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apathetic-revenant · 6 years

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alright I have had this Doctor Who rant building up in me for years and I gotta get it out eventually so I might as well go ahead and do it

this rant is about why I stopped watching the show after season 7 and it’s not gonna be complimentary so I will put it under a cut and not in the tag so no one has to read it that doesn’t want to.

also it is very long.

some background: I started watch Doctor Who when I was thirteen. because I have a knack for picking the worst place to start a series, the first episode I ever fully watched was Human Nature. it was very confusing, but I was entranced. I immediately went to the internet and looked up as much as I could find about the show, and before the next episode had even aired I was already whole-heartedly in love with it.

Doctor Who was very important to me for the next several years. it was something to hold onto through some pretty difficult times. it could be quite hard to watch in the US (let alone to get a hold of merch or novels) but I grabbed every scrap of it that I could. Doctor Who was something that I found solace in when everything else seemed absolutely awful.

so it really hurt to fall out of love with it. but I did.

now I’m fully willing to admit that a lot of what happened had to do with very personal, specific circumstances for me, and truthfully I don’t know how much of it applies to anyone else at all. but...I don’t think that makes my feelings about it entirely invalid either.

I was sad to see RTD and Ten--my first Doctor--go, but I was very excited for Steven Moffat to take over. I thought that the episodes that he had written were some of the best in the show, and I was looking forward to what he would do with more free rein. but he disappointed me in a lot of ways.

I don’t like Moffat’s writing, not anymore. I think he did well under the constraints of only writing one story a season, but not when given control over the entire show. I think his overarching plot lines are grandiose, over-complicated, are more concerned with building themselves up than delivering a satisfying resolution, and show a tendency to think that stories get more interesting the larger they are in scale, which is sometimes true but certainly not always. I think he spends too much time talking things up--his characters, his stories--resulting in a lot of telling and not enough showing. I think the occasional bombastic reminder of how old/powerful/smart/morally conflicted/whatever the Doctor is is fine enough, but that Moffat turned the dial on that up so much that I got sick of hearing people talk about the Doctor at all, which is not a good thing for the protagonist of the show. I think he hamstrung his own monsters by insisting on bringing them back over and over on increasingly larger scales so that something that was originally scary because it was mysterious and unknown become banal through over-exposure. I think his characterization is extremely poor, resulting in characters that are either inconsistent, two-dimensional, or both. I think he relied too much on using Time Travel Rules for dramatic effect, which doesn’t work too well when said Rules were made up just for that episode and aren’t consistent. I think he has a deeply irritating tendency to extend his control not just over his own era but on the entire show: ret-conning the Time War to what he thought it should be, writing characters that are not just the most important person ever to the Doctor he is writing, but to every Doctor there’s ever been.

but.

all that is just writing. I think it’s bad writing, and not writing that I at all enjoyed, but just bad writing on its own doesn’t really offend me. Doctor Who has had plenty of bad writing in the past and it’s carried on quite well regardless, and even if I don’t like it, well, if other people do then that’s good for them and I can live and let live.

the problem is that bad writing is not all that I disliked about the show under Moffat’s tenure. it is not what made me truly and deeply uncomfortable with the show as it went on until I had to stop watching it altogether.

here’s where the personal bit starts to come in. see, I’m asexual. at thirteen, I don’t think I really knew that yet, but I had started to twig that there was something a bit different about me. I didn’t seem to be feeling all the things thirteen year olds were usually supposed to be feeling. I read YA books describing puberty in ways that I often felt uncomfortable with and disconnected from. but maybe I was a late bloomer, I thought--I didn’t really have a lot of other information to go on anyway.

so when I was reading up on the show after watching Human Nature and read that the Doctor typically didn’t show any interest in romance or attraction, I didn’t exactly think “oh, it’s someone like me!” but it definitely drew my attention, even if all I thought was “oh thank god, a show that won’t spend so much time on all that weird boring stuff.”

of course, watching the second part of that two-parter made it pretty clear that while the classic series may have abstained from romance, the new series felt no such restriction. I was disappointed, but not too much, because this was pretty much business as usual and I was very accustomed to it.

but I’ve never been able, since then, to completely disconnect my experience with watching Doctor Who with my experience of discovering asexuality and what that meant for me. not when it contained the only character I’d yet encountered who even came close to being canonically asexual. not when there was so much discussion in and around the fandom about how the Doctor should be written. not when the show itself was clearly conscious of wanting to prove that whatever had happened in the old series, the new series Doctor was not asexual.

