#this is the only post i'm gonna make that's even remotely discourse related and i'm not gonna reblog any more of them either

[anachronistic-falsehood]

i don't even care who wins. i hope they all collectively snap. i want bad to hunt down charlie and kill him over and over and over until he rage quits. i want fit to lavacast red and blue's spawnpoints until they're screaming bloody murder at him. i want cellbit to eat pac's other leg. i want tubbo and phil to kill each other a thousand times over. i want tina to relentlessly hunt down cellbit for killing bagi. I WANT THIS PLACE TO LOOK LIKE 2B2T BY THE TIME THE TWO WEEKS IS UP!!! from a storywise standpoint i just want all the characters to go batshit and i'm not even going to look at the qsmp tag anymore i want to go crazy all on my own with my cubitos with not even a HINT of discourse on my dash

[theprismaticvoid]

I've seen a lot of discourse about Gwen in Across the Spider-Verse and whether or not she's trans, and one thing I keep seeing that frustrates me is people calling it "queerbaiting" because they never directly say Gwen is transgender in the film, arguing that it's "drip-feeding representation" and that the creators "should've done better".

It really annoys me to see people talk like this bc it shows that they very blatantly do not know how the entertainment industry works, how censorship boards and studio mandates handle these things.

A few years ago, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch posted a video showing some of the emails he got from Disney Channel's Standards and Practices board, and some of the completely wild shit they took issue with. They legit demanded that a reference to "spin the bottle" be removed because they thought it implied that the teenagers were having orgies, or that Mabel not call someone a "poopy face" because it came across as a reference to "getting shitfaced" (a slang term for getting drunk, for anyone where that term isn't used). Even a character wearing an animal mascot suit was a point of contention because they thought it was a reference to furries and a character dressing up like a cartoon animal was going to corrupt the kiddies. Things that absolutely no reasonable person would care about were treated with the same level of gravity as if they'd had the kids saying the fuck word and giving the middle finger.

(And that's not even mentioning how Alex wanted to include gay characters in the show but the best he got to manage is the two cops vaguely saying they're "in love" in a way that could easily be read as just them being friends, in one of the last scenes of the final episode, after he'd already decided he was done working with Disney and was jumping ship to a different company after GF was over; at that point, it was just a matter of "What are you gonna do? Fire me?")

Steven Universe had to fight for years to get the Garnet wedding they so desperately wanted... and basically as soon as they did it, they were cancelled and given five episodes to conclude a story arc that was meant to go for at least another season, if not longer. The Movie and Future basically only happened due to the Crewniverse fighting for enough of a continuation to give the series a proper ending + strong fan reception to Season 5; Ian has made it clear on Twitter several times that the crew wants to make more Steven Universe, but the show that got famous for including queer themes being EXPLICITLY queer is too extreme for CN and they refuse to let it keep going.

Am I saying that Spider-Verse is the paragon of representation and that it couldn't possibly be done better? No, of course not. Am I saying people shouldn't want more than little easter-eggs that hint at representation? No, no way, that'd be ridiculous.

But even getting what was in the movie represents the team struggling against censorship and regulations to try and get across what they wanted. Even getting a pride flag in the background with "PROTECT TRANS KIDS" written on it is an absolutely massive thing, and there's not a doubt in my mind that this required hours of email back-and-forths with censorship boards who demanded it be removed.

It just really annoys me to see people say that they somehow should've done more, as if it was just as simple as a script writer writing a line where Gwen says "By the way Miles, I'm transgender." and that being it. It shows a complete lack of understanding for just how difficult it is to get any subject that they think is "taboo" or "controversial" into media meant for children.

And because I know people will bring this up: The stuff about Gwen is nothing even remotely close to Disney's fifteen different "first gay characters". Nobody related to Spider-Verse tried to hype up how Gwen was totally trans and this was a huge step forward for representation. Sony didn't try to use it to get brownie points with the LGBT community only for it to turn out to be a minor thing.

Spider-Verse including trans pride flags in the background and including an arc about her "coming out" as being Spider-Man to her parents is absolutely not comparable to Disney making a big hullabaloo about how Endgame and Rise of Skywalker were going to include gay characters, only for that just turning out to be one character mentioning a husband in a way that could be dubbed over and a three-second kiss between two nameless lesbian Rebels at the end that could be cut out for foreign releases.