On Representation

Half of what’s in here has already been said. I’m building to the half that hasn’t. If Homestuck made The Legend of Korra look like Republican propaganda, then She-Ra made Homestuck look like Mein Kampf. Multiple examples of gay and lesbian couples, including the two main characters and their developed relationship over the course of five seasons. Nobody’s head gets cut off. No teenagers get drunk and fall down stairs. Nobody has to make out after one or both parties are dead. These relationships and spontaneous gestures of romantic affection are treated as normal and accepted in their universe. The final shot of the series is two couples, one gay and one straight, celebrating their love and friendship while looking upon a newly rejuvenated world.

This is not how the real world works. I’m going to point out a few big mistakes I’ve seen people make when talking about representation.

We need to distinguish “gay and lesbian representation” versus “queer representation.” The difference isn’t what group is being represented, or how many minority groups you can stack on top of each other in one character, but rather how the representation is handled. She-Ra is great gay and lesbian representation. It represents gay and lesbian people by showing them on the screen as people of action and varied interests, not targets, pawns, victims, or irredeemable villains with their evil tied to their sexual orientation or gender identity. However, She-Ra is not queer representation.

This is the part where I make up new words in confusing tongues to divide and confound the masses. “Queer¹ representation” is transgressive by definition. She-Ra is not particularly transgressive in-universe. She is a predestined hero chosen by ancient magic technology to defend a planet from invaders. She-Ra, the show, could be considered transgressive out of universe, but the fact that it was allowed on a major streaming service doesn’t particularly strike me as transgressive.

On the other hand, Homestuck is significantly transgressive. It got the opportunity to be, because it was self-published on an author’s personal website without any significant corporate backing until after 2017. The gay and lesbian representation in Homestuck² is largely treated as the butt of jokes, mostly because the author was an assumed cisgender man³ steeped in late-2000s internet culture (which, believe me, you’d be shocked by), but by the end of the comic, they realized what they had in their hands. In my opinion, the best representation that came out of Homestuck is queer representation.

An inside joke in the Homestuck fandom is “explaining troll romance.” That’s what’s going to happen here. Trolls are an alien species with yellow eyes, gray skin, and candy corn-colored horns that live on the planet Alternia, known for its repressive and artificially-shaped society designed to raise elite murderers. “Blackrom” is a type of romance and sexual attraction known only to trolls defined by a hatred or desire for rivalry with the other person. In contrast, “redrom” in troll society is more akin to human romance, but I’d argue that due to the differences between human and troll society, “redrom” isn’t what we would think of as romance. It’s impermanent and self-satisfying, and boxed into two separate quadrants: “matesprits”, which is an amorous relationship for the primary purpose of reproduction, and “moirails”, which is a non-sexual relationship where two trolls confide and almost co-depend on each other, treated as another form of romance. Trolls are naturally bisexual; either “gender” is interchangeable for the purposes of reproduction. Being gay or lesbian is treated as a preference, and being transgender is treated by Hiveswap, Hiveswap Friendsim, and Pesterquest as nearly inconsequential, despite the despotic society of the trolls. What does get you killed is refusing to reproduce, or transgressions against the strict caste system determined by blood color.

The first queer narrative in Homestuck is the briefly touched-on relationship between the Signless and the Disciple, said to be a relationship that “transcended the quadrants.” The quadrants are enforced for the purpose of reproduction and control over troll society. The Signless is a martyr character who died for his message of equality across castes. He was intended to be a Jesus parallel, but the comparisons are largely superficial (crucified by an empire for his beliefs, followers carry on his beliefs in secret by wearing religious symbols on necklaces). More than anything, the Signless is a queer narrative, defined primarily by his romantic, familial, and fraternal relationships to others (the Disciple, the Dolorosa, the Psiionic) rather than any of his teachings. On Alternia, being a friend, a mother, or having a relationship not defined by quadrants can be queer.

For a later queer narrative in Homestuck, John Egbert, one of the main characters, was the first human to experience blackrom. Before he and his group of human friends came into contact with the trolls, he had no words to describe blackrom. However, he developed a “blackrom crush” on a troll, Terezi, by the end of the comic. Sadly, this wasn’t explored in depth in the comic proper.

Most gay and lesbian representation in popular media exists to serve two purposes: to score dunks on a steadily decreasing minority of angry and reactionary Christian fundamentalists, a socially acceptable target, and to make more money by virtue-signaling. This is usually the point where the author goes into a wild rant about how Western culture is being destroyed by evil leftists or whatever and the reader logs off in anger, but by the prevalence of “pink-washing” and “rainbow-washing” memes last June, I think it’s acceptable for me to say that. That’s why gay and lesbian representation exists, because people buy stuff with it. Something, something, “social change in capitalism happens because people buy stuff/that’s what’s marketed.”⁴ I have a little more faith in the ability of the individual human to make their own judgments; otherwise, that footnoted statement wouldn’t even exist, and all individuals and classes would exist in perpetual stasis to satisfy existing orders. Regardless, that’s why gay and lesbian people get represented.

The reason it should exist is different altogether. A lot of terrible things exist because people seem to want them, like kranch. We live in a society. I’ve seen people argue for good gay and lesbian representation for a couple reasons I think lose sight of the original goal. One of these reasons is to distinguish between “problematic” and “non-problematic” media. If a piece of media jumps through the correct set of hoops and does some form of representation correctly without making any mistakes, it gets placed in the stack of “non-problematic” media. However, if it fumbles its delicate gymnastic routine, it gets thrown in the “problematic” pile, where it is never looked at again. I have no sources for people who think like this, but just trust me on this one, they’re out there.

