a term of affection - that's just another assumption and an entirely baseless one at that.) We know that humans and Time Lords are mutually sexually attracted (Susan and Whats-his-name, Leela and Thingummy, The Doctor and that-Aztec-woman) and that the Dr favours bimbos in mini-skirts (what, you think he was choosing them for their brains?) The most you could conclude from watching the show is that he's a little reticent about involvement (not surprising when your inability for commitment extends to your entire home planet!) So if the Doc's vow of celibacy is a fan assumption which flies directly in the face of the established continuity, why would you think a new series would pay any heed to it? Steven Moffat P.S. I mean, the guy has one snog in thirty years of saving our planet and you're all complaining! You utter, utter bastards!!

I think what's also interesting about this comment is the inevitable link between allosexuality and sexism that also exists in Steven Moffat's tenure as showrunner. how does one show a [man] into a [woman?] By making her wear short skirts and having the dude make comments about it of course

Also very funny it actually hits upon a very good point -- there are allosexual Timelords (I'd disagree about the Doctor and that-Aztec-woman) (second note here about how even in this message it's kind of clear how secondary romance was for DW, the romantic partners are Not memorable characters), so if the Doctor is sort of... not like the other Timelords, then the asexuality and aromanticism is not alien... it's the Doctor

2.  A bit about the show's attitude towards writing the Doctor as asexual and how that interest has waned over the years:

But that was then and this is now, and the discussion over whether or not the Doctor is still an asexual character has certainly become very heated. Many fans have asked whether or not the Doctor can still be considered asexual, given the nature of the current show. John Richards, in a brilliant and surprisingly funny essay for Queers Dig Time Lords titled “The Heterosexual Agenda,” lamented the aggressive assertion of the Doctor’s heterosexuality

This is the Confidential episode around The Girl In The Fireplace around the Doctor and "snogging" and ways in which fans might read it (fans can "explain it away" as "she kissed him")

In it we get a bit more about Moffat's whole... deal... around women and the Doctor. It's interesting because he argues that it works because Madame de Pompadour is a "match" for the Doctor due to being well-educated and civilised and multi-talented... "if the Doctor was going to settle down, it would be a girl like this," in the season in which one might argue the main romance is with Rose, a working-class woman who never finished highschool

so a bit about the ways sexism, classism, and heteronormativity also play into the writing of a "more allosexual" Doctor...

It also includes DT saying they had an extraordinary relationship that was over before it began -- I just like how he refers to it without attempting to label it

the framing of the confidential episode is very romantic, just so you're prepared. It also has more unintentional framing of the Doctor's potentially "falling in love" as a more "human" emotion (in contrast to alien emotions of not falling in love)

as you can hear, it conflates allosexuality and alloromanticism throughout

3.  Eleven, He's A Little Confused But He's.... kinda? Got the Spirit (and an unfortunate slice of sexism/heteronormativity):

One thing has been a constant, though — the Doctor himself has been entirely asexual, save for the notorious on-screen kiss during Paul McGann’s performance as the Eighth Doctor in the one-off special made during the show’s wilderness years, a kiss that had fans outraged precisely because it was so out of character and proved that the producers behind the telemovie had no idea what they were doing.

It’s interesting how recent Doctor Who has, if anything, emphasized this idea of the Doctor’s asexuality; Matt Smith said earlier this year that his version of the character was “more asexual than some of the others,” and in 2011 he answered a question about whether his version of the Doctor is at all interested in sex as follows: “No. The Doc’s idea of an orgy is playing chess with an ostrich. His brain doesn’t work in that way. He would find it weird and peculiar. He finds women peculiar. He is quite asexual.”

The idea that the Doctor “finds women peculiar” is probably one that says more about Matt Smith than it does about the Doctor’s character — 30 years of Doctor Who history rather contradict the idea that the Doctor finds women any stranger than men, and in general he has been characterized by his enduring affection for humanity in general, regardless of gender.

In general the way people talk about Matt Smith’s doctor to me, often has a bit of infantilisation along with it - of course we can read him as ace, because he’s boyish, hyperactive, and distracted... he's weird and alien

There's also this cute little fan-video that has some Nine, Ten, and Twelve but is mainly focusing on Eleven's asexual Vibes in a couple of scenes, which actually is something I've always struggled a little more with, because Moffat had Eleven doing sexist shit occasionally and was also soooo male-gazey, but it's also got one of my favourite ace moments for the Doctor period ("I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!????")

(the scenes with Amy in this exemplifies so much of what I dislike about Moffat, but it's also fascinatingly The Tightrope Of Asexuality -- Amy is essentially violating the Doctor's consent over and over, but it's fine because "he's" a "bloke" -- she then goes on to show the Doctor's former companions on screen.... but notably only the women, and making a biiig mistake in including I think both Zoe and Ace, who were teenagers when they travelled with the Doctor... implying that that was... idek......)

I will also acknowledge here that while I don't think Moffat ever got... super comfortable writing queerness, he did get much, much better and stopped constantly referring to the doctor as a "bloke," who does bloke-y things (like objectify women, care too much about machinery/the TARDIS, and be a playboy who whisks away young girls in order to seduce them, I guess?)

and I personally think that the gender component plays into the Doctor's increased asexual vibes in his run (which is ironic considering where Moffat started lol), but I'd have to do wa-HAY more of a deep dive to actually confirm that... just a theory.... but also interesting that asexuality and aromanticism is more fine, because the Doctor is not a bloke......

it's complicated

4. Ten, The Jessica Rabbit Effect (just because you think they're hot doesn't mean they want to fuck)

[Patrick Troughton and Sylvester McCoy] would hardly have been much cop as Casanova; the 2005 TV role for which Tennant won much praise. Perhaps that's why the Times christened him "the first Timephwoard". "That's the Times?" he boggles. "It's, er, quite surprising..." Or why the Pink Paper voted him the Sexiest Man In The Universe, above Brad Pitt and David Beckham.

in general, it seems unequivocal to me that ten doesn’t like getting hit on, even playfully [...] not only does he seem consistently uninterested in these advances, but in most cases, a bit confused and/or unsettled by the idea of being hit on by anyone. contrary to the ‘space casanova’ narrative frequently espoused by magazines and interviewers, in reality ten is no stud. far from it. apart from with rose, he never reciprocates flirtatious behavior, nor does he ever seem pleased to be on the receiving end of it. 

https://tenscupcake.tumblr.com/post/126914939560/dunderklumpen-that-smug-face-needs-to-be

[Link to a gifset in which The Witch in The Shakespeare Code tries to seduce the Doctor and he answers “now that’s one form of magic that definitely won’t work on me.

the second/third/fourth gifs are of David T saying: “she nearly kisses me. I don’t nearly kiss her. It’s an important distinction.”

This interview is around the time the final RTD/DT episodes were beginning to air

Interviewer: Lots of snogging you've done, there was- DT: Not lots Interviewer: More- I'm trying to think now I don't remember any of the previous doctors- DT: More than Jon Pertwee did, yes Interviewer: Yes a lot more than Jon Pertwee... what-how come...? DT: I can't help it if the ladies of the Universe are flinging themselves at me, you know? Its not, you know, it's just part of the job I have- It's- usually it's not a sexual thing with the Doctor. He's a fairly asexual character. Interviewer: So what's with the kissing then? DT: Well, I don't think- there's a genetic transfer as it was once... or, and you know these women just can't help themselves, I don't know-

5.  12, Too Old To Be Romantic?

Capaldi talking about his relationship with Clara, noting the age-difference as reasons why they would never be a romantic couple (the subtext here is non-sexual as well, although it conflates the two).

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/15/doctor-who-needs-lots-more-kissing-according-to-peter-capaldi

[Capaldi] said there was “no romance, but deep love” between the Doctor and Clara, played by Jenna Coleman.

“It would have been completely creepy,” the star told the Radio Times. “It’s fine if you have handsome young men like Matt [Smith] and David Tennant, but as a father I felt it would be inappropriate.

Capaldi laughed off complaints that his first full episode last year was promoting a gay agenda after it featured a kiss between a lizard woman and her human wife. “I think it was good,” he said.

“Actually it’s not just lesbian. It’s across species, which is even worse, presumably. It’s crazy if people get up in arms about it. There should be lots more kissing in Doctor Who. So long as it’s not the Doctor and Clara.”

Honestly I wonder how much the hype died down because he was no longer young and "hot." Skill issue honestly

6.  The Doctor and The Master/Missy 

I feel like I don't have enough on this, and that's also a facet of the whole "is the Doctor now allosexual and alloromantic." It seems to only really come up in relation to the [seemingly] het relationships

I don't really see much in relation to the Doctor and Jack (who's canonically in love with the Doctor) or the Doctor and Simm's Master -- I mean, fanfic, yes, but not bigger article-worthy discussion...

(and Jamie and the Doctor and Adric and the Doctor and Alan Turing and the Doctor......)

so if anyone has a bit to add on that

Most of it is in relation to... Moffat's sexier "Missy." (sigh). However very interested in what Michelle Gomez (who was excellent as the character!) had to say about it:

She added a female time lord "blows open all these new possibilities for different relationship that couldn't have happened before" but denied the idea of sexual chemistry between Missy and the Doctor.

"You're reading into it something I've never even thought of," she said.

The Scottish star added: "With [the Doctor’s young companion] Clara, it would have been straight away, ‘What is the romantic connection, does the Master fancy her?’ No. We can move past that, into something much more interesting, much more detailed, which is life. That’s what life is. It’s not all black and white."

Idk, she seems to get something intrinsic about the possibilities of all this that many others don't

Gifset of The Mistress (being questioned by Clara on the nature of Missy’s/the Doctor’s relationship): Try, nanobrain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain and contemplate friendship.

I find the whole post quite charming actually, it's a small moment in Doctor Who fandom from a specific person. I don't even remember how I originally found it

7. Misc

I don't really have anything on Thirteen currently, because I haven't seen all of those seasons yet. I know Yaz/Thirteen is very shipped, I assume I'll prooobably feel similarly to all the other Doctor/Companion ships in that I'll be going at it from an aromantic lens

I have seen discussions about how the Doctor’s perceived romantic and/or sexual relationship with this person or other (insert your preferred person here, Rose, Madame de Pompadour, River…) has made him too human, too normal. Discussions that assume that romantic and sexual attraction is an inherent part of human experience, so removing them from a character makes him alien.

This is about the way "Asexuality" (meaning aroaceness) applied purely to alien creatures isn't... great... for aroace people

I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard fans discuss wanting a more alien “asexual Doctor”, which is generally taken to mean “no romance in the Tardis.”

It often goes back to the same questions: is the Doctor's "Asexuality" (that is, asexuality and aromanticism) purely used to indicate the alien? When John Smith is human he falls in love and asks "what sort of a man" the Doctor is that falling in love didn't occur to him. Many classic actors (whom I have a great deal of affection for) tend to use alien as the reason for the so-called Asexuality, and that seems to lie at a lot of the fans discomfort with a more "sexy" Doctor of nu!who, rather than anything to do with character or portraying asexuality and aromanticism in sci-fi

and on the flipside, people who very much like an alloromantic and allosexual Doctor dismiss aroace Doctor reads because of things that are absolutely within the purview of an aroace experience (I've seen anything from having a grandkid to being hot to caring about others to knowing what sex is)

I wonder if actually consciously writing an aroace Doctor would make people really uncomfortable as well, since it would remove the "alienness" from the idea of it... also it would make people who really really like allosexual and alloromantic Doctor angry too... so no winning I guess

I wonder how Ncuti Gatwa alongside RTD's queerness will redefine the subtext of it all once again...

