#queer coding is VALID

[mbqnoyolo]

Very Excited About This

✨️intercontextuality✨️ Alphabet Mafia Strikes Again

"QUEER SUBTEXT IS BETTER THAN NO TEXT ESPECIALLY BACK THEN" [checks notes]

**ah, yes 2002**

DEAN [softly, flirtatiously]: "Whatcha doing there, Roy?"

[sbd-laytall]

"Okay, Dean and Cas are clearly queer, while Sam is obviously the straight ally rooting for them."

I'm sorry, but you think that Sam "queer-coded, thinks he's unpure because of who he is and because angels consider him an abomination, actively joked about shipping himself with Cas, ran away from home as a kid because he felt like he was different from his family and wanted different things, separated from his family to go to college after his father told him to never come back, used to have an 'imaginary friend' who wore rainbows on his clothing and encouraged Sam to find his own happiness, didn't deny anything when Dean called him gay, wore the purple dog shirt, has ridiculously good maintained hair, wears flannels all the time" Winchester is cishet?

Like, even if you claim that this is me projecting my bisexuality on Sam, Jared Padalecki literally said, "Everybody [Sam] wants a relationship with, guy or girl, ends up dying."

[chororine]

i guess we doin mandy/sally now

[nightmarefandom]

*grabs microphone*

TRANS PEOPLE ARE VALID!!! CODED TRANS CHARACTERS ARE VALID!!! CRY ABOUT IT!!

[sapphicsparkles]

I am taking the word "abuse" away from the internet until y'all learn what it actually means

[oldbutchdanielcraig]

btw people who say romangerri is any form of yaoi/yuri/etc. you are my best friend forever and i would award you with a nobel prize if i could

[noirineverysense]

Not to be dramatic, but i think this is the worst sentence i've ever read.

[nohara-rin-dot-mp3]

deciphering naruto gender and sexuality is like. what did kishimoto intend. what underlying biases influenced his writing. how are they applied differently to characters of different gender and allegiances. and many beautiful realizations rise to the top along the way and you look back at the road behind you and understand that you know so much more about almost every character, and that you've learned so much on your journey. and then you look at the question you set out to answer in the beginning (why is tenten allowed to be aro and gnc) and realize that you STILL DON'T FUCKING KNOW!!!!!!

[mofsblog]

Me when I wanna reblog controversial ship art but I don't want to make anyone I follow uncomfortable and I'll probably tag it correctly but I also don't want people to assume I 100% always ship the characters. AND I DONT?? WANT PEOPLE TO THINK??? I THINK INCEST IS MAGICALLY SUDDENLY COOL?? I JUST?? DON'T PERSINALLH INTERPRET THEM AS LIKE. SIBLINGS LIKE MOST OF THE FANDOM but I also do engage with fandom stuff that does portray them siblings BUT? THATS??? LIKE?? COMPLETELY SEPARATE?? FROM ME SHIPPING THEM?? BECAUSE??? I HAVE 2 SEPARATE INTERPRETATIONS OF THEM??? THAT DONT OVERLAP?? I JUST?? SOMETIMES FEEL LIKE?? MORE INCLINED TO ONE THAN THE OTHER???? but also what if I'm a bad person forever

[petercaths]

WICKED REVIEW

Not gonna spoil anything, but for the people who have queer readings of Wicked (and really, what other reading is there?) and, like me, were worried on how the film would approach that , I just wanna assure you:

1. Ariana 100000% played Galinda like a lesbian with comphet. Even I — someone who never doubted her capability for this role, but was worried about how the lesbian interpretation I have of her character would translate — was surprised at how very clearly queer-coded her she was. So much to the point where I’d argue popular is the gayest song on here. It had to be a conscious acting choice.

2. Which means… for those who were worried that they’d try to erase/squander any queer readings of Wicked, they absolutely did not. Gelphie is as alive and canon as ever. Like they definitely played into the “love story between two girls…” aspect of this, nothing here was sacrificed, if anything they added some more stuff to validate our points.

GELPHIE NATION WOOOONNNN.

