#op.

anyway, while a lot of analysis put toward queer fandom's inexorable "wife guy x his wife" space laser of heteronormative doom i've seen is astute, i haven't really seen someone point out the reason i personally find it all so fundamentally cisheteronormative even in the absence of eternally contentious sex tropes no one can be normal about or cultural & racial biases. those things tend to all interact with the same premise, which is framing one character in a ship/relationship as hypercompetent, adored, or otherwise elevated and relegating the other to supporting their elevation (especially over themselves), aka Thee Trope characteristic of bad-mediocre cishet r/s writing

it's bad writing generally. but the presence of one character in a partnership reduced more or less to an elaborate prop for the other is deeply patriarchal. and any variation on human experience interacts negatively with this dynamic. even in instances where a character takes on a supporting role to their counterpart canonically or in well-thought out interpretation, as soon as it widens a gap of elevation between them (narratively, but sometimes materially in-story as well) sociopolitical disparities are exaggerated. and biases in the audience. you can't escape this in any direction without adjusting the elevation, and hollanov make it particularly obvious bc in (show) canon the narrative they create as individuated fleshy characters is their parity, not their corporeal or material qualities. anything which alters their narrative elevation turns a floodlight on heteronormative under/overtones, even if inadvertently. wife-guy-and-his-wife/wife-and-her-wife-guy tropes rely on elevating one over the other, and so fall especially flat in their case for me