[happilyfeatherafter]

Happilyfeatherafter’s ficrec Fridays

Back back back again, and I don't know guys, I think we should all just totally stab Caesar! Welcome back to a new fortnight of fics that I’ve read and loved recently.

If you want to find more you can see my previous rec lists here!

15 March 2024

Are You Writing From the Heart? by  @luckshiptoshore is now complete!! Congrats Luck! Full disclosure, Luck is one of my very best friends, but that just means I know not only how much of a talented fic writer she is, but also how much of her heart and soul she poured into writing this love letter to queer storytelling, season 4 Destiel as a romcom, meta text (and subtext), and finding out who you really are when society and your upbringing is fighting against you. Castiel is a ghostwriter for L.S. Shore's Supernatural novels about Neal and his brother. Caught in a storytelling rut, Cas finds himself adding the fallen angel character of Bel...what could possible go wrong? Meanwhile at his local writing coffee shop spot, he meets the handsome stranger Dean who is an up and coming standup comedian and Supernatural fanboy. They because firm friends, but that's definitely it because Cas is straight....right?! Following these two dummies as they FAIL TO USE THEIR WORDS is a total joy, as Luck's humorous and emotional writing paired with her eye for detail is so very on point, and I'm so excited more people will finally get to read this story in full.

Baker Six by komodobits because !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I cannot tell you how goddamn excited I was to get this email notification and finally be back in 91w world, and to witness these early stages of Dean and Cas' relationship through Dean's eyes at last. This barely needs a rec because it's THEE 91w Dean, but komodobits hasn't missed a beat in getting back inside their heads and I was once again swept away by this iconic love story against the odds. Head the trigger warnings as always, this is truly on the front lines as a medic in a war zone. Baker Six was written for the very good cause of the fandom Palestine fundraiser, in support of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Please donate if you can!

Truth & despair by @shallowseeker was a recent discovery and such a fascinating read! It's set in a post-15x18 verse, but importantly it features a fun Sam narrative perspective that delights in his lens by...being a bit of an unsympathetic oblivious dummy (affectionate). I really appreciate a crunchy Sam characterisation and oooboy does this pay off. Dean is steeped in his grief for Cas, and Sam is oh so concerned. He reaches out to Mia Vallens to understand his own grieving, and that leads to him making a discovery...Dean's memories of Cas' death aren't what he claims happened. With the unwelcome reappearance of Chuck (he lost...didn't he?) and LITERAL sinkholes appearing in the fabric of the universe, can they figure out what's happening to save Cas and save the world? This wip plays with physics, theology and narrative fuckery in such intriguing ways. I can't wait to see how it wraps up in the next two chapters.

The Leap by @friendofcarlotta started reading this one when Tina reshared it on Leap Day...because of course. I'd actually read it before but it more than lived up to the reread. 'Castiel Krushnic is a police officer in Soviet-occupied East Berlin. He is also gay, in a city where that’s a dangerous thing to be. One night, he meets Dean Winchester, a mechanic from the American sector. Their mutual attraction is instant, and a convenient hookup quickly turns into a passionate love affair that defies all rules and expectations.' Meticulously researched, emotional, heartrending and thought provoking. I highly recommend taking the leap on this fic!

See you in two weeks and OMG it's @deancaspinefest time!!!! I'm so excited *clears calendar*

Tag list under the cut - let me know if you'd like to be added to be notified of future recs!

@dean-you-assbutt-cas-loves-you

[malicious-compliance-esq]

Why the World Needs Black Jack Randall: Queer Representation at Its Worst and Best

On March 29 my amazing mutual and fellow Evil Redcoat Pipeline traveler @meerawrites tagged me in a reblog of this video essay from @rowanellis about media literacy and queer villains that mentions both Lestat de Lioncourt from Interview with the Vampire and Black Jack Randall from Outlander. Double bisexual representation from an openly ace creator? Be still my heart!

I’d seen a few of Rowan’s other videos on YouTube—not ever having looked for her on Tumblr before Meera sent me that video—and often enjoyed both the content and the nuance. Certainly true for many aspects of this one as well. I want to make it very clear before going into detail here that I ardently support Rowan as a creator and appreciate that advocacy for diverse queer representation tremendously. I’m tagging her blog here primarily to promote her work and to encourage folks to explore for themselves. Her video essays are excellent in general and this one certainly has its fair share of wonderful content just the same.

I love the analysis here of why queer villains often get embraced as folk heroes by the LGBTQIA+ community, and many of the specific commentaries on beloved characters from iconic films and shows I grew up on like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Lion King. Of course, I’m no expert on any of those canons despite many viewings. I don’t consider myself an expert on Interview with the Vampire by any means either, but I’ve read all the books and seen the film and the available season of the new television adaptation. I found a lot of the commentary here insightful and resonant as a more casual consumer of media in that universe. I fully expect that folks who truly do have that depth of expertise would have much to say about the specifics of Rowan’s analysis of Lestat.

If y’all are on my blog, you know why I’m here and you know where my expertise lies. I am here to sustain the collective derangement of the few and the proud who take a deeper interest in Black Jack. Who see him for the complex and complicated person he is rather than writing him off as a Complete Monster or hand waving the things he does that truly are monstrous. And oftentimes who take that deeper look at him from the informed perspective of lived experience with sexual abuse. Many of the folks I’ve met who find Black Jack uniquely resonant and compelling do so from the firsthand perspective of submissiveness and masochism—of finding him alluring because of what he could do for them.

Well then. You could fix him. You could make him worse. I could rail him.

I’m going to out myself in no uncertain terms here because I need to make my authorial standpoint painstakingly clear. Hi, my name is Malicious Compliance. In addition to being quite openly bisexual in every possible area of my life, I am Dominant and sadistic. Are those the only things I enjoy sexually? Not at all. Although I’m not switchy in the slightest when it comes to D/s and S&M activities, I absolutely enjoy sex that does not involve BDSM elements as well. I’ve also had intensely kinky sexual relationships that involved no physical practice of sadism whatsoever. This will come back later—just like Black Jack does at Versailles in S2E05 “Untimely Resurrection” after supposedly being dead from a cattle stampede at Wentworth Prison. Awesome, right? Like me, our favorite randy Redcoat is tough to kill.

Given all this and my general level of immersion in all forms of Outlander canon, once I finally could make the time to give Rowan’s video essay my full attention (more on that below) I found myself going from pumping my fist to shaking my head. I knew I’d have to say something in response. That I would need to address the Republic and set the record accurate if certainly not straight.

Initially I thought about doing a brief reblog commentary noting that although the analysis in the video gets several things quite twisted about Randall, these are understandable omissions considering Rowan does not position herself as having intensive expertise on Outlander canon. But then I started thinking about Rowan’s stated purpose in making the video. The sorts of deeper analysis and nuances that, as Rowan herself points out in her own ways, often get missed with intent in considering the actions of queer villains who are specifically bisexual and sadistic.

And as a bisexual sadist who has frequently encountered the framing of my own sexuality as an automatic threat even by other queer people who otherwise support kink practice I knew it could enhance the positive impact of the original video essay to provide some detailed commentary. Broader systemic issues that Rowan references herself can make it altogether too easy to reproduce the same harms one looks to dismantle. Black Jack Randall is a fictional guy in a fictional world. Yet how the non-fictional world views people like Black Jack—and especially people brought to those dark places in their own minds and actions by their familiar cycles of abuse—matters tremendously to me. Not because I’ve gone down his path myself, but because I understand the stakes of not going down his path.

One thing about me is I would rather pull out what remains of my natural dentition with pliers than take no action when I know I can do something uniquely impactful in addressing that passive reproduction of harm to our community, which very much is our community as both bisexual and asexual creators. In the interest of directly unpacking harmful stereotypes about bisexual sadists, building on the video essay’s overall spotlighting of queer villains and some of the specific ways biphobia factors into those characterizations and storylines, I’m taking this deepest of dives. Doing more. Because it’s my brand, certainly. But moreover because it’s my duty.

As blazingly gay Will Tavington so eloquently stated in The Patriot amid some premium sinister flirting with his enemy Ben Martin: It’s an ugly business doing one’s duty. But sometimes, it’s a real pleasure.

So here, point by point from my own manual transcription of Rowan’s comments—using both the audio and captions for the video to ensure full accuracy, y’all know both my style and my propensity for em dashes—I give you a detailed analysis of the analysis. If you’re envisioning me gesturing wildly at a tangled yarn map like the Pepe Silvia conspiracy theory one from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia then you’ve got the measure of things entirely. Much more this energy here than the XKCD angle of Someone is wrong on the Internet. Indeed, I’d say Rowan is very right on the Internet to open this dialogue and provide folks who’ve made this depth of engagement with various characters referenced in this video the opportunity to build on her own insights.

But “duty calls” nonetheless! Happy Culloden Day to all ye Randallites near and far. Have fun and try not to get disemboweled too much.

Across the seven seasons of Outlander, a drama about a World War II nurse who travels back to 1740s Scotland—I know, don’t question it—perhaps the most loathed character amongst the show’s many villains is Captain Jonathan Randall.

The phrasing here made me reflect with sorrow on how that same premise of time travel elements automatically making something not worthwhile for reasons of implausibility—and thus perceived frivolity—has often made others pass on exploring Outlander at all. It also made me wonder, as many other things in the video essay continue to do, if perhaps the commentary draws on familiarity with only the first season of the show despite Black Jack’s storyline extending into the third season in live action and beyond that in impact. That would seem a lost opportunity considering the depth of analysis of other canons like Interview with the Vampire and Hazbin Hotel here. Both of which I highly recommend for folks who’ve not yet had the pleasure!

I also noted how the video essay makes no mention whatsoever of Randall’s canonical nickname of “Black Jack” anywhere, which seems strange given what a major plot point this becomes right from the start in S1E01 “Sassenach”. I see this as a missed opportunity to get into some of the basic nuances here about his sadism, which itself only gets mentioned minimally despite the surrounding context. The video essay sets Randall up as a sadist with the framing of this segment but then doesn’t really connect those dots. I’ve done that for y’all before with my “Red Black and Shades of Gray” meta comparing sadism themes in Outlander and The Patriot canons, which contrasts the former’s frequent depiction of sexual interest in actions causing intentional pain in Black Jack Randall’s actions with the latter’s depiction of strategic interest in actions producing incidental pain in Will Tavington’s.

Speaking of the Outlander and The Patriot contrast between the canons’ respective evil Redcoat characters, I had some notes jotted down in the background of my various in-progress BJR fics that explores canonical nicknames for Randall and Tavington and what these monikers lampshade about their respective characterizations. I also had another meta in much more primal stages of development exploring rape themes in both canons and the nuances of how sexual violence gets invoked in storylines featuring Randall and Tavington. That phrasing is very deliberate for good reason; Will Tavington doesn’t rape anyone. And Randall’s own sexual violence doesn’t play out remotely the way one might think from watching this video. Apropos of this, I had another meta envisioned about homosociality in Outlander and how Randall’s bisexuality makes him an outcast among straight and queer characters alike—inspired of course by a dear mutual exploring similar themes with Tavington in The Patriot canon.

