The descriptions of his tantrums are so fuckn funny and you just know...this comes from a place of experience and affection on the part of the author. And yes, in an interview, the author said that she didn’t need to invent Howl’s dramatics when he got a cold, that’s just what her husband (a medievalist/academic) acted like when he was sick. She was like...I just watched him and wrote it all down.

Another comment I saw in a tag of a tumblr post was someone saying...why do you guys like this guy (Howl)? He’s a mess!

Yes! And that’s the point! His fake castle, his hair dye, his fake reputation, it is all just a slightly heightened version of what we all are. We all project a front. We curate our image. (Can you IMAGINE how insufferable Howl would be if he had instagram???) We all have insecurities, and we all sometimes want more attention and validation than we get. 

Sometimes we all want to dramatically slink around the house going ‘oh woe is me, I need a bit of attention’. And so we smile when we see Howl just go for it lmao at least I do. Because of course, despite working overtime to seem more perfect than we are, we all just want to be loved for who we authentically are.

So then of course as Sophie gets to know the real Howl, she also finds out that he is kind. He undercharges poor people for spells, he takes in an orphan and an old lady looking for a rest, and he is very protective of his fire demon, and judges people based on how nice they are to Calcifer.

And again, that’s the whole point. We humans are bundles of kind, squishy hearts, as well as flaws. And we all work overtime putting up images, but in the end, we just want to love and be loved both for our good points, and our absurd, stupid, vulnerabilities and flaws. We want to find value in the soggy human condition.

The Princess and the Frog (where in Howl is the princess and Sophie is the frog)

So, Sophie is cursed into a shape that will (according to fairy tale villain logic) prevent her from finding love. And since the character is a girl, and this book has emotional intelligence, that shape is not a frog, it is an old woman. Women are still valued by society primarily for youth, fertility, and beauty, and are put out to the pasture of invisibility and irrelevance when we get our first crow’s feet. This ‘should’ have been (if Sophie bought into all that) the end of her life, so to speak.

But the absolutely amazing thing is, being an old woman turns out to be Sophie’s secret weapon, her path to self actualization. It gives her strength and courage. She is like...oh, old women can get away with just saying whatever they feel. Oh, people have to be nice to me. And she just gains all of this confidence. Maybe too much! Lol She gets pushier and nosier and more stubborn. 

Sophie has flaws too! But Howl falls in love with her too, and again in the theme of genuine love and inner beauty, he falls in love with her just like she is. He knows she is under a spell but he doesn’t know what she ‘really’ looks like. He just falls in love with who she is.

It’s like the polar opposite of the Little Mermaid (Disney version). In that movie, Ariel loses her voice, and the prince has to get to know her in the silence. In Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie’s voice is amplified by her curse. She just comes tromping into his house, shouting at him. And he loves her for it.

Howl needs her honesty and her clear eyed assessments. He loves that she is protective of his found family (Calcifer and Michael). (They become her family too.) And, despite her complaining, she is very protective of Howl as well. She even goes to save the woman she thinks he loves, even though she is unbearably jealous.

And in the end, his love doesn’t break the spell. Sophie herself lets go of her ‘disguise’. Her elderly persona has become the armor that she wears to give her courage and strength. It is like assistance, or an aid to her personal growth, and when she grows strong enough on her own to make the choices she wants to make, (love Howl, embrace her magic, choose her own place in life) she lets go of it.

Another subversion to the Princess and the Frog is that Howl is the princess. I just love the gender fuckery of it all. Howl is the one who yearns for true love and relentlessly pursues it. It is Howl who wears jewelry, who primps, and who colors his hair. 

Men are told that if they enjoy anything associated with the feminine, then they are not men. I hate that. I want people to be able to express their gender however they see fit in their individual ways. So to have Howl be aggressively vain and embrace the trappings of femininity and for him to also be loved and the hero, Idk I just really like that. 

Sure, in the end, the fact that he rushes out to save her without doing his hair is a sign that he’s truly in love. But that’s just because he prioritized her wellbeing over his beauty routine that day to save her life. He doesn’t stop being Howl. You get the idea that he’s still gonna be traipsing around in dangly earrings and flashy suits for the foreseeable future. I’ve noticed that on tumblr, the bisexuals have embraced him and Sophie, which is right and good.

