#yes im watching they het romance show for the 'lesbians' what of it?

[baltharino]

[rcarx]

seems like a common theme to call avatrice crumbs from people who only watch warrior nun through gifsets

yes they only kiss once, and they don't explicitly talk about their feelings until the very end.

i know we've had a lot of history with wlw representation on television, i've seen all the charts about wlw couples getting significantly less screen time than other combinations of couples. so i understand why people are skeptical. but this is not the same as the other shows with token gays where they make characters gay and barely give them any screentime.

literally the biggest evidence you have for this, other than ava being the lead, is that ava and beatrice are literally the only romance on the show. there isn't another het romance, or any other romance on the show beside or overshadowing the lesbian couple. warrior nun is not a show about romance. it's about show about warrior nuns that just so happens to have a leading lesbian couple.

yeah if wn had a het couple that kissed all the time and avatrice only getting to kiss once, then it's crumbs. but i cannot express how different it is when avatrice is literally the only couple on the show.

because then the intention matters. how the writers and directors choose to show the relationship progress matters. when we don't have to compare, the other ways you show a romantic relationship on screen matters. and they do show. they show beatrice's gay panic. they show ava's attraction to beatrice. they show both of them expressing explicit jealousy. they show beatrice lose her shit when she thought ava died. they show ava asking beatrice to run away with her. and then finally they show the kiss and the love declarations.

here, kristina tonteri-young talks about them contemplating a second kiss before ava goes through the arq, but they decided against it because they wanted the kisses to mean different things. and two kisses too close to each other would lessen the impact of the first one. they've thought about it, and each progression in ava's and beatrice's relationship means something.

it's not crumbs, it's the opposite. well, it is crumbs, but it's not the type of crumbs they throw to "make they gays happy". it's well intended, slow burn crumbs, so that when they do actually get together and they do get to do the coupley shit, it's gonna feel so much better.

we never get slow burn so we don't know what it looks like, but im gonna skfjdkfjdj scream because we deserve the slow burn and the happy ending at the end. stream warrior nun season 2 for the happy ending.

[daggersandarrows]

i think almost every single issue i have with the cr fandom can be summed up with the responses that i got when i said “molly is yasha’s soulmate”.

“ummm eww, she’s a lesbian?”

there’s so many problems with this one i’ll just take it from the top.

yasha was not confirmed a lesbian (by someone else, btw) until we were in the triple digits. this fandom hates the possibility of bi women so bad it’s embarrassing. y’all know how often i see people call keyleth and vex het? and allura a lesbian?

yes, AND? how does her being a lesbian invalidate her having a soulmate who isn’t a woman. how. i’ll wait. as far as i know “lesbian” means “is attracted solely to women/women adjacent people”. why do soulmates have to have anything to do w attraction.

“gross, yasha is not attracted to a man”

sigh.

first off, see the first point, soulmate does not necessitate attraction.

second off, even if it did, mollymauk is not and never was a man--or at least not solely. and he’s not a cis man, goddammit, which is what the more insidious version of this argument looks like--”yasha isn’t attracted to a cishet man”. also he’s BI.

this wasn’t a late reveal or anything either. in EPISODE GODDAMN TWO we have confirmation of nonbinary molly.

molly ids as genderfluid. now idk how yasha thinks of her own sexuality, but if she wanted to include him in hers then...that’s...okay. it is. stop arguing. there are *plenty* of lesbians dating genderfluid people out there.

“you mean PLATONIC soulmate right haha”

i mean, i could mean that. i could. i could also mean other things this doesn’t have to mean platonic or i’m a terrible person.

this is where i’m sure im gonna lose some people: in addition to the above points about genderfluid molly, let’s just consider for a moment that i did not in fact mean platonic soulmate. or romantic actually.

let’s think about what it means if i meant sexual soulmate.

“thane what does that even mean what are you talking about”

i don’t know! soulmate has extremely variable definitions some of which are highly amatonormative but for right now let’s just say someone whose sex life meshes with yours so well that it feels like you were made to have sex with them.

this fandom has a huge and i mean HUGE problem with thinking that sex = romance and that sex MUST under ALL circumstances = sexual attraction. also the understand of consent is so poor here my god

i don’t have the time energy or brain to get into ace shit here and trust me i’ve been treated horribly by both allos and aces alike for how my identity presents itself but i will just say this

i have never been sexually attracted to anyone i’ve had sex with.

i have never been ROMANTICALLY attracted to anyone i’ve had sex with.

i like having sex.

i also know kind of a LOT of people who have sex with people who are “outside” of their identity. this isn’t an uncommon thing, very online tumblr gays.

for some reason people HATE that here. but my point is: if yasha and molly were fucking it doesn’t change anyone’s identity and it didn’t have to involve any attraction at all, and if you don’t want to see that that’s absolutely valid but it does NOT give you the right to read every thoroughly tagged fic and leave nasty hate comments or worse for the author because of it. (i’m looking at you, allos who decided to run ace fjorclay shippers off the internet.)

and last but not least, the fact that so many people violently object to this statement that i made--angry, indignant, accusing me of hatespeech, etc, when it’s word for word something that ashley said, right next to where she was comparing molly to, y’know, yasha’s literal wife. so. i can’t imagine how mad certain people would get if i made that comparison myself.

which brings me to my final point: i’m not sure that some of y’all are actually watching the same show as i am and it is very annoying for the rest of us.

