IDK.. But I Like Them

about Mycroft Holmes

The problem I have with nine out of ten versions of Mycroft Holmes is that, inevitably, people forget one of two truths:

1. Sherlock, who despises modesty, openly declares Mycroft to be far better than him at deduction and reasoning.

2. Mycroft personally helped found a gentleman’s club specifically for people who want to be left alone in silence. It’s not just about political secrets, it’s literally a club for people who were too introverted to be normal even by Victorian standards.

Sherlock is, at least, empathetic enough to understand people and want to engage with them, even if he wants to do it entirely on his own terms. Mycroft is the one who created a club so he could entirely avoid all contact with other people except silent butlers when he so wished.

Dear modern writers, Mycroft is the extremely antisocial, possibly sociopathic, utterly unambitious, unfathomable genius who only made the effort to conform to social norms because he decided he’d rather run the government that already exists because it would be too much bother to dismantle and rebuild it to his preferences.

Hi! I’m part of the lgbtq+ community and Severus is my favorite HP character and I was wondering (if you have the time and feel obliged) if you could please give me a few examples of how he’s queer? It’s been a few years since I reread the books, and def before I came out, so I’m a little in the dark here lol Thanks!!

First of all, I just wanted to apologize for how long it has taken me to properly respond to your ask. I’ve been dealing with some ongoing health issues that have turned me into something of a moody writer. I’ll get random spurts of energy and inspiration and then hit a wall of absolute writer’s block assisted by a major case of executive dysfunction every single time I try to respond to the multiple asks languishing in my inbox. Fortunately, I found myself involved in a discussion just today that addressed your ask so perfectly that I wanted to share it with you.  In the very least, that discussion has also managed to shake off my writer’s block temporarily so that I have found myself in the right head-space to finally be able to give this lovely ask the thought and attention that I feel it deserves. 

Although, in regards to the Snape discourse I linked above, I feel that I should warn you in advance that the discussion was prompted by an anti-Snape poster who made a rather ill-thought meme (I know there are many in the Snapedom who would rather just avoid seeing anti-Snape content altogether, so I try to warn when I link people to debates and discussions prompted by anti-posts) but the thoughtful responses that the anti-Snape poster unintentionally generated from members of the Snapedom (particularly by @deathdaydungeon whose critical analyses of Snape and, on occasions, other Harry Potter characters is always so wonderfully nuanced, thought-provoking, and well-considered), are truly excellent and worth reading, in my opinion. Also, as I fall more loosely under the “a” (I’m grey-ace/demisexual) of the lgbtqa+ flag and community I would prefer to start any discussions about Snape as a queer character or as a character with queer coding by highlighting the perspectives of people in the Snapedom who are actually queer before sharing any thoughts of my own.

In addition, I also wanted to share a few other posts where Snape’s queer coding has been discussed by members of the Snapedom in the past (and likely with far more eloquence than I could manage in this response of my own).

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Along with an excellent article in Vice by Diana Tourjée, in which a case for Snape being trans is convincingly argued. 

Importantly, you’ll notice that while some of these discussions do argue the possibility of Snape being a queer or trans character others may only discuss the way that Snape’s character is queer coded. That is because there is a distinct but subtle difference between: “This character could be queer/lgbtq+” and: “This character has queer/lgbtq+ coding” one which is briefly touched on in the first discussion that I linked you to. However, I would like to elaborate a bit here just what I mean when I refer to Snape as a character with queer coding. As while Rowling has never explicitly stated that she intended to write Snape as lgbtq+ (although there is one interview given by Rowling which could be interpreted as either an unintentional result of trying to symbolically explain Snape’s draw to the dark arts or a vague nod to Snape’s possible bisexuality: “Well, that is Snape’s tragedy. … He wanted Lily and he wanted Mulciber too. He never really understood Lily’s aversion; he was so blinded by his attraction to the dark side he thought she would find him impressive if he became a real Death Eater.”) regardless of her intent when she drew upon the existing body of Western literary traditions and tropes for writing antagonists and villains in order to use them as a red-herring for Snape’s character, she also embued his character with some very specific, coded subtext. This is where Death of the Author can be an invaluable tool for literary critics, particularly in branches of literary criticism like queer theory. 

