#queer portrayal

[seven-oomen]

The Last of Us episode 3 was a MASSIVE deviation from its videogame equivalent, but fuck me I'm here for it!!!!

Bill & Frank, their love, I am so here for it how they portrayed it in the show. It wasn't always pretty but it was real and these two middle aged men found each other in the unlikeliest of circumstances and places and their love was real, and meaningful, and beautiful in its own way.

ALL THE FUCKING PROPS TO NICK OFFERMAN AND MURRAY BARTLETT FOR THEIR PORTRAYALS!!!!!!!!

Holy fuck I cried.

It's everything this 31 year old queer hoped for and more!

We NEED MORE OF THIS, HOLLYWOOD TAKE FUCKING NOTES!

[allthefujoshiunite]

Have you watched Buddy Daddies? If you have do you like it?

Random ask....Do you think anime like Free, Sk8, Jeweler Richard and Yuri on Ice are queerbaiting or at least have semi canon couples? I mean I love those anime series and my fav otps are from those series, but what do you think?

P.s Love your latest meta, it really made my day and when I read them, I also found answers to my internal questions my self...Thanks for sharing them...( I'm not the anon who asked that)...

💐🌷🥰🤩

Hello! Today's great coincidence that made me chuckle into my morning tea was getting asked about my opinion on queerbaiting by two different people, 1-hour apart 🤣 Thanks a lot, both of you! I'll put my two cents down about queerbaiting discourse in anime and I know it's silly to mention but just to be sure, these are all opinions, and my opinions only. 

Before I start rambling about gays, no I haven't seen Buddy Daddies yet. I've been very excited about it ever since I've seen the PV but as you may know, I decided to review every first episode of the Winter 2023 season so I'm pretty much swamped... I'm saving Buddy Daddies to savor it! If you wait a bit, you'll be reading my first impressions of it soon. 

So. Okay. Queerbait. First of all, definitions because for the love of BL gods, people have been throwing words around without knowing what they mean. 

According to this interesting book that's been sitting on my TBR pile, Queerbating and Fandom: Teasing Fans Through Homoerotic Possibilities, the definition of queerbaiting is as follows: 

Queerbaiting describes an industry tactic where “those officially associated with a media text court viewers interested in LGBT narratives... without the text ever definitely confirming the nonheterosexuality of the relevant characters.” For this reason, the term is seen as exploitative, and when fans use it to describe a series, its marketing, or the actions of producers, they are engaging in a “form of queer activism.”

There are other terms coined by the scholars such as "covert courting" (i.e. targeting gay consumers using subtle elements not intended to be picked up by heterosexual audiences) etc. but in my opinion, these terms are built upon the presupposition that there is a queer audience to bait into consuming your media. And I'm not sure whether there's a group of audience that is acknowledged as queer in the minds of producers and/or creators in Japan. 

What they want to tap into according to yours truly, however, is FujoMoney. No, it's not a new currency, although now I kind of wish it was. There's an interesting video on it that delves deeper into the topic but in short, they are after the buying and creating potential of shippers. Creating fan content is, in itself, a grey area legally but it's overlooked because the franchise profits from it immensely. A similar practice, if you're or have been into K-pop at some point, is the fansites. Normally, they shouldn't be allowed to make merchandise off of the artists and gain profit from it. However, they attend concerts out of their own pockets, take these photographs using their own cameras, and contribute greatly to the group or the individual artist's popularity. Tl;dr: it's free real estate for the companies. 

So I guess the term we're looking for is fujobait, rather than queerbait. What the higher-ups want to attract are shippers who are buyers and/or fancreators. Look at any sports anime and you'll see. There have been multiple times when I got into a series because I've seen a shippy fanart or a video edit of a character. And to be honest, if I was more fortunate economically, they'd be making that kind of monetary profit through merch off of me as well. xD

While queerbait and fujobait might seem like they mean the same thing, they eventually are not because the former capitalizes on real-life stigmatized identity while the latter relies on a consumer's practice of queering the content at hand. I'm personally not as interested in putting the label of "right" or "wrong" on these terms, so I'll leave it at this for now. 

Moving on to the series you mentioned, they can't all be put into the same box, but can be divided into two groups where Free and Sk8 rely more on fanservice and the intricacies of the relationships are left to the shippers' imaginations while Jeweler Richard and Yuuri!!! on ICE are entirely different. Especially, Yuuri!!! on ICE because there's no room left for discussion or different readings that Yuuri and Victor are a couple. They literally get married, and the only reason some people still to this day question whether they are canon or not is because of eurocentrism/racism. I come across reels of real-life women taking a ring out and putting it on the ring finger of another woman with people cheering in the background and no one is asking to see their marriage registration in the comments. On the contrary, they congratulate them! The exact same scene is there in animated form, so why do we even question its validity? 

