#in this specific instance he turns out to be gay but I don’t think she should let that get her down! you can find another cutie I promise!

[micamicster]

I am literally always rooting for the heroine to fuck the second lead like I could think she and the lead are made for each other madly in love and I’ll still be like yessss girl get some

[cherrixxox]

In Princess Zelda’s defense: Misogyny in the Legend of Zelda (and every fandom really)

(Spoiler Warning for BOTW and TOTK)

One thing I’ve noticed as Tears Of the Kingdom has come out, is this incredibly shameless irritable misogyny in the Legend of Zelda fandom. With fandom and internet culture really boosting in the last decade, I feel as if people are less fearful of what they say, and I’ve noticed it in the fandoms I love, like Legend of Zelda specifically.

What could I possibly mean? Doesn’t everybody love Zelda? You’d be incredibly surprised what people say about her.

I can’t image why. She’s incredibly kind, smart, interesting and an emotionally complicated character, which I personally find endearing and not at all bland. However, I think I’ve finally come to understand *why* she’s so hated in the fandom as of this last couple weeks. I think I finally get it.

Zelda is a complex character. I know this doesn’t fit with some of the fandoms fantasy of her being “boring”, but I challenge that with a question. Why is it that every female character, regardless of personality, backstory and upbringing, actions and speech patterns are all boring to you? Is it because they’re actually boring? Or is it because female characters, no matter how developed, will always take the back seat to male characters even with less complexities?

I think I would be remiss if I didn’t mention shipping culture playing a huge part. It’s unfortunate, because, as a gay person, I do think that a lot of the fujoshi/bl community is misogynistic and hates admitting that: so they turn towards the only thing they can- picking and choosing small scenes and lines out of context to demonize a perfectly fine character.

Let me remind you all that I don’t care about harmless shipping. Mostly everyone in fandom ships characters. It’s normal and as long as you aren’t being weird about it and everything is morally correct: who cares. However, I do think that shipping culture has made is hard for people in fandom to correctly distinguish media in any other way. And that’s unfortunate. But I’ll come back to my shipping point later.

Zelda, for instance, is not fond of Link in the beginning of the TOTK/BOTW/Age of Calamity timeline. That’s very apparent from the very first memory in order from Breath of the Wild. In context, that all makes sense why and it’s explained very well. She very quickly after takes a liking to Link, and the rest is history.

However, you have people saying that she’s awful, hates Link, treats him badly, etc. She’s being treated like she’s helpless, something that, in game, she despises feeling. If you can’t tell from context, many times it’s said out loud and in your face. Take this memory with Urbosa for example:

She feels like a failure and Link being appointed to her just reminds her of that feeling.

Despite feeling this way, she’s proven to be a character that can grow and develop. She takes a liking to Link, as previously mentioned before, shortly after said scene with Urbosa explaining to link why she is the way she is. After her heart crushing memory where she’s sobbing about how she couldn’t save her father, the champions or Hyrule, Link is in danger. He is close to death and still he refuses to give up. At the very moment he is going to die. Zelda *finally* is able to release her power, after many many years, and in turn, his life. Why? Because she loves him.

Mipha hints at this being the way she can release her power. Though she doesn’t outright say it, it’s incredibly obvious she’s trying to get across that Zelda think about love and who she cares for.

I feel like if a man had that same backstory, people would acknowledge how incredibly complex of a character he was. They never do this with female characters, and instead take their emotions at face value, like how Zelda has multiple scenes where her determinations, wants and hopes are explained with heavy emotion and people throw it all away for some screwed up, incorrect perception of a character who is more multifaceted then they can ever comprehend.

And why do I think people refuse to look at the truth when it comes to Zelda? Yep, I’m going back to shipping. Like I mentioned before, specifically the fujoshi shipping community seems to be incredibly misogynistic as a whole. And if you self identify as a fujoshi, please stop. It’s not a good term or a nice term. Obviously this isn’t about people who enjoy gay ships in general as I don’t see any harm in shipping whatever you want as long as it’s not morally wrong. However, as someone who has been heavily engrained in fandom culture for the majority of my life: women are second rate citizens to the vast majority of these people.

With the appearance of Sidon in BOTW came a brand new ship that, though I think it’s a very very weird ship considering that Sidon looks like this when Link first meets him:

I never had anything much to say about it. I didn’t ship it, but to each their own since Sidon is very much an adult in current day BOTW/TOTK.

However, the birth is Sidon as a character has incredibly turned the tide when it comes to how people view Zelda. Every bit of character growth and backstory has been dismantled because they see her as a “home-wrecker” to this very much headcanoned ship. I genuinely think people who do this have very little ability to understand female characters in any piece of media, but Zelda is a great example of this. Now that TOTK has come out and Sidon (reminder from the beginning of this post, that I said there would be spoilers) canonically has a Fiance, I feel like this misunderstanding of female characters has just completely gone off the rails and people are now just saying things completely untrue.

For one: I don’t think arranged marriages are ever the best way to try to convince an audience that two characters are in love, and I give that to the shipping community completely. Arranged marriages are not good 9/10 times. Though, sometimes they work out, it’s often for political reasons, and almost never are these two people in love. It’s not a good trope. *However*

Sidons case is different. Yona, a brand new character in the series, is his fiancé. She’s, in my opinion, is quite pretty and helpful to the Zora community, as she seems to be their main healer in the domain.

A lot of the fandom is taking the fact that he saw her as a sister when he was a CHILD out of context as he quite literally says in the next paragraph that his feelings for her start to change and become “difficult to quantify” which clearly, in this case, means that those feelings are changing. And then, he seems to get to embarrassed to go further as those are for more private thoughts. Not only that, but Sidon very clearly calls her his love multiple times, even when she isn’t around.

And how does this character, the kind and caring Yona get treated?

Badly. Just from the first month of this game being out I’ve heard that she should die, she’s a dumb bitch, she’s ugly, she’s boring (how creative), etc.

I can’t help but notice that these comments are clearly coming from a place of distain that Sidon isn’t a free man, and believe it or not hating a female character because she gets in the way of your ships is misogynistic whether or not you think it is!

Now that Sidon isn’t free for grabs, I feel like that brings considerably more backlash upon Zelda yet again because she’s just not a character that can be ignored in favor of Sidon anymore. I’ve noticed an incredible increase of this hate that just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Hating female characters just because they get in the way of your ships will never be cool, but will always unfortunately be a part of fandom that I will refuse to get behind. It’s not just The Legend of Zelda fandom. I can name multiple female characters who get hate for the same exact thing.

This may have just been a rant that went on too long, maybe a mini essay, I’m not sure, but I genuinely challenge the Zelda community to interact more with the actual game over who belongs with who and stop picking at straws to find faults in characters that ruin your perfect perception of who you want to be with who. And please, judge the female characters the same way you’d judge the male characters.

-Cherri 🍒

[lovecolibri]

Now that 911 is a (more or less) finished product, looking back on the thing as a whole kind of exposes that it often asked for (& got) more credit for it’s supposed progressiveness than it really should have. Maybe that’s not really a surprise given that apparently it’s core audience is middle aged white people. But let’s review and think about some of the more questionable messages we’ve been willing to overlook in hope of future improvement:

1. Casual sex is bad and people who have it are disrespecting themselves and eachother. Day one.

2. A therapist (in a position of power & authority) having sex with a (vulnerable, emotionally unstable) patient is funny. Nobody will ever call it assault or even admit that anybody was taken advantage of. It will be brought up later, but only in the form of a joke.

3. They gave the lesbian couple the cheating storyline.

4. A bOy NeEdS hIs MoThEr. On it’s own was one thing because in the specific instance of Shannon she was a known factor and it was about re-establishing a pre-existing bond, so you could say maybe they just expressed “this specific character loves and misses a parent he remembers” poorly. But then when you combine it years later with telling the lesbian couple that a BoY nEeDs HiS fAtHeR after said father exhibited extremely alarming borderline grooming behavior…. The combined effect leaves a taste about as pleasant as toothpaste & orange juice. Got it. Gay and single parent homes are incomplete. 👍 Real nice.

5. We can overlook the lack of intimacy with Mavid because it happened at the height of the pandemic (and one of the actors turned out to be a serious antivaxxer), but why so little physical affection for Henren? Six whole seasons and only a couple seasons, and they were only allowed to finally imply that sex successfully happened in a flashback? They get interrupted every other time? Because what, they audience is expected to be the “fine as long as I don’t have to see it” type?

6. Chimney and Buck didn’t need to work their shit out onscreen, after such a serious falling out? Why is that?

7. For that matter writing Chimney out for the duration of JLH’s maternity leave because???? His character is only relevant in relation to her??? Even though he was there first???

8. The Taylor of it all. The show never actually condemns her for attempting to use a vulnerable, high, grieving Bobby for personal advancement? Buck, who loves Bobby like a father, is okay with it?

9. Everybody must forgive their shitty parents no matter how little they try. I think only Toni properly apologized. And Ramon at least expressed general regret and willingness to change. Everybody else was totally unearned.

10. For all the found-family vibes, the show actually never once says that? The closest we actually get is May saying it in 6x11, and Bobby acknowldging it, but that is A: specific to Bobby & Buck only and never brought up or even shown again. That’s the last time their storylines intertwine. Given the repeated hammering on the subject, the ultimate message seems to be that making your own family is nice but blood family is paramount.

11. The last season completely undermined the unconventional family structure that they had built with Chris, Eddie, & Buck. They didn’t have to actually go the romantic route to preserve that. They could have left off open-ended, or even put a bare minimum effort into setting up decent female love interests for one or both of them while still saying “this dynamic is still important and any new person in their lives is going to have to be okay with it.” Because families can look all sorts of unusual ways!

Idk in the end I think 911 missed a lot of opportunities to actually be as interesting as we gave them credit for being when we could still believe they were building to something. But instead they committed a sin worse than being bad, and that’s being boring.

Wow. This is...A Lot to look at laid out all at once. I will say 2 things, one, as far as intimacy goes, the show definitely had more in season 1 and a little in s2, and then sort of went to more "implications". Not sure why but it's been kind of a bummer. I don't expect cable levels but like, *somthing*. And it could be actor preference too, who knows, but it's been pretty across the board (except for Buck of course because KR is obsessed with getting into his pants). We DID see a sex scene with Hen in season 1it was just tied to the cheating thing sooo 😬😬😬 and we got the flashback but boy did Henren get interrupted at every other turn! And, we got Eddie in season 3 saying the line about "isn't that what the 118 is? The family we choose?" but you're right, that thread has been dropped HARD since KR took over because apparently she doesn't like found family.

[erigold13261]

Random HCs of Pav and Gayatri (applies to both canon and the NSpideR AU)

Pav and Gaya became friends when Gaya was singing. Pav fell in love with her voice! The others… were afraid of her though.

Later, they realized that Pav wanted to be like cool boy like Gaya and vice versa. They were both trans! They chose each other’s names.

Gaya’s dad immediately accepted her because it all clicked for him, the clothes, the rejection to cut her hair, her friends mostly being other girls… Her mother… didn’t. She just said it was going to be a phase, and ignored her wishes. She was also afraid of her daughter’s powers, which she had no immunity to.

inspector Singh decided to fight to get full custody of his daughter to keep her safe.

he somehow succeeded, and now Gayatri barely meets her mother. (She has abandonment issues and anxiety though)

seeing how Pavitr makes his daughter happy, inspector Singh considers Pav to be his secondary family.

now, they were both in elementary school and quite content, but as they got older, people made strange jokes around them saying that “boys don’t have feeling for other boys if they aren’t gay.” Turns out they were both mspec.

After the rock revolution, things got much harder for Pav. His peers teased him for being the cousin of Eve, and started to fear he would “Diva Realm” them

those fears became true, and he accidentally used his powers on them.

this earned him a recommendation to go to Nueva York.

Pav was miserable in Nueva York for the first few weeks, barely talking to anyone but Gayatri, via video chats every night.

Hobie reached out to him, and asked how Eve was able to master her powers while not going to Nueva York.

This is all I have for them now…

1). She had absolutely thought she hypnotized him at first and refused to talk to him or get near him. After a while though, when the singing would have OBVIOUSLY not been affecting him though, and he still tried to hang out with her, that was when she started to let him in closer.

2). Oh that's really sweet! I like that a lot!

3). I for some reason felt like Gaya's mom isn't around at all (either died or left, forgot what I wanted to go with), but if she is around I can definitely see her being like this. Possibly having Gaya be mute or extremely quiet because of no immunity to her voice like her husband ended up having.

4). Good for him! Keep his daughter away from that awful woman (especially if she did what I suggested in keeping Gayatri quiet).

5). Poor Gayatri. At least she has a father who wants her and is absolutely willing to fight for her.

6). At first I do see Inspector Singh being hesitant to let Pav around, but like you said, after seeing how happy he made her, especially after the divorce, you better believe he was doing what he could to make sure Pav stayed in his daughter's life.

7). For some reason I always read mspec as "male spectrum" and not "multiple spectrum/multiple-attraction spectrum" and so think it's specifically a term for gay men. Anyway, wouldn't they be seen as a "straight" couple, or were people just being total asshats and accepting Pav as a guy while denying Gaya the label of girl. That's probably what it was.

8). There's probably rumors that Eve poisoned Pav's mind or that Eve ran away to NSR because of Pav being born. Like truly awful shit to try and make Pav feel bad (as well as him being unhinged or crazy like Eve). Literally anything to try and get under his skin.

9). The fears coming true in that instance probably made even more rumors spread and the ones already around just got bigger/more "real" to everyone. Pav is in an absolutely lose-lose situation with no outside help really coming (other than Gaya and Nueva York's "help")

10). More like a "strong recommendation" that Pav and his family couldn't really fight against (though thankfully Pav actually believed in this company and so went willing and wasn't giving the traumatizing forced to go to Nueva York option).

11). And yea, even if he did go willingly, he would still be miserable because of the culture shock, loneliness, and overall situation her was in sucking the joy out of almost everything.

12). Pav hadn't thought about how Eve had mastered them, but that was enough to make Pav snap a bit out of his depression and think a bit. It got him talking with Hobie a bit and the this is probably when Hobie starts to hint that Nueva York isn't actually going to help Pav without fully saying it yet (Pav is still in shock from everything and Hobie wants to get his trust before outright saying how shitty Nueva York is and to not trust it)

[herinsectreflection]

The hilarious part about Faith and how incredibly gay she comes across is that it's all a natural side-effect of her intended narrative role. According to Whedon she wasn't intentionally written to be a queer or even queer-coded character, but the way she is written and her metaphorical function necessarily meant she came across as queer-coded. I'll explain what I mean:

1) As Buffy's shadow, Faith is meant to be symbolic of Buffy's repressed desires, and specifically her frustrated sexuality. Buffy is dealing with imposed chastity throughout S3, first with her trauma over Angel getting in the way of a relationship with Scott, and then the curse preventing her from being physical with Angel. It's the centre point of Enemies, its touched on in Amends, and is one of the reasons they break up. There's a reason the season climaxes with Angel and Buffy in a passionate embrace, making orgasm faces as he 'penetrates' her. It's a whole season of sexual frustration for Buffy.

Faith needs to be constantly reminding Buffy of the thing she can't have - sex. She needs to talk about sex to Buffy - and she does, extensively. Faith is written as a very sexual person in general, but it's specifically and disproportionately aimed towards Buffy, because that's her narrative role. So you end up with this character who is constantly going around like "hey Buffy do you like sex? you should think about sex now. sex. when I'm on screen the main thing on your mind should be sex and having it". Which begs the question - why does Faith want Buffy to have sex? Symbolically, it's because she represents part of Buffy, and Buffy wants to have sex. But on a pure character level... what is the explanation? What is motivating Faith to constantly talk about sex to Buffy? A few instances you can write off as her making Buffy uncomfortable for jokes, but not all of them. How it comes across is that Faith has some sexual interest in Buffy, and is probing for her feelings.