In the first of what became many drafts of this Very Long Essay, I said “it will probably be quite some time until I get any of these finished” and then spent a few days turning that over in my head. Indeed, the process of drafting this piece to encourage readers to peek behind the curtain of Black Jack Randall’s life has necessarily involved some deeper reflection on things behind the curtain of my own life. Including how I still—at 40 unlikely years old and counting—often do things out of feelings of obligation rather than genuine desire.

Did I mention I’m a rape survivor? And that I couldn’t possibly count how many times I’ve let someone take dozens of “no” signals as a “yes” because of what it would cost me to refuse? It’s okay to enjoy certain aspects of fandom casually. Even if one isn’t already doing tons of other activity that’s anything but casual. Let yourself enjoy things. This world robs us of so much joy even when we try with all our might to protect it, to hold onto it. I am begging all of you to let yourself enjoy things before it’s too late. To do what Randall didn’t in canon—to live, and to stop willfully breaking his own heart.

If you read my blog, you know that this year has been an absolute hellscape on many fronts and that I am constantly slammed with even more of a professional overload than usual while dealing with A Lot in both the mental and physical health domains. And I generally publish at least one novella-length transformative work for Outlander each month on top of that. As a good friend put it: If I had a full-time job and had the energy to volunteer on top of that, I don’t think I’d ever write. I do what I do not because it is good for me, but because I am certifiably insane. This is not hyperbole or satire. I easily qualify for the designation per the DSM. Which has faults in spades and I’m not endorsing in the slightest, mind. My point is that I write not because I have the time or the energy to spare, but rather because if I do not write I will feel as if I cannot breathe. Why? Asked and answered.

So, a note for the good of the order: I can wait a long, long time before I write another fandom essay. This is a Sisters of Mercy reference, because of course it is. I’m writing this response to the video essay instead of finishing development on the fic I otherwise could probably have released for the Battle of Culloden anniversary on April 16. Ideally I would have done both, wouldn’t I? In addition to already releasing the prior installment of that continuity on April 13 no less! Perhaps if I’d just tried harder I could’ve given you two different lengthy writings in honor of the specific day. Or at least released something else on AO3 for April without waiting until the last minute like a slacker.

That’s the kind of thinking that made me stop sleeping entirely and wind up having a complete breakdown both mentally and physically. For those who are new around here, this is an even worse idea for me than it is for most humans because of a progressive genetic disease that kills people on the regular even when they do sleep and eat adequately and generally show compassion for themselves.

Accordingly, that sort of thinking about my own self-worth as anything other than an ATM for other people’s consumption of output is also what made me complete a PhD in literally two years while working full-time and being actively in the process of dying from my disease. I got on a medication that saved my lungs and my life just over a year after defending my dissertation. It’s taken another decade to learn the lesson I should have learned back then. How did Annie Lennox put it? Dying is easy; it's living that scares me. Paging Black Jack Randall—because if that isn’t the absolute biggest Culloden energy I don’t know what is.

It is amazing and terrible what sadism can do when turned inward on a person. The original video essay I’m responding to here never quite got around to how masterfully Randall’s character spotlights this pattern in several ways. Because the video is much broader by design than it is deep, and thus does not allow for more thorough engagement of the source material in commenting on Black Jack’s character, a lot of the same tropes the video essay aims to unpack could get repackaged with new hats instead without these additional details. So in the interest of not sending people who aren’t bisexual sadists to do bisexual sadists’ jobs, I’m giving y’all the goods.

As a British captain in an occupied Scotland, Randall radiates pure villainy.

Does he? I’m not so sure at all. First, see here for details focused closely on Outlander itself. Second, see here for use of Black Jack’s storylines in Outlander as examples of a larger trope. Search both of those pages for “Even Evil Has Loved Ones” using your browser’s Find function and you’ll get some telling material. Catch that reference to the Duke of Sandringham and Mary Hawkins in the second link, did you? We’ll get to those in time. Oh, how we will get to those.

The complete lack of mention of Season 2 and especially the iconic BJR episode near the end makes this oversight unsurprising. I think touching on that content just briefly would have supported Rowan’s overall purpose in making the initial video. At the same time, I’m guessing that stimulating nuanced and enduring dialogue about queer villains is the most important aim of the original essay! Indeed, S2E12 “The Hail Mary” represents the absolute pinnacle of my plunge into permanent derangement about Randall for reasons likely obvious considering everything I’ve already shared about my own backstory in the process of waxing loquacious to fill in additional canonical details that didn’t feature in the referenced video essay here.

I promised that the notes about my own sexual proclivities would come back, did I not? As BJR is canonically known for doing, I always keep my word. Not hyperbole in the slightest for either of us. On Black Jack’s end this gets referenced explicitly by Claire in Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber when she is helping Randall care for his dying brother Alex. It also gets demonstrated consistently by other characters and Randall himself throughout his storylines in both Season 1 and Season 2 of the show.

So indeed, oneof the things I find most resonant about Black Jack is that he leans into whatever the other person in an encounter is giving him and bases his own behavior on that. This is made quite clear on the show in numerous ways—and arguably even clearer in the source novels by Diana Gabaldon, wherein we learn from Book 1 / Outlander that Black Jack frequently has trysts with domestic employees in the Scottish countryside.

Many people find Black Jack charming and handsome, to the point that he has a drawer full of perfume-scented love letters in his office at Fort William. Hilarious comic relief because he’d clearly have no reason for keeping those around other than masturbation fodder. Those of you who’ve circulated that meme about jerking off face down on the bed with the #black jack randall tag applied are entirely understanding the assignment.

For all the times he’s sexually assaulted someone—which seems to be countable on one hand for any person who isn’t Jamie himself, and near zero for anyone who isn’t associated with Jamie Fraser in some way—Randall has clearly had plenty of consensual sex with people who are not only willing but also entirely enthusiastic to get in his breeches. In the books we also learn about some rumors surrounding another prisoner named Alex MacGregor. These are never confirmed and it’s unclear even from the rumors themselves what the exact nature of Black Jack’s relationship with MacGregor was.

Why is this so important to highlight in analysis of queer villains? Here I go again quoting Carmen Maria Machado as I have before in both fic and commentary and surely will again: The world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt. This, friends, is the thesis of Black Jack Randall.

He shows little to no redeeming qualities, offers no sympathetic backstory to why he acts the way he does, and appears purely to have been driven by rage and violent pleasure.

Oh my. I’m going to leave S2E05 “Untimely Resurrection” and S2E12 “The Hail Mary” alone for the moment. But even in S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” we start to get some light shed on what Randall is really doing in Scotland. We learn by degrees later just how much his reasons for being there belie what we see on the surface. This gets expanded on in the books where the reveal on Randall’s benefactor the Duke of Sandringham being a secret Jacobite is much more detailed. But even on the show, we learn by S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine” that Sandringham got outed as a suspected traitor to the Crown.

Goodness knows he's been outed as gay from the start to everyone but Claire, who didn’t learn this until much later after making the initial blunder of falling for Black Jack’s gambit about Sandringham having a wife. Not that this would have stopped him from being gay, of course. So-called “lavender marriage” was indeed relatively commonplace—and remains so now in some communities—both generally and in Outlander specifically. I’ll cover that in detail when we get to the points about Lord John Grey below. Notably for now, Sandringham rather than Randall himself is much more centered in a villain role in Season 2. And apropos of other content here, he absolutely doesn’t qualify for tropes about redeeming qualities. The extent of his monstrosity gets revealed in that same episode near the end of Season 2 when it comes to light that he ordered his valet Albert Danton to attack and rape his own goddaughter Mary Hawkins in an alleyway in Paris.

Even early in the series it thus seems difficult to consider Black Jack the most loathsome villain in Outlander. We’ll get to Mary in earnest—and the extreme tenderness with which Black Jack always treats her from their first meeting until his death at Culloden Moore—as we go along. For now, remember what Claire learned about Black Jack’s fate all the way back in S1E01 “Sassenach” where she and her husband Frank Randall were looking into his family genealogy in the Reverend Reginald Wakefield’s office at Inverness during their long-belated honeymoon. Some details missing there certainly, which only get revealed by degrees in Season 2. Black Jack really is Frank’s 5x great-grandfather though; he’s just not his only 5x great-grandfather.

I should probably mention here that I’m donor conceived and that I wasn’t told the truth… No, that’s putting it too kindly. I did note that I’ve always been quite dedicated to seeing the good in people who do bad deeds, and to working tirelessly to bring it out. But enough is enough. My parents lied to my face for 18 years about my ancestry. I asked them point-blank about it several times and they still told me lies. I finally got the truth out of my mother on a balcony overlooking an olive grove halfway around the world. The bus ride to get back to the nearest city and the airport were the longest four hours of my life. I never traveled with them again. And the hole inside of me never fully closed, and never will.

This too will resurface when I get to the content about Mary Hawkins and her marriage to Black Jack. I’m getting there, I promise. As my spouse once put it: I knew you were going to land the plane.

Getting back to early portions of Outlander canon and what we learn about Black Jack in Season 1 though, there’s also the iconic S1E08 “Both Sides Now” extended scene in which Black Jack gives Claire his own perspective on what he’s doing in Scotland in the first place and how distasteful he finds his work. How badly he wishes he could just go home and be warm and take a bath. How little he cares about the outcome of the conflict and how futile he feels it all is. We already know from a couple episodes prior that he loathes both the British aristocracy and his own superiors in the Army, who treat him like he’s lower than the dirt he then passive-aggressively shakes out all over their wardroom at Brockton. Including and especially his commanding officer Lord Thomas, a general who’s about as flamingly gay-coded as Will Tavington in The Patriot.

Oh, and speaking of being driven only by violent pleasure that is entirely incorrect—S2E02 “Not in Scotland Anymore” alone makes this perfectly clear. I’ve previously covered the finer details about Black Jack bottoming enthusiastically, and also enjoying gentler sexual experiences as well as rougher ones.

Black Jack’s interactions with Jenny in her flashbacks from S1E12 “Lallybroch” also shed light on this; once she goes inside the house with him, he only touches her with gentle curiosity until she bashes him over the head with a heavy object. Even then, he responds by…tossing her onto to the bed and getting partially undressed. When she starts laughing at him because he can’t get an erection (a telling piece of evidence of how Black Jack ultimately loses interest in sex if the other person doesn’t want it to at least some degree, or feel strong emotions about it that they’re willing to show) he panics and conks her head against the bedpost so he can flee without it being obvious that she chased him off.

Then there’s also the prior content from Book 1 / Outlander about the scented letters and the maids, some of which also comes back in Book 8 / Written in My Own Heart’s Blood when Roger Wakefield goes looking for Black Jack at Fort William after time traveling to 1739 a couple of weeks after Randall’s installation as commander there. I’ll come back to that a bit later given how much that scene reveals about Randall’s character and his reasons for being in Scotland.

And most of all, his villainy is compounded by the fact that he will rape, torture, and murder men and women alike—an equal opportunity monster.

