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mywingsareonwheels · 5 months

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I was thinking about the whole... what's more progressive debate out of m/m romance representation and actually close and tender (as opposed to buddyish) m&m friendships. And how utterly futile and insulting to the need for more of both a debate it is when we need infinitely more of both and a lot of other things.

Fundamentally, between the lingering after-effects of the Hays Code and the extremist end of Christianity (not that those two are unconnected) and the patriarchy (ditto) and militarism and capitalism... in mainstream Western story media we still struggle to get *any* genuine emotional intimacy that isn't:-

romance between a different-gender couple who are both cishet, and which if it's happy will lead to marriage (but hasn't yet).

marriage between ditto, but only if they haven't been together very long (after they have for a few years they're supposed to bicker all the time).

at an extreme pinch, fond closeness between blood relatives, especially if at least one of them is a woman.

Friendships between men and between women are okay so long as there's a... distancing of rivalry and teasing. If you can imagine one of them tucking the other in or stroking their hair (especially if they're both men) or being utterly and wholly in solidarity with each other (especially if they're both women)... hm, no.

And that's... it. We're still at a point in mainstream western media where anything that deviates from, especially to the extent of serious warmth and trust and confidence and understanding between the characters, that feels at least a little transgressive, especially in e.g. a blockbuster movie. We're still at a point where everything else is under-represented. Less and less so, thank everything, but still.

I'm thinking of some of my favourite relationships in fiction at the moment and how they fuck with those stereotypes and do better things (and always as part of awesome stories, because as always, good rep is important but it should never be treated as everything). :-) This is inevitably a v personal list, I'm not claiming that anything here is The Purest And Least Problematic Thing Ever, and this is very much just a, "this is what's enthusing me right now" thing. :D

yes they're a het couple and both cis, but: Mike and Alison Cooper in Ghosts. They have been married for a few years now, and they actually like each other. They're best friends as well as lovers, and I know that some critics have actually had a problem with this and regard it as unrealistic. [facepalm] I adore so much that they're not a stereotypical sitcom married couple, nothing like. In a quiet way they are utterly defiant and fuck completely with the genre.

Donna Noble & the Doctor in Doctor Who. I mean, do I need to say much more? :D Close, glorious platonic friendship between a woman and... the Doctor. Some of the most beautiful platonic love in any fiction ever and it's so tender and gorgeous and fun. Adore it. <3

Red, White, and Royal Blue is a silly film but omg I adore it and part of it is seeing all of those standard romance beats between two men. And with a lot more true closeness than a lot of het romcoms manage. We're getting more and more of this (we need more between women too, and indeed other queer romances of many and various kinds!!!). <3 <3 <3

yes, they're shit at expressing their love for each other most of the time, but I still stubbornly add: E Morse & Fred Thursday in Endeavour. The fact that they're inhabiting the 1960s-70s and there is no framework for their mutual affection and devotion is of course part of why things get so hard for them both. They don't know what to do with it or where to place each other in their priorities, but the loyalty and the tenderness is there, and some remarkable emotional intimacy at times considering who they both are. We watch and interpret it as father-son or as romantic or as fraternal or as an intense and wonderful (and complicated and difficult) friendship. But it defies easy definition and... and oh goodness well anyone who's been following me for any length of time knows how I can go on about them, apologies. ;-)

the entire Fellowship of the Ring, but especially Frodo and Sam. And whatever my mixed feelings on the PJ films of The Lord of the Rings, my Gods am I endlessly glad and grateful that they retained warmth and intensity and devotion and intimacy. I worry that it wouldn't have been if made now, with a more stereotypical masculinity so much in the ascendant in mainstream film-making (we really are in the midst of a patriarchal/homophobic/transphobic reaction :( ). As with Morse and Thursday, you can absolutely interpret some of the connections there as romantic (and we know that Tolkien was remarkably non-homophobic for a man of his generation and religion), or as platonic. Either way, what matters is that there's serious love there between male characters and that goes right back to the books. Tolkien could be problematic af, but I love him so much for how he writes masculinity and love between men. <3

Heartstopper, not just for Nick/Charlie and Tara/Darcy, but also because of Charlie's friendships with Elle, Isaac, and (especially, actually) Tau.

everything with Found Family, and especially everything with Found Family where there is no easy equivalence to a "nuclear" family to map the characters on to.

