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Another kind of "no heterosexual explanation" moments
TFV's post on "no heterosexual explanation" moments, where it is hard to come up with an in-canon explanation for a certain character's behavior unless it's them being in love with another character, got me thinking about another kind of moment I experience periodically.
It's the moment where my own tendency to read queer subtext in everything blinds me to the fact that there is really obvious textual queerness going on. I am so used to thinking of the way I read queerness into everything that sometimes I just don't realize that it's not just me.
Case in point: the blowjob scene in Nico and Dani. I thought it was just an awkward film about two teenage boys who were maybe getting each other off a little bit, no homo here unless you're a slasher! And then... blowjobs! (Honestly, I still sort of think that my university's Spanish department selected its films with an intent to troll the firsties. Poor little bb!epershand was like "Did you just fade to black and keep the screen black for like a minute while keeping the blowjob noises on? European film, you... you confuse me.")
Dumbledore's "outing" was another one of those moments for me. Because... of course I'd been slashing Dumbledore/Grindlewald, GAY OLDER MENTORS is my favorite trope. But finding out that JKR also slashed them came at me out of nowhere.
Editing this to add one more example: in Farthing it took me way too long to figure out that all those intense conversations about what kind of tea people drank that sounded like obscure euphemisms for homosexuality? Were obscure euphemisms for homosexuality. ("Do you like INDIA tea or CHINA tea? Personally, I like China tea... with lemon. You look like a man who... also likes lemon in his tea.")
So, what are your "being a slasher made me not notice obvious canon queer characters" moments? What are the texts that you only belatedly realized didn't need queering?
It's the moment where my own tendency to read queer subtext in everything blinds me to the fact that there is really obvious textual queerness going on. I am so used to thinking of the way I read queerness into everything that sometimes I just don't realize that it's not just me.
Case in point: the blowjob scene in Nico and Dani. I thought it was just an awkward film about two teenage boys who were maybe getting each other off a little bit, no homo here unless you're a slasher! And then... blowjobs! (Honestly, I still sort of think that my university's Spanish department selected its films with an intent to troll the firsties. Poor little bb!epershand was like "Did you just fade to black and keep the screen black for like a minute while keeping the blowjob noises on? European film, you... you confuse me.")
Dumbledore's "outing" was another one of those moments for me. Because... of course I'd been slashing Dumbledore/Grindlewald, GAY OLDER MENTORS is my favorite trope. But finding out that JKR also slashed them came at me out of nowhere.
Editing this to add one more example: in Farthing it took me way too long to figure out that all those intense conversations about what kind of tea people drank that sounded like obscure euphemisms for homosexuality? Were obscure euphemisms for homosexuality. ("Do you like INDIA tea or CHINA tea? Personally, I like China tea... with lemon. You look like a man who... also likes lemon in his tea.")
So, what are your "being a slasher made me not notice obvious canon queer characters" moments? What are the texts that you only belatedly realized didn't need queering?
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Another example for me is Boy Meets World, a show that I used to think was playing up its slashiness for a sort of... crude joke at Shawn and Cory's expense, like 'ho-ho, aren't these characters homoerotic, it's hilarious.' But now when I rewatch (again, don't judge me), it's clear to me that it's SO over-the-top that it crosses the point of being a joke and just becomes real. When Shawn buys a Cinnabon and Cory knows it's for him and Shawn blushes to his roots and murmurs, "Cory..." we have officially gone beyond.
ugh they even had a meet cute. so ashamed.
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lew6qfVs2O1qddfrco1_500.gif
And then they cuddled. SO FRIENDLY!
Re: ugh they even had a meet cute. so ashamed.
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But oh yes, Cory and Shawn. Totally, totally preteen boyfriends. Or at least a long-running joke on the part of the actors and writers at the audience's expense. And then later on there was the intense boyfriendyness of... Will Fridel and Matt Laurence? I don't remember their characters' names. That show was all about the MMF OT3 ships.
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(Vaguely related: I have a friend whose father watches Brideshead Revisited on a regular basis and every single time he says things like, "These days that would be considered gay.")
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I actually had that experience with Willow and Tara in s4 Buffy too. I was watching it thinking they seemed kind of... oh wait, they *are*.
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Um. Yay D.H. Lawrence?
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(Anonymous) 2011-05-04 03:46 am (UTC)(link)~Dani
PS--Peter O'Toole!!!
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And Becket is startling with the intensity of the homoeroticism. "I! Love! That! Man!"
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Eugénie Danglars is strong and independent and musical and she doesn't want to marry the man her father has engaged her to, and she'd rather spend time with her pretty tutor Louise--and at this point, I'm thinking, "yeah, I get it, nineteenth-century lesbian subtext" But then Eugénie disguises herself as a boy, and she and Louise run away together. And then, the next morning, they are discovered in an inn, sleeping in the same bed. And it's like, "... huh. That is not really subtext anymore." (The last we see of them, they're departing again, together--they get a happy ending!)
It was obvious that Eugénie was supposed to be kind of gay, but I had no idea that in 1844 it was even done to have actual gay romance. It didn't occur to me that Eugénie/Louise could be the canon pairing.
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For a start, I have lots of these moments despite really not seeing myself as an m/m slasher, and often being happier shipping popular slashy couples as friends. But on further thought, it's not that I don't ship m/m couples in principle, I just prefer stories about female protagonists (and thus I am more interested in f/f and m/f in fanfic etc, even if I enjoy shipping m/m while I watch/read)
Anyway:
I was another one who was caught off guard by the Talented Mr Ripley.
