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bookofmirth · 3 years

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Can you please elaborate why it is considered problematic that SJM wrote that elain is uncomfortable around lucien? You mentioned in a previous response that it was not a good move for her to write elain being uncomfortable by a disabled POC but I’m not quite sure why that is a problem because she is not uncomfortable because of his disability or race- her discomfort has nothing to do with that.

Also, racism is not an issue in prythian the way it is in real life. You have high lords such as helion and tarquin (among others) that are explicitly POC and there has never been mention of any hostility towards them because of the color of their skin. The only discrimination I can recall is between high and lesser fae which is classist not racist.

I’m just confused why it is considered ableist or racist when SJM decided to write how elain is uncomfortable around lucien when it has nothing to do with his skin color or disability.

On another note- would it have been racist if amarantha (a known rapist) was written as a WOC rather than white? I’m just trying to understand your point of view and I’m a little lost. To me, acotar is a diverse world with characters of all races and some are good, some are evil but pretty much every character has done something morally grey at at least one point in the series. And none of that is not specific to one race vs another. There are white characters that are good, morally grey and downright evil. And the same can be said for other races.

I appreciate any further elaboration you can supply!

Hello! I will try my best. I don't mind answering questions like this! I recognize that I have had a lot of education about these topics and I have learned A Lot from Black women on Twitter over the years. I hope to share it in a way that is useful. I can maybe make a reading list if anyone is interested, but people should definitely ask around so that it's not getting filtered through just one person (aka me).

So the whole thing with talking about race in the fandom is that race does not function the same way in the acotar world as it does in ours. You are correct about that. You may have seen my post that attempted to break down various ways that characters access privilege in Prythian? Either way, yes. It is not a one-to-one correspondence with our world and the book world.

However, there are issues within the acotar world that mirror issues in ours, and the way that fans engage with those issues can reveal underlying prejudices. I mentioned in this post that we don't have to intend to do these things. (Also, intent versus impact is like diversity, inclusivity, and equity training 101. It's one of the first, and most important things you will learn. Even if you didn't mean to harm someone, they still feel hurt, and it's important to acknowledge that.)

The issue with the way people talk about Lucien - and I mentioned in another post that this is perhaps just as much on Sarah for creating this scenario as it is on the fandom for hopping on that horse and riding - is that there is a history of white women being painted as the victims of Black men specifically.

I'm going to put the rest of this under the cut because I want to show you some examples.

I hope that I don't have to explain why this is disgusting. There is a real-life example of this ^^^ if you google Emmett Till and read his story. This is by far not the only example of a white woman claiming that a Black man (or boy, in his case) was harassing her in some way, and often, that has resulted in lynching.

These are clearly older examples, and also really good examples of how people of color can be dehumanized, but these problems persist. The methods are just more subtle. More recently, it could result in police brutality. When that women called the police on a Black man in NYC last summer, it played into the long history of a woman claiming that she was being threatened or victimized by a Black man. As @gimme-mor explained in her post, the concept of white womanhood is often used as a way to uphold racism and white supremacy because it shows people of color as being violent threats, giving white men (and white women) a reason to retain their privilege.

You're probably wondering now what the fuckity fuck this has to do with Acotar and Lucien. I am getting there!

Because of this historical context, there are many slurs and stereotypes used against POC that on the surface, seem innocent. However, they have a deep, dark history of oppression and violence. It's not about the "one time" that someone said one racist thing, but generational trauma. I can't speak to what this is like as a lived experience, and so I would really appreciate anyone who does want to add on!!!

For example, just to take us away from acotar for a minute, there is a problematic, sexist and often racist trope in which characters get fridged. This is a term used to refer to the way that women, women of color, or characters of color (this could include queer and disabled people as well) are killed off to further a white person's story. This happens SO OFTEN. Nehemia was killed in ToG to motivate Aelin. Sorscha was killed in HoF to hurt Dorian. In a multitude of super hero and action movies, the wife or girlfriend of the main character is killed off in order to provide either pain or motivation to the white male hero.

Individually, these events are whatever. Taken as a whole, though... it shows a trend that the girlfriend of the hero is disposable. It shows that people who are not white, straight, able-bodied males are worthless, and only function to further someone else’s plot.

So that's what is sort-of happening here. After a long, long history of white women positioning themselves (or being positioned) as the innocent victims of brutish, violent, barely-even-human men of color, there are some disturbing parallels when people try to say that Elain is a shrinking violet next to Lucien's insistent attentions.

The context is everything. It's not about this one event, but that there is a history in the real world of this trope playing out over and over, and it has even been an explicit tactic used to perpetuate white supremacy.

This context influences the way that we interact with one another in fandom. The point of that post was not to critique the acotar series itself, but to expose some problematic aspects of the fandom.

I am not going to speak for anyone else, but I think that the original intent of pointing out this parallel between Elain/Lucien and white feminism was not that we want people to stop saying that Elain feels this, or Elain feels that, or Lucien is doing this or that, etc. The reason why this has been mentioned in the past is because there are some very uncomfortable, violent historical precedents set, and while people may not realize that those exist, they may be unintentionally furthering that stereotype.

There were many, many other points made in that post that I think bear repeating and further attention. I hope that this made sense. It's hard to condense literal centuries of racism like this, and of course I am only talking about the context in the U.S. I'm sure it's different elsewhere.

The main takeaway from that post, though, is that it wasn't about the world itself. It was about the way that the fandom engages with the world, and how they utilize some problematic tools to do so. Critiquing the world itself is a completely different issue, which... I will sorta touch on now!

One last point, since you brought up Amarantha and the potential of her being a WOC and a rapist - it could be viewed as problematic and racist, due to the oversexualization of Black women in particular (again, the context throughout history supports this). However, that would not be a fandom problem! That would be an sjm problem.

BTW - I do have serious problems with the way that Illyrians are portrayed in acotar, again because of the history of POC being portrayed as uncivilized, brutish, violent, and... that word that means someone isn't religious. I am getting tired and forgot the word. When sjm says that Illyrians are that way, and when she emphasizes the fact that they are a race... yikes. It's not racist of us to point that out, but it was highly questionable that she created them to be that way in the first place.

Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense, please! To anyone reading this to the end, first off RIP! But also let me know if I've gotten something wrong or if you see something differently.

#acotar #acosf #acotar fandom #cw racism #cw racist images #ask #anon

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codename-adler · 4 years

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Dear Tumblr toxicity,

Hi. Adler here. We need to talk.

- TW: mental health issues, depression, bipolar disorder, self-harm, homophobia, transphobia, coming out, xenophobia, islamophobia, racism, implied sexual content, rape, non-con, addictions, abuse, parental negligence, depictions of violence, swearing (please message me kindly if I forget anything)

- What prompted this message: The release of Skam France S7 teaser (emphasis on teaser, will get into that below)

- Where I’m coming from: I will talk from the pov of a white, cis and queer 22-years-old woman (she/her); this is the pov that affects my experiences and the opinions I will share below; but my message comes from a place of deep hurt, and love

- What this is about: My goal is to share a recurring experience that has hurt me in order to spread a message of awareness, maturity, peace and love

- Central content: Skam France, Skam Wtfock, and Skam/remakes in general

From now on I will assume people have enough information for me to talk about the topics without explaining every plotline/character. There are plenty of wiki pages to help you out and I will gladly answer any (respectful) questions asked if a plothole bothers your comprehension of my message. I’m only making these assumptions in order to alleviate the text.

January 9th, 2021.

The francetv slash YouTube channel releases an unexpected teaser video for an equally unexpected seventh season Skam France. The video features Tiffany, a white, cis female teenager, going into labour from denial pregnancy just after winning what appears to be a gymnastics championship. Overall, the video and its release are very dramatic.

The character of Tiffany, also called Tiff, was previously seen on season 6 of Skam France as a bully who persecuted the main character, Lola, both at school and on social media. Outside of this characterization, nothing is known about her. It is majorly accepted that Tiff is not a liked character; she rather poses as one of the antagonists of Lola’s arc.

Now you know the details of what happened, in the most objectively possible way.

Now I’ll speak for myself.

Before I went digging around for people’s reaction, here is what I initially thought of this video.

1) Shock: I thought Skam France was over, so... Big, big shock.

2) Excitement: I hold this web series very close to my heart. It has gotten me through depressive episodes, anxiety attacks, coming out to my best friend. To see this new development? It couldn’t bring me more joy.

3) Curiosity: I recognized Tiff immediately. I was intrigued as to what would happen to her to set off a new season in true Skam Fr fashion. As soon as she started gripping her stomach, I knew she was pregnant and wasn’t aware of it. Big, big surprise here again.

4) Numbness/Overthinking: As I stared at my screen, motionless, my mind went off. What did it mean? How did she not know? Who is the father? Do we know him? Will the baby survive? Where are the other characters? Will Lamifex be present? What? How? When? Why? Who?

5) Disappointment: No, I did not like Tiff one bit in S6. Yes, I sincerely wished for a season on either Jo (ambiguous and funny teenage girl, cis + white), Sekou (seemingly neurodivergent teenage boy, cis + black), and my favorite, Max (mysterious and grave teenage boy, trans + white) So why Tiff? It felt to me like a missed opportunity, but I did not lose hope.

So, these were the five stages of my emotional process. And then I made the terrible mistake to go look for the fans’ reaction. I didn’t even look at the YT comments, I didn’t go on Instagram, I went directly here on Tumblr. Why? I’m still asking myself that. From S1 to S6 of Skam Fr, I kept my love for the show to myself and only looked at ig and video edits. I tried once, and only once, to look it up on Tumblr, and was greeted by fervent agressivity, disrespect and hate. Why did I ever forget that after watching the S7 teaser? I still don’t know.

The reactions on this platform were wild. People are furious (I get that). People are disappointed (I get that). People are anxious (I get that). People are also verbally agressive, insensitive, hateful, disrespectful and bullies. I don’t get that.

Comments along the lines of “What she gonna do with a fucking baby?”, “Are we gonna watch the baby do nothing all fucking season?”, “Wowwww, teenage pregnancy, so new and relatable!” (note the sarcasm made in the comment here), “Who gives a shit about Tiff?”, etc.

And then all the mistakes Skam Fr ever made flooded back onto the feed. The wlw misrepresentation, the whitewashing, the overdramatization, the dubious sex scenes between minors, all of it.

Let’s take a break here. Do I condone these mistakes? Nope. Am I a white-bully apologist? Nope. Did I forget every horrible action Tiff has made in the past? Nope. She manipulated a whole school against Lola, she profited from Lola’s mother’s death, she bullied her, harrassed her, pushed her deeper into mental distress. Tiff was a despicable character that I never once liked. The way she was played by the actress made it clear that Tiff was not intended to be a good guy. If I could replace her as the main of S7, I would, in a heartbeat. I’d choose, as I said, Jo, Sekou or Max.

Skam France deeply lacks diversity and made mistakes when attempting to diverse the issues represented. This is not an opinion, it’s a fact.

Poc representation is very, very low. Only one season has a woc of Islam beliefs as mc (Imane, S4) with poc entourage/family. Only 2 other characters not related to Imane were poc (Sekou and Sarah, S1-S2). These 2 characters were very in the background and served to further the mc’s plotline, they had no real content. (I am not a poc, and so my opinion does not matter here. If you are not poc, your “opinions” don’t matter here, this point is not for you to debate. These are facts.)

