What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

larry-or-die asked: When u gonna make it gay

pbstv:

When you say it, please specify it. Do you mean Steven King’s it? With Pennywise the clown? Or the it from five children and it by E. Nesbitt? I’m not sure either It needs to be gayer than they already are.

-Mark

OK, you know what? No. I’m sick of this crap.

Queerbaiting on TV is a goddamn problem. There’s such a dearth of actual queer representation in media, with the little we do get so often ending in death or tragedy, that being purposefully ambiguous about your intentions has a genuine adverse impact on the queer community.

Personally, I gave up on Sherlock – and anything to do with Steven Fucking Moffat, for that matter – a long time ago, for a number of reasons, but it’s still a meaningful, beloved show to a lot of people, and I’m disgusted by how consistently flippant the creators have been about the Johnlock subtext, like feeding into the endless are-they aren’t-they for media cookies isn’t fucking gross. Sherlock has always had a problem with baiting fan speculation to the point of oversaturated frenzy, in part because they so rarely commit to giving any sensible answers in canon (How did Sherlock survive? BECAUSE REASONS), but let’s not pretend that doing so re potential queer characters isn’t messed up and offensive in a way that their regular Moffatry isn’t.

At this point in time, confirming either ahead of time or by Word of God that your characters are canonically queer doesn’t count as a spoiler, and especially not when you’ve been openly teasing the issue for years: it’s a fucking courtesy.

When Brian Konietzko confirmed that Korra and Asami were a couple at the end of Legend of Korra, he acknowledged openly that it wasn’t a “slam dunk” for queer representation, not least because he had to go outside the text in order to cement it as official. And yet, after years of mocking fanwriters, vacillating wildly between contempt for and smugly exploitative teasing about queer interpretations of the characters, and otherwise dragging shit out beyond all previous limits, I guarantee that even if – and that’s a big if – Moffat and Gatiss commit to making Sherlock and John canonically queer, they’re not going to have so much as a fragment of Konietzko’s humility about it. If they do go through with it, they’ll act like heroes for so faithfully preserving the secret of a queer endgame all this time, and if they don’t, they’ll go right back to wagging their metaphoric fingers at the fanbase for getting ahead of themselves, like Lucy perpetually yanking the football away from Charlie Brown. Well, you know, it’s just that we like to ensure a thematically varied narrative, one where the viewers can come away thinking whatever they want –

Bullshit. You can cut that right the fuck out. I know that Mark Gatiss is a gay man, and if he’s privately been lobbying for better queer representation in the show and being stymied, then I’m sympathetic to that. But on the basis of remarks like this, where he knows damn well what’s being asked and opts to be pithy instead – on the basis of every public statement I’ve ever seen the creators make about queerness in the show – that doesn’t seem likely to me.

Fuck this nonsense. Queer fans deserve better.      

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