Talia and Susan in Babylon 5. I watched this a few years after it was made and was thinking "heehee, this is deliciously slashy but they'd never... ZOMG WAIT WHAT". And rewatching there is definite deliberate slashiness between Franklin and Marcus, though it's not supposed to be canon.
Spike and Angel never became canon, but at a certain point it became clear that the slashiness was very deliberate and not just in my head. Same with Faith and Buffy.
Yuki and Toya in Card Captor Sakura. It's a kids anime about a magical girl, I was sure I had to be imagining it.
There's a Dorothy L Sayers book with lesbians which I wasn't expecting in that period, can't remember which one. (They're not very happy lesbians, alas)
There are others but my mind has gone frustratingly blank.
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I keep meaning to watch B5, and Talia and Susan are a big part of that.
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Here via metafandom
Miss Agatha was never one for flirting and foolishness. Often she used to say to me: 'Betty' she said 'I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we are going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen' (Chapter XII, "A Tale of Two Spinsters").
(And there's no suggestion that Agatha's death is her being punished for her sexuality).
I also wonder about Harriet's friends Sylvia and Einnued, who live together, and aren't at all interested in the feverish heterosexual coupling going on around them and, apart from Harriet herself, are portrayed as much the sanest people in her circle, and are certainly the happiest, including Harriet.
And I'm pretty sure that we're supposed to read Boyes' friend Vaughan as gay and having an unhappy unrequited crush on Boyes (though Boyes was such a bastard that he'd probably have been even unhappier had it been requited, so I think what's being shown as tragic and unhappy is having the poor judgement to fall for Phillip Boyes...)
Re: Here via metafandom
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Though I have to confess that the first time I watched B5, it took me a while to notice that when they were in bed, they were in bed TOGETHER. *facepalm*
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I did not realize this post was going to turn into a massive list of things I totally need to read/watch, but I am excited that it has!
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I was so certain that all the femslashy subtext I thought I was seeing between Felicity and the other girls was only me seeing what I wanted to see (after all, there's always someone eager to jump up and tell me exactly that every single time I see slashy subtext in anything, including some of the authors themselves, you know? And the heroine was straight and had a het romance-type subplot, so, yeah) that when I read further into the series and discovered that there actually were bi and lesbian girls in my mainstream YA historical fantasy novel, I think I might have actually cried.
I think in that case, though, and in most modern cases (i.e. not books written by queer writers in pervious eras where they had to pull the literary equivalent of the celluloid closet) where I thought two characters were kind of slashy and then they turned out to be canon, it was less that I was distracted by "slash goggles" and more that I was so sure that a writer who wasn't either explicitly LGBT or a slasher gone pro just wouldn't bother to include queerness that I kept thinking "they really seem attracted to/in love with each other, but of course you never get that kind of thing in actual canon. It's either the result of that peculiar kind of utter blindness to how homoerotic something looks that makes some people unable to see even blindingly in-you-face canon gay relationships (ex: like those fanboys who insisted that the gay couple in The Authority had to be straight even after you saw them in bed together and they'd kissed on panel) or it's fanservice the writers are never going to deliver on; the writers will never actually go there, I shouldn't get my hopes up, it's too good to be true," right up until they actually did go there.
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I definitely agree with you about the modern cases. Basically I tend to have this expectation that if something isn't marketed to me as Queer Film I'm not going to find any gay characters in it, and that any queerness in it will probably be coming from me and not from the movie itself. I am slowly beginning to settle down and not clutch desperately at everything where the author or creators or actors INTENDED the homoeroticism. But it's slow-going.
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I know this happens to me a lot, especially since I started talking about subtext to my brother, who provides an external perspective. It used to be that he shot me down all the time, and mostly he was right. I would hear his explanation shooting me down in my head when I started to think "they would be cute together." A few times I was vindicated. These days he can anticipate what I'll see, and sometimes he sees it too.
The most obvious example was in the comic Runaways where I knew that Karolina had a one-sided crush on Nico and that Nico was definitely straight and oblivious. Another one is in an execrable fantasy novel that I forgot the name of, which was written by a straight man and included one woman giving a much younger woman the "coming out slash mutant pride speech" before trying to suck her soul out sexily.
Oh, and even though I was forewarned about the pervasive bisexuality of the Kushiel books, I was still taken aback by the intensity of the heroine's relationship with her nemesis.
ZVfodYAwFFM
(Anonymous) 2013-05-21 10:55 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
Dumbledore was definitely one for me also. I think that we'll start seeing more of this as queer characters become more common in fiction. We're normalized to having to write in the relationships for ourselves, so I think there's going to be a significant transition period where fandom talks about how slashy relationships where the romance ultimately turns out to be canon are.
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I recently re-read Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett and was very surprised that I managed to miss the first time that two of the girls in the company was in fact a couple.
They went from two boys suspiciously close to each other to one of them turned out to be a girl following her man into war to two girls who ran away together.
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I honestly didn't think it was intentional and that the actors and writers noticed the subtext. My experience is usually "Holy shit, they weren't meant to be a couple?" (Honestly, when I first read The Fountainhead. I was genuinely stunned that Roark and Keating didn't hook up, and that there was seriously no implied subtext between Roark and the newspaper guy. When I found out that Ayn Rand was homophobic, I swear, my jaw dropped: I was very much, "Well why did she include all that homoerotic subtext in that book?")
Here via metafandom
Truth to tell, I actually -- and I've never admitted this before, because I'm still a little embarassed by it -- had this moment the very first time I read The Importance of Being Earnest, with the "Bunbury" scene. I was nine years old and knew nothing at all about Oscar Wilde's personal life or other work.