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In case you need a refresher before tonight’s episode ⬇️ https://www.buzzsprout.com/1371367/episodes/19321776-the-vampire-lestat-detroit
Interview with the Vampire is back with the first episode of The Vampire Lestat! Lestat is telling his own story through two framing devices
I love being agender because 100% of our rep is aliens and robots and everyone in phighting and the amongi (new!)
it’s always “we need more complex queer rep” until it’s Stolas or Jax or Angel dust or Charlie or literally any queer character who had flaws and makes mistakes
do you want complex LGBTQ rep or do you just want to say you do to feel like a good person and then shit on actual complex rep to also feel like a good person
I don't have anything to draw for pride but I do have some stuff I wanted to say.
CUPIOROMANTIC : wanting a romantic relationship but not feeling any or very little romantic attraction. also we have a very pretty flag
I never got crazy into mha, not that I remember clearly, but I really liked denki and mina. I head canoned her as cupio because I saw a lot of my own tendencies in the way she was acting and I didn't think she had romantic chemistry with anyone. A while later I think I was watching aromantic tiktok compilations or something and she was brought up as canon in one of them and so I had to check because that would be crazy. And then she was and I was so excited since I thought I'd never get anything like that since it's a microlabel.
That excitement was pretty shortlived since it's not brought up in the story, it's in a random book so she gets shipped anyway and lots of aro characters are just ignored anyway. It kinda hurts to see so much pride art of her as being bi, pan, lesbian (romantically) when she's already rep that aromantics and, more specifically, cupioromantics are sorely lacking.
I don't blame people for not knowing but I also don't think we should ignore this. It's not just a label that got slapped on for points its in line with her actions (shes invested in the love lives of her classmates but doesn't pursue anything herself), confirmed by the author, and it can't be bait since it doesn't get talked about enough for it to be functional in that sense. Then that's another problem though, it's not really made obvious or even clearly referenced in the main material nor the merchandise (that I know of).
I just wish we talked about this more because I had a second in that wonderful warm sun of representation and acknowledgement and then it instantly came crashing into me that no one else cares.
If Persona 6 isn't in-your-face levels of Queer/Disabled after the entire state of The Discourse™ for like 15 years, I don't care about it
Representation
To see myself in stories;
Is a blanket being given
When I didn't know I was shivering.
Is tears in my eyes
As someone else calls "you too?"
Is finding buried treasure
After having lost the map.
Representation always matters,
Always reaches out vitally.
No matter how different
Or how short the reach
Representation is comfort
For anyone who hasn't seen it
Or struggles to find it.
Representation calls us forwards
And embraces us imperfectly.
What a wondrous treasure.
What a fearsome stature.
What silent stretching reach.
One thing that just came to me just now was that, despite Luz being the main character, we never actually any exploration of her bisexuality besides blushing to both guys and girls, dating Amity and coming out to her mom during the Thanks to Them montage.
Like, we don't know how Luz realized she was bi or when she did -was it before or after coming to the Boiling Isles? If it was before, how did she feel on being closeted? Why did she feel the need to be in the closet? Was she also bullied for being bi and gender non-conforming? If it was after coming to the Isles, was Amity the first girl she knowingly crushed on? How did that realization felt? How does she feel on being in a place where queerness is normalized, to the point a brown nonbinary transmasculine person such as Raine managed to ascend to Coven Head status? How does it affect her relationship with puritan Belos?
It's kinda egregious when compared to Amity, who despite coming from a queernorm society, deals with stuff related to coming out as a lesbian, such as being afraid of being cruelly rejected by her crush, not knowing how to deal with this burgeoning feelings, chosing between what her parents want and what she wants, and standing up to her mother when she disaproves her girlfriend. And she's not even part of the main trio!
On top of that, considering the parallels between Azura and Hecate with Luz and Amity, and that Luz creates fanart AND fanfic about the books, you could even have her realizing her sexuality via fandom! It's a really common fandom experience of experimenting and realizing your queerness via fanworks! I myself did that!
I get that there are queer writers and audiences who just want queerness to be casual, as mundane as a character's haircolor for example. This usually comes from queer people being tired of homophobia plotlines or just being The Queer Character while the cishets get all cool genre storylines. Or they just don't see their own queerness as an interesting part of themselves. And I understand that. I've been out as bi since I was 22 and I don't feel like it changed my life drastically. It's just been fine.
However, I still think it's disengenuous to treat queerness as something a mundane as eye color because despite the advances on queer rights throught history, we still live in a white supremacist cisheteronormative capitalist patriarchal society, which means gender non conformity and any expression of sexuality that deviates from heterosexual monogamy with the endgoal of marriage and reproduction is still frowned upon. This means that being gay or trans or ace or whatever impacts how someone interacts with the world, and it would be disingenious to treat it otherwise, especially with the current wave of conservatism we're having.
Overall, I think there's a middle ground between tokenized queerness and queernorm.
PS: Yes, I know that Disney meddled with The Owl House to hell and back and they couldn't even showcase Eda going on a date because the executives didn't want to portray a "Dirty old woman". However, if censorship was the case, you'd think Terrace would speak about it, like she did about the aforementioned example or the Disney's involvement with the Don't Say Gay law some years ago, or most recently, the shelving of the Moon Girl episode centering a reccuring character struggles with being a trans girl playing volleyball.
I DO NOT know Dana Terrace, so the most I'll say is that it seems as if it didn't occur to her to expand on Luz's relationship to her own queerness, despite being queer herself. Anyway, it was one hell of a missed opportunity.
The context of this scene is a bit messy and (intentionally) awkward, but I love that Paul says so clearly that being gay feels central to his personal identity. He could have shot down Mirror Georgiou's provocations in a number of other ways.
Homophobia is a thing of the past in Star Trek. But that doesn't necessarily mean society has to "grow past labels" in the sense that nobody uses them or finds them meaningful any more. Though there would most likely be some conceptual shifts.
I find what Paul says about "any universe [he] can possibly imagine" very relatable. Intellectually, I can of course conceive of possible worlds across which features such as sexual orientation vary. But practically and emotionally, I can't really imagine myself as anything but lesbian in a way that this alternate version still feels like me. (Maybe as asexual, but even that is a big stretch.)
Just showing people in queer relationships, who they're attracted to, etc. without "labeling" them is also a good approach to representation. But it's not the only one that makes sense for science fiction.
Not everyone attaches the same significance to their sexual orientation, and they don't have to. But it feels good to see this represented too, especially in utopian science fiction.
