tehriz:
bisexual-books:
a-little-bi-furious:
argumate:
angrybisexual:
a-little-bi-furious:
I really have no time for shitty excuses for lack of labeling people bisexual/pansexual/polysexual in fantasy fiction.
“Oh but it’s a period piece, in the culture they don’t have words for sexuality yet!”
I can go on about how “historically accurate” it is to have dragons in these “period pieces”, but ultimately my bottom line is that this is fantasy fiction, not a historical account, the possibilities are endless in this genre of fiction and yet we never get a universe where people are able label their sexuality, it’s not wrong to ask why.
The “but dragons are historically inaccurate” argument is really weak, because you’re basically just making a historically accurate myth real, rather than introducing an anachronistic element. Also, authors are trying to give the work a certain tone through language and often avoid modern sounding words in general.
I don’t see the point in labelling people, especially if it’s anachronistic.
Why not just show it through their actions?
Because actions don’t equal orientation, whatever you define as “actions” that prove they are multisexual, using only that to convey their sexual and romantic orientations both feeds into toxic stereotypes and provides really weak representation that heterosexists can argue away from existing altogether.
Thanks to heteronormativity all characters are assumed straight as the default, everyone in society is assumed to be straight from birth until they “prove otherwise” with their actions which is really fucked up and completely unecessary when you think about it, and I don’t want that mentality promoted and supported irl or in fiction because that’s a really harmful trope, especially to young people.
There’s nothing wrong with not labeling any characters persay, but if that’s the only option presented to readers in the majority of fiction that becomes a problematic trope and an excuse for lazy writing. And don’t even get me started on the tons of arguments I’ve had with people over how lgbtq-coded characters are “open to interpretation” and “ambiguous” because “they don’t use labels” (and therefore are not really representation so stop reading into things! :/), even with creator confirmation unlabeled characters are dismissed as not being lgbtq, so labels can be very important to convey certain kinds and qualities of representation.
If there is one thing that’s not lacking in fiction it’s non-straight characters without labels, not just in fantasy fiction, all genres have a problem with this trope and I’d like to see a lot more diversity in the representation we get. There is nothing blocking creators from giving their chracters labels (except shitty writing and prejudice perhaps but that’s another post), it’s an entirely a fictional world they create and I’m sick of people acting like it’s “impossible” or somehow “rude” to give characters labels in fantasy fiction.
I also don’t see how labeling people is anachronistic but having dragons, magic, advanced alien technology in the middle ages, everyone with the same american dialect, and making up names for each branch of fictional mythos is not anachronistic at all. That makes zero sense to me and imho it’s really lazy writing to say you can’t have openly labeled lgbtq+ characters alongside the rest of the myth and magic.
^THIS. Bold for emphasis.
Labels help isolated queer kids find communities and give description and meaning to their experiences. I really don’t know how many more ways we can say this before people realize how hurtful “I don’t see why we have to label people” is.
Giving people a real world term they can go look up if they resonate with the characters experience is important I think and there’s no way its going to be the only modern language used in the story, but:
Would characters making descriptive statements like “I’m attracted to people of many different genders” also work?
That doesn’t use modern/setting inappropriate language but its still fairly explicit and it is a label its just a long one.
In fantasy particularly having cultures that use different labels (that are then defined in text etc) and those who define how sexuality works differently to how we do now also isn’t really a problem – and it is deffinitly fairly inappropriate to apply modern this society sexuality labels onto historical settings that are not white/western (for lack of a better term) because you think your labeling system or way of conceptualising is better. (Mostly cause you’ve done that before…)
fearlessstateofmind backup 