look I understand it’s the internet and whatever but i am begging you guys to understand: if you try to be playfully/sarcastically mean-spirited to someone who you have zero established relationship with, 99/100 times you will just come across as an asshole.
I’m halfway through Little Fires Everywhere and have finally realized what it is that elevates Elena beyond your standard upper middle class white woman antagonist to a character I feel physical pain having to hear about because I hate her so much:
Her whole personality is that she is 1000% convinced that American suburbs are humanity’s greatest invention.
(EDIT: THE BOTTOM PANEL SHOULD SAY “DOESN’T EXIST” i’m just not very good at memes)
Because I think yours is a very logical approach! If I’m watching a show someone has described as gay I had better get to see kissing on the mouth at least, like Korrasami is a big important deal but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the show felt to me, this particular lesbian, like a truly gay show even as I can recognize how impactful it was and probably especially because I know why it wasn’t more overt. I know that some of this comes from the interplay between increased demands for representation, media companies that give us just absolute scraps so standards for representation are low, and to some degree audiences’ inabilities to discern ‘what is me projecting onto this piece of media and what is me reading something in the text?’
When I reblogged earlier, I was definitely thinking more in terms of literature and the whole trend of marketing books based on represented identities and not actual plot or theme content combined with the 'how will we know if they are gay if they don’t have a romantic subplot’ problem, combined with the gay=good quality mindset that leads fans to reject an otherwise good piece of storytelling as 'bad’ for not focusing on lgbtqia romance, combined also with the way people have started to accuse narratives of queerbaiting just because a romance hasn’t explicitly happened yet, combined with the accusations of queerbaiting getting leveled at actual real life people (this is, perhaps, the most peripheral issue of the list).
Add onto that a heaping serving of 'just being a judgy mean lesbian’ and sprinkle in some 'I love ambiguity so much that I revel in feeling like I don’t truly know what’s going on with any character and thus have to make an interpretative argument that I know is not definitive" and you get me reblogging that and ranting about The Outsiders in the tag.
But I do think that you get at a key distinction that exists somewhere in my mind, though I don’t know that I can place exactly where - it’s historical vs. modern, sure, but it’s also grounded in a sense of why something doesn’t actually move beyond subtext. There’s a spectrum from Xena to A League of Their Own (the movie) to official approaches to Pharmercy to Clexa to AO3 fics shipping the Pretty Little Liars with each other to the Taylor Swift secret lesbian conspiracy theorists, but it’s not just about pieces of textual evidence, level of delusion, or bad faith participation by corporate marketing professionals, it’s about all of these things and more, the why of ambiguity AND the centrality of the relationship/situation in question.
Xena to me is a 'gay show’ (a term I’m only using for the sake of explanation) but Legend of Korra isn’t because Korrasami isn’t nearly as central of a feature to the narrative or setting of the whole show, or even to the characters’ arcs, as Xena & Gabrielle’s relationship is from what I know and have seen. Pharmercy does better than Clexa because there’s at least now actual recognition of Pharah being a lesbian and they haven’t killed off either of them yet in what was essentially just a more hurtful sweeps week kiss (the kids don’t even know about those these days I think), but it has still very much been a marketing tactic rather than simply loving storytelling and so it’s miles away from something like ALOTO. In many cases it just comes down to the “I know it when I see it rule” that is not how congress should be legislating on obscenity, but that is perfectly fine for us to use talking about things on the internet.
“it’s not queer fiction unless the queerness is explicitly declared in the text according to currently accepted terminology and in a way that meets the approval of the entire audience” I mean follow your heart I guess but I trust myself as a queer person to recognise queer themes
“but doesn’t this risk giving the author undue credit for queer representation” I do not care about the author
funniest language thing in modern greek is that the word for baby/infant is “moro” which literally means “idiot.” like someone looked at a baby 1000 years ago and was like “this guy doesnt know shit.”
just to be clear it meant idiot BEFORE it meant baby so like, this wasnt an insult born out of comparing people to babies, it really was people looking at babies and thinking “i dont think theres a better word to describe these things than “moron”” (which “moro” is the root word for)
i just remembered this post. i think i should add onto it:
“moro mou” (my baby) is an affectionate nickname for a partner in greek, the same way “baby/babe” is in english. however this does mean that you are ostensibly calling your partner “my moron <3”
is finding ‘lmao’ to be like a statement of extreme murderous hostility just a me thing or is this something everyone agrees on. like ive always thought that this is self-evidently true to anyone under the age of 30 but is this like one of those things where if oyu smile at an ape it thikns its threatening you and kills you (im the ape)
to be clear 'LMAO’ is fine thats someone expressing genuine amusement but 'lmao’ registers as more genuinely hostile than 'kys’ like 99% of the time and i’m not joking
agreeing with the people in the replies saying that the hostility doesn’t necessary have to be directed against the person you’re saying it to but can be directed towards a third party or the world in general. noentheless conveys a hateful and violent sentiment. its a malediction
“This isn’t some UFO goose chase you’re leading me on, is it Mulder?” says Scully like 5 minutes into episode 2, entirely unaware of the premise of her show
ohh please please look at this. roses are falling by orville peck just syncs up TOO GOOD to the adolescence of utena dance scene. thank you to my hot epic wife @bongcummer69 for putting this together for me bc idk how to use my computer
wwdits really kinda shit the bed last season imo but they are working very hard to redeem themselves and ‘my ex-boyfriend Davy Crockett at the Alamo’ does a fair amount of heavy lifting