Ultimately, even if Rowling did not intend to write Snape as explicitly queer/lgbtq+ the literary tradition she drew upon in order to present him as a foil for Harry Potter and have her readers question whether he was an ally or a villain has led to Snape being queer coded. Specifically, many of the characteristics of Snape’s character design do fall under the trope known as the “queering of the villain.” Particularly, as @deathdaydungeon, @professormcguire, and other members of the Snapedom have illustrated, Snape’s character not only subverts gender roles (e.g. his Patronus presents as female versus male, Snape symbolically assumes the role of “the mother” in the place of both Lily and later Narcissa when he agrees to protect Harry and Draco, his subject of choice is potions and poisons which are traditionally associated more with women and “witches,” while he seemingly rejects in his first introduction the more phallic practice of “foolish wand-waving,” and indeed Snape is characterized as a defensive-fighter versus offensive, in Arthurian mythology he fulfills the role of Lady of the Lake in the way he chooses to deliver the Sword of Gryffindor to Harry, Hermione refers to his hand-writing as “kind of girly,” his association with spiders and spinners also carries feminine symbology, etc.) but is often criticized or humiliated for his seeming lack of masculinity (e.g. Petunia mocking his shirt as looking like “a woman’s blouse,” which incidentally was also slang in the U.K. similar to “dandy” to accuse men of being effeminate, the Marauders refer to Snape as “Snivellus” which suggests Snape is either less masculine because he cries or the insult is a mockery of what could pass for a stereotypical/coded Jewish feature, his nose, Remus Lupin quite literally instructs Neville on how to “force” a Boggart!Snape, who incidentally is very literally stepping out of a closet-like wardrobe, into the clothing of an older woman and I quoted force because that is the exact phrase he uses, James and Sirius flipping Snape upside down to expose him again presents as humiliation in the form of emasculation made worse by the arrival and defense of Lily Evans, etc.). 

Overall, the “queering of the villain” is an old trope in literature (although it became more deliberate and prevalent in media during the 1950s-60s); however, in modernity, we still can find it proliferating in many of the Disney villains (e.g. Jafar, Scar, Ursula, etc.), in popular anime and children’s cartoons (e.g. HiM from Powerpuff Girls, James from Pokemon, Frieza, Zarbon, the Ginyu Force, Perfect Cell, basically a good majority of villains from DBZ, Nagato from Fushigi Yuugi, Pegasus from Yu Gi Oh, etc.), and even in modern television series and book adaptations, such as the popular BBC’s Sherlock in the character of Moriarty. Indeed, this article does an excellent job in detailing some of the problematic history of queer coded villains. Although, the most simple summary is that: “Queer-coding is a term used to say that characters were given traits/behaviors to suggest they are not heterosexual/cisgender, without the character being outright confirmed to have a queer identity” (emphasis mine). Notably, TV Tropes also identifies this trope under the classification of the “Sissy Villain” but in queer theory and among queer writers in fandom and academia “queering of the villain” is the common term. This brings me back to Snape and his own queer coding; mainly, because Rowling drew upon Western traditions for presenting a character as a suspected villain she not only wrote Snape as queer (and racially/ethnically) coded but in revealing to the reader that Snape was not, in fact, the villain Harry and the readers were encouraged to believe he was by the narrator she incorporated a long history of problematic traits/tropes into a single character and then proceeded to subvert them by subverting reader-expectation in a way that makes the character of Severus Snape truly fascinating. 