it was little things. like the way, any time I read anything about that infamous kiss in the TV movie, the reaction to it was always characterized as being a silly fandom thing--oh these repressed nerds, fussing about how the Doctor kissing someone violates canon, just goes to show how stuffy and out of touch they are. or the discussions of ‘dancing’ in season one that scornfully made clear that of course the Doctor felt attraction because it’s such a fundamental thing that it’d be weird for even an alien not to feel it. I mean, who could empathize with a character who wasn’t interested in sex?! it was things like the way the EU in the hiatus years tended to play up the Doctor being asexual--all in the service of making him seem more alien, more detached from human emotion. it was things that I never saw anyone complain about, that no one else ever seemed to think was a problem in any way, so I thought the fault must be mine for being uncomfortable with it.

I’m well aware that this did not start with Moffat--the new series was taking part in it from the outset, and I have my own issues with that (I’ve never been able to get onboard with a romance between a 1000+ year old alien and a 19-year-old girl. sorry, I know lots of people love that ship, but I just can’t personally). but it got a lot worse under his tenure.

I watched the TARDIS--a goddamn inanimate blue box--get characterized as the Doctor’s wife, a woman, called ‘sexy’, because for some reason the connection between an alien and their biomechanical time machine needs to map nicely onto a heterosexual relationship. I watched River making orgasm jokes at the camera with a wink, and the sonic screwdriver used to make dick jokes. I watched a parade of female characters that all seemed to fall into the mold of Sexy Flirty Feisty, who all fell hopelessly in love with the Doctor, whose lives revolved around him even from a very young age.

I remember feeling sick and stunned as I watched a scene where Amy started making out with the Doctor while he tried to get away, a scene that was clearly supposed to be funny. I watched all this at the same time that I was struggling with the idea that I didn’t think I wanted sex at all, feeling like I was weird and wrong for it, like I would eventually have to fall into the right mold and go through the motions no matter how much I didn’t want to, because there didn’t seem to be any room in the world for a person like me.

but even then, I felt like the problem was more on me. Doctor Who wasn’t really doing anything that every other show I watched didn’t do. it felt selfish to expect the show to cater to me when I was clearly in the vast minority of people. anyway, I didn’t really expect asexual representation. I still don’t. I’d love to have it, but expecting would just be getting my hopes up a lot so they could be dashed over and over again. I know a lot of people still don’t even know that asexuality exists, or what it really is, which is becoming less and less of an excuse as it becomes more well known, but I still don’t ever expect it to be brought up in mainstream pop culture (at this point I pretty much figure I’ll just to have to do it myself). I assumed that this writing on Doctor Who came out of the same place, that they felt fine writing off any sign of asexuality in the old series as being an outdated artifact they were no longer bound to because they didn’t know there was anyone in real life who actually felt like that.

and then I read a quote from Steven Moffat, about Sherlock--another series featuring a character with a distinct lack of interest in sex or romance in the source material. Moffat said that Sherlock was not asexual because that would be boring--no fun at all--and that him intentionally distancing himself from his feelings was much more interesting.

that was the betrayal. that was when I realized--he knew. he knew what asexuality was and he chose not to put it in his work because it was boring. it was not just “I don’t see you.” it was “I see you, I know you exist, but I don’t care.”

all my struggle, my identity, my existence, willfully tossed aside because it was too boring to even think about, compared to the gripping tale of a straight dude who didn’t have time for women because he was too busy being really smart.

in retrospect it’s not surprising. this was, after all, the same show in which a self-described lesbian falls for a man, I guess to show that Sherlock is just so appealing that women will change sexualities for him. but hey, it goes both ways--this is the same character that, according to Moffat, Sherlock only lost to in the original story because he fancied her and got distracted. obviously nothing else could explain a woman beating Sherlock Holmes. don’t worry, he corrected that little oversight in his show by having Irene have to be rescued by Sherlock, the way things should properly go.

I guess that was the point where I lost trust in the show. Doctor Who had been there for me through a lot of rough shit, but it was not going to be there for me on this one. it was not going to make me feel more comfortable with myself, feel like I was okay just the way I was, like I could be proud in my own skin. I know it’s helped other people with that, and I am truly happy for them. but I wouldn’t be one of them. not while Moffat was in charge. I was too boring. now, another woman falling in love with the Doctor--now that would be interesting, eh?

