Pushed to the Moon
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
Tony Schiavone in Disguise
Working myself into a shoot
Posts: 15,819
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Post by Pushed to the Moon on Dec 16, 2020 15:28:10 GMT -5
We all keep a little fan fiction in our back pockets that we might "revisit" one day.
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Toates Madhackrviper
King Koopa
Is owed an Admin life-debt.
This avatar is so far out of date I might as well stick with it forever now.
Posts: 10,723
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Post by Toates Madhackrviper on Dec 16, 2020 16:13:31 GMT -5
But gay people can and have played straight characters? White people have played black folks too. We don't do that any more either. OK first of all, with what you're responding to here you're suggesting that queer actors should be relegated to only queer roles, which would severely limit their opportunities in an industry that is still extremely limited in the number of queer roles available. Like maybe you could say that once there are enough queer roles available for queer actors (and wrestlers) to play, but until then that's a bad path to go down. If you misread what negan said or something, and thought they meant that straight people had been playing queer roles for awhile now, then you'd have a point. One I have some small nuanced squabbles with, but I'd see your core point. Second... well I'm not sure I should get into this because I argued with my partner about these points and it may well have ended our relationship but I want to try and make my point here. I think there's a few key differences between sexuality and race. The most important one for me as a writer is that a characters sexuality is something you can "find" in the middle of writing a story. Race is not something you can "find" in the middle of writing a story. I mean, I personally have established sexualities (and gender identities) for all my characters set from the get, and I think that's a good practice writers should start doing. But I can completely see how a writer can start writing a story without having a character's sexuality (or gender identity) set in stone and "find" it along the way. Maybe even they're in a straight or gay relationship near the start, then later the writer realizes they'd rather right them as bi or pan and change that. I don't think anyone would question the ethics of doing that in a medium that does not involve actors. And I definitely understand why having actors makes it's different, and think that queer roles should go to queer actors when it is definitely known that the character is meant to be queer from the start. And in wrestling, I think that wrestlers who are queer irl should be written as queer on screen as well. Sonya and Tegan should definitely have their sexualities established on screen. That said, if you start writing a show with actors, wrestling included, and don't have a set sexuality in mind for a character, and along the way it occurs to you that they ought to be queer, but you already cast a straight actor, I don't see a problem with increasing the number of queer characters on television by having an already established character turn out to be queer. I don't think that hurts anyone. My partner thinks it hurts queer people to have straight actors play queer roles no matter what, but I just don't see the harm if its an already established character becoming queer after already having been cast. As a writer, it seems like that's severely limiting the amount of queer stories that can be told, in a way that only applies to certain mediums. I'm also thinking of cases where shows like Supernatural. Shows with a strong slash fandom where it could have been a very powerful statement if they established Dean as bi before the end of it. He obviously wasn't intended to be from the start, but I don't see a problem if the writers had "figured out" that he is over the course of the show. That particular show has the problem of there being overt queerbaiting involved as well, which complicates things, but while they obviously shouldn't have done that once they did I think the only right thing for them to have done would be to follow through on it. Even though the actors behind Dean and Castiel are straight, I don't think queer actors are losing roles that should have gone to them if the character's sexualities are figured out well after casting. And I don't think shutting down queer stories that queer fans want to see happen because the actors are straight makes any sense. That said, I've gotten less firm on my footing regarding this after arguing with my partner about it. So I could be convinced otherwise, perhaps. But right now thats my take.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on Dec 16, 2020 19:34:04 GMT -5
This is my fault for using a shorthand for a much longer point that I couldn't be bothered to make at the time, but you have written a very long reply responding to me when I pretty much agree with you. Before I respond to the specific parts of your reply, the purpose of mine was supposed to be a big shorthand for 'just because we used to always doesn't mean we should still always or at all'. There are a whole load of things that we used to do, even if we're only counting things that were allowed depicted onscreen in any kind of media, that we don't do any more, and there are very good reasons for that. Meanwhile a lot of truly awful shit has continued way past when it should have stopped in the name of 'tradition.' OK first of all, with what you're responding to here you're suggesting that queer actors should be relegated to only queer roles, which would severely limit their opportunities in an industry that is still extremely limited in the number of queer roles available. I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that when there are so few queer roles, they could at least go to queer people. I don't think wrestling and acting are actually comparable. A sexuality is not like the Kane gimmick or