Correct in essentials on the first two items as I cover elsewhere. Not so much on the third, though! In fact, the TV adaptation clarifies this beyond the information we get in the books. Whereas Book 1 / Outlander features murky rumors about Randall possibly killing one of his own soldiers at Fort William so he can pin the murder on Jamie, show canon makes little of this and indeed offers several opportunities to see Black Jack deliberately not killing people who attack him.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the final episode where he appears, S3E01 “The Battle Joined”. In that Culloden-centric episode, we watch Randall get fully pulled from his horse by a group of Scots warriors who then proceed to attack him. Up to that point Black Jack has just been shooing people away from his horse by swinging his cavalry saber in the air. Once on the ground, he basically just elbows his way out of the cluster of Jacobite soldiers and makes a beeline for Jamie instead.

Then of course there’s also Black Jack’s aggrieved, hesitant behavior at Wentworth Prison in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” right before the cows show up to give him the business. Although Randall is well known for keeping his word, even by people who despise him absolutely, he looks defeated and anxious when Jamie reminds him that he owes him the debt of taking his life ahead of the gallows in exchange for finally “[making] free of [his] body” (see S2E02 “Castle Leoch”) in the night. Jack takes out a dagger and sort of swings it around idly—with a look on his face that can only be described as “Really?” Any playfulness remaining there seems to come from Black Jack eyeing Jamie’s nude body and thinking about what else he might do with the blade besides killing him.

Randall has a zero kill count onscreen in the television show. I’d be remiss not to note here how this places him behind even his own eventual wife Mary Hawkins, often heralded quite accurately as one of the characters in Outlander who comes closest to embodying pure goodness. But of course, the trauma of sexual violence can twist a person’s mind horribly. I might know just a little about this myself. And it only takes one experience, more so given the horrifying context outlined in S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine”. Like anyone else, Mary has the capacity for brutal violence herself if pushed sufficiently far. I consider it something of a miracle I never went that route myself considering my own experiences can scarcely even be counted in any meaningful way. I can only think in terms of years. Seven of them whose shadows will never fully retract. When I say Black Jack and Mary were a perfectly arranged marriage, it isn’t for nothing.

We’ll get to her in earnest, I promise! Of course, I’ve already covered that ground in fiction before.

Randall makes his monstrous mark on Season 1 by sexually assaulting both of the show’s protagonists, Claire and Jamie.

Correct in essentials, but potentially a false equivalence. I’m not sure how much the video essay was intended to set the assaults on Jamie and Claire up as direct mirrors of one another. There is however a common thread here worth pulling out: How in Season 1 Black Jack only goes through with assaulting people who show at least some sexual interest in him.

Randall assaults three people in Season 1 overall: Claire in S1E01 “Sassenach” and S1E08 “Both Sides Now”; Jenny in flashbacks from S1E02 “Castle Leoch” and S1E12 “Lallybroch”; and Jamie in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” and S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul”. He also propositions Claire and Jamie together in S1E09 “The Reckoning” in an echo of propositioning Jamie individually in the S1E02 “Castle Leoch” flashback. But of the three people he assaults, only two respond with any sustained evidence of interest amid their anger and indignation.

The hateful attraction Jamie feels for Black Jack has been flogged—to borrow Frank’s phrasing about press coverage of Claire’s mysterious disappearance and return from S2E01 “Through a Glass, Darkly”—almost as badly as the man’s own back by this point. So I won’t belabor that here except to say it’s entirely nonrandom that Jamie keeps enticing Black Jack into further conflict after recovering from the brutal assaults at Wentworth and discovering Randall alive in Paris. He’s still having horny nightmares over two decades later about everything from weird group therapy scenarios with shamans on misty mountains (not hyperbole, see Book 6 / A Breath of Snow and Ashes for the goods) to fighting a totally naked Black Jack at Culloden and winding up covered in his “hot, hot blood” while they lie on the ground in a clinch (see Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone for that especially choice sequence) and exhausting Claire’s patience so badly in rehashing these that he eventually resorts to rambling about the dreams to Jenny instead.

What doesn’t tend to come out as much in analysis of the TV series is the key plot point from Book 1 / Outlander that Claire feels attracted to Black Jack because of his resemblance to Frank. Not just in appearance, but also in certain mannerisms and pleasures—see the shaving scene from S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and Claire’s flashbacks to shaving Frank thusly with the very same razor, for example. Little surprise then how in Book 1 / Outlander she specifically mentions feeling “compelled to open [her] legs for him” when he ties her hands behind her back at Fort William in the equivalent sequence to later portions of S1E08 “Both Sides Now”.

By her own admission this latent attraction-by-association does not wane entirely until after she and her friends rescue Jamie from Wentworth Prison at the end of Season 1. After that point, things go the other way. Although Claire spends Season 2 in an odd state of détente with Black Jack himself, even after the events of S2E07 “Faith” for which neither she nor Jamie explicitly blame Jack, she initially feels afraid of Frank when she reconnects with him back in the 20th Century as seen in S2E01 “Through a Glass, Darkly”. Why mention this here? That fear only subsides when Claire sees how much Frank treasures being a father to Brianna, the child she conceived with Jamie before going back through the stones to her own time. Indeed, later installments of the book series also show Claire deliberately striving for accuracy in her remembrances of both Frank and Black Jack as complicated men who were capable of deep love.

Scuffling is also arousing for Black Jack. Although the shaving scene demonstrates that this isn’t the only sort of physical pleasure he enjoys, he certainly gets a kick out of it regardless. So Claire’s willingness to scrap with him—including when she literally gives him a kick to the testicles with her knee in S1E01 “Sassenach” after he pins her to the ground in the forest—heightens the arousal and feels like play to him. Contrast this with Jenny’s incredulous laughter and complete unwillingness to take the fight further after hitting him over the head with a blunt object to get him to back off.

Does this take any of Randall’s actions out of the territory of assault? Nope. But it does provide a context to his motivations. Although his means of seeking affection are entirely warped, at the end of the day Black Jack really is after human connection. I’m entirely in agreement with other Outlander fans who’ve mentioned wanting a companion series about the Randall family. I have my own ideas about that history that I’ve referenced in transformative works. I would also love to see Gabaldon’s own perspective on what damaged Black Jack’s psyche so badly.

Finally, Randall’s treatment of women often differs from his treatment of men just in general. By his own admission in S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” he is “not a casual person with women” usually. He says this while expressing regret for how he treated Claire in the woods outside Craigh Na Dun. Which is very genuine per his actor’s own comments about playing the character; Tobias Menzies has mentioned in interviews that Black Jack always believes whatever he’s saying fully in the moment.

Something to note about Black Jack in general is that he will express regret and then claim he doesn’t feel it. This is probably quite accurate considering Jack shows a lot of signs of dissociation and may not feel much of anything most of the time. We see an example of this simultaneous expression and negation of regret in S2E12 “The Hail Mary” during the sequence at the tavern. And although the meaning of Randall’s comment about not being casual initially seems ambiguous, we get the reveal on it entirely in that same episode via the dynamic between Black Jack and Mary Hawkins. He takes her well-being and her safety so seriously that he’d rather die than risk any chance of hurting her.

Of course, his brandy-soaked mind isn’t realizing that she’ll get hurt far worse if he does die. We see enough in both book and show canon to understand how Black Jack treated Mary in life. Even that single moment where he enters the room at the boarding house says a lot; his entire face lights in a genuine smile that reaches his eyes as soon as she looks at him. The interactions between the two of them are some of the most delicate and tender moments of the entire season.

These sequences also provide some context for the different handling of the moments after Alex’s death. In the Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber version of this sequence Black Jack is crying and so drunk he can barely stand, whereas in episode S2E12 “The Hail Mary” he’s more lucid and vacillates between catatonic silence and a harrowing moment of punching his brother’s cadaver. Calls back to Claire’s comment in S1E02 “Castle Leoch” about how “there’s no joy in flogging a dead man” because of course this wasn’t about joy. Black Jack is entirely devastated, both for himself and for Mary. And although Mary herself looks pained at seeing this unfold, and clings to Claire in response, she looks more heartbroken than afraid. Her depth of emotion in that moment contrasts clearly with her apathy at gazing upon Danton’s dead body and Sandringham’s decapitated corpse back at his Bellhurst Manor estate (or Belmont House depending on which version of canon one consults) in the previous episode.

Finally and perhaps relatedly, I should spotlight Black Jack’s “I choose the whore” comment from S1E01 “Sassenach” about his own taste in women. Although part of an ironic commentary on the juxtaposition of Claire’s accent and vocabulary with her ample use of profanity, this also tells us a fair amount about Randall’s overall attitudes toward class. We learn in other portions of canon such as S2E06 “Best Laid Schemes” and various sequences in the first two books that Randall visits sex workers and that there aren’t lurid rumors swirling around about his treatment of feminine prostitutes. Black Jack’s sexual antagonism toward other men is more intense by design.

Randall’s queerness is a weapon that he wields indiscriminately.

Not really. That would be his dick. Randall generally doesn’t go through with assaulting people who don’t show any sexual interest during the initial scuffle. In fact, he can’t even get aroused physically when the other person isn’t fighting him in a horny way. Even when the person is somewhat horny it still doesn’t work for Randall unless their level of arousal is high. We see this with the assault on Claire during S1E08 “Both Sides Now” and especially in the equivalent scene from Book 1 / Outlander.

The only exception to this is an assault that happens during Season 2—which definitely seems like a missed opportunity to mention in direct parallel to the reference to preying on children in Rowan’s analysis of Lestat from Interview with the Vampire. During the S2E06 “Best Laid Schemes” chronology later revealed in full during S2E07 “Faith” Randall assaults Claudel, a boy who either pickpockets or works (depending on whether one goes with the show or book version of the canon backstory) at the Maison Élise brothel in Paris.

On the show it’s clear that he does this specifically to get Jamie to fight him; he knows Jamie is on the premises collecting debts and that Claudel has been walking around with him. Sure enough, upon hearing Claudel scream Jamie comes bursting into the room, hauls Black Jack into the hallway, and proceeds to beat the daylights out of him. The look of delight on Randall’s face at seeing him appear and subsequently getting pummeled by him leaves little doubt as to his objective in assaulting Claudel.

In Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber the timing and particulars of this storyline differ substantially. But as in the show, Randall is canonically an alcoholic and gets progressively deeper into his cups throughout the Paris storyline and his brother’s subsequent health decline. At the brothel he’s so drunk he doesn’t know where he is, what is going on around him, or even seem to remember who he is. Given the greater development of intrigue in the books surrounding whether Randall had a sexual relationship with his younger brother Alex, it seems likely that the angle here is Black Jack somehow seeking Alex in a person who reminds him of his brother during his early adolescent years.

No one is safe.

Aren’t they? Here we go, then. Time for some detailed Mary Hawkins content at long last.

The basics: We learn all the way back in S1E01 “Sassenach” and equivalent sequences from Book 1 / Outlander that before dying at the Battle of Culloden, Black Jack Randall married someone named Mary Hawkins and that she later gave birth to a son named Denys. Claire encounters Mary Hawkins for the first time in France in S2E02 “Not in Scotland Anymore” and grows closer to her while having the vague sense that she knows that name from somewhere. It isn’t until learning in S2E03 “Useful Occupations and Deceptions” that Black Jack himself is still alive that Claire realizes where she’s seen Mary’s name before: Frank’s family bible during a meeting with the Reverend Wakefield.