Honestly I could go on. Hooray for all of these! But also: we are still in a position where these all feel subversive and make a lot of the more bigoted critics spectacularly uncomfortable (even when there is no actual queer rep). We're still in a position where mainstream film series and some tv shows struggles with anything like this, and/or will sabotage a friendship between men and even an entire character arc because it's got too close and intimate and there's a desperate need to "no homo" everything (*coughs* Steve Rogers *coughs*). We're still in a position where romance between women and any romance involving trans people of any gender is dramatically under-everythinged (but that between cis men is also still not exactly even a fraction of where it should be). We're still in a position where honestly even the representation of romance between cishet characters is most often weirdly distant and lacks real closeness or mutual liking between them (often, let's face it, because the writers struggle to write women as people). I snarked a bit at first about the debate as to which is more important and under-represented between m/m romance and really open and loving m&m friendship, but honestly the main problem with that debate is that dividing up the exact same problem: we aren't going to get more open and loving representations of m&m friendship until the media get less afraid of the relationship being interpreted as romantic whether or not it is, by both fans and haters. (I.e. don't blame the shippers when a production company loses their nerve and trashes a friendship between men so that it's not seen as romantic! Blame homophobia. I mean, to put it on its simplest real-life terms, it's consistently my experience in the UK at least that het male allies are in general vastly more comfortable hugging each other than homophobes are.)

#long post #post i wrote when i should be looking after my neck by not being on my laptop oops #bbc ghosts #doctor who #rwrb #red white and royal blue #itv endeavour #lotr #heartstopper #mcu critical #tw homophobia discussion #tw misogyny discussion #tw transphobia mention #i could so easily have got into good omens and conversations from a long marriage but honestly they were both almost too easy :D

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egharcourt · 3 months

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Hot take for queer christians or affirming christian allies, but focusing on picking apart mistranslations in the clobber verses as the means to address homophobia, transphobia, or queerphobia in the church community is literally not gonna take us anywhere further. Okay, now we've disproved that Lev 18:22 doesn't imply whatever the English translation means. Oh and Deut 22:5 applies to a certain context. And then what. Do we just acquiesce in the fact that, after providing a rebuttal to some points raised by exclusionists, we still gotta sit in this unwelcoming and often spiritually stifling environment that they created.

I think what's fundamentally imperative is understanding what the core tenets of the Christian religion stand for (aka the Great Commandment). The second commandment, "love your neighbor as yourself" already makes it clear that there's no room for prejudice and bigotry. Bring up the verses and stories where the laws change to empower women, sexual minorities and outsiders in social systems that initially deny their rights (the daughters of Zelophehad, Isaiah 56:3-6, Acts 10:9-16). Stories about people who were underdogs, or from such communities, praised, promoted, and occupying an important position in the narrative.

The Bible's a big book and any argument can be extracted out of it to befit one's agenda. With so much hateful and intolerant rhetoric being thrown around, it's way better to highlight the passages that reaffirm marginalized people are blessed and cherished and deserve a place in faith, ESPECIALLY for vulnerable queer folk within the religious community that are told they can't belong. That's all I'm saying.

#religion tw #obviously goes without saying that reconstructing what certain verses imply is important #but I think we can do way fucking better than that!#on theology with egharcourt #liberation theology #progressive christianity #queer christianity #christianity #queer #lgbtq #homophobia tw #queerphobia tw #transphobia tw #religious discourse #religious discussion

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matoitech · 4 months

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ppl on here r always talking about how they’re not allowed to complain about men anymore but there’s not a whole lot of acknowledgement that this website is infested with transphobes particularly of the fascist variety and a lot of posts about gender and ‘feminism’ on here r total bull. like idk call me crazy but maybe there’s a reason trans people r ‘sensitive’ and care a lot about wording and shit. it’s not like we’re whiny baby idiots who can’t handle ‘the patriarchy and misogyny is bad’ unrelated its so crazy that when uterushaver5000 complains abt how they’re called a transmisogynist for complaining about MEN!! you click on their blog and they’re a transmisogynist. like who would’ve been able to guess (this is sarcasm)

#transphobia tw #transmisogyny tw #i don’t knkw i just think it’s interesting when ppl i blocked for being friends w terfs make posts about how no one’s allowed to complain #abt men anymore and no one wants lesbians to have fun like damn must suck so much for you to not be able to spew radfem talking points #without ppl noticing what a shame for you maybe you should try sticking your face in a paper shredder #also way to throw lesbians under the bus i know plenty of gay women who Aren’t transphobes and don’t make their points abt the patriarchy #by sounding like a fuckin radfem but like sure #gay communities r no stranger to accusing trans ppl of homophobia for ‘not liking transphobia very much’#or misogyny 👍 both real and legitimate things that deserve discussion but ur not gonna get that from this website

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cupcraft · 11 months

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The reality is this whole "cis is a slur thing" on Twitter (which I find very similar to "terf is a slur" rhetorics) is because Transphobes don't want to confront their transphobia. I'm serious.

