#black content

Lupita Nyong’o and Viola Davis Remember Chadwick Boseman On the fourth anniversary of Chadwick Boseman’s death, his former co-stars are sharing touching tributes. Viola Davis worked with Chadwick on the 2014 film Go up as well as the 2020 film Ma Rainey’s Black Ass — his last role. “Authenticity, passion and love were all woven into one extraordinary human being…CHADWICK BOSEMAN!” she wrote in…

I Present to You, the Queerbait Library

"What is a Queer Icon?" Randomly cherry-picking which straight actors you consider Queer Icons leads to two basic problems: 1) crying "queerbait!" the moment the text explicitly shows heteronormality when these were always straight actors playing straight characters, and 2) randomly becoming offended when a straight actor DOES play a queer character, because they haven't "earned" Queer Icon Status, and thus them intentionally doing what other straight actors do accidentally is seen as pretentious and "stealing from real queer representation." News Flash: You getting horny watching two straight women talk was never queer representation.

"Even actual queer people aren't queer enough to be Queer Icons"

A Comprehensive Guide to Marvel Ships

"Can the Audience Handle Queer Versions of Normal Heteronormative Tropes?" How many opportunities for queer representation are possible if the audience is triggered by unresolved sexual tension between queer people, aka UST, by calling it queerbaiting? How many opportunities for queer representation are possible if the audience needs "confirmation and validation" of queerness through fully developed love interests, romantic subplots and romantic resolutions for any character even remotely off the Kinsey Scale?

"The show is transphobic because the trans character successfully clapped back against her bullies" So, you felt uncomfortable seeing a trans character bullied even if she won against them, and therefore the show bullied you?

"Forgiving the Villain of the story the MOMENT the video game allows you to change their sex." Did you know that if a game changes absolutely nothing about a story of a corrupt scientist and businessman who uses prisoners for sick experiments to "unlock human potential," that villain protagonist's morals become gray and misunderstood instantly by changing their sex from male to female, thus making them an abusive lesbian who slept with a woman while knowing the only reason she'd joined her crew was to find her dying father the evil scientist was experimenting on?

"No matter how many gay, bi, and trans love interests you have in the video game, it is oppression because the writer is forcing you to endure having two straight best friends." Also, everyone should just be bisexual, because characters being specifically straight OR gay means I COULD experience some form of rejection and that's practically violence against me.

"Shipping is NOT Activism" Small reminder for Pride Month, you are not a queer ally and you are not engaging in any type of activism because you ship two straight actors playing straight characters. You are not helping anyone by reducing trans sexualism and sexual orientation to suicide, depression, drug addiction and abusive melodramas.

"The Downward Spiral of Political Correctness" Insulting is bad. Offending is rude. But shaming others is violence. Queerbaiting is a fundamentally flawed concept, even when used "correctly" because it is a claim that the audience has the right to assume, presume, interpret as much as they want, but its the authors responsibility for those things. What agency does the audience have, then?! This is the mass media equivalent of a straight man claiming he's practically a woman's boyfriend because looking at him made him horny. And if you try to break down any of this backwards logic, using objectivity, like open communication, it blows up in your face because a person FEELING HURT validates their assumptions and interpretations that they made with ZERO explicit text from the story.

"Even LGBT people are afraid to create LGBT representation"

"So, the only love interests that can die are straight men?" If a straight woman dies, its stuffing the fridge. If a queer woman or man dies, it's burying your gays. Killing a love interest is wrong, not because of the killing, but because killing non-straight cis men is wrong. If a story has TEN murdered victims, two of them being lesbians is homophobia because the gay victims should magically live while no one else survived.

"Know the difference between bad representation and simply not being the main character"

The Heteronormative Equivalent: All female characters are sexist. Because, ultimately, if the show's main hero and main villain are men, can we really say that ANY female character is well-written? Any character type, any character position, it doesn't matter. They aren't the main character. Therefore, they are sexist. If they have a character arc, it wasn't good enough because it wasn't the main arc. If they don't have a character arc because they are awesome as-is, that's just a cheap excuse to not give them a character arc, isn't it? If they are a satellite character with minimal impact on the plot, well, its sexist for them to be a woman. Women don't deserve to be satellite characters, plot devices, or one-scene wonders.

"Racebaiting and Queerbaiting: Anyone CAN be queer/ a POC, but want we really meant is that we want the main character to be queer / a POC" A decision must be made in a person's mind if they can really tolerate, stomach, accept a queer character NOT being the main character. If they really can't... then they have to accept watching/reading fiction ACTUALLY made by queer content creators. That's all. Because calling characters bad representation for simply existing and NOT being the star of the show is getting tiresome. NOT RECOGNIZING queer characters right in front of you because they are boring, normal, emotionally stable plot devices and not zany misfits with character arcs is tiresome. NOT RECOGNIZING queer characters right in front of you because the author actually played with stereotypes and made them unique/different and YOU can't recognize them without stereotypes is tiresome.

And a special shout out to Anti-Toxic Queerbaiters

A special subset of queerbait believers who are convinced that a show/book/movie is intentionally writing a toxic queer relationship and are hell-bent to rebuke it, but any time I've pointed out that they can hate a toxic/problematic/kinky SHIP all they want, but they have no reason to think the authors intended for the relationship to be a homosexual one, the anti-toxic queerbaiters would use the logic that the horny fangirls must have gotten their shipping fuel from somewhere, thus, the authors MUST be intentionally writing an evil gay character/relationship.

Pearl and Rose Quartz from Steven Universe: In a story that is already about a slave in love with the master who set her free, anti-queerbaiters will INSIST that the show somehow eludes to the idea that Rose Quartz intentionally had a relationship with Pearl. Which completely undermines the whole "hopeless, delusional, pining Pearl" thing. Not once does the story ever establish that they were a couple, not once does the story pinpoint some time in which Rose dumped her. Not once. So, the best the anti-queerbaiters have is, "I dunno, maybe they were casual fuck buddies or something. But something MUST have happened there, and I just think its very problematic!"

Baron Zemo and Bucky Barnes from the MCU: A male damsel in distress with a brainwashing protocol and a rich, powerful foreign spy? The fanfiction writes itself! I have actually sat down and talked to a person who fully believed that the MCU was intentionally writing Zemo and Bucky to have had a relationship in order to establish a dark love triangle between Zemo, Bucky and Sam (and who felt this was very racist to do, since Zemo being white meant that the white fangirls had permission to root for an alternative couple to Bucky/Sam, and, I guess, race theory meets romance means that a character needs two black or two Hispanic or two Asian love interests or else any audience preference can be chalked up to racism...?) But the larger, laughable issue here is obviously that this fangirl genuinely thought The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a love story, and thus thought the writers were trying to redeem Zemo by giving him a romantic lead. When this fangirl had to face the truth that nothing about that show indicated any romantic interest between these two characters, she double-downed on the racism angle by saying that disgusting, white, racist fangirls could influence her accusations to become future developments by encouraging the MCU to continue Zemo's storyline with Bucky--but she would fight to the end that Bucky was in love with Sam, not some evil Nazi!

It's no worse than Dynasty and yet people have been watching that show for years.

My thing is if we don't support our own people, making content then how can we complain about not getting more black shows on the air.