#serious tag
I’m seeing it happen a lot again as Pride Month gets into full swing so here’s a reminder:
Someone having a queer headcanon for a character, that is not the same as YOUR queer headcanon for that character, doesn’t mean They Hate the Specific Queer Subset of Your Headcanon; it usually just means they’re connecting with the character on a slightly different but still very personal wavelength.
Someone seeing a gnc character as something other than binary trans is not an attack on trans people - there ARE people who do it for transphobic reasons, but the majority of people who read characters as “the gender the mainstream says they are, but a little to the left” are doing it because they are alsothe gender mainstream media lets that character be but a little to the left, many being trans themselves and desperately looking for “permission” to be gnc and still be their actual gender.
Someone reading a character who is implied to be some flavor of not-straight as bi and shipping them with an “opposite” gender character is not erasure, it is a bi experience. Yes, there are people who do this for homophobic reasons, but most are just trying to write an experience like their own.
People sticking fictional characters on queer flags is usually not “cishet people reducing queer rights to ships”, it’s usually queer people trying to see themselves in their faves. Just because some people handle it that way (and for that matter some of the LGBT+ people doing it are assimilationist suckers for rainbow capitalism) does not mean that it is inherently trivializing.
Finally, fictional characters are not praxis. Shipping is not activism. Trans headcanons are not activism. If your activism begins and ends at trying to find The One True Progressive Reading of a fictional character, your “activism” is garbage and WORSE than a waste of time because YOU, in fact, are the one trying to take toys away from other queer people.
Some of you on this hellsite will swear you’re not exclusionists until you’re blue in the face and pay lip service to ace and mspec and genderqueer people, but when you can wrap it up in fictional character discourse and talk about “representation” (usually in venues where that is NOT a relevant discussion to be having) you make it painfully clear that you think the only groups Queer Enough to Be Worth Representing are binary trans people and gold-star gays and the next time you feel like starting internet drama with ANOTHER QUEER FAN about their headcanons I want you to step back and think long and hard about who you’re actually helping with that
If you can’t tell the difference between “I think this character is queer, but in a different way than you think this character is queer, but your version is cool too” and “omfg what’s wrong with you fucking sjw [slur] that character isn’t a [slur] get the fuck out of MY fandom” that’s what we like to call a You Problem
Making leisure spaces hostile to other queer fans will ALWAYS be more queerphobic than headcanoning Blorbo F. M. Shows as ace even though they have a popular gay ship
Again, if you hear “be kind to and stop immediately assuming the worst of the other living, breathing queer people in your hobby space; don’t go starting WWIII with them over which queer reading of your blorbo is The Most Correct Progressive One, they deserve a place to unwind as much as you do and this is NOT that consequential” and you internally translate that into “let cishet queerphobes trample all over you in your own leisure space” you are not as anti-exclusionist as you think you are
I’m seeing it happen a lot again as Pride Month gets into full swing so here’s a reminder:
Someone having a queer headcanon for a character, that is not the same as YOUR queer headcanon for that character, doesn’t mean They Hate the Specific Queer Subset of Your Headcanon; it usually just means they’re connecting with the character on a slightly different but still very personal wavelength.
Someone seeing a gnc character as something other than binary trans is not an attack on trans people - there ARE people who do it for transphobic reasons, but the majority of people who read characters as “the gender the mainstream says they are, but a little to the left” are doing it because they are alsothe gender mainstream media lets that character be but a little to the left, many being trans themselves and desperately looking for “permission” to be gnc and still be their actual gender.
Someone reading a character who is implied to be some flavor of not-straight as bi and shipping them with an “opposite” gender character is not erasure, it is a bi experience. Yes, there are people who do this for homophobic reasons, but most are just trying to write an experience like their own.
People sticking fictional characters on queer flags is usually not “cishet people reducing queer rights to ships”, it’s usually queer people trying to see themselves in their faves. Just because some people handle it that way (and for that matter some of the LGBT+ people doing it are assimilationist suckers for rainbow capitalism) does not mean that it is inherently trivializing.
Finally, fictional characters are not praxis. Shipping is not activism. Trans headcanons are not activism. If your activism begins and ends at trying to find The One True Progressive Reading of a fictional character, your “activism” is garbage and WORSE than a waste of time because YOU, in fact, are the one trying to take toys away from other queer people.