They only view cis as bad because by accepting cis have to accept trans and accepting trans means wanting trans people to be real and exist. They don't want to understand gender can be separate from sex They don't want to deconstruct their small minded ideas of gender and sex they don't want to do that because they don't want trans people to exist.

They also view cis as bad because they spend so long speaking for and against trans people that when us trans folk are like hey cis transphobes stfu forever they don't want to confront their own bigotry and learn. Instead they find a way to invalidate being called out on the bigotry they perpetuate and reinforce by saying "welll the real bigots are those that call me cis 🤓 "!!

I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of bigots acting like the victim so that they perpetuate more harm against trans people that is actively reinforcing a society that is out to kill us (right now!). I'm just tired.

#my musings #discourse #tw transphobia #<- discussion of #feel free to add on or correct me

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wizzard890 · 2 years

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how do you deal with liking an author's work when you find out the author has done something shitty/harmful? i found out yesterday that hilary mantel made terf-y comments and i'm (what feels like) unreasonably devastated. thought you might have a good perspective on this, thx.

There are two questions here, as I perceive it. So I'll answer both, separately.

1.. You're basically asking how to separate the art from the artist. This is a question that has been litigated to death, but my thoughts are blessedly short: you decide it for yourself. If someone has done something or holds opinions that irrevocably color your opinion of their work, that can be all there is to it. How you choose to engage with art is your own business, and so are the things you think are a bridge too far. However, we all should appreciate that other people don't have the same cut off points as we do, and let them navigate their own feelings in peace.

2. A few things, right off the top. At this point, TERFs are a fascist hate movement. They're no longer exclusionists, or uncomfortable, or confused, or asking bigoted questions. They're like (and often allied with) Nazis: their goal is to suppress and destroy people in order to make the world fall into line with their politics. A seventy year old woman getting her dander slightly up about The (British media's largely fictional) Gender Wars is not the same thing as TERF apologism. I understand that it can be upsetting to see an author whose work you love espouse views you feel are self-evidently wrong, but at this point we need to be very very clear about what it means to be a TERF. What we could call "terf-y comments" in 2013 are a world away from what TERFs have become.

With that said, I'd like to take a look at the comments in question, which I'm quite familiar with. I've thought about them a lot.

(They're all from this interview in la Repubblica, a centrist Italian newspaper, if anyone wants to play along at home.)

The conversation is wide ranging, but eventually the questions begin to hone in on nationalism and the state of the country, and the interviewer asks Mantel about the future for women in the UK.

You are also a great example and symbol for all the women in this country and worldwide. Are you optimistic about the future of women’s equality? Mantel: "I would say, as I did above, that from where I stand, the world seems to be getting better. But I would hardly feel that if I were a young Afghan."

This response reaffirms Mantel's attitude in the larger piece: she approaches liberal ideas of progress with a grain of salt, and emphasizes that the world does not improve for all people at the same rate or through the same means.

The interviewer then pivots somewhat sharply into a question about JK Rowling.

From the point of view of a woman, what’s your opinion on the TERF-accusations against your colleague JK Rowling? I recently interviewed Margaret Atwood and she defended her. What’s your opinion about all this?

Mantel's answer is long, and has therefore been pull-quoted by all sorts of people in all sorts of different ways. So let's break it down a section at a time. First, her response to the direct query about Rowling:

Mantel: I have never met JK Rowling, but I know her to be a woman who has brought much pleasure and done much good. I think the attacks on her were unjustified and shameful. It is barbaric that a tiny minority should take command of public discourse and terrify those who disagree with them.

So here's the thing. JK Rowling has brought much pleasure and done much good. Does this uncouple her from the fascist shitheels she pals around with? Absolutely not. But we are on Tumblr, we all know how much joy people have taken from her books. It's also a matter of public record that Rowling has been very generous with her wealth.

She also has been viciously harassed online. This was happening long before she went full TERF, when she was circling the top of the radicalization funnel, liking gross tweets and "just asking questions." I understand why some people, especially trans and GNC people who have a fraction, a skerrick of the power JK Rowling has, lashed out at her when they saw her teetering at the top of that long drop. She was deluged with threats of murder, rape, and violence.