I couldn’t trust anymore that any joke about the Doctor not understanding sex--ha ha, those jokes always seemed to go, look at the funny alien acting all confused and ignorant--would be any more than that, a joke, to be tossed aside the moment a tempting bit of lewd humor or romantic moment came up. I couldn’t trust that any female character would appear on the show--or even would have existed in the show’s history--without becoming yet another in the long line of women who fancied the Doctor. maybe the show would do better, maybe it would become something I could feel comfortable with again--but I was done waiting around to find out.

I stopped watching the show. I went to college. I watched other stuff. I kept on struggling. I still didn’t see myself in media, in lots of ways, but I found people like me on the internet, I read niche fiction and bits of fanfic that finally described my experiences, and I started feeling better about myself. not perfect, but better.

I wasn’t watching Doctor Who anymore, or Sherlock, but I heard things over time.

like Moffat passing over three past Doctors, saying that despite them all being ready and capable he wasn’t including them in the 50th Anniversary because he didn’t think they’d want to “struggle into their old costumes” again, managing to simultaneously diss three great actors who’d been contributing to the show for decades and demonstrate a stunning lack of creativity for a sci-fi writer for a show with a large budget by apparently being unwilling to even try to figure out a way to work around them having aged. oh, but McGann got to come back long enough to get killed off. and we would have had Eccleston but he didn’t want to come back for the special that retconned all the work he put into his character as being based on a giant lie, I wonder why?

like how Sherlock rewrote the ending of a story that originally had the villain finished off by a woman, because as the writers explained in an interview, it was completely unbelievable that that could happen.

like lots of lovely little comments, about how women only watched Sherlock because they were attracted to Cumberbatch, or watched Doctor Who if the Doctor was hot enough; about how bisexual representation wasn’t needed because bi people were too busy “having fun” to watch TV anyway; about how the idea of a female Doctor was as silly as a male queen. well, fine. I’m personally glad that Steven Moffat dismissed the idea of a female Doctor because I shudder to think how he would have written her.

I could go on, but I have other stuff to do. you don’t have to take my word for it, though; here’s a nice article to start with.

I almost didn’t bother watching the newest season, but I made a spur of the moment decision to catch it. and I am enjoying it so far. it’s reminding me of the things I originally loved about the show. I was nervous about how the first female Doctor would be written, but watching Thirteen in action gave me a sense of empowerment I honestly wasn’t expecting. maybe someday I’ll be able to just completely enjoy the show again without having so many conflicting feelings about it.

probably eventually I’ll go back and watch what I missed. there may be things I enjoy in there. episodes I like. I’ve gotten the impression I would like Capaldi himself. and if I just didn’t like Moffat’s writing, I would be happy to enjoy what I enjoyed and not bother with the rest. I would be willing to believe that he might improve or take a different tack that I enjoyed more.

but after the things I’ve seen in Moffat’s writing, and the things he has said, I don’t trust him anymore. I don’t feel comfortable enough to ever fully enjoy his writing. I can’t respect him because I know he does not respect me.

really I guess I should never have been all that surprised. like I said, I don’t really expect to see myself in most media. and plenty of works are worse than Doctor Who.

I guess Doctor Who was just the only one that got my hopes up first.

#rants #long

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bartsugsy · 7 years

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I hope the use of Seal lyrics was intentional Lo (I mean I'm pretty sure it was lol) cos "my power my pleasure my pain" distracted me from the great meta (to be?) post you were making! But back on topic I feel you on all the unresolved shiz, I just don't think the show think anywhere near as deeply into it as us! I do think more effort is put into Robron (and Coira) then other couples which translates into longer story arcs, so there's still hope.. pleasure and pain... lol!

oh, yk i just can’t resist throwing nonsensical song lyrics into things

the show definitely doesn’t think about this shit as deeply as we do because… well, they’ve got other characters to worry about and we’re all out here like HERE’S 200 WORDS OF META ON THE SIGN IN THE BACKGROUND OF A SCENE WHERE ROBERT AND AARON ARE MAKING OUT

