[ 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)]

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)]

Okay, so by that token, it's totally fine to interpret characters who have only been shown to have same-sex relationships in canon as being bi or straight, because people can identify as another label before figuring out what they are.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean there is SOME point where you can reasonably read from behavior to identity. But it takes a lot!

[(Anonymous)]

But it's also the case that many bisexual people feel pressured to "pick a side," or have enough adverse experiences from being out as bi that they go back into the closet. They haven't ceased to be bi; they've just decided that it's easier socially to identify as either gay or straight.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, especially if they're in a committed relationship. The pressure to pick a side and the implications that you're going to cheat because you couldn't possibly be happy dating just one person of one gender are exhausting, so a lot of the time if you're in a committed relationship it's way less stressful to just ID as straight or gay.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, I agree that happens sometimes. I am definitely not objecting to reading characters as bi or headcanoning them as bi. What I disagree with is that any character who ever displays attraction to men and women MUST be bi.

[(Anonymous)]

+infinity

[(Anonymous)]

But characters aren't people, they are written the way they are for reasons that we are meant to pick up on. If a character displays explicit attraction to more than one gender, the writing's intent is that we are meant to pick up on the fact that they are bi, unless later they have a canon realization that they're actually something else.

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes, sometimes not.

It just isn't the case that writers always display that amount of intentionality in how they write characters! Sometimes characters evolve over time in ways that weren't intended from the start.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly! By that logic, my lesbian sister must totally be lying about being a lesbian because she was married to a man for several years before getting divorced and exclusively having relationships with women after that.

Not to mention the fact that fictional characters are open to interpretation and different people are going to interpret them in different ways. This is especially true when canon itself does not definitively state the character's orientation and there's no word of God. And even if there is, other fans are not doing anything wrong by headcanoning/writing those characters as having a different orientation than the one stated. This is fandom; people can do fandom how they want as long as they aren't being dicks to other fans about it.

[(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)]

It still happens, especially among people who were raised in or live in conservative environments.

[(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.