#let people enjoy what they want to enjoy
some of y’all need to stop thinking you’re so much better then every one else because you prefer the characters ‘in character’. Ya’ll don’t have a clue what would be ‘in character’ or OOC in other peoples works and/or post canon. It’s fiction. Also people can change? or grow? or have multiple layers? also your version of ‘in character’ can be so off as well. I’m not the one saying that Andrew doesn’t love Neil / or / that they ‘don’t feel emotions’. Like, some of you guys need to ~self reflect~.
soo…let’s see if i get it..first kill is too sexual and caters to the male gaze, crush was too cringey cheesy and unrealistic, blymanor was queerbaiting, killing eve is too toxic, happiest season was just not good enough, fear street was not the right genre and the characters were unlikeable. what else? *checks notes* oh,period dramas are overdone and so are high school romances and any kind of meet cute, coming out stories are boring and too out and proud characters are unrealistic, slowburn is now equal to queerbait, and if the entire team shooting the film isnt queer forget it - truth is yall are constantly finding excuses not to watch wlw media ripping it to shreds over the smallest things in the name of “better reppresentation” and thanlog on twitter and cry “where are the sapphics????” ????????!!!
Back when we got a lot (relatively speaking) of period dramas like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the question was “where are the cute sapphic romcoms with unambiguously happy endings instead?” Then when Happiest Season came out and seemingly answered that exact question, it had some of the worst discourse I’ve ever seen. The movie had a coming out storyline, which not everyone likes but is a pretty much universal experience for lgbts, and the things people said and implied about closeted gays - a very real living situation for huge numbers of lgbt people who were definitely reading those mean hot takedowns, btw! - were downright cruel and vicious and just totally unnecessary. People twisted themselves into pretzels to explain how this Hallmark ass Christmas romcom with a fully happy ending was actually super problematic and harmful and and and.
That’s when I just decided to make a tactical retreat. Around the time when Twilight was becoming popular, it was also becoming just as popular to mock and bash it. I didn’t like Twilight either, but I made an active effort at the time not to participate in the mockery on the principle that teen girls should get to enjoy things too! I was a teen girl not so long before that and I understood that the world was not kind to that demographic. And it was so obvious that people had jumped on the Twilight hate train as an excuse to hate yet another thing popular with teen girls, because misogyny is eternal, so I wasn’t gonna participate in it even if I did think Twilight was bad. (You still see people on corners of the internet today in 2022 who think that hating Twilight is a stunningly original opinion.)
It’s the same thing with sapphic media, right now. I definitely don’t like all of it, and I sure do make fun of the stuff I don’t like with my friends in private because I’m a known hater. But seeing sapphic media publicly torn apart over and over every time for one reason or another is exhausting - and there’s always a reason to fill the gap no matter how high-quality and critically acclaimed it is, no matter how optimistic, no matter how realistic, etc - and at some point you just gotta make the choice to withdraw, to push back on it, to accept that some things are not for you personally but that increasing the quantity and variety of wlw rep in different genres and tones and media is undeniably a good thing we need to encourage and not smother in the crib. That queer women are allowed to have fun and enjoy things that might be problematic or trashy or whatever too. That Netflix and Hulu and HBO Max execubots are watching metrics relentlessly to see what people are streaming and what is hyped on social media and so on and using that to determine what to cancel and what to renew. Etc.