[wisteria-lodge]

What are your thoughts on those who believe hp fans (fan writers, artists, and appreciators alike) should leave the fandom sphere in favor of not giving JKR any “support” even if one does not share her views, as opposed to consuming fan content (or even the original media) while understanding the separation between art from artist (even if that can’t truly be 100% done, as HP is JKR, though that is another discussion entirely)?

I can only answer for myself, but I guess I would say - I'm a teacher, IRL. And my students, they know about Harry Potter, they know the property, they grew up with the movies, they read Harry Potter fanfiction, and... they talk to me about it. I think it's *good* that they talk to me about it. They ask questions about JKR, about the problematic elements in the books, trans issues, queer villains. Whatever is bothering them, whatever they otherwise feel dumb about asking.

Just the other day I had a very sweet conversation with a trans student who had realized he was gay because Harry and Draco in the books were so "real" and "me coded" (and then he realized people shipped them and was like OH.) Basically, he just needed to be told that his experience was still okay and valid even though JKR is such a terrible transphobe. I had another one ask me "why are all queer people Wolfstar?" (what she meant was, why do gay couples in media tend have a masc one + a femme one. But for her, patient zero is Wolfstar, and that's how she phrased the question.)

On this blog, I'm in this position where I clearly know like, a lot about Harry Potter, I clearly authentically love it (and the fan culture around it...) but am very VERY critical of both JKR as a person, and specific choices she made while writing the books. That's a combination that's definitely got me some hate mail, but also thank-you letters, and extremely earnest questions. And, if I never touched HP meta or fandom, I wouldn't get to occupy that space.

I completely, completely understand people who never want to read the words "Harry Potter" ever again. That was me, for years. I only started writing about Harry Potter on this blog last July, but so far it's been very a interesting, rewarding, cathartic experience. I've also had a great time writing fic, and using that as a means to examine my emotions and issues around this property, and with JKR herself. I got such a kick out of matching JKR's writing style as perfectly as I possibly could, and then writing Book 4 babygay Drarry. Or making Tonks just like, super genderqueer, trans, all of the above. Or flipping the framing to write a 100% canon compliant morally grey Dumbledore, and a sympathetic Lucius Malfoy. People seem to really like the fics too, so that's a nice bonus. I've gotten a lot from fanfiction myself in the past, I think it's a fascinating and useful form of art. So, I like getting getting to continue the cycle.

[olderthannetfic]

I was reading a fic and genuinely enjoying myself up until the author decided to make a huge deal, in their AN, about how their protagonist is bi. As in ACTUALLY bi, not that stupid "straight with one exception" trash homophobic fujoshits write. I'm a cis man. I am heterosexual with exactly one exception. I don't know why. I went through years telling myself I was just confused. I heard from my queer friends at the time that only being interested in one other man wasn't a thing, that it was actually me being confused in the other direction, hiding all my crushes and desires from myself.

My family was convinced I was straight. My friends were convinced I was bi for a lot of men, I just wasn't admitting it. My now husband was the only one who told me it was fine. He's gay and he had a crush on one woman, once. Exceptions happen.

So at the risk of siding with the dreaded (presumed cis, presumed het, presumed white) enemy known as women, I... actually like the whole "if it's you, it's okay" thing. I don't assume an evil fetishizer who hates queers is writing it. It never reads that way. It reads as a story, just like any other story. A way to be queer just like any other valid option. Queerness is a spectrum. Not everyone is bi in the same way or gay or lesbian or anything else. The Kinsey Scale exists for a reason.

I spent five years in and out of therapy and church trying to fix myself. Being bi in any way was too much for my family. It was "get rid of the gay or get out" territory of panic. I could have a family or I could have my feelings for him. Choosing him involved giving up everyone I had grown up with. It involved years further of "so you can admit now that you had other male crushes, right?" no matter how many times I said no until I had to cut some queer friends out of my life, too.

And I'm not "ACTUALLY bi", apparently. I'm a trashy homophobic stereotype fujoshi came up with. I'm not actually bi. Real bi men have an equal number of women and men they're into. Bi is code for 50/50 or else you're, you know. Basically fictional. Definitely doing it wrong.