While I do not particularly find the wlw representation bad, I do understand how it hurts/bothers other queer women. From my perspective, the bar was very low regarding my expectations of the Lola/Maya pair (none of them died *yay* they had a happy ending *yay* they were not typically overfeminized or overmasculinized *yay* Lola and Maya were respectful of each other, understood each other, accepted each other with all their flaws and their beauty *yay* I truly believed in their love and it gave me confidence and hope *yay* I ould really go on but this is not my main point so I’ll stop here) Regardless of my opinion on Mayla, I understand that to some queer women, it was bothering/hurtful. (If you are anything other than a woman / wlw, this point is not for you to debate. Keep your “opinions” to yourself, it does not matter here. These are facts.)

Like every remake of the original Skam where the S4 was given to Sana/Imane, the Muslim community was not represented at its best, at its most beautiful and respectfully. The character of Imane, although she is my favorite girl of the series, was not portrayed in a way that respected the majority of the Muslim community. (If you are anything other than Muslim, this point is not for you to debate. Our opinions do not matter here. These are facts.)

And so the same goes for the portrayal of sexual assault and child pronography in S2, of mental illness and homophobia in S3, of disabilities in S5, of addiction, transphobia, self-harm and neurodivergence in S6. Again, if you are not part of these communities, your opinions do not matter on these issues. These are facts that are not up for debate.

In other words, Skam France, as well as the original Skam, Skam Wtfock, Skam España, and probably all the others I haven’t watched in their entirety, are NOT perfect shows. They (maybe) tried their best to portray issues of the younger generations that are ugly, shameful, taboo, hard-to-swallow-pills. Of course they made mistakes. Of course they have to be held accountable. Of course they can and should do better. Of course it must be spoken about.

Here is my problem.

The so-called “fans” shamelessly SHITTING on the WHOLE show because of ONE TEASER TRAILER. (btw, this is where I get angry)

I am not talking about the fans making fun of the show and this season’s premise like “Better MCs than Tiff for S7: a romance between the car that almost hit Lucas S3 and the car that hit Arthur S5, or the school’s nurse, or Imane’s dad, or Elu’s rabbit” (that shit’s funny and I’d watch all of these).Or the joke about Wtfock and Skam Fr shaking hands while signing the same contract to disappoint the fans with white MCs (it’s funny cuz it’s trueeeee).

I am not talking about the fans criticizing the producers’ choice of Tiff as MC. There is a difference between shitting on issues and adressing/discussing them. I WANT to talk about how this season’s issue would have been so much better if a woc, specifically a black woman, had been the MC, because black women and doctors are a whole different level of issue than white women and doctors. Add on top of that an unplanned teenage pregnancy? It would have been IMMACULATE. I WANT to talk which wlw couple was better represented, Mayla or Croana/Crisana, and why is that. I WANT to talk about disabilities in black and poc communities. I WANT to talk about headcanons, AUs, to rectify the missed marks. I WANT to talk about our takes on seasons about Max, Sekou and Jo, instead of Tiff’s.

I DO NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT YOUR SHITTY, NEGATIVE, UNHELPFUL, HURTFUL COMMENTS.

Just because the protagonist is white, doesn’t give you ANY right to dismiss the issue that is unplanned teenage pregnancy. This is a problem that affects countries WORLDWIDE. Do you know how many deaths are related to minors giving birth? Do you know how many babies die at birth from these pregnancies? Do you have any idea the trauma it puts you through, to go into labor without even knowing you were pregnant in the first place, and then giving birth, and then having to care for a defensless human being? The dilemma of keeping it, or giving it away? The fear that lives in every person able to give birth, that one day they’ll become pregnant, because society turns sych a shameful look to that? No matter your ethnicity, your gender identity, your sexuality, your political stance or whatever shit you bring up to justify your disgraceful and downright degrading comments, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SAY THAT A MINOR GIVING BIRTH IS NOT AN ISSUE.

You think the topic has been covered plenty before? Yeah, because shows like “16 and pregnant” and “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant!” are such good examples and show the reality with such an objective point of view!

Bullshit. Teenage pregnancy is still a taboo, it still kills, and people are still morons about it.

“Well I guess everybody is secretly pregnant now!” No, Jessica, but you wouldn’t know about it, would you? Because I wouldn’t tell you shit if you were my “friend” and I was going through it. The whole message of all the Skams is not that it presents super relatable issues of teenagers, although it is a big topic of the show. They present some issues that affect the youth in an authentic light, but that’s not it.

Tous les gens que tu rencontres mènent un combat dont tu ignores tout.

Sois indulgente. Toujours. x x x

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

Be kind. Always. x x x

THAT’S THE MESSAGE. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE SHOW.

And you all missed it.

All of you making dead baby jokes and death threats, degrading people who give birth, shaming teenagers for their pregnancies... Listen to yourselves.

“Well she deserves it, she was such a bitch!” No, Michael, you shit stick. Let’s rewind a bit for you, yeah? It was a GOD DAMN TEASER. We literally know nothing! Nothing at all! Why are y’all getting mad when we saw 3:25 minutes representing a whole ass season! Listen to yourselves. Y’all judge so fast for people pretending to love Skam and its authenticity and its motto.

You say Tiff is irredeemable?

Emma cheated on her boyfriend.

Manon lied and manipulated her friends.

Lucas was homophobic and prejudiced agaisnt mentally ill people.

Imane was homophobic too and went behind her friends’ back to get what she wanted.

Arthur cheated on his girlfriend too.

Lola dragged Elliot down with her in her addiction, lied, was verbally abusive, etc.

ALL THE MAINS ARE PROBLEMATIC.

Any guess why?

BECAUSE THEY ARE TEENAGERS. THEY ARE STILL GROWING AND LEARNING.

Yet we still loved them all.

So don’t you dare tell me that Tiff deserves this, that her baby deserves to die, that teenage motherhood is irrelevant. Motherhood is not a curse in the first place, nor is it something to wish to inflict upon anyone. Motherhood is different for every single person and nobody except the person living with it can have an opinion on that. We don’t even know if the baby survived, for God’s sake!

There is no excuse for this kind of behavior..

It makes me so angry. Women are discriminated against in a fandom I thought was safe, again and again and again.

I have to stop here because, well, this is just too much. There is much wrong with Skam (the original AND all the remakes), but there is even more wrong with the fans. I’m done.

You don’t support the show anymore? Fine, then don’t watch it! If I really am wrong, the number of viewers will go down and the show will die, just like you wished. There is no need to be vicious about it.

I hope y’all are proud of your misogyny.

Sincerely,

Adler.

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cushfuddled · 4 years

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Okay so JDS came forward with a statement about how he’s working to be better and the comments underneath are like...oh my god

Some of them are genuine critique and like, people saying “Yeah, you really hurt me with how you portrayed x character.” But some of them are just flat-out cruel??

Like, I’m under no delusions here. Voltron FUCKED UP. It fucked up HARD. Adam, an mlm POC, died screaming as he was blown to fiery bits. Allura, a POC commander, suffered a frankly ridiculous amount of torture (she lost her planet; her whole family and culture besides Coran; her commander position; her castle ship; her LIFE...even her crown). Shiro, an mlm Asian disabled man with PTSD, existed to be sidelined or get the ever-loving shit beaten out of him. Ezor, another queer character, would’ve been killed had there not been fan backlash. If the wedding was an olive branch (as the EP’s claimed), it was a twig thrown over the studio’s shoulders as they fled down the fire escape.

VOLTRON. WAS. A. FUCKING. MESS.

These creators fucked up. But the fact that one of them has had the balls to come forward and say, “Hey, I’ve been writing from a place of privilege, and I understand that I can’t make up from what I’ve done in the past, but I am educating myself and working to become a better person now,” is like...I think that’s something to celebrate!

I’m not saying anyone has to forgive this dude. A lot of people like me loved Voltron BECAUSE of its hopeful messages about rep and found family...and when that blew up like a grease fire, we were left to pick up the pieces. There was zero response from the studio besides a somewhat patronizing pair of Afterbuzz interviews two months after the fact. I was in those video chats; I know how frustrating that was. Voltron meant a HELL OF A LOT TO PEOPLE. For those of you who used Voltron to literally survive: I’m one of you!! I used Voltron to get through my depression and stress and misery at college! It gave me something to hold on to when I wanted to give up.

BUT ALSO...we have to remember that Voltron was, at the end of the day, a show. It might have been healthy for some people to use Voltron to cope, but it certainly wasn’t healthy for me. I attached too much of my mental health to VLD, so that when it spiraled it took me with it. The show made horrible choices that hurt me and others like me terribly, but a lot of the very real pain I experienced after s7 dropped (s8 was more a nail in the coffin for me than anything else) was because I’d literally become dependent on a show to keep me going in life. And I don’t think that’s a fair burden to put on any show!

I’m saying—we’re valid af, to be pissed off at the VLD team for their creative choices. But there are replies to this apology with people talking about how, after the last season aired, they had to TALK MULTIPLE PEOPLE DOWN FROM SUICIDE, and then PINNING THAT ON JDS.

If VLD made you have anxiety attacks or caused a depressive episode or made you contemplate suicide...like, I also struggle with depression and anxiety, and VLD punched me like a train to the gut. But at a certain point I had to look at myself and say, “This reaction is not all the EP’s fault.” I had tied my emotional health to a fictional series. It was a dangerous thing to do, and it backfired.

Personally?? I’m really glad that JDS is educating himself. It would’ve been REALLY easy for him to just move on with his life and pretend nothing ever happened now that like *checks watch* a year and a half has passed since s8 dropped. But instead he came forward and promised to do better, and he gave people a platform to finally tell him how they felt.

Isn’t this what we want? For creators to acknowledge it when they fuck up, and work to do better next time? Yeah, I know—he could’ve done this a year and a half ago. But he’s doing it now, when he could have chosen not to do it at all...and honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a big-time creator make that kind of decision. I just wish people wouldn’t look at that apology about fictional representation and respond by accusing JDS of NEARLY INCITING SUICIDES

#fjdaklfjala #voltron #vld #vent #death mention #suicide mention #suicide ideation #panic attacks #anxiety attacks #depression

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maiaphaelsource · 4 years

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I was the anon who sent you the trans Raphael headcanons ask on your other blog, do you have any more? With some trans Maia thrown in too🥺 like Magnus being the best trans dad to his son and the love of his sons life and being supportive and loving. Raphael kissing Maia on the forehead and telling her how beautiful she is, you know? Cute shit like that

yes!!! hello!!! i hope you know i love you and you're my favorite person in the world!! thank you so much for this ask!

okay so i’ll begin with the specifics... magnus is absolutely THE trans dad to both of them. not only with practical stuff like offering to help them with glamours, magical transitioning, stuff like that, but just... being so supportive and understanding. he’s always there, and he has so many stories to share, so many people he’s met who had happy lives. he was there for stonewall, he’s met Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and it’s just so heartwarming for the both of them to talk to him about that, you know? that feeling of not being alone in history, of knowing that there are and were other people like you, that you’ve always existed.... it’s just great

also in maia’s case since she also lives a partially mundane life he just solves all her documentation problems like deadname? gone forever. no registers. you’re welcome. the first time maia sees her document with her name she almost cries and she throws herself in magnus’ arms and magnus is so touched and moved and shocked you know? like the gratitude and the affection and she’s just thanking him and he’s so moved and raphael just watches with a little smile in his face because he knows that magnus is moved by the display, even if he won’t say it. and maybe he tells magnus that later? like, “your kindness means more to others than you imagine,” and of course magnus isn’t important just because he’s kind but he’s used to not being recognized for his services (ahem especially by CERTAIN people) and it’s nice to see that being appreciated, you know?

