[ SECRET POST #4451 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4451 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 18 secrets from Secret Submission Post #637.
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

[fscom]

03. https://i.imgur.com/0WqkD6N.png

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed. To me, that complex, swirly, physically affectionate place of label-resistant friendship and intense emotion is where the most interesting and nuanced relationships reside.

[(Anonymous)]

So much this.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

And it's not that I can't see how other people might look at that swirly place and see only requited sexual attraction and boning, but too often all the subtlety gets tossed out in the stampede toward the bedroom.

[(Anonymous)]

Same. My current favorite pairing fits into that category and I find it way more interesting than just a regular traditional romance.

[(Anonymous)]

I won't fully disagree, but when I first read the book, I got a huuuuuge 'only lovers left alive' vibe from A/C where they'd just been around each other so long their relationship had morphed from enemies, to companions, to friends, to lovers, to this super deep frienship+lovers thing where sure, they weren't always together, but they were always together.

At the same time, it doesn't bother me at all if people just read it as platonic friendship either.

[chamonix]

Agree! Once upon a time this was known as UST and is also one of my favourite dynamics. Keeps the mystery alive I guess?

[(Anonymous)]

Ok, just this week:

Queerbaiting: Yet another Marvel wonk giving yet another interview about how the MCU is ready for a gay superhero.

Not Queerbaiting: Gaiman commenting that a miniseries is going to be faithful to the work he created with Pratchett. (Especially given that Gaiman wrote some of the first explicitly LGBTQ characters in mainstream comics.)

[rosehiptea]

This.

[(Anonymous)]

The MCU is ready for a gay superhero, yes. That doesn't matter.

The Chinese government does not allow gay characters in movies. Any movie with gay characters cannot be released in China. They also disallow ghosts, which is why Ghostbusters wasn't released in China.

So as long as China's a huge market segment for superhero movies, which it is, nobody will be gay, the Ancient One won't be Tibetan, and they'll insist on extra footage in stuff like Iron Man 3, all about how much better China is.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh hi China hateboner!anon

[(Anonymous)]

Then they need to actually admit that's the case rather than play this game of having big-name producer, director, or actor talk up how they're ready to do it on the publicity circuit.

[fishnchips]

"BECAUSE CHINA" isn't a great excuse though. I mean, yes, Chinese censorship is ridiculously shitty, but they do release movies with gay characters, provided they can cut out all the gay parts (like they did just recently in Bohemian Rhapsody). And that would still really suck on the Chinese side of things but as long as the creators made it so that it can be edited out, they could absolutely make a character gay. But they won't because they don't actually want to - "Oh drat, them evil, homophobic Chinese people are to blame, we would totally include all the gay if it wasn't for them boohoo" is just a lazy shifting if blame and a very convenient excuse.

[(Anonymous)]

I think fandom thinks the only way to prevent a male friendship from queerbaiting is to have them show no real fondness for each other, just incessantly call each other "bro" and talk about stereotypical straight man things like how much they love to fuck women.

You know, like actual straight men think they need to act because anything else is too gay. Fans who go on anti-queerbaiting screeds are virtually indistinguishable from dudebros.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this. I mean, what do people think a pair like these two are going to act like? You know someone for literally six thousand years, you fight against them and with them and for them, you gradually redefine your place in the honest-to-god cosmic order because of them, you go from enemies bent on sabotaging each other to being the first person either of you want to contact under stress, you face the end of days together and basically say ‘fuck you’ to both your sides to manage it … I mean, there’s going to be feelings there. There’s going to be moments of comfort and teasing and shielding each other and clinging to each other. Not because of anything remotely to do with sex, but because you’ve spent six thousand years together and almost died side by side at the end of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I ship A/C like FedEx and have since I was a teenager, and if they happen to kiss/have sex on screen I’m gonna be right there in a heartbeat, but … there was nothing I saw in any trailer that struck me as anything other than ‘I’m supposed to hate this person but I’ve spent six thousand years getting to know them better than anyone on my own side bothered to get to know me, and fuck it, if we’re all about to die, it might as well be beside them and for something we actually believe in’. Which, you know. Is beautiful in its own right.

