I just love when my favorite books get a screen adaptation and suddenly the fandom tags on every platform are overrun by detailed and aggressive think-pieces about characters that don't exist and relationships, events, plot points, and character background stories that never fucking happened. As well as for characters that have been changed so much from the book that they might as well not even be (and really shouldn't even be considered) the same character anymore.
The words began to pour out of me as they had out of him, and soon we were talking about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words seemed to be essential words the way they did on those rare occasions with my mother. And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like “Yes, yes,” and “Exactly,” and “I know completely what you mean,” and “And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it,” etc.
—THE VAMPIRE LESTAT
AMC really struck gold with the unreliable narrator idea because now people will insist that any flaw in the storytelling is actually a genius premeditated reflection of a fallible narrator, any pacing issues are actually a genius premeditated reflection of a characters psyche, and any lack of character development is actually a genius premeditated reflection on a characters refusal to face their own trauma, and having cheap looking production is actually a genius premeditated reflection of a characters memories, and any unwarranted deviation from the source material is actually a genius premeditated lie that will be proven false at some unspecified point, and any poor handling of sensitive subjects is actually a genius premeditated commentary on the characters own failings, etc, etc.
current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.
someone brought a cake analysis robot to feed the cake into to determine the exact ingredients and supposedly it can spit out the exact same cake. and if you're like dude. what. then they're like well if it bothers you you should have made more cake. i'm hungry and i deserve cake. and you're like dude we're at a party.
Three months later you find out that fifty people locked themselves in a room to discuss how much they loved your cake and how they wished you made more. None of them ever told you.
"why can't they just be friends?" not in the homophobic sense, but in the "in your need to center romance in everything you are missing the whole point of the media in question" sense
People need Jennifer's Body (2009) and Love Lies Bleeding (2024) to be lesbian films even if they are two of the queerest, messiest and most openly bisexual films of our times, simply because there is a certain subset of queer folks who see bisexuality as inherently less queer and more falling into the paradigm of heterosexual titillation for the male gaze. It is pretty much the same theory that governs the criticism of media like The Secret History (1992), Saltburn (2023) or Hannibal NBC (2013-2015) for queerbaiting or for "being cowards" about the depiction of same sex love stories between two men who are clearly bisexual or attracted to multiple genders in canon.
The onus of the blame for heteronormativity in contemporary publishing and media often falls upon bisexual women. I'm thinking of that God awful YouTube video by that Lavender Menace person who started speaking of how sapphic literature these days is so normative (I personally agree) before veering way™ off course to spew vitriol about how this was because every popular sapphic book nowadays is bisexual and not performing the acceptable model of lesbianism or sapphic desire.
When films like Bound get talked about in terms of being a lesbian classic, nobody mentions the fact that Corky, the butch from the film demonstrates biphobic (and by extension lesbiphobic) feelings towards Violet, the femme, and considers her to be "lying" for the male gaze and performing queerness. The film ends positively, with Corky overcoming her biases and acknowledging that Violet is just as queer as she is. It's irrelevant if Violet is bisexual or a closeted lesbian (I lean towards the latter with reference to her character), what's relevant is the policing of certain kinds of identities as being "less" queer and the refusal to accept or show empathy towards bisexual women, as we are considered beings incapable of authentic self presentation or autonomous desire. Instead, we are all just a gaslit hivemind of people operating under comp het.
Bisexual women cannot have peace when it comes to representation; people took that one sentence about Poison Ivy wildly out of context, retconned decades of her representation as a bisexual icon in popular culture in love with another bisexual woman and then gaslit bisexual folks for being "annoying" about it on social media. When Love Lies Bleeding released, on Twitter, bisexual women were told to stfu because this is a film about "REAL butch4butch dykes" (and then you see the film made by a bisexual director and the muscle mommy you love to gatekeep is a) not a butch and b) an open and proud bisexual).
Villanelle, who was openly bisexual in the Killing Eve books, was retconned by fandom into a man hating lesbian and that apparently made her more authentically queer than Eve, who remained bisexual in both TV and source material. Of course, it is easier to see the more "visibly queer" Villanelle as a lesbian, while Eve, whose relationships centre men more, and who has to have her eyes opened by the sexy assassin hunting her down, can be bisexual.
I find this a really weird pattern. The whole subgenre of "bisexual woman having a reckoning and leaving her husband for a lesbian" is corny at best and poorly equates bisexuality with heteronormativity at worst, especially because the same formula is almost never applied to show a bi woman leaving her husband for another bi woman, or a lesbian leaving behind a comp het marriage or having a mid-life awakening in popular sapphic tradpub literature; the closest to this I can find is the novel Cash Delgado is Living the Dream (2024) by Taylor Kay Mejia.
It's silly, and vapid and frankly very condescending to assume that every bisexual women in popular media is actually a lesbian facing comphet. You need to unshackle your points from separatist biphobic rhetoric on social media, even if it is dressed in shallow feminist terminology. It's literally okay to let a film or book be bisexual, and I can promise you it doesn't make the narrative less queer or feminist or subversive.
I know some nasty people will be rbing this post and talking about how bisexuals are the privileged white people of the lgbtq community etc etc, and honestly I don't know how to articulate about this issue without coming off bitter, so here is an essay by Carmen Maria Machado, whose writing on bisexuality, queerness in horror/dark fiction and on sapphic literature & culture in general I highly recommend:
This essay is an exclusive excerpt from "It Came From the Closet."
Most of the men I’d hunted back in my days of acting as judge, jury, and executioner had felt some level of remorse, or at least fear of being caught.
Many of them turned to alcohol or drugs to silence their worries. Others compartmentalized, created fractures in their personalities and lived as two men, one for the light and one for the dark.
But for the worst, the vilest aberration I’d ever encountered, remorse was not an issue.
june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be good june will be
Being mad at Nolan for not casting Greek actors: normal, justified, valid and I agree and most of the castings are ass bc they were focusing on star power rather than casting actors who fit the characters.
Being mad at Zendaya and Lupita Nyong'o bc they’re black but taking no issue with the white actors who aren’t even Greek or even Mediterranean at all: racist and weird, at least Lupita Nyong'o is insanely gorgeous which justifies casting her as Helen, why tf is Tom Holland Telemachus?
i knew some of what would come up in the rots novelization but nothing could have prepared me for just how much love there is in this. implied as well as plain and spelled out. padme asks obi-wan if he loves anakin. palpatine asks anakin if he loves obi-wan more than he loves padme. obi-wan just goes right out and says he loves anakin multiple times, right to the end as he's facing darth vader. obi-wan pulls anakin back from a furious meltdown just by softly saying his name. as soon as they're apart they miss each other like a limb. obi-wan thinks about he'd like to tease anakin in the middle of a deathly fight. anakin, at one the lowest points of his life, says that all he needs his obi-wan to guide him back to the light. obi-wan can't imagine a better way to spend the rest of his life than looking out for anakin's son, alone in the desert. and all this is only, like, half of it. i need to get my hands on whatever matthew stover was smoking when he wrote this
my favourite thing about anakin is how big of a hypocrite he is 😌 palpatine asks him to spy on the jedi council and he’s like ‘okay ❤️ yay ❤️’ but when the jedi council ask him to spy on the chancellor he’s like ‘how can you ask me to spy on him? that’s so dishonest :/’
Yes! He also does this with Palpatine and Mace. Palpatine says a (literally disarmed and helpless) Sith must die and Anakin dews it. Mace says a (dictatorial) Sith must die and Anakin says 'no wait gotta spare him'.
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