#queer zelena

At the moment they’re writing a romance where Belle has willingly chosen a man who put her in a cell, made her his maid, beat her father and killed her fiance.

I don’t think people want her to be the lgbt+ representation. There are theories about it and they actually kind of make sense :[ Whether Zelena is on the show or not, it doesn’t really bother me but i’m not really the ideal person to talk about this because I love Bex.

I don’t want Ruby/Mulan to be my minor representation either though, but it’s always better than Zelena. She has literally raped Robin and takes pride in it. Um... she’s mentally unstable lmao why would we want her to be our representation?

If they’re making Ruby/Mulan a real thing, I don’t want it to feel rushed. I want them to build their feelings for each other, just like swan queen did. That’s all I’m asking, and quite frankly, that’s what we deserve, because remember:

I have complicated existential feelings about queer Zelena as an actual reality rather than as a prediction.  I … am holding out some of my reasoning to talk about if I turn out to be right.  I have spoken about this at length with @anothershadeofgreen and there is a certain amount of subversion in Queer Zelena Theory just as Dump Positivity is a form of protest.

If it is Wicked Kansas they’ll have to walk a line of making sure that it is not the copy of fanon Swan Queen that it appears to me on the surface.  But that is still possible.  A lot of the Swan Queen dynamic comes from the chemistry between Regina and Emma and no matter if there is a similar set up chemistry can’t be repeated.

If it is Queer Zelena in general they have the the evil lesbian who raped a man to steal his sperm problem.  I’m absolutely not dismissing that that’s a terrible form of representation on this show.  But at this point any representation that is not Swan Queen is going to be problematic–and in some of the ways that Queer Zelena would be problematic so would Swan Queen.  Reformed or not Regina is a mass murderer and a rapist.  Now there is a significant difference between 3 seasons reformed Regina versus making rape jokes yesterday Zelena, but if we’re looking for “Role Model Representation” this show is not going to give us that even if they did Swan Queen because Regina is a complicated multi-layered character.  Oh and Emma just raped her boyfriends soul last week so let’s not pretend she doesn’t have baggage now too.

But here is the thing.  One of the arguments about representation is that it moves along in steps.  When racial minorities were first appearing on network television they needed them to be normal and good people to show the world that blacks were intelligent and heroic.  Once you normalize their representation (and this is a gradient because the representation for racial minorities is still not good) you move on to a place where you stop asking for “Credit to their Minority Status” characters and you start asking for complicated and flawed characters.  I am no longer at the point in my life where I just want or need Jack Harkness to be omni sexual.  I need him to be a complicated flawed man.  And the most complicated and the most flawed and the richest development on Once Upon a Time is with villain characters.  Who have a decided tendency not to remain villains.  Would Red or Mulan avoid the evil lesbian trope?  Sure.  But I say this with a great deal of love for Red… they’re also relatively boring characters on the canvas of Once.  And…. they’re not unproblematic as representation.

So why wouldn’t Red and Mulan be better than the crazy rapist?  Well for one thing they are not regular characters so the writers are, to be frank, quite likely to drop and forget them like they have so many other characters.  Neither had been seen in more then a year before they popped up again in 5.09.  Mulan hadn’t been seen in more than two!  Zelena for all her faults is a regular character so a commitment to a relationship with her is a stated commitment to carry on the story even if it is with a recurring character as the other partner.  Red has more characterization because she’s had two centrics but Mulan hasn’t even had that.  What we know about Once’s Mulan is that she’s an honorable soldier who fell in love with a princess and broke gender roles.  Do we know why she became a soldier?  Do we know why she has not returned to her family?  Do we know anything about Mulan that we don’t have to infer from the historical legend or the Disney movie?  And Red, who I adore as a character, ate her boyfriend.  So we’re fine with saying gays are secretly monsters who might kill the people they love if they lost control?  If that’s not an unfortunate metaphor not that far distant from deranged Zelena I am not sure what is.  And if you read the subtext in 5.09 it appears at least part of Red’s potential story would be that she was in love with Snow.  Good match for Mulan in the queer women can’t be friends with straight women without falling in love with them and having to leave rather than be threats to their families.

So on paper… while Red Warrior/Mulan Rouge might look like better representation then Queer Zelena/Wicked Kansas that isn’t necessarily the case.  I go back to something I’ve said before.  The only unproblematic characters on this show are unproblematic because they are unimportant.  If you want the representation to be real and organic and not some model of something bland and inoffensive it wont be organic to the show, it will be obviously forced, and that doesn’t do queer kids in 2016 any good at all to see themselves as bland, side, unimportant characters in an irrelevant romance.

Now… there is the Swan Queen question and in fact if they had done this story 2 years ago I don’t think this would be so much of an issue especially if they don’t write a carbon copy dynamic in Wicked Kansas.  The simple fact of the matter is that the majority of the show’s queer fanbase are shipping Emma and Regina.  And those people are never going to be happy to get the scraps of another relationship because they are shipping Emma and Regina not lady parts that we’re never going to see at 8PM on a network Sunday night show.  The people invested in the show are invested in the characters they love.  It would be condescending to say “oh, it doesn’t matter if we kill off Robin and Belle and David because the Outlaw Queen, Rumbelle, and Snowing shippers can just ship Captain Swan.  After all… he’s got a penis and she’s got a vagina.  They like peg A in slot B.”  Now if you are a LGBTQIA+ person and you don’t ship Swan Queen you are saying “well it’s not a story for them it’s a story for me.”  Sorry dear, no.  You have your ship.  You are shipping it already.  

The audience they are aiming at are the people who are not already shipping one of their established canon romantic ships.  Three years ago the show could have given us a canon LGB ship … I don’t know maybe one that involved two iconic Disney princesses … and I think that many Swan Queen shippers would have given it a chance.  Go look at AO3 and see who actually writes fan fic for Sleeping Warrior if you have bought into the weird narrative that SQers are somehow anti-SW.  What they are facing now is a rejection of the scraps because they tried to feed them to us before and then pulled them away at the last minute and said “just kidding.”  The show’s LGBT fanbase, the one they say they are trying to honor, is understandably wary.  We should be.  They’ve pulled this shit before.  They pulled this shit in 5.09 where Mulan manages to have an entire monologue awkwardly avoiding the use of any gendered pronoun.  Mulan is still not canonically bisexual.  Now I think she is, just as I think Regina Mills is, but that shit still stinks in subtext as much as it does in main text.

Handled delicately and with some good writing I think it could be good.  On paper it’s not a bad idea.  Especially when you remember the cultural connections between the gay community and the Wizard of Oz and Wicked.  Oh, but yeah.  This is Once Upon a Time.  The chances of getting good writing and a delicate handling of a queer romance of any sort?  A good handling of a romance of any sort no matter what the sexualities of the characters involved?

I will also continue to hope for SQ until the last minute of the last episode and it will continue to have a place in my heart long after the show ends.