At first glance, Mary is everything one wouldn’t expect in someone who’d eventually marry Black Jack—or at least Claire thinks so. She feels completely befuddled by how someone who seems so meek and timid could possibly end up with someone like Black Jack. This becomes all the more confusing for Claire in S2E04 “La Dame Blanche” when Mary is getting involved with Jack’s younger brother Alex, a curate who has accompanied his employer the Duke of Sandringham to Paris. After Claire and Mary are attacked in an alleyway at Sandringham’s behest, resulting in Mary getting raped by a mysterious assailant later revealed to be the Duke’s own valet Albert Danton, Alex cares for her—and then gets locked in the Bastille for his trouble. Claire wrestles with her conscience about whether to get Alex freed given her own knowledge of how Black Jack and Mary are supposed to wind up together if Frank is ever to be born at all.

Leave it having half the information resulting in getting things half right, as often happens in Outlander and in life alike.

Mary has been leveling up her confidence throughout Season 2 and corresponding portions of Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber while growing closer to both Claire and Alex. We don’t see onscreen how her social relationship with Black Jack himself evolves once he arrives in Paris—but in the TV series the two clearly know one another well already when Jack shows up at the boarding house in S2E12 “The Hail Mary”. In book canon the different pacing of events puts Black Jack’s wedding to Mary and Alex’s death earlier in the year, leaving a couple months until the Battle of Culloden. On the show Black Jack and Mary are only married for three days but have substantially more history with one another prior to their wedding. Blending the canons offers a portrait of two people uniquely poised to understand each other, united through their shared love of Alex but also oddly well matched on several other fronts.

Have I freeze-framed those sequences of S2E12 “The Hail Mary” that feature Mary and Black Jack interacting? Yes. Several times. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to plummet into that sort of derangement.

For the rest of you fine folk, the cocktail napkin summary here is that Mary represents both the shining gentleness that Black Jack so prizes in his younger brother—and I’d encourage anyone who still thinks of him as a Complete Monster to consider how Alex turned out so well in the first place given Jack is documented as the only member of their family who’s taken responsibility for his well-being—and the capacity for ruthless violence that Black Jack repeatedly points out in himself.

Here I should mention though that Black Jack remains as dedicated to veracity in this as in anything else. When he says “I dwell in darkness, madam—and darkness is where I belong” to Claire at Brockton in S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” he’s saying this as much to convince himself as to convince her. Ditto his comments to her at the tavern, most of all the haunting question: “Do you really want Mary in my bed?” Where exactly would she be safer than with someone who has consistently treated her like gold, who looks at her as if the sun shines directly from her face, and who would move mountains to honor his beloved brother’s wishes? And wouldn’t Captain Zero Kill Count also understand well from Mary’s own history what would happen to him if he were to lay so much as an unwanted finger on her? She killed a practical stranger in all but cold blood with a triumphant hiss of satisfaction!

Badass, by the way. Judging by his responses to Claire throughout the series—see his comments in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” describing Claire as “no coward” and “a fit match for [her] husband” for example—I suspect Black Jack agreed. He even said explicitly in the same episode that he “cannot give [Claire] a better compliment than that” regarding her bravery and nerve mirroring Jamie’s own. I imagine quite a bit is happening behind those hazel eyes (described by Claire oftentimes as cold but noted distinctly by Roger in Book 8 / Written in My Own Heart’s Blood as being warm) whenever Black Jack looks at Mary.

Especially because Mary herself got Randall’s own abuser offed via Murtagh Fraser keeping a promise of his own in S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine” by following up Mary’s own dagger-assisted disposal of Danton with an axe swing to Sandringham’s neck. Consider one of the only things Black Jack tells us verbatim about his life offscreen: In S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” a visibly shaken Randall tells Claire about finding Private McGreevey beheaded a couple weeks prior. By contrast, Mary regards her own godfather’s headless corpse with a shrug and says “I think we’d better go” in a matter-of-fact tone. Mary, all of 16 years old at the time, has no combat experience whatsoever and keeps her cool about this absolutely. Quite an evolution even from earlier in the same episode when she questions her ability to assist Claire in communicating with Hugh Munro just outside to help Murtagh and Jamie sneak into the Duke’s house.

Our girl comes through in the end—right before we watch the steel in her spine break through in earnest as she picks up a dagger from a table full of food and ends her rapist’s life after the reveal of this being the same man who attacked her in Paris. And she doesn’t lose her nerve after the immediate danger has passed, either. When we next encounter her at Inverness in S2E12 “The Hail Mary” she’s bullying a pharmacist into giving her more laudanum to ease Alex’s coughing and pain as his illness progresses. Then when Claire recognizes her and says hello, Mary immediately lights into her for conspiring to keep her and Alex apart.

I’ll note that as a person with progressive lung disease myself, I really appreciated Mary’s ire here. However strategic and born of understandable fears that Frank would never get to live, Claire’s invocation earlier in Season 2 of the tired old idea that chronically ill people make undesirable partners—that we can only take from the world and never give—rings both hollow and sour. After all, I’ve been there before. And in many ways I’m still scrambling frantically to escape the shadow of those ideas. To quote my spouse again: You never stop running until long after the demons finally stop chasing you.

I admire Mary Hawkins because she knew when to run—and moreover, because she knew when to stop running and bring the man who chased her in the first place down in sniveling puddle with a knife through his kidney. “It’s messy,” Black Jack said back in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” of killing people with daggers. But the visceral impact there—exact words and no mistake—never fails to feel any less relatable for me, considering my own experiences.

Here’s the other thing: People came to save Mary Hawkins. When she needed help, people showed up. She killed her own rapist but she had an audience and she had backup. Murtagh demonstrated how seriously he took the promise to avenge Mary if he ever found out who was responsible for the attacks on her and Claire. Black Jack took showing up in Paris to help Alex earlier in Season 2 with similar gravity. In Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber Claire specifically reflects on how “Jack Randall was a gentleman” with all his promises, and has never given anyone reason to doubt his word despite being awful in many other ways. The fact that Black Jack chose to keep his vows to Mary by caving to the self-loathing fear of being able to love her better by dying and leaving her and Denys his pension than by living and showing her the same fierce devotion he showed Alex doesn’t negate the seriousness of those promises in his mind.

Again exact words there regarding love as action. I’m certain from her own subsequent sharing about Black Jack to their son that Mary would have appreciated both the devotion and the ferocity. And likewise, that Jack himself already appreciated Mary’s own variety of darkness and the specifics of how it manifested after first taking root.

In that spirit I highly recommend visiting the Outlander Wiki page about Mary for additional specifics on her background and character arc. Don’t sleep on the pictures if you do venture over there, especially the ones featuring her looking deep in thought while wearing an elaborate silk gown. That’s not the face of an innocent little lamb with no capacity for brutality of her own. And even prior to her rape, Mary often manipulates people to get what she wants by pouting and playing coy. Which of course tracks—Siri, play “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates! See also my reblog commentary on a dear mutual’s wonderful art envisioning Black Jack and Mary in a happier timeline.

TL;DR: Mary has a lot of steel in her spine. But it doesn’t save her from additional tribulations. Indeed, those further struggles wind up serving as evidence of Black Jack’s own character and how he treated her himself during their brief marriage prior to his death.

I don’t tend to cry over media. But I absolutely teared up reading Denys Randall’s words about Black Jack in Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone. Denys is Black Jack’s son who—true to the expanded version in Book 1 / Outlander of the prophecy Claire whispers into Randall’s ear in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison”—never got to meet him because he died in battle. I won’t go into this in detail just here, but that book resoundingly refutes the idea that Black Jack ever treated his family like anything other than gold.

Even in Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber he speaks with grace and understanding about his older brother Edward, the family heir who is stingy and neglectful and married to a person who clearly and openly hates Black Jack for being queer. In that later book though, we learn how Black Jack actually treated Mary and how carefully he made sure that Denys would always be taken care of financially even if something happened to Mary later on and the income from her widow’s pension was lost. He specifically set aside money for Denys to buy a commission in the Army—or to get an education if he had been considered female, so that he wouldn’t wind up trapped in a loveless marriage for the sake of survival.

The contrast Denys then draws with how Mary’s second husband Robert Isaacs—who was very materially wealthy and very kind to Denys but not a loving spouse—gave me chills. Yeah, Mary Hawkins did get abused by one of her husbands. Just not Black Jack Randall. The clarity with which Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone shows how much better off Mary would have been socially and emotionally if Black Jack had survived to raise Denys with her wrecked me and still does.

I was and am lucky to have an amazing dad. The lies he and my mother told are wholly understandable stains on the records of two people who have always done their best in an absolutely garbage world that thinks very little of fathers who do not sire their children. And I know some of the members of the sperm donor’s family as well, though not my biological father himself. They’re pretty cool people too. One of my great-cousins on that side said he’d be proud to have been my biological father if he too had chosen to donate to that research study. I did cry then. I’ll never forget opening that letter with my hands shaking while I sat on the stoop of my old house. I can’t impress enough on those of you who are direct genetic descendants of both your parents what that meant to me. I can’t tell you how it feels to look in the mirror and always see a huge question mark. To miss a person you’ve never met, to feel them there like the phantom sensation from an amputated body part.

Denys Randall understands that entirely. And as much as Alex clearly loved his son in life and death alike, we come away from that storyline knowing just how thoroughly Black Jack was a real father to Denys. We also learn how Mary keeps his memory alive and still carries a torch for him as she also continues to mourn Alex. Knowing how much she withdrew into herself haunts me. I keep fixing it in my fics. There will never be a story of mine where Mary isn’t loved and cherished—no matter how much trauma she goes through.

Which also seems to have been Black Jack’s philosophy about both her and Denys. Tragically if quite understandably, he deluded himself into thinking he could love them better in death than in life. The reveal in Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone on just how tragic a choice this wound up being still crushes me. Because it’s such a hopeless lesson, isn’t it? The idea that cycles of abuse and violence can only be broken by meeting a gruesome end oneself. That humanity has no hope for redemption. That rapists can only ever be rapists, nothing else. Even if they were clearly many other things all along.

This is, incidentally, why as much as I enjoy exploring continuities in which the specific canonical unfolding of events from Wentworth Prison gets averted to at least some degree, I have more active continuities in which this does not happen. I even retconned one of my older stories somewhat because I realized that for the rest of the continuity to play out as I envisioned it, and fully develop the ideas I wanted to develop, straying more than a hair from the exact canonical take in the initial arc didn’t make sense. The results from that deeper thinking are what I just dropped this past Saturday in observance of Alex Randall’s death anniversary. Among my published stories, I presently have three continuities that feature some aversion of the canonical Wentworth sexual assaults and three others that feature no aversion whatsoever.

Someone once asked me if I thought Black Jack and Jamie could ever have a healthy relationship after what happened at the prison in canon. It certainly seems unlikely. But fiction isn’t exclusively about showing healthy relationships. To me, it’s about showing relationships that make sense for the story being told. And in that regard, I do explore the strange intimacy that sometimes grows between trauma bonded people. After all, it’s a tale I’ve come to know well. One I’ve written in my own life. One I’m arguably still writing.

