#wlw forehead touch common W

[abbey-abdominal]

THEY DID IT! THEY DID THE SAPPHIC FOREHEAD TOUCH THING!! OKAY WLW ITS TIME TO ADD CHAGGIE TO THE MASTERLIST OF FOREHEACD TOCUHES

#hazbin hotel posting #cmon ladies where’s the masterlist I know I saw it the other day #chaggie #they did the thing they did it 🥺🥰😣🩷🩷🩷 #wlw forehead touch common W

[fencesandfrogs]

“i love you”: ambiguity in media

spoilers for she-ra. the entire show. especially the last season. but if you don’t care i’ve also added context. so it’s not mandatory watching.

spacer gif for spoilers. also cause its cute.

okay so i’m still thinking about the scene where glimmer says, “i love you,” and bow kisses her on the temple, and it’s just the cutest thing and my heart says “squee”.

i wrote something about gay media & the necessary differences in gay tales and ATM it has not been posted bc i routinely shuffle my queue but the basic thesis of it is: gay romance stories are inherently different from straight ones, because it is impossible to separate them from homophobia. and i kind of ran into a wall writing it because homophobia is really hard to ignore on earth because its omnipresent and it dramatically affects gay youth growing up.

and then i watched she-ra, which has lesbians*, in case you didn’t know, and also basically zero homophobia.

*also gays, but the titular character is a lesbian, so.

which damn, was very refreshing. like. yeah. sign me up for that.

so. adora and catra are adorable lesbians w/ shared traumatic experiences and their character arcs are interesting and wonderful and there’s a lot of great analysis of that already and here’s one that sums it up better than i ever could: 

love that. they’re adorable. i love them.

bow & glimmer are also best friends who get together at the end of the show & have a lot of parallels to catra and adora minus the trauma and also including crushing weights of responsibility.

uhh so catra & glimmer both make a mistake at one point during the show that basically irreparably wrecks the world and requires sacrifice of life to solve. adora is the intended sacrifice each time but this isn’t about adora, i just want to give context for this.

so catra has the explanation of trauma and the scared behaviors of a traumatized teen. like. she makes mistakes for an understandable reason. again. not about her. just giving context.

glimmer on the other hand basically throws a fit that her friends have other friends. i mean. glimmer has problems but her mistakes are not like, “you know if you were raised in a loving home this prob wouldn’t have happened” because she was raised in a loving home. it’s more like “you know if you didn’t become queen at age, like, 17, this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

(side note, i don’t know how old the characters in she-ra are. i read them as 15-17 in the beginning of the series and 18-20 by the end, and i’m just not really sure. because you know, cartoons & child soldiers do not accurate age placing make. catra and adora’s arc speaks to me ages 15-18ish because that is when i had a similar arc.

according to the wiki adora starts around 17 and ends around 20. which is w/in my own estimations i’m just commenting.)

right so glimmer apologizes to bow and is all “look you don’t have to forgive me, i don’t have a right to that, but i’m not going to stop trying to earn your forgiveness,” and bow, well, he says “okay”

and. you know. i feel that.

(more side notes: i, age 17ish, broke up w my boyfriend. for reasons. we got back together. for other reasons. repairing the bond of trust is hard. because i was not secure that he loved me, and he was not secure that i wouldn’t leave if something went wrong. so you know. i feel glimmer, here.

yes, she made a mistake and no, she does not have a right to forgiveness. but she’s also a kid, who has had one friend for her entire life, and is only just beginning to learn how to share friends, and she thinks she lost him, and that desperation and rejection is painful. she was lashing out, and she never intended this to happen.)

so glimmer & bow throughout the show have romantic tension, but in a soft way. in a, bow goes to a ball with someone else and glimmer gets jealous but it’s also directly stated she’s jealous because she’s sharing her friend way.

plus there’s a scene that definitely has some strong glimmer x adora vibes is what i’m saying

it’s not this specific scene but idk what to search for to find it & i’m not fighting w tumblr to include external images again i’ve been hurt before.

anyway.

so when glimmer says, “i love you,” my heart pounds in a new way, because what does she mean by that? does she love him?

and at some point in this adora has a fantasy future where bow and glimmer are together & it’s adorable but i’m mentioning to explicitly say that it’s not relevant because bow and glimmer r def not together before this moment.

anyway bow kisses glimmer on the forehead and my heart go “thumpthumpthumpthumpthump” real real fast and it’s cute and i text my boyfriend a bunch of hearts because that’s what i do when i see cute couples i’m a soft gay nerd.

and the thing is? i’m also thinking, “wow there is so much ambiguity” there.

and then. i realized. this is why gay romance is fundamentally different. because american culture is not very touch-y, especially across gendered lines.

& i have a very physically affectionate family. i will cuddle the homies. i will kiss them on the temple. (ok i won’t do that bc my boyfriend would not like that n i respect that it’s legit i kiss him on the temple instead. mb i’ll write about boundaries in relationships where people have different understandings of physical affection.) so like? did not occur to me before to discuss this.

but there’s a huge ambiguity in gay romance. it’s hard to write gay romance that’s explicitly gay (especially wlw since men r less affectionate & more stereotyped in media imo and that’s another discussion but there’s a reason i’m focusing on catra and adora in she-ra’s gay relationships) without slapping a huge “THEY’RE LESBIANS, HAROLD” on it, so like.

yeah. it does get a label.

& i mean. she-ra is the big gay. it could have gone hard queer baiting, but even if that was a possibility, adora and catra are too hard-coded to Love Love each other. they have a best friends to rivals (to enemies) to lovers thing going on, it’s hard to miss. there is no doubt in my mind what catra means when she tells adora she loves her.

this is from before the confession and just. look at them. they are gay.

& meanwhile glimmer and bow have the soft affection, the feelings which could be read either way.

objectively the same hold, but he’s saving her life. catra leaps into adora’s arms, bow catches her. (after he just caught her before:

& it does not escape my attention that bow was the one who caught her from the void of space, not the stronger & arguably better adora/she-ra.

okay so bow & glimmer = adorable, and i’m v happy they got together. but it was an interesting application of tropes in that i don’t think you could tell this romance in a very different context. it just. it doesn’t work right. 

i think glimmer & bow end up a will they/won’t they couple in a different context. and that works, yeah, but that’s the point. gay tropes r just...different.

and it’s really hard to switch them because you kind of need a fantasy world where physical affection is much more common and we don’t have the baggage of gender in friendships.

just for fun, here’s one last couple. mermista and seahawk. i’m not gonna spend a long time on them i just wanted to say maybe i’m gay but it took me until season five to realize they’re together and i think they’ve been together the whole show. 

& i think that’s because she-ra does a really good job at depicting the post-homophobia, post-sexism universe. (sexism plays a big part in all this ik i didn’t talk about it but some other time)

so you get the opportunity to have these fantastic stories of relationships through new lenses. & i appreciate that. i appreciate getting to have a “he’s my friend” (i love him) “he’s mine” character moment with a new kind of angst. (glimmer: the gay, who loves her best friend but also loves her best friend, vs glimmer: the hypothetical straight, who loves her best friend, and her best friend loves her. the difference is subtle but it’s there.)

anyway yeah a lot of words. forehead kisses kill me because i have a weak, gay, heart. uhhhh media & tropes & telling explicitly gay romances requires us to be able to shake around what role friendship plays in the relationship arc, and something we’re not entirely up for yet, as a culture.

i leave u with this bc no one has made a gif of their actual kiss

#glimbow #she ra #she-ra #media analysis #romance #q #mine #txt #13th #December #2020 #December 13th 2020 #rant #essay