plus, maia makes it a point to pay him and magnus is all like “i couldn’t possibly take payment for something like that. it’s the least you deserve” so instead maia teaches him her secret sangria recipe. magnus is super pleased but he also jokes that now he has one less excuse for inviting them over. and raphael goes, super seriously, “you never need an excuse” and magnus just melts

raphael kissing her forehead! yes! tbh i think they both love forehead kisses (as well as hand kisses and shoulder kisses) and sometimes when she’s feeling dysphoric or upset for any reason she likes just... lying down on raphael’s chest and letting him pet her hair and kiss her forehead and tell her that it’s alright, bella, te quiero

and YES he just makes it a point to talk about how beautiful she is constantly and kiss down her whole body (not sexually of course, just sweetly?) and she giggles and it’s fun :’) sometimes things get to her, especially after jordan’s constant transphobic/racist rethoric, and it’s nice that raphael always makes it a point to tell her she’s beautiful and amazing and he loves her. and he always does it in such a matter of fact way, but also intense, you know? he has her close and he says shit like “you’re the most beautiful woman i’ve ever met” and she melts

as for general headcanons!

maia figured out she was trans relatively early in life, and it’s the reason she always knew she’d have to run away from her parents’ house. she was basically only planning until she had enough to be able to survive without them. but also, jordan and wanting to be able to “be with her already” rushed her out of home when she was finishing high school

raphael and maia are absolutely willing to throw down for each other if someone’s transphobic and that’s that on that. someone being transphobic to raphael? fine, he can handle his own, he’ll end them with his words and do it with a pleasant smile. someone being transphobic to maia? they’ll be met with the usual cutting sarcasm until they back down. but if the other catches you doing that? you’ll be thrown against the wall and threatened/punched in the face so fast you won’t even know what the fuck happened

a lot of baby trans downworlders start coming to them! they’re already an iconic couple for many reasons, what with being a werewolf/vampire couple, a black/latino couple (we need more black/latino couples okay! desperately! and black/native and native/latino too! i want more poc solidarity and romance!), and an iconique trans couple. people just feel comfortable going to them because they’ve brought so much change and are so accepting you know?

it still surprises raphael, even after years on end, that so many people come to him for help with that. he never thought that he would be seen as the kind of person people can go to, and yet here he is. after being told for most of his life that he was cold/unfeeling/threatening/weird... it’s nice to be valued like that, to be seen as someone who can be soft and provide comfort and love, too

same goes for maia, who’s also used to be seen as agressive/violent for just defending herself and her people, and just generally reduced to being a “threat”. it’s nice to know that many, many people see her as someone they can look up to, and who they feel safe it

that is not to say obviously that they just love doing emotional labor for other people but like... having other trans downworlders, especially trans downworlders of color, come to them, feels nice. especially people who are trying to figure themselves out and approach them with so much hope and admiration in their eyes you know? the way they always come with a “sorry to bother, but..” ready in their lips and look at them like they are heroes... it’s really something

taki’s slowly becomes a place for trans downworlders to hang out, especially those who don’t enjoy clubs and stuff like pandemonium (which is totally a queer club as well bite me. including for mundanes. with taki’s that’s trickier of course since they have like, blood on their menu lmao but a few trans minors have hung out there and it was cool) for whatever reason. it’s just a cool queer-inclusive space for people who want to hang out, you know? and they love that

the first time maia saw raphael lose his cool was when a shadowhunter made a gross comment about how it’s lucky he didn’t want sex, so she wouldn’t have to deal with that. he almost tore their throat off

raphael just.... loves maia’s shoulders. she was a little self conscious of them, she always made a point to have them covered, but raphael just loves peppering kisses on her shoulders and making her chuckle

magnus gives maia a bunch of fashion tips similar to the ones he gave raphael, just how to better protect herself and figure out how people are reading her gender and stuff like that, you know?

they do the thing where they show each other pre-transition pics (once they’re comfortable with that of course) just to hear each other be like “*outraged gasp* i don’t recognize you at all” and “oh, look how much happier you are now”, and my personal favorite, “i can’t see a boy/girl in there, i just can’t” (like personally whenever i see pictures of my partners/friends pre-transition i’m just like... i realize this is pre-transition and that you’ve changed a lot but also i’m unable to see an [assigned gender] in this photo). it’s all like “how did people not notice you were a girl? unbelievable” you know. just that sweet sweet trans couple validation ritual

together they have like. all the insufferable pun-happy sexualities (bi[romantic], pan, ace, trans) and you will be hit with those constantly in conversation if you’re a friend of them. raphael in particular greatly enjoys making those puns with the most blase, straight face as he looks straight into your eyes and watches as your soul slowly leaves your body. magnus is so proud and also afraid he created a monster

raphael is that bitch who’s like. “i heard that broccoli has a substance that’s similar to testosterone so i’m now eating 5 bowls of it” and maia wants to tear her hair out because it doesn’t work like that and he’s like “can’t hurt to try. also i’m finally able to eat let me have this”

maia never got to like... celebrate those small transition moments because she was all alone and felt like she was transitioning in such a rush, you know? and raphael makes it a point to point out the small changes that are still going on with her body, to take her shopping and encourage her to be as giddy about it as she wants to, you know? and it’s nice and fun and he also gets to relive those small gender reaffirming moments and it’s really nice

maia is a huge against me fan!!! like not to project but it’s just... their songs are so great and relatable even when they’re not about being trans at all and laura jane grace’s voice is so beautiful and maia for sure absolutely loves punk, so like. it’s one of her fave bands for sure

she liked them since before laura came out and when she did it was like. oh. oh. so that’s why i always related so hard to her songs. it just... makes sense

while punk is not as much raphael’s style he likes true trans rebel, especially the acoustic version, where her voice just sounds mwaaahhh imo and he can listen to the recording for hours because her voice in there is just... sensorial heaven and maia feels all giddy that raphael genuinely loves a trans woman’s voice so much

raphael always makes a point to say that he loves her voice just as much, too :)

they are just very trans and really love each other the end

#ask #anonymous #sorry this took relatively long to answer daidhaidha it's my first week of classes and i'm a little tired #as always i really loved this ask and just thank you so much for asking #sh #shadowhunters #maia roberts #raphael santiago #magnus bane #trans maia roberts #trans raphael santiago #trans magnus bane #maiaphael #maphael #magnus & maia brotp #magnus & raphael brotp #headcanon #text

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incarnateirony · 5 years

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as an emerging lgbtq+ (i'm 'BT') guy i am so glad you're making the point you made in your last post. I've always gravitated towards Dean because he is so 'imperfect' in his queerness, like me. but he's not a uwu soft queer so apparently that bothers a lot of ppl on here? Especially younger queer women, I've noticed. But a lot of guys, cis and trans, struggle with being attracted to men so much in a way that is simply different (not better or worse) than (1/2)

being wlw, especially depending on one’s generation and region, etc. basically what i’m saying is a lot of the few queer men that there are in the fandom stay quieter as it is almost completely queer women dictating what is and what isnt, and not quite empathizing with the unique struggle many queer men have with internalized homophobia/being Unmanly for being attracted to men. hope this wasn’t too all over the place, ive had this on my mind for a Long time and i’m glad you brought it up. (2/2)

ps: I’m not trying to put down queer women for being a significant part of the fandom. I just really wish the environment of the fandom felt more like somewhere queer men’s voices can be heard better, considering the largest pairing is, needless to say, mlm

Well, first of all, welcome Nonnie. I take it you’re addressing this untitled post addressing intersectionality, representation vs tokenization, represented demographics and just general motivations of those in discussion, yes? (x)

You’ll find this is a longstanding topic of my blog, be it excavating creator commentary people have buried for their own motivations and talked down and around, or dual faceted issues.

(If you haven’t read the crosslinks on the post you’re addressing, you may want to read The Problem With Dreamhunter (x) It discusses exactly this issue, even if it was written over a year ago at that point, showing just how cyclic this issue is. It talks about MLM/WLW intersectional issues, migrating goalposts, a bunch of show stuff and some of Bobo’s sociopolitical commentary from 2003 about advancing LGBT representation through moderate incremental methods being proven effective at expanding the media presence/platform exponentially above liberal, or more severe/extreme styles)

But when it comes down to it, basically: Yeah, you right.

I didn’t just arbitrarily develop this opinion. I didn’t… just magically tune in to what the LGBT men that literally dodge fandom, for exactly the reasons you say, and know it’s because of the reasons you say – like that didn’t manifest. It came from leaving fandom (un)”safe” spaces. It came from engaging a great variety of LGBT males in real life, many of which engage the content. From observing how they spoke of the content in multifandom servers, or even *why* they chose to avoid speaking up.

And no, I personally didn’t get a read of you, like, insulting LGBT women for their part in fandom. Women engage social media for primetime TV fandoms at an exponential rate above men, so it’s almost unavoidable and it’s nobody’s fault really, but that says nothing for the perpetual habit of drowning out their voices to the fact that– well, they literally abandon engaging.

I’ve seen it enough times it *hurts* me. I shouldn’t *have* to pull my gay writing buddy out of holes to face this, and him still hide silently. I shouldn’t *have* to be the vein of news and information on the show to the bi male friend I have that refuses to touch this fandom. I shouldn’t *have* to even speak up about this. I really do want *you all* to speak up about this, because I can only speak so far, because you’re right: OUR JOURNEYS ARE DIFFERENT.

Hell, even a cis lgbt male vs a trans lgb(t obvious) male have entirely different journeys even though they’re both validly men. These battles are not the same. One community can speak up to defend another, and help hold them up and amplify them if there’s just not enough of them to project the way they need to, and this is something *greatly under respected* in this fandom. Nobody’s holding up the LGBT male voices when actually talking about representation. And you’re right, it’s mostly women, and you’re right, our path is different and our struggles and needs and wants and lives are different. But unless you take a considerable amount of time talking and sharing and learning personally the perspective of the LGBT male community, you’re not… really… helping them speak.

And let it be said, “holding up LGBT male voices” does not and should never equate to “despite having multiple LGBT men saying one thing, I found the one LGBT male saying the thing that matches what I want, who may or may not even actually be in the targeted demographic set of the character we’re discussing representation about, because it’s more than just being bi, it’s entire lives, paths and challenges– but you know, I found the ONE, so fuck the others.” That’s using your friends as tokens and cards. If you want to genuinely add to the conversation, what you do is you introduce your male LGBT friend to the other male LGBT friends and let them have a long conversation to talk out the sources of their disagreements before engaging in conversation.

But drawing a pretty base line collective from all people in the represented demographic, respectfully learning the majority wants and needs and struggles, and helping voice those is pretty key.

Women can sit here all day, and pass around things they’ve been told by other women are woke points, or things that sound progressive and good, and often sort of decontextualized from their purpose (be that the dresswear mentioned shortly hereafter, or what LGBT want/expect/SHOULD want or expect – but in the end, if you’re not sitting down and having dialogues – not just with one, or two, or even three LGBT men – but large handfuls and subsets, able to actually critically examine the differences in LGBT males of gen X, Y, or Z and their lives and stories – if you’re not doing that… If *that* isn’t the core of your discussion values, rather than pass-along buzz vibes– then you’re really not talking representation. You think you are. But you’re not.

There’s the uh. Thing. You noticed. About how women expect the men to engage.

When it comes to young queer women, I’m going to risk pissing some people off, but the long and short of it is (I could probably dig up the link but it’s been an eternity) a while ago they ran a psychological study to figure out why young women were attracted to yaoi, and gay porn, especially what is essentially stereotypical force-role type gay porn. It has to do with blooming attraction, primal fear, and trying to make the men more appealing in a way that does not intimidate them.

This later manifests into feminizing them, setting twink/bear roles that go beyond into top/bottom, and conflating it with penetration, position, power, dom/sub, fork/spoon, sometimes served with a dose of internalized misogyny being projected into the vessel of whatever twink/sub is positioned, and generally— like, kink culture. Often this is passed with narrowly progressive-masked arguments of “Men should be allowed to be feminine if they want!” rather than a genuine answer to, “Why do you perpetually heterosexually resize, or reframe, and enforce heterosexual structure onto characters that do not meet this mold, and why is that a personal gain to you?” because in the end– it’s a personal gain. And again, at that point it’s not about representation.