Two things are true at once.

One: JK Rowling's decision to loudly side with a hate movement is hers and hers alone. It is her responsibility and her inexcusable moral failing.

Two: a woman who has been a victim of domestic violence and sexual assault getting inundated with online harassment absolutely sucks. The fact that it happened at a delicate point in the radicalization process, and at the hands of people she associates with the entire trans rights movement, likely shut off some routes that might have been used to reach her.

What a shitty, ugly situation all around. But, returning to Mrs. Mantel, it is worth remembering: this is a shitty, ugly, very online situation all around.

The legacy media has covered Rowling's harassment. Beloved author devoured by her own fans! That's news. Online radicalization and the struggles of the trans community? Less so.

Mantel is famously analogue. She has no internet presence, and used a typewriter for comms with her editor at The London Review of Books until the mid-aughts. She presumably knows about JK Rowling what your grandma knows about JK Rowling: she wrote the Harry Potter books, and used that money to become a famous philanthropist. People on the internet are harassing her for -- vague reasons, reasons that those big articles in the Guardian never quite manage to explore in depth.

What does Hilary Mantel know about cancel culture? The same thing, again, that your grandma does, because that's the moment of moral panic we're in. This doesn't come from exclusively right wing sources, either. You know what The New York Times writes, you can find ten fuckin...coastal media listicles on this shit right now.

Cancel Culture, as a concept, is an amorphous blob of lies (trigger warnings are for kids who Just Can't Handle Shakespeare), actual infighting (the cultural elite just can't decide whether watching a movie about about rape makes you a rapist), and the complex rendered flatly as possible (someone said that abortion is in many ways a women's issue and now everyone is screaming at one another). And then this whole blob is just thrown, undifferentiated and sensationalized, into the opinion sections of every newspaper in Britain and the United States.

What a seventy year old woman is going to glean from this pearl clutching from the papers of record, rightly or wrongly, is that a small group is taking "command of public discourse and [terrifying] those who disagree with them."

Is that what happened with JK Rowling's harassment? It's more complicated than that. But you know what else is more complicated than that? An elderly woman's uncertainty as to whether gains that she fought for, struggles she lived with, will be elided by a fast moving world with no grace for nuance. I think you can see a genuinely confused and defensive human moment in the second part of Mantel's answer to the interviewer, something that makes me take her comments in much better faith:

"I recently found myself ‘misgendered.’ I received a university publication, with news items relating to alumni, where I was referred to as ‘they,’ not ‘she.’ My books were ‘their books.’ I wasn’t singled out – the other alumni were similarly treated. I thought, ‘Being a woman means a lot to me. My sense of it has been tested. I have thought deeply about it. I value it, even though it has meant struggle and pain. I do not want my womanhood confiscated in print. It is not right to deprive an individual of identity on a whim, and make him or her into something neuter, plural. I have not given my consent to become a grammatical error."

You see this sentiment a lot with older women. You see it with Gen X and Boomer lesbians. You see it with second wave feminists who have fought for reproductive justice. Women who have had to really fucking knock their heads against a brick wall in the mid-20th century, trying to establish themselves as creatives or career people or someone who wanted to have a fucking abortion, or a lesbian who didn't want to give dick a chance because who knows she might Change Her Mind. Being a woman means a lot to them. Accomplishing what they have, as women, means a lot to them.

I have empathy for her dismay at seeing herself misrepresented, especially in such a top-down way, from a university publication that was clearly covering its ass rather than reaching out to the authors in question to discern their pronouns.

Unfortunately this adds fuel to that Cancel Culture moral panic: you will not have a say in how you are understood or perceived, you will have something personal and intimate about yourself dictated to you by a group that does not know you and cares for you only insomuch as you acquiesce to their worldview.

(Note: this is what trans people go through at the hands of a cis-oriented culture every day.)

Older women have been through a lot, and I want us to remember that they can and should be our allies. Often all it takes is for someone to explain to them what the trans rights movement actually is. Away from splashy newspaper articles and the shit that they have swimming in our brains that we heard somewhere once and take as unconfirmed but emotionally urgent concerns. If a person is, overall, thoughtful and compassionate, I think it's best to extend a hand to them in good faith, and see what can be achieved with dialogue.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I was born fully formed with a nuanced and evolved and sensitive understanding of trans people or their struggles or the social aims of their justice movement. I'm not going to pretend I had one five years ago. Or even now. I'm just trying my best here, and I only can because people who knew more than I did gave me the benefit of the doubt when I said dumb shit.

