WTF do I write here

Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.

And it's ALWAYS worth the reader honestly taking a minute to examine whether or not there's a perfectly fine female character existing there in the shadow of the reader's own previously unexamined gender biases.

Let’s fucking go

re: jack's lock-in scene in me3, i think it's actually pretty notable that she was vocally willing to walk away from the work she was doing with her biotic students if they hadn't been so effective/needed a teacher on hand to function. much of her growth is tied to how deeply she cares about those kids, as people, as family, who are getting far better and kinder training that what she was given. she was willing to walk away from them. that's pretty significant. and much as she offers "no strings" while the war is ongoing and she and shepard and separated, the hanging thread of "but if we make it out of this alive..." certainly implies that she wants strings. in fact, i don't even think she can hold herself to the idea of a "no strings" arrangement, given her scenes in the citadel dlc. how she talks about the relationship is not always in line with the way she behaves, or what she actually wants, which feels very apparent when she shows up on shepard's doorstep to tattoo a representation of herself on them. it's "no strings" but it's also "if you're ever hurt, barely breathing, lying under a pile of rubble at the ass end of this war, you're going to have something that tells the galaxy that you belong to me"

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