(i say we but that was me. i did that. I DID IT AND I STAND BY IT)

sometimes i do think though that… even if yes, ok, OK FINE, none of these scenes were made to withstand the level of in-depth scrutiny we put them under and no, i never needed to write a 3000 word essay on the confusing characterisation of rebecca white when she’s clearly, in the crudest terms, more plot device than representative of an understandable human and as such it’s all just sort of futile, but… sometimes, just sometimes, i think the bigger picture ideas aren’t actually necessarily off base

ok and i just got this ask from another anon, so hopefully neither of you mind, but i’m going to put this in here, because this ties in to the point i’m going to attempt to make (that’s really just me validating my inability to be succinct and my love of meta) lmao:

anonymous asked:

but i think - because its a soap - robert and aaron are never going to resolve any of their issues in a satisfying way. because if they were resolved and dealt with then the show wouldn’t be able to use those issues for drama. so i can’t really see their reunion addressing any of the january stuff tbh

on some level, i agree with you. i totally do. on another, broader-picture level, i think that… i think i’ve been surprised by the level of cohesiveness in the storytelling for aaron and robert - like, it’s not the most tightly constucted thing in the world by any means, and this is obviously coming out of me coming from the glee fandom, where we had literally no cohesiveness ever and so i’m probably just over-impressed by even the most marginal attempts to write a meaningfully constructed longer form story, but… but i think, given that it’s a soap and given how much content they need to produce and given the inconsistent treatment of a lot of the characters on the show, aaron and robert’s relationship does get a decent amount of care put into it, on the whole, and sometimes that’s visible in the storytelling - like sometimes, a scene will happen that just sort of… slots a lot of things into place and calls back to meta we’ve been writing the whole time and… idk. like, you really do just need to look at rebecca as a character and compare the writing for her over the past year with the writing for aaron and robert, who have much more consistent traits and motivations.

i think this is why i like writing meta for this show. because sometimes there’s a pay off, where the show will specifically highlight things we’ve been talking about and examining and make them explicitly canon. it’s super satisfying. the heavy handedness works (for me) for this purpose. it’s like taking our meta and saying to everyone ‘oh hey, that thing you were reading into is exactly what we were going for’. and the general audience will do this as well - everyone will have an opinion on what’s happening beneath the surface of some stuff, it’s just that they might mention it off-hand to someone they’re watching the show with whereas we sit down and spend three hours typing up an argument to support it based entirely on how we’ve interpreted that last three years of canon and then use it to try and convince people to feel the same way lmaoooo. it’s awesome. but those bigger picture ideas that maybe aren’t called out specifically

like… don’t get me wrong, i don’t believe in the idea that they’re going to call back specifically to the january argument and take a big, in-depth delve into why that specifically happened and why it was some sort of turning point that they ignored in favour of being together and how that ultimately went wrong… i can’t imagine that’s happening lmao, that’s absolutely what our meta is for (which is fine). like… i don’t see them calling back to the specifics in any meaningful way (at most we might get some dialogue parallels bc the show loves those, as we know lmao)

but like… ok, some of this is going to come back to how early on did the show know they were going to break aaron and robert up, in all honesty. we know that iain has been intending to get rid of the whites… probably since the time he started? going by the interviews he was giving at that time? we know rebecca was brought on with some sort of plan in place for her character (to get in between robron lmao). obviously we can sort of… like, chicken or the egg, what came first - lucy announcing she was pregnant and them realising that rob and aaron would have to get married quickly, or iain deciding to go max feeling exploitation and get two weddings out of robron? this is all random extrapolation on events we know, because we can’t pinpoint when it became clear to them that they were going to do a wedding, followed by a big break up, followed by a big reunion and culminating in another, ~~~~real (so to speak)~~ wedding. but at some point, that would have been firmly in their plans.

the january argument -

ok. ok fuck it let’s meta the january argument even though i literally said i wasn’t going to and that i wanted to wait until they got back together idc i don’t listen to me she doesn’t know what’s up

the reason i love the january argument so much as a turning point within the larger overarching story they’ve been telling is because it works so well as this big flashing harbinger of doom that the boys both ignore - it’s built up specifically from problems they have been having since right before they got engaged

and look, i wanna write meta about all the arguments they have firstly from the reunion until ssw and then from in between ssw to the january argument, because i think the stuff that takes place when rebecca is in the village is very pointedly building towards what ultimately happens in january

and i think it’s clever because when you watch it for the first time, the fact that aaron is ultimately driven to violence and puts kasim in hospital and then ultimately gets arrested is what you’re left thinking about - it totally draws attention away from the things aaron and robert are saying to one another and the way that their argument(s) echo previous fights they have had around rebecca and aaron not understanding rob’s bisexuality and rob’s tendency to lie and scheme and rob’s defensiveness around his schemes and how much he has changed and is trying to change vs how much aaron needs from him and just… the ways in which they’ve been slowly falling apart.