So, in conclusion, how do I feel safe saying that Hilary Mantel is thoughtful and compassionate, and would hopefully respond well to a larger conversation about trans rights? Here is an answer she provided earlier in the interview, to a question about racial justice:

Do you think Britain and England are places of “systemic racism” as Black Lives Matter and other activists say? Is England more racist than in the past? Mantel: "To me – but what would I know? – it seems that we are going in the right direction, and most people aren’t as racist or misogynistic as they were when I was growing up. But once sexual and racial discrimination are ‘baked in’ to a country’s opinions and institutions, it takes generations to scrub them out; language may be made over, but real-world change takes longer. I fully concede that the changes may be cosmetic, and I have great sympathy with those who say radical action is needed."

That seems to me like a promising person.

#uhhhhhhh jesus #tw: transphobia #(I guess? discussions of it I suppose)

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trans-advice · 1 year

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A PSA about Transphobia & outrage clickbait circa 2023.

#psa #media representation #rainbow capitalism #tw discussion of transphobia

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sixth-light · 1 year

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Came across this thread on Brandon Sanderson's historical homophobic views on Twitter yesterday (which I was not previously aware of the specificity of) and it has made me do some thinking. Not really about Sanderson in particular; the only reason I have any awareness of or even the vaguest level of interest in him is his intersection with WoT. But about for me personally what people have to do for me to feel like they've wiped the slate on those sort of comments - i.e., whether I will ever trust or respect them.

And it really boils down to one thing: you have to acknowledge the level of harm that was done no matter the way you originally framed those views to yourself. In this case - but this is by no means the only example I've seen - extremely, vitriolically homophobic statements are positioned as just another viewpoint which is deserving of equal respect as advocacy for queer rights. The fact that the statements don't use slurs or outright call for violence doesn't improve anything, because they align with and give support to people who *are* willing to go that far. It is extremely reminiscent of comments I have seen from transphobic people who argue vociferously that they're not transphobic, they have every respect for trans people, they just think they should be banned from using public toilets because they want everybody to be safe. This is, of course, a violently transphobic position which does material harm to trans and GNC people on a daily basis.

In both those cases, the only way I'm ever going to consider the espouser of such views to not still be homophobic or transphobic is if they articulate very clearly and publicly that they understand the level of violence inherent in their statements, that it was wrong they ever made them, and that they now positively support the opposite. Anything less tells me that they don't want criticism for those views, but they haven't actually rejected them. Because if you can't say "I was wrong and harmful and I am sorry", then...what is anything else you say worth?

#homophobia tw #transphobia tw #before we devolve into discussion of BS's work (emphatically not what this post is about or for)#I'm just gonna note there is a long #LONG history #of people with very repressive views of minorities being perfectly comfortable with *fictional* depictions of them #especially genre fictional depictions #because they can and do mentally separate that from what is right and proper in the real world #the whole concept of what you write and consume in fiction not necessarily representing your real-world actions or beliefs #absolutely cuts all ways

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uncanny-tranny · 11 months

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It's still fucked up to go "why can't people accept trans men as men when they act JUST LIKE cis men," and it (at best) is putting trans men in a shitty position wherein we have to prove ourselves suffieciently enough and at worst is actively just transphobia reliant on gender essentialism, which affects all trans people and then some.

#trans #transgender #lgbt #lgbtq #ftm #nonbinary #transphobia #transphobia tw #i've honestly found that people have held me to a much higher standard than cis men and i imagine that is multiplied tenfold among TPoC #the conversation about how we (general) make TPoC into a Threat is not mine to have. i have seen this discussion pop up multiple times #and the way gender is racialized absolutely affects PoC and TPoC #it runs me the wrong way precisely because of the gender essentialism and how much of that is rooted in transphobia 👍#like i feel as though people will read past the transphobia i'm talking about to go 'oh classic man whining' but...#...transphobia is transphobia even if it is 'gender-affirming' transphobia #my manhood isn't affirmed when you assume i'm a danger or that i am bound to be a fuck-up yknow?#because i *do* actually try my best to be good to the people around me and i *do* my best to protect others #and i am confident in the fact that the people around me irl will know that i don't fuck around when it comes to wanting to have their backs #like i have made it clear that i am willing to go apeshit if i'm told somebody is not safe #anyway i just want people to be mindful about how they talk about trans people and how playing into gender essentialism won't save us #i want people to know that they're still hurting trans people even if they think they're somehow punching up at us #talking about this because it's weirdly something i see so often when people even look at a trans man (only slightly hyperbolic)#people assume trans men have no idea what women and gender expansive people go through when it's like...??? HUH???#(also going off earlier my manhood doesn't even *need* to be rooted in protecting others and being a shield for me to be a man)