2) Faith is a Seductress. That's not a comment about her character, that's her function in the story. She is the version of Buffy who goes down a darker path, and is trying to seduce her into doing the same thing. Part of Buffy's arc in S3 is resisting this temptation, and the symbol of what she is resisting is Faith. So Faith must be an enticing, seductive figure. To quote Passion of the Nerd's review, if Faith is there to to tempt Buffy into a moral dark side, it only makes sense that she is, well, tempting. The seduction is happening on many levels.

Faith is more or less filling the Femme Fatale archetype: the seductive, sexual figure who leads the Hero off their path. It's a trope you see all the time in male-led stories, going back to goddamn The Odyssey. Buffy as a character was invented as a simple gender-swap of an old horror trope, and part of the appeal of the show is that she gets to fill the role of The Hero as a woman. So what happens when you gender-swap The Hero and don't gender-swap the Femme Fatale? You get a gay story, that's what.

3) The Faith arc of S3 is a recreation of the Angel arc of S2. It is structured in the exact same way, with the two having a push-and-pull in the early parts of the season, a setback in their relationship in episode 7, getting closest again mid-season before a night of passion that ends in sudden tragedy. Angel/Faith then turn to the dark side, become the Big Bad, and show that they are beyond saving in episode 17. The season ends with Buffy having to fight and the kill them in order to save others. This is all an intentional recycling, as part of the show building up the Trolley Problem and the idea of Buffy being a killer, repeatedly escalating it to get us to The Gift. What this means is that Faith steps into the role that Buffy's love interest played in the previous season. This is the story that we have just had told to us as a tragic love story. We see it again, and guess what? It's still a tragic love story. Only now Faith is in the role of the love interest.

4) Part of the conflict surrounding Buffy and Faith is Buffy's fear of being "Single White Female'd". She fears Faith might steal her loved ones, and Faith does threaten that. She gets along with her mother, her friends... but most of all, her love interests. Buffy's fear of being replaced manifests as Faith trying to literally seduce away anyone romantically linked to Buffy. Angel, Scott Hope, Xander, later Riley, Spike, Robin Wood... Faith is comprehensively and exclusively attracted to men that Buffy dated. I'm honestly surprised she didn't find Owen and Parker from somewhere for a night in the sack. Again, this makes perfect heterosexual sense from a symbolic point it view - she threatens to take Buffy's place in the narrative, so she takes her place in relationships - but on a character level it becomes ambiguous. Is she actively trying to replace Buffy? Or is she trying to stop Buffy dating anyone for another reason? The simple fact is, there is exactly one common denominator with all of Faith's romantic entanglements: Buffy.

It's a canonical aspect of Faith's character that she is jealous of Buffy. We see that made explicit in Enemies - she's jealous of everything Buffy has: her family, her comfortable home life, her friends, her narrative standing, and of course her loving partners. So of course Faith displays jealousy whenever Buffy is involved with a guy. It's a necessary part of building Faith as this figure of Want and Envy. But how it plays out on screen isn't that Faith is jealous of Buffy because she wants these other guys - of course not, because we see her look jealously through the window at Buffy and Riley in This Year's Girl and Riley obviously means nothing to her. Rather, it very much appears that she is jealous of these other guys, because she wants Buffy.

There's also the added bonuses that come from the show playing with so many metaphors, that sometimes they cross in interesting ways. One of Faith's main purposes is to celebrate being a Slayer, and to encourage the same in Buffy. She wants Buffy to accept and embrace being a Slayer. Here, Slayerhood is standing in for independence and hedonism and making your own rules, all the things that Faith is encouraging. But one of the many other metaphors used is the 'coming out' metaphor. "Have your tried not being a slayer?" "It's because you didn't have a strong father figure isn't it." "I've tried to march in the Slayer Pride parade." It's a note that's hit really hard specifically around the time in the show that Faith is introduced. So if you carry this metaphor on, then Faith becomes an out-and-proud lesbianSlayer, trying to convince Buffy to accept and embrace her sexuality.

And it has a recursive effect too. All this stuff contributes towards Faith feeling like a very queer character. And Faith, of course, is Buffy's shadow self, meant to represent her unconscious desires. So when the symbol of your unconscious desires is so lesbian-coded, then the implication becomes that one of your unconscious desires is lesbian desire. Faith's existence as a part of Buffy implies the existence of Buffy's bisexuality. Which contributes to the relationship feeling ever more queer, which makes Faith even gayer.

I find this absolutely hilarious, because the queer subtext was never intended. Joss Whedon apparently was annoyed that people read this into their relationship, and the commentary from the other writers that does address it tends to point to Dushku's performance. And yeah, she is definitely leaning into that in her portrayal. But the main reasons that so many people have this reading all come from the writing. It's all stuff that is integral to the point of her character. Every metaphor and function in the narrative, every symbolic purpose she has, none of it was meant to be gay and yet it all leads directly to Faith appearing to be totally and completely gay. The queerness is accidental and unavoidable. And I just find that really fucking funny.

[army-of-mai-lovers]

in which I get progressively angrier at the various tropes of atla fandom misogyny

tbh I think it would serve all of us to have a larger conversation about the specific ways misogyny manifests in this fandom, because I’ve seen a lot of people who characterize themselves as feminists, many of whom are women themselves, discuss the female characters of atla/lok in misogynistic ways, and people don’t talk about it enough. 

disclaimer before I start: I’m not a woman, I’m an afab nonbinary person who is semi-closeted and thus often read as a woman. I’m speaking to things that I’ve seen that have made me uncomfy, but if any women (esp women existing along other axes of oppression, e.g. trans women, women of color, disabled women, etc) want to add onto this post, please do!

“This female character is a total badass but I’m not even a little bit interested in exploring her as a human being.” 

I’ve seen a lot of people say of various female characters in atla/lok, “I love her! She’s such a badass!” now, this statement on its own isn’t misogynistic, but it represents a pretty pervasive form of misogyny that I’ve seen leveled in large part toward the canon female love interests of one or both of the members of a popular gay ship (*cough* zukka *cough*) I’m going to use Suki as an example of this because I see it with her most often, but it can honestly be applied to nearly every female character in atla/lok. Basically, people will say that they stan Suki, but when it comes time to engage with her as an actual character, they refuse to do it. I’ve seen meta after meta about Zuko’s redemption arc, but I so rarely see people engage with Suki on any level beyond “look at this cool fight scene!” and yeah, I love a cool Suki fight scene as much as anybody else, but I’m also interested in meta and headcanons and fics about who she is as a person, when she isn’t an accessory to Sokka’s development or doing something cool. of course, the material for this kind of engagement with Suki is scant considering she doesn’t have a canon backstory (yet) (don’t let me down Faith Erin Hicks counting on you girl) but with the way I’ve seen people in this fandom expand upon canon to flesh out male characters, I know y’all have it in you to do more with Suki, and with all the female characters, than you currently do. frankly, the most engagement I’ve seen with Suki in mainstream fandom is justifying either zukki (which again, is characterizing her in relation to male characters, one of whom she barely interacts with in canon) or one of the Suki wlw pairings. which brings me to--

“I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!” 

now, I will admit, two of my favorite atla ships are yueki and mailee, and so I totally understand being interested in these characters’ dynamics, even if, as is the case with yueki, they’ve never interacted canonically. however, it becomes a problem for me when these ships are always in the background of a zukka fic. at some point, it becomes obvious that you like this ship because it gets either Zuko or Sokka’s female love interests out of the way, not because you actually think the characters would mesh well together. It’s bad form to dislike a female character because she gets in the way of your gay ship, so instead, you find another girl to pair her off with and call it a day. to be clear, I’m not saying that everybody who ships either mailee or yueki (or tysuki or maisuki or yumai or whatever other wlw rarepair involving Zuko or Sokka’s canon love interests) is nefariously trying to sideline a female character while acting publicly as if she’s is one of their faves--far from it--but it is noteworthy to me how difficult it is to find content that centers wlw ships, while it’s incredibly easy to find content that centers zukka in which mailee and/or yueki plays a background role. 

also, notice how little traction wlw Katara ships gain in this fandom. when’s the last time you saw yuetara on your dash? there’s no reason for wlw Katara ships to gain traction in a fandom that is so focused on Zuko and Sokka getting together, bc she doesn’t present an immediate obstacle to that goal (at least, not an obstacle that can be overcome by pairing her up with a woman). if you are primarily interested in Zuko and Sokka’s relationship, and your queer readings of other female characters are motivated by a desire to get them out of the way for zukka, then Katara’s canon m/f relationship isn’t a threat to you, and thus, there’s no reason to read her as potentially queer. Or even, really, to think about her at all. 

“Katara’s here but she’s not actually going to do anything, because deep down, I’m not interested in her as a person.” 

the show has an enormous amount of textual evidence to support the claim that Sokka and Katara are integral parts of each other’s lives. so, she typically makes some kind of appearance in zukka content. sometimes, her presence in the story is as an actual character with layers and nuance, someone whom Sokka cares about and who cares about Sokka in return, but also has her own life and goals outside of her brother (or other male characters, for that matter.) sometimes, however, she’s just there because halfway through writing the author remembered that Sokka actually has a sister who’s a huge part of the show they’re writing fanfiction for, and then they proceed to show her having a meetcute with Aang or helping Sokka through an emotional problem, without expressing wants or desires outside of those characters. I’m honestly really surprised that I haven’t seen more people calling out the fact that so much of Katara’s personality in fanon revolves around her connections to men? she’s Aang’s girlfriend, she’s Sokka’s sister, she’s Zuko’s bestie. never mind that in canon she spends an enormous amount of time fighting against (anachronistic, Westernized) sexism to establish herself as a person in her own right, outside of these connections. and that in canon she has such interesting complex relationships with other female characters (e.g. Toph, Kanna, Hama, Korra if you want to write lok content) or that there are a plethora of characters with whom she could have interesting relationships with in fanon (Mai, Suki, Ty Lee, Yue, Smellerbee, and if you want to write lok content, Kya II, Lin, Asami, Senna, etc). to me, the lack of fandom material exploring Katara’s relationships with other women or with herself speak to a profound indifference to Katara as a character. I’m not saying you have to like Katara or include her in everything you write, but I am asking you to consider why you don’t find her interesting outside of her relationships with men.

“I hate Katara because she talks about her mother dying too often.” 

this is something I’ve seen addressed by people far more qualified than I to address it, but I want to mention it here in part because when I asked people which fandom tropes they wanted me to talk about, this came up often, but also because I find it really disgusting that this is a thing that needs to be addressed at all. Y’all see a little girl who watched her mother be killed by the forces of an imperialist nation and say that she talks about it too much??? That is a formational, foundational event in a child’s life. Of course she’s going to talk about it. I’ve seen people say that she doesn’t talk about it that often, or that she only talks about it to connect with other victims of fn imperialism e.g. Jet and Haru, but frankly, she could speak about it every episode for no plot-significant reason whatsoever and I would still be angry to see people say she talks about it too much. And before you even bring up the Sokka comparison, people deal with grief in different ways. Sokka  repressed a lot of his grief/channeled it into being the “man” of his village because he knew that they would come for Katara next if he gave them the opportunity. he probably would talk about his mother more if a) he didn’t feel massive guilt at not being able to remember what she looked like, and b) he was allowed to be a child processing the loss of his mother instead of having to become a tiny adult when Hakoda had to leave to help fight the fn. And this gets into an intersection with fandom racism, in that white fans (esp white American fans) are incapable of relating to the structural trauma that both Sokka and Katara experience and thus can’t see the ways in which structural trauma colors every single aspect of both of their characters, leading them to flatten nuance and to have some really bad takes. And you know what, speaking of bad fandom takes--   

“Shitting on Mai because she gets in the way of my favorite Zuko ship is actually totally okay because she’s ~abusive~” 

y’all WHAT. 

ok listen, I get not liking maiko. I didn’t like it when I first got into fandom, and later I realized that while bryke cannot write romance to save their lives, fans who like maiko sure can, so I changed my tune. but if you still don’t like it, that’s fine. no skin off my back. 

what IS skin off my back is taking instances in which Mai had justified anger toward Zuko, and turning it into “Mai abused Zuko.” do you not realize how ridiculous you sound? this is another thing where I get so angry about it that I don’t know how useful my analysis is actually going to be, but I’ll do my best. numerous people have noted how analysis of Mai and Zuko’s breakup in “The Beach” or Mai being justifiably angry with him at Boiling Rock or her asking for FUCKING FRUIT in “Nightmares and Daydreams” that says that all of these events were her trying to gain control over him is....ahhh...lacking in reading comprehension, but I’d like to go a step further and talk about why y’all are so intent on taking down a girl who doesn’t show emotion in normative ways. obviously, there’s a “Zuko can do no wrong” aspect to Mai criticism (which is super weird considering how his whole arc is about how he can do lots of wrong and he has to atone for the wrong that he’s done--but that’s a separate post.) But I also see slandering Mai for not expressing her emotions normatively and not putting up with Zuko’s shit and slandering Katara for “talking about her mother too often” as two sides of the same coin. In both cases, a female character expresses emotions that make you, the viewer, uncomfortable, and so instead of attempting to understand where those emotions may have come from and why they might be manifesting the way they are, y’all just throw the whole character away. this is another instance of people in the fandom being fundamentally disinterested in engaging with the female characters of atla in a real way, except instead of shallowly “stanning” Mai, y’all hate her. so we get to this point where female characters are flattened into one of two things: perfect queens who can do no wrong, or bitches. and that’s not who they are. that’s not who anyone is. but while we as a fandom are pretty good at understanding b1 Zuko’s actions as layered and multifaceted even though he’s essentially an asshole then, few are willing to lend the same grace to any female character, least of all Mai. 

and what’s funny is sometimes this trope will intersect with “I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!”, so you’ll have someone actively calling Mai toxic/problematic/abusive, and at the same time ship her with Ty Lee? make it make sense! but then again, maybe that’s happening because y’all are fundamentally disinterested in Ty Lee as a character too. 

“I love Ty Lee so much that I’m going to treat her like an infantilized hypersexual airhead!” 

there are so many things happening in y’alls characterization of Ty Lee that I struggled to synthesize it into one quippy section header. on one hand, you have the hypersexualization, and on the other hand, you have the infantilization, which just makes the hypersexualization that much worse. 

(of course, sexualizing or hypersexualizing ANY atla character is really not the move, considering that these are child characters in a children’s show, but then again, that’s a separate post.) 

now, I understand how, from a very, very surface reading of the text, you could come to the conclusion that Ty Lee is an uncomplicated bimbo. if you grew up on Western media the way I did, you’ll know that Ty Lee has a lot of the character traits we associate with bimbos: the form-fitting pink crop top, the general conventional attractiveness, the ditzy dialogue. but if you think about it for more than three seconds, you’ll understand that Ty Lee has spent her whole life walking a tightrope, trying to please Azula and the rest of the royal family while also staying true to herself. Ty Lee and Azula’s relationship is a really complex and interesting topic that I don’t really have time to explore at the moment given how long this post is, but I’d argue that Ty Lee’s constant, vocal  adulation is at least partially a product of learning to survive at court at an early age. Like Mai, she has been forced to regulate her emotions as a member of fn nobility, but unlike Mai, she also has six sisters who look exactly like her, so she has a motivation to be more peppy and more affectionate to stand out. 

fandom does not do the work to understand Ty Lee. as is a theme with this post, fandom is actively disinterested in investigating female characters beyond a very surface level reading of them. Thus, fandom takes Ty Lee’s surface level qualities--her love of the color pink, her revealing standard outfit, and the fact that once she found a boy attractive and also once a lot of boys found her attractive--and they stretch this into “Ty Lee is basically Karen Smith from Mean Girls.” thus, Ty Lee is painted as a bimbo, or more specifically, as not smart, uncritically adoring of Azula (did y’all forget all the non-zukka bits of Boiling Rock?), and attractive to the point of hypersexualization. I saw somebody make a post that was like “I wish mailee was more popular but I’m also glad it isn’t because otherwise people would write it as Mai having to put up with her dumb gf” and honestly I have to agree!! this is one instance in which I’m glad that fandom doesn’t discuss one of my favorite characters that often because I hate the fanon interpretation of Ty Lee, I think it’s rooted in misogyny (particularly misogyny against East Asian women, which often takes the form of fetishizing them and viewing them only through a Western white male gaze)  

(side note: here at army-of-mai-lovers, we stan bimbos. bimbos are fucking awesome. I personally don’t read Ty Lee as a bimbo, but if that’s you, that’s fucking awesome. keep doing what you’re doing, queen <3 or king or monarch, it’s 2021, anyone can be a bimbo, bitches <3)

“Toph can and will destroy everyone here with her bare hands because she’s a meathead who likes to murder people and that’s it!”  