I cannot bring myself to swallow whatever poisonous purity philosophy would lead me to believe that people who have sexually assaulted others in the past cannot have consensual sexual relationships as well. I also can’t ignore the considerable data I’ve amassed on this from direct personal experience.

If people cannot change, what are any of us even doing here? Why not just give up the ghost of life on a burning planet—leave the indignities and hurts of corporeality behind forever? That sort of thinking seems more bleak than anything Black Jack Randall could possibly say or do. Indeed, him winding up looking at his own choices that way in the end broke two hearts irrevocably. And that’s a charitable estimate. Jamie’s own haunting memories, vivid dreams, and enduring obsessions about Black Jack throughout Book 4 / Drums of Autumn and beyond make clear that killing Randall didn’t solve anything, or diminish the formidable pull Jamie feels toward him. Even in show canon, when Claire reveals in S2E03 “Useful Occupations and Deceptions” that Jack is still alive Jamie breathes a sigh of relief and expresses joy at having his will to live restored.

Sure, he frames this around a specific interest in getting revenge against Randall. What’s that saying about digging two graves? There’s no exact source for this in any documented Confucius writings, but the idea certainly holds up. Jamie almost heads to his own grave for the sake of tangling with Randall one last time. For his trouble he winds up nearly dying on the battlefield, then doing the same from a severe infection secondary to his wounds, then goes on the lam for several years and lives in a cave, and then winds up incarcerated under especially deplorable conditions before getting paroled to indentured servitude and winding up coerced into sex again. All while still having relentless horny dreams about Black Jack—which only get hornier after Claire returns to him nearly two decades later. Amazing.

It perfectly correlates that he’s not just a sadistic person, but also holds a powerful position as a member of a colonizing military force.

This came so close to full accuracy. Like frostbitten Edward Little gasping his last with chains in his face levels of close.

Sadistic person? Yes. Powerful position? Kind of. We’ll get to that in a minute. Colonizing military force? Yes. However, is Black Jack himself a colonizer? Only if one discounts what gets revealed in Season 2 and the equivalent portions of Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber about the Duke of Sandringham having Jacobite sympathies and pulling the strings of Randall’s posting to Fort William.

The Reverend Wakefield and Black Jack’s fifth great-grandson Frank Randall unpack this to some extent in S1E01 “Sassenach” when discussing what Jack was doing in Scotland in the first place and the kind of reputation he built. We don’t get the full goods until close to the end of Season 2 with those scenes in S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine” where the British Army has Sandringham’s estate surrounded with a massive encampment.

To lay things out quite clearly for those less familiar with Outlander canon: Sandringham was deliberately and strategically trying to incite the Jacobite rebellion. He got Black Jack posted to Fort William specifically because he knew Randall could stir up sentiment against the Crown if given the proper conditions. What’s a better weapon of mass agitation than a terrible guy already maligned by his superiors for being bisexual and kinky and having “unnatural tastes” as Randall himself puts it in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” while rambling to Claire? If he didn’t give direct orders for Black Jack to lean into his worst impulses when presented with worthy adversaries, the Duke certainly gamed the system as much as possible by marooning Randall in a cold and isolated place where most of the civilians thought he was weird and most of the soldiers thought he was creepy.

Jack doesn’t connect all these dots directly during the scenes at the prison. But in S1E08 “Both Sides Now” during the Fort William sequences—in the broadcast version but even more so in this extended cut—we get Black Jack’s own perspectives on his posting in Scotland and how thoroughly he isn’t invested in the conflict there. All he wants is to go back home and be warm again. Which of course he can’t do, because it would spell serious harm for his younger brother per everything we learn throughout Season 2 and Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber.

Is Randall powerful in the Army? More so than the soldiers under his command, certainly. But as a Captain—per both what we see in the Brockton sequences of S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and historical information on British Army ranks—he’s subordinate to many others. Who very much enjoy putting him in his place, at that. So in terms of power relative to other English soldiers, he’s somewhere in the middle of the structure. To those now busily envisioning Office Space type corporate middle management AUs: I salute you! And I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday.

So what about with respect to other people and contexts? Black Jack definitely isn’t powerful relative to the Duke of Sandringham, per other content here. Indeed, he spends at least the last decade or so of his adult life quite firmly under Sandringham’s thumb. Probably other body parts too—see Randall’s hedging comments in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” about the Duke liking to talk “especially when he drinks” for example. Book 1 / Outlander and Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber provide additional context about Black Jack’s positionality relative to others in his world—especially via the Duke telling Claire how much Randall craves punishment.

Finally, let’s talk about Black Jack’s status relative to his self-made enemy Jamie Fraser. By which I mean not at all that Jamie is self-made, because of course he isn’t. As a Laird in charge of his own family estate on which tenant farmers pay taxes, Jamie comes from a more powerful family in the Scottish Highlands than Black Jack’s own back in southern England. We learn more from meeting characters like Mary Hawkins later in canon about how “not all baronetcies are created equal” as I once phrased it. Randall’s own father Sir Denys being a baronet didn’t mean much, as evidenced by Black Jack’s own comments to Claire during S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and equivalent portions of Book 1 / Outlander about his parents paying for tutors to help their son disguise any hint of a Sussex accent.

Ironically the most power Black Jack could’ve had over Jamie in any structural sense would have come from serving as his commander when the younger man fought in the British Army himself. Which would absolutely make for a splendid fic premise, but never happened in canon. Jamie and Black Jack don’t meet until the former is already back from France and settling in anew on his family’s Lallybroch estate in October of 1740.

We certainly meet other people connected to Jamie’s own family who would qualify as colonizers though. Given I already discuss Lord John Grey elsewhere, here I’ll mention Jamie’s aunt Jocasta Cameron as a prime example. Storylines set at her River Run plantation—yikes—beginning in Season 4 of the TV series and corresponding portions of the novels reveal her as not merely a colonizer but an enslaver. One who has the means—and indeed the implements ready at hand—to liberate her slaves but declines to do so. Even after pressure from people close to her. Double yikes.

I don’t want to set Jocasta up as somehow being more villainous than Black Jack; the two characters show us different aspects of the human capacity for knowing harm. However, I do find it telling that a bisexual person whose worst behavior focuses almost entirely on one guy—and otherwise gets directed at people somehow in his orbit—often gets held up as this shining paragon of evil by viewers outside the queer community, a point Rowan makes herself in the original video essay. What I’m specifically unpacking here is the colonialism angle. The bleak side of humanity shows up in many forms in Outlander with respect to colonialism as well as other forms of violence.

The queer figure is not just a danger to the individual, the men or women who might be their victims, but also a danger to society at large—because their existence contradicts oppose truths about what is natural and right.

This tracks. Randall would say so himself—and indeed he does, in almost those same exact words. “I may have what are called unnatural tastes,” he muses to Claire in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” while letting her hair down around her shoulders and then giving her a big old sniff and shivering with delight, “but I do have some aesthetic principles.” You know, just in case anyone was still wondering if Black Jack’s interest in women was genuine. Whether in the show or the books, we get plenty of evidence that Randall is in the mood for cunt as often as not, to borrow his own phrasing.

Incidentally, I need to point out how “me myself, I’m not in the mood for cunt today” is probably the most bisexual line ever uttered on television. Today. Mercy.

And so here we see this twisting of a homophobic rhetoric of queer danger to create a monstrous rapist colonial figurehead.

First, a clarification: The relevant phobia here is biphobia rather than homophobia. Rowan’s video essay covers this overall topic and the distinction between the two phenomena with substantial detail and insight. What doesn’t come through clearly in the video is how gay people are treated with much more respect in the story world of Outlander than their bisexual peers. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than with Lord John Grey, another queer Redcoat whose path intertwines with Jamie’s in numerous ways over the years.

After first encountering Grey as a scared teenager whose life Jamie spares in S2E09 “Je Suis Prest” we encounter him anew years later starting in S3E03 “All Debts Paid” as the incoming warden of Ardsmuir Prison where Jamie is incarcerated. Swiftly mortified by conditions at the prison, Lord John enlists Jamie’s help in working with prisoners and eventually forges a tenuous friendship with him. Much chess is also played. However, a wedge also gets driven between the two men when Lord John places his hand over Jamie’s one evening during a chess game, unaware of his history with Black Jack or how it would make him react to any expression of affection by another man.

But over time, Lord John secures Jamie’s parole to the Helwater estate where each of them respectively wind up entangled with one of the Dunsany sisters. The younger Geneva, a feisty and cantankerous person who develops quite a fondness for Jamie, coerces the Highlander into sleeping with her when she reveals that she knows his true identity and could get him in a lot of trouble. To get Jamie employment and ensure that he could stay out of prison, Lord John had to pass him off as a run-of-the-mill parolee instead of the fabled “Red Jamie” who helped to lead the Jacobite rebellion. Rather ironic considering Jamie killed one of the actual leaders of the rebellion and could likely have gotten significantly better treatment from the Crown based on that—but that’s beyond the scope of this analysis.

Throughout his storylines, whether serving as warden at Ardsmuir or Governor of Jamaica or any of the other roles he occupies over the years, Lord John is shown to be empathetic and kind. Not without fault certainly. Amongst other things there’s an intriguing storyline later in canon involving him and Claire that serves as a reminder of how sexuality is often not black and white. But he does get set up consistently as a foil to Randall, perhaps most effectively in his choice to marry Geneva’s older sister Isobel and care for the child she conceived with Jamie prior to dying while giving birth. Lord John presents a different take on fatherhood, choosing to give of his presence to William Ransom rather than feeling he can love him best in absentia.

The books offer some fascinating scenes in which Lord John’s son William and Black Jack’s son Denys encounter each other while both serving in the British Army in the American Colonies. That’s how we learn some of the information referenced elsewhere about what Mary Hawkins has passed on to her son about his father, and how she feels herself. I resonated a lot with both men’s sense of having a hole inside them. At this point William has lost two mothers and two fathers—Jamie having had quite a hand in the boy’s upbringing until age six. By 1778 when he encounters Denys again, he has learned the truth about who sired him.

I could write a whole other essay about that considering how relatable the entire storyline surrounding William’s parentage is. Folks who read my work likely know by this point that I got into Outlander because the interconnected storylines surrounding the Randall and Fraser families resonate with my own trauma in a way nothing else ever has. For purposes of this essay though, I’ll point out that even after lying to his kid for many years and dealing him a psychic wound that will never heal as a result, Lord John gets hailed as a good dad and a good person.

John Grey absolutely isn’t a rapist. In fact, in S3E04 “Of Lost Things” he reacts with horror at the idea of Jamie giving him sexual favors in exchange for raising his son. It turns out that Grey is already marrying Geneva’s older sister Isobel—another fascinating subject for deeper analysis that I’m planning to incorporate into my “Dispatches from Fort Laggan” continuity.

Brief sidebar apropos of general queer representation themes: The relationship between Lord John and Isobel offers an undersung illustration in Outlander canon of the diverse dynamics in queer marriages. I think there’s ample ground for reading the union between Lord John and Isobel as either a “lavender marriage” between a homosexual and homoromantic man with a heteroromantic or biromantic woman who’s asexual or a purely romantic marriage that doesn’t involve any sexual activity because one person isn’t interested at all and the other person is only interested with members of their own sex.

