Making up for lost LGBTQ+ tropes

I think the most important condition of this discussion is remembering that the site's tropes aren't inherently supposed to represent or make anyone feel seen, they are supposed to document recognizable meaningful patterns in media used to convey something to the audience in the narrativity. The Useful Notes pages, Queer Media and the (still on TLP I believe) LGBT Representation Index have that role. Would listing all canonical asexual characters on Useful Notes/Asexuality be useful?

Edited by good-morning on Nov 14th 2022 at 10:48:16 AM

Well, that draft doesn't pop up when looking for "Representation". Do you mean the Transgender Media draft?

LGBT Representation in Media

thanks, I hadn't known it had been launched!

Edited by good-morning on Nov 15th 2022 at 9:45:04 AM

Anybody want to put input on Transmasc and Transfem Pair? I personally think it's essentially a Trope in Aggregate at this juncture: it seems like there's a deliberate choice by a lot of authors of queer fiction to have a duo of this nature but it's unclear why.

This post was thumped by the Eldritch Flyswatter of Horror

The Representation page isn't interested in background or side characters, even if it manages to avoid tokenism.

Ohhh yeah.

...I'm going to go look through that actually, feel like I've seen side characters mentioned with no main characters.

So I once asked this thread if Has Two Mommies "having gay parents" was chairs. I've now completed Has Two Mommies And A Wick Check, and while the usage is in line with the "whatever" tone the description takes, it's still (a) super scattershot and (b) mostly "has gay parents" which I think is chairs and (c) the rest is basically "has 2+ people they could reasonably call parents, whether it's two lesbian moms, a stepmom and a biological mom, or two people who built a robot together" which I think is too broad.

Is it worth taking to TRS to try and narrow down the definition into "unconventional family structure" as previously proposed?

Edited by Synchronicity on Mar 1st 2023 at 1:29:13 PM

I think the unconventional family idea is viable so I support a TRS move.

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 1st 2023 at 7:39:32 AM

Agreed.

Wouldn't that be broadening the definition rather than narrowing it down? I do think a supertrope for "unconventional family structure" would be viable, though maybe it'd have to be brought up in-universe as unconventional to be tropeworthy? Unless I misread and you mean the definition should be "gay parents and the struggles that come with the unconventionality."

Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 6th 2023 at 3:57:55 PM

Back when Synchronicity first asked, good-morning pointed out the existence of Platonic Co-Parenting (launched in 2020), which covers non-romantic cases (but allows pairs of differing genders). Just pointing it out, since the potential overlap between the concepts would be greater.

HTM is actually much broader than the name; it's pretty much already "Unconventional Family Structure but specifically with two people of the same sex". I guess what I meant with my post was narrowing to focus on the unconventionality aspect (rather than "I just have two moms") to and if by broadening you mean nixing the same-sex requirement we're probably on the same page lol

Forgot about that. It's in the writeup on TRS Queue, thanks~

Edited by Synchronicity on Mar 7th 2023 at 10:04:03 AM

Ever since learning of Trans Audience Interpretation I've been thinking about there being a similar YMMV to cover popular queer orientation headcanons. As far as I know the closest things we currently have are Rainbow Lens (a story element is read as analogous to queer experience), LGBT Fanbase (while specifically about queer people making up a good chunk of the fanbase, I've sometimes seen it used to talk about queer fans headcanoning a character as also queer), and I guess Ambiguously Gay and Bi (a character's canon traits suggest that they're not straight, but doesn't cover headcanons regardless of canon evidence).

If it were completely up to me, I'd simply broaden TAI to be about any and all popular queer headcanons and rename it accordingly, but regardless, there does seem to be a gap on this site for popular headcanons like Rise!Leonardo being gay or Jessica Rabbit being asexual.

Ohh yeah, I've thought about that as well — I feel like there's enough of a distinction that TAI and the theoretical YMMV for the rest of the LGBT umbrella could be separate.

Eh, the problem with that is that it often gets entangled in shipping garbage. We'd have to be very careful in how we word it so that it's strictly for when fans interpret a character as gay/bi regardless of doing it to enable pairing them up with same-gendered characters, but that's kind of hard to observe since the thing about sexual orientation is that it involves more than one person.

Not really. Sexuality is independent of if someone is (or even wants to be) in a relationship, even when it comes to demonstrating it on screen.

Most cases of characters being headcanoned are from LGBTQ+ viewers recognising their own experiences, and trying to dismiss it as an attempt to enable ships (which, it has to be said are just another type of headcanon anyway) feels regressive.

Not saying it can't be, but many examples in fandom are more focused on shipping than genuine desire for LGBTQ representation and we have to make the description clear enough (or monitor the trope strongly) to avoid that situation. For example as someone who does interpret Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes from the MCU as bisexual, my experience in the fandom shows that for everyone who genuinely thinks they are bi, five more are in it purely for the shipping Guy on Guy Is Hot aspect and will throw a fit if you consider depicting them as bisexual in any context outside of being in love with each other specifically.

Or Voltron fandom where the Venn diagram of people who pushed for Lance to be canonized as bisexual and fanatical Klance shippers was a circle, and if you tried to talk about Lance being attracted to women or men other than Keith you got accused of being a pedophile. It was transparently an effort at getting their ship canonized by disguising it as a campaign for LGBTQ representation, not something done in good faith, as many other bisexuals in the fandom who were attacked by these people noted.

We have to be careful here because there are instances of large-scale headcanons made in questionable faith.

Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 12th 2023 at 9:44:19 AM

If it's just for the ship, it's sorta Single-Target Sexuality instead of being bi or something?

Sometimes they'll allow one of the characters to have had a Dry Docked Ship with another character in the fanfic as a token concession, but often the sexuality is simply being treated as a tool to enable the shipping, whereas a serious queer headcanon would typically be the other way around or not get so pressed about others people interpreting the character as having that sexuality in a context outside of shipping.

Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 12th 2023 at 10:21:14 AM

I think I've seen such an idea come up before, but the same concern about shipping came up. Personally I've seen examples in Fanon that aren't specifically about shipping, but I think Fanon covers them well enough for the time being if the shipping overlap is a concern.

I will conceded that the line between a character being shipped with someone of the same or similar gender and a character being headcanoned as non-straight is fuzzy. This hypothetical YMMV would be about fans explicitly labeling a character as a specific orientation and would require examples give reasons for the headcanon's popularity beyond shipping. For instance, in the examples I gave Rise!Leo is Ambiguously Gay and Jessica Rabbit has several lines that have resonated with sex-repulsed asexuals.

And as uncomfortable as it may be, fans headcanoning a character as queer just to ship them with one specific character or because they find it hot, is still fans headcanoning a character as queer.

That all said, I totally understand being against creating such a YMMV for the above mentioned reasons, and if it were to become a thing, keeping it free of examples that are merely one-off Ho Yay Shipping (or X on X is Hot if that were deemed a disqualifier for an example) would require diligent monitoring.

Yeah, I'm not super concerned about shipping because a headcanon is a headcanon, but I understand the resistance. May at least be worth a TLP, though.

Yeah, I have to agree. The reason doesn't really matter as long as it's a consistent headcanon from fans.