Toph is, and always has been, one of my favorite ATLA characters. My very first fic in fandom was about her, and she appears prominently in a lot of my other work as well. One thing that I am always struck by with Toph is how big a heart she has. She’s independent, yes, snarky, yes, but she cares about people--even the family that forced her to make herself smaller because they didn’t believe that their blind daughter could be powerful and strong. Her storyline is powerful and emotionally resonant, her bending is cool precisely because it’s based in a “wait and listen” approach instead of just smashing things indiscriminately, she’s great disabled rep, and overall one of the best characters in the show. 

And in fandom, she gets flattened into “snarky murder child.” 

So where does this come from? Well, as we all know, Toph was originally conceived of as a male character, and retained a lot of androgyny (or as the kids call it, Gender) when she was rewritten as a female character. There are a lot of cultural ideas about androgynous/butch women being violent, and people in fandom seem to connect that larger cultural narrative with some of Toph’s more violent moments in the show to create the meathead murder child trope, erasing her canon emotionality, softness, heart, and femininity in the process. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t write or characterize Toph as being violent or snarky at all ever, because yeah, Toph definitely did do Earth Rumbles a lot before joining the gaang, and yeah, Toph is definitely a sarcastic person who makes fun of her friends a lot. What I am saying is that people take these traits, sans the emotional logic, marry them to their conception of androgynous/butch women as violent/unemotional/uncaring, and thus create a caricature of Toph that is not at all up to snuff. When I see Toph as a side character in a fic (because yeah, Toph never gets to be a main character, because why would a fandom obsessed with one male character in particular ever make Toph a protagonist in her own right?) she’s making fun of people, killing people, pranking people, etc, etc. She’s never talking to people about her emotions, or palling around with her found family, or showing that she cares about her friends. Everything about her relationship with her parents, her disability, her relationship to Gender, and her love of her friends is shoved aside to focus on a version of Toph that is mean and uncaring because people have gotten it into their heads that androgynous/butch women are mean and uncaring. 

again, we see a female character who does not emote normatively or in a way that makes you, the viewer, comfortable, and so you warp her character until she’s completely unrecognizable and flat. and for what? 

Azula

no, I didn’t come up with a snappy name for this section, mainly because fanon interpretations of Azula and my own feelings toward the character are...complicated. I know there were some people who wanted me to write about Azula and the intersection of misogyny and ableism in fanon interpretations of her character, but I don’t think I can deliver on that because I personally am in a period of transition with how I see Azula. that is to say, while I still like her and believe that she can be redeemed, there is a lot of merit to disliking her. the whole point of this post is that the female characters of ATLA are complex people whom the fandom flattens into stereotypes that don’t hold up to scrutiny, or dislike for reasons that don’t make sense. Azula, however, is a different case. the rise of Azula defenders and Azula stans has led to this sentiment that Azula is a 14 y/o abuse victim who shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions. it seems to me that people are reacting to a long, horrible legacy of male ATLA fans armchair diagnosing Azula with various personality disorders (and suggesting that people with those personality disorders are inherently monstrous and unlovable which ahhhh....yikes) and then saying that those personality disorders make her unlovable, which is quite obviously bad. and hey, I get loving a character that everyone else hates and maybe getting so swept up in that love that you forget that your fave is complicated and has made some unsavory choices. it sucks that fanon takes these well-written, complex villains/antiheroes and turns them into monsters with no critical thought whatsoever. but the attitude among Azula stans that her redemption shouldn’t be hard, that her being a child excuses all of the bad things that she’s done, that she is owed redemption....all of that rubs me the wrong way. I might make another post about this in the future that discusses this in more depth, but as it stands now: while I understand that there is a legacy of misogynistic, ableist, unnuanced takes on Azula, the backlash to that does not take into account the people she hurt or the fact that in ATLA she does not make the choice to pursue redemption. and yes, Zuko had help in making that choice that Azula didn’t, and yes, Azula is a victim of abuse, but in a show about children who have gone through untold horrors and still work to better the lives of the people around them, that is not enough for me to uncritically stan her. 

Conclusion    

misogyny in this fandom runs rampant. while there are some tropes of fandom misogyny that are well-documented and have been debunked numerous times, there are other, subtler forms of misogyny that as far as I know have gone completely unchecked. 

what I find so interesting about misogyny in atla fandom is that it’s clear that it’s perpetrated by people who are aware of fandom misogyny who are actively trying not to be misogynistic. when I first joined atla fandom last summer, memes about how zukka fandom was better than every other fandom because they didn’t hate the female characters who got in the way of their gay ship were extremely prevalent, and there was this sense that *this* fandom was going to model respectful, fun, feminist online fandom. not all of the topes I’ve outlined are exclusive to or even largely utilized in zukka fandom, but a lot of them are. I’ve been in and out of fandom since I was eleven years old, and most of the fandom spaces I’ve been in have been majority-female, and all of them have been incredibly misogynistic. and I always want to know why. why, in these communities created in large part by women, in large part for women, does misogyny run wild? what I realize now is that there’s never going to be a one-size fits all answer to that question. what’s true for 1D fandom on Wattpad in 2012 is absolutely not true for atla fandom on tumblr in 2021. the answers that I’ve cobbled together for previous fandoms don’t work here. 

so, why is atla fandom like this? why did the dream of a feminist fandom almost entirely focused on the romantic relationship between two male characters fall apart? honestly, I think the notion that zukka fandom ever was this way was horrifically ignorant to begin with. from my very first moment in the fandom, I was seeing racism, widespread sexualization of minors, and yes, misogyny. these aspects of the fandom weren’t talked about as much as the crocverse or other, much more fun aspects. further, atla (specifically zukka) fandom misogyny often doesn’t look like the fandom misogyny we’ve become familiar with from like, Sherlock fandom or what have you. for the most part, people don’t actively hate Suki, they just “stan” without actually caring about her. they hate Mai because they believe in treating male victims of abuse equally. they’re not characterizing Toph poorly, they’re writing her as a “strong woman.” in short, people are misogynistic, and then invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of feminist theory to shield themselves from accusations of misogyny. it’s not unlike the way some people will invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of critical race theory to shield themselves from accusations of racism, or how they’ll talk about “freedom of speech” and “the suppression of women’s sexuality” to justify sexualizing minors. the performance of feminism and antiracism is what’s important, not the actual practice. 

if you’ve made it this far, first off, hi, thanks so much for reading, I know this was a lot. second, I would seriously encourage you to be aware of these fandom tropes and to call them out when you see them. elevate the voices of fans who do the work of bringing the female characters of atla to life. invest in the wlw ships in this fandom. drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic (please, drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic). read some yuetara. let’s all be honest about where we are now, and try to do better in the future. I believe in us. 

[gates-keeper]

Part 1: “Words of Affirmation” Destiel Quotes & Parallels

I’m sure someone’s done this before me and done it better, but I’m compiling a huge Destiel evidence docket for no reason. Anyone got any quotes to add?

Comments From Outside Characters

To Dean

Uriel: “He has this weakness. He likes you.” (4x10)

Balthazar: “You have me confused with the other angel. You know, the one in the dirty trench coat who’s in love with you.” (6x17)

Hester: “The first time Castiel laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost.” (7x21)

Meg: “He was your boyfriend first.” (7x23)

Charlie: “What about Castiel? He seems helpful. And dreamy.” (8x20)

Marie: “Although we do explore the nature of Destiel in Act 2.” (10x5)

Sam: “Shouldn’t it be Deastiel?” He then goes on to tease Dean with “Sastiel” which Dean takes negatively. (10x5)

Dean: “This Cas is looking at me weird.” Sam: “So like the real Cas then.” (15x14) 

To Castiel

Hannah: “We gave you our trust. Don’t lose it over one man.” (9x22)

Metatron: “His true weakness is revealed. He’s in love…with humanity.” (9x22)

Metatron: “Oh, that’s right. To save Dean Winchester. That was your goal, right? I mean, you draped yourself in the flag of heaven, but, ultimately, it was about saving one human, right?” (9x23)

Ishim: “I’m going to cure you of your human weakness [i.e. Dean]” (12x10)

The Empty: “I have tiptoed through all your little tulips. Your memories, your little feelings, yes. I know what you hate. I know who you love…There is nothing for you back there.” (13x4)

Demon: “I thought you were joined at the… (looks down) everything.” (14x01)

There are also several instances where other characters try to poke at insecurities regarding their relationship.

Naomi: “You're hoping Castiel will return to you. I admire your loyalty. I only wish he felt the same way.” (8x19)

Casifer: “There comes a time when every relationship has run its course.” (11x18)

Michael!Dean: “You only tolerate the angel because you think you owe him, because he ‘gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition.’ Or whatever.” (14x10)

Comments From Dean

To Cas

“There are two things I know for certain. One, Bert and Ernie are gay. And two, you are not going to die a virgin.” (5x03) 

“So what? I’m Thelma and you’re Louise and we’re just going to hold hands and sail off this cliff together?” (5x03)

“You know what? Blow me, Cas.” (5x18)

“Cas, not for nothing, but the last time someone looked at me like that, I got laid.” (5x18)

“Look, I don’t need to feel like hell for failing you, okay? For failing you like I’ve failed every other godforsaken thing that I care about! I don’t need it!” (8x07)

“We need you. I need you.” 

For more on this quote see the “We vs. I” section.

To Other Characters

Bobby: “I think maybe it’s time you made a call.” Dean: “Why does it always gotta be me that makes the call, huh? It’s not like Cas lives in my ass. The dude’s busy.” (Cas appears) Dean: “Get out of my ass.” Cas: “I was never in your… (head tilt)” (6x19)

“On my car…. He showed up naked… covered in bees.” (7x23)

While Cas suffered from some mental issues at the time, it seems somewhat significant that he sought Dean out under the circumstances, not Sam, etc.

“There’s things… people… feelings that I want to experience differently than I have before, or maybe even for the first time.” (10x16)

“My shy but devastatingly handsome friend here” (12x12)

“He came into my room and he played me.” (12x19)

“Let’s see. Crowley’s dead, Kelly’s dead, Cas is—Mom’s gone.” (13x01)

Dean’s inability to list Cas’s death singles him out as the most devastating of the losses.

“We’ve lost everything. And now you’re gonna bring him back.” (13x01)

While some people have heard this as “bring ‘em back”, the Netflix captions and transcripts I have been able to find say “him.”

“And Cas bought it. And you know what it got him? It got him dead! Now you may be able to forget about that, but I can't!” (13x03)

“I have a family.” (In response to John Winchester lamenting Dean doesn’t have a wife and kids) (14x13)

Comments From Cas

To Dean

“I was getting too close to the humans in my charge. You. They feel I've begun to express emotions. The doorways to doubt.” (4x16)

“I’m hunted. I rebelled. And I did it—all of it—for you.” (5x02)

“I gave everything for you. And this is what you give to me.” (5x18)

“I do everything that you ask. I always come when you call.” (6x21)

“So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord.” (6x22)

Before taking on the role of God, Cas seemed very concerned with Dean’s forgiveness/acceptance/love. It is interesting that, as God, that was the first thing he asked for, turning from Sam (who had just stabbed him) to Dean to ask for love.

“Sam, and everyone you know, everyone you love, they could be long dead. Everyone except me.” (10x22)

“I love you. I love all of you.” (Arguably to the group, but the first “I love you” can be seen as Dean-specific, especially since it cuts to Dean after being said.) (12x12)

“You mean too much to me. To everything.” (12x9) (To Mary, Sam, and Dean. However, the camera immediately cuts to Dean specifically, even though he is in the back of the group).

“I’m your Huckleberry.” (13x06)

Cas love confession (15x18)

To Other Characters

“Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” (6x03)

“I won’t hurt Dean.” (8x17)

This is said as Castiel is breaking away from Naomi’s mind control—mind control she fostered specifically by having Cas kill a thousand versions of Dean. This implies she knows that Cas’s strongest loyalty is to Dean, not Sam, or humans in general.

“The point is that they [Dean & Sam] were here at all and you got to know them, you -- When they're gone, it will hurt, but that hurt will remind you of how much you loved them.” (14x14)

“You know, Dean, he... he feels things more acutely than any human I've ever known.” (15x13)

Other Comments

Reaper: “How do I start looking for this... Castiel?” Bartholomew: “I got one word for you. Winchester.”

Rowena: “An Angel of the Lord, shattered at the altar of Winchester.”

Use of We vs. I

In the crypt scene in Season 8, Dean tells Cas, “We need you.” This is not enough to stop Cas’s actions. When the language switches to “I need you,” Cas drops the angel blade.

We can clearly see that Dean tries to put up barriers about how he really feels about Cas in his use of “We.” For example, after showing the audience many scenes of Dean, not Sam, frantically trying to call Cas, we get the following lines:

“So not only were you ditching us, but you were also ignoring us?”

“With everything that's going on, you can't just go dark like that. We didn't know what happened to you. We were worried. That's not okay.”

It’s clear that these “we’s” are really “I’s”

In the alternate future presented in 15x9, Sam asks Dean, “What’s happened to you Dean… ever since…?” to which Dean responds, “Ever since what? We lost pretty much everyone we’ve ever cared about? Ever since the Mark made Cas go crazy and I had to bury him in a Malak box… ever since then?” While he acknowledges Sam’s losses as well, his switch to “I” in reference to Cas implies that Cas’s loss belongs especially to him.

(Mostly) Verbal Parallels to Other Couples

In 1x01 (start at 2:27), Dean pulls Sam away from a dead Jess in a direct parallel to how Sam pulls Dean away from Cas in 12x23

Following Jessica’s death, Sam keeps seeing glimpses of her as he and Dean travel around in the Impala. Dean does the same in Season 8 following his return from Purgatory without Cas.

David from “Bloodlines” (9x20) tells his love interest, “I was there. Where were you?” which is the same thing Dean says to Cas in “The Man Who Would Be King” (6x20)

When asking Dean whether he’s in love with Cassie, Dean gives a similar response to what he will say in 10x5 when asked about Destiel.

Destiel is paralleled with their counterparts from the Supernatural play who are “a couple in real life” (10x5)

Cain compares himself to Dean in Season 10. He describes the significant kills of his life (The Knights of Hell, his wife Collette, and his brother Abel) and tells Dean that he will follow his same pattern by killing the King of Hell Crowley, Castiel, then Sam. It is also mentioned that all Collette asked of Cain was “to stop,” which is the same language Cas uses with Dean in 10x22.

Dean explains how his parents fell in love to prove his identity to Mary in 12x1, “He was cute and he knew the words to every Zeppelin song, so when he asked you for your number, you gave it to him, even though you knew your dad would be pissed.” Later in this same season (12x19), Dean gives Cas a homemade mixtape of his favorite Zeppelin songs.

Ishim fell in love with a human named Lily Sunder who ultimately left him for someone else. When trying to recruit Castiel, he compares Dean to her.

Dean questions how much of their life has been controlled by God. Cas states, “You asked, ‘What about all of this is real?’ We are.” (15x02) Later, they find out that God has been using Eileen to spy on the Winchesters. She says, “After what happened, I don’t know what’s real anymore.” Sam kisses her, stating “I know that was real.” (15x09)

PART 2 “Physical Touch” Now Finished

[firelxdykatara]

I’m just really confused as to where this idea that Zuko is gaycoded came from. Like people are allowed to have that headcanon but I don’t understand where people are coming from when they try and claim that he was undisputedly gaycoded and trying to deny it is homophobic when he’s only ever shown romantic interest in women.