What’s more relevant here is how Lord John and Isobel clearly share a deep affection for one another that engages their shared love for other family members—quite similar to the dynamic between Black Jack and Mary. In serving as a foil for Black Jack on some fronts, Grey serves as a mirror in others. Unsurprising then how by the time he encounters William again, Denys Randall has dropped “Isaacs” from his surname entirely after the death of his stepfather Robert.

On the colonialism front, it would be difficult to frame Black Jack as being somehow the worse offender. Although not a Jacobite himself because he doesn’t care about the outcome of the English-Scottish conflict one way or another, he serves as an agent for the Jacobite cause de facto by agitating unrest at Sandringham’s behest. Ironically an example of punch-clock villainy in that regard. Although I wouldn’t ordinarily associate that trope with Black Jack for his zeal in antagonistic behavior towards Jamie and anyone in his orbit, it certainly seems to reflect how he approaches his career. Randall has no less antipathy for his fellow English people than he does for Scottish Highlanders, and indeed awkwardly hopes for acceptance by the local people while new at Fort William per his exchange with Roger in Book 8 / Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.

Meanwhile, Lord John’s storyline sees him become Governor of Jamaica. Governor of Jamaica. If that isn’t the epitome of white settler colonialism I don’t know what is.

Here’s a monster against which are two culturally opposed heroes; English Claire and Scottish Jamie can feel equally threatened.

I think I covered most of the relevant contrasts here in my musings on the sexual assaults against Jamie and Claire during Season 1. Here I’ll add that indeed a major plot point for Claire is how she often does not feel threatened by Randall—and how readily he comes to consider her an ally deserving of his deepest respect. This seems especially interesting in the context of Claire’s own ambiguous sexuality, which I touch on directly in some brief discussion of Geillis Duncan. And from their encounter in the gardens at Versailles from S2E05 onward, Claire by her own admission doesn’t consider Black Jack any sort of threat. She wants Jamie to leave him alone and let him help his brother out without the two of them getting into trouble for having horny fights. Dueling was illegal in Paris at the time, and indeed Jamie gets arrested for fighting Black Jack at the Bois de Boulogne a couple episodes later.

Prior to that though, Claire frantically ruins Jamie’s original plans for dueling Black Jack by getting Randall locked in the Bastille overnight on suspicion of raping Mary Hawkins. The irony to end all ironies, surely! Randall himself doesn’t even seem that aggravated about it given Claire did this in an effort to spare his life. He does however feel aggravated about Jamie apparently deciding he’s not worth the trouble to fight, not knowing all the history surrounding Frank Randall or why exactly Claire seems certain that he’ll die in April of 1746.

Both Black Jack and Claire wind up badly injured following the duel—her with a complicated stillbirth that leaves the placenta inside her body and nearly causes death from sepsis, and him from a significant stab wound to the groin. In show canon per S2E07 “Faith” this appears to be mainly a soft tissue injury to the pubic mound and possibly a cut to the side of the base of the penis; in the novel version it’s more extensive and involves some maiming of the penis and one testicle. I mention this now because in Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber Claire reflects specifically on Randall being even less of a threat because of his injuries. He’s also very ill in the novel version, likely from a recent bout of cholera, whereas in the show his physical impairments are caused by the cattle stampede from the rescue sequence at the beginning of S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul”.

So it seems unsurprising that when Black Jack reconnects with Claire at Inverness (Edinburgh in book canon) and begs her to use her skills in healing to save his brother Alex’s life, the two characters find themselves on remarkably even footing. Claire lampshades this herself in repeating Randall’s “I am not the man I once was” line from S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” back to him. Randall also acknowledges this amid strong praise for her medical acumen. He has long since gotten direct perspective on those competencies himself considering the aid she rendered to a badly injured British soldier at Brockton in the same episode, along with her clear success in rehabilitating Jamie’s hand following the extensive injuries Black Jack inflicted to it in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison”.

In both the show and book versions of canon, Claire shows Randall as much compassion as she can, and also expresses respect in her narrations for how he has shouldered the financial and instrumental costs of caring for his brother largely alone. When she urges him to wed Mary in their interactions at the tavern in S2E12 “The Hail Mary” she echoes many of Alex’s own sentiments about Black Jack’s capacity for tenderness and how seriously he takes caring for his family.

Given she already knows how Randall will die, and continues caring for him as best she can even after it gets revealed that Frank’s family line descends genetically from Alex rather than Black Jack himself, her “I’ll help you bleed him myself” comment to Jamie in S2E05 “Untimely Resurrection” seems more for his benefit than her own. Indeed, in book canon Claire feels threatened by Jamie’s lingering obsession with Randall and his repeated rambling about the strange erotic dreams he has about Black Jack. She wants him to have closure on that part of his life, thinking that Randall dying will put a stop to that fixation. Unfortunately for Claire it’s not that simple.

Even Jamie himself doesn’t consider Randall much of a threat in the end. In the book version of canon, he even attends Black Jack’s wedding and serves as a witness for him, whereas Murtagh does this on the show. Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber details how Jamie escorts a drunk and crying Black Jack back to his own quarters, holding him up because he can’t walk on his own. We never find out what exactly happened between the two of them in that room, though goodness knows a couple of enterprising fan authors have done heroic work in envisioning potentialities.

Show canon does deliver entirely on the erotic tenor of the final encounter between the two men just as Book 3 / Voyager does, with much of S3E01 “The Battle Joined” getting devoted to Black Jack and Jamie grappling with each other while moaning against each other’s ears and looking as if they’re about to have orgasms. Makes sense considering the showrunners reportedly instructed Tobias Menzies and Sam Heughan to go for a combination of the final battle sequence from The Patriot and the sex scene from Cold Mountain in their choreography. They definitely nailed it on the filming. Very much the same energy in the books from all of Jamie’s flashbacks to those moments and the time he spent lying under Black Jack’s body.

An irony that seems worth mentioning itself for how Randall’s last act was to protect Jamie from getting finished off himself during the British Army’s death sweeps of Culloden Moore. In light of this and all the other history between the two of them, it seems less surprising that Jamie left his wedding present—which Claire had returned to him for safekeeping before going back through the stones to her own time—of a dragonfly preserved in amber on the battlefield with Black Jack’s body.

And it’s by standing up to his reign of terror that the two come together, eventually falling in love.

Reign of terror? Not so much, for reasons I’ve already gone into elsewhere. What precisely is Randall “reigning” over in the first place? He’s an exiled soldier who got given a remote fort on a bunch of barren rocks surrounded by water in a freezing cold place that he hates. He has no power over anyone except his own soldiers.

In terms of more overt antagonism, Black Jack focuses the vast majority of his awful behavior on someone who even while chained to a dungeon floor could still kill him with his bare hands. Jamie does kill Black Jack’s much larger and stronger bodyguard Marley in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” while restrained thusly. If Randall is keeping the Highlands in any kind of iron grip, it’s so weak that he can’t even keep his own bodyguard alive with a chained-up prisoner. Who isn’t even there by his own doing, mind—Jamie gets picked up by a random Redcoat patrol after getting coerced in S1E13 “The Watch” into joining the Watch with Taran MacQuarrie, a suspected Jacobite accused of treason. More details on this get revealed in S1E14 “The Search” as Claire, Jenny, and Murtagh all strive to locate Jamie.

Much of that falls beyond the scope of this analysis. Directly within that scope though is how whether or not anyone likes it, Jamie survives his incarceration at Wentworth Prison because Black Jack raced down there just in time to get him brought down from the gallows. Given canonical knowledge of how Randall does nothing without sincerity—however twisted that sincerity may be—this paints a complicated picture of his impact.

Indeed, one of the things that makes the dynamic between Black Jack and Jamie so interesting and satisfying is how in many ways they’re equals. I covered that extensively in my Ask response about foil dynamics in Outlander canon, so I won’t rehash it in this analysis. But TL;DR: Black Jack assaulting Jamie, and Jamie assaulting Black Jack in kind, was never an exercise in one person punching up and the other punching down. Rather, it is very much an exercise in two people punching sideways. Which a dear mutual illustrated masterfully in their “Killer” sketch previously shared here on Tumblr.

Claire and Jamie do fall in love though. That process is fairly telling on its own—as Rowan points out herself with the very next insight in the video essay. But a few additional details can further unpack sexuality in the context of that relationship, especially in the context of both characters’ interactions with Black Jack.

By opposing Randall’s villainy, they are essentially fighting to maintain the political and social beliefs of the 1740s Scotland, while also solidifying their own relationship and sexual identities—which are heterosexual and monogamous even across time and space.

Okay, folks. I’m flicking on my megaphone here to remind everyone reading this that Jamie is bisexual and that the omission of this key canonical detail could inadvertently reproduce some of the stigmas against bisexuality the video aims to dismantle. I absolutely do not think Rowan did this intentionally. It may stem from limited engagement with the source material in general. I wouldn’t expect a video essay covering a wide scope of media to go into 16K+ words of detail about a single character! That’s what I’m here for. In that spirit, I highly recommend folks interested in going deeper with Outlander canon revisit Jamie’s own narration of his experiences in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” and the many things he says and does in later episodes regarding Black Jack. The books go into even more detail about how much Jamie still lusts after Randall even after the assault at Wentworth, I’ll note.

The more important point here though is how erasure of Jamie’s bisexuality via inattention to his own words can inadvertently reflect Claire’s own behavior at the abbey in that episode: refusing to listen to Jamie unless he tells her what she wants to hear, and specifically shutting him down every time he tries to make her understand that Black Jack made him face things he already wanted beneath the surface.

Even regarding Claire, nuances abound that seem especially important to explore given the above. Specifically concerning the ambiguity of Claire’s own sexuality—how although she never narrates herself clearly in bisexual context, she certainly gets into some telling situations with Geillis Duncan. Claire may not be explicitly bisexual per her own words as Jamie reveals himself to be from S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” and equivalent portions of Book 1 / Outlander onward. But we can certainly spot multiple bi-coded elements of her character before even getting to the whole Malva Christie business in Season 6 and Book 6 / A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

Geillis herself is another bi-coded villain who could put Randall to shame for the extent of her agenda and advance planning. Indeed, Geillis’s deeper intent and systemic aims qualify her much more classically for the villain designation than Randall himself, who behaves much more opportunistically. Let’s not forget that he leaves Jamie entirely alone for three years until the Highlander turns up in his office window at Fort William with an empty pistol! Likewise, Black Jack’s own service as an instigator of Jacobite rebellion only comes in exchange for the Duke of Sandringham protecting his beloved brother Alex—including not raping him, which gets further lampshaded by Jamie’s comments about how the Duke has treated him over the years.

It also seems worth noting how Claire offers a good example of how people who might be capable of polyamory through their capacity to love two different men at once don’t necessarily want polyamory. That’s why I abandoned a storyline in one of my early fic series development efforts—my first actually, which never saw the light of day in its original form because it morphed into “Dispatches from Fort Laggan” with a much greater depth of attention to the relationship between Black Jack and Jamie in parallel to his evolving relationship with Mary. Which winds up catapulting Jamie headlong into a raging attraction to Geneva Dunsany, someone much better equipped to meet his needs as a bisexual and kinky guy who’s perfectly capable of sustaining unspeakable horniness about an absurdly complicated man while also being a loving and devoted life partner to a woman.