This is a terrible way to think about stories. Most stories written before 1980, hell, before 2015, are problematic. Your favorite story is problematic. You’re problematic. Everything that exists, at one point, did or said something that won’t be acceptable to people 20 years from now. The “window of taboo” isn’t expanding, it just rotates. Back in the day, it was uncouth to say curse words on TV. The stand-up comedian that made up that list of “seven dirty words” got arrested in 1972 for “disturbing the peace.” Our cultural taboos now are shifting toward personal identity, rather than obscenity. In a couple centuries, they might shift toward something different altogether. I’ve seen Catcher in the Rye get the flambé treatment from internet people because it’s “problematic.” I haven’t even read the book, but I don’t think that was the intended message. From what I’ve heard, it’s about an asshole rich kid who thinks he’s the only one who sees the cracks in society, and is disillusioned from the role set out for him because of it. It’s an imperfect story, much like all other stories. The point is you’re not the only disillusioned teenager.

We aim for more perfect representation, not to avoid being put in the “problematic” pile by Twitter analysis 20 years in the future, but because we want to avoid sending the wrong message. Going back to what makes good gay, lesbian, or transgender representation, I love myself a sassy, flamboyant Disney villain, but that was it for people in the 90s. Before that, we had Frank N. Furter, a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania.” These characters are icons now, because that’s the only way queer people saw themselves on screen. They’re the butts of the jokes, the antagonistic forces in the way of the heroes. They’re inherently disgusting because of their deviance from the norm. There are entire essays and books that talk about the history of gay/lesbian/transgender people on TV. This isn’t one of them, sorry. I’m trying to focus on the “why”.

The reason we teach the classics in school shouldn’t be to “ingrain values of society into the youth.” Rather, it’s to put your current experiences as a student in 2021 in perspective to other people throughout written history who were once students and authors. The reason we should diversify the classics to include more books from continents other than Europe shouldn’t be to collect mystical “diversity points.” Rather, it’s to put the student’s experiences in multiple perspectives from multiple continents, and to serve as a beacon to students from continents other than Europe that their experience is also a human experience, and therefore fundamentally matters. Therefore, this is why gay representation should exist; gay representation is a beacon to a group that hasn’t been reached out to, to remind that group that their experience as human beings is fundamentally important. It should be a statement of the author that you are important, should be able to participate on all the same adventures as the dominant group of the time period, and have your experience be centered and fundamentally important.

This is what separates “gay and lesbian representation” or “transgender representation” from “queer representation.” Queer representation is a further acknowledgement that your adventure is going to be different from “the same adventures as the dominant group of the time period,” but your adventure also fundamentally matters. Again, multiple perspectives. The boundary of this type of queer shifts with what’s considered “acceptable” and what’s considered “transgressive,” but boundaries need to be broken. People need to be shocked. For this reason, it’s probably fundamentally impossible for “queer representation” to be created by a dominant industry first. If something exists for a profit motive, there’s already a market for it. It’s not transgressive, not here at least. Maybe in other countries where it’s edited out and not shown, but not here.

As a tangent, this is why “queer representation” could be antithetical to the principles of “good writing.” As this tweet-thread elaborates on, queer narratives have to be intended from the start to be “foreshadowed.” That’s not how real people work. I dislike this discourse altogether. Aristotle’s Poetics has successfully convinced generations of media critics and YouTube commenters that art must imitate real life in order to be “good” or “enjoyable”, and this tweet-thread unintentionally operates on that premise. This clearly isn’t the case. Real life isn’t logical, and “foreshadowing” is mostly recognized in hindsight by obsessive pattern-finding monkey-brains⁵ trying to predict the future.

My theory is that art imitates a “perfected” version of life, one where there is foreshadowing and the reader does have perfect information, so they can feel satisfied upon reaching the conclusion, even if it ends badly for the characters, or subverts some of the expectations of the reader. The goal is to prime the reader to think and reflect, and a setting like real life, where very little is expected by an individual, isn’t useful for focusing on a specific topic. If I were to give you a story that represents real life according to me, it would be a series of details about random objects in whatever room I’m in at the moment, interspersed with extensive internal monologue about nothing in particular, and one or two pages of dialogue. Critics would lambast my life for having an “unsatisfying narrative.” I would too. Why the hell would I want to read a book about that? I’m experiencing it directly right now. This “perfected” version of life is a framework for getting a reader to put their experience into a historical and cultural context by thinking about perspectives other than their own.

Both types of representation are important to have in a story. The problem with representation of specific groups is it’s impossible to represent every possible group in a story equally without it being incredibly cluttered. It would require, as of July 25th, 2021, 7.882 billion characters. However, it’s still important for a story to try and represent groups the author is from or close to, and more importantly, uplift stories from authors actually in those groups, because real gay people are more important than fake gay people.

This is directed towards you. Yes, you, the reader of this post. This includes me, as I read this to edit it further, or to merely satisfy my ego. If you want to make a change in the world, the real world, you need to stop posting about other people’s properties, get off your metaphorical ass, and make that change in a realistic and practical manner. Disney will not hand you your desired representation, no matter how much money you give them. Institutions designed for profit will not hand you something that isn’t profitable yet just because you, personally, give them attention. If you want something done right, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Don’t settle for headcanons or handouts in the media of people who do not care about you or people like you. Create something of your own, or actively seek out people like you who create things you like. Don’t drag them down for being imperfect; rather, find something that’ll take you in the direction of “more perfect.” Vote with your attention and your wallet. This is how new stars are born, not ones that seek to scorch, but ones that seek to warm and enlighten.