I made a pretty long post on the topic a while back, but the ultimate gist of it is this: there are a lot of elements of Zuko's status as an abuse victim and trauma survivor that resonate with queer folks. This is understandable and completely fine! However, there are some parts of the fandom who have taken that to the other extreme and will now insist that those elements are uniquely queer, and that they can only be read as some sort of veiled gay/coming out narrative, even though that doesn't make much sense since there is no part of Zuko's narrative which is unique to any sort of queer experience.

I think the problem really does stem from two things being conflated--Zuko's history of abuse and trauma, and trauma&abuse being something a lot of queer people have experienced. I suspect it goes something like 'I see a lot of myself in Zuko, and I was abused for being gay, therefore Zuko must be gay too in order to have had similar experiences.' This can then lead to feeling dismissed or invalidated when other people point out that those experiences are not unique to being queer--but on the flip side, abuse victims and trauma survivors whose abuse&trauma do not stem from queerness (even if they are queer themselves) can feel invalidated and dismissed by the implication that their trauma must be connected to their queerness or it isn't valid.

This is also where the 'people don't actually know what gay coded means' part comes in, and I realize now that I didn't actually get into what gay coding (and queer coding in general) actually means, since I was so hung up on pointing out how Zuko doesn't really fit the mold. (And the few elements that exist which could be said to count are because of the 'villains historically get queer coded bc Hays Code era' thing and mostly occur in Book 1, not because of how he acts as an abuse&trauma survivor.)

Under a cut because I kind of go on a tangent about gay/queer coding, but I swear I get back to the point eventually.

Queer coding (and it is notable that, with respect to Zuko, it is almost always framed as 'he couldn't possibly be attracted to girls', rather than 'he could be attracted to boys as well as girls' in these discussions, for... no real discernible reason, but I'll get into that in a bit) is the practice of giving characters 'stereotypically queer' traits and characteristics to 'slide them under the radar' in an era where having explicitly queer characters on screen was not allowed, unless they were evil or otherwise narratively punished for their queerness. (See: the extant history of villains being queer-coded, because if they were Evil then it was ok to make them 'look gay', since the story wasn't going to be rewarding their queerness and making audiences think it was in any way OK.) This is thanks to the Motion Picture Production Code (colloquially and more popularly known as the Hays Code), which was a set of guidelines which movies coming out of any major studio had to adhere to in order to be slated for public release and lasted from the early 1930s until it was finally abandoned in the late 60s.

The Hays Code essentially existed to ensure that the content of major motion pictures would not 'lower the moral standards' of the viewing public. It didn't just have to do with queerness--cursing was heavily monitored, sex outside of marriage was not allowed to be seen as desirable or tittilating, miscegenation was not allowed (most specifically interracial relationships between black and white people), criminals had to be punished lest the audience think that it was ok to be gay and do crime, etc. Since same-sex relations fell under 'sexual perversion', they could not be shown unless the 'perversion' were punished in some way. (This is also the origin of the Bury Your Gays trope, another term that is widely misunderstood and misapplied today.) To get around this, queer coding became the practice by which movies and television could depict queer people but not really, and it also became customary to give villains this coding even more overtly, since they would get punished by the end of the film or series anyway and there was nothing to lose by making them flamboyant and racy/overly sexual/promiscuous.

Over time, this practice of making villains flamboyant, sexually aggressive, &etc became somewhat separated from its origins in queer coding, by which I mean that these traits and tropes became the go-to for villains even when the creator had no real intention of making them seem queer. This is how you generally get unintentional queer-coding--because these traits that have been given to villains for decades have roots in coding, but people tend to go right to them when it comes to creating their villains without considering where they came from.

Even after the Hays Code was abandoned, the sentiments and practices remained. Having queer characters who weren't punished by the narrative for being queer was exceptionally rare, and it really isn't until the last fifteen or so years that we've seen any pushback against that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is famous for being one of the first shows on primetime television to feature an explicitly gay relationship on-screen, and that relationship ended in one of the most painful instances of Bury Your Gays that I have ever personally witnessed. (Something that, fourteen years later, The 100 would visually and textually reference with Lexa's death. Getting hit by a bullet intended for someone else after a night of finally getting to be happy and have sex with her s/o? It wasn't remotely subtle. I don't even like Clexa, but that was incredibly rough to witness.)

However, bringing this back to Zuko, he really doesn't fit the criteria for queer coding for a number of reasons. First of all, no one behind the scenes (mostly a bunch of cishet men) was at all intending to include queer rep in the show. This wasn't a case where they were like 'well, we really wanted to make Zuko gay, but we couldn't get that past the censors, so here are a few winks and a nudge', because it just wasn't on their radar at all. Which makes sense--it wasn't on most radars in that era of children's programming. This isn't really an indictment, it's just a fact of the time--in the mid/late 00s, no one was really thinking about putting queer characters in children's cartoons. People were barely beginning to include them in more teen- and adult-oriented television and movies. It just wasn't something that a couple of straight men, who were creating a fantasy series aimed at young kids, were going to think about.

What few instances you can point to from the series where Zuko might be considered to exhibit coding largely happen in Book 1, when he was a villain, because the writers were drawing from typically villainous traits that had historically come from queer coding villains and had since passed into common usage as villainous traits. But they weren't done with any intention of making it seem like Zuko might be attracted to boys.

And, again, what people actually point to as 'evidence' of Zuko being queer-coded--his awkwardness on his date with Jin and his confrontation with Ozai being the big ones I can think of off the top of my head--are actually just... traits that come from his history of trauma and abuse.

As I said in that old post:

making [zuko’s confrontation of ozai] about zuko being gay and rejecting ozai’s homophobia, rather than zuko learning fundamental truths about the world and about his home and about how there was something deeply wrong with his nation that needed to be fixed in order for the world to heal (and, no, ‘homophobia’ is not the answer to ‘what is wrong with the fire nation’, i’m still fucking pissed at bryke about that), misses the entire point of his character arc. this is the culmination of zuko realizing that he should never have had to earn his father’s love, because that should have been unconditional from the start. this is zuko realizing that he was not at fault for his father’s abuse--that speaking out of turn in a war meeting in no way justified fighting a duel with a child.

is that first realization (that a parent’s love should be unconditional, and if it isn’t, then that is the parent’s fault and not the child’s) something that queer kids in homophobic households/families can relate to? of course it is. but it’s also something that every other abused kid, straight kids and even queer kids who were abused for other reasons before they even knew they were anything other than cishet, can relate to as well. in that respect, it is not a uniquely queer experience, nor is it a uniquely queer story, and zuko not being attracted to girls (which is what a lot of it seems to boil down to, at the end of the day--cutting down zuko’s potential ships so that only zukka and a few far more niche ships are left standing) is not necessary to his character arc. nor does it particularly make sense.

And, regarding his date with Jin:

(and before anyone brings up his date with jin--a) he enjoyed it when she kissed him, and b) he was a traumatized, abused child going out on a first date. of course he was fucking awkward. have you ever met a teenage boy????)

Zuko is socially awkward and maladjusted because he was abused by his father as a child and has trouble relating to people as a result. He was heavily traumatized and brutally physically injured as a teenager, and it took him years to begin to truly recover from the scars that left on his psyche (and it's highly likely, despite the strides he made in canon, that he has a long way to go, post series; it's such a pity that we never got any continuation comics >.>). He was not abused for being gay or queer--he was abused because his father believed he was weak, and part of Zuko's journey was realizing that his father's perception of strength was flawed at its core. That his entire nation had rotted from the inside out, and the regime needed to be changed in order for the world--including his people--to begin to heal.

That could be commingled with a coming out narrative, which is completely fine for headcanons (although I personally prefer not to, because, again, we have more than enough queer trauma already), but it simply doesn't exist in canon. Zuko was not abused or traumatized for being queer, and his confrontation with Ozai was not about him coming out or realizing any fundamental truth about himself--it was about realizing something fundamental about his father and his nation, and making the choice to leave them behind so that he could help the Avatar grow stronger and force things to change when he got back.

TL;DR: at the end of the day, none of the traits, scenes, or behavior Zuko exhibits which shippers tend to use to claim he was gay-coded are actually evidence of coding--they aren't uniquely queer experiences, as they stem from abuse that was not related in any way to his sexuality, and they are experiences that any kid who suffered similar abuse or trauma could recognize and resonate with. (Including straight kids, and queer kids who were abused for any reason other than their identity.) And, finally, Zuko can be queer without erasing or invalidating his canon attraction to girls, and it's endlessly frustrating that the 'Zuko is gay-coded' crowd refuses to acknowledge that.

[kaypeace21]

Will’s fear of clowns

*Ps -not mine. this is a submission from an anon. tw: for s.a. It’s an interesting submission. ANON-please make a tumblr account already . I’m begging you XD

Hi! It’s me, Lonnie Meth Anon. Back with more depressing thoughts about Lonnie!

I just read your post on Jonathan’s ab*se at the hands of Lonnie, and I second it all. It breaks my heart. But it also got me thinking deeper about Will’s fear of clowns. I think you’re right that part of the horror for Will is that the clown attacks in bed. The bed is, obviously, like you say, a common site for s*xual assault. (Doesn’t El’s picture of “three legged Brenner” also have a bed in it? In a picture with not much else?) The fact that Will needed Joyce to sleep with him for a week suggests he was specifically feeling unsafe in bed, or at night. 

But maybe it’s not just the location of the attack in Poltergeist that Will found so harrowing. Maybe it’s the combination of that location with the fact of a clown being the attacker. 

I think Lonnie might have dressed up as a clown for Will’s birthday one year, and something happened. 

In this instance, I don’t think Joyce would know what happened. I think the incident in her mind would be something like “Lonnie dressed up and Will was scared of the costume”. She might even have thought it was cute. Just a typical little kid fear of something mundane. When she teases him about Poltergeist, she doesn’t actually say the movie was the START of his fear of clowns. Just that he was afraid of that particular clown. The general fear of clowns could have been an older one, going back to when Will was even younger.

Maybe Will even liked clowns, before whatever happened with Lonnie turned them into a source of fear for him. Will has a lion plushie (lions are commonly found in the circus) and the circus seems like the kind of vibrant, colorful environment full of outcast, that a young gay kid would really enjoy. If Will did like circuses and Lonnie poisoned that for him, that’s just another reason to hate Lonnie. But it definitely seems possible. 

Lonnie is a deadbeat dad in general, but we’ve seen before that he’s capable of faking the “family man” act in front of Joyce and their neighbors. We’ve also seen that even though he treats Will horribly, he would also try and keep Will on his side with father son bonding activities, like baseball. And Will’s birthday is one of the few occasions Lonnie makes a half-assed kind of effort, even when there’s nothing directly in it for him. He sends that card, even though it’s late. Maybe Joyce made called him up and made him send it, but she always seemed happy to keep Lonnie out of the picture. She didn’t even want to involve him when Will went missing. And we know Jonathan would never try and facilitate more interactions between Lonnie and Will. So it seems like Lonnie did this of his own accord, when he realized he’d missed the day. Kind of weird. And it’s classic abuser behavior, to make contact on an anniversary date, reminding you they exist and you can’t escape them. Reminding you to keep quiet. Or hoping you’ll miss them, remember the “good times” when they made an effort, and let them back into your life. (Ugh.)

So, anyway, back to my theory. Young Will likes circuses, and the Byers family are poor, so they can’t afford to take him to one, or throw him a party at an ice cream parlor or a bowling alley, like other kids. It makes sense that they would have a party at home instead, and that the family themselves might dress up. We know Joyce made Will’s Ghostbusters costume in season two, and a clown is a pretty easy costume. Most of it is just make up. It’s possible the whole thing was Joyce’s idea, and she made the costume, and Lonnie just went along with it to look like a good dad in her eyes. 

Remember how we see Bob (Will’s new father figure) dressing up in costume for Halloween? Joyce loves it. This is a thing good dads do, to have fun with their kids. That’s also the same episode we see Will scared by a guy in a clown costume, and Jonathan is hyper-protective of him that night. School is okay, but he doesn’t want him trick or treating. (Like he knows that school is a safe environment, but in other contexts, costumes and parties might be a trigger for Will.) Jonathan is convinced to leave Will and “let him have fun” and what happens? The clown attacks. Later that night Jonathan goes to a costume party himself, where he finds Nancy upset and takes her safely home.  Maybe this is how Will’s birthday party ended - with Jonathan finding Will upset, and trying to comfort him. The whole night could be playing out like a parallel to that birthday party, from Jonathan’s perspective. 

What actually happened with Will and Lonnie is up for debate. It’s possible there was a s*xual assault, and that’s why the clown scene in Poltergeist was such a trigger for Will. Or maybe Lonnie thought circuses weren’t “manly” enough for his son to like, and actively tried to scare Will, so he wouldn’t like them anymore. It’s hard to know. Something would have happened though, and probably something pretty formative, because the fear of clowns lasts a long time. 

Something else interesting is that when Mr Clarke is talking about the Upside Down in season one, he uses the metaphor of the flea and the acrobat. Acrobats are a main act in the circus, and, well … fleas. Flea circuses. That’s a thing. Maybe it’s a hint that the trauma that created the Upside Down was circus / clown - related?

Kali, El, and their gang wear clown masks too, when they’re going to confront their childhood trauma, and the child-like Alexei is surrounded by clowns when he is killed at the fair. 

Clowns are just so associated with birthday parties and little kids, that it doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me they’re Will’s biggest fear. Especially as the show keeps dropping hints about Lonnie and Will’s birthday. It feels like there’s more to the story. I have a horrible feeling SOMETHING happened. 

RESPONE (kaypeace):

I think it’s very possible-that maybe he did dress as a clown for Will’s birthday and something happened. We have alexi (paralleled to Will) playing carnival games with kids. Then he's attacked by the Lonnie-look alike : and alexi looks at his wound then stares at all the clowns laughing around him. Joyce and Murray find Alexi bleeding/dy*ng next to a clown statue. As joyce looks in horror and Murray says to her, he was “only gone for a second” (which sounds like something you’d say in relation to a kid you were supposed to watch-running off ). We also had sarah at age 7 die while wearing a gown with clowns on it (Will: it was a 7 the demogorgan it got me). Death of innocence symbolism? Hopper also describes his depression as a cave- he goes through the carnival ride where it mentions a "cave of horrors", which had decor of a tiger and a clown painting. So yeah... whatever happened probably isn't good. So- there may be some symbolism there in relation to Will’s past. Not only because (like I and you have mentioned before) Lonnie is highly associated with birthdays. And canonically we know he mentally scarred jonathan on his b-day. But also, s4’s ‘victor creel’ may be an easteregg to the xmen character victor creed- who had a tradition of tra*matizing family members specifically on their bdays

As another alternative:I could also totally see Lonnie “ruining” circuses for Will because it’s not “manly” to him. Like how Jonathan liked thumper the rabbit-from the film bambi. in the film, Thumper is bambi’s bff, and the hunters are the bad guys who k*ll Bambi’s mother and terrorize all the wildlife. SO yeah- making Jonathan become a hunter, and k*ll a rabbit ,despite this fact, is really messed up. And shows Lonnie has already tried to ‘ruin’ things the boys like. By mentally scarring them in one way or another…

I also mentioned how Will’s bday could even be a trigger for jonathan in a diff post.

if the s4 bts calender hinting it’ll be near Will’s bday and easter it could be relevant to Jonathan.we know in s1 el has tra*matic flashbacks when seeing certain things- coke, closet, cat, etc. And Will in s2 has his ‘anniversary effect’ where memories flood back based on the time of year.But like … Easter has bunnies - could seeing rabbits jog stuff up for Jonathan? El seeing a cat made her have a flashback of brenner trying to make her kill a cat. Would Jonathan seeing like Easter bunny decor jog up a flashback of lonnie making him kill a rabbit? (It happened on his bday too). So Will’s b day being around easter would only fuel that memory. (heck even popped balloons may trigger gunshot symbolism idk). And then for Will there is clowns that could be a tr*gger at a party.