We can certainly debate the authorial intent vs. authorial impact where Snape’s character is concerned. Particularly as we could make a case that the polarizing nature of Snape may well be partly the result of many readers struggling against Rowling subverting literary tropes that are so firmly rooted in our Western storytelling traditions that they cannot entirely abandon the idea that this character who all but had the book thrown at him in terms of all the coding that went into establishing him as a likely villain (e.g. similar to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Snape is also coded to be associated with darkness/black colors and to represent danger and volatile/unstable moods, while his class status further characterizes him as an outsider or “foreign other,” and not unlike all those villains of our childhood Disney films which affirmed a more black-and-white philosophy of moral abolutism, such as Scar or Jafar, the ambiguity of Snape’s sexuality coupled with his repeated emasculation signals to the reader that this man should be “evil” and maybe even “predatory,” ergo all the “incel” and friendzone/MRA discourse despite nothing in canon truly supporting those arguments; it seems it may merely be Snape’s “queerness” that signals to some readers that he was predatory or even that “If Harry had been a girl” there would be some kind of danger) is not actually our villain after all. 

Indeed, the very act of having Snape die (ignoring, for the moment, any potential issues of “Bury Your Gays” in a queer analysis of his death) pleading with Harry to “look at him” as he symbolically seems to weep (the man whom Harry’s hyper-masculine father once bullied and mocked as “Snivellus”) memories for Harry to view (this time with his permission) carries some symbolic weight for any queer theory analysis. Snape, formerly portrayed as unfathomable and “secretive,” dies while pleading to be seen by the son of both his first and closest friend and his school-hood bully (a son that Snape also formerly could never see beyond his projection of James) sharing with Harry insight into who he was via his personal memories. For Harry to later go on to declare Snape “the bravest man he ever knew” carries additional weight, as a queer theory analysis makes it possible for us to interpret that as Harry finally recognizing Snape, not as the “queer coded villain” he and the reader expected but rather as the brave queer coded man who was forced to live a double-life in which “no one would ever know the best of him” and who, in his final moments at least, was finally able to be seen as the complex human-being Rowling always intended him to be. 

Rowling humanizing Snape for Harry and the reader and encouraging us to view Snape with empathy opened up the queer coding that she wrote into his character (intentionally or otherwise) in such a way that makes him both a potentially subversive and inspiring character for the lgbtq+ community. Essentially, Snape opens the door for the possibility of reclaiming a tradition of queer coding specific to villains and demonstrating the way those assumptions about queer identity can be subverted. Which is why I was not at all surprised that I was so easily able to find a body of existing discourse surrounding Snape as a queer coded or even as a potentially queer character within the Harry Potter fandom. At least within the Snapedom, there are many lgbtq+ fans of his character that already celebrate the idea of a queer, bi, gay, trans, ace/aro, or queer coded Snape (in fact, as a grey-ace I personally enjoy interpreting Snape through that lens from time-to-time). 

Thank you for your ask @pinkyhatespink and once again I apologize for the amount of time it’s taken me to reply. However, I hope that you’ll find this response answered your question and, if not, that some of the articles and posts from other pro-Snape bloggers I linked you to will be able to do so more effectively. Also, as a final note, although many of the scholarly references and books on queer coding and queering of the villain I would have liked to have sourced are typically behind paywalls, I thought I would list the names of just a few here that I personally enjoyed reading in the past and that may be of further interest should you be able to find access to them.

Fathallah, Judith. “Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC’s Sherlock.” Television & New Media, vol. 16, no. 5, 2014, p. 490-500. 

Huber, Sandra. “Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or How to Speak With The Dead.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, p. 15-25.

Mailer, Norman. “The Homosexual Villain.” 1955. Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, edited by Sipiora Phillip, Random House, 2013, pp. 14–20.

Solis, Nicole Eschen. "Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater.” Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, p. 115+. 

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “The Essentialist Villain.” Jan. 2019,  SBN13: 978-1-4384-6966-9

Bruno’s room?? Analysis??? Theory? Headcanon?? Thingy???