[olderthannetfic]

hi hi history-non again, sorry I know it's a very

ahem wide and girthy ahem

ask, and i'm sorry for not narrowing it down farther my brain is smooth as butter and the dart board, so to speak, is. big. i feel like im throwing my dart in the ocean of 'what i don't know' and trying to spear a fish who might speak to me like the queer elder i never ha d ;lkasjd;flkas damn you small conservative town ANYWAYS

i guess okay maybe do you have any favourite figureheads? whats your fave pieces of lgbtqa+ media (like books or shows?)

thanks again and sorry for.

uh.

big.

--

Lolololol. Yes.... it’s so... big...

In the 90s, the writers of nonfiction who I found really inspirational were Susie Bright and Kate Bornstein. My Gender Workbook was a classic. I gather there’s a new edition.

I was a massive, massive nerd, so my actual favorite queer book as a 14-year-old is one that will be a bit... uh... much if you’re not feeling very intellectual. It’s Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. This thing is a massive doorstop of a book that collects academic journal articles on third gender roles from various cultures. I was obsessed with this thing. Again, it’s academic journal articles, not popular nonfiction, so expect that level of impenetrable prose.

I was also a giant weeb, so I read a bunch of books on the history of gay sex in Japan. It’s pretty interesting how much people assume the “m/m sex = sin” shit was worldwide and how much it just was not.

In terms of fiction, I’ve always struggled to find f/f media I relate to. I really like the tv adaptations of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet. Lots of fucked up problematicness and gorgeous visuals. Gotta love the lady with the strap-on and the gold body paint!

For other queer media, I was a big fan of Velvet Goldmine and of Pedro Almodóvar’s older films, which are full of every problematic kink you can think of. They also have a lot of het I like, like the lady being coerced into sex (that she enjoys) by the drag queen who impersonates her famous mother she has a lot of mommy issues about... except said drag queen is really an undercover police officer. Just... whut. (All the “straight” stuff in Almodóvar’s films is also bugfuck nuts and often kind of queer.)

I really, really, really loved Crash. Not the shitty one that won an oscar: the car crash perverts one full of weird UST. There’s a ton of straight sex in this too, along with every gender combo and a laundry list of upsetting kinks. It’s just every kind of weird perv thing. (”Weird art film full of sex and problematicness” is pretty much the defining feature of movies I liked as a teen. I loved Kissed, that het necrophilia movie too.)

Stage Beauty is probably my favorite film for bi vibes. It’s this meditation on identity as the English stage was changing over from having men play women to having actual actresses. It ends in f/m, but it’s definitely a very queer film.

If you want slice of life stuff, I guess you could try Dykes to Watch Out For (the comic that’s the source of the bechdel test) or the Tales of the City novel series. These will both give you a sense of what was going on in certain queer communities in the late 20thC. If you want something relatively fluffy, Maurice is a historical costume drama with a happy ending. I found it awfully slow as a college student, but it does have naked Rupert Graves (Lestrade from Sherlock), so...

----

See, this is hard to answer because I came of age and did all of my reading of that kind a long time ago. I pretty quickly moved on to fangirl media, which I have always liked a lot better than other arguably queer stuff. Back in the 90s, that meant Japanese stuff and fic. Later, I had access to more flavors of by-fujoshi-for-fujoshi media.

So my actual favorite m/m books are a bunch of “m/m romance” (i.e. American BL being sold as ebooks on amazon). If you want live action TV and fandomy vibes, you’re better off with Trapped (hot cop/mobster action!) or one of those Thai series about schoolboys or something than stuff made by cis gay men in the US.

I also came of age in an era when “queer” media was very Cis Gay Men And Sometimes Cis Lesbians with an occasional nod to bi people existing... maybe. Kate Bornstein and a few others were raising the profile of MtF transsexuals (the term in use at the time) who wanted surgery or even, gasp, maybe didn’t want bottom surgery in some cases. Anything about FtMs or nb/agender/etc. identities was practically invisible. I saw the term ‘genderqueer’ around a bit, but it was mostly in contexts that were very tryhard and unappealing to me.

(You haven’t given any details, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’re like much of tumblr and the flavors of queerness you relate to aren’t so much the Cis Gay Men Only culture that makes up quite a bit of queer history and older queer media.)

I can tell you what I liked as a teen, but not everybody is into fucked up art films that may not have happy endings. I can try to rec things about queer culture in the 90s, but I probably don’t have great recs for way earlier or later than that... unless it’s so much earlier that I’ve researched it while writing fic of some historical canon or other. A lot of how I learned about queer culture myself was from magazines or from reading soc.bi on usenet or just from living through the 90s--not typically from books that are easy to unearth and just hand to someone now.

I tend to just not like anything in the contemporary romance or slice of life genres, regardless of gender and orientation, so while I’ve watched/read a bit more queer stuff like this, especially in the past when I had less access to queer media, it’s not a space I’m great at reccing in. And that’s unfortunate because a lot of that type of art gives you a better sense of what other queer people were like in other eras and/or it’s a safer rec than some bananas crazy BDSM film.

I was, and am, very kinky (though pretty lazy in terms of actual practice), so a lot of my reading and media interest was bound up in that also. Obviously, I was quite interested in the drawings of Tom of Finland or the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, but are you going to be into photos of some guy shoving a whip handle in his ass? I love the movie Cruising... it’s about serial killers and leather and homophobia and is every bit as potentially traumatizing as that sounds.

I feel you on the problem of finding queer elders. There isn’t really an obvious way to go about this.