The flea and the acrobat analogy (in relation to Will and circuses is very interesting) and could be foreshadowing- it’s even a title for an episode so I feel like it’s narratively an important hint to …something. similar to a s1 ep being called “the bathtub”.  Also, Will was compared to a circus flea- which were placed in an enclosed space, where heat was applied as they jumped  and tried to escape the increasing temperatures as they burned .Which could relate to my theory about Will having a se*zure due his body overheating due to Lonnie injecting him with m*th.

 If Will’s bday is in s4- I feel like Lonnie will come back in some capacity (flashback or literally). The ‘sorry, I forgot you b day’ card from Lonnie in s2, in Lonnie’s shed Joyce mentioning Will’s b day, the rainbow ‘happy birthday cup’ placed next to Will at Mike’s -while Will explains the supernatural, Lonnie already tra*matizing Jonathan on his bday, etc…

[ashdumpsterpile]

I know you talk abou st*cky in the interracial ships stuff, but can we talk about st*ny? Iron husbands is literally right there, but I also always sees Rhodey as Tonys moral support only. And ik Tony is very shippable with most characters, but the fact his ship is Rhodey is one of the lowest ships in ao3 (ironstrange, winteriron and god forbid stark*r all had more fics in ao3).. It's pretty telling this side also has racism problems...

I'll go ahead and answer this here, but letting y'all know that I do have a marvel sideblog if you want to hit me up there (@themarvelarchives).

Hey, I'm going to ramble for a good minute.

So after I posted my very incoherent, controversial take on St*cky vs SamBucky, there were a ton of ppl who came onto anon saying that St*cky shippers were racist. I think I only answered a few, but y'all were pretty insistent on it. I personally have not observed that St*cky shippers are so I'm not calling anyone out on that side of the fandom for that.

I also did not call out anyone on this side of the fandom bc that's not what my meta was about. I think I mentioned maybe once or twice in the whole post that there was underlying racist in the fandom, but since you asked, we can talk about it here.

Covert Bigotry In Fandom Spaces.

To understand what's going on in the MCU, we have to first look at what I call "woke-queer" fandom.

So "Woke-Queer" Spaces is the phenomenon where certain fandom members like to call ppl out on their bigotry, while covertly harboring their own queerphobia/racism/etc. An example of this that we're all familiar with is TERFS and how they like to claim that they are progressive and woke, while also claiming that trans women are fake and trans men are sexist.

How this translates to fandom, however, is the hypocrisy that is cancellation and callout culture.

For example, Supernatural in particular is a fandom that likes to call out the writers on their homophobia and racism, and yet, somehow, the fandom is chalk full of homophobia and racism. If you want to read more about this, here is a truly excellent article from the perspective of a queer woman of color.

Moving on, I've also talked in a previous meta post, on the internalized acephobia that exploded in 2019 after Good Omens was released. Rather than reiterate everything I said in that post, I'll just leave it at this: the controversy in the Good Omens fandom can be summed up by the fact that queer audiences are claiming that Ineffable Husbands is the wrong kind of queer. The hypocrisy oozes off the screen, doesn't it?

A final way this viably translates to fandom, is in how the Doctor Who fandom evolved over time.

So Steven Moffat takes over as head writer and showrunner in 2010. It's a new series, a new Doctor, a new Tardis, and new branding. He steps up the action, changes the color grating, and raises the stakes. Women are sexier, the Doctor is smarter (and more of an asshole, but that's another meta post), and every companion comes with their own impossible mystery that makes them Special™.

Series 5-10 got tons of woke points for having lesbian characters, an episode where the Doctor is homoerotic with James Corden, and an underlying trans narrative with the Master's reincarnation. What a lot of people forget, however, is that his series was incredibly sexiest, incredibly lesbian/biphobic, and basically turned the Doctor into everyone's fantasy sex-object.

This, unfortunately, brought out the worst of the fandom. There was RTD Era vs Moffat Era wars exploding in certain corners, TenxRose shippers vs ElevenxRiver shippers.

What does this have to do with covert racism in fandom cultures though?

Hnnngng ok, so back in RTD era's we get Martha Jones, the Actual Best Companion On The Entire Show. Except for the fact, of course, that she is written to be in love with the doctor. She's a brilliant character--smart, sassy, flawed, funny, flirtatious--and her entire plotline is reduced down to a school-girl crush on a white man.

She doesn't do well with fans, they scrap her after one season.

We move on to Donna Noble (The Other Actual Best Companion On The Entire Show) and RTD's era ends with them scraping her too and regenerating David Tennant's Doctor.

It will be five more series (not seasons, SERIES) until Doctor Who will have another black companion--who gets extra points for being gay--only to fall victim to "bury your gays" at the end of the season (but not really bc no one stays dead on Doctor Who).

The fandom's reception of Martha Jones was historically bad. The comparisons to her predecessor, Rose Tyler, were rampant and everyone was finding a reason to hate her.

The fandom's reception to Bill Potts was also historically bad, as everyone was screaming that she was being written for more "woke points" and that they wanted Clara back.

Fandom has a historically bad reputation of being problematic and, I would argue, the majority of it has to do with these toxic undertones of bigotry that slip under the radar. "Woke-queer" spaces, as I call them, are these instances above where spaces that claim to be inclusive of gender/orientation/race are covertly bigoted.

Marvel and Cancelling

Now is an excellent time to talk about the MCU.

Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson) has recently come under a lot of criticism from fandom members for shutting down shipper speculation.

"The idea of two guys being friends and loving each other in 2021 is a problem because of the exploitation of homosexuality. [...] something as pure and beautiful as homosexuality has been exploited by people who are trying to rationalize themselves."

I can't find the rest of the quote, but Mackie goes on further to say that it was important to him to portray "a sensitive, masculine figure" without insinuating that there was romance involved.

Woke culture lost it's shit. Everyone was suddenly claiming that Mackie was calling them exploitative for shipping a gay ship as a queer audience, which could not have been further from the case.

Mackie actually makes some very excellent points in that sensitivity is not gay/queer. Woke culture loves to rag on Toxic Masculinity, but the minute someone plays a character who is loving and sensitive with no queer narrative in mind, they are immediately canceled.

What Am I On About

Okay, let's actually address what your ask was about, Nonnie. You pointed out--rather truthfully--that it is unfair to call-out racism on one side of the fandom, while ignoring it on the other side.

Well, I've gone back through my St*cky vs. SamBucky analysis (which is incoherent at best, I apologize for that) and I see maybe once instance where I called out fandom members for being racist. Here's what I had to say about racism:

"[...] Iron Husbands is a rarepair, probably because it’s an interracial ship."

"[there is] nothing wrong with shipping two white men, but it does become a problem when you ignore/bash POC/interracial ships to the determinant of your own white ship."

And then there was the post you brought up where I addressed interracial ships in the fandom. That one is probably more relevant to this topic, to be honest, as I actually addressed fandom racism there. I assume that your reason for bringing up Stony is because it's a ship that is more relevant to my side of the fandom, HOWEVER, the reason I highlighted Stucky instead was because I was comparing the fact that they've both been around the same amount of time and are relationships that feature the protagonist and their best friend.

You brought up St*ny in the ask, however, so I'm going to talk about St*ny for a minute.

As someone who never has nor will ship St*ny, it never even occurred to me that some of the problem behind the Iron Husbands tag being so small is because everyone ships the white, boring ship. You brought up a very valid point, but because I was never in that part of the fandom, I can't really speak to any possible underlying racism there, besides what I've already said above.

I would be interested in hearing a St*ony shipper or ex-St*ony shippers thought on this, but sadly I don't know any. If you have any more thoughts regarding this, Nonnie, pls drop back into my inbox.

You do make some excellent points in this ask though, and I would like to talk about racism on my side of the fandom.

So back to Mackie and his Twitter cancellation. Notice that Disney made him address the rumors and not his co-star, Sebastian Stan. Anthony Mackie is put on blast and made to answer fan demands and receives backlash, while Sebastian Stan gets to fly under the rader. This is not, by the way, a criticism of Stan, but instead of the blatant racism Disney has been displaying over the past few years.

How this ties in with the rest of my post has to do with my "woke-queer" spaces bit. The outcry across the MCU fandom over Mackie was swift and unforgiving. He was cancelled on charges of homophobia and bigotry--all the while these same fans turn a blind eye to any queer interpretation of other interracial ships and discourse in their own fandom.

The racism that I'm speaking about, of course, is an almost passive racism. Of course if you don't ship a specific ship for reasons other than their race, it's perfectly fine. It's okay not to ship Iron Husbands or SamBucky or any other interracial fandom ships. However, the distinct lack of shippers in the fandom IS telling because there are people who would ship that exact ship if not for the fact that one of men is black.

I don't have much more to say about this except to thank you for bringing it up and for listening to my long rambling post.

(Feel free to bug me about Tony Stark, MCU ships, MCU Meta and anything you want to talk me about on this blog and @themarvelarchives.)

[tendercoretroglodyke]

... I’m interested in legitimately gay Reese (I assume one piece of evidence is “look at what they’re doing and tell me you’re not gay”)

okay this is like 2 days late but this is why reese malcolminthemiddle is legitimately gay:

(side note: did anyone need a queer media thesis paper or something... I am willing to share lmao)

so none of this is like... rock solid evidence or anything but I need to believe at least one main character of a show is gay and/or trans to maintain interest and reese is the most plausible gay character. also it’s early 2000′s so he just gets a lot of vaguely homophobic jokes lmao

first of all, yes, the biggest piece of evidence he’s gay is those lines from that episode I quoted the other day--thinking malcolm is gay, he tries to show his support by giving him a gay porno: “’Naught Pool Boys 3!’ I watched 10 or 12 of these, and this one seems to have the most stuff you guys like.” and when malcolm says he isn’t gay, reese responds “Malcolm. Check out what those guys are doing in that movie, and THEN tell me you’re not gay.”-- so, 1) reese sat down and watched like a dozen gay porn movies to ““find a good one for his gay brother”” and 2) he thinks malcolm would reconsider his heterosexuality if he watched what was in that movie, implying that HE reconsidered his sexuality after watching that movie, or at the very least found it hot

in the same episode, the character tricking malcolm into thinking reese is gay lists the following as evidence: he obsesses over his hair and his looks, loves his gourmet cooking, has a bunch of magazines covered in comically muscular men, and that he’s angry and acts like a jerk because he’s “dealing with something weird and confusing.” now obviously, the obsession with hair/looks can be chalked up to the fact that he’s a teenage boy, and there’s nothing inherently gay about enjoying cooking. the dozen magazines of muscle-bound men could certainly be taken as gay evidence, though, and it IS established in the show that his entire bully persona is his way of masking his inner feelings and insecurities. there’s literally a whole episode where he & malcolm realize they have no friends because they act like little shits to push people away because they’re afraid of rejection and/or abandonment from their peers. they ostracize themselves before they can be ostracized by the other students at school. I could probably write a whole other essay on reese’s psyche tbqh lmao there’s a shocking amount there!!

of the brothers who are actually old enough to be attracted to girls (reese, malcolm, and francis), he shows the least interest. now bear with me here. you might be thinking, “well, yeah, it’s malcolm’s show, we’re not gonna see things from other people’s perspective!” but that is actually surprisingly untrue, the show is very much equally shown from each family members’ perspectives. starting about s2, when malcolm is in early middle school, he starts getting crushes on girls and pursuing them. francis goes after a few women in the first couple seasons and then marries a woman we see a lot throughout the show. 

in the roughly... 130?? episodes I have watched so far, nearly all of reese’s “interest” in girls involve either: competition with malcolm, genuinely just liking her as a friend, or some completely ulterior motive. the only exception to this I can think of is in the early seasons where he has a crush on a cheerleader and tries to get on her good side by joining the cheerleading squad, which the writers clearly set up as a way to make gay jokes about reese. let me give you a few examples of his relationships with girls

the first relationship we see him in is with a “stupid girl” that malcolm tried (and failed) to date, and the main reason they get together is that they think on the same wavelength and genuinely seem to enjoy hanging out. they take breaks from their bro chats to make out every once in a while. eventually he gets her to break up with him because he doesn’t want to go to the school dance with her (he doesn’t want to go at all). years later, he’s dating some girl we meet for like 5 minutes, before he goes to confess to her that she’s the first girl he’s ever loved. she then breaks up with him. he’s sad, but taking it fairly well. he’s about to leave when he sees malcolm hiding under the bed, and learns that he stole his girlfriend. he then runs away to join the army. he was clearly MUCH more upset that his brother stole his girlfriend than he was that his girlfriend broke up with him. there are many more instances of him and malcolm competing for a girl’s affections, and he seems mostly motivated by the competition itself.

in addition to “stupid girl,” he also manufactures an “attraction” to his female army buddy in the last season. the premise of this episode is that his old army buddy (a girl he play-wrestles with and insults like he would his own brothers) comes to visit him, and malcolm convinces reese that she’s attracted to him, and that reese’s nervousness at learning that fact is proof he’s in love with her. there’s a misunderstanding where reese asks her if she has certain “feelings” and she says she does, but what she ACTUALLY means is that she has a crush on reese’s MOM. she’s a lesbian. reese later propositions her (saying he’s saved his virginity for this--he’s probably about 18 here), and when she says omg no im gay, he is HUGELY relieved they can go back to being friends. CLASSIC mlm/wlw friendship moment. 

there’s an episode where these cute girls pick up reese (& nerds) to kiss in front of their boyfriends to make them jealous. reese is all for it, and when malcolm argues that it’s not worth his dignity and the beating he’ll get from the girl’s boyfriend, reese counters that that’s WHY he wants to do this--he’s completely invisible at school, and thinks getting beaten up for kissing some guy’s girlfriend will at least make him known around school. at no point does he indicate he’s actually attracted to this girl, and when it comes time to kiss her, he finds the weakest excuse to run away at the last minute. 

im not gonna list all of these but there’s more lmao

the following is a random assortment of one-off gay jokes and out-of-context lines with gay reese implications, often homophobically bc its early 2000′s writing:

says “I’m gay” to a girl to give malcolm a better shot at her

(again in competition with malcolm) tries to flirt with a girl by spraying milk in her face as the punchline to a joke, which is. well. hm. self-sabotaging, to say the least!!

Reese: “Do you think it’s right to totally change who you are and turn your back on EVERYTHING you believe in, just to impress a hot guy??” [his dad gives a long, blank stare, before asking:] “...Burt Reynolds hot, or Sting hot?”

“YEAH I like clouds! I call them sky kittens :)” (I just think that one’s sweet!)

“Look, Christie, here’s the thing. When I first met you, I was just messing around. But we’ve gotten so close that, now... I really like you! I can’t keep this up anymore. I’m not the person you think I am. I’ve been pretending since the day I met you. It’s so hard having to constantly cover my tracks to keep my story straight... and I don’t WANT to anymore! I’m tired of living this lie! I’m done with it. I’m sorry.”

he catfishes some guy to blackmail him, but is implied to continue the flirtation even after the catfishing/blackmail is revealed

reese is, technically, married to a man. this particular plot point is played as a joke and manages to be both racist and homophobic, so I won’t go into it. but I believe he is still married to that man. technically.

reese takes care of a huge box full of caterpillars until they pupate and become beautiful butterflies. I feel like there’s some kind of gay coming out metaphor here somewhere.

I think there are a couple other times where he comments on a guy’s attractiveness but I couldn’t find specific instances.

In conclusion: Reese is a deeply repressed gay kid who was socialized SO thoroughly as an early 2000′s straight boy that, despite his attraction for men and his obvious compulsory heterosexuality, he still cannot admit to himself that he is gay even as he enters adulthood. Furthermore, his subconscious frustration about this fact is turned outward to form the “schoolyard bully” costume he uses to mask his insecurities and keep others from getting too close to him. 