The point of Own Voices is to address the fact that there are a ton of unemployed trans people because 'we don't know what to do with you' and 'we don't think you are versatile enough to play cis people' or 'we don't need any 'niche' writers, thank you' meanwhile they've got cis people picking up Oscars for the 'brave incredible' act of pretending to be trans for a few months. It's having people lining up to suck you off because 'oh look how much you care about those people' but in real life, they wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.

The issue is, the vast unemployment problem for visibly queer people, and then, us having to watch the people who exclude them parade around acting like their savior.

The answer is always…if the money is flowing, you need to make sure little dams are not being built to keep it from flowing to the communities you are profiting from.

The solution is to make sure marginalized people are in the room in positions of influence, so that the characters aren't mocked. To make sure the stories are told in an authentic manner.

If you are telling queer stories and you haven't got any queer people on the project? That's a problem. If you are making money off communities and excluding them? That's a problem.

Own Voices is a principle that targets the capitalist element of producing art. It looks at the people who fund the project. It takes into account makeup of the project over all. It makes sure that the capital is flowing to the places it is benefiting from.

IT IS NOT an exclusionary principle of 'you have to be of that exact queer identity in order to depict that queer identity'. That's literally absurd. It inhibits empathy. It restricts storytelling. And, it goes in the dead opposite direction of where we want to go!!

AND it is actively homophobic and destructive and malicious, because it leads to policing people's identities. It leads to outing people. It leads to reductive, predatory, behavior, it leads to harassment. And for bisexual people, it creates this constant hostile environment of we cannot just be. We cannot just exist. We have to keep proving ourselves.

I remember when I told one of my friends that I was bisexual. (I talked about this in my day of bi visibility post) She told me she didn't believe me. That all girls like to kiss girls for boys attention and for fun. She told me when I ate pussy, she'd believe me. (lmaooooosob I know!) And this is a common common common attitude towards bisexual people. "I don't believe you. Perform a sex act." PEOPLE I'M NOT KIDDING THIS IS ABSURDLY AWFUL AND HORRIBLE AND YES SOMETIMES FEELS DARKLY COMEDIC BUT IT IS SO HARMFUL AND IT IS SO COMMON. STOP IT.

Now, is there nuance to the question of casting queer people in queer roles? Yes. Of course. As a feminist I would be remiss to not mention trans women. (actual feminists give a fuck about all women not just cis women, just, you know, for the record) For example, with trans women, the most overbearing stereotype of trans women is that they are men in disguise. There are quite literally legal defenses that are built on it that have (and continue to allow) men to murder trans women and escape punishment in America. That they are just men under women's clothes, tricking you. Waiting to spring the truth on you. They are literally murdered behind this vicious bigotry. When you have a cis man playing a trans woman, you risk feeding into that stereotype.

Now. There is more nuance on top of that. If the project involves trans people, trans women are writing it, is it well done, is it humanizing? It may have value! But people also aren't obligated to feel overjoyed about it either. People are allowed to point out that connection and to prefer to see a trans woman in a trans woman role.

BUT THERE IS LITERALLY NO NUANCE ANYWHERE that allows you to take this concept of own voices, and use it to say "you must always be x to portray/write x or we will harass you." THERE IS NO EXPLANATION ANYWHERE that allows you to require people to 'prove' their identities to you. There is LITERALLY NO WIGGLE ROOM for you to demand people to perform sexual or romantic acts for you to 'prove' who they are. That is disgusting. And it is actively hostile to bisexual people.

And when you fix your fingers to get on twitter and say that a boy (HE IS BARELY 18) is APPROPRIATING queer identity because he hasn't fucked a dude for you on camera, I mean lol you don't give a fuck about queer people. STFU lmaooo. You don't look like Marsha P Johnson, you don't look like Harvey Milk. You look like a petty, small minded little asshole with too much time on their hands, trying to get clout on the internet. (I also suspect there is some horny fetishizing behavior at play there because people want to watch him kiss other boys. This is the whole....please understand the difference between fiction and reality. Enjoy fictional queer relationships all you want. Find men hot together all you want. But do not treat REAL LIFE ACTUAL men and boys like they are your little performing dolls ffs. Gross, people. Gross!!)

Anyway,

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE QUEER TO PLAY QUEER. We can demand broad and consistently inclusive projects, AND not be utter assholes and police people's identities. I promise you. We can. In fact, it is perfectly logical, consistent and normal. We can include gay men and bisexual men in projects that depict them, without bullying children. I promise you that. It's easy. It's simple as pie my dears.