demi dithering
Jun. 21st, 2019 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2N3wGuf
My deepest sympathies, first of all, to anyone who was not in the Good Omens fandom before and wasn’t ready for this; just from the possibly-un-representative sampling of my follow list on Tumblr, all sorts of people who have never before shown any particular interest in the book are suddenly surfacing like the Kraken and submerging the entire world under sudden waves of new Good Omens content.
Listen, all the Problematic shit, well most of the Problematic shit, makes more sense in the original 1990 context, and my sympathies if you weren’t braced for that.
I have, of course, followed with some anxiousness the varying Discourse. They made the love story more explicitly a love story in TV show, of course, but they still left it ambiguous as to whether it’s platonic, asexual, or gay, or something else entirely– because, of course, the angel and demon aren’t human and so don’t have human sexualities or genders, and so really their love is a celestial one, and so of course it can be and is intended to be taken as representation of all sorts of queer things, which is fantastic. But equally, it is not explicit representation of anything, and so while the exultation from the ace community on the first hand is absolutely understandable, the bitter cynicism of the gays is also understandable! It sucks, we had to watch a stupid shoehorned-in hetero love scene in a fucking tornado, and while in the book it kind of lampshaded how ridiculous it was a little better (eh, that is debatable, I admit, but really, they were meant to be ridiculous, you can’t argue that), it’s still sort of gross that they made the hetero bullshit all very obvious and explicitly-stated, and the queer stuff is *airy wave* whatever you want it to be*~* sparkle.
As a “whatever” myself, I did find it lovely, and I would not have enjoyed anything else as much, likely, given my fondness for the original book, but still. I mean, they’re not queerbaiting, and it’s infinitely preferable to that– it’s a different “no we genuinely mean that they’re in love but you can interpret that however you like in terms of concrete shit” than the normal “Oh ha ha whatever you see there, of course, we edited the trailer to make it look gayer than it really was so you’d watch and then we made sure to give him a flashback girlfriend to no homo it a bit for the rest, but you do you, you wacky little fangirls”– it’s a subtle distinction and fairly faint compensation. I get it. If we had a bunch more firm canon rep everywhere else, this would be less ambivalent and meh than it is. I get it. I’m like, a moderate fan of Gaiman, and I find some of his stuff great but some sort of leaves me cold, and I absolutely get how this is brilliant to some and shitty to others. And honestly? I’m kind of on both sides.
This is the kind of issue I do genuinely feel like you can be a centrist on, you know? I get that it’s a dirty word politically, as it should be– expecting people to be civil with people who are actively working to murder them is pretty fucking stupid– but in terms of fandom stuff, sometimes it’s okay for things to just not… work for you. Like, that’s a nice thought, and I can see why you thought it, but it doesn’t help me and also just doesn’t work for me. Fine!
(Also, as a component of this kind of viewpoint, you have to accept that other people are not going to feel this way, and so are going to remain on their side, and that’s fine. If you hated GO, then I’ll try to tag consistently so you don’t have to see it! If you loved it, let’s squee, but there are probably some things about it you loved that didn’t actually work for me, so I might not interact with all your content! Fair enough! I don’t plan on making a fuss, but I understand the people who do and so I’ll skim or skip things that rain on my parade without expecting there never to be rain. It’s fine.)
Anyway. All of that is a wordy way to say I’ve accidentally been dipping my toe into fanfiction mostly because I wanted to have that exact argument out, in there. Are they ace? Are they gay? Are they fluid-gender queers? Well, I’m asking them. Or, they’re asking each other.
I don’t know that it’ll wind up a story worth telling, but listen, as an ace-spec who, myself, has a lot of sex nowadays, I’m going to #ownvoices the shit out of this and it’s going to be a dithery muddle, and maybe nobody’s going to like it but oh well.
Shit, this got long. I’m going to put the snippet in another post.
My deepest sympathies, first of all, to anyone who was not in the Good Omens fandom before and wasn’t ready for this; just from the possibly-un-representative sampling of my follow list on Tumblr, all sorts of people who have never before shown any particular interest in the book are suddenly surfacing like the Kraken and submerging the entire world under sudden waves of new Good Omens content.
Listen, all the Problematic shit, well most of the Problematic shit, makes more sense in the original 1990 context, and my sympathies if you weren’t braced for that.