(and ok at some point i will write my actual meta where i actually quote the dialogue instead of making vague references to it, although i usually feel like it’s a safe assumption to think that you guys know where i’m sort of pulling these ideas from when i talk about this shit - specifically, stuff i want to talk about includes the things aaron has said about rebecca and robert’s interactions with her, the moment robert talks about his scheme as something that is no longer about andy and absolutely about the money, aaron’s understanding of the robecca kiss, rob talking about how aaron can’t be happy and that he screws things up (which is horrible foreshadowing for kasim), rob yelling about aaron walking away from arguments and not recognising the change rob has made and the way that rob literally brushes his kiss with rebecca under the table, aaron literally saying that he doesn’t like the person he is around robert because of how things have played out with rebecca ec. etc.)

anyway, they just… i’ve fully written about this before, but the kasim stuff acts as a distraction both for robert and aaron - who, before aaron’s arrest, are having a tentative conversation where rob is gently pushing for them to still go to vegas to try and work things out and aaron is absolutely not convinced. after aaron gets arrested and then gets released, the next scene they have is aaron trying to give robert an easy out and robert point blank refusing - over the course of the three episodes, from aaron getting arrested to aaron giving the police a new statement, rob makes multiple references to fighting for their relationship even if aaron doesn’t think it’s a good idea - literally says that he’s not going to stop fighting for them, which is important but also sort of conveniently skims past the point that this argument didn’t occur in a vacuum and at no point have they faced up to what happened to bring them there between the two of them.

when, during the reveal, aaron says that rob was the one who pushed for this, you can sort of see where he’s coming from in a sense. i think aaron’s impending sentencing also made it harder for them to focus on what the real issue was (or rather, made it way easier to ignore, because they were too busy being terrified of losing one another) - but even then, rob decides to throw a surprise wedding because in canon we know that aaron is panicking about leaving robert and losing him completely - which is ultimately what happens, both exactly in the way aaron feared, but also not at all because rob’s motivation to cheat is, as we all know, entirely about aaron (or rather, about both rob’s feelings for aaron and rob’s horrible decision making/tendency towards lashing out impulsively when confronted with things he doesn’t know how to deal with like a normal human and fucking up his and other people’s lives in the process). aaron’s fears that rob would want someone else were unfounded but those fears also sort of led him to underestimate how much of a toll his getting sent to prison would have on robert and so, in the most perverse and unexpected way, his fears about what robert would do given rob’s behaviour up until that point, ended up being spot on.

all this is to make a point that the january argument played a massive role in robert and aaron getting married the first time round and also led them both down a road where they were distracted from what should have been the ultimate sign that things weren’t working and thus didn’t take the opportunity to fix it, rather let things get dangerously and disastrously out of control. i remember a lot of the meta around the time of the jan argument pointing out that things hadn’t been resolved and that they would be resolved at some point - i saw a lot of people talk about an immediate resolution. i think my instinct was that it would take them a little longer - maybe a month max, but that things would be worked out before the wedding. the fact that the wedding wasn’t legal was like this big red herring - it made us all believe that the only reason they’d have a second wedding would be to legalise things. but oh, oh no, no - little did we realise at that point that the whole first wedding was just another distraction (a very beautiful and romantic distraction, but a distraction nonetheless). the first wedding wasn’t a random break from the misery they’d had between that point and ssw, it was a symptom. once again, robert finding a way to push through their issues, to make it more about their love and the fact that they want to be together, and aaron following because that’s what he wanted too - neither of them wanted to deal head on with any of their shit.

uh, taking things right back to my original point of ‘how much of this will we actually see resolved when they get back together’ - i mean, it’s difficult to say? because on the one hand, it depends on what story the show wants to tell with them next and on the other, it depends whether they want to sort of just brush their issues under the carpet and pretend they never happened (worst case lmao). i think, though… i mean, i don’t know, i actually genuinely don’t want to speculate at all on what we’ll ultimately see because down that road leads madness and also an inevitability that we’ll all get it wrong, as we did before with both the jan argument and the purpose of the first wedding, for instance. i think, particularly because it is something i’m looking forward to, i also don’t want to put any expectations on it, really? i’d rather just watch it as open-mindedly as possible. which is also why i want to wait until after i watch it until i really write my meta around this break up, because then i can sort of shape my opinions about what we’ve been shown and where they’ve taken things. i don’t want to try and assume they’ll deal with x or they won’t deal with y or they’ll have them do this or whatever.