Now again, I’m not… shaming anyone for having a kink. But kink/fetish needs/wants have blurred themselves in as if to hedge on equal territory to discussing canon content. Or sprinkling the quite literal fetishized art (power to you if that’s your thing, I guess, even if I do bear discomfort over fetishization of any LGBT demographic, even by another LGBT demographic) and reasoning with dialogue that implies it as being representative, and inserting that into the representation discussion, which *literally* just makes the entire bog muddier, makes the LGBT men trying to speak more easily dismissed in a vat of “just women/fetishists”, it just– it’s Not a Good. I’m… personally not a fan of it. Like at all. A lot of it makes me angry tbh. So I don’t engage. I don’t browse fanfiction. I look at very little art.

Hell most of the people around here don’t even realize it’s actually a *minority* of LGBT men that choose to engage in penetrative sex, but it’s become a topic of outright obsession around here. There is so much simple… lack of awareness and discussion of the lives LGBT men lead, even by LGBT women because again – we don’t have your path. We can only listen to you. (And BOY have I gotten earfuls from my LGBT male friends absolutely going apeshit banana bonkers over fandom’s obsession with penetration culture, gender role enforcement while feigning it as liberation, and all kinds of other stuff. And that’s what I base most of my talking points on.)

Because if I’m going to talk representation, I’m going to talk about representing the demographic the character is supposed to represent, not molding him into a tokenized wash-over of every single person’s wants. If you’re an LGBT woman that can resonate with Dean Winchester, that’s great. Sometimes representation can be shared. But a character’s origin determines what demo he represents and not all of any given representative’s character’s attributes, methods, functions, anything – not all of it is going to meet any one person’s goals collectively, but the target demographic is inevitably closer to it.

Another point to raise is that it feels like people have lost track of *what* the representation battle is about. It isn’t just about any one person attaching to any one character. It’s about developing a TVscape that looks more representative of the real world, with a fair presence of PoC, of women, of LGBT people of all types, of the disabled community, of people that are even more than one of these, of people with different stories: people. About, well, normalizing it, because it should be normal. About saturating television enough that one day, and that day will not just be tomorrow per convenience, that people won’t be desperate for representation even vaguely in their wheelhouse, that they can turn on and see people of any intersectional type and go– wow, the world finally realizes we’re real. And that in that wide, realistic menu, yes, being able to turn a channel and eventually see someone *just like you*. A day when any show turned on has at least *someone* in your wheelhouse because every show eventually should have some sort of realistic spread, but if you find the *right* show, *there you are.*

That’s how it’s built. We don’t start by footstomping and tokenizing everyone to be vaguely representative of everyone or it doesn’t count because it didn’t work for *them*. We start by sharing truly diverse narratives, each unique to their own, just as diverse as straight stories are, maybe even more. That’s the only way you’re actually going to end up with a TVscape full of The Gays, and full enough to find *explicitly yourself* in there.

Deleting normalized, non-sensationalist text for lacking either visibility or flavor, even if you weren’t the intended demographic for it to speak to, is quite literally contrary to the entire fight.

and tbh?

This shit is why I hate shipping culture.

And I say that as someone who presumably “ships” Dean and Cas, if it’s shipping to address canon bullshit happening in front of you and just watch the show as it folds out without going into denial for *whatever* personal reason.

There’s a lot of well intended people, most shipping fandom is full of good beans, but as a collective group – skewed by sociopathically manipulated dialogues we can literally track the origins of – have been driven into much of the above while genuinely believing they were doing the right thing, in a long chain of being told this was what and how to fight for, without really stopping and critically examining the nuance of the conversation. Because why would you? Seems to be the popular gay thing to do – while a lot of bisexual people currently hide their commentary via reblog hashtags or hedge awkwardly into an anon box sideways.

That all said, it continues to be my focus. It will never change on this blog. I will never surrender to being pressured, be it by antis or bitters or people just wanting to argue, into pretending things that were text are subtext. I will not move that goalpost. You are real, and you are valid, and you are welcome in my inbox any time, Nonnie, confidentiality guaranteed. Like, DM too.

but lmao like shit, dawg. There’s a reason the LGBT guys I’ve had as writing partners as Dean literally refuse to play with another Cas. That’s not just because I’m a *super aweSOME auTHOr*, it’s because they recognize I do not come from the wing lost to fanfiction, to troll wars, or even to shipping culture, love of a ship be damned. I don’t try to force gender roles on them. I listen when they speak, and often, surprise many with the angle I ever enter discussion or listening from to begin with, because of spending so many years listening to begin with. It’s an intrinsic understanding of why they resonate with the content, not what I can pull some transformative art stuff on or wanting to *make* it into anything else to fit *my* molds. It’s because of being someone engaged to the male perspective, without the need to twist or change a character to be content with it, and being WILLING to hold those challenging conversations.

Listen first. Talk later. But never in front of or over the people you claim to be talking for.

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alluratron · 5 years

Text

What’s wrong with VLD?

This is gonna be a two-parter post expressing all my various frustrations with VLD, and highlighting exactly where I think it went wrong (all of them. yep). I’m going to keep it ship-neutral because ship discourse has a tendency to blind people and make them belligerent (myself included, I can admit that) however I will be discussing the canon relationships. This isn’t ship hate by any means - in fact I like all the canon relationships (or at least I like what they could’ve been) - but I think it’s pretty undeniable that VLD did not do them justice, and in fact took the worst possible route with them.

That said, let’s dive in.

(sorry to those on mobile, this is RIDICULOUSLY long.)

“Voltron: legendary defender” is a show that began with a whole lot of promise. Off the back of the (widely regarded as) almost faultless storytelling in A:TLA and the much celebrated queer ending of LOK (which resulted in a lot of writing issues being brushed under the rug but I digress), VLD was heavily anticipated, tapping into these shows loyal fanbase(s) - as a show produced by their alumni - as well as the market of older viewers, nostalgic for the Defenders Of The Universe cartoon they grew up with. It always had a lot to live up to, and when it dropped in summer 2016, it seemed to live up to the hype.

I personally didn’t join the voltron bandwagon immediately. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of it until around November of 2016. I was late to the LOK and A:TLA hype (very late actually. I first watched LOK around October 2016 and then doubled back to watch A:TLA) but got deeply invested and quickly followed several blogs with these interests. Through following these blogs, I kept happening upon the word “voltron” but didn’t pay it much mind.

Until I came across a post titled “HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH VOLTRON.”

I decided to give it a read. The 4 key points of this post were:

A diverse main cast, with 3/5 of the main characters being confirmed POC, and a dark-skinned princess.

Focus on character and team dynamics, reminiscent of the A:TLA found family spirit.

Possibility of queer representation as suggested by the EPs, whom both worked on LOK, as well as the freedom of the Netflix platform.

Beautiful animation thanks to Studio Mir.

(Only one of those things ended up delivering in a convincing, satisfying manner. Hint: it’s the animation.)

These 4 points were enough to pique my interest enough to delve into the show and, after watching the first season in late November 2016, I was won over. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters, burgeoning dynamics and light hearted tone interspersed with deeper moments. Was it perfect? No. It was a little goofy. But that was ok, it had time to grow and settle. I joined the fandom and excitedly awaited the release of season 2, which came in January 2017.

This is where it started to go bad.

I will admit that, with the benefit of hindsight, season 2 is not as bad as I initially felt it to be. It struggles with pacing and balancing of the 7-character core cast, with several characters reduced to more one-note figures (namely Pidge, Hunk and Lance, although Pidge’s note as a genius is more flattering than the latter two). But story-wise, it is a solid season. The biggest problem of the season comes from the poor handling of the conflict between Allura and Keith over his galra heritage.

Allegories for racial discrimination are always tricky, especially in children’s media. They’re storylines that should only be tackled upon input from people that have experienced such discrimination, so that they may be handled with tact and grace. VLD season 2 did not do this.

What we got was several scenes designed to frame Keith as the victim of Allura’s aggression and intolerant nature. Bear in mind that Allura is a genocide survivor, whose entire race was (at the time of the season) believed to have been eradicated by Zarkon and the galra, whom had previously been her allies. Her emotional response is entirely justifiable and yet, through the framing of the conflict, the narrative was able to manipulate viewers into seeing her as the offending party, with many fans taking to social media to call out her “racism”.

To add to this, Allura is, in design, a black woman. Black women are often portrayed as harsh and aggressive, and VLD played into this to further sway support to Keith’s side of the conflict. He - a light-skinned boy of unspecified ethnicity - was often seen looking hopefully at Allura or looking down dejectedly. Allura, however, was shown glaring, ignoring and turning away from him. We are given an episode (Belly of the Weblum, S2E9) in which Keith talks to Hunk about Allura’s “hatred” for him, but we never see Allura expressing her hurt to a companion (ideally Coran as a fellow genocide survivor) or even lamenting alone. In fact, the only time we hear Allura’s side of things is when she is apologising to Keith (Best Laid Plans, S2E12).

More still, the entirety of BotW has Keith on the receiving end of several microagressions from Hunk. Microaggressions are “slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership”. Hunk’s prodding about Keith’s heritage, initial discomfort about being alone with him and joking remarks (e.g. “do you guys all know each other?”) are strongly reminiscent of microagressions that POC (myself included) encounter on a daily basis. Except, voltron decided to flip the script. This time, the microagressions are directed at Keith for being part galra. Remember that the Galra are the perpetrators of oppression, colonisation and imperial rule, making them allegories for several White endeavours in human history (space nazis, so to speak). And yet, voltron has the fat, dark-skinned boy (who would ordinarily be on the receiving end of such microaggressions in our world) be the perpetrator of these microagressions against the slim, light-skinned, space-white boy.

To sum up, their handling of the arc of Keith’s discovery of his heritage was extremely tasteless at best, and insidious at worst.

And the issues surrounding the writing of the Galra don’t stop there. Though Allura was treated as in the wrong for distrusting the Galra as a whole, the story makes you question whether this should have even been the case. Throughout the length of the show, the Galra are continuously portrayed as a violent and warmongering race. Their history involves conquering all the other races that called Daibazaal home and their most prevalent salute, “Vrepit Sa”, is revealed to mean “the killing thrust” (Omega Shield, S6E1). Proponents of the Empire will often declare “victory or death”, while their counterparts in the Blade of Marmora have a mantra of “knowledge or death”. Even more pertinently, Keith is a character with anger management issues, prone to aggressive outbursts. Instead of these being treated as a character trait, something that he has to work through, it’s chalked up to his “galra side” by the EPs. When he faces Clone Shiro (The Black Paladins, S6E5) he occasionally fights with more aggression, with the clone’s remark of “that’s the Keith I remember” implying that this aggression is a trait that has been present in Keith for a long time. This comes with the animation of Keith with tinted yellow sclera, narrowed pupils, purplish skin and fangs. All of these are traits associated with his “galra side” and all of these only make an appearance when he’s fighting with more aggression.

So how is it that the narrative repeatedly shows us that the Galra are an inherently aggressive and violent race (which is such a problematic concept anyway: they’re not wild animals, they should have agency and self-control), yet also tells us that Allura was wrong for not trusting them?

It’s because the narrative was dead set on punishing Allura.

Throughout the length of the show, we see Allura put through emotional punishment time and time and time again. She is portrayed as wrong for her behaviour towards Keith in season 2 (as detailed above). In season 3, she is explicitly stated to be the “decision maker” (The Red Paladin, S3E2) then is swiftly demoted from that position (and yes, it’s a demotion, but more on that later).