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Encanto Spoilers!!!

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Okay, I promise this will get to Bruno’s room but for starters, I think I should talk about how the casita’s rooms are implied to work. Sorry but it’s important!!

In both the film and the concepts, it very much seems that the casita’s rooms reflect a combination of who their owners are to others, and who their owners want to be. We only see a small handful of rooms in the film but this is best seen in Isabela’s room, which is a perfect, flowery, empty room. There isn’t any furniture that we can really see besides her hanging bed, the rest is all for show, literally advertising how perfect she is with topiaries of herself making “perfect, practiced poses”. This is who she wants, and strives to be for others, but secretly worries that she is lacking in identity outside of what she portrays to others.

Why is this important? Because her room changes with her. In “What Else Can I Do” her entire room shifts and changes just as she does– the more she explores herself and the freedom and passions she never knew she was capable of, the room grows more colorful and wild and more difficult to navigate with her.

The concepts for Luisa’s room were similar– her room concepts consisted of various training areas with a secret room that led to an amusement park– a place where she could just relax and be a kid, but that she felt the need to hide it from others to appear strong. Jared Bush also recently confirmed that Pepa’s room never had “a place for her to let loose”, that that was “part of her problem”-- insinuating she’s been taught to compartmentalize and suppress her emotions instead of letting them go.

So now… we talk about Bruno.

So firstly. No way did Bruno’s room always look like… that. Casita would have never given a five-year-old that room. And it logically doesn’t make sense!! We know from extra content that when Bruno first got his gift he was the “golden child”-- that people were impressed by his gift to see the future, it was only when they believed that he caused bad things to happen that they rejected him. Does Bruno’s room really reflect that golden child?

One thing I noticed was that the wood to Bruno’s room is… hardwood. Underneath all that sand and rock is the remnants of the beginnings of a normal room. It seems like such an odd choice and detail to put there when the rest of the room is all built into natural surroundings. It looks like the remnants of a living space that’s just been covered up to the point of becoming unlivable. And when we examine the specific ways this room has become unlivable, it starts to paint a very interesting picture about Bruno and how he perceives himself.

So we know that over the years Bruno’s reputation has shifted from the “star child of the family” to the Madrigal that no one talks about except in hushed whispers– the one that people are afraid of and dislike. We know from implications as well as discussions from Jared Bush that Bruno had already started isolating himself long before leaving to protect Mirabel.

So what better way to isolate yourself than a literal mountain of spiraling stairs?

They’re so impossibly long that it’s clearly meant to keep most sane people out (sorry Mirabel, it’s true). And we know he didn’t have a shortcut, he used the excuse of the tower having a lot of stairs as a reason to not live there. But again, and I can’t stress this enough, no way did casita give a five-year-old that amount of stairs (and in such a dangerous fashion!).

They’re there to keep people out. Now whether this is because Bruno just wants to avoid them and keep people away from him, whether this is to keep people from harassing him for visions, or maybe (and likely) a combination of both, isn’t explicitly stated. We know that Bruno’s visions can be both emotionally and physically exhausting and draining– to the point of physical pain and weakness. It isn’t much of a surprise that he would want to avoid people asking for visions.

But personally? I think it was also out of a desire to protect people as well. He really starts to internalize this idea that he makes bad things happen, so the more he can avoid people, and the visions, the better. The more he hides away, the more a burden it all becomes, the longer and longer the stairs get.

They’re eventually disconnected completely from the door with an enormous gap. I think this was the last straw when Bruno broke the vision and left, and his door stopped glowing. It disconnected from the inner sanctum completely and the entire room disconnected from the casita. When Bruno disconnected from his family. When he rejected his gift, and with it, himself.