having said that!!! that doesn’t stop us from looking at what’s been done so far - the wedding, prison and the ons happened over six months ago now, so we’ve got enough distance from it to say that… look, rob and aaron had so much misery and so many problems from ssw onwards and they ended up going through a massive break up. so big-picture wise, it’s logical that all that misery was intentional. it wasn’t just fuelling the andy plot or whatever, it was there as a build up to ultimately splitting aaron and rob up and making it last a while (even if they hadn’t decided at that point to actually break them up - it’s chicken and egg, they would have known what they’d put them through up until that point and understood that this could realistically ultimately lead to a break up). the january argument wasn’t resolved because it couldn’t be, because that would be counter-productive to the eventual plan of separating them. the first wedding was rushed and not legal and the reason for it being held was literally LITERALLY bc aaron was afraid rob would cheat - because again, that wedding wasn’t going to be the one that lasted. there had to be problems there.

basically - yes we absolutely put more thought into this shit than the show does but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the thought we put into it is… wrong? or will lead to us not feeling satisfied? because the way that things have gone wrong with robron so far have led to a break up. it feels like a safe assumption that they’re not going to go through a massive break up again after they get back together at the beginning of 2018, so on some level somewhere, it seems like a safe assumption that we’re not going to have rob kissing his ex to get money, or aaron doing a miserable 6 week prison stint, or robert knocking someone up etc. basically, i guess what i’m saying is… the pain wasn’t for nothing? it was there to play a function in the story and while i doubt that aaron and rob are gonna get back together and the show is gonna be like ‘ok well their problems are fixed now so that’s nice’, they’re going to be writing with a different eventual goal to the one they’ve had this year?

this wasn’t even ur original question i just took this to an entirely different place lmao. sorry. i guess what i’m trying to say is i’m not particularly concerned about getting a final resolution on rob and aaron’s issues, but the writing for them will change as the direction of their story changes, so. the reason i’m waiting is more because i’m waiting for that direction to stop being “keep them apart” and start being “get them back on track and prove they can be together”. which is sort of… the next step? i guess? regardless of whether or not they have problems (and it’s a soap so u know they will), the story needs to shift from a break up to a big second wedding - the one that you assume will last more than a month (because they’re not stupid - they know there’s only so much you can wring out of a thing and they’re already pushing it). so… yeah. that’s what i mean when i talk about this particular storyline wrapping up.

i could just keep that last paragraph and delete the rest and you would still have your answer but im obviously not going to do that.

#answering anons #....im on my mobile so this isn’t going under a cut im so sorry #i’ll fix it later #long post #meta #god damn @ myself pls shut up for once

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bisexual-books · 7 years

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Prepub Review - Ramona Blue by Julie Murphy

Guess who managed to get their hands on an advance reader copy of the year’s most anticipated bisexual book?

Before we start, all our book reviews contain MASSIVE SPOILERS and this one will be no different. Which means if you want to read this book spoiler free when it is released in May, turn back now!

Also, I have a LOT of thoughts on this book and how it plays into cultural narratives around non-monosexuality, so buckle up cuz this is gonna be a long one.

Everybody ready? Got a snack? Lets do this thing.

The most important thing you need to know about Ramona Blue is that its not a story about a lesbian who is “cured” by straight boy dick. Not even a little bit. Ramona flat-out says she is not straight and shuts characters down HARD when they make that assumption. There is no way you can read this book and walk away with the conclusion that it plays into a homophobic trope of men “turning” lesbians unless you are just willfully ignoring both subtext and very explicit text.

The connection between Ramona and Freddie (the straight guy) centers a lot of the emotional action, but it unfolds slowly and with a lot of deliberate choices. It’s also an interracial relationship in which he teaches her about blackness as much as she teaches him about queerness. The whole thing has a super social justice vibe about it. The characters make mistakes and missteps, but they (and the reader) are allowed to learn from them. The book is also grounded in the strong relationship between Ramona and her sister Hattie, creating something that is more akin to a classic coming of age story than a romance novel.

Now let's go deeper.

Bisexual feminist author Shiri Eisner writes a lot about how bisexuals operate in the gray area, the mushy middle, the space between homo/hetero. We are inherently boundary busters and shit destabilizers. I couldn’t help but think of her work while I was reading this book because at its core, Ramona Blue’s overarching theme is about finding oneself when your shit destabilizes and all that is left is the gray area.