Some of you on this hellsite will swear you’re not exclusionists until you’re blue in the face and pay lip service to ace and mspec and genderqueer people, but when you can wrap it up in fictional character discourse and talk about “representation” (usually in venues where that is NOT a relevant discussion to be having) you make it painfully clear that you think the only groups Queer Enough to Be Worth Representing are binary trans people and gold-star gays and the next time you feel like starting internet drama with ANOTHER QUEER FAN about their headcanons I want you to step back and think long and hard about who you’re actually helping with that
If you can’t tell the difference between “I think this character is queer, but in a different way than you think this character is queer, but your version is cool too” and “omfg what’s wrong with you fucking sjw [slur] that character isn’t a [slur] get the fuck out of MY fandom” that’s what we like to call a You Problem
Making leisure spaces hostile to other queer fans will ALWAYS be more queerphobic than headcanoning Blorbo F. M. Shows as ace even though they have a popular gay ship
An issue I have with media critique is when people correctly point out problems with worsening quality control under late-stage capitalism, then completely undermine their point by putting on the thickest nostalgia goggles they can find.
This is really common in critique of video games - YES, developers are getting overreliant on day-one patches and crunch and it’s getting worse because hehe line go up. YES, obsession with preorders and preorder bonuses is letting AAA studios get away with selling you garbage. YES, monetization models are getting greedier and greedier with microtransactions and lootboxes and DLC-locking major parts of a game. YES, this is extremely bad practice for both employees AND consumers.
NO,there was no magical Before Time when all commercially available games were passion projects and totally not cash grabs made by happy and totally not overworked developers and totally free of game-breaking glitches at launch. Before patches became a thing, if a game was broken at launch, if a cartridge would brick if you approached a quest the wrong way, if you would almost always get softlocked without a guide, those games would typically just bomb and get forgotten to time because they couldn’t be fixed without just straight up being updated and rereleased. The idea that retro games were all masterpieces with only obscure glitches found by running into the tricks they used to carefully allocate the system’s extremely limited memory is an invention of survivorship bias.
Or, how about film and special effects? YES, overreliance on greenscreen and CGI to avoid paying unionized prop and set and even costume designers is bad for everyone involved in the process except the CEOs. YES, movies getting increasingly formulaic, to the point where you can go to pretty much any big budget movie and predict what’s going to happen by watching the clock equally if not more reliably than by watching the movie, is exhausting if you’re over 12 or not successfully lured in by big names and nostalgia. YES, the anti-competitive practices by Disney are horrifying (and in fact even a halfway decent lawyer could easily argue that they’re illegal, unfortunately Disney can afford to argue their way out of it), and YES, there used to be a lot more mid-size studios making a lot more varied films.
NO,there was no era where all practical effects were beautiful and no actor or film crew was ever mistreated to save a buck. NO, there was no time when the supergiants of the industry were willing to take big risks, or cared more about art than profits, unless you count Disney undermining their own projects to punish employees for being too ambitious (see: Treasure Planet). As for the less convincing side of practical effects, we’re in love with them now because we’ve seen the monstrosities that have replaced them, but when they came out people pointed and laughed and rolled their eyes and thought “damn, they really were too cheap to do any better?”
The reason I hate this is the same reason I hate a lot of fandom and shipping drama: because take a step back and look at what’s happening here. It sounds petty, because it’s based on something fairly frivolous, but what’s happening here is that you’re correctly identifying a bad trend, but exaggerating the difference between then and now and romanticizing a past that never existed. You know, just like shit like trad recruiting.
Yeah, I know that sounds like catastrophizing, it’s movies and video games! It’s not like there have been entire reactionary movements born of people angry about something as stupid as gaming and using that as an excuse to take action on their bigoted ideals-
But even if it never comes to the worst-case scenario, where you end up obsessing over some nostalgic golden age to the point of resisting any and all positive change and decide that NO, things were PERFECT once upon a time, We Need To Go Back, reject modernity etc. etc., and anyone who WASN’T happy in this perfect idyllic before time needs to be stamped out lest they ruin it for youeveryone,you’re still horribly oversimplifying the problem. We can’t fix it by “going back” because even when things were better in the ways we can identify, the people with the money were already laying the groundwork for the exploitative hellscape we know today. Things need to be totally overhauled.
Don’t fall into the nostalgia trap, and don’t assume the nostalgia trap is harmless because “it’s just games and movies.”