Upon some digging, I found out the writer is a lesbian woman. You would think with all the shit lesbians get she'd know better. I've seen people try to tell lesbians they aren't lesbians because "oh you dated a guy once" or "uh, you had sex with a man, you can't be" and all kind of shit that makes no sense whatsoever. So for her to turn around and go, "there is a single correct way to be a bi man" is just insane. Ma'am. Ma'am. You should know that's not how queerness works! You're queer!

This has annoyed me so much that for the first time in nine years I have pulled up a Microsoft Word document and I am writing fanfic. I am going to write so much It's Okay If It's You, one-exception-only queer fanfic.

Because it's fine to be queer even if it's this way, actually. It's fine to be queer, period! There are not rigid rules to it, that's one of the biggest joys of it!

I feel so old and tired and I'm only 40. Jesus Christ. "ACTUALLY bi". Fuck. The world is broken.

--

[bakuhatsufallinlove]

"Queer-coding" is only useful for a narrow range of media and it'd be great if we could stop using it for literally everything

Here's my problem with it:

The term originated to discuss negative media depictions of cultural stereotypes for LGBTQ people in the United States. It is inherently tied to the conditions of media censorship at play in the USA during the 1900s, with the Hays Code restricting depictions of anything it deemed "immoral."

Now, for whatever reason, people are using it to refer to literally anything they see as "kind of gay."

The term begins with the premise that making the audience see the character as queer is the creator's explicit intention. The creator knows the stereotype, you know the stereotype, so they are using the stereotype to convey to you something they can't say outright.

However, you can see how this goes awry, right?

The second we cross language, cultural, or even generational lines, this gets messy.

What traits are deemed queer? What behaviors or characteristics are seen as gay? The reality is this is a huge spectrum, and every culture has a different relationship with queerness in its history. For that matter, every nation has its own unique issues with censorship. A viewer from the USA may interpret a Japanese character as exhibiting stereotypically gay characteristics, but does that mean the Japanese creator intended it to be taken that way?

But then, if we try to account for what stereotypes Japanese media might use for queer characters to ascertain what the Japanese creator might have intended, we arrive at the same dead-end: the implication that queerness is only really portrayed via (usually negative) stereotypes.

This suggests that if media does not contain enough "clues" to imply a character is queer to the broadest possible audience, a queer reading of their story is out of the question. "Queer-coding" is treated as a metric of validity, a way to "prove" queer interpretations are allowable, yet it is based in stereotypes, censorship, and presumption of authorial intent.

The way queer-coding is continually brought into discussions about art essentially creates an ultimatum: media needs to be "explicit" by using direct (usually English language) terminology, or characters need to engage in things like kissing, declaring one's love, sexual activity, etc., yet even those are dismissed at times.

This creates a dynamic where art which is intentionally subtle or multifaceted may be seen as exhibiting cowardice rather than artistic complexity. It implies that if something is not "confirmed queer," queer themes cannot be read into it, queer subtext cannot be interpreted from it, and queer people are not allowed to identify with it.

This limits art. This builds walls that diminish human connection; it creates a situation where queer people are discouraged from seeing themselves in media not explicitly designated for them. Because, obviously, queer people are a completely different species from "normal people," right? Their feelings and experiences are so alien and distinct, there's no overlap anyone else could sympathize with.

You don't need permission to see queerness in art. You don't have anything to prove. Queer interpretations are just as valid as any other, and anyone who tells you different is selling something.

As I spoke about in this post, authorial intent is not more important than audience perception, and trying to infer the creator's intentions is a fool's errand. Especially in a situation where censorship is supposedly at play, any public statement from a creator could be reasonably disregarded as dishonest, which leaves us alone with ourselves and the work.

Which, by the way, is the only real way anyone experiences art. It's not you and the creator, it's you and the work. When people try to infer authorial intent, they are not discerning real, objective truth. They are sorting available information through a filter of what they consider believable before arriving at a subjective conclusion, which they then project onto a mental image of the creator.