Mirabel knows the casita to the point of even being able to understand its non-verbal communication like she would anyone else, and she seems shocked that it cannot help in Bruno’s room, implying that this isn’t the norm for the magical rooms. His room is cut off because he is cut off. And the deleted scene “Chores” contributes to this idea. Félix says that “his room turned all rotten and gross and Abuela was like ‘no one is ever allowed in there again.’” We know that Alma forbids anyone from going into Bruno’s room because it’s ‘off-limits”, and we can clearly see how dangerous and unstable the room has got, so this isn’t out of the realm of possibility for film canon either. Like Luisa said, his room is off-limits for a reason.

His room refused to let anyone find that vision.

AND NOW FOR THE BEST PART. THE INNER CAVERN.

So after Mirabel risks her life to get to the inner part of Bruno’s room, we finally see these relief sculptures of Bruno on the walls. There’s no beating around the bush, they are terrifying. Empty eyes, blank expressions, gaping mouths. (And they pretty much prove that Bruno’s room didn’t look this way because they display the steps of his ritual, which Jared confirmed he invented himself later on after receiving his gift.) It’s a terrifying depiction of himself, meant to scare people away. He’s considered a curse, treated like the village bogeyman, and he’s clearly internalized these ideas about himself because his room reflects it so much here, in the same fashion that Isabela’s room flaunts the topiaries of her perfect posed stature.

But here’s something I have to mention. The designers did not simply pull this design out of thin air. It is heavily inspired by existing Colombian architecture… specifically burial tombs. The Tierradentro tombs, located in the southwest region of the nation in the Inzá municipality, were made somewhere between 600 and 900 CE and served as a burial site for elite groups. Their structural and decorative features are entirely unique and not found anywhere else on Earth, and the geometrical patterns within them signify the individuals buried there.

So. Bruno’s room is based on an existing gravesite. That’s a lot to unpack.

Bruno feels that he, or at least the version of himself that his family wants from him, is dead. The star child. He had tried to cling to this idea, to be someone they could be proud of, but he just doesn’t know how. His family no longer understands him. He feels like a stranger who has replaced the person they used to love, who’s now buried in a literal tomb of self-doubt.

A tomb that Mirabel almost dies in because of how unstable and disconnected it has become. A tomb that follows an infinitely long spiral staircase up to a room filled with spiraling imagery– all to find a man who truly has spiraled. And one who isn’t there because he is so terrified of hurting people.

Bruno’s room looks the way it does because of his warped self-image that has become so twisted over the years. This internalized perception that he hurts people- that he causes these twists of fate- and while I think he knows on a logical level that this isn’t how his gift works, clearly doubt has infected the way he feels. We can see it in the way he treats Mirabel, wanting to push her away at first because he’s scared he’ll somehow hurt her, refusing to do visions, refusing to help until she tells him that the family needs him. And that’s all he ever wanted, really.

Maybe his next room won’t have all those stairs.

Some of…practice

the trolley problem

some arcane stuff again!

This is basically the dynamic I was talking about in this post, in which both Sans and Papyrus are faking being the other's "original brother"

They're both new to the world of Undertale, but due to a misunderstanding, they each assume the other is native to it; hence this conversation.

I think the funniest outcome here would be that there really isn't any milk in the Underground, and they both make a point to never bring that up to each other but still wonder about it in the dead of night

A Case for Reed Richards’ Asexuality: Aphobia and Amatonormativity in Marvel and its Fandom

I have been thinking quite a lot about how fandom’s rampant aphobia factors into Reed hate, probably because I recently discovered that a Marvel artist had vilified Reed in the past over on Twitter by claiming that he is an asshole who thinks of his wife as “just a friend,” as though it somehow would make his love for her less valuable or important if he did. So I’m going to talk about the ways in which Reed has been coded as ace within Fantastic Four canon, and how he is troublingly framed as strange, abnormal, and Other both by official FF canon and fandom over this ace-coding. To be clear, Reed has never been explicitly called ace in canon, but there are moments where it’s been made abundantly clear that he does not experience sexual attraction and that he is fairly ambivalent about sex. 