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. I could be convinced to come back for another talk about how Dewey is trans or about how each and every member of that family is neurodivergent in entirely different ways. Assuming anyone has read this far in the first place!!

[bthump]

I wanted to touch on the whole gutsca thing with someone (I know zero people in this fandom so you're my lucky pick!). Am I alone in feeling like their first time together came out of no where? My meta with Guts is that he was not at all comfortable with sex at that time of his life (this instance being his first time [outside of the rape he experienced as a child]). His choice of words too, "here I go", translated to me like someone only doing what they felt was expected of them rather than something he was yearning for. He clearly wasn't even ready given how rough he was and how he regressed and attacked her. This moment seemed very forced and almost rang to me like Kentaro's declaration of "no homo though". I would be curious to know how Kentaro felt about homosexuality (bisexuality, etc) and if he ever addressed the ever blatant gay tension and romantic-non-platonic-love blossoming between Guts and Griffith pre-eclipse. I do get the sense that this may be a case of severe queer baiting or perhaps a PSA against gay love altogether ("falling for a man will literally destroy you and send you and everyone you love to hell" type of message); but I'm a very jaded person so I hope to be proven wrong. Sigh, my point being Gutsca seems pretty dang forced and empty of true development. I buy them more as besties than anything romantic. Especially since both he and Casca are actually in love with Griffith (what a fucking triangle!). Does anyone in fandom have any opinions on the sad possibility of this whole beautiful and ultimately tragic love between Griffith and Guts actually being a fucked up anti-gay PSA? Are there any interviews with Kentaro shooting this theory down so I can stop being sad and bitter about it? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for sending this, I'm definitely down to talk about it! I hope you connect with more people in the fandom but don’t worry about sending random asks even if you do lol.

Anyway you’re definitely not alone. I have a lot of thoughts on Guts and Casca's hook up, and they're all pretty much "it feels really forced and not particularly romantic but I think you can argue that that's deliberate" lol. For instance I discuss in a lot of detail here how various aspects of the scene indicate that Guts and Casca having sex is shown to be a case of both of them rebounding from Griffith and sort of giving to each other what they were unable or failed to give to him.

And I talk a lot about how Judeau essentially orchestrates it all and what that suggests about Guts and Casca's relationship here.

And lol sorry for all the links but also this post is about how their relationship feels one-sided to an extent and is used to illuminate a lot of Guts' flaws, using Judeau as a comparison point.

Oh shit and also one more lol, here's a comparison between the sex scene and Griffith's with Charlotte that suggests that both start as ways for the dudes to repress their feelings.

(Don't feel obligated to read all those posts if you don't want, you should get the gist of what I'm saying w/ those descriptions.)

But yeah basically I do think that Guts and Casca getting together felt forced and awkward. At best it might be intended to be seen that way, as two friends hooking up awkwardly in an emotionally intense moment but probably doomed to failure because neither of them are ready for a relationship with the other, or particularly interested in one deep down, once they finished "licking wounds." At worst it’s just bad writing lol. But again like I think there are good arguments for the former.

I also totally agree that their relationship has a strong vibe of doing what's expected. Like for real, at least to me both Guts and Casca read so easily as gay and repressed lol. Casca talks about her feelings for Griffith in terms of “he was a boy she was a girl can I make it any more obvious”

and I can’t help but see it as Casca like, wow I have strong feelings towards Griffith, he’s a man and I’m a woman, so clearly these feelings must be romantic, there’s no other option. Then when she has sex with Guts she keeps contextualizing it essentially as repayment for Guts saving her, like she owes him. “I too want a wound I can say you gave me.” “Not just being given to... maybe I can give something as well.” Which just doesn’t make her desire for him look all that genuine lol.

And then you have Guts. The way he tells Casca that from the start only her touch was okay with him after he has sex with her, referencing the scene when he wakes up with her on top of him and starts to panic before realizing she’s a woman, is soooo suggestive of repression to me. Like, first off because it’s incorrect, he was also okay with Griffith going in for a face-grab after winning a duel Guts had been projecting his rape trauma all over, which seems like a pretty conspicuous omission. And secondly because the reason he was okay with Casca’s touch specifically is solely because she’s a woman, not because she’s special or because they have a magic romantic connection - it’s because she’s not a man. To me that just screams that Guts was open to sex with Casca because she’s the only woman he knows, and he’s afraid of the idea of physical intimacy with men, regardless of what he might actually want deep down.

So yeah that’s basically how I feel about Guts and Casca’s relationship, strong agree with you.

When it comes to Miura’s intent, I can tell you that Miura was asked about the subtext in an interview once, back in 2000, and he responded with something along the lines of ‘two men can have passionate feelings for each other without it being romantic.’ The interview is here, but this is a paraphrase the translator mentioned in the comments.

Other than that I’ve never seen him address it directly, but on the flipside he has cited several textually gay stories as inspiration (off the top of my head: Kaze to Ki no Uta, Devilman, Guin Saga, mangaka Moto Hagio in general), and he has straightforwardly said that the (magical intersex) central character of his other work, Duranki, was intended to have romances with both male and female love interests. Also people tell me there are strong griffguts vibes with the main, presumably canon or intended-to-be-canon ship there. So there’s that lol.

As for the no homo aspect and the potential homophobia in the griffguts subtext... I can’t deny I’ve also considered the idea that it’s a deliberate anti-gay PSA (though I haven’t seen anyone else address the idea as far as I remember, and I’ve only briefly mentioned it offhandedly). Like, Guts and Griffith’s relationship turns bad because they’re both too invested in each other, maybe the barely-subtextual desire is meant to look like a sinister twisting of pure platonic feelings that ruins everything, if Griffith hadn’t loved him the Eclipse never would have happened, etc.

But honestly I don’t think that reading holds up compared to a much more positive reading of their feelings, in which it’s their failure to understand them and act on them, thanks largely to formative childhood trauma and self-hatred, that leads to tragedy.

I don’t know what Miura intended, and there certainly are aspects of the story that are homophobic regardless of his intent, even if my best-faith reading is entirely correct, like the only textual gay attraction being pedophiles and over the top heretic orgies lol, or yk, Guts and Griffith both assaulting the same woman while looking at/thinking about the other in a very sexually charged way.

But the reading of their relationship where it’s positive and good for both of them, even including sexual desire, and only gets fucked up because they both incorrectly think their feelings are unrequited is legitimately so weirdly strong, much stronger than a reading where the sexual nature of their feelings is what fucks everything up, so I’m pretty happy just rolling with that take.

And as much as Casca can be seen and may very well be intended as a no homo, it’s also very easy for me to read her relationships with both as less of a hopeful opportunity for positive heterosexual romance and more of a “here’s how repressing your feelings thru attempts at heterosexuality fucks you up” PSA lol. Griffith and Charlotte too, for that matter. It’s definitely a stretch to think that’s intended, but whether it’s intended or not it’s an easy sell for me and I’m fine with not really worrying too much about possible authorial intent there.

Finally, I also want to link this post that goes pretty thoroughly into why I interpret griffguts as very positive rather than as a cautionary tale or predatory gay lust etc

And also have this shorter post about Femto on the same subject too, why not

Oh and maybe this thing where I split hairs about Guts’ lust for Griffith and desire for revenge to make a point that the homoeroticism isn’t necessarily being equated with violence by the narrative lol

[bao3bei4]

girlbosses, male wives, and other lesbian genders

a post about jing wei qing shang. but also mostly about another unrelated movie. spoiler-free.

for a lot of people, mulan 1998 is their definitive “ohhh i’m a chinese woman dressing as a man for contrived reasons and i get absolutely nooo erotic pleasure from this” movie. 

however, because i am very special and unique, for me it’s the love eterne 1963. it’s the shaw brothers adaptation of butterfly lovers, the classic chinese folktale. here’s how i’d summarize the movie: 

zhu yingtai, an aspiring scholar, convinces her parents to let her dress as a man to attend school. on the way there, she meets liang shanbo, another prospective student, and they become sworn brothers. they study together for three years, growing closer, until zhu yingtai returns home. liang shangbo accompanies her for the eighteen-li journey home while she hints she’s a woman, but he remains oblivious. by the time he learns her gender, her parents have engaged her to another man. he dies of grief, and while she mourns at his grave, it splits open, and she buries herself inside with him. two scraps of her torn outfit turn into butterflies and fly away.

it’s worth noting here that like. this movie is made in the huangmei opera style. so both zhu yingtai and liang shanbo are played by women (betty loh ti and ivy ling po respectively). because of this, basically every level of the film is preoccupied with gender: if we take zhu yingtai’s male performance as credible (as the characters in the movie do) the leads bond through male homoeroticism; the text is ultimately about a heterosexual romance; it is acted out by two women, in a performance that is difficult to mistake as heterosexual or even feminine; and the dialogue of the movie can’t help but remark on this.

basically it asks: what if lesbians could be gay both ways? wouldn’t that be based? 

like opera was traditionally made by single gender casts, so roles tended to be genderless, in that the gender of the actor doesn’t determine the gender of the role they play. roles are instead typed into four categories: dan (fem), sheng (masc), chou (clown), and jing (painted face). it’s a sick gender quadinary. each of these roles has further subtypes that are represented through stylized patterns of singing, makeup, costuming, movement etc.

so in butterfly lovers, betty loh ti plays a dan, and ivy ling po plays a sheng. but because of the textual cross-gender play, you end up with a woman playing a woman playing a man who falls in love with a woman playing a man.

i’m going to make a brief digression here into talking about like.. acting theory. in the european tradition, you see it evolving out of early concerns (from stanislavski, brecht) about the fourth wall, and its permeability or lack thereof. in chinese opera tradition, the fourth wall didn’t ever really exist. and mei lanfang, the legendary fanchuan performer, claimed that his success wasn’t just due to his appearance, but rather, his mastery of some nonliteral feminine subjectivity. 

If I kept my male feelings, even just a trace, it will betray my true self; then how can I compete for the audience’s affection for feminine beauty and guile?

i’m not going to argue that there’s like, an essence to being a woman because i’m not a fucking idiot. but there’s something to be said for the idea that the gendered interplay between the audience’s perception of the actor, the actor’s perception of themself, and the character they play is a massive part of the appeal of fanchuan performance.

this is echoed by david hwang’s m. butterfly, in which gallimard memorably says, “i’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. everything else—simply falls short.” btw sorry for having the type of brain disease where i constantly reference chinese crossdressing related media. you already know why i have it. 

anyway. parallel to that (but far less morally detestably), jin jiang argues “young male impersonators in yue opera embody women’s ideal men—elegant, graceful, capable, caring, gentle, and loyal.” so, trivially, 1) the eroticism embodied by fanchuan performers is distinctly different from their “straight” counterparts, and perhaps less trivially 2) it’s way better. 

back to the love eterne for a bit. one of the many reasons it’s lodged itself into my psyche is because there’s something more interesting at play than just all that. normally in opera, to compensate for any perceived residual femininity in the sheng, the dan camps it up even further. so this is how zhu yingtai first appears, this bratty femme pastiche of womanhood. yet within a couple minutes she’s dressed as a man, which she’ll stay as for the bulk of the movie. they do however make compromises with the makeup--more gently lifted eyebrows than the steep angles of the sheng opera beat, and an improbably masculine smoky eye. 

that’s right. they performed girlbossification on her. 

i don’t want to suggest that she’s straightforwardly feminine. i could write an entire other thing on her relationship to masculinity. instead i want to highlight the erotic interplay not just between the “girl” and the “boss” but also between her and her counterpart: the male wife. 

liang shanbo is ostensibly straightforwardly male, but his relationship with zhu yingtai isn’t gay in the ahaha what if i was into my bro way-- it’s a what if i was into my bro and i was his wife way.

that’s right. they performed force fem on a cis woman-man. like when zhu yingtai tells him he can’t watch over her as she recovers from an illness because “boys and girls can’t sleep together,” liang shanbo asks “are you implying that I’m a girl?”

there’s a lot of shit like this that builds up over the course of the movie. it all culminates in that final 18 mile journey. along the way, zhu yingtai compares them to a pair of mandarin ducks, one male & one female. liang shanbo sputters “i am a man inside out-- you shouldn’t--” before graciously conceding, “you may compare me to a woman.” 

this is like. a simple punchline. but it’s incredible. it’s true! liang shanbo isn’t a man inside out in that he’s a man and only a man, but rather that he’s a man seen inside first, built for desiring, by a woman & for a woman. as a perpetual object, he becomes a more believable woman than zhu yingtai. and at least in his view, it seems more likely that he could be a woman than her. but beyond that, his permissive tone reads as a kind of wanting in itself--recast, if she wants, “for you, i’ll be a woman.” 

obviously this is a classic lesbian mood. who among us has not seen “no gender only lesbian” posts. and speaking of classic lesbians, you might ask. did you just tiresomely reinvent butches and femmes but with a more annoying name? yes. no. okay. well. 

first, like butch/femme dynamics have both historical specificity and a classed character such that it’s not rlly that appropriate to impose them on the love eterne. and i guess more importantly, i wanna talk about stuff that isn’t real.

we fight all day about people who confuse performance with performativity, (i use we lightly here. for instance, i go outside every day so i don’t care about discourse) but what if we actually wanted to talk about the former for once? something specifically, whether we choose or are forced into it, that we pretend to be? 

anyway. what the hell does all that have to do with jing wei qing shang. i’m going to start by first making the argument that there’s no such thing as a naturally occurring girlboss. i think, honestly, she’s a product of capitalism (“boss” should be the tipoff here) but because both of these stories are set in ambiguously historical china, i’m going to say, instead that she’s a product of uhhh primitive accumulation.

semantics so that i can be canon compliant with marxism aside, if girlbosses are made not born, can you choose to be a girlboss? sheryl sandberg says yes. i don’t disagree, i guess, but i will say: stop glamorizing it! humans only become girlbosses when they’re greatly distressed. 

you become a girlboss when you have no other choice not to be one. when your wants are too great to be a woman, when the things you want are not things that women should want-- whether that’s something that really no one should want, like being a ceo, or whether that’s just something like loving a woman (or, as it is quite often, both) -- you have to become something else. 

another important part of being a girlboss is that other people are not. your excesses mean that not only do you lose something in the process, but your bosshood comes at the expense of others. the girlboss necessitates a girlworker, or so to speak. 

now we’re getting to jwqs. i’m assuming that you haven’t read jwqs, because most people haven’t. that was me until like four days ago. in broad strokes, the novel is about a woman, qiyan agula, who was raised as a prince, and her quest for revenge against the kingdom who slaughtered her people. of course, this involves marrying one of the princesses of that kingdom. it’s all very exciting (lesbian). 

what’s striking about jwqs is that both of them seem to fit the girlboss paradigm, in vaguely similar ways. qi yan (agula’s assumed name) seems to follow the lineage of zhu yingtai, who pretends to be a man to achieve her goals. she’s forced to give up much in the process, and also sacrifices a, uh, lot of innocent people. similarly, nangong jingnu, the princess, is inherently a girlboss because royalty sucks. but also, qi yan girlbossifies her over the course of their relationship. 

but i wouldn’t say jwqs is girlboss4girlboss. there’s something a little more complicated happening. qi yan isn’t zhu yingtai in that she’s a dan pretending to be a sheng. it seems more like that she was a sheng all along. it’s something that the women of the novel return to often: qi yan seems to be better than a man.

for instance, nangong sunu, jingnu’s older sister, reflects on this. 

Nangong Sunu had seen many foolishly loving women who sacrificed everything for the sake of their husbands, but there were rarely any men who would do the same for them. 

(...) 

Thinking it through, Nangong Sunu felt that Qi Yan was truly becoming more interesting. She intended to observe discreetly for a while, to verify if such a man truly existed in this world. (ch 221) 

and i forgot to write down the citation for this, but nangong jingnu also seems to argue that not only is qi yan prettier than a man, but she also seems to be prettier than a woman. (it’s the bit where she’s watching qi yan sleep. help me out here.)

moreover, the way qi yan relates to nangong jingnu is suggestive. jingnu brings out the elements of wanting to be a woman in her. it’s jingnu’s body that makes her wonder what she would look like if she was more feminine. it’s jingnu’s happiness that she resents, wishing that her people could have that as well. it’s her desire for jingnu that makes her a woman. 