In literary analysis, we select a "lens" through which to view art. This means that we decide to accept certain ideas as given fact and explore what the works says once we look at it that way. For example, we could accept as fact the idea that a number of the core cast are queer in some way. It posits the question: once we dismiss heterosexuality and cisgender identity as the only options, what do we see?

This is an intellectual concept, but the reality is that everybody naturally applies their own lens to art when they view it. This lens is not nearly so rigid or clearly defined, but it is a lens nonetheless, defined by their experiences, values, and individual personality.

I would love for people to stop using the phrase "queer-coding" quite so freely. It centers a need for validation and hinges that on "what the creator intended."

If you want some ideas for different language about this, consider these:

A theme might be queer by exploring broad topics queer people often struggle with, such as secrecy, shame, or self-acceptance.

The subtext of something might be queer in that one could read a double-meaning or deeper implication to the narrative device or scenario.

A work might contain allegory, symbolism, imagery or parallels that could be interpreted with queerness.

I don't think it's interesting to try to "win" by convincing you I personally know what the creator intended. That leaves the art static, unchanging, and lifeless. I would much rather tell you how I personally see the art and why, because that dynamic allows all of us examine the work more deeply.

In the end, it is not an author's edict in some external statement that gives art meaning. It is the audience. Our feelings are what give art meaning, and connecting with other people about what it all means to us is what keeps art alive.

[heliza24]

I want to talk a little bit about Daniel in the Interview with the Vampire show, because the new trailer material has me stuck thinking about him, and also I’ve never written about how meaningful he is as disabled character to me before.

I don’t see many people thinking about show!Daniel in these terms, but he’s a canon disabled character. And I think the way he is written is just SO good. The acerbic wit, his relationship to doctors and his medication, his rueful acceptance of the way his disability has changed him. It is all so correct!! It’s really incredibly rare to have not only a disabled character written this well but specifically a chronically ill character written this well. His illness is always present; it doesn’t get forgotten about by the story. It gives Daniel insight into the vampires (more on this in a min), but it also gives Louis and Armand leverage over him. When Louis triggers his Parkinson’s symptoms? Deeply not ok. But that’s what made it such a great scene, and really made Louis feel dangerous and threateningin that moment. Armand and Louis arranging Daniel’s meds is a sign of great care and also great power over Daniel. It’s the perfect way to communicate the complicated power dynamic in their relationship.

I also just fucking love that this show takes place in 2022 and doesn’t erase the pandemic. Covid is a very present concern for Daniel and I cannot describe how validating that is for me as someone who is clinically vulnerable to Covid and who has had to really limit my life and take a lot of precautions because everyone else has decided to stop caring whether they pass on Covid or not. The fact that Daniel gets on a plane to Dubai is a BIG DEAL. He’s risking his life to talk to Louis and Armand before he’s even in the room with them. He really wants to be there. I have to make a similar calculation every time I travel, and trust me, getting on that plane knowing getting sick could spiral you into even worse health or kill you is really hard.

I think making Daniel disabled and including the pandemic is kind of a genius level decision on a thematic level. Of course Daniel is now facing down his mortality, which gives him a whole new lens on the vampires and the fact that he once asked them to turn him. And the pandemic further highlights his fragility, and is also possibly being used as a cover for drama that’s happening in the vampire world. But I think it also really sets Daniel up as a foil to Louis.

There’s a lot of analysis of the vampire chronicles that reads vampirism as a metaphor for queerness. But I would actually propose that it’s a much neater parallel for disability and illness in a lot of ways. So many of Louis’s initial experiences after being turned resonated with me, as someone who became chronically ill in my 20s. My appetite and relationship to food completely changed, much like Louis. My relationship with the outdoors and the sun changed, because of dysautonomia and allergy reasons. I was very mad, and very depressed, and I too have missed out on birthday parties and big life events like Louis did because I was too sick to go. Hell, you can even say that the way that Louis is treated as evil by his family, that the way vampires literally can’t be a part of society during the day, is reminiscent of ableist exclusion and ugly laws. (Ugly laws were laws that forbid disabled people, especially those with visible differences, from being out in public, and they were on the books in many American municipalities until the 1970s.) You can look at Lestat being an out and proud vampire in the first few episodes on the season and imploring Louis to leave his shame behind as a queer thing, but you can also view it as a disabled thing. Disabled people are portrayed as monstrous so often (and in a way that has gone relatively unexamined compared to say, the queer coded villain trope) that sometimes it’s just easier to embrace that label: I’m the monstrous Crip, but at least I’m not ashamed of or disgusted by who I am anymore.