In the same season, the team enters an alternate reality (Hole in the Sky, S3E4) where they find alteans, alive and well. This is especially exciting for Allura (which genocide survivor wouldn’t be thrilled to find their people alive and thriving?), but her joy is short lived when, after she helps the alternate alteans, they are soon revealed to be evil, arguably moreso than the galra in the main reality as they use technology to enslave races that oppose them by taking away their free will entirely. The comet ore that they manage to keep out of the Alteans hands to prevent them from making a second voltron is quickly snatched from them by Lotor when they return to their own reality. Allura laments that she “finally understands” why her father, King Alfor, scattered the lions: it was to prevent this reality. However, in the pilot episode (The Rise Of Voltron, S1E1) Allura spoke with King Alfor’s AI, complete with all his memories. The AI told her that she had in fact been right to want to keep voltron and fight the Galra, and he had been wrong to send them away. If he had sent them away to “prevent this reality” why didn’t the AI say that? HitS retcons Allura’s rightness in that call, further devaluing her judgment. How would Alfor have sent the lions away to prevent the reality where Lotor gets the comet ore, when Lotor wasn’t even born when Alfor died?

This tendency to punish Allura continues with Allura’s relationship with Lotor. When Lotor is first taken prisoner by team voltron (The Prisoner, S5E1) Allura doesn’t trust him at all. He asks her to see past his Galra race and, following her arc in season 2 of not seeing galra as an evil monolith, Allura eventually does. She works alongside Lotor even before discovering that he has Altean heritage. Eventually, they fall for each other and Allura is on cloud nine for a while as the war seems to be over and she is spending more and more time with Lotor, who encourages her, praises her and helps her connect more to Altea. So, of course, this doesn’t last for long. Lotor is revealed to have been manipulating Allura (and the others) all this time, using her to upgrade his Sincline ships while secretly using Alteans he found in the diaspora as batteries.

(Pictured: Lotor holding Allura’s hand in Bloodlines, S5E5. She agrees to help him search Haggar’s den and during this search, learns of his Altean blood.)

So, what was the need of this relationship? She was punished for not trusting the Galra, and then punished for...trusting the Galra. She clearly could not win. And why was it necessary to have Allura fall for Lotor, only for it to end on such a terrible note? Why did their relationship have to be romantic? Was it simply so Allura would feel the pain of his “betrayal” that much more? Because it sure comes off that way.

There are so many scenes of Allura breaking down in tears - Crystal Venom, The Red Paladin, that one episode in s8 that I can’t remember that has her crying bc Sincline was about to kill Lance, probably more - and she is constantly giving up pieces of herself and her heritage. In the very first season, she heals the balmera (Rebirth, S1E8) at expense to her own health. Through the length of the show, Allura continues to risk her life to protect others. She desperately wants to maintain connections to Altea (hence her joy at the alternate alteans, as well as her close bond with Lotor) yet she is constantly losing every connection she has. She has to destroy her father’s AI, the alteans turn out to be evil, Lotor turns out to be evil, they blow up the castle to save all of existence, she gives up the jewel from her crown (which she never took off) to save shiro, and then ultimately, she dies to save all realities (because...reasons). One would have thought that her arc would involve being less self-sacrificing, but no. Allura is tortured emotionally, loses everything she cares about and then dies.

On a similar note, while Allura was constantly put through emotional torture, Shiro was constantly put through physical torture. There are several pieces out there by people far more eloquent than myself that detail the constant use of Shiro for torture porn throughout the show so I won’t rehash them. I will say that, like Allura, his torture does not culminate in a satisfying ending that made all his suffering “worth it”. Throughout the first and second seasons, we see Shiro bond closely with the black lion. He battles Zarkon for control (Space Mall, S2E7) and almost fails, until he realises that “nobody controls the black lion” and this galvanises the lion to take action and save him, severing zarkon’s bond. In the final episode of the season (Blackout, S2E13) Shiro and the black lion connect more deeply than ever before and we are shown a montage of all their bonding moments, leading up to Shiro unlocking the black lion’s wings, which enable them to phase through Zarkon and collect the black bayard, a plot point introduced in the very first episode. After seeing Shiro work so hard to earn the black lion’s trust, forge a bond stronger than the one that lasted 10 thousand years, and triumphantly collect the bayard, his fans would be understandably excited to see him use it. But he never does. After all that hard work, Shiro never sits in the black lion’s cockpit again. His clone does for a while, but Shiro himself does not, and he never touches the bayard again. This is a huge disappointment to his fans, after 24 (technically 26) episodes of buildup to that moment.

And to add insult to injury, it’s never explained why he doesn’t. The EPs said in an interview that when Allura unmerged Shiro’s quintessence from the black lion, she also broke their bond. But this explanation comes with a number of issues. Firstly, this is never stated in canon. Viewers should not have to rely on extra-canonical material to get a full story. Extra-canonical material should be supplementary, an opportunity for eager fans to learn more about the universe and the characters. It shouldn’t be a requisite to understand the story. And, believe me, this information was. When I was watching season 7 with my (at the time) 10 year old brother, he turned to me and asked me why Shiro wasn’t flying the black lion now he was back. I shrugged and told him I didn’t know. I, in fact, did know the EPs explanation, but I wasn’t going to do their job for them. Secondly, the explanation falls apart upon the slightest examination. Say Allura did remove Shiro’s bond with the black lion (somehow...because that doesn’t even make sense). In the pilot, Allura says that “the quintessence of the pilot is mirrored in his lion” and this is why they can bond and fly together. Well, Shiro’s quintessence hasn’t changed, as Allura simply extracted and transferred it. The black lion’s quintessence hasn’t changed since nothing happened to make it change. When they first met, Shiro and the black lion didn’t have a bond. They formed and strengthened that bond upon flying together. So, why can’t they do that again? What is stopping Shiro from simply sitting in the cockpit and restoring their bond?

Short answer: Keith.

Long answer: the EPs desperate desire to have Keith in the black lion at all cost.

Keith was the leader of voltron in DOTU. This isn’t news, we all know this. Keith has also been the leader in every iteration since. This means that Keith has always flown the black lion. VLD following this trend makes sense, right?

Well, no.

Other iterations of voltron always begin with Keith in the black lion. They don’t shuffle him there later, they start with him there. Keith is always the strong, sensible, heroic figure that makes him perfect to lead the team, so he does. VLD strayed from that, and that makes all the difference. In VLD, Keith is introduced as a loner with a temper. He’s closed off from the team, only displaying affection for Shiro. This makes him unsuitable for the leadership position at the time of inception. Does that mean he can never lead? No. He can absolutely grow into leadership. But the problem is, the show already presents us with a valid position for him: the red lion. In the red lion, Keith’s fiery nature, intuitiveness and fast pace are positives. He’s allowed to stretch his legs, flying in the fastest lion and doing cool stunts, then returning to the team when necessary. He doesn’t have to change the core of who he is. Additionally, he is shown to have abandonment issues, hence why he clings to Shiro so tightly. It seems fitting then, that the lion he is matched with is the only one that comes to save their paladin so often, retrieving Keith on five different occasions (S1E1, S2E6, S2E8, S2E11 and S2E12) and even across several galaxies.

In previous iterations, the lions are not given personalities, nor do they demand unique traits/quintessence from their pilots. They’re just ships. But in VLD, Allura tells us in the pilot that the lions are meant to be piloted by these five alone. Their quintessence is mirrored in the paladins as she assigns them. They are perfect matches, just like with red and Keith. Hunk is fearful and Yellow has superior armour. Pidge is brilliant and Green is inquisitive. Lance is insecure (especially in relation to Keith) and Blue is nurturing, but more importantly, chose Lance out of all 5 pilots available (Keith visited the cave several times but blue didn’t take him. She waited for Lance). And Shiro and Black are both strong leaders that suffered from trauma and struggled for control over themselves.

Naturally, when you begin a story with a perfect fit, you want to shake things up because conflict begets growth. However, shaking things up shouldn’t cause them to end up in a worse place than they began because the question becomes: well, why don’t they just go back to where they were before? And that’s the big question in vld. Why didn’t they go back?

So, ok yeah. I think the lion swap is trash.

(Pictured: splitscreen of the paladins minus Shiro in All Good Things, S6E6. They form voltron with Keith in the black lion, Lance in the red lion and Allura in the blue lion.)

Now, like I said, you want to shake things up because conflict begets growth. And for that reason, I don’t think the lion swap was a bad concept. Putting Keith in the black lion forces him to learn to work with his teammates instead of remaining a lone wolf. Putting Allura in the blue (or any) lion brings her closer to the paladins. Lance and the red lion could have easily been the most interesting switch. In the pilot, the first major thing we learn about Lance is that he only got a spot as a fighter pilot because the best pilot of their generation had a discipline issue and flunked out. This student happens to be Keith, and Lance has a lot of insecurities about the guy, instigating a rivalry with him (mostly one-sided but Keith shoots back with his own barbs too). Coming back to the lion swap, the red lion is Keith’s old lion. There was a wide open opportunity to explore Lance’s insecurities here, as he would once again be stepping into the pilot role that Keith left behind. Lance could have felt that he would yet again be in Keith’s shadow (as Keith has now levelled up to leader) and this could’ve caused some major conflict. But nothing was done with it. Lance simply makes a comment about how Keith “probably trained it to bite my head off” and that’s the end of that. Lance then has no qualms about flying red and his Keith related insecurities (and indeed, all his insecurities that aren’t about romance) are brushed under the rug and he props Keith up as “team leader”.

Personally, I think each of the characters affected by the swap should’ve had a mini-hero’s journey. The characters start in their original lions (the castle for Allura). In their original position, they have whatever issues it is they need to tackle (Keith’s lone wolf tendencies, Allura’s self sacrificial nature, Shiro’s trauma and sense of worth, and Lance’s insecurities). When the swap happens, they struggle with their new positions, but are forced to grow. They then take this growth with them when they return to their original positions as wiser individuals (Shiro knows he isn’t a monster, Allura learns that the weight of the war against the galra isn’t entirely on her shoulders, Keith comes to trust and open up to the team and not only Shiro, Lance realises that he isn’t a discount Keith and he has his own strengths).

But the wasted opportunities aren’t the only problem with the lion swap. Arguably a bigger problem is the hierarchy it suddenly establishes. The concept of voltron is five equals coming together to form something that is greater than the sum of its parts. They cannot form voltron if even one of the lions is indisposed. So, by definition, all of the lions should be equally important. The black lion being the leader shouldn’t make it the most important, it should just be because every team needs someone to organise them and black happens to be that for the lions, just as Shiro was for the paladins. After all, of what damn use is voltron with only a head and torso? No, all lions should be equal.

But they aren’t. When Keith moves to the black lion, Lance moving into the red lion is framed as a promotion. Allura says that it is because Lance put his need for glory aside when accepting Keith as leader and this somehow passed the red lion’s test, but what about the others? Did they put their needs for glory first? Did Allura? Why was she unable to fly the red lion? The EPs said in interviews that the blue lion is the nurturing lion and is like a mother bird that pushes her baby out of the nest when the baby is ready to fly, suggesting that she pushed Lance to red because he didn’t need her anymore. They also refer to the blue lion as the “training wheels lion”, implying that those who fly the blue lion are not yet ready to fly a real lion. What does this say about Blaytz, the previous blue paladin? He was the leader of his planet, yet he spent his entire time in voltron in the training wheels lion? And, more pertinently, what does this say about Allura? It completely infantilizes her and is absolutely insulting.