That’s it. That’s the theme. This entire book is about boundary busting and category destabilizing.

Ramona starts the book with a strong identity, not just as a lesbian but believing she knows exactly what the rest of her life will be. By the end, she has moved into questioning not only her orientation but everything she had planned for life after high school. For example, she starts the book absolutely positive that she is not going to college, not leaving her small town, and not leaving the trailer where she shares a bedroom with her flighty, pregnant, older sister. She believes fanatically that she needs to stay put, and provide for the new baby emotionally and financially. She ends the book starting a pre-college program in another town after their trailer was destroyed in a tornado.

The subtext here is about as subtle as a brick to the face.

As far as her sexual identity, the book ends with her still unsure which label is right. Her sexuality is woven into that larger theme via character development that is deliberate and thoughtful. This book takes place over the course of a school year, giving Ramona plenty of time to examine herself and her options. And importantly, she ends the book liking herself despite her uncertain future on several fronts.

Don’t get me wrong -- I would have loved it if Ramona came out as bi in the end. Because I see Ramona as clearly bi (or some other flavor of non-monosexual). I come to this conclusion not just because she dates/has sex with a dude, but because there are a few little moments where she appreciates boys in a way that her lesbian friend clearly does not. She shares a profound emotional intimacy with Freddie in addition to overtly wanting him sexually. And her responses to the pressure to ‘pick the gay side’ are familiar to anyone who has come out as bi. But in the end, she doesn’t choose that word.

However I want to make clear that Ramona Blue doesn’t fall into the trope of the missing B word. She doesn’t react poorly to being asked if she is bi, she doesn’t insist that she just looooves people, doesn’t spit biphobia, put up with biphobic jokes, or wax about how she just doesn’t like labels. Murphy doesn’t treat it as an unspeakable thing. Ramona is considering if she is bi, but she just doesn’t know.

And that is okay. It is okay to be questioning. It’s ok to write books about teens who are questioning where they end the story still questioning. The problem I often have with bi representation is that questioning stories go to ridiculous lengths to avoid the word ‘bisexual’, or handle bisexuality in biphobic ways. Ramona Blue does none of this. As much as I want more explicitly bi literature, there is also a lot of value in this kind of questioning story because it is so rarely explored in ways that are this deliberate and well written. I appreciate Ramona Blue opening up a place in YA lit for a questioning story that is thematically sound and handled with such delicacy.

In queer culture, questioning is often portrayed exclusively as the stop between straightsville and gay town, but the reality is so much more complicated than that. For so many bisexuals, questioning comes around again after first identifying as gay or lesbian. For so many bisexuals, we continue questioning even when we pick a bi label. For so many bisexuals, questioning is always asking if they are ‘bi enough’. The bi experience of questioning is different than the gay/lesbian experience with questioning.

This book is touching on some of that difference and that complexity. It is destabilizing the neat tidy categories of gay and straight. I can understand that for monosexual people that can be scary and cause them to react in knee-jerk defensive ways to protect their own privilege. It can be offputting to read a book that centers questioning through a nonmonosexual queer lens instead of a ‘traditional’ gay/lesbian one.

I believe that is what is behind the rush of lesbians (who haven’t read the book) and would much rather deny the complexities of non-monosexual experience and instead label this book as ‘lesbophobic’. This book is only lesbophobic if you believe anyone who identifies as a lesbian should be forced to only/always be a lesbian because there is no room for questioning once that label has been applied.

Reading Ramona Blue made me remember Adam Silvera speaking at the Andersons YA Lit Con in 2016 about how he is so often assumed to be a gay author because he writes so many gay characters, but he too is questioning. He’s not sure if he is bi, but he’s become less comfortable over time with saying that he’s gay when he himself doesn’t know. That is exactly the feel Ramona Blue is going for.

So to sum up, Ramona Blue is not lesbophobic unless you’re a giant biphobe, has great depth and themes, and it fills a much-needed gap in the YA queer lit canon. The end result is a smart and enjoyable read.

- Sarah

PS: Because the last time I talked about this book we got a rash of threatening, cruel, biphobic, and generally fucked up asks, they’re temporarily turned off. If you have a response to this review, reblog it and own it publically. Because I’ve removed your option to lowkey tell me I deserve to be coercively raped fuckface

#ramona blue #ya books #queer books #julie murphy #reviews #prepub

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