But by making Lestat the only bi vampire in the show, his moral depravity can be seen as in some way linked to an assumed sexual depravity too—specifically of voracious appetite that separates his bisexual nature from either straight or gay counterparts.

This would be pretty accurate for Randall too. Kind of a missed opportunity to get things close to spot-on. With Randall though there’s even some Zig-Zagging of this aspect, which is part of what makes his character great. Although Black Jack has a voracious sexual appetite and is pretty much always DTF, he is also very much a Regular Guy with Regular Dick Function. He can’t just constantly get it up over and over. Between his alcoholism and his constant pursuit of sexual pleasure, he sometimes can’t get hard at all. He even has concerns about this with Jamie at Wentworth, gloating in delight when he does get an erection. The “can you feel that” scene in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” wherein Black Jack pulls Jamie’s hand against his crotch and expresses jubilation at having a boner is one of the funniest moments in the entire series to those of us who enjoy Randall’s character.

This is perhaps a good time to note that one thing queer villain representation often does beautifully is imbuing characters with hilarious and often bizarre senses of humor. When I’ve seen other writers frame Randall as humorless or “harrowingly joyless” I’ve wondered again if we watched the same show. The Brockton sequences from S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” alone ought to debunk this, from Randall’s passive aggressive dust party right down to his impish little wink at Claire while he dumps out the prized claret the senior officers were drinking before getting called out on some kind of wild goose chase.

Then there’s also his sardonic monologuing in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” about possible methods of killing Jamie in the morning, which is entirely tongue-in-cheek and intended solely to make Jamie get annoyed enough to tussle with him. I also consider the weirdly earnest threesome proposition from S1E09 “The Reckoning” when Jamie appears in the window of his office holding an empty pistol. It’s quite clear here that regardless of whether Jamie takes him up on it or just gets irritated enough to fight him fisticuffs and thus give him some nice opportunities to rub up against him, Randall is delighting in the offering.

Finally, we can’t forget his overjoyed little smiles whenever he sees either Jamie or Mary Hawkins. I covered much of this previously via in-depth discussion of Mary’s storylines. So here I’ll note that for all his own efforts to convince Claire that he’d be terrible for Mary, she doesn’t believe Black Jack in the slightest—because she’s already seen how he behaves with her, and likewise both seen and heard directly from Alex how kind and tender Randall has always been with his younger brother. Whom he basically raised, which is a whole other yarn.

Here’s the thing though: One doesn’t need to watch Outlander in any great depth to see that for Black Jack, much of the point of sadism lies in the aftercare. I haven’t belabored that point here overmuch because I don’t want to suggest that caretaking afterwards in any way negates harm done beforehand. However, Randall does consistently show genuine pleasure in taking care of another person. We see this in some ways with Jamie at Wentworth Prison in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” but then get a whole different context on it in Season 2, especially with S2E12 “The Hail Mary” when the curtain finally pulls back fully on Black Jack’s family life. The only moments where he seems to relax at all is when he’s helping someone feel better after a horrible privation—either by his own hand or from the ravages of illness. And in those moments, we see plenty of vulnerability. Which brings us to…

Unlike Randall, there is a vulnerability in and understanding of Lestat’s backstory that contextualizes his behavior.

I’m not so sure about this. Even midway through Season 1 starting with S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” this understanding of Randall’s character begins to fray at the edges. More details on that below. Likewise, we learn a good bit in Season 2 about Randall’s family and what has been going on behind the curtain of his own life as a result. But even beforehand, the scene in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” where Black Jack forlornly talks to Jamie in the dungeon cell while seated and looking at him with sad eyes says quite a bit. He finds Jamie’s rejection in the face of a clear attraction painful; this is no less important for his own vicious response to that pain after Jamie taunts him about having no self-control. Subsequently we see in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” the lengths Black Jack will go to for the sake of affectionate treatment.

Not all love is constructive or good, but Randall leaves little doubt in his own behavior that his actions are very much in pursuit of love. This gets lampshaded a final time in Book 6 / A Breath of Snow and Ashes with the reveal of what Randall mouthed to Jamie in that one sequence of S3E01 “The Battle Joined” just before collapsing on top of him and dying from his wounds. During the abbey sequences in Book 1 / Outlander Jamie also recalls Black Jack lying beside him on the dungeon floor, crying profusely and begging him to speak words of love. Adding in the murky context missing from the show—about Jack having some sort of sexual history with either the deceased prisoner Alex MacGregor and/or his own younger brother Alex Randall—paints a telling portrait of a man desperate for affection and connection.

Though he doesn’t excuse it, we see his traumatic past, and feel how much he yearns for family and love.

Very true about Lestat, certainly. But I’d say this could also have easily been written about Black Jack.

In other portions of this essay I cover Randall’s behavior at Wentworth Prison in Season 1 and the Inverness storyline at the end of Season 2. To rehash here in brief, the only things that matter to Black Jack are (A) someone loving him back in a way he understands and (B) doing whatever he can to take care of his family. Black Jack doesn’t say as much directly to this effect, but he certainly shows us through action that yearning for family and love motivate a lot of his behavior. The fact that his pursuit of these things often happens through twisted means scarcely means he doesn’t want them. Quite the opposite.

As for the traumatic past, Black Jack and other characters alike (especially the Duke of Sandringham) drop hints throughout the Season 1 and Season 2 storylines—and even more so in corresponding portions of Book 1 / Outlander and Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber—that Randall grew up in an abusive home and imprinted on that. It’s also clear from his interactions with Alex that he’s been protecting his brother from a lot over the years. The Duke himself certainly, but also other things. And in the corresponding sequences from the novels Jack goes into some detail about how little support he and Alex have ever gotten from their family back in Sussex, including from their older brother Edward even now that Alex is dying.

Then of course Black Jack himself talks aloud to Claire at Brockton about his traumatic present and how the armed conflict in Scotland has further warped his mind. He’s clearly shaken about finding one of his own men brutally beheaded and speaks in more general terms about being “not the man [he] once was” as a result of his military service. No surprise either that he looks like a fish out of water the one time we see him in non-military dress during S2E12 “The Hail Mary”. Black Jack may not like what serving in the Army has done to further damage his psyche, but at this point it’s all he understands and the only place he feels he belongs at all. On that front…

It’s not difficult to see the parallels between his existence as a vampire, and the isolation and threat many members of the queer community feel.

Here I should also include my response to the aforementioned excellent meta on homosociality in The Patriot canon. As noted previously I’m hoping to release a similarly focused reflection of my own in time addressing Outlander canon directly. For now I’ll applaud Rowan’s general attention in the video to how bisexual people often become isolated within the queer community as well as in the world at large.

Double marginalization is a lonely experience in the utmost—and one that can breed tremendous resentment. That anger has to go somewhere more often than not. Even without the added burden of silent rage from sexual violence and the constant “insult to injury” experience of having our own trauma collide with that of others walking a similar path, things are tough. And the data on experiences of rape and abuse in the bisexual community remain incredibly damning.

So again, I think Lestat and Black Jack would find plenty of common ground in one another’s histories. Although Lestat himself doesn’t really meet the criteria for sexual sadism, he certainly enjoys bloodplay and the general aesthetic of violence as part of intimate congress. This isn’t surprising in the slightest considering how the capacity to enjoy such pleasures often grows and sharpens in response to abuse of any form, including rape and domestic violence.

My own life has certainly been an exercise in this. If that seems confusing, consider: For people who are well accustomed to people bleeding on us when we didn’t cut them, it can feel immensely satisfying to have someone bleed on us because we did cut them.

Whereas the initial seasons of Outlander have no sympathetic or heroic queer heroes at all, Interview with the Vampire does give us another lead who fulfills this protagonist role in Louis.

I’m glad this was the last content in the video that mentioned Outlander directly. I think there’s enough context from the rest of this segment for viewers to understand the intended contrast here. Prior to Season 3 we don’t encounter characters in Outlander who are fully immersed in their queerness other than Black Jack, whereas Interview with the Vampire centers characters who show more of that immersion from the beginning on both the protagonist and antagonist sides.

Given the centrality of Jamie’s character arc to Randall’s though, the omission of his own bisexuality from this video essay seems quite the lost opportunity. To reiterate, in both versions of canon beginning with S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” and equivalent sequences from the novels we get verbatim documentation directly from the source that Jamie is bisexual himself. This is in addition to his earlier comments about considering the prospect of sleeping with Randall at Fort William and only turning him down because he thought his dad would be disappointed in him. Not for having same-sex relations, but rather for capitulating to another man. That’s a lot to unpack, folks.

Indeed, Jamie’s storylines throughout the TV and book series alike are often demonstrations of how the ideation of heterosexuality and the pressure to live a heterosexual life do deep harm to bisexual men. This gets lampshaded further by the anvilicious contrasts constantly drawn between Black Jack and the decidedly gay Lord John Grey. The latter is set up as a perennial foil for Randall, getting into similar scenarios with Jamie—starting with his time as warden at Ardsmuir Prison in Season 3 and Book 3 / Voyager—but taking them in entirely different directions. Which I appreciate in essentials for the spinning of a superb narrative about complex post-traumatic stress. More so for living with that particular set of issues myself.

Once again for the good of the Republic: If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.

Apropos of this, I want to express particular appreciation for the video’s exploration of the “puriteens” phenomenon—and incorporate a caution for those slightly elder members of fandom. It can be very easy for people to fall into the trap of assuming that bisexual people are always hypersexual. And even easier to assume that those bisexual folk who truly are hypersexual are automatically threats because of this. More so if said individuals also happen to be kinky, and especially if they are specifically sadistic.

I mention this now because as queer people marginalized from within the queer community as well as without, bisexual and asexual folk stand on common ground. I have seen the transformative power in allyship between bi and ace people in fighting our shared oppressions. Sadly I have also seen many successful efforts to tear that natural solidarity asunder by making ace people fear us as predators. And the first against the wall, same as always, are the hypersexual and kinky among us.

So I’m happy beyond words to see openly ace creators like Rowan Ellis standing up for bisexual people. Making sure that our struggles and our humanity alike are always seen and valued. In kind, I strongly encourage everyone reading this to take this analysis of Rowan’s commentary on Outlander in the spirit in which I intend it. To say that I strongly support both the general content and overall standpoint of this video would understate the case.

Indeed, I offer this detailed analysis now because I know the depth of Rowan’s commitment to diverse queer representation. I want to build on the dialogue sparked by the video and to bring that depth on Randall’s character to the impressive breadth of focus in Rowan’s overview of queer villains. The fact that doing so amplifies the labor, effort, and insight of an asexual creator made me even more inclined to give this my full effort. I hope Rowan will keep putting her voice and perspective into the world for many years to come.

For now, I’m grateful for this opportunity to once again bring Black Jack Randall to my little corner of the Internet in dizzying detail. And moreover, to do so in amplifying the work of a fellow creator explicitly naming the harm done by respectability politics surrounding queerness.

Randall may not be the bisexual representation everyone wants, but he’s absolutely the bisexual representation the world needs. Because if he isn’t a resounding comeback to respectability politics that attempt to deny “problematic” bisexual people their basic human rights—and indeed an effective illustration of the deep harms those kinds of approaches to queerness not only do directly but also reproduce in cyclical patterns—I don’t know what character possibly could be.