#this post is about casual white privilege not whatever weird obsessive shit you got going on

[gen-is-gone]

Hey so, I hate to be the person to drag drama into a small and mostly pretty decent fandom with very little of it, but you know what would be fucking fantastic? If people in tumblr WicDiv fandom could stop fucking calling Amaterasu straight. Please, do a rando on the internet a favor and just fucking stop.

Before folks start getting righteously indignant and come to me with eighty different reasons why bi erasure is okay if it’s Ammy, hear me out:

IT’S STILL BI ERASURE. Amaterasu, you might say, has called herself straight, and only kissed/slept with girls while drunk. To which I reply, no, Amaterasu called herself “boring” and later explicitly pointed out “prefer guys” =/= “only attracted to guys”. She called herself “the boring one. I’m sooo boring” while the magical equivalent of high on E, and here’s something for you, has only ever shown on-page attraction to women. Pretty weird that such a large portion of fandom would’ve decided that an ambiguous, out of context statement a character said once outweighs multiple instances of textual sapphic attraction, huh?

Another argument then, perhaps? Amaterasu was unwilling to go down on Sakhmet, therefore she’s obviously only faking attraction for attention/”experimenting”/not-really-bi. Here’s a thought: attempting to rationalize policing of a character’s (or worse, actual person’s!) sexual/romantic orientation via what sexual experience they have or what sex acts they are comfortable with, is a really fucking ugly, biphobic thing to do. No better, in fact, than declaring that a man who is uninterested in anal sex must not really be bi, because everyone knows that’s what mlm attraction is all about. Cunnilingus, and any given woman’s interest in/comfort level with it, is but one small facet of a world of wonderful ways in which to be a sapphic woman.

And for the last, and I suspect, most salient of arguments in favor of calling a queer woman straight, Amaterasu is a piece of shit.

This is 100% true. Hazel Greenaway is an over-privileged, spoiled, cruel, self-obsessed, thoughtless, unrepentant racist. Her behavior particularly in Imperial Phase is almost calculated to hit just about everyone’s buttons in some way at some point, and make us all boil over with rage and cringe in resigned disgust at every new word that comes out of her mouth. She wore out her welcome at the end of IP1, and by this last issue I don’t think there’s a single reader who doesn’t at least briefly harbor the thought that she got what she deserved.

But here’s the thing: there is no moral litmus test for queerness. My fondness for Ammy had like most people’s, diminished down to nearly nothing by the time she died. I don’t particularly identify with her, and yeah, in WicDiv, if not most media, we’re not exactly hurting for mga rep. But within the past month or so, I’ve seen a flurry of snide comments and derisive not-quite-jokes about how much of a straight girl Amaterasu is, how predictably like “that kind of straight girl”, how she’s “curious” in comparison to out queer characters. And every single fucking comment feels like a slap in the face from an otherwise friendly fandom.

Guess what? Orientation and attraction are not inherently moral. There is obvious merit to calling attention to queer virtue, to the beauty and power and strength of our people, in response to centuries of being told we’re all degenerate and sick, disgusting and unholy. But just as straightness is no sign of either good or evil, so too is a woman-loving-woman inherently a good person. Amaterasu isn’t exactly an aberration among wealthy white queers either, as the many blatant and highly public instances of racism and antisemitism on display at Pride this year can attest.

Positive representation is diverse. If she were the only character to express same gender attraction in WicDiv, I’d have a whole different set of beefs, and with the text, rather than the interpreters. But she’s not, and she has a specific place and role within the larger narrative. Saying out loud that Amaterasu is bi does not, in fact, erase or ignore or forgive her cultural appropriation or her passive aggressive cruelty. It is, in fact, possible for her to be attracted to women, uncomfortable with performing specific sex acts, semi-closeted or nervous about coming out of the closet, and still be a hideously bad person. These qualities are not mutually exclusive. Her having human moments of sympathetic interaction adds human complexity to her character, but it doesn’t actually dismiss her many, many flaws. Acting as though queer characters are only ever good, and characters who are not good can thus not possibly be queer, strips huge layers of nuance out of analysis of a highly nuanced text. Plus, you know, it’s pretty fucking textbook bi erasure, and (unintentionally I’m sure) viciously biphobic. 

*Sigh* And before everyone chimes in to tell me how they’re bi and they don’t think Ammy is and they’re perfectly comfortable calling her straight, please. Don’t. Don’t bother pointing at “Curiosity” as the interstitial in 28, don’t bother to give me whatever you think Gillen meant by that or your own personal experiences of straight girls breaking your heart while pretending to be bi. I am pointing out a Thing, and honestly no, I can’t actually stop you from doing or saying whatever the hell you want. But it is a Thing, and worth pointing out. And having seen three separate posts in two days make that kind of snide comment, and having had one day honestly kind of ruined by that (yes, I do blow things epically out proportion and fixate on the negative, why do you ask?) and my heart start fucking racing over it, I’d just. Like to get this off my chest, you know?

My apologies; this is barely coherent and deeply uncharitable, and I know I’m breaking my own rules of assuming good faith as often as possible, but I’ve had my blood pressure skyrocket over a casual comment in a tumblr post one too many times in an already ridiculous and aggravating week, so here you all go.