I have, of course, followed with some anxiousness the varying Discourse. They made the love story more explicitly a love story in TV show, of course, but they still left it ambiguous as to whether it’s platonic, asexual, or gay, or something else entirely– because, of course, the angel and demon aren’t human and so don’t have human sexualities or genders, and so really their love is a celestial one, and so of course it can be and is intended to be taken as representation of all sorts of queer things, which is fantastic. But equally, it is not explicit representation of anything, and so while the exultation from the ace community on the first hand is absolutely understandable, the bitter cynicism of the gays is also understandable! It sucks, we had to watch a stupid shoehorned-in hetero love scene in a fucking tornado, and while in the book it kind of lampshaded how ridiculous it was a little better (eh, that is debatable, I admit, but really, they were meant to be ridiculous, you can’t argue that), it’s still sort of gross that they made the hetero bullshit all very obvious and explicitly-stated, and the queer stuff is *airy wave* whatever you want it to be*~* sparkle.
As a “whatever” myself, I did find it lovely, and I would not have enjoyed anything else as much, likely, given my fondness for the original book, but still. I mean, they’re not queerbaiting, and it’s infinitely preferable to that– it’s a different “no we genuinely mean that they’re in love but you can interpret that however you like in terms of concrete shit” than the normal “Oh ha ha whatever you see there, of course, we edited the trailer to make it look gayer than it really was so you’d watch and then we made sure to give him a flashback girlfriend to no homo it a bit for the rest, but you do you, you wacky little fangirls”– it’s a subtle distinction and fairly faint compensation. I get it. If we had a bunch more firm canon rep everywhere else, this would be less ambivalent and meh than it is. I get it. I’m like, a moderate fan of Gaiman, and I find some of his stuff great but some sort of leaves me cold, and I absolutely get how this is brilliant to some and shitty to others. And honestly? I’m kind of on both sides.
This is the kind of issue I do genuinely feel like you can be a centrist on, you know? I get that it’s a dirty word politically, as it should be– expecting people to be civil with people who are actively working to murder them is pretty fucking stupid– but in terms of fandom stuff, sometimes it’s okay for things to just not… work for you. Like, that’s a nice thought, and I can see why you thought it, but it doesn’t help me and also just doesn’t work for me. Fine!
(Also, as a component of this kind of viewpoint, you have to accept that other people are not going to feel this way, and so are going to remain on their side, and that’s fine. If you hated GO, then I’ll try to tag consistently so you don’t have to see it! If you loved it, let’s squee, but there are probably some things about it you loved that didn’t actually work for me, so I might not interact with all your content! Fair enough! I don’t plan on making a fuss, but I understand the people who do and so I’ll skim or skip things that rain on my parade without expecting there never to be rain. It’s fine.)
Anyway. All of that is a wordy way to say I’ve accidentally been dipping my toe into fanfiction mostly because I wanted to have that exact argument out, in there. Are they ace? Are they gay? Are they fluid-gender queers? Well, I’m asking them. Or, they’re asking each other.
I don’t know that it’ll wind up a story worth telling, but listen, as an ace-spec who, myself, has a lot of sex nowadays, I’m going to #ownvoices the shit out of this and it’s going to be a dithery muddle, and maybe nobody’s going to like it but oh well.
Shit, this got long. I’m going to put the snippet in another post.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-21 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-21 05:04 pm (UTC)So I'd've been mad if they'd done that with a queer relationship.
But if it's a joke it's not, like. It's not a direct parody of anything I'm aware of, unless perhaps just the whole genre of basically every action or supernatural movie ever? And if it's a joke it's not really... given a lot of room to be one in the text? So.
Yeah it's one of the less-skillfully-incorporated bits of the adaptation and it's absolutely faithful to the book. I get why it being an homage to a departed co-author necessitated not changing that at all, but it really could have done with... I don't know, something.
(The other line that was like, I cringed, was the boy being like "I believe in a clean world!" like. no. that was. that was too awkward to be as impactful as it ought to have been.)
I love the ambiguous but absolutely definitely something relationship. I really love it, and I'd've been probably embarrassed or squicked or upset somehow by anything else. (I'm not sure of that, I just feel like... probably.) I definitely grant that it goes much farther than the 1990 original, and is absolutely meant to be undeniably love of some kind.
I just totally get why people are upset and feel like it was a cop-out. I get both sides of that one.
But my demisexual little heart loves that they get to be plausibly ace, especially in this time of totally unneccessary Ace Discourse. And I feel sort of grossed-out that it's hard to tell the good-faith queers being sad about ambiguous rep from the ace exclusionists, and this is the era we live in now. I've had to unfollow a number of people I thought reasonable, over the last couple of years, when all of a sudden up pops the borderline-TERFy bullshit ace-ex stuff. You think you know someone. Ugh.
So... Anyhow. I couldn't write a good essay so I wrote a long rambly one. I don't think I'm saying anything revolutionary, I just wanted to say it, y'know?
no subject
Date: 2019-06-21 07:14 pm (UTC)I am quite glad that I am missing nearly all of the Discourse on this one. I just want my squee, unadulterated and unharshed. I think it was really great and it made me happy.