I've wanted to make a post about this for some time but I find it difficult to word it properly. But here it goes.
I've noticed quite a lot of hostility and just plain wrong takes about Osiris, especially since it's been confirmed he and Saint are in a relationship. Of course, there's the classic dudebro homophobic rage but I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about the very frequent and persistent attempts to sideline and erase Osiris from this relationship. Sometimes it's jokes and memes, which I don't mind, but they muddy the water after a while.
I'm talking about memes like "Osiris if you don't go to your husband, I'm going to take him away from you!!!" and the variations of that. As I said, memes are fine and I support them, but at some point these memes become very aggressive and honestly quite upsetting to look at all the time. It becomes an active attempt to sideline and erase Osiris from his own canon relationship which isn't helping anyone and can actually be harmful to mlm who see o14 as their representation.
But there's a worse trend. The trend of calling their relationship abusive because they tend to have arguments sometimes (most recently seen in new Trials ship/shell/sparrow lore). First of all, people took that out of context. The three lore pieces tell the same story from three different perspectives for a reason. People overfixated on the most angsty one where we only see the end of the argument. But there's also the beginning and there's also Saint's own thoughts about the situation and he never describes it as abusive in any way.
The second issue is two-fold.
First, it operates under the assumption that a heavily traumatised gay man of colour is abusing his lover because they disagree sometimes. Osiris, the man who broke time and space to get Saint back is apparently abusive, somehow. I know there's a lot of young people on here, but please understand that relationships are not always sunshine and butterflies and that includes LGBT+ people. Sometimes there will be arguments and disagreements. Saint himself says that he does not view their most recent clash as a battle or an argument, but a rebuilding of a relationship that takes time. This is an important message to learn, especially by young people who struggle with trauma and mental illness and discrimination because of their sexuality and/or gender.
Which brings me to the second issue with this line of thinking: it assumes Saint is helpless and possibly too stupid to understand that Osiris is abusing him which cannot be further from the truth. Saint is a capable and emotional man who thrives from empathy towards others and understands when people are going through a difficult time. He is also fully capable of understanding whether or not chasing Osiris is worth it. He can make his own decision about that and he, in his own words, sees Osiris as someone who is worth helping without expecting anything in return because that's what you do for the people you love.
So we have constant villifying of one of them and entirely infantilising the other. This take is objectively wrong and also harmful for people in the fandom who want to interact with this content, especially mlm.
And finally, they're being written by an openly bisexual man who spoke about his own struggles with sexuality and knows how important representation is. It's highly disrespectful to look at this writing and call it abusive.
I know that Saint is wholesome and popular and a lot of people have their own HCs and ships, but you can modify canon without being nasty towards Osiris to the point where I see some takes and I have to genuinely wonder if I'm looking at homophobic and racist undertones.
Destiny lore is all over the place and confusing and it's totally expected to miss some information that would otherwise completely clear things up so I'd implore y'all to first look into it with a bit more nuance and understanding before making blanket statements about a canon gay relationship being abusive.
It's also highly disrespectful to actual abuse victims and actually does the opposite of help when things are mislabelled as abuse. It makes it harder to recognise and identify real abuse while also giving people a false idea of what a normal relationship is like, leading to a lot of people having a completely warped idea about relationships (especially LGBT+ ones). Arguments, disagreements and falling out can happen to anyone. The widespread trend about LGBT+ relationships being pure and flawless and unproblematic is a very dangerous idea to believe in. We have to see these relationships being difficult and nuanced sometimes without immediately jumping to the conclusion that: if it's not perfect then it's abuse.
Thanks for taking the time to read through this.
So we have constant villifying of one of them and entirely infantilising the other.
I just want to emphasize what you said here because this seems to be fandom’s habit with every conflict that occurs between characters and it’s tiring.
