Full disclosure that I am a gringo and will touch on how xenophobia impacted a Latino character. I did check this with my Afro-Latina found brother @jasontoddssuper though!

Apparently people think Leo is an incel because he flirts a lot??? But he isn't! He's a traumatized autistic boy! That and Rick Riordan is xenophobic but I'm going Watsonian right now.

So what do we know about Leo's childhood? His mom died when he was 8. His Aunt Rosa made his family blame him, so he was sent to foster care, where he was neglected at best and abused at worst. He was also often bullied by girls at school.

As another Leo who was ignored and bullied as a kid, I can say from experience you play into expectations to get love. Mine were gender roles, his were stereotypes. Latine people of all genders are often oversexualized and stereotyped as "spicy flirts." Children are often aware of bigotry and stereotypes no matter how hard you try shielding them, and I don't think anyone but Esperanza would care to. If you're what people expect, they can't be disappointed, and maybe if they aren't disappointed they'll be proud. Flirting is also surprisingly affective at getting bullies to back off, which I know from watching my friends and my own tactic of fighting back not doing anything.

Leo learned to be flirtatious because it was how he got out of trouble. Because he was expected to and wanted to be loved. We see that when he becomes friends with other kids who love him for who he is, he gets less flirtatious. Because it was a coping mechanism and trauma response. Because he feels safe on the Argo II.

Queer Me, or The Queer Games Library, is a new digital game library and archive, which will curate video games which offer the opportunity to explore diverse gender and sexuality expressions, or a queer perspective through play.

Queer Me, or The Queer Games Library, is a new digital game library, which will curate video games as queer experiences for young people. Created by a team of students in Glasgow, The Queer Me library presents young users with a selection of video games (and other multimodal digital texts) which offer the opportunity to explore diverse gender and sexuality expressions, or a queer perspective…

“In my theorizing of temporality I explore forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinary linear measurements of everyday life, that engage heterogeneous temporalities or that precipitate out of time altogether—forms of being that I shall argue are queer by virtue of their particular engagements with time. These forms of being show, in fact, that time itself is wondrous, marvelous, full of queer potential.” 

- Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?

“The past is in the present in the form of a haunting. This is what, among other things, doing a queer kind of history means, since it involves an openness to the possibility of being haunted, even inhabited, by ghosts.”

so, I semi recently had some

✨️gender thoughts✨️

I'm still trigender, but now I want to get top surgery (I mostly identify as a female, as a afab btw) bc I don't want to have chest

so I had a goal to get a binder in 7ish years

and

I totally forgot I got this ask from you sorry😣 I think in a way I changed a lot and not at all. My journey started when I was 18 with me realizing that I was ace, eventually adopting bi-romantic for a time, and after a good few months of consideration and doubting to nonbinary. Lastly came the re-label as aromantic instead of biromantic (with some hesitation at first) and a pretty chill polyamourous addition after the rest settled in. And I feel like all these labels did something for me. Like when I first adopted them, I actually started to understand my peers more who lived this cis-, allo-, monogamous- and hetero-normative life. I could see suddenly why I felt a little out of place at some times.

Just yesterday my roommate told me about a friend of her brother who got really worried about me growing up queer in our region (I'm living in a more rural and conservative area). And I was like "Yeah this could have sucked way more than it did if I hadn't been a little stupid and understood how different and ostracized I actually was." (But also I was super lucky that my parents raised me accidentally pretty queer. Like there was never the talk of me getting married or having a boyfriend when I got to that age. They haven't been perfect with everything but that they did pretty stellar)

But then again, I don't think my personality changed much because of it. It got a little more confident, a lot more critical and maybe a little more angry for all the people who have it hard because of all those struggles.

Really it's that quote from Dolly Parton (supposedly): "Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

I feel more secure but also know I'm free to change if I like to. I'm not a sculpture. I'm a breathing being and I can and may change even if I haven't changed much in the past. I've found the words which resonate with me and make me happy and it gives me a great deal of peace and a sense of community even though I'm not the most active person^^