the Undertaker gimmick that you can just slap on someone and call it what they do, at the very least not in the modern world of wrestling. Kayfabe is dead. This shit doesn't fly any more. We know these wrestlers are real people. And being coded queer, like Velveteen Dream is, for a gimmick, is not the same thing as being a queer character. Wrestling also has very little reason or motivation for there to be many queer characters in it anyway. I agree on this. Race and sexuality are not comparable in representation, just like disability isn't. I jumped to a ridiculous example in my original reply to try to make the point bluntly (and inefficiently). I'm not sure I agree with this. If you are working on a draft of something, and you find out that a character is queer, and so you go back and edit that in, then, sure, I buy that you can 'find' a character's sexuality, before that character first appears in any kind of publicly consumable fashion. If you have an established character who is out there in books or episodes or whatever already, 'finding' that they are queer later is not representation, because that is denying what the experience of queerness is. Queerness is one of the biggest parts of who I am, and even people who choose not to define themselves through it, it has to be a big enough part of them for them to choose to do that. Even people who are in the closet realise there was over-compensation. Even someone who turns out to be queer later, and in your story has displayed no outward signs whatsoever up to that point, this has to be a choice that is made in the writing, not a convenience as a result of you not thinking the character was queer until they were already established. Throwing queerness on a character retrospectively, to me, is disrespectful. But I don't know how queer you are, or what your experience of queerness is, so maybe you interpret it differently. I can't comment on this. I have never seen even one second of that show.
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Toates Madhackrviper
King Koopa
Is owed an Admin life-debt.
This avatar is so far out of date I might as well stick with it forever now.
Posts: 10,723
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Post by Toates Madhackrviper on Dec 16, 2020 21:10:53 GMT -5
I don't think wrestling and acting are actually comparable. A sexuality is not like the Kane gimmick or the Undertaker gimmick that you can just slap on someone and call it what they do, at the very least not in the modern world of wrestling. Kayfabe is dead. This shit doesn't fly any more. We know these wrestlers are real people. And being coded queer, like Velveteen Dream is, for a gimmick, is not the same thing as being a queer character. Wrestling also has very little reason or motivation for there to be many queer characters in it anyway. See, this is going to come down to a difference in taste, but I've always preferred to see wrestling as a self-contained universe where the wrestlers just simply aren't their real life counterparts, and get personally annoyed at anything in the shows that violates that. Which honestly, I recognize is both not how the show is written and not how most fans consume it, so I guess I have to deal with reality on this one and accept your point as largely accurate. Still, I do wish that all of wrestling would be like Lucha Underground that way. I respect your point of view as a queer person. However, I still think that there are examples of an established character having been established as queer later in the story, that clearly were not always intended to be queer from the start of the story, that ended up being powerful examples of what to me definitely feels like representation and that I, as a queer person, enjoyed. Though I can't off the top of my head think of examples involving live action actors (and certainly not wrestlers), I can think of some involving voice actors. Most noteably Korrasmi, though another thing I learned from my partner is that some queer people see Korrasami as having been far too open to interpretation to take as good queer representation. This doesn't involve any kind of actor, but there's also the recent history of long time comic book characters being established as queer after years of writing them otherwise. Some, like Kitty Pryde, actually were originally intended to be, in her case, bisexual but it was rejected at the time and then confirmed recently. But others I don't think were originally intended at all, like Peter Quill's recent establishment as bisexual and polyamorous. Others, like Wonder Woman, had been having calls for them to be established as queer for decades. YMMV with how all of these work for you of course, but of all of them I can think of only one example that struck me as disrespectful, and that one wasn't just because of a character formally written as straight being established as (in this case) gay. That would be Iceman by the way, which frustrated me because they established him as monosexually gay after years and years of writing him as having meaningful relationships with women. They could have instead established him as bi or pan, but they chose to invalidate a bunch of character history instead. That one I did not like. The rest though pretty much all work for me. Again though, I do get that there's a difference between these examples and ones that involve actors portraying them, but you were saying your standards apply to any case of "finding" a character's sexuality well after the character is established. I actually agree with the suggestion that my experience with queerness colors my perception here, because I've felt since I came out that I "found" that I was bi along the way and don't really relate to "born this way" narratives about having always been essentially bi. I know that's a very rare experience though. Even as a writer, I don't think I would write many characters that way, especially since as I said, their canon sexualities are all set in stone from the outset for me.
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