It does bear pointing out that Reed DOES love his wife romantically—if you’ve ever read FF comics, that much is fairly obvious:

I love you, Susan. You bring light…and life…and joy…and meaning to my days. Now and forever.

Marvel Knights 4 #21

But the fact that he doesn’t behave like a stereotypical heterosexual man—in possession of a high libido, sexually aggressive, obsessed with sex, constantly sexualizing and hitting on and competing over women the way Ben and Johnny do, etc.—means that, in many people’s eyes, Reed’s love for his wife is somehow lacking and not really love. Personally, I think it factors quite a lot into people’s arguments that Reed is “abusive” for “neglecting” his wife, which he simply is and does not do in canon. The implication is that it’s because of his lack of sexual attraction and low sex drive – Reed “owes” Sue sex because he’s her husband, the thinking goes, and his failure to provide it consistently means that he is failing in his husbandly duties. The aphobic notion that aces are abusive to their allo partners because they “withhold” sex is, unfortunately, old and familiar, and it is coercive and, worst of all, encourages rape. Unfortunately, it’s not an interpretation of Reed’s behavior that hasn’t been encouraged in official FF media – take, for instance, this exchange:

Just think of the technological marvels that ancient spaceport might hold, darling!

[sighs] I can see a bikini doesn’t stand a chance with you.

Fantastic Four: The Animated Series: Ep 2x12: The Sentry Sinister

Discussion of aphobia below the cut.

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it’s very wild to me that people can earnestly and sincerely say shit like “well snape fought back, so was it really bullying?” and not just like… hear how utterly gross they sound tbh. like do i have to use the “think about if this was an actual, real kid” argument to get people see that fighting back doesn’t erase victimhood or magically turn bullying into rivalry or friendly roughhousing?

idk. i feel like people say that shit really never experienced bullying in their whole damn life. bc how could they truly think that fighting back against bullies, shoving back, throwing back insults and punches, is anywhere near making things “equal”? defending yourself is not nearly the same thing as starting a fight for fun. protecting yourself is not the same as hurting someone else. like do they just like… forget how to use empathy and critical reasoning skills when it comes to snape or are they just really that clueless??

The most striking thing about Papyrus (aside from his limitless positivity) is the fact that it is literally impossible to die in a fight against him. Even Toriel, who starts purposefully missing you once your health gets low enough, can accidentally kill you, but Papyrus? It is literally impossible. Papyrus has incredible control over his power! Wow, what a great and impressive skeleton. And, even though he could probably deal some legit damage to you on the murder run, his only action is to spare you, because he’s heckin worried about this little emotionless murder child.

A lot of people like swap aus where Sans is the one that dies and Papyrus is forced to shed his naivete and face you going all-out, which makes sense, but also, Papyrus is just so. Papyrus. I feel like if Papyrus had to be the final murder-run boss, it’d be more like, “After losing Sans, the world seems like a different place. I can’t imagine what you must’ve gone through for you to see the world the way you do.”

He only has one attack, but it’s a really long one and powerful one (kind of like Sans’ before his ‘special attack’), plus he talks during it, which would be pretty distracting. whenever he gets your hp down to 1, combat automatically stops and you’re ejected back into the judgement room. if you try to talk to him without healing, he’ll just say you’re too hurt - a gust of wind could knock you over! after you heal at the conveniently placed save point and go back to fight him, he has stuff to say about how you don’t have to be alone, you don’t have to do this, you might think there isn’t any good in you and it’s too late to change, but there is and it isn’t! After a few of those, he’ll talk about Undyne and Sans, and they always tried to help him, even when they thought he wouldn’t notice. He’s got a ton of stories about that. After he says his piece there’s an option to either fight or don’t fight, and every time you pick fight he looks disappointed, but he goes all out. He’s always able to be spared.

if you survive his attack, he goes down in one hit. his last words would probably be an apology, even though he tried really hard he still couldn’t show you a better path