Ultimately, the downgrading of the blue lion to a training wheels lion and the sudden insistence on the red lion being the right hand man to the leader establishes a hierarchy of Black > Red > Green/Yellow > Blue. Allura used to be the decision maker. In the pilot, Shiro says “Princess Allura, these are your lions, you've dealt with the Galra empire before. You know what we're facing better than any of us. What do you think is the best course of action?” From the very first episode, Shiro (who is already the leader of the paladins) defers to Allura. She was their commander, calling all the shots, superior to even the black paladin. But once she steps into the blue lion, she loses that rank. She falls to the bottom of the totem pole. Taking a dark-skinned woman and putting her in a powerful position, only to strip her of that and relegate her to the bottom (mind you, it only becomes the bottom when she gets there), is either the height of ignorance or deliberate malicious intent.

In fact, the lion swap leaves us with a very uncomfortable set up. With the establishment of the hierarchy, we know that the head is superior to the arms, which are superior to the legs. Well, the head happens to be the space white (arguably earth white too - his ethnicity was never revealed, possibly because they knew they would lose support if they countered the popular Asian Keith headcanon) male character. The arms are the white female character and the brown (but lighter brown) male character. The legs are the darkest-skinned characters.

At the end of the day, VLD was racist. Plain and simple. The characters of colour that remained in voltron were short-changed terribly, and Shiro was shuffled off onto the atlas because they weren’t allowed to kill him.

I mentioned how pretty much all of Lance’s insecurities were brushed under the rug, save for one: romance. From the very first episode, Lance displayed a crush on Allura. He flirted with her incessantly, to constant rebuffs but remained undeterred. In the 3rd season, he suddenly stopped flirting. He and Allura developed a friendly and mutually encouraging rapport. It was sweet. They were sweet. But then everything changed when the fire nation attacked Lotor arrived. Despite Allura and Lance’s continued sweet moments, Allura fell for Lotor. She didn’t shun Lance or anything, and she certainly still valued and cared for him greatly, risking her life to save him (Omega Shield, S6E1). But she didn’t see him romantically. How do we know this? Because when the mice inform her of the depths of Lance’s feelings for her (Timey Wimey ep, sorry idk the name, S6E2) she is initially surprised, but then sad.

(Pictured: Allura’s face after the initial surprise of the mice recounting what Lance told them about his feelings for her in S6E2. This episode comes before the one where she and Lotor share a kiss.)

It can be argued that she’s “conflicted” and not sad, but I personally don’t see that. I just see sad. But even if she was conflicted. Even if she did have romantic feelings for Lance by this point, her feelings for Lotor were stronger. We don’t see her torn between the two men. We see her consistently choose to spend time with Lotor and kissing him despite knowing how Lance feels about her. Whatever potential romantic feelings she may have for Lance, they weren’t enough to deter her from choosing Lotor. That is inarguable.

So after totally ignoring all other aspects of Lance’s insecurities, the narrative then validates the only one left by confirming that, yeah, he is the second choice. And I know people love to argue that just because he isn’t Allura’s first kiss doesn’t mean their relationship isn’t valid and obviously this is true. I’m not saying Allura can’t kiss more than one man in her life or she’s some sort of impure slut. Of course not. What I am saying, is that we know that Lance has insecurities pertaining to being second choice. He is insecure because he’s been told that he only made fighter pilot because Keith messed up. Well, guess what? He only became Allura’s boyfriend because Lotor messed up. He’s in the same situation all over again. Allura knew her options and made her choice. When that choice was no longer viable, she went for the other option. The narrative confirms Lance’s inferiority. There are so many other ways this could’ve been handled. For example, if Allura and Lotor had been spending a lot of time together working on the ship, and it only looked like they were dating, that would’ve been fine. Finding out about the colony would still have been heartbreaking for Allura because she trusted him. As another example, if Allura had feelings for both men but chose Lotor because she felt it was almost her duty, to secure a stronger alliance with the empire, that would’ve made the ultimate endgame with Lance more believable. Or, if the mice simply never told her how Lance felt and she didn’t know he was still into her. Or if they even had one moment after the colony reveal (The Colony, S6E4) where Lance did or said something and Allura was shown to be considering him romantically, before she walks up to him in season 7 all blushy and stammering (I don’t know s7 episode names but it’s there, I think it might be s7E10). That moment seems to come out of nowhere because all of Allura and Lance’s scenes that can be interpreted as romantic on her part occur before she kisses Lotor (and no, Lance comforting her in S6E5 doesn’t count because she’s literally crying on his shoulder over another guy. That’s not romantic. Her comforting him in S6E7 doesn’t count either because it’s essentially the same day as the colony reveal and there is no way she’s believably gotten over it that fast. Also he’s literally crying over their dead friend’s body. Nothing says romance like a corpse, amirite?) so we’re left wondering: when? When did she start liking him back? Which is a shame, because a relationship built on mutual support is a wonderful thing to show. VLD just didn’t show it well.

The buildup to relationship fails Allura just as much as it does Lance, because it appears as though she is being punished (yet again!) for making the wrong choice. She had the options of Lotor or Lance and she chose Lotor. And her reward for choosing Lotor is discovering that he neglected to mention the tiny fact that her people are not eradicated and he’s been using them as batteries all this time. A lot of heartbreak would’ve been avoided if, upon finding out about Lance’s feelings, she’d just chosen him directly instead of going through the Lotor thing first. Because she learnt nothing from that experience that required that she kiss him. There was no need for her to have romantic feelings for Lotor; after all, he needed her magical abilities so it’s not like they wouldn’t have gone to Oriande anyway. So what was the need to put her through that heartbreak When her romantic endgame was already available, willing and able? It ends up just feeling like someone working on VLD once had a crush on a girl who chose a suave bad-boy type over him, and he’s reliving it through this cartoon by showing how the bad boy type is actually just using her and she should actually have chosen him (my guess is JDS but that’s just me).

Continuing on the topic of romance, Shiro’s relationships are a mess. From the whole ordeal with Adam, his death and the 5 seconds of mourning Shiro was allowed, to Curtis’ name only coming up in captions and he and Shiro never actually having a conversation before getting married, it’s pretty clear how little effort was put into queer representation. The EPs knew how desperate the fans were to see queer rep and they played on this in interviews and at panels, stringing fans along with hope to see at least one queer main character and couple. But they never intended on fulfilling that. Several sources reveal conflicting information on how and when Shiro being queer was decided, with some sources saying it was Bex Taylor Klaus that asked for it, some saying it was a recent development and some saying they’d been sitting on it for a long time. In fact, the EPs themselves claim they’ve been sitting on the knowledge for a while, but with their awareness of the “Bury Your Gays” trope, they considered making somebody else The Rep™️ (because y’know. They wanted to kill Shiro. They have been very vocal about wanting to kill Shiro. Also The Rep™️ because heaven forbid you have representation for marginalised people in more than one character, right? Can you imagine having TWO WHOLE QUEERS? Scandalous!) but when their higher ups informed them that they were not to kill Shiro, they decided to make him The Rep™️ again. If this is true (and that’s a big if) one must ask: if they were aware of the “Bury Your Gays” trope, why did they do it anyway? And TWICE for that matter (thrice if you include Shiro’s death and resurrection. That’s right, shiro is Jesus).

They killed Adam supposedly to show the casualties of war, but we’ve only ever seen Adam once and it was during his and Shiro’s breakup scene. Of what emotional value is he to us? To show the emotional stakes, killing Sam would’ve made more sense because we’ve at least met the guy and we’ve seen how much Pidge loves her dad. Adam was barely a character. In fact, my brother didn’t even know we had ever seen the guy before when I paused during his death scene and asked him who that was (he said it was just some random pilot we’d never seen and had no idea what I was on about when I said it was the guy shiro was arguing with in the first episode). So frankly, I don’t care that Adam died. I only care that Shiro is yet again on the receiving end of the VLD stick of pain, and that a queer character was killed for no good reason. And Ezor is only alive because of the backlash after season 7 (sidenote: well done y’all. Making your voices HEARD and getting change is a beautiful thing). Yet another queer character would’ve been killed off unceremoniously if the EPs had their way.

I could go on forever about how much this show fucked up but I’m actually getting tired of thinking about it so I’m gonna summarise the next few issues in another post.

PART 2

#finally posting this #hoo boy #i have A LOT of thoughts #i've been sending snippets of this to friends whenever we're talking about one specific issue #but here it is in its entirety #well part 1 of its entirety #vld critical #a pinch of salt #vld #voltron #long post #voltron legendary defender #more like #voltron legendary disaster #or #voltron legendary disappointment #whats wrong with vld

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camelotpark · 6 years

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http://thisdiscontentedwinter.tumblr.com/post/182179304312/in-which-camelotpark-falls-in-a-whole#notes

These are just some of the terms under your dumb as a box of scotts

"because Stiles isn’t a fucking idiot." (when directly comparing him to Scott and thereby calling Scott a fucking idiot)

"You have to be smart to be at Peter Hale levels of villainy. I’m not sure Scott could think his way out of a paper bag if someone gave him a flashlight and a map, TBH."

"But you know what else is brainless, and also as canonically smart as Scott?

A box of rocks."

Each of these quotes go far beyond just his academic success and instead talking about his intelligence as a whole so you're "I'm just calling him academically challenged" is bullshit. You are calling a latinx character "dumb as a box of rocks" when canonically he was shown to outsmart men I'm sure you consider his superior in every way. Just because you didn't like how he did it doesn't take away it took intelligence and skill to do it. Something the show clearly acknowledged he had and something you have worked hard to strip him of.

"And given that Scott’s bad grades are being mentioned as early as the first few episodes, how do you account for that? "

“Second verse, same as the first!"

Once again your tag goes far beyond his academic intelligence and into you thinking he is as dumb as a bag of rocks (your exact words) as a whole so trying to pull the "he failed classes" tactic now is a weak attempt to save face. A stereotype that most latinx deal with is assuming that they are stupid because they aren't "as smart" as their white counterparts and "because Stiles isn't a fucking idiot" shows you sure as hell think that despite canon showing Scott is more than capable of holding his own

I'm sure instead of just saying "Okay,maybe he had academic troubles,but that isn't a measure of his overall intelligence" you'll just dig you'll heels in more and swerve to prove this latinx character is stupid because you (a white woman) judge Scott (a brown latinx) for not knowing what every single english word means. And yes, that stupid bestiary thing comes up in the tag a lot so you use a latinx's grasp on the english language to call him stupid. You know he speaks english (as you often complain that him not speaking spanish can prove he's not a latino in canon) Yet you used him not understanding one word to prove your point, I would ask if you know that's a racist stereotype too (latinos not speaking the english language well), but it's clear you lack a lot in understanding racial bigotry beyond just hating someone for their skin color or calling them a slur.

Of course trying to attack my own intelligence because I misspelled words is tactic you used and clearly show a pattern so I'm not surprised. It's a easy lazy way to try and discredit someone because your defense for your actions are paper thin.

"I know that you never said fandom wasn’t an open place for self-expression and that we all have different tastes. Because clearly you don’t believe that, right??"

You damn right I don't believe that,not for a second. I'm a poc in fandom and have been for a long time. Teen Wolf is not my first dealing with this culture and I've seen poc fans driven from fandoms in droves because their "open-place for self-expression" was attacked. Because they dare challenge the racially bias way a poc character was treated. See, when you say "Open place for self-expression" what you mean is "Let me do what I want, let me paint this poc how I want, and I don't care if it hurts poc fans to see the characters that look like them judged more harshly by fandoms then their white counterparts. You don’t like it,don’t read it."

Then of course those poc go to safer spaces and we have people like you and StickeyKeys and the rest of your crew going "I can be here and say what I want because this tag isn't just for you to celebrate your character it's also for me to let you see how awful he/she is" See, the problem is that you don't want poc to have their space just for them. You want to be in every single part of it and eventually it makes poc fans leave the fandom completely.