(Not gonna lie, though, that shot of Aziraphale sheltering Crowley under his wing hit both my wing and hurt/comfort kinks HARD and catapulted my brain right straight into happy time – I’m just self aware enough to realise that this is mostly my own brain going hnnngh, me likey!)

Also, STOP TALKING TO THE CREATORS ABOUT THESE THINGS! For real, why is this such a thing these days?

[(Anonymous)]

Right? Honestly, my take on why this is now a thing is because people like the tumblr user who messaged Gaiman in the secret believe it's not just them pestering a creator about something they want to see. They've convinced themselves it's a form of activism to "friendly reminder" the creator that the work they created isn't gay enough.

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t personally ship Aziraphale/Crowley, but I don’t not ship them either. I’m perfectly happy with the book as written, but don’t mind headcanons where they’re explicitly boning or bringing each other breakfast in bed.

But Gaiman’s answer saying that “Pratchett would have enjoyed” the new adaptation as an answer to a question about queerbaiting and why Crowley and Aziraphale aren’t going to be openly romantic in the show could be read as saying Pratchett would’ve disliked making the characters openly gay. Which I think is selling him short and also using a dead man’s supposed preferences as an excuse.

[(Anonymous)]

Or, perhaps, Pratchett preferred the ambiguity and hefty subtext on the subject, as it was written, instead of something heavy-handed. Maybe he'd be against a nuanced relationship being portrayed in a ham-fisted way?

Gaiman isn't against portraying gay characters, openly or otherwise. He's done it before in Neverwhere, in his comics, in American Gods. If Aziraphale and Crowley weren't openly gay within the confines of the pages of Good Omens, or any backstory on them that was planned but never depicted, then he is being true to the characters and what they BOTH had planned for them.

Pratchett was never afraid of portraying openly gay characters either, but he made it pretty clear that a character's sexuality is only one facet of their being and that a character shouldn't be entirely about who they prefer to get into bed with.

[(Anonymous)]

Pratchett's preference for a faithful adaptation and deathbed request that Gaiman take responsibility for it have been well publicized. And Gaiman is notorious for walking away from big money when he wasn't satisfied with casting, production, or screenwriting of an adaptation he controlled.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it could be read that way by people who are, well... reasonable. Because it simply says that what's in the miniseries will be the same that's in the books. It definitely does not say "won't be openly gay because Pratchett didn't want it to be openly gay specifically".

What's more, Pratchett very clearly, unambiguously passed the torch to Gaiman for these types of creative decisions. You're free to disagree with the decisions, of course. But it's simply not accurate to suggest that Gaiman is making decisions that sells Pratchett short.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's unreasonable to want it to be a canonical relationship, and I don't think it's an unreasonable question to ask. The only thing question-asker is really doing wrong is misusing the concept of queerbaiting. But that's it.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's a pretty unreasonable question to ask when neither writer involved has shied away from writing gay characters in their other works. If the two of them had intended for A/C to be a canon ship in the book, it would have been.

[(Anonymous)]

IDK. The whole tone is pretty passive aggressive as well.

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, I'm just tired of people misusing the term 'queerbaiting.' It's misapplied to everything these days and it's starting to lose its meaning as a result.

[(Anonymous)]

I ship them hard (although it wasn't until a number of years after I first read the book that I started to) but I don't need an after-the-fact, word-of-God confirmation that Aziraphale/Crowley is canon (when authors start doing things like that, we get to hear about wizard pooping). I mean, it's one stand-alone novel published 30 years ago, not an ongoing TV show. The canon is closed. The fact that the authors haven't minded people shipping it is enough for me, and it's fine that the series isn't doing anything differently.

As for queerbaiting, look, Pratchett and Gaiman wrote these characters who aren't explicitly in a romantic or sexual relationship - maybe it never occurred to them to write those particular characters that way - and when people shipped A/C anyway, the authors didn't object, but also didn't make any pronouncements about the relationship. That's not queerbaiting. That's people having a headcanon, insisting what they imagine about it is the creators' fault, and getting pissy no one will make it canon for them.