the only thing i needed to salvage from twitter was having a pinned post of the blorbeaux art that @carriecmoney drew for me. they turned out so amazing and i was incredibly touched that not only was she interested in hearing about them, she wanted to draw them. every day looking at them brings me incredible happiness and i'm so grateful for the care and effort paid towards my horrible, horrible little men and their awful relationship. 😭😭😭
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Character Profile: Gregorio de la Vega and Hugh Dawkins (Extraño and Tasmanian Devil)
I was thinking that it's been too long since I've done a character profile, and then I realized that I don't think I've ever posted about DC's CANONICALLY MARRIED, HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT DILFS, a.k.a. Wizard Daddy and his furry husband. I'm so sorry. I've failed you all.
ANYWAY MEET GREGORIO AND HUGH:
Gregorio (on the right) is the first out superhero in comics, ever, from before the Comics Code even allowed gay characters. Hugh is DC's third gay superhero (Pied Piper came out a year before him) and the first canonically queer member of the Justice League. See? Historically significant!
CONTENT WARNING: Homophobia, racial stereotypes, attempted suicide, HIV/AIDS, and some particularly gory fridging (Hugh got better).
Gregorio de la Vega first appeared in Millennium #2. Now, they never actually use the word "gay" in the eight issue Millennium miniseries, but, well...
No, seriously, despite the fact that they never use words like "gay" or "homosexual" in the pages of the comic itself, the art and dialogue make Gregorio's sexuality very clear - and in case that wasn't enough, the editors do use the word "gay" in the letter columns.
Millennium was an event in which the Guardians and the Zamarons identified a group of diverse humans to be "the vanguard of human evolution" and gave them all superpowers. Gregorio is hanging out in a cantina in Peru when they show up to give him the news:
He's calling himself a fruit do you get it??? Honestly I love him so much. He's so extra.
I want to emphasize again how groundbreaking Gregorio is. Like, yes, obviously he is a raging stereotype and arguably a problematic one. But this was 1988. The Comics Code Authority would not be updated to permit queer characters until the following year (probably because of Gregorio, in large part). The fact that he existed at all, and not cloaked in layers upon layers of subtext, was a huge step forward. No, he's not perfect, but when you're the only canonically queer superhero in mainstream comics, that's an impossible ask.
Anyway. Gregorio's not super into the idea of being a main character at first, but after a self-loathing suicide attempt (Wally saves him), he decides fuck it, why not be a superhero, and joins the team that will become the New Guardians. He's granted his superpowers, which are generic magic ones, and takes the codename Extraño.
Unfortunately, in the spinoff series that followed Millennium, New Guardians, things get...uh...kind of rough. By which I mean that a) the original writer left, b) the new writer dialed Gregorio's gay stereotyping waaay back in favor of, um, Latino stereotyping instead (he stops calling everyone "honey" and starts calling them "amigo"), and c) the team is attacked by the Hemo-Goblin, an HIV-positive white supremacist vampire. Yes, really. It's fucking awful.
The Hemo-Goblin scratches Gregorio and bites Jet, a Black woman on the team. They both subsequently test positive for HIV. There are many letters from fans pointing out that it's nearly impossible to contract HIV that way, but the editors insisted that actually it was totally plausible, and then implied that probably Gregorio already had HIV because he was gay (even though he had tested negative earlier in the book). Then Jet dies. Again: it's fucking awful.
New Guardians was canceled soon after that and Gregorio pretty much disappeared. By the 2000s, he was viewed as basically an embarrassment, if anyone even remembered him at all: so stereotypical, so flamboyant, so offensive, so cringe. In the Love Is Love anthology, everyone's least favorite human Dan DiDio wrote a story where he claimed that Extraño died of AIDS back in the 80s, which...literally wasn't true??? The publisher of the goddamn company and even he assumed that the Cringey Stereotype must have died the Stereotypical Death.
And then in 2016, Gregorio got a makeover, courtesy of Steve Orlando and Fernando Blanco:
HELLO.
Yeah, so Gregorio is a silver fox now who hangs out with Apollo and Midnighter, does wizard shit, and lives in Lima with his husband and their adopted daughter. SO LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT HUSBAND:
Could you tell he's Australian???
Hugh Dawkins, a.k.a. Tasmanian Devil (no relation to the Looney Tunes character except that they are both owned by WB and, obviously, Tasmanian) actually first appeared in the Super Friends tie-in comics to the cartoon of the same name, in 1977, as part of a plotline where the Justice League teamed up with a bunch of international superheroes.
As you can see above, Hugh, like the other international superheroes, is a massive stereotype. He's also a were-Tasmanian devil who can grow really big, like many Australians. (Even though he's been around for 50 years, there are very few panels of Hugh in human form, but if you need to know for reasons of all the fanfic I hope you are about to write: he's blond.)
