STAR TREK: PICARD // S1E7 Nepenthe
Before your sister came to me, I was haunted by my past... and marking time. Wasting my life. But now, I'm alive, and I have a mission, which means there's not a hell of a chance that you or anyone else can stop me.
Supermassive artpalooza. I always find my screencaps or the original photos through Pinterest or @hardyoungpro who graciously agreed to let me use his freecams with credit. My love letters to these wonderful characters and stories.
On representation, "word of god," and speaking to minor deities in The Quarry fandom
Building off of @torchmlp's excellent post about ace Ryan headcanons, I've been thinking a lot about "word of god" and the construction of canon since that poll in which Nick Furcillo was apparently assigned "canon" bisexual via Instagram DM.
Beware: disc horse under the cut...
I honestly found that a little bit irritating as a way to determine a character's 'canonical' sexuality because, to me, being canonically queer means that a character provides representation for queer people in the actual work. Dylan Lenivy is canonically queer. Ryan Erzahler is canonically queer. Nick Furcillo is NOT canonically queer, because he doesn't do or say anything to indicate that queernees in the game.
Now, his being queer isn't contradicted by anything in the game either, so we can't say he's canonically straight/canonically not queer. I like to ship him with Jacob myself, so I don't take issue with the idea that he could be bi or pan or whatever. (I'm not sure anyone at that summer camp is actually straight straight!) But I dislike when actor headcanons are presented as truth and used as a way to shut down discussions because that reading is now privileged by the actor. They're headcanons. You can take 'em or leave 'em. But, strictly speaking, they aren't canon.
[Not that that's what was happening there, it just reminded me of the times I've had this happen to me when I questioned an actor's headcanon to other fans. No hate to the operators of that polling account or the person providing the information from Evan, or even Evan himself! I don't think anyone is doing anything wrong there, I just personally take issue with that construction of canon because it separates it entirely from the issue of representation.]
Things writers say but do not indicate for certain in the actual work, to me, are more of a soft canon. It might be that they had the intention all along and simply didn't feel the need to make it any more explicit (which I think is the case when the SMG devs talk about Dylan being gay [as opposed to bisexual] and Ryan being 'bisexual no matter what the player choses'), but it also gives the opportunity for less than scrupulous writers to claim representation for themselves after the fact without taking on the inherent risk of actually representing that aspect of the character (JKR telling us Dumbledore was meant to be gay all along without ever having more than the barest of subtext in the books, for example).
And some actor headcanons are just so irresistible that we've nearly all taken them up as our personal headcanons too (Dylan's cat being named Schrödinger, for example), others are widely adopted but still occasionally disputed (Dylan 'having access to drugs' as Miles says in his first Quarry playthrough, or being a stoner in general, is a popular headcanon but not one I personally share--again, no hate to those that do, but to me the drug talk seems more likely to be part of the 'blasé Dylan' persona than something he's serious about in his regular life--not that Dylan couldn't or wouldn't ever smoke weed, but the idea of him sharing the stoner archetype of many of Miles's movie characters just doesn't really fit him, to me).
Then we have Justice's statements in the cast playthrough, which are all over the place: he facetiously says that Ryan "fell for Laura because they're both alphas," that Ryan "likes Dylan-Dylan" and "doesn't care about technology, he just wants to be closer to Dylan," then later says he initially interpreted the "maybe neither" to be hinting that Ryan is developing feelings for Laura, but after more reflection came to see it more as Ryan being "an ace king who doesn't like nobody."
Justice gives us such a variety of interpretations that even if we wanted to take his word as canon, it would be difficult to know which of his words to take. Miles even says that Justice can declare Ryan to be canonically asexual if he wants, but I'm 99% sure he meant that as a joke and so many people took it seriously. I'm not opposed to the idea of Ryan being asexual (in fact, one of the many WIPs I'm working on is about how he might navigate realizing he has some sort of feelings for Dylan, but feeling conflicted about letting those feelings be known because of the stigma around asexuality and the fear of being rejected for it), but as someone on the asexual spectrum myself, I do not feel represented by Ryan in that way just because Justice declared him an "ace king" after the fact.
The bottom line is that I think we should take actor headcanons for what they are. They may be influenced by some greater insight coming out of their experience portraying the character, or they could be something they came up with after the fact when reflecting, OR they could be off-the-cuff comments made to either please, provoke, or amuse fans, their fellow actors, interviewers, etc. In the end, we get to pick and choose from the buffet of ideas, but I don't think canon canon can be determined by what is said in extra-canonical spaces.
you should draw jacob... or nick... or both if you like them together...........
i wanted to focus on solo pieces for now but this is my first time drawing nick!! i hope he looks cool enough:3 i always found his model a bit awkward but charming. evan evagora is a guy ever