In the case of Jeweler Richard, sadly light novels aren't my thing. I have only seen the anime and have read the first volume of the manga. However, I've read an extensive blog post on the light novels comparing them to the anime adaptation. From the blog post, their relationship is evident even though to an anime-only it might come off as implied. I personally didn't think it was implied even in the anime, but if anyone else did, we have our answers in the source material. 

All of this then begs the question: does having things spelled out on screen matter? If yes, to what extent it matters? I mentioned in the previous meta post that the consumers of Asian media are already lucky when it comes to the existence and variety of such content. I'm personally someone who's in favor of having media to consume at hand instead of waiting for the Perfect Representation. I don't even want representation, because what is representation anyway for a non-monolithic community with a deep, rich history? I want portrayal, and while having things openly said is cathartic and something I want to have, I won't discredit the works I enjoy and find meaning in just for the sake of it. Especially content that come from countries with heavy censorship or a high possibility of GP backlash.

Plus, while I'm not in any Chinese BL or BL-adjacent work fandoms, I watched dramas here or there and have a lot of mutuals who are actively in the fandoms of certain series, so through osmosis, I learn a couple of things as well. I've seen people talking about the cultural significance of certain choices in these works that someone who's not well-versed in the codes of the Chinese culture won't be able to pick up, i.e. characters wearing red can be an insinuation on marriage because red is a color worn in weddings. Or there's no way I would pick up that Chinese BL dramas are dubbed over just so they can pass censorship. Would it be better if China were to be supportive of LGBTQA+? 100%. Should people there push for the content they'd like to see or portrayals that they see themselves in? Without a doubt. Should it mean that they should get nothing until they get exactly what they want? A hard no. There must be still works that portray such relationships even if they are implied because I see this attempt as getting a foot in the door. 

To sum everything up: what I want is to enjoy what I read/watch and share it with others while trying to keep a critical eye on as much as I can. My background is in STEM and I'm not formally educated in humanities anyway. What I try to do is to read and discuss questions I have in mind, and writing helps me order and expand my thoughts. I find value in trying to keep an open mind instead of gatekeeping and micro-analyzing every little thing, or at least, I try not to let them take the fun out of it. To quote the great Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts:

I am not interested in hermeneutics, or erotics, or metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking.

Easily one of the best books I've read in 2022. Pure brilliance.

[gunstreet]

sorry I'm not a photoshop master but would someone mind hanging this up in the SNW writers' room because I think we have all had enough

[cuties-in-codices]

mary & elizabeth

from a cycle of miniatures, possibly originally preceding a psalter, muri (?), first half of the 12th c.

source: Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 83, fol. 2r

[ratsdontmurder]

people really need to learn the difference between queerbait and complex queer media

[thesiltverses]

Hello! I found the silt verses about three weeks ago and have listened to it several times since. I have a few things to say.

I absolutely adore that episode about the national grid workers. I think it’s my favorite episode of any podcast I’ve ever listened to. My favorite part of that first episode Paige is in is how she justifies not standing up for Vaughn, that cognitive dissonance that you wrote so well. This episode gives me what I wanted from that episode, the workers all banding together to stop the wasteful sacrifice of one of them. The actor who played the foreman did an incredible job as well. I think that having him discuss which of his workers he would sacrifice was such a significant moment, despite how brief it is. It cuts right to the big question that I took away from the podcast which is, “How much is someone willing to sacrifice in order to maintain their comfort?” And the utter disrespect of Glodditch (apologies for the spelling) refusing to cancel even the radio but asking grid workers to kill themselves for 200kw/h! Top tier episode.

I grew up in the south and went to college in Appalachia. I saw the disparity in technology and “advancement” if that makes sense that poverty brings, and the way you set up the world invokes that feeling in me again. You are an amazing world builder and storyteller.