An article that dared to celebrate Scott and put him in a space of queer-coded that moc are hardly ever in with fandom was attacked mercilessly and his character was demonized once again. The article never once bashed Stiles or any other character,but of course a place to celebrate a poc had to have people tell everyone exactly why that support was wrong.

A “they do it so I can do it too” is not a reason, it’s an excuse.

Your blog has literally condemned Scott for switching out a white man's cancer pills as evil and cruel when that white man has attacked him repeatedly. Has stabbed him and plainly said he would kill Scott's mother. Scott was painted as non-heroic for potentially killing a man who has tried to kill him before and would have gladly killed Scott's mother. Let's ignore that Donovan telling Stiles he’ll kill his father and attacking him is all the justification you need to say Stiles was not at fault for what he did.

You love to use the word hypocrisy without realizing you are literally the biggest hypocrite there is.

Of course I can hear the excuse now "Heat of the moment!" "Stiles didn't plan it!" "Scott’s was premeditated!" I'm sure if Scott had just slashed Gerard's throat you would back him up and defend him against accusations he's unnecessarily cruel. I'm sure if Scott somehow got the upper hand on Derek on that ice rink and ripped his heart out you would be the first to defend Scott against people saying his safety doesn't excuse his actions. He should have been “better”

I'm sure to you it means absolutely nothing to put a white man's life over a poc's and paint that poc as bad for taking actions against it, but it means something to people like me because this behavior isn't confined to just fandom. So yes, when a poc brings this up it is amazing how fast that "Open place for self expression" disappears.

"And I’m calling Scott not academically smart because that’s what his teachers say. That’s why he had to go to the parent teacher night."

Once again you literally called him no smarter than a bag of rocks.

"We could also talk about how stereotypes are different all around the world, and that your US-centric worldview isn’t the universal experience and that people from different countries and cultures aren’t ingrained with the same racial biases from birth as Americans are."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat

"Ignorantia juris non excusat[1] or ignorantia legis neminem excusat[2] (Latin for "ignorance of the law excuses not"[1] and "ignorance of law excuses no one"[2] respectively) is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because one was unaware of its content."

The same goes for racism and stereotypes. Just because you are unaware racial bias exist with certain stereotypes does not give you a pass for using them. You learn it, you acknowledge it, and you stop doing it.

"That’s called a metaphor." "And disagreeing with another woman’s opinion is not misogyny"

I'm glad you know what a metaphor is,but nobody said your disagreement with another woman is misogyny (or your disagreement with a lgbtq man is homophobia) The language you used to defend yourself is. You attacked their sexuality to one up them and saying that a woman or lgbtq man is "sucking someone's dick" when all they are doing is defending a character you don't like is key misogyny and homophobia, metaphorically intent or not. And don't think I didn't notice that you didn't mention your homophobia in your reply. You could have went a million different ways to defend your stance. It is disgusting and you were disgusting for doing it. There is absolutely no defense for that action.

See, you say people are moving goalpost when they dismantle your argument and you try and swerve. It's not. I'm saying what I always said "Scott McCall is not as dumb as a bag of rocks and you trying to prove that true is racial stereotyping"

One last thing. I have never said you can't speak on racism, if you see it by all means call it out. What I said was you can't tell other people (especially poc) what is not racist. That is not your right.

#trash from a land down under #anti-teen wolf fandom #fandom racism #fandom misogyny #homophobia

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fozmeadows · 7 years

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Rumours About Rumours, or: The Kent Parson Meta That Nobody Asked For

As is well-documented by this point, I’m a hopeless fan of @omgcheckplease, to the point where a gay hockey comic has turned me into an actual fan of ice hockey, dear god, I’ve become invested in a sport that’s barely even fucking played in my country, what is this even?? Naturally, this means I follow a few CP-heavy blogs on tumblr, and recently I’ve noticed a few people expressing confusion about why so many people like Kent Parson, given the fact that, canonically, his big introduction involves him being goddamn awful to Jack.

Now: straight off the bat – and I’m saying this, obviously, as someone who finds Kent Parson a fascinating character – I want to acknowledge that fandom, as a general entity, is heavily biased towards white guys. It’s one of those raindrop-in-a-storm problems where, at an individual level, everyone is entitled to their own personal preferences (always bearing in mind that said preferences can be influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by cultural bias), but where the cumulative, collective effect of those choices amplifies the effects of cultural bias. It would therefore be disingenuous to deny that, whatever my thoughts on or interest in Kent as a character, there’s still a collective issue with how much more attention he often receives than more canonically prominent – and non-assholish – POC characters like Ransom, Chowder, Nursey and Lardo.

(Sidenote: as part of various race-oriented meta about CP, I’ve seen it pointed out that, in fanworks, the POC characters are most often romantically paired with white characters rather than other POC, and that this is a worthy point of investigation and criticism. I agree on both counts, but also feel that, in this specific instance, it’s important to note that, in canon, all the POC characters are primarily – either romantically or platonically – paired with another white character, and that these pairings dominate their appearances in the strip. (Ransom and Holster, Chowder and Farmer (or Chowder and Bitty, platonically), Nursey and Dex, Lardo and Shitty.) So while that doesn’t excuse the comparative lack of creative licence taken in moving beyond those pairings, as is common fanwriting practice, it does explain their existence as a non-trivial narrative baseline. ANYWAY.)

As to why Kent himself is interesting - well. There are, I think, two main reasons for this:

1: He’s Jack’s most significant ex; and

2: He’s presented as an antagonist.

If only the latter point was true, then I’d be much less inclined to invest in him emotionally. What matters is the fact that, despite all the wonderful shipping opportunities afforded by CP, Kent is one of only three (thus far) canonically queer characters – and not only that, he has an existing, complicated backstory with Jack, which therefore connects him emotionally to both Jack and Bitty. Any canon-compliant take on Jack’s romantic history must therefore feature Kent, and with that particular speculative door cracked open, it’s natural to wonder about Kent’s version of events.

Which is where my personal interest in Kent comes in. Because Jack Zimmermann, despite being our noble hockey hero and the protagonist’s love interest, is, by his own admission, an unreliable narrator of his own emotions. And as Jack’s narration is the only insight we get into his and Kent’s relationships, it’s not unreasonable to wonder what we’re missing out on – to say nothing of the possibility that Jack, historically, might not have been great for Kent.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

Jack “emotional range of a teaspoon” Zimmermann

From early in the comic, it’s clear that Jack isn’t great at expressing his emotions – which is why, for the whole first year of their friendship, he’s presented, not at Bitty’s love interest, but as his antagonist. In the fifth strip, Bitty says he’s “thinking of quitting” because Jack “chewed [him] out – in front of everyone. Again.” The others try to reassure Bitty that Jack “gets real bitchy” during pre-season, but will return to “regularly scheduled levels of bitchy after the first game”: even Jack’s closest friends recognise his habit of taking his stress out on other people. This is when we learn about Jack’s father, and the pressure Jack feels because of it: or, as Shitty puts it, “When a bro’s dad is Bad Bob, a bro’s gonna turn into a fucking hockey Nazi every once in a while.”

By itself, this information doesn’t exonerate Jack’s behaviour towards Bitty. The subsequent strip, however, is crucial to our understanding of – and the creation of sympathy for – Jack, telling us, the readers, about his history of anxiety, his overdose, his feelings of guilt, and why success at Samwell is so important to him. This piece of backstory serves to recontextualise Jack’s prior treatment of Bitty while adding an interpretative lens to everything we subsequently see. As such, when Bitty talks about “Reason #17 to hate Jack” two strips later, and Jack pushes him to get past his fears of checking, it’s easier to view his brusqueness in a kinder light than if we didn’t know his personal history. Without knowing that fear of failure is one of Jack’s most powerful demons, Jack telling Bitty emphatically that they’ll work “Until you stop being scared” could easily read as insensitive or angry, even with the more light-hearted line that follows.

From this point, the development of Jack and Bitty’s relationship is one where the reader knows more about Jack’s motivation than Bitty does. (Potentially, at least; we know that Bitty has Googled Jack’s dad, but not whether that search turned up information about Jack’s time in the Q.) This means that, when Bitty finds Jack sitting alone and anxious in the loading bay before his father’s visit, we have a deeper understanding of Jack’s pregame stress than Bitty does. As such, even when we sympathise with Bitty afterwards, when Jack, jealous and stressed, tells Bitty that his game-winning goal was “a lucky shot,” we still understand Jack’s feelings. Our awareness of him is layered: he’s just done something incredibly hurtful and dickish, but we know that he’s hurting, too.

In the sixteenth strip, Bitty still thinks that “Jack hates [his] guts,” and is upset by Jack glaring at him when Bitty is put on his line, yet the readers know that Jack is stressed by the implied criticism of being told that “you’re a better player when you’re with Bittle.” Their relationship changes on both sides when they start officially playing together: it’s the first time Bitty really speaks positively about Jack, and the first time we see Jack being impressed by Bitty as a player – a development which is immediately followed by a dash of mutual hurt/comfort to cement their sympathies. Bitty, for the first time, sees Jack belittled for his stint in rehab by a sportscaster post-game, while Jack sees Bitty concussed on the ice for attempting a risky play. Jack subsequently apologies for his actions: not only to Bitty personally, but to the team as a whole. And thus ends Bitty’s first year at Samwell: with Jack as a friend instead of antagonist.

Even so, this changed relationship doesn’t make Jack any better at expressing his feelings. At the start of Bitty’s sophomore year, Ransom notes that “Goal celebrations provide the rare opportunity for the stoic Canadian warrior to express his emotions,” with Holster adding, “Many believe this is his only way of emoting.”

Enter Kent Parson – or rather, our first oblique reference to him, when Jack is talking to Bitty about his NHL prospects: “They said with the way the teams are stacking up? With how Kent– uh, the Aces won the cup a couple of years ago…”

The fact that Jack stumbles over his name is telling: he doesn’t want to talk personally about Kent, though at this point, we don’t know why. The next strip marks Kent’s actual first appearance, chirping Jack for taking a selfie with Bitty: the fact that Jack is visibly shocked to see him is likewise a clue to their complex relationship.

Kent Parson: Rumours About Rumours

When Ransom and Holster give us Kent’s backstory, they emphasise the “rumours” about Jack and Kent’s relationship when they played together – a statement accompanied by the image of a younger Kent sitting on younger Jack’s lap at a party – complete with reference to “a trove of Zimmermann/Parson fanfiction”. At the same time, they’re also clearly unsure as to what Kent and Jack think of each other now, noting that “Jack doesn’t really talk about him much.” The flashback image accompanying this claim is significant: while younger Jack frowns anxiously over a newspaper article about the draft, a younger Kent is shown sitting beside him, a hand on Jack’s arm and a hopeful smile on his face – the attitude of someone trying to comfort a person they care about. Equally significant as a narrative hint is the fact that, in quoting the synopsis of a piece of Zimmermann/Parson fanfic, Holster tells us, “It’s not that Jack wasn’t into relationships, it’s just that Jack wasn’t a relationships kind of guy.” This is noteworthy, not only as foreshadowing, but because it shows us that, canonically, Jack was perceived by shippers to be emotionally distant – something that tracks accurately with his characterisation as someone who’s Bad At Feelings.

