Weymythical

by this i mean the problem with straight fiction is often that it doesn't consider itself straight, it simply is. by contrast queer is a choice (the old classic "straight, white, able-bodied, cis, peri, man" is a universal story, whereas anything else is specific to That Demographic).

it's important to read heterosexuality, because it's saying something specific about society. deconstructing universality (again, similar to any other of those above-mentioned so-called "universal" traits) makes heterosexuality and heteronormativity (not the same thing) a thematic choice that interacts with queerness more authentically than if one simply slots man a into man b (as it were).

it's also interesting because a lot of analysis that decouples from heterosexuality on this here webbed site, does so in a way that -- as many have said before and will again -- handily also tends to remove women and people of colour and queer people who aren't gay cis men. it's not really interrogating text, it's merely substituting one form of universality with another without changing the core biases of said text (substituting heteronormativity with homonormativity).

when i read characters and/or themes as heterosexual, it's because those themes have relevance to the text and i want to highlight them (even if said text thinks that they're universal). yes, sometimes a text isn't aware that it's making things queer, but sometimes fans have a tendency to make things gay (not necessarily queer) that aren't doing the text justice.

examples include: an angry straight man isn't necessarily or lbr primarily angry because he's secretly queer, but because straight men are socially raised to make anger a dominant emotion, burying other more healthy expressions and feelings. a storyline about that experience is interesting because he's straight.

a man and a woman being in a relationship isn't necessarily less interesting than two men in a relationship, and in fact the canon version may have way more substance than the one in which he leaves her (and she's angry but then accepts it every time) for a man. a storyline about this relationship is interesting because it may be challenging or modelling or deconstructing or playing with or simply presenting.

a man and a woman who have broken up isn't necessarily more interesting to read from the perspective of him having buried queer feelings that lead to [being a bad partner/being incompatible/outside forces making it the wrong time/etc], but can uncover a lot about heteronormative (AND amatonormative) cultural ideas about what a relationship "should be like" and how one can be more healthy in decoupling (ha) from those norms.

and also, these are interesting because of women. the angry straight man and his inability to emotionally connect with his partner leads them to break up says a lot about her role (and no, the narrative in question may not always be interested in her, but i can be) and how she exists in society and maybe also her flaws (is she someone who always wants to "fix" men? is she also holding onto toxic ideas about what a real man "should be"? does she not believe in better for herself? is she also angry all the time? does she want the relationship to fail? etcetc).

im not immune to "this makes no sense, gay be upon ye (regardless of gender jean harlow and myrna loy in libeled lady pls i believe you can do better)" but sometimes it does actually make sense and it's not sentencing a character to the straight salt mines of disinterest

also also, im always interested in how this interacts with queerness. are there queer characters in the thing? if not, where would they be? are there parts of the story that do read as queerer than intended and how do these clash with heterosexuality and heteronormativity in the text?

david and caspar in the diner!!!

And as I was contemplating all that I realized… not only can Gloria not bear the thought of losing the diner, and all that that means, she can’t go through losing someone again. Her parents died when she was young and she carries that around every time she cooks because that’s her history. And on Earth, at a certain point, she was so lonely even with friends that The Diner scooped her up. It gave her a family of crazy people to love and take care of — to cook for and learn from and with. But you can see between her brave faces and swearing she’ll be fine when the diner goes dark that she’s just so tired of losing. Which, of course, made me cry.

BUT.

Then I was thinking about the conversation Kazi has with Gloria about guilt for not being able to save them all, the way Caspar tries to protect Gloria from bearing the weight of a truly unbearable burden, and specifically what happens this current season.

Kazi asks what kind of person she would be if she didn’t take advantage of Gloria being able to steer the diner. But even before Team Sisters and Team MB get split up after the meeting with Krok, Kazi almost backs down from that approach in a way. Because Gloria says, in the freezer after she’s stolen/liberated some snow leopards, she can’t “leave any of them behind.” And Kazi doesn’t egg her on, really. She just talks about a blessing denied (the diner and all it can do), is just another burden. Even when Gloria asks how they COULD save everyone, Kazi tells her that’s for later and to celebrate their most recent victory, symbolic though it may be.

Cut to this season where Kazi is not just gaining control of the colonies her father has made, but freeing people. Freeing them to the point of leading fleets through warp gates at just the right time to escape retaliatory volleys from Krok. To the point of almost DYING because she was doing that! Kazi! Not fucking Tita, KAZIIIII. What kind of general does THAT Kazi?

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

Bit from Ted Just Admit It, which is still one of my Favorite episodes! I’ve been working on this one for Ages, I’m really pleased with it :)

Some details: