[ SECRET POST #6348 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6348 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #907.
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)]

Someone will call you homophobic for this secret and say they're allowed to "headcanon" a character who has canonically been attracted to men and women as gay, because that's what headcanon means now, not "fill in the blanks canon left open" but "make up whatever I want even if canon says different."

[(Anonymous)]

Headcanon has always meant the second one. What are you on?

[(Anonymous)]

That's... that's what headcanon has always meant. 'A self-contained version of canon that exists in one's head, regardless of its accuracy to the version of canon that exists on the screen'.

Maybe people kept their headcanons more adjacent to canon back in the day, but actual canon-compliance has never been a requisite for the "make up things about characters" side of fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I agree, headcannon =/= canon, people can do whatever they want. But let's be honest, if you HC a gay character as bi/straight/anything else, people flip their shit in a way they never do if the character is bi HC as gay.

[(Anonymous)]

What? No it hasn't, not in any fandom I've ever been in.

[(Anonymous)]

DA Not true! Headcanon used to mean "something that has no appeared on screen but does not contradict any canon events". You could also make things up all you liked, but a headcanon meant specifically something that was canon-compliant but not canon.

[(Anonymous)]

(Different) DA

Not in any fandom I can remember being a part of, anon.

[(Anonymous)]

Different Different DA

Your experiences are weird then, because that's always been the definition in every fandom I've ever been apart of for the last 30 years.

[(Anonymous)]

That was my understanding of it too. Either builds off canon or at least fits in without contradicting anything else.

You can certainly come up with events that contradict with canon, but it stops being headcanon and is just a fantasy. Headcanons are based on the original story, while fantasies deny original events in favor of a fan's or fic author's preferred story.

[(Anonymous)]

You say that like you think fantasies are a bad thing, even when the material for those fantasies is fiction in the first place.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

No, they don't? It's just a definition....

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure how you interpreted my post that way, but I don't have a problem with fantasies. I have a problem with calling them headcanon when they clearly contradict established canon.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this is how I've always seen the term used in every fandom I've ever been in. Headcanon is for stuff that can fit into canon without contradicting it, like deciding that a character's favorite ice cream flavor is Rocky Road or that when they were a kid they had a teddy bear named Mr. Dinkums that they slept with until they were seven.

Anything that contradicts canon in any way is considered an AU, not a headcanon.

[(Anonymous)]

There are times where it's OK to headcanon a character who has canonically been attracted to both men and women as gay, or as bisexual.

Expressing attraction on screen / on the page to both women and men does not necessarily make a character canonically bisexual. There can be characters who express attraction to both men and women on screen / on the page who are, nevertheless, not bisexual. Expressing attraction to both men and women on screen is not dispositive for determining whether a character is canonically bisexual.

It's possible for someone to have expressed attraction to both men and women in their lives, and still not be bisexual; it's open to the individual person how they define their own identity. For a fictional character who doesn't explicitly say anything definitive about their own identity, and where there's no explicit Word of God statement about their identity, it's often going to be the case that there is a lot of room for different valid interpretations and headcanons of how that character identifies.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly, I eat meat all of the time, but that doesn't make me any less of a vegetarian.

[(Anonymous)]

>Expressing attraction on screen / on the page to both women and men does not necessarily make a character canonically bisexual. There can be characters who express attraction to both men and women on screen / on the page who are, nevertheless, not bisexual.
>It's possible for someone to have expressed attraction to both men and women in their lives, and still not be bisexual

Go back to Tumblr. This makes zero sense.

[(Anonymous)]

Willow Rosenberg is an example of a character who expresses attraction to both men and women on the screen - in fact, her significant love interests are both men and women - but she's canonically not bisexual and is canonically a lesbian.

Do you think she, like, doesn't exist? Or do you think she's not a lesbian and is actually bisexual? Or what?

[(Anonymous)]

Except that in her case, Word of God from the creators is that she's a lesbian.

If there's nothing in the canon itself/nothing said by the creators to indicate that a character who expresses interest in both genders is not in fact actually bi, there's zero reason to interpret them as anything other than bi.

[(Anonymous)]

OK so your position is that if you take Buffy and only look at the parts of canon up until the episode where Willow self-identifies as a lesbian - season 5 episode whatever it is - if you just look at Buffy canon up to those episodes, Willow as depicted in those episodes is unquestionably bi and it is objectively wrong to read her as a lesbian based on those episodes?

Because that's an absurd proposition. We know that Willow as a character has a depiction that is consistent with her being a lesbian, because we know that she is a lesbian. It is completely logically absurd to say that it's wrong to read Willow as a lesbian based on her appearances in the series before she is confirmed as a lesbian. And then, after she gets confirmed as a lesbian, the exact same depiction of the character immediately becomes incontrovertibly a lesbian. That's an absurd state of affairs.

To be clear about what I think is the case - up until the character is confirmed to identify as a lesbian, then it's reasonable to interpret the character either as a lesbian or as a bisexual. The confirmation of how the character identifies - either by the character themselves in text or by extra-canonical word of God - is what makes one of those readings textually wrong or right.

[(Anonymous)]

The trouble is that identification alone doesn't tell the entire story of a person's sexuality. We often choose identities that are at odds with our inner selves, because the way we identify influences how our community, society, culture, etc treat and perceive us. This means that people can, and often do, deny or disavow their own sexual attraction in order to adopt a social role.

[(Anonymous)]

Willow always sounded like biphobic writing to me. It's not unheard of for gay people to have opposite-sex relationships or identify as another label before realizing they're gay, which I'm sure what was what they were trying to go for, but in practice it came off as awkward bi erasure to me.

[(Anonymous)]

It's not unheard of for gay people to have opposite-sex relationships or identify as another label before realizing they're gay

It is! Which is why insisting all such characters must be bi until confirmed otherwise is so silly.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm about the same age as the characters and there were so many girls who had a straight relationship then a lesbian one and decided they were and had always been 100% gay (and of course this changed again over time - some were bi, some were lesbians, some went back to being straight, a couple turned out to be trans men). So it could be biphobic writing, but it could also just be something that was happening in real life at the time.

[(Anonymous)]

I can see that, and you don't have to like it. But that does not mean other fans are doing anything wrong when they talk about seeing Willow as lesbian or write her as a lesbian.

[(Anonymous)]

+a billion