The most telling clue we’re given about Jack and Kent’s relationship, however, comes two panels later, from Shitty. As was demonstrated early in the comic, the fact that Shitty is Jack’s ride-or-die best friend doesn’t make him blind to Jack’s faults, while a key part of Shitty’s characterisation is his utter hatred of douchebags. As such, it’s doubly significant that Shitty is the one to warn Bitty, not that Kent is a bad guy, but that Jack is bad to Kent. Specifically, he says: “Jack can get pretty jealous, okay? Like, the last time Parson dropped by – yeah, it was after he’d won a fucking Stanley Cup, but it wasn’t like he had his Calder under his arm. Parson’s a modest bro. And the way Jack acted… brah. It freaked me out! It was kinda how Jack used to treat you.”

In other words: Jack was antagonistically jealous of Kent’s success, even though Kent did nothing to lord it over him, in the same way Jack was once antagonistically jealous of Bitty’s success. In Bitty’s case, the mutual hurt was only resolved when they started to play together: their on-ice chemistry let them see the best in each other, and as Jack’s teammates have all observed, Jack – at this point in his life, anyway – only really expresses his feelings on the ice.

Which is when we learn that Kent has come to ask Jack to play for the Aces.

Which brings us to the argument Jack and Kent have, which ostensibly cements Kent’s status as an antagonist. But let’s, just for a moment, view this scene from the little we know of Kent’s perspective.

The last time Kent came to see Jack, Jack reacted with hostility, pushing him away despite the fact that nothing we’ve seen in the flashbacks to their relationship is indicative of bad behaviour on Kent’s part. Instead, they look happy together, with Kent offering comfort and optimism in response to Jack’s anxiety. We also know that Jack has difficulty expressing his emotions, especially negative ones, being more likely to lash out or withdraw than to try and address them productively. It’s also not a stretch to imagine that Kent, as a former teammate – someone who once played spectacularly with Jack, the same way Jack now plays with Bitty – knows, as Jack’s current teammates do, that Jack works through his feelings best on the ice.

In their argument, Kent says that he only came unannounced to Samwell because Jack “shut [him] out”, suggesting that Jack refused to talk to him – and not, given what Shitty said about Kent’s last visit, because of anything Kent himself did. And the first thing Kent sees, on walking into the party, is Jack smiling at a short, blonde hockey player who looks a bit like a younger version of Kent, one who plays on Jack’s line and makes him better the way Kent used to do. Kent, who could easily react with jealousy here, is polite to Bitty instead; goes out of his way to take selfies with everyone who wants them; takes Lardo humiliating him at flip-cup in good humour: behaves himself, in other words. A modest bro, just like Shitty – whose judgement we ought to trust at this point – said.

When Bitty comes upstairs, he doesn’t immediately overhear an argument between Jack and Kent, because at first, they’re not arguing. Kent is asking Jack if he’s thought about coming to play for the Aces, and while it’s hard to prove, the way Jack’s speech is broken up mid-word, followed by overt pauses, suggests that Kent kisses him, as does the fact that Jack says “I can’t do this” immediately afterwards. Kent begs Jack to “just fucking stop thinking and listen to me for once,” suggesting both that Kent knows Jack is prone to overthinking, and that Jack has refused to hear him out on the topic previously.

The point where the conversation turns hostile comes when Kent calls the Wellies “a shitty team”, followed immediately by an attempted contrast to their old style of playing together: “you and me –”

But Jack doesn’t let him finish. Instead, he tells Kent to get out. This is when Kent yells that he only came the way he did because Jack shut him out, adding that he’s “trying to help”. At this point, Kent is desperate, his plea very clearly an appeal to an emotion he himself feels deeply: “What do you want me to say? That I miss you? I miss you, OK?... I miss you.”

(When Kent walks into the Haus and sees Jack, he says, “Didja miss me?” Because Kent misses Jack. He wants Jack to miss him, too, and is desperately insecure about it.)

Jack replies with an absolute dismissal of Kent’s feelings: “You always say that.” Meaning, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. I don’t care.

And it’s then, and only then, that Kent becomes aggressive. What he says is calculated to wound, just as Jack telling Bitty his winning goal was “a lucky shot” was calculated to wound: and as such, I’d argue that the two scenes are paralleled in more ways than one. When Jack dismisses Bitty’s goal, he’s acting like an antagonist because he thinks Bitty has taken something from him – his father’s approval – that Jack feels ought to be his. Similarly, Kent is acting like an antagonist because he thinks Jack has taken something from him – their partnership – that Kent feels ought to be his, too.

And so Kent insults Jack, though his wording is curious (bolding mine): “You think you’re too fucked up to care about? That you’re not good enough? Everyone already knows what you are, but it’s people like me who still care. You’re scared everyone else is going to find out you’re worthless, right? Oh, don’t worry, just give it a few seasons, Jack. Trust me.”

Jack tells him to get out, to which Kent replies, “Fine. Shut me out again.”

The final blow comes as Kent is leaving : “Call me if you reconsider or whatever. But good luck with the Falconers… I’m sure that’ll make your dad proud.”

It’s not until the following year in the comic that we’re given a flashback that shows us Kent’s face as he says this. Kent, like Jack, is shaking – even more, is crying as he walks away, the image juxtaposed with present-day Jack telling a reporter that his history with Kent “is all in the past”. Which, for Jack, it is. But not for Kent.

And it’s here that the visual medium of comics becomes relevant to our perception of dialogue, because while particular words can be given an emphasis, all the verbal subtleties that differentiate tone and meaning are absent. When Kent finally rips into Jack, it’s telling that he doesn’t insult him directly: instead, he attacks Jack’s self-perception, and in such a way that, depending on spoken emphasis, he’s arguably saying one of two different things. In one version of Kent’s dialogue, he’s agreeing with Jack’s fears: offering a confirmation that he’s worthless, that (in Kent’s mind) nobody but Kent will ever care for him, and that, once he starts playing professionally, everyone else will see what a failure he is. And certainly, this is how Jack seems to take it.

But in the other version, Kent is angrily ridiculing Jack’s self-perception: You think you’re too fucked up to care about, but I still care, even though you don’t think I should. You’re scared that people will think you’re worthless, but everyone already knows what you are. (A desired player; one Kent came to recruit.) You don’t need to worry; you’re Jack Zimmermann. Just give it a few seasons. Trust me. And because of the context, this version is still hurtful to Jack: not only has Kent just verbalised his deepest insecurities, but he’s effectively mocked him for having them at all. But Kent has every reason to hate Jack’s insecurities at this moment, because Jack’s tendency towards emotional shutdown is why he keeps shoving Kent away, refusing to talk about a relationship that Kent, quite clearly, needs and wants – and, I would argue, deserves – to discuss with him.

Because when Jack later explains his relationship with Kent to Bitty, he doesn’t say anything about his treatment of Kent. Again, the structure of what he says is telling (my bolding): “We only hooked up a few times back in juniors… and with the draft changing everything… I don’t think he got over it… He got drafted. I didn’t. And it… stopped. Looking back, it really wasn’t anything more than physical. Hockey. And after taking my break, then Samwell… it takes a lot of growing up to realise someone wasn’t good for you… It kind of had an expiration date from the get go, you know? Push comes to shove… hockey came first. Something like that could’ve really messed with our careers.”

And this is where, for me, Jack Zimmermann becomes an emotionally unreliable narrator: his account of their relationship is not only clinical, but emotionally contrary to what we already know. The draft changed things, not because it was inevitable, because Jack was jealous that Kent was drafted. Shitty explicitly says as much to Bitty, but Jack doesn’t mention his jealousy here: instead, he says that the relationship was always going to end, and that – by implication – Jack chose hockey over Kent. Jack also says the relationship just “stopped,” which implies a mutual end to things, despite his simultaneous claim that Kent never got over it. Kent, however, has consistently expressed his frustration at Jack shutting him out; has likewise told Jack that he misses him on multiple occasions. So when Jack says the relationship was only physical – that it was nothing but sex and hockey, even though we’ve seen how close they were as friends in flashbacks – it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that he is severely downplaying the emotional aspect of their relationship.

When Jack and Bitty tell their teammates they’re dating, Jack admits to Shitty that “I don’t think I realised I wanted to be with Bittle until the last minute. Right at graduation… I don’t think about this stuff too much to be honest. Or I didn’t. Bittle says I’ve gotten better with my feelings.” Meaning that, for the better part of two years, Jack thought that his feelings for Bitty were platonic, even though he was acting in an ultimately romantic way, or at least in unconscious pursuit of a romantic end. Which means we have a strong canonical basis for asserting that, once upon a time, Jack treated Kent the same way – in a caring, enamoured fashion – while under the impression that their relationship, and his own actions, were strictly platonic. The only difference? Kent and Jack were actually sleeping together, and after Jack overdosed and nearly died, he cut Kent out, the relationship a secret from anyone Kent could’ve talked to.

In canon, we don’t know how Kent reacted to Jack’s overdose. In fanfic, however, it’s an incredibly powerful speculative point. Was Kent the one who found Jack when it happened? Was he allowed to see him in the hospital, or to visit in rehab? We know Jack’s parents eventually knew about Kent, but did Kent know they knew? Did Kent, a teenager whose secret boyfriend nearly died just days before he was forced to make the biggest career choice of his life and move, alone, to another state, ever get any help to deal with his feelings?

When Jack says in one breath that his relationship with Kent “wasn’t anything more than physical” and then, in the next, that Kent “wasn’t good for [me]”, he’s contradicting himself. Either there was an emotional relationship that went sour or was negative in some way, or they had uncomplicated casual sex – and from Kent’s perspective, there was clearly an emotional component. At the very least, and regardless of whether Kent actually behaved badly when they were together – a statement for which we have no tangible evidence – it’s clear that Kent has been hurt by Jack, having invested emotionally in someone who doesn’t want him. That Kent still wants Jack back after almost five years, and yet has barely interacted with him in that time, is telling: Kent’s attachment is unhealthy only because it’s unrequited, not because he’s been relentlessly and constantly pursuing an uninterested party.

When Jack tells Bitty that his relationship with Kent had an expiration date because of their careers, it makes Bitty insecure: he worries that Jack is going to eventually leave him, because, in Jack’s own words, hockey comes first. Similarly, in discussing why things ended with Kent, Jack emphasises the impossibility of the relationship, the inherent impermanence of it, which fits with the fact that, when Kent propositions him at Epikegster, Jack says “I can’t do this” – can’t, not I don’t want to. Suggesting that, if Jack ever gave Kent a reason for ending things after the draft, it was the same one he gave Bitty: we can’t do this anymore because of our careers. In which case, it makes perfect sense that Kent has spent five years pining for Jack: because Jack “I Don’t Understand, Recognise Or Articulate My Own Feelings” Zimmermann never actually told Kent that he didn’t want to be together – only that they couldn’t.

So Kent has waited. He’s made a name for himself, keeping his distance from Jack but always making it clear that he misses him, returning even after Jack acted like a jealous ass about Kent’s success. And when he comes, he has a plan: they can be together again. Jack can be on his team again, they can date again, and why the fuck won’t Jack talk to him –

And then Jack throws him out, and Kent, who is fucking heartbroken, finally lashes out at him.

For all that Kent says some truly awful things to Jack, they ultimately fall into the same class of antagonism that originally characterised Jack’s treatment of Bitty – except that, in Kent’s case, we have to piece his sympathising motives together from context cues instead of being given a neat synopsis. Jack’s relationship with Bitty – the way he learns to identify and express his feelings, to prioritise his boyfriend’s life – is predicated on an arc of emotional healing, one where Bitty makes Jack a better person. Kent at Epikegster is the result of Jack’s attempt at relationships before he learned to do this.

For Bitty, Jack Zimmermann is a romantic hero; for Kent, he’s a messed-up origin story.

And that is why I’m interested in Kent Parson.

#omg check please #omgcheckplease #omgcp #meta #check please #kent parson #jack zimmermann #relationships #eric bittle

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