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bornetoblood · 9 months

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@littlealeta making a new post for this just cus I feel a little bad tagging onto this post ad infinum I hope you don’t mind :)

A lot of the things I have to say on this are pretty complicated (and I’m a little stupid) so sorry if this is like... uninteligable (also dw you’re not being mean! This is a pretty light hearted discussion about a video game I’m really not taking it to heart). I hope you don’t mind me doing the same right back at ya.

I don't really mind Vincent not saying he has a girlfriend since he's confused as to what he wants in his life, plus Rin and Catherine both threw themselves at him not Vincent. I think the game often gets viewed wrongly, a lot of people seem to think that if you have a partner, you should settle down with them and not think about breaking up with them. The game is trying to tell you that while it's not okay to cheat and betray your partner, it is okay to not have serious relationships.

My problem with Vince not telling Catherine he has a girlfriend doesn’t stem from the fact I expect him to settle down or think that’s best for him (the true freedom ending is my favourite for a reason) I have a problem with the fact it is a very serious betrayal of Katherine’s trust. While there are extenuating circumstances (the like... demon shit) Vince’s reluctance to come clean to both the girls purely stems from him not wanting to face consequences, which is selfish. Again I don’t think this is bad from a character standpoint, I find it very compelling, but it is immoral.

The problem is moreso how both Catherine and Katherine are written. They're both selfish and overly controlling to your character in different ways that it's just hard to fathom why Vincent would want to be with either of them. I wish Katherine was written to be less selfish, like why would you want to marry and have children with a man who drinks, smokes, lives in a messy apartment, and spends money impulsively? And Catherine had such rapey and yandere vibes from the start, which doesn't make sense because again, the game is focused on cheating and the idea of whether you want to live a free or traditional life. So why make both women so mean-spirited to the protagonist, one of them even raping and sexually assaulting him? And Vincent isn't even concerned about it? At least make Catherine's evilness more subtle and maybe not really come up until later in the game as Vincent starts pushing her away more and have Vincent not remember what happened between him and Catherine at the bar at all.

I agree and I think Full Body remedied the points with Katherine specifically to an extent. The scenes we are shown of Kath and Vince at the begining of their relationship genuinely makes me wanna see if they can make it work like that again! I think Kath wants to marry Vince cus they’ve been together for 5 years and they’ve both drifted apart over the years and don’t want to acknowledge that. The K endings read to me as the rekindling of their dynamic that had been dampened over time if that makes any sense. The deal with C is that I think her malice is already a slow burn (the SA point I fully agree on btw even if it is kinda ambiguous if they ever actually had sex when she says they did ((cus of the whole demon thing)). I think theres a relitive suspension of disbelief with C because she is supernatural. I think C nad K are both pretty compelling and both can be good for the Vince that ends up with them (the Vince that wishes to settle down and rekindle his romance and the Vince who wants to be king of hell).

But isn't that what all the characters in the game do? Is challenge women and each other? If they weren't, wouldn't we have Vincent agreeing to settle down with Katherine from the start? Sure Vincent has a problem with speaking up, but it doesn't mean he doesn't wish to rebel against the pressure women place on him. Personally, I can see Vincent's point here. He's often pressured by women to live a traditional, old-fashioned life of finding one partner and settling down with them. Vincent doesn't care about serious relationships, he just wants to take his time hooking up with women until he finds the one he truly loves. Like I said, cheating is never okay. But we've never seen Vincent make a move on Catherine.

Vincent may be jumping to conclusions about women here, but that's all he's ever known, since both Erica and Katherine and even most Catherine players are pressuring him to settle down and to stay with the one he's been with for a long time, even if she may not be right for him.

Vince being a guy who wants to sleep around and not settle down is the same Vince who wants to settle down with his family, or be with no one at all, we get to pick which Vince he becomes and the game is about Vince self discovering into the ending we pick for him. He is all and non of these things. Vince, and the other men in Catherine, experiencing pressure from women does not excuse thier treatment of them and I do not blame the women for this, it’s society as a whole that places this importance on marriage and women are more so affected by that expectation (that was created by men might I add). Marriage may be right for Vincent Brookes and it might not be. There is no right way to climb the tower.