(another important distinction i suppose--while one person can’t be both a butch and a femme, because the girlboss and the male wife are things we pretend to be until we embody them / them us -- there’s greater slippage between the two.)

anyway, the girlboss/male wife dynamic is reversed wrt who’s actually dressing as a different gender. that suggests an inversion in the implications we see from the love eterne, if we are to take the love eterne as the paradigmatic girlboss text. which i do, for no reason in particular. 

so then, is qi yan pretending to be a man? under the opera framework, we’re forced to say no. she’s not pretending to be a man any more so than liang shanbo (as acted by ivy ling po) was. but that, of course, feels incorrect, just looking at the text. is she, then, pretending to be a sheng? i’d strongly say no. the things that others see in her, they authentically see; and she does authentically feel the same things as liang shanbo wrt femininity.

so it has to be the opera framework that jwqs is subverting then. if qi yan kept some trace of her once-womanhood, if qi yan reveals her true self, and yet she still can compete for the audience’s affection-- jwqs’s inversion of the opera framework seems to argue instead that it’s that true self that allows you to compete. it’s being masc that lets you be a desirable woman; it’s being feminine that lets you be a desirable man.

there’s an increased gender ambivalence to jwqs, which make sense, i guess, seeing as it’s not meant to be a het story the way that the love eterne was. for instance, nangong jingnu crossdresses to go out in public, and qi yan remarks that jingnu’s disguise fooled her on their first meeting. when qi yan and jingnu go out in public, both disguised as men, they’re repeatedly perceived as a gay male couple. there’s freedom in that: they could be gay women only privately, they could be straight officially, but they could be anonymously gay publicly. 

so it’s through the gay male pretense that they can be gay women; it’s through the qi yan pretense that agula can love women; it’s the qi yan caring husband persona that coaxes jingnu in caring for qi yan in return-- jwqs, more precisely, argues that you can’t be a woman if you’re going to love them, and even less so if you’re going to be loved by one. 

this is perhaps well-trodden ground for anyone who has read wittig & certainly many people who haven’t. but it’s the layer of pretense that for me complicates these two narratives. 

i think it’s a relatable feeling: wanting something anticipating getting something, or wanting something for yourself anticipating knowing that you already had it. that is, desire in itself being constitutive of that reality. 

or less abstractly, knowing that you’d want to be a lesbian if you could, knowing that you’d want not to be a woman if you could-- anticipating any realization of either. 

the dramatic excesses & wants of the girlboss, i think, are a decent literary stand in for being a lesbian. 

i wanna note here that this is rlly just based on my experience being a transmisogyny exempt nonbinary diaspora lesbian lol. it’s fun & cathartic to overread this history & place myself in the accidental implications.

i don’t think most of the things i say are literally true. and i don’t want to overstep & say any of this can be generalized. please lmk if something here doesn’t read right! ok kisses bye

[femmeharringrove]

so niki has two dads. so what?

if you say anything about it, she'll kick you. and if principal kane wants to meet with her fathers, then so be it.

that only happens twice - first with steve, who walks in with sunglasses high on his face, a cup of coffee in hand, and a stance that makes the shorter man in front of him admittedly uncomfortable. niki is almost gleeful as she watches her dad stare blankly at the principal, then tug his glasses down to eye him more critically. not a word is spoken, there isn't a sound outside of the gentle swishing caused by niki's feet kicking back and forth. when the silence is broken, it's by steve, voice bored and uncaring.

"what's the problem, mister kane?" principal kane looks a little intimidated by the man in front of him - as he should be, niki knows.

"uh - well, uh, you see, nikita got in another fight again with a student, and -"

his words come to a halt when steve's hand comes up to stop them, the other hand perched comfortably on his hip. his head turns to face his daughter, and while his face is deadly serious she sees the sparkle in his eye and knows she's in no trouble here.

"nikita," he drawls, "did you get into a fight today?"

"yeah," she replies, without an ounce of remorse.

"do you want to tell me why?" he pushes, and she does, so she tells him.

"joey carter said that nobody wants to be my friend because i have two dads and that's wrong." joey is full of shit, as uncle dustin likes to say. she has plenty of friends, and all her friends love her papa and her dad. because steve always makes them the best snacks and takes them on all sorts of trips and takes the time to get to know the kids. and billy lets them do his makeup and carries them around the house while they squeal in delight. their parents might have been unsure at first, but steve and billy have made friends with most of niki's friends' parents. but the carters are gross people and their son is no exception as far as the eight-year-old is concerned.

"thank you," steve hums, before turning back to principal kane. the hand he'd held up to stop his talking lowers again and he places it on his other hip. "principal kane, where is joey?"

"why, he's in class," the ruddy man replies. steve's eyebrow arches in the way it does when papa says something dumb, or when niki tries hiding something from him.

"and why is that?" he presses. "are we just allowing students to verbally harass other students now?" principal kane gulps.

"well, you know how children are -"

"i do," steve cuts in sharply. "i'm raising one. do you know how long it took me to teach her not to say fuck because it's not a nice word?" nikita stifles a giggle at the offended look that crosses her principal's face. "picked it up from her aunt," steve continues. "kids just soak these things up, you know." steve pauses to sip on his coffee, hand raising to stop the man from speaking, and then he continues. "joey's parents are bigots, i know that very well, and i'm not surprised joey's picked up on it. but if nikita here said fuck in class, you'd reprimand her for foul language, yes?" he peers through his sunglasses while principal kane nods vigorously.

"of course we would." steve nods his approval.

"i take comfort in that." the glasses come off after that, and steve leans forward to meet the shorter man's gaze. "now, if one of your students says hateful comments towards another, would you do the same thing, mister kane?" niki grins at the way her principal shifts uncomfortably.

"I - I suppose, yes," he stammers.

"you suppose," steve repeats, mean and critical. "well, in that case, if you suppose, i suggest you get to calling the carters. nikita and i are going to leave you to it." principal kane tries speaking up, but steve's already got his sunglasses back on and he holds his hand out to the smaller brunette in the room. "let's go, honey. say goodbye to principal kane." nikita hops off the chair and waves a cheery goodbye before happily walking out with her hand in her dad's.

later that night, he's reading her a story and she snuggles against his side, enjoying the gentle brush of his fingers through her curly hair, and she can't help herself.

"hey, dad?" steve stops reading, sets the book down to look down at her.

"yes, baby?" and now nikita huffs, because she doesn't know what she wants to ask. they've talked about this before, both about gender and sex, and sexuality. she knows some people think something's wrong with her dads, but she doesn't hear it often. it shakes her a little when she does.

"why are people so mean?" she settles on. steve's face falters a little.

because there's no easy answer to that, is there? he and billy have been raising her for eight years, they've been together for five of those years and have only been open about it for three. they've been talking about getting married, about having one more kid together, about moving and settling somewhere new, but he knows no matter where they go or what they do there are always going to be instances like this, people like the carters and this kane asshole. and as much as he aches to protect his baby from that, he can't.

so he and billy have taught her the importance of kindness and understanding and respect. and at just eight, she has such an understanding of those concepts. she's absolutely brilliant, and beautiful, and more precious than steve will ever be able to put into words. he studies the face that peers up at him, brushes her bangs from her face, and holds her close so he can rest his chin on her head with a sigh.

"well, kita, sometimes people are scared," he tries. "remember when papa gave you seaweed that one time we went to california?" he doesn't have to be looking to know her entire face scrunches up in disgust.

"yeah, but that was gross," she points out, making the same face steve makes when he eats something he doesn't like, trying to get the taste off her tongue. steve laughs softly.

"to you and me, yeah, but not to papa. he grew up out there so he was already used to it, but for you and me it's scary. green stuff from the sea? icky, right?" nikita nods against his chest. "well, some people haven't seen gay people before, not like papa and i and our kid living like other families. and that's new and scary. and sometimes, when people get scared, they act a certain way." steve tries thinking for another example. "like when papa brought that beetle inside and scared me, remember that?"

nikita will never forget the way her dad scrambled over the couch trying to escape the bug. she'd laughed until the beetle took flight because that really was scary. the pair had screamed around the house and steve had absolutely refused all of billy's apologies the rest of the night, huffing and pouting while nikita giggled at the sight.

"you hit him," she recalls. it hadn't been hard, just a couple of swats on the shoulder while scolding the blonde man. steve nods.

"yeah, which was mean," he agrees. "but sometimes, people get mean when they're scared. obviously, something like having two dads or liking another guy or gal isn't the same as bringing in a beetle, it's much bigger than that. and when people get mean about the bigger things, it's more than just a little hit on the shoulder."

she gets that too, as much as she doesn't like it.

nikita sighs and wraps her little arms tight around steve's waist.

"i don't want people to be mean to you," she decides, and steve knows she loves him, of course he knows, but it warms his heart to hear a reminder of it.

"i know," he sighs. "but we can't make other people be kind. we can only be kind ourselves, yeah?" the girl nods and smiles up at her father.

"you're the most kindest" she announces, and then niki rests her head against his chest again. he doesn't start reading right away, but his voice sounds a little wobbly to her when he does.

the second time principal kane has to meet with one of her dads, it's over a father's day event in class and professor kane specifically requests billy instead of steve. he shows up a little greasy from work, looks from the principal to a mother and her son, to his teary-eyed little girl, and knows there's about to be trouble.

nikita doesn't know if it's hurt tears or angry tears, but misses hartwell's words sting and she can't get them out of her head. her son jeremy's words had hurt even more, and so a now ten-year-old nikita had punched him right in the face.

"something has to be done, mister hargrove," the principal says. amy hartwell scoffs.

"something indeed. we'll be pressing charges, that's what will be done." billy fixes her with a glare.

"you're gonna press charges against a kid?" he questions incredulously. "i know my girl, she doesn't do that unless he messed up big time."

"my son would never do any -" the woman begins, but nikita has no time for this. she doesn't want to sit here and listen to them act like jeremy is innocent.

"he said i can't bring my dad to school because i don't have one!" she snaps, and billy almost snaps too.

"well, it's true!" jeremy shoots back from the safety of his mother's side. "tell her, mom." now amy looks usure, and principal kane shifts uncomfortably as billy's cold glare flashes to the woman.

"yeah, tell her," he repeats, low and threatening. "better yet, tell me." amy shifts her weight and steps back.

"well, everyone in town knows her mother got pregnant in some indianapolis bar," she has the audacity to say. "the girl's never met her real father." nikita opens her mouth ready to protest and hurl insults, but billy speaks first.

"nikita doesn't have a mother," he growls. "her father gave birth to her, and i raised her. we're her dads, and she can have either of us at this little party, got it?"

"it's not healthy to feed her lies like that," amy argues, "you're poisoning her mind, it's dangerous -"

"- no," niki's dad cuts in. "what's dangerous is saying all of that within three feet of me. what's fucking dangerous is teaching your kid how to be as fucking disgusting as you."

"mister hargrove!" principal kane cuts in sharply. "i will not have you threatening misses hartwell like that!" billy turns on the man with an aggression nikita has never seen from her pa, a wild gleam in his glare and his lips set in a snarl. the principal shrinks back.

"what a time to grow a spine," he bites. "you've let her walk all over my boyfriend and i, i'll say whatever the hell i want." principal kane looks a little scared, backs down pretty quickly. but billy is on a roll. "i know how this works. you think steve and i don't know what assholes like you say behind our backs? huh? well, we do. and it's fucking ridiculous. steve has more balls than you-" an accusatory finger gets thrown in principal kane's face - "and more class than anyone in this stupid hick town is capable of. and you know what? i get it, we can't stop you from being ignorant dicks. but what i can do, and what i will do, is step in when someone brings this shit to my little girl. do you get that?" billy's yelling stops and both adults look at him wide-eyed with shock. jeremy looks scared, and niki thinks he should be. with a decisive nod, billy ends the conversation, he scoops niki up after that and she can feel him shaking as she hides in the safety of the crook of his neck. "you wanna sue us? sue us. we'll return the goddamn favor, trust me." and he stomps out to his car and just stands out there for a little while, clinging to nikita until she stops sniffling.

they don't really talk on the way home, and when they both enter the house steve looks a little confused.

"aren't you both supposed to be places?" he asks, but the little tease in his expression fades into worry as he gets a better look at them. billy leans in and kisses niki's forehead chaste and soft.

"go get changed," he mutters, which she knows is actually code for when he doesn't want her listening to their conversation. she obliges and disappears up the stairs she's known her whole life, right up to her room where she gets more comfortable clothes. she hears steve yell, "she what?" at some point, but mostly the pair are quiet. when nikita does tiptoe down the stairs eventually, they're in the kitchen, her papa's face buried against her dad's neck while they whisper to each other. it looks like billy's shaking again, but she can't tell.

steve catches her after a minute and kisses the top of billy's head before calling her over and holding her tight. "i'm sorry you had to deal with that stuff today," he offers, mumbled partially into her her hair. she remembers the things he said about mean people and clutches onto him a little tighter.

that night, aunt max and uncle dustin come by for dinner and take her out for ice cream, and when she comes home steve gives her a bubble bath with extra bubbles. she doesn't love letting him bathe her all the time, but sometimes it's fun, especially when he does extra bubbles. he finishes and dries her off and takes his time with her hair, and before long she's just about ready for bed.

her parents work her through the nightly routine, and they tuck her in to bed together like they do every night one of them isn't working late. but after steve plants his pattern of kisses on her face and leaves, billy stays. he sits on the edge of her bed and looks a little unsure, which is strange because as far as niki knows, he always knows what to do.

"honey," he starts. "you know what they said today isn't true, right?" nikita nods easily.

"yeah. dad's my dad and you're my pops." nikita knows, to some degree, how she came to be. she knows steve didn't have her with billy like that. but never once has she ever had to doubt her family, and no one's dared do it to her face. not before today.

"okay, good." billy nods, reaching a hand out and rubbing her shoulder. "people like misses hartwell and her kid, they don't - they don't get it. and i'm so sorry that you had to hear it, and that you had to hear me yell like that."

"and say all those words dad tells you not to?" she adds quietly. billy breathes out a laugh.

"and hear me say all those words dad tells me not to say," he agrees. it gets a laugh out of nikita, much to billy's relief, and he leans forward to hold her by both her shoulders now. "i'm serious, babycakes. i don't care what people like that say. you're my baby, you hear me? always mine."

"always yours," she echoes, leaning forward and throwing her arms around him in a hug. billy plants as many kisses as he can manage on her head and face, before laying her back down and adjusting her covers.

"i love you, green bean," he tells her, and she murmurs in kind before watching him move to the door. he pauses when he gets there, then turns to her sheepishly.

"hey, about the bad words," he hums. "i won't say anything about it to dad if you won't. deal?" nikita makes a thoughtful face.

"can i have ice cream and a kitten?" he snorts at that.

"you have several kittens, baby. but ice cream is doable."

and when amy hartwell knocks on the door the next afternoon talking about billy's offensive language, he only gets a claim of innocence from his boyfriend and a confused look from his daughter who doesn't recall a single bad word from the meeting. steve looks back at the woman and misses the grin nikita shares with billy as she chomps on a bite of ice cream.

[ouyangzizhensdad]

So one thing I am confused about. I see a lot of takes on how Wwx acted like a gay stereotype in the first few chapters. And this is pointed out as a mark of his homophobia (as in he's homophobic because he thinks that's how a gay person would act). But, from context of the book, it seems to me he's weaponizing what *society* will think a gay man would act like to get out of what he views as a dangerous situation? As in, to me he's deliberately playing up stereotypes... (1/2)

(2/2) to make people uncomfortable and leave him alone. This isn't to say he's not internalized some stuff. Working through those feelings is a major part of the book. But it feels like people seem to be missing the fact that he's using how people are uncomfortable with Mxy as a means to get out of what he sees as a tight situation. Rather like how we get a woman using 'lady problems' as an excuse to make men uncomfortable and leave her alone. Or am I completely of the mark?

