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this kind of follows with my two posts on women here and here, but i think there's this image of queer representation being a positive portrayal of same sex relationships specifically. i'm not making the argument that all queer people in media should be villains. with historical portrayals of queer individuals as villains (as in silence of the lambs, where the killer is shown to be violent thanks to being trans), it's clearly not a good stance to take. i think that just limiting queer people to being good is pretty bad. i mentioned this before, but in the dream house does a pretty great job in one of its chapters (and really through the whole book, honestly) of dismantling this narrative, that lesbian relationships can't be abusive. of course, with same sex relationships with women, there's interplay with misogyny in its reception through the enforcement of purity culture on treatment of women. there's also another aspect here where people like to disregard a character's queerness (not even just characters; real people, too) if they're bi or pan and end up with someone of the opposite gender, but that's a whole other can of worms and might not be my can of worms to open, so i'm not really talking about that.
anyway, the point really is this: villainization of queer people in the way older films and medias sucks, but so does the more modern stance of bleaching queer relationships to be as palatable as possible. both ultimately end up stripping i guess dimensionality from queer people that's not at all beneficial given the current conditions of the world (though i mean arguably there's never been a time where queer people had it as good as cishet people). there's really not much i have to say about this beyond this; it just bugs me when i see people online (usually teenagers in all fairness) insistent on using only totally positive queer relationships as representation. with regards to the original villain point, i'm not by any means saying that queer people can't be villains. i just wish that the motives for being a villain are either disconnected from that queerness or well-done if it is connected. the transmisogyny present in silence of the lambs sucked even though i liked the movie as a whole. so yeah! i think that's really about it since the main point of this is literally to ask that queer people be treated as people and given real flaws and struggles.
anyway, the point really is this: villainization of queer people in the way older films and medias sucks, but so does the more modern stance of bleaching queer relationships to be as palatable as possible. both ultimately end up stripping i guess dimensionality from queer people that's not at all beneficial given the current conditions of the world (though i mean arguably there's never been a time where queer people had it as good as cishet people). there's really not much i have to say about this beyond this; it just bugs me when i see people online (usually teenagers in all fairness) insistent on using only totally positive queer relationships as representation. with regards to the original villain point, i'm not by any means saying that queer people can't be villains. i just wish that the motives for being a villain are either disconnected from that queerness or well-done if it is connected. the transmisogyny present in silence of the lambs sucked even though i liked the movie as a whole. so yeah! i think that's really about it since the main point of this is literally to ask that queer people be treated as people and given real flaws and struggles.