I do think the real strength of this adaptation is that while you can find parallels between queerness or disability or other forms of marginalization with vampirism, ultimately it’s not a one-to-one parallel. It speaks to the real world but ultimately it is a gothic horror story about supernatural monsters. So I don’t mean to say that vampirism directly equals disability, because it does not. But I do think that making Daniel disabled was an intentional choice to help draw out some of those parallels, and I think the text is richer for it.

So Louis and Daniel have had these kind of parallel experiences of uncontrollable and difficult things happening to their bodies. It sets them up perfectly as foils, and even, I would argue, as the A plot and B Plot protagonists. This is one of my favorite ways of kind of examining the structure of a TV show (or maybe it’s that most of my favorite shows seem to be structured this way?). When TV was all episodic, it would be common to refer to the A plot (mystery of the week), B plot (interpersonal drama happening as the mystery gets solved) and C plot (any overarching plot tying the season together) in an episode. Now that stuff is serialized, there’s often a main protagonist, who has the main dramatic question and the most agency, and then there is often a secondary B plot that explores similar themes and mirrors the A plot, or presents a second main character who is the ldifferent side of the same coin” to the main protagonist. (My favorite example of this is Flint and Max in Black Sails, and I’ve also made the argument that Wilhelm and Sara fit this pattern in Young Royals.) In IwtV, Louis is obviously the main protagonist of the show, especially in the A Plot, which is the stuff taking place in New Orleans/Paris. But I would argue that Daniel is the protagonist of the B Plot set in Dubai. At the very least they’re intentionally set up as mirrors of each other:

They are both unreliable narrators, who are struggling with the way memory contorts (through memory erasure, illness, deliberate obfuscations, and just the passage of time). The most recent teaser trailer, where we hear Louis saying “I don’t remember that”, with panic in his voice, further underlined this similarity between Louis and Daniel to me. I don’t know if it means that Louis has also had his memory tampered with, as I’m assuming Daniel has, but I do think it means that Louis is going to be struggling with feeling out of control of his own narrative more in season 2, a thing that was already starting for Daniel in season 1.

They are also both locked into power struggles with people more powerful than they are. The fact that Louis is under Lestat in the flashbacks and above Daniel in the Dubai scenes in terms of power/status makes it all the more interesting. And, if we want to go ahead and assume that the Devils Minion’s years have happened in the past by the time we get to Dubai— it’s possible that both Daniel and Louis are united in being the less powerful partner in their own respective fucked up gothic romances.

They’re also both the audience’s entry point into their respective stories. Louis’s narration guides us into the world of vampires. Daniel’s questioning satisfies our human curiosity in Dubai.

I think one of the things that makes the show so special is the way that these two protagonists interact. In a lot of shows the a plot and the b plot stay pretty separate. I love talking about Black Sails for this because I think it’s such a good example; Flint and Max never exchange dialogue the entire show, even though they’re so clearly affecting each other the whole time. But the way that Louis and Daniel clash in Dubai is so exciting. We see them both wrestling for control of the narrative. It’s thrilling to watch and it just hammers home the theme of how complicated and changeable stories can be.

I am SO excited to see how the Dubai scenes play out in season 2 because of it. I really can’t wait. I’m really hoping we’ll see Daniel and Louis’s relationship evolve in surprising ways, and I’m holding my breath that we’ll get a lot of Armandaniel material to work with. (I have a whole other post drafted that’s much less smart than this one and is just me waxing poetic about Devil Minion’s theories which I may post at some point. You have been warned.)

