Jinshi at most random time of the day:

Age-gap m/m ships certainly exist, but I wouldn’t call hankcon just another version of the same old trope.

I also don’t understand why the age gap, their different body types, or either sexual position would automatically make the ship heteronormative. Connor being a bottom does not make him "the woman," and Connor being a top would not make the relationship more or less queer. Top and bottom are sexual positions, not gender roles.

What feels especially selective is singling out hankcon for this when similar dominant/submissive or top/bottom patterns appear in countless other ships across fandoms. In many pairings, those roles are far more rigid, yet the entire ship is rarely dismissed as heteronormative because of it. And hankcon is not limited to one fixed dynamic anyway. Connor may be written as a bottom more often, but plenty of people write him as a top, too, write both characters as switches, or avoid assigning them fixed roles altogether. Honestly, hankcon seems to have one of the widest ranges of interpretations and sexual dynamics in this fandom, yet it is the ship people keep singling out as inherently heteronormative? The fandom gives their relationship a wide range of dynamics, so reducing the whole ship to "an older dominant man and a submissive young twink" means treating one particular portrayal as if it defines everyone who ships them.

as a demon, he likely behaves in a way wholly different from the persona of sebastian. yet what he performs now is part of his education, not an artificial “illusion of continuity.” if he claimed to have attended balls at schönbrunn palace, then either he truly did or he lied — and i doubt the rules of a contract can be bypassed with technicalities like “it isn’t a lie if i’m maintaining my façade.”

moreover, sebastian is not omniscient. he excels because he learns. we see this from the very first chapter, when he had to improvise a solution to the catastrophe caused by the other servants, flipping through books to find a description that would match the image he had constructed. it was the same when he and ciel learned how to coexist. he never needed to know the proper temperature of bathwater for a human body, nor how to brew tea — and so he made mistakes. but he learned to cook, to polish silver to perfection, to kill quietly enough not to disturb his master. that is what makes him fascinating as a demon: despite possessing centuries of existence, he continues to evolve. and i would argue that this perfectionism and meticulous attention to detail are traits of the demon himself, not merely of sebastian.