I really enjoyed the cameos - I’m a big fan of malevolent/devisor, Old gods of Appalachia, and all of Jonny sims work, so hearing familiar voices was an absolute delight. Harlan Guthrie as an acolyte of the snuff gods might have been a bit too on the nose with some of the things that man writes, though… /pos

I’m transmasculine, and something that I really appreciate is how you manage to make a trans man do some objectively awful things, but still manage to make him a complex, full character that I was rooting for very frequently. Brother Faulkner is so, so important to me as a character. Paula Vogel has a play called “Indecent,” which is about the true story of a troupe of I believe German Jewish actors between the years of 1910ish and 1940s putting on a show called “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch, also a Jewish man. “God of Vengeance” has queer themes and received a lot of criticism from the Jewish community for showing Jewish folks in a “bad” light at a time when there was already so much hatred for Jewish people. Brother Faulkner being as complex and, in my opinion, malicious and cutthroat as he is at a time when trans people face so much bigotry, especially legislatively in the United States, brings this conversation about “God of Vengeance” up again for me. I also love how normalized non-binary people are in this world, without question. “Sibling this or that,” the hunter, adjudicator Shrew - big thanks from me for all of this.

All of this to say, I love this podcast. Can you talk more about the rhetorical gods? Is Babble one? What makes them one if they are, or why aren’t they? I’m fascinated by them. Can you talk more about the propaganda gods too?

Thank you so much for the thoughtful and kind words!

I'll check out Indecent, it sounds really interesting and I'm very glad to hear Faulkner works for you as a character. I think the topic of how to include and write queer characters who are capable of terrible things and thoughts (because, after all, these characters are human beings and not tutelary exemplars), within the context of both a rising movement of transphobia right now and centuries-old scapegoating / pathologising portrayals more generally, is a really knotty but a really important one, and I always want to make sure I'm approaching it with care and due responsibility as well as a sense of humility around the limitations of what, as a cis writer, I can actually achieve.

To that end, I don't want to ever take the audience response for granted, but I'm always really grateful to hear that the portrayal is working for a listener!

Propaganda gods: gods whose prayer-marks or ritual verses are fed directly to the enemy, enforcing destructive or sabotaging changes to reality (so rather than sending a destructive saint or angel to rampage over the foe, you might drop pamphlets or send radio messages to the enemy to 'convert' them).

Rhetorical gods: gods whose followers possess reality-warping powers of language itself (which is why 'rhetorical god' is a polite way of saying 'liar's god'). In other words, the paranoia around them comes partly down to the fact that a disciple like Val may appear to be a limitless shaper of new forms, rather than shaped into a limited form of their own, as a result of their worship.

[queeringclassiclit]

Dorothy Gale

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

submitted by @lightupthisuniverse

[palehottubchild]

i know we all joke about the best ace rep and our favourite character being an eshay (and tbf im european that word means nothing to me) but imo thats one of my favourite things about his characterisation: the fact that he is not something an allo audience would mecessarily expect or imagine to be ace.

small disclaimer, im happy with any ace rep we get in the first place and if you do like what im about to describe more power to you, this is just my personal opinion.

That being said, i love that cash is kind of an 'unconventional' ace character, for lack of a better word. all too often ace characters fall into one of two stereotypes, either the heartless cold robot that is already kind of weird or other in itself and does not care about your or anyone elses feelings (this also includes nd coded characters), or the innocent sweetheart who is so pure and cute and has (most likely) one singular character trait (somehow almost always books). again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this since these people exist in real life, but they do push yhe aspec community further into the little boxes that allos have already put us in.

Now what i love so much about cash is that he is one of the most clearly genuinely kind people in the show. Despite him being surrounded by bad company, he is constantly shown to be gentle and sweet with his grandma and is obviously uncomfortable with the whole harper situation the entire time (not saying he handled this perfectly but thats not what this post is about). He is shown to clearly care about people deeply and he is not afraid to show this, except for when he is in bad company.

However, him having and showing emotions does not push him into the pure innocent cinnamon roll part either. He goes out to parties, does engage in enough sexual activities to end up the map, openly flirts with darren and is totally rocking his mardi gras outfit (including thong on head) without hesitating once. He is also stereotypically a 'tough guy', which is also not a type of guy too often represented as any sort of queer in popular media afaik. all in all the way cash is portrayed as an eshay to me makes him being aspec so much more valuable to me and while i understand the eshay posts are mostly jokes i did want to talk about it

[milogoestogreendale]

i think one of the things that is so refreshing to me about trobed is that a lot of slash ships in fandom are admittedly based around stereotypes. there’s kind of a cookie cutter pattern for how people accept gay couples, but none of that is really seen with troy/abed. the openly weird, film obsessed autistic nerd is seen as the more confident and experienced one in his sexuality. meanwhile, the popular and masculine jock is allowed to be overly emotional and sometimes insecure in his feelings.

this isn’t done just to subvert expectations though, it’s all in keeping with their characters. abed is sometimes perceived by his friends as a nerdy virgin, but the show goes out of the way to say that this isn’t the case, with a character that is very self-assured (in what is hinted at in canon and commonly accepted in fanon as his bisexuality.) troy, on the other hand, who works to portray a macho heterosexual persona, comes to realize it’s okay to get rid of those barriers and explore himself now that high school is over. it all comes off as a very authentic portrayal of queer identity, and the chemistry between troy and abed makes for a very real portrayal of a gay couple, whether it was intentional on the writers’ part or not.

