going to say this once and i'm going to say it clearly. bc i woke up to some weird shit about that post.
this fandom is primarily white. that has shaped everything about it—the discourse, the dynamics, the way certain characters get treated, the way certain actors get treated. and if you've been in this space for any length of time and you're being honest with yourself, you already know this.
here is the structure of what happens: in all white spaces, asian identity gets flattened into stereotype. in queer white spaces (& this will be a tough pill to swallow for many of you) it actually gets worse—because whiteness becomes the default lens for queerness itself. so it's not just "he doesn't act like what white people expect," it's that his existence reads as a disruption to how queerness is supposed to look. one axis of marginalization is not authority over all of them. a lot of people in this space have not learned that.
what that produces is the most self-assured and punitive discourse imaginable. entitlement that becomes weaponization—of identity, of language, of "correctness." it is exactly why queer people of color do not feel safe in spaces like this, or in identifying with queerness at all when it has been this thoroughly and historically shaped by whiteness.
this is not abstract. not even a two days ago someone was in my notes talking about european superiority on an HR post. when i named it—because this is a japanese canadian character, and no matter how you dice it you are implying something very strange—anons flooded in with defenses about nationality, canadianness, anything except the point. that is the pattern.
and it extends into how this whole thing gets managed. it is strange that Hudson's PR team spends more time fielding questions about his sexuality than addressing what keeps getting dredged up about him—which, by the way, is happening precisely because he is the main person of color on this cast. it is strange that the people directly associated w this show, and i am deliberately not naming names, mostly speak up about speculation on sexuality and relationships, but i have heard them address the reality of having an asian canadian lead maybe once or twice, in very mild terms, considering how much of the hostility toward him is directly tied to that. this is the same dynamic i'm describing above. it is about what people are comfortable naming. queerness fits the framework they already have. combined with race, apparently, does not.
it is not always exclusively twitter drama. it is a consistent structural refusal to engage with context when the context is inconvenient. it has been going on a lot longer than this fandom and it will outlast it. and we should all be a lot less comfortable with it than we are.