I do have two wishes for Daniel in the new season, and they’re 1: that he gets to have romance/sex, because disabled (and older!) characters are so often seen as unworthy of being desired, and I would like to see that challenged and 2: that he continues to refuse to be turned/is not offered a vampiric cure for Parkinson’s. The magic cure for a disability or chronic illness is probably my least favorite disability trope, because it serves to erase disabled characters and representation from the narrative, and I want to see my experiences continue to be reflected in Daniel’s. That means that whatever ending Daniel’s story has will probably have at least a bit of tragedy baked into it, but I’m ok with that.

[dotthings]

Okay yeah I am really really tired of this. So I'm just going to say outright that what spn did with 15.18, with Cas's confession, that was a whole lot of people at spn showing their love and support. Writers, Jensen and Misha, the director, and anyone else who cared--which was a good number of people who worked at spn. It was the show full on validating fan lens and the deliberate crafted work of writers that had to queer code Destiel for years due to network censorship.

Crew members were in tears watching that Dean and Cas scene get filmed.

No, Cas's love for Dean wasn't last minute added.

No, it didn't come out of nowhere.

It was a 12 season arc payoff.

It was many seasons, who knows how many years, of writers weaving it into the text.

Who even knows when the deliberation to try to push it into text decision was made. I usually think Carver era, but then Ben Edlund said some things and...who knows.

No, spn was not gaslighting and mocking Destiel shippers.

The original plan for the finale at the time 15.18 was filmed had Cas be there for the ending. They made 15.18 in good faith believing they'd be able to follow through on Destiel, as much as they could get away with it.

15.18 was filmed in March 2020 and the pandemic production shutdown hit a few days into filming 15.19. Production shutdown gave some higher ups too much time to think, and too much of an opening and an excuse to strip back 15.20.

Without the network support the most spn could do on Destiel anway was thread the needle to get as much into the text as they could, even if they couldn't make it open. But they tried to make it anyway within those parameters. They deserve credit for that and they didn't know how 15.20 was going to be stripped back when they filmed 15.18.

So tired of seeing malice assigned to the effort of the creatives who did it. Who told that story within a restrictive system.

Cas's confession wasn't even queer coded. That was the moment it switched to loud and blatant. Misha even said he was astonished they were allowed to film it at all. Lack of network support and PR erasure set in afterwards.

No, it wasn't fanservice. It was integral to the plot!!!! The major giant stakes save the world endgame plot!!!!!!!!!!!!

15.18 was respectful.

15.18 was showing the love!!!!

[microclown]

I think, not everyone, but a lot of the people who are so hung up on the kiss aren’t thinking about it within the context of the narrative.

I probably won’t articulate this well, but the whole plot of season 2 felt like a direct, meta-y response to us, the fans, and our desire see Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship progress to something more.

Neil had established in the first season, they are already in love, so what is it really then that we want see? What is it that’s missing? That leaves us feeling unsatisfied?

What does love mean to you? What would it mean to Aziraphale and Crowley? What does a loving relationship look like, and how does one get there?

The methods Crowley and Aziraphale use to get Maggie and Nina together are common romance tropes in fiction. Crowley says “one fabulous kiss and we’re good!”

But rainstorms and dancing didn’t make Maggie and Nina fall in love. They were going to get there on their own, eventually, after a lot of open communication and working on their own personal growth.

And “one fabulous kiss” won’t give us a happy ending. It won’t give us what we’re missing from Aziraphale’s and Crowley’s relationship. We as fans like to think that’s all we want, but is it really? Because the love is there! What we’re truly missing has more to do with internal growth and healing, communication, and working towards a true understanding of each other.

And I think that’s what we’ll get in season 3! I don’t know if we’ll get another kiss although I would love to see one but we will get a satisfactory resolution between two beings who are deeply in love.

As a side note, I don’t want to down play how fucking important it was to have them kiss on screen. As someone who has grown up watching queer coded relationships on screen and is exhausted from having everyone involved queerbait, or even outright ridicule their fans for seeing it that way, it is so refreshing to have a very visual, undeniable, romantic gesture. Because I know it really does take a kiss for some people *cough* my parents *cough* to see a relationship as anything but platonic. I’m so glad we got that undeniable validation before what I can only expect is going to be an epic third chapter!