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#also I hate ppl who do gender bends and especially the ones who makes the gender bend like
whimsyprinx · 3 years
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I hate how entitled webcomic fans are,,, like not every page is gonna be a mile long chill and stop whining that the chapter you’ve read is shorter or “not even a whole scene” (which was rude and bs like wtf)
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morethanonepage · 6 years
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My social media circles are full of ppl that really like CMBYN (not to mention all The White Gays everywhere) that get rly incensed if someone mentions pedophilia so I feel awks expressing An Opinion on there and tbf I don't much about the book/movie but I do know the kid is like... barely an adult? And idk man, making an entire romantic story about a barely-adult's torrid love affair with a guy in his thirties is uhhh weird, js
y’know anon i feel great empathy for you because honestly when my (mostly straight) friends have brought up CMBYN and spoken positively about it, i haven’t actually said shit, mostly because this becomes a really hard movie to criticize in a concise fashion -- like the age difference is sketch, the fact that it was written by a straight man makes me automatically wary, the fact that it’s a relationship built on cheating is iffy, and honestly? that it ends with ‘and then he went and married a woman’ is the like the second most common Gay Tragedy ending to things after ‘one or both die,’ and I find it honestly irritating and eye-rollingly predictable, especially if they end there. I expected better from James Ivory, frankly, given that he wrote Maurice, one of my favorite queer movies of all time.
like i have no doubt that CMBYN is beautifully shot and probably well acted and written and I don’t even really have a problem with Characters Doing Problematic Things per se -- my problem is when those things are normalized and romanticized, and my concern with CMBYN is that that’s 100% what happened. It’s a tragic beautiful coming of age story about a seventeen year old child who falls in love with an older man who should know better than to get involved. it’d be sketchy if it were a 17 year old girl and a 24 year old guy, it’d be sketchy in any other combination of genders, and the fact that it’s not treated as such is troubling to me. 
Because we can go up and down on ‘oh but it’s consensual and elio is in love/lust and pursued the relationship in the first place and he’s of age in italy’ but that’s the kind of rhetoric that leads to young people getting manipulated and abused by older men and women -- they wanted it, they’re mature for their age, they pursued me -- like those aren’t rare justifications from abusers, y’know? and i see such similar phrasing used in so many think pieces about how it’s totes cool for CMBYN to have that relationship at it’s center, apparently without irony.
And like, look, most of us have had crushes on older people in our lives, and especially for people in the queer community, where there aren’t as many options for dating and you’re just so desperate for someone who understands you and accepts you for who you are, but that ends up putting you in a very vulnerable position when it comes to people who have any potential power over you (even if that power is literally just something like ‘they can leave at the end of the summer and you’re still stuck with your parents’), and that’s why the adults in that situation have a responsibility to shut that shit down when it happens. 
The queer community has a particular problem with this -- because there is this narrative/perception in the straight world that gay men especially are going around ~recruiting~ young boys to abuse, and i think we as a community tend to overcorrect and bend over backwards to deny that that ever happens, that any queer relationship would ever be abusive or predatory, which does us all a disservice and puts young people in genuine danger.
i’m not clutching my pearls at the fact that a 17 year old teenaged boy has sexual and romantic feelings for a very handsome 24 year old man who looks like Armie Hammer. Like, duh.  But that it’s requited and consummated -- especially given the fact that Armie Hammer’s in his 30s and looks it, and Timothée Chalamet look substantially younger than his 21 years (and even younger than the character’s 17, in the movie) -- gives me pause. Like maybe it’s because I’m too old -- I’m 29 atm and I look at Elio and I’m like, that’s a child, but I honestly see gifs of them together and it genuinely just looks off to me. 
And I think tbh the filmmakers and Hammer himself have done the movie no favors by pretending everyone who’s somewhat dubious about the relationship is just being homophobic -- like I’m sure I have as much internalized homophobia as literally anyone raised in a homophobic society might, but in this particular case I’m p sure that’s not my problem. But then again there definitely are homophobic people latching on to the same issue, because it feeds into their already well established narrative of The Predatory Gays, and I’m not like going to blame that precisely on the filmmakers, but also like...not helping, dudes, not helping.
i’m not ready to say this movie glorifies pedophilia because as much as I hate the ‘well pedophilia actually means’ parsing that these debates can devolve into, I genuinely feel like the intent of the film is to put Elio in a position of discovery and power in his identity and his sexuality (more than put Oliver in a position of pursuing and using a 17 year old boy for his own power or pleasure). But art doesn’t exist in a vacuum etc etc and i’m just personally not comfortable with the movie itself and, more importantly, with how it’s been perceived and put forth as this beautiful gay romance story that you can’t criticize without people accusing you of being homophobic or prudish. 
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