Oh anon, dear anon, how did you know I’ve been meaning to write a post about this since I’ve first been introduced to these takes? Have you taken a trip to the dark recesses of my mind lately (or maybe spied on my drafts)? 

Before we get started, I do want to address the fact that the ExR translation, which is generally how international fans first access the novel, uses terms/ways of phrasing things about cut-sleeves that make it seem more connoted than what you can see in the original chinese, thereby colouring how we may perceive WWX’s opinions on cutsleeves (since he is the narrator). If you compare pumpkinpaix’s translation of chapter 2 to that of ExR’s, you may understand what I mean (I personally went and checked the original with my limited chinese skills and pumpkinpaix’s is the most faithful translation imo).

Compare and contrast: 

Pumpkinpaix’s translation: “Thank goodness, this body had not been born with a strange appearance, only strange tastes. Here was a grown man who not only wore a full face of rouge and powder, but wore it in such an ugly fashion!“

ExR scans’ translation: “Fortunately, the body wasn’t born this way—it was only one of the owner’s penchants. He was no-doubt a man, yet he was covered with makeup (not to mention, badly applied makeup). Ugh, how unbearable!“

And another: 

Pumpkinpaix’s translation: “Not only chased, but banished with great shame: for Mo Xuanyu was a cutsleeve who even dared to recklessly molest and harass his peers. With this public scandal, along with the mediocrity of his talent and the insignificance of his cultivation progress, there was no reason to let him stay in the family any longer.

To make matters worse, no one knew what kind of shock he’d suffered, but after he returned, he seemed to have gone completely mad. He had good days and bad—it was as if he had been scared witless. After reading to this point, Wei Wuxian furrowed his brow. Being just a cutsleeve was one thing, but a lunatic as well! No wonder his face was all covered in powder and rouge like an old hanged ghost, and no wonder no one found the bloody array surprising.”

ExR scans’ translation: “On top of that, he was driven back shamefully.Mo XuanYu was homosexual, and had enough nerve to harass the other disciples. The scandal was revealed to the public and, as he had few achievements in terms of cultivation, there were no reasons for him to stay in the clan.Like adding frost to snow, aside from the event itself, when Mo XuanYu returned, he often behaved in a crazy manner, almost as if his life was scared out of him.The story was almost too complex to be put into words. Wei WuXian’s eyebrows twitched.Not only a lunatic, a homosexual lunatic as well. That explained why there were enough rouge and powder on his face to make him look like a hanged ghost, and also why nobody was surprised at the large, bloody array on the ground.”

See how the latter translation makes it seem as if WWX were thinking that being a gay lunatic is worse than being a lunatic, and that him being a ‘gay lunatic’ explains his appearance; whereas, in the former, it appears to be more of a comment about how MXY was perceived by his family as a disgrace, and underlines that the fact he is a “lunatic” explains how ‘usual’ his appearance and the shack’s disarray were to his cousin and his lackeys.

But to address your actual point, I think saying that WWX weaponizes what society think of how a gay would act is still an oversimplification. WWX is in fact weaponizing the very specific nature of MXY’s reputation, which includes him being known to be:

a lunatic

a cutsleeve

a molester/harasser

The fact that people even suggest that this is how WWX views gay people is ludicrous to me because of the context in which it is presented in the novel. WWX is not trying to “pass” as MXY by attempting what he believes to be an authentic performance of being a gay man. WWX, from the get-go, acts in public in ways that are incompatible with what he knows of MXY. When he first gets out of the shack, he acts in ways he knows are contrary to how MXY would have acted. 

“Thinking to recover the face he’d [A-Tong] just lost, he jumped over and, like one would reprimand a dog, waved his hand and scolded, “Shoo, shoo! Go back! What did you come out for!”

Even towards a beggar or a fly, one wouldn’t be more unpleasant. These servants had very likely acted like this towards Mo Xuanyu in the past. After all, he never resisted, so they could be this unscrupulously reckless. Wei Wuxian, with a light kick, knocked A’Tong head over heels, laughing, “Now, who is it you think you’re insulting?”

Finished kicking, he followed the sound of the hubbub, walking towards the east.“ [Chapter 3 ]

Instead, WWX weaponizes MXY’s reputation (the trifecta of lunatic-cutsleeve-harasser) whenever he needs it to either 1) get the information he needs/test a theory, 2) manipulate people into certain actions 3) quickly get out of a sticky situation. Again, it is not meant to be an authentic representation of what he believes to be a gay man: it is a targeted attack with expected results. 

Let’s take for instance the East Hall Scene at Mo Mansion. WWX goes there, and slips into a lunatic persona which, from what we can infer by the Mo Family’s reaction, is not even a close performance of MXY’s “lunacy”. At this point, WWX is trying to test out if publicly humiliating the Mo Family will be enough to fulfill his part of the contract MXY forced upon him. It is the first time he brings up MXY’s being a cutsleeve, and he does so in the process of trying to cause disgrace by implying his cousin might not have had pure intentions towards him. The text makes it clear that he is only doing so to attack the Mo Family’s face, implying unspeakable designs upon MXY by his cousin. 

Unexpectedly, Wei Wuxian spoke again, “Speaking of, he not only shouldn’t have stolen my things, he really shouldn’t have gone to steal them in the middle of the night. Who doesn’t know, this son here likes men! He might not know shame, but I know not to tie my shoes in a melon patch!”

Madam Mo gasped in horror, shouting, “What are you saying in front of your village elders! How  can you have so little face; A’Yuan is your younger cousin!”

When it came to wild displays of atrocious behavior, Wei Wuxian was a master. In the past when he ran wild, he still had to mind appearances for he couldn’t let others accuse him of having no family upbringing, but now since he was a lunatic anyways, what face did he need! He could go straight to making a scene, acting on whatever pleased him. He straightened his neck and stated with righteous confidence, “He clearly knows he’s my younger cousin, and he still didn’t try to avoid arousing suspicion—exactly who has less face?! If you don’t want any, fine, but don’t spoil my innocence! I still want to find a good man!!!” [Chapter 3]

It is also important to remember MXY’s reputation as a molester/harrasser, which WWX leans into at certain points in the novel (for instance when he gets ‘caught’ trying to steal LWJ’s seal to exit the Cloud Recesses and pretends to have been spying on him bathing to try to get kicked out instead). I do not consider that WWX actually believes at face-value the accusations; like LWJ, he is wary of judging without having all the information, having himself suffered groundless accusations (and, surprise surprise, it turns out the accusations were fabricated by JGY! btw, for all the people out there who say MXTX is homophobic because she wrote a gay character who’s a molester...... i am begging you to get some reading comprehension, even store-bought is fine at this point). And if people think MXTX did not mean to emphasize the importance of that reputation, I ask them to please pay attention to what is said before WWZ implies JC is trying to flirt with him/flirts with LWJ later on in the novel (in front, as well, of many of the Juniors). Notice how we are getting the trifecta again?: 

Even after thinking it over multiple times, Jiang Cheng still couldn’t accept the fact [that Zidian had not worked]. He pointed at Wei Wuxian and scowled, “Who on Earth are you?”

Finally, a meddlesome bystander added a word to the conversation. He coughed, “Jiang-zongzhu, you might have not paid attention to these things and thus remained unaware. Mo Xuanyu was part the LanlingJin Sect’s… Ahem, he used to be a foreign disciple of the Jin Sect. But, because his spiritual powers were low and he didn’t work hard in his studies, and also had that… He harassed a peer and was thrown out of the LanlingJin Sect. I’ve also heard that he lost his marbles? In my opinion, he was probably bitter from being unable to cultivate using the correct path and ventured off onto the wrong one.”

Jiang Cheng asked, “That? What do you mean?” 

“That… As in that…” 

Someone couldn’t help but comment, “The cut-sleeve penchant!” 

Jiang Cheng’s eyebrows twitched. His eyes which stared at Wei Wuxian seemed more disgusted than before. [Chapter 9]

The text also makes it clear that WWX is drawing upon more than just “Eww gay!” when he’s weaponizing MXY’s reputation to try to get away from JC and LWJ. He’s also thinking about JC’ inferiority complex and LWJ’s (perceived) serious nature. 

“Then,” Jiang Cheng replied coldly, “why is Lan-er-gongzi going to such great lengths to protect an unimportant person such as him?”

Out of the blue, Wei Wuxian suppressed laughter could be heard.

“Jiang-zongzhu, umm, I’ll feel very troubled if you keep on bothering me like this.”

Jiang Cheng’s eyebrow twitched again. His instincts told him that this person would definitely not say anything pleasant next.

"Thank you for being so enthusiastic, but your thoughts are quite off. Even though I am attracted to men, I don’t like just any type of man, much less follow anyone who waves at me. I’m not interested in men like you.”

Wei Wuxian was purposely trying to disgust him. Jiang Cheng had always hated being defeated when compared with others, no matter how pointless the comparison was. If anyone said that he was not as good as someone else, he’d get angered and not think about anything else until he won against them. As expected, Jiang Cheng’s face darkened.

“Oh, really? Then, may I ask which type you’re interested in?

“Which type?” he replied, “Well, I am very much attracted to people like Hanguang-jun.” 

Lan Wangji could not tolerate this sort of frivolous and foolish joke at all. If he felt disgusted, he would definitely draw a line between them and keep his distance. Disgusting two people at once—this was killing two birds with one stone!” [Chapter 9]

I won’t go through all the examples and moments in the novel (even in forced-voluntary self-isolation it is too much to ask out of me), but I hope my point was illustrated well enough with just these! Thank you again for your ask, it forced me to finally write it all down!

[djmarinizelablog]

A Conversation with the Author of City Comma State, kippielovesyou/ForcedSimile

Had a short interview with the author of City Comma State, @kippielovesyou/ForcedSimile and asked her if I could share our conversation online---she said yes!

Did you know that Hange and Levi in her work was based on Spongebob and Squidward's interactions?

Read the entire transcript below:

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djmarinizela (D): if i may ask, where and how did you learn to write so good? what inspired you to write city comma state?

kippielovesyou (K): i don't mind at all! it's genuinely just years of practice. i've been scribbling stories since kindergarten (i had a long standing multi part series in first grade about all my classmates). i think one thing is certain: having a strong understanding of characters whether you borrow them or they are your own is pretty key.

a lot of points [in Isayama's story] could have been better thought out or tighter. however, we all love his characters. a weak plot (or in the case of city comma state: no plot) can be ignored or forgiven if everyone loves the characters

i'll be honest, i spend a lot of time trying to understand why a character does things or reacts a certain way. and yes, sometimes, that means i act out scenes in my car while driving. it's embarrassing...

there's a lot more to it, but to me that's the most important thing

as far as how city comma state came about: i wanted to do a slow burn romance centered around levihan, but I also wanted to show how all these characters care about and support each other. i knew in the confines of the AoT world, anyone could die at any moment and that didn't work with the softer feelings i wanted people to enjoy. how can you enjoy the friendship between mike and hange if he dies? it's possible, but it upends all the warmth we were enjoying. so i wrote an AU. i wanted to keep levi with a rough background with many walls, and i wanted hange to have her own issues that they can work through together. and i love the idea of them adopting/supporting the 104th kids without the fear of sending them out to war

D: your answer is so profound and helpful, thank you so much! I can honestly say you pretty nailed it when it comes to character development---everyone has a character arc in your fic! [my next question] is about the gender discourse in your story. I know you started City Comma State pretty early in 2014, but even back then, the nonbinary identity wasn't widely known before. How were you able to flesh out the discourse on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and play it out on the dialogues and backstories?

K: it's pretty funny, a lot of the LGBTQIA+ has always been discussed i my family. we've had gay, lesbian, trans, gnc, bi and asexual people in my family for generations, as far back as the 20s (that we're aware of). hange's gender being debated made it a prime opportunity to write such an experience, some of which is borrowed from my own life. when i read older chapters i see certain slips in dialogue where i could have made an effort to be more neutral. we're in such a binary society that sometimes even if you feel in between, it slips in. in fact, i'm sure some people might take issue with the fact that i stuck with she/her for hange. i'm not sure i'd make a different decision today. i like this version of hange the way she is, and i hope hange's nb/gnc status comes across in more than just pronouns. hange's full identity is so much more than that and that is what i wanted to explore. and i think no matter where you fall on the whole LGBTQIA+ spectrum, you are more than just the label you've chosen. yes, in this story levi is bi/pan. but i don't think he ever says that explicitly, and he avoids labels. it seems fussy to him, which feels levi. discourse would not be his thing. i think even having a debate about whether or not he was bi or pan wouldn't be something he would want to engage in, he just wants to do what he wants. instead it's heavily implied. i think we forget since so many of us experience this discourse online and want to label things that there are people who don't want to involve themselves in it. it goes back to how would this character act. for instance, based on how levi is in canon, i can see many ways to interpret his sexuality. there's cues for a lot of different takes. but levi doesn't seem like the type that would need a definitive label in order to be happy. there's many ways to interpret hange's gender (and i've written several takes, some where they're more insistent on their pronouns), but i think hange's more excited to explore life than worry too much about much about how they're addressed or how someone talks about them. maybe another character might be more caught up in labels but hange and levi not so much

D: No, don't be sorry, I am more than thankful for your answer. I really appreciate it! I don't get to have these kinds of conversations with other writers, so I am grateful for your insights.

K: a really funny anecdote for you: i loosely based the idea of my levihan off of spongebob and squidward. you know, since they start out as neighbors and hange is more invasive than levi is used to

D: that's.... a stretch. but thanks for the tidbit! was the annual star wars contest also something that you do in your family? that part as well as all the geeky references won me over tbh!

K: it was an extremely loose inspiration! but hange mowing her lawn in the middle of the night so levi wouldn't be mad at her is on par with a spongebob move. and um...my family, while they can be a little nerdy, is not nerdy enough to do the star wars tournament! i made that up entirely

i just imagined hange having eccentric family, so they have very unusual traditions that none of the children question

i'll be the first to say a lot of city comma state is unrealistic and a little bit of a domestic fantasy. there's a lot of problems with money, employment and such that hange and levi SHOULD have but that's a little too real and not what i want to be the focus of this story. like hange landing a job that gives her a day off and she doesn't suffer a severe pay cut as a result? unrealistic. but i have other things i want to tackle. plus, in canon we have humans that turn into giants and 3D maneuver gear which would probably kill its user in real life. i think making certain parts of this fanfic a little idealistic is okay

D: are there other works that influence your writing? or authors that inspire you to write?

K: There's too many influences to count. reading is so important and even things that are bad are helpful. i actually was trying to read a YA series that seemed really cool and i had to stop reading because so many things were so annoying (I won't reveal which, since i think it has a small but dedicated fandom and i don't want to rain on their parade, it is purely a taste thing to some degree). instead of being upset and thinking that I wasted my time, i took note of what made me stop reading (that is a long list of things i didn't like so i won't bother to outline each one). even if it's something as small as a fanfiction that you had to click out of, ask yourself why you stopped. Especially with fanfiction: you already like these characters, what you're looking for is usually pretty specific (a pairing, an au, a specific scenario, etc). why, when this author has ticked all your superficial boxes, did you stop reading? and when you love something as yourself why. Ask yourself why you love the source material even! do you really love the plotlines and the world or do you love the characters? Is the dialogue strong? something to also pay attention to: people in general. how do they speak, gestures, facial expressions. really listen to how people talk (Youtube podcasts are really good for this!).

i think people would be surprised, a lot of what i really like to read is very all over. from surrealist novels, to classic literature, to science fiction aimed at children (i'm finally reading animorphs after almost 20 years!). and what i write for original fiction doesn't reflect what i'm probably best known for.

D: thanks for this, Kippie! looking forward to reading more of your works!

K: i'm still amazed at the response! writing is so solitary to me and i don't really look at my numbers. it never occurred to me that people would be discussing my fic!

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If you haven't read Kippie's Levihan fic yet, here's the link to get started: City Comma State