[ SECRET POST #3834 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3834 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #549.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Writers show their intentions through their writing. The way they write their characters, the things they have them say and do. It's much more likely that a real person could be gay and unaware of it or very good at hiding it, than that a fictional character is actually gay when he says he's straight time and again with no deliberate text that implies he's hiding it or not aware yet. Characters are fictional and can't keep secrets about themselves from their own writers.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

If writers always perfectly got their intentions across through their writing alone, there would never be any arguments over canon.

[(Anonymous)]

I disagree with this, and I want to be clear that I disagree with it in the most general possible sense for reasons in no way specific to this discussion. The text is the text is the text is the text. What we're doing is interpreting the text. Statements of the creators external to the text can, at best, be a guide to our understanding of the text, but the text itself is the paramount thing, not the statements or intentions of the creators. And if it's open to interpretation in the text, then it is open to interpretation in the text, whether or not the creators wanted it to be. If it's unspecified, then it's unspecified and nothing more.

I mean, I'm not even advancing an argument about whether Dean is gay or straight here. My point is just that the answer to that question has to be located mostly in what shows up in the text itself. Not in lines of argumentation about how if the creators had wanted him to be gay, they would have implied it or stated it definitely. I agree, for what it's worth, that the creators probably don't and haven't intended him to be gay at any point, but that's really secondary.

[(Anonymous)]

This is exactly what I was thinking as well. I mean, having a character assert himself as straight is one of the most overt possible ways for the writers to establish him as such (providing, as you say, they aren't deliberately doing things within the text to imply otherwise).

Having the character sleep with women and only women? Having other people who know the character well assert that they've never known him to show interest in another guy? Having the character not show on-screen interest in any male characters? All of those things are evidence based on absence, and so are more easily discounted. Whereas having him outright state that he's straight is not evidence based on absence, it's evidence that's present and quantifiable.

Could that character still be gay or bi, and just be unaware of it/in denial/in the closet? Sure. But the writers had him state his heterosexuality, and they obviously did so for a reason. They wanted to establish something with that line. So in the absence of anything that deliberately implies the character isn't straight after all, the burden of proof is pretty clearly on the people who want to read him as being canonically other-than-straight.

[(Anonymous)]

You've never read or watched a story where you thought it was perfectly obvious that things were one way, then seen an interview or something where the creator says something completely different?

Writers have blind spots and biases too. Sometimes, what they write and what they intend are in complete opposition to each other.

(I would name names but that would just start another tangent.