rant time I guess because I keep seeing more and more people pissing me off
This doesn’t only apply to Sam and Frodo, but it’s the example I’m going to use because I see it coming up the most. Call them platonic, call them romantic, but please stop shoving your opinions down other people’s throats. I’m going to share my own experience.
My grandfather loved lord of the rings so much because he interpreted a lot of those "deep platonic friendships" as being quite romantic. He grew up in the earlier half of the 20th century, in Germany especially, and he had a lot of really "troublesome" encounters with his close male friends (his words not mine) before meeting and marrying his wife.
Then he raised me, and when I read his copies of lord of the rings he told me to take care of them because those books were so important to him in adulthood (when they came out in the 50s) because he felt seen. not like it was such a disastrous thing to fall madly in love with your best friend and then grieve that relationship for decades. He really related to Sam, especially his relationship with Frodo, marrying Rosie, having to say goodbye, etc. I still remember being a younger teenager and seeing the movies in theaters when they came out, and seeing him crying in the seat next to mine because "Patrick, Patrick, they got the [insert tiny detail from book] right!"
Stop normalizing the erasure of queer literature just because characters “weren't intended to be written that way”. One of the beautiful things media can do is be interpreted in different ways by different people. by someone who always felt such grief over wanting to live his life differently than he was allowed to.