Like Katherine, Erica can be well-intentioned at times, but just some of the things these two say just sound very morally biased, especially regarding relationships, mostly about the importance of being tied down. It's why I cannot stand any of the women in the game. They all just seem so shallow and narrow-minded. Maybe it's because I'm not someone who is focused on going after the idea of marriage, but I don't see how it's a problematic thing to not want to settle down, get married, and have a family, especially in the 21st century. Maybe that kind of thing is different in Japan, but here in the western world, where Catherine is set, those things aren't important anymore.

I’m also adverse to marriage for myself, the talk in Catherine about the importance of marriage all sounds the same to me. But it is the same coming from every character in the game, which is why I don’t hold it against Katherine or Erica and still fully enjoy them (Erica specifcially being one of my favourites I love that she takes 0 shit from anyone). Also sorry if this is pedantic but Catherine is set on Mars in an amalgum of the US and Japan (like Ace Attorney ((not the Mars part)). It being a made up setting allows it to make its own culture, which happens to be one where society deems marriage very important. I wish the characters ‘happy endings’ didn’t tend to end in marriage too but that seems more like a general thing with how Atlus decided to write the game than a specific character issue if that makes sense.

Again, I do agree that Vincent isn't written as well as he could have been but with what they had, I think they did a decent job, especially compared to characters like Shinji, Jerry Smith, and Arlo the Dinosaur who are just shallow and/or inconsistent characters. I just find everyone else shallow for the reasons I mentioned in the other post and I just can't find myself connecting to their characters. Orlando even goes back and forth between saying his ex betrayed him and he betrayed his ex. Like, am I supposed to even sympathize with this character? Is he a victim or not? I don't even know what exactly happened between him and his ex.

I ADORE these character inconsistancies. With Orlando specifically it’s implied his use of their finacies in the scam was a betrayal of sorts (like he lost their life savings by getting tricked) and his wife leaving him cus of this was also a betrayal. I love it because there is no good or bad guy here, it’s humans in a human scenario where they both made mistakes and I find that deeply compelling. Orlando’s struggle with blaming his wife and then himself for the totality of the situation is soooo fuckin cool I feel like I’ve known people like Orlando.

Like with Archie and some of the other sheep, trauma is not always an excuse to be an asshole. I went through some trauma, Vincent has gone through way more trauma, and we still care about others and want to do the right thing. We're not perfect, but at least we're willing to help others which Vincent's friends rarely do, at least they're not as empathetic with him.

I despise Archie and I would dance on his grave, but what I do love about this side quest is that it shows off how compassionate and loving Vincent is. He forgives and loves unconditionally no matter how awful a human being is and is always there to help them. When they die, he becomes quite shaken.

Here I think we are simply after different things in these characters. Archie’s trauma does not excuse his actions and never will but they do contextualise them and make him sympathetic. I can empathise with how he has come to the conclusions he has due to his past even if those conclusions are harmful and wrong. This is what I love in characters, messiness and humaness. This goes for all of the patrons for me btw. I agree that Vince’s interactions with the sheep bring the best out of him (tbh I think they showcase his more confident and heroic side in a much more natural way than Rin does lmao). Vincent finds comradre with a group of other traumatised, also misogonistic men. They learn together. Get better together. They open up to each other in a way society has barred from them outside of this life and death scenario and they are better people for it. They remedy their biases and they have each other now ( have i mentioned the bar patrons are my favourite part? cus they’re my favourite part).

I don't see the problem with the game showing another side to Vincent. I think it was Atlus's attempt at showing Vincent's more likeable side (which I think they did a good job with compared to the original) but it also tracks because we've seen Vincent being mentally stable and compassionate like this toward the other sheep. Rin is the only character who's consistently nice to Vincent, so it makes sense that Vincent would be at his best with him. Rin is perfect because he's an angel. And he does have flaws, he refuses to forgive Vincent after he apologizes for pushing him away. That was a cowardly and cold move considering how close they were. I think I just like that Rin is the only character who actually shows empathy and support for our main protagonist when everyone else hardly did.

