El Goonish Shive

Isn't Sarah still cishet? I mean, she has a date with a transman, but she doesn't know about it. The most she's wavered from cishet, to my knowledge, is that time she called herself "like a 2 on the Kinsey scale" - which still makes her predominately heterosexual.

I can totally see Susan being on the ace spectrum. I've wondered if Elliot's on it as well, given his disdain for sexiness.

edited 15th May '17 4:28:44 PM by TobiasDrake

Sarah has had quite a few bi moments recently... That of course I can't remember so I have no proof. I think one involved Ellen or Grace in that MV 5 arc?

Bi with an opposite-sex preference is still bi.

Okay we need to take a couple steps back because a lot of this is starting to sound like tumblr discourse.

Oh, but the internet is all about speculating about the sexuality of characters and stating that they definitely fit your pet category. Heck, people even do it with historical characters. The number of people who swear that Abraham Lincoln must have been gay because of his enjoyment of topless wrestling matches...

It took me twenty seconds of searching for something else to poke fun at, to run into this headline:

J. Edgar Hoover: Gay or Just a Man who has Sex with Men?

That's funnier than any joke I ever could have made.

edited 15th May '17 7:03:42 PM by TobiasDrake

Didn't the Greeks have an "it's only gay if you're the bottom" policy?

No, that was the Romans.

For the Greeks I'm pretty sure it was the policy was "It's only weird if it's two women." I remember seeing an exhibit of Greek art and the number of men calling each other beautiful was pretty high.

"A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, a goat for ecstasy." —probably foreign propaganda, not an actual Greek saying

The Greeks definitely thought two women was weird compared to two men. Centuries after her death, Greeks told storis about how Sappho killed herself because of unrequited love for a man. Y'know, Sappho. The woman who wrote poetry about how beautiful women are, and who's home is the source of the word "lesbian".

For today's comic... well, if nothing else, panel 4 is exactly how I've predicted Elliot would respond to the question.

@25236 I disagree - the author is still the one who created all of that. They just didn't necessarily logically think of how certain traits would progress until they've hit a certain point in the writing. And that's fine; an author seldom has the time or ability to plan out every minutiae of a work. But I feel like it's still abdicating responsibility for one's own work to claim that they didn't have control over their own characters. If an author writes themselves into a position where they either have to compromise story flow/continuity or compromise character development, it's on the author, not "a character living their own life."

@25242 That's not how I'd put it at all. Among other things, I'd probably want to see a wider range of stuff from Shive before saying something like that. And that's even without noting that Diane seems pretty cishet, noting that all of the hints on Noah have been that he's cishet (if non-traditional in presentation), or trying to split hairs as to how to classify Susan's sexual leanings (my guess for Susan would be heterosexual but aromantic, but I'm fully ready to be proven wrong on that).

There are some authors where they've been more blatant about trumpeting non-traditional gender and sexual identification (at least one where it seemed like being something other than cishet literally gave people super powers), and even then I wouldn't have said that.

@25251 Um... while I wouldn't rule out that Elliot is overall asexual while not being aromantic, I think it's way too early to say. I'll speak from experience when I note that internalized issues with sexuality over a parent's experience (if nothing else, that's Nanase's theory on it) can result in a cycle of repression even if someone has an active libido. Of course, it could just as likely be that Elliot is trying to resolve his biological urges versus his own desires and he really is asexual. Like I said, too early to tell - I honestly wouldn't expect Elliot to have that hashed out until college, possibly even further. Which, given the schedule for EGS, means we should have an actual answer by 2050.

@25255 Let's be fair - historians have been discussing that well before the Internet became common. Sure, some of them in private asides at academic conferences, but the only thing that the Internet did was make discussions of Lincoln's fondness for topless wrestling matches easier to find (and, from what I've been told, not even the biggest argument for Abe's possible homosexual tendencies).

The Internet: it didn't invent talks about gender and sexuality; it just indexed them better.

@25256 It's recently come to my attention that there's an entire subculture of people who partake in homosexual activity to varying degrees that adamantly refuse to call themselves "homosexual" or "gay." (And while some of us may be thinking of some jokes about politicians, let's just leave it at that.) Psychologists are even doing research into it because of the disconnect between what's actually done and how those people present themselves. That kind of headline reads like someone, at the very least, acknowledging that divide.

That said, I've always looked a bit askance even at people who are generally cool with gay rights who take that stance. For someone like Hoover...

@25257 I'm not the expert, but I'm not sure the Greek city-states in general had much issue with anything. I mean, to some extent, keep in mind that some of the record is incomplete due to Bluenose Bowdlerizer attitudes among some historians and archaeologists in the past, who would neglect or outright destroy certain articles if they were deemed "offensive."

And whose name is the source of the word "sapphic".

I am absurdly pleased that he got his ridiculous tiny hat back in the last panel.

Now I recognize him!

Comic 2349

Much commentary was had.

If Heidi is asexual, how do we account for the second-last panel in this comic?

Elliot hadn't figured that out yet and made an inaccurate prediction?

Asexual != aromantic.

edited 18th May '17 8:05:38 AM by SalFishFin

Ugh... this gets into The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body, which I have never been overly fond of. Not to mention, it kinda feels like there's a level of Mind Control that magic is doing to Elliot when this happens, which gets awkward.

Still, taking this totally at face value, I'm not sure if Shive is trying to suggest that the Heidi form is asexual or aromantic (or both). If you're going to go into a digression about the issue, it'd really help if the digression was actually clear.

The current NP ar reminded me of Nanase's spell for knowing who's looking at you. That would certainly have made Grace's game easier...

Asexual because shive doesn't want to write the end result of what happens if you have a nympho spell in the book.

... I'm going to regret asking but what exactly is the logic there?

Questionable Consent. Like magic spiking your drink which makes you sleep with someone you otherwise wouldn't.

Although there was that one thing on the pinups Tumblr with Elliot and Susan...

But the other two secret identity forms have shades of that as well. Is the implication that Bisexual!Heidi would be some kind of sex addict?