In the late 80s, Hugh and the other international superheroes from this story were incorporated into the main DCU as a team called the Global Guardians. They became occasional supporting characters to the various Justice League International books, and some of them joined various Justice League branches. Others had random cameos here and there, and in a 1992 issue of Justice League Quarterly, Hugh's random cameo involved casually mentioning that he is gay:
Again, this is a big deal. It's only 1992, meaning the only canonically queer superheroes in mainstream comics are Extraño (1988), Pied Piper (1991), and Northstar (1992). And this is a Justice League book. AND IT'S 1992. When Hugh talks about things being hateful for gays, he's likely referring to the virulent homophobia in Tasmania at the time (homosexuality wouldn't be decriminalized there for another five years).
Which means it was also a big deal that Hugh went on to join the European branch of the Justice League shortly after this, making him the first canonically queer member of any branch of the League. Of course, his sexuality was never mentioned during the year and a half he was on the team...or in any comic...until 2006. And then it was a vaguely homophobic joke involving Hal Jordan. But still!
(There is a panel that I SWEAR exists from the JLI era of Hugh describing a total bullshit version of his origin which granted him "the power of 106 Tasmanian devils!" which I cannot for the life of me find but was the first thing that made me fall in love with this character. If you stumble across it, please let me know what issue number it is?)
Hugh then had the misfortune of next appearing...sort of...in the infamously awful Cry for Justice in 2009. I say sort of because it's revealed that the villain, Prometheus, has skinned him and turned him into a rug. So we only see his skin. The late 2000s were really, really rough, guys.
However, a year later he appeared in the Starman/Congorilla special and he was totally fine? Don't ask me how. Gorillas were involved. The issue ended with the possibility of him and Starman (the Mikaal Tomas version) hooking up, but then the New 52 happened, so that never came to anything.
...BUT WHO CARES, BECAUSE NOW HE'S MARRIED TO GREGORIO AND THEY HAVE A DAUGHTER AND THEY ARE IN LOVE.
The nickname! The clutching! I'm dying.
Did I mention the canon threesome with John Constantine?
HUGH LOVES HIS RIDICULOUS HUSBAND SO MUCH. Tragically the JLQ only showed up in these two stories but all the baby queer superheroes in the DCU call Gregorio "Tio" and it makes me want to weep. HE WAS ALL ALONE IN 1988 AND NOW HE HAS A FAMILY. I AM VERKLEMPT. 😭😭😭
Unfortunately Gregorio and Hugh are pretty much relegated to occasionally appearing in Pride specials these days, but maybe if we all wish really hard, DC will let Steve Orlando or Andrew Wheeler write a miniseries about how they met and fell in love. I think Nick Robles should draw it.
ANYWAY I LOVE THESE HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT HUSBANDS, THE END.
Edited to add: Since a lot of people are reblogging this original post, I'm adding the updated version I did that incorporates the intersex circle...
I know intersex people are still getting excluded in a lot of LGBTQIA+ spaces (let alone wider society) and I think it's crucial to show this group is included in the statement that we all deserve equal rights.
Probably should've done this one before yesterday's polls, but unfortunately, i didn't think of it until immediately after posting. Oops.
Anyway!
You've beaten the odds and have joined the 5% who have survived the boosting process! Yay! Spin here for your boost and here for your classification. If you roll something with a repeat button 🔁 in the name, you have the option to spin again for an extra boost if you so desire, you lucky son of a gun! Just try not to go all Catastrofiend about it.
Most of the options don't get very specific, so feel free to make it more specific in the tags. Does your photokinesis blind people like Nocturne's or do you conjure hologram illusions instead? Or are you a Gamma level photokinetic who can't do anything more than clap to turn on the nearest light bulb? Your boost is your sandbox.
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Making a trans awareness week post for dragon age on reddit and immediately getting down voted should have been a very foreseeable outcome, but it's no less disappointing.
So, I'll just double down everywhere.
Your trans Hero of Fereldan is valid.
Your trans Hawke is valid.
Your trans Inquisitor is valid.
Your trans Rook is valid.
Your trans woman who romanced Alistair is valid. Your trans man who romanced Morrigan is valid. Your trans man who romanced Dorian is valid. Your trans woman who romanced Sera is valid. Whoever your trans PCs romanced, they are valid.
Fuck transphobia, fuck transphobes, trans men are men, trans women are women 🏳️⚧️
no more assigning babies a legal sex at birth. i feel like this should go without saying, but no more surgeries on intersex infants. no more surgeries on intersex children. embrace intersex traits as natural. because they are.
no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?
no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.
no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.
the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.
i'm not asking for the end of gender, i'm calling for an acknowledgement of gender and sex that understands the infinite diversity of the human species. i'm suggesting an end to binary systems that only benefit the ruling class. just think about it. okay?
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ok can we talk about this frame I need to talk about this frame
this is right after Frodo gets on top of Sam, and the fact that Sam’s first instinct for Frodo in his lap WHILE HOLDING A DAGGER TO HIS THROAT was to reach out his hand to Frodo’s thigh to steady him before pulling it away??? Crazy. Saying “it’s your Sam” afterwards didn’t help his case either
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basically the best thing any character can do is decide they don't want to be afraid anymore - in fact they never want to be afraid of anything ever again - and take action so drastic they fail to realise that this too is a decision motivated by fear. or to account for the Consequences of that.