[captain-hen]

is that piece of media ‘fetishizing’ lgbtq relationships or did the characters, like. have sex once.

[gouinisme]

i truly do not think alice can possibly stop being a character bc of previously stated reasons so now my working theory is the "i'll die down here" is mostly a distraction from "i was born down here" and alice Is some kind of reborn or construct or undead or something in the way that what she Is, her Current form of life was born from whatever weird alchemist shit is going on in the OIAR and the Magnus institute

[perplexingly]

I have fallen into a rabbit hole how do I get out

[oldedo]

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

there are a lot of reasons i'm really, really impressed by how well sdmi portrayed the dynamic of an abusive relationship with pericles and ricky, and one of the big ones is how accurately they show what it looks like when abuse starts to escalate.

the extent of that is yet another thing that'll take a longpost of its own to go into, because it spans like.... the entire arc of their relationship in the show. but one thing that stands out to me in particular is their portrayal of the massive red flag that is a partner trotting out bigoted behavior against a group you're in. especially insults, and especially directed right at you.

this show has a LOT of fatphobia, jesus christ does it ever, and there are certainly some fatphobic tropes going on with ricky; but i've always been surprised and impressed by how many of the nastier ones they avoided, especially considering his role in the story and what his arc is about.

he is a major, nuanced character whose trauma is treated with full weight and sincerity. it's implied that his body type changed the way it did due to the trauma he went through when he was younger, and the ensuing mental illness, which is a pretty realistic experience for a lot of people. the things that happen to him are played for full tragedy and horror, when it would have been so, so easy for them to make light of it because Tee Hee Fat Guy and Tee Hee Male Abuse Victims Funnee. despite how his whole thing involves corporate greed, they don't go the route of portraying him as Gluttonous and Hedonistic; if anything he is very obviously not using all that money for even basic physical self-care, and the only time we ever see him eating anything it's when he's drinking wine grape juice with pericles. which, like, there's issues to be unpacked with that too, but jesus christ it's an improvement over what usually happens with characters like him.

he's a fat queer man who isn't degendered or made feminine in a mocking and/or predatory way. (there's nothing wrong with feminine fat queer men and they need more non-shitty rep, please and thank you god, but there is a lot of nastiness in the tropes they're often used for in mainstream media, and one of those tropes is when people consider 'fat queer man' and 'masc' to be oxymorons.) no one ever once calls him ugly; if anything multiple people in his life think he's attractive and desirable, for better or for worse. no one body-shames him. and no one ever mentions his weight.

except pericles.

'The Horrible Herd' and 'The Devouring' are two halves of a whole here, re: escalation of abuse. 'Devouring' is when the abuser goes full mask off and shit hits the fan; 'Horrible Herd' is the wind-up before the punch. HH is when ricky realizes things are getting Bad and he needs to put a stop to this now, and Devouring shows what happens when he tries, because by the point where it's gotten bad enough to give him a wakeup call it's already too late. it's how abusive relationships tend to go, and it's chillingly accurate.

and what's one of the things pericles says during Horrible Herd when that punch is winding up? something no one's ever said before now, including him? 'you pudding-faced dummkopf.'

he body-shames him. he insults his weight, and that's a major turning point. bigotry is something that's often there to some degree from the start, but not always, because some abusers are good at hiding things like that until they're confident they've got you where they want you. the message with ricky and pericles is loud and clear: when this happens, the walls are dripping blood. get out.

(if you can. and be careful when you try.)

when this show is good, it is really, truly good. god damn.

[nostromo130]

I dont understand people saying the new dead in america issue is like biphobic like?? They're just fucking?? Sure it's not a perfect relationship but what do you expect from john constantine ???? Did I miss something

[queeringclassiclit]

Irene Adler

from the Sherlock Holmes series (A Scandal in Bohemia) by Arthur Conan Doyle