My problem isn’t with Vincent showing another side, it’s that I think this shift is sudden and jarring. Vincent acts sooo differently in the Rin cutscenes (even when he’s with his friends he was stammering next to like 5 seconds earlier). Like I said I thnk this is done better in regards to his slow gain in confidence with the sheep. Rin is the only character who is pretty much always nice to Vince and, yes, it is because they are an (at least allegorical) angel but I do find this... boring and not very compelling. Flawless characters send me to sleep sorry I just can’t personally see the appeal in someone who has no room to grow. I feel like an angel character can have compelling flaws but they just didn’t do this with Rin and thus their scenes do not grab me the way the rest of the cast’s do. I am aware this is my personal preference but I do like my characters with a little more going on. Rin refusing to forgive Vince for having the literally textbook transphobic response to seeing them naked is not a flaw, in fact I think they reacted too mildly. While Rin is not explicitly trans I hope you understand I’ve seen the whole: Character is she/her’d, character is revealed to have a penis (shocking!!! violent and/or disgusted reaction expected!!), character is he/him’d like a billion times and I am a little sick of it actually.

I suppose my point here is that Catherine is about the relationships between damaged people. Navigating those relationships through the hardships is what I find compelling about the game and Rin distictly lacks that dimension. Vincent works for and cultivates his healthy support system by the end of the game. He gets closer to his friends, to other men, to himself- regarless on whether he chooses to persue romance. Rin throws a pretty hefty spanner in this for me in a way that could of been interesting but feels underbaked. I get why people like these additions but it runs in direct contrast to all the things I find interesting about the game soo uhh yeh.

#uuh yeh i like this game but i have problems with it like a lot of problems but that is okay #anyway fun fact about me is that my favourite character from anything ever is Astaroth of all people??? dont ask me how that happened #his lack of motivation aside sadism #genderfukery #and use of puns have enraptured me #anyway thanks for the talk! feel free to respond to this but i do have to sleep soon its late and i have work #again hope im like making sense here my brain is fried and im an idiot #the rat speaks #reluctant catherine tag #catherine game #yes #tw transphobia #just for that bit in the middle i know i cringed HARD when i got to that scene so #tw misogyny #for the discussion of characters diagnosed with it/j

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doctormead · 1 year

Text

The Phandom and LGBTQ reality.

Something has been niggling in my brain since I rejoined the Danny Phantom community and started writing fanfic for it. It may have been written up many times before (Damn, is “Danny Phantom” allowed to drink in the U.S. yet?), but it’s not filtered across my dashboard, so I’m gonna do it. If there is a better take, please link me.

On AO3, the tag “Bad Parents Jack and Maddie Fenton” has (at time of writing) 190 works while “Good Parents Jack and Maddie Fenton” has only 86. I’ve not done an extensive comparison inside the “bad parents” tag, but, while it seems some of them have this tag because Jack and Maddie are (as seen in the show) oblivious and neglectful, many of them are due to Jack and Maddie reacting badly when they find out that Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom are one and the same. And this is in spite of the cannon in two separate episodes (”Reality Check” and “Phantom Planet”) showing the opposite.

Why is that?

I suspect that a large part of it is that the relationship between Danny and his parents maps frighteningly well to an LGBTQ kid living with openly and loudly homophobic/transphobic parents. I’m not going into details here, because I’m sure that, if you’ve seen more than three episodes of the show and witnessed/experienced ANY homophobia/transphobia, you can clearly see the parallels. Now, for a children’s cartoon produced in the early 2000′s, I can see why Nickelodeon went with the “when the parents actually find out their child is half-ghost, their love for him makes them realize they were wrong and they accept him” tack. Playing out the reveal in a way that was entirely consistent with the characterization of Jack and Maddie up to the point of at least “Reality Check” would have been pretty damn dark and perhaps traumatizing for their target audience. But...it IS inconsistent with their prior characterization for the Fentons to have reacted they way they did at Danny’s reveal.

I’m sure most of my friends who are LGBTQ would dream of their family reacting to their coming out the way Jack and Maddie did with Danny’s, but the reality is, for many of them, this was likely to never happen. Particularly if their parents were as rampantly homo/transphobic as the Fentons were ectophobic. So I guess there is a bit of cognitive dissonance when we watch the show that perhaps fanfic is trying to resolve. I’m not suggesting that all “Bad Parents Jack and Maddie Fenton” fic is being written by people trying to work through their own trauma about being closeted/coming out in a hostile household. I have no idea the background of these authors and, quite frankly, it’s none of my business to ask. But, once you see the parallels, it’s pretty damn hard to un-see them.

What do you think? Am I on to something? Am I full of shit? If I’ve gotten something wrong, please let me know. Constructive criticism is welcome.

#danny phantom #lgbtq #fanfiction #tw: homophobia #tw: transphobia #art reflecting life #lets discuss

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