hi idk what im doing

Me when something LGBTQ+ happens in the LGBTQ+ series with the LGBTQ+ characters that I watch because they are LGBTQ+ and have LGBTQ+ characters: 🤯

gay people are in my gay show????? REVOLUTIONARY

Another banger from the "we can always tell" crowd 💀

(for those who don't get it: the picture is of MatPat, a cis man)

oh this is so fucking funny

as someone who is a huge fan of other queer content (like heartstopper and red, white and royal blue), dead boy detectives feels so incredibly different.

despite how much i love those two, they don’t feel like they’re made for queer people.

in a lot of ways, they feel like media made for cishet people about queer and trans people which is fine and doesn’t make it unenjoyable, but dbda has a totally different feel to it.

it feels like queer media made FOR queer people.

they have so much nuance to their characters and don’t shy away from it. charles openly flirts with both edwin and crystal despite the fact that he never says anything about his sexuality and edwin’s backstory doesn’t try to hide the horrifying way that queer people were treated historically and i think that’s really important.

though he is very clearly repressed, he is still unapologetically queer. he showcases his jealousy loudly and there is no doubt in the viewer’s mind that he is queer even for a moment.

same with monty and the cat king. they’re so vibrantly and boldly queer. monty begins flirting with edwin nearly the moment we see him and as does tck. what i really appreciate about tck is his gender nonconformity. i think that’s so important and i honestly really appreciate that they don’t even mention it.

with tck in particular, his actions can be considered rather predatory, but we never really feel like that’s due to his queerness which is FASCINATING because that is a really harmful stereotype of queer people, but it never feels like that’s what they’re going for or like they’re using it to demonize queerness.

with jenny, she says so casually that she’s attracted to women and it’s not even something that they have to discuss again. it’s such an unimportant aspect of her character, but it’s still so unabashedly there. i love that niko doesn’t even say anything about it when she learns, she just accepts her, no questions asked.

even with simon, he very clearly discusses his sexuality in E7 when he tells edwin that he liked him, but he never has to say the words. we just KNOW contextually because he talks around it. he i would argue that he is the only instance of a character discussing shame in their identity and it immediately results in one of the loveliest quotes in the show.

“if you punish yourself, everywhere becomes hell.”

he has spent over a century repressing himself and when he finally tells edwin, the boy he liked and treated terribly because of it, he is immediately told that it is not torture to be queer. he is immediately told that there is nothing wrong with his sexuality.

the confession scene btwn edwin and charles in E7 and the scene in E6 where edwin is TRYING to confess are so fucking important to me. nearly immediately, charles tells edwin that it doesn’t make any difference that he’s queer and that he accepts him. when he does confess, he doesn’t make him feel bad for it. he tells him that he loves him too, but that he can’t say he does in that way right now, but that he’s the most important person in his life and that that will never change.

the scene in E7 where they’re on the roof and edwin tries to apologize for potentially having made things awkward, charles shuts it down immediately. he says “it doesn’t.” and that’s the end of it.

this show exemplifies queerness through a queer light and it’s very clear who the intended audience is for dbda not to sound like i’m hating on the first two pieces of media (rwrb is literally one of my special interests, trust me, i adore them both), but maybe that’s why hs was given a third season and dbda was cancelled within five months of airing. i feel that these two pander to straight people in a lot of ways, but dbda doesn’t. it’s something that is incredibly important to me and i’m really happy about it.

incredibly beautiful post by op that touches on why dead boy detectives is such an important show for queer people and how well it handles the subject

on a similar, but much angrier, note: this is exactly why it was cancelled but a show like heartstopper isn’t

dbda isn’t palatable for cishet people. they need queer people to be more easily digestible and explained plainly to them. they don’t understand the subtext of simon and edwin in hell, of the cat king, of the complexities of charles’ sexuality that queer people do because it’s our lived experience

and this isn’t to say this is a good reason for dbda to be cancelled, no, quite the opposite. it is the stupidest reason out there especially with dbda’s popularity. in a show like heartstopper (which is a show i also personally enjoy), the characters sexualities and genders are spoon fed to the audience which is not necessarily a bad thing, but there’s a clear difference between how heartstopper tackles queerness and how dbda does.

i see something similar in an also cancelled show shadow and bone, which is a remake of a book series i hold very near and dear to my heart. there’s two characters, wylan and jesper, who get into a relationship but it’s never explicitly stated that they’re gay. jesper flirts with men and women, similar to charles, and it’s never mentioned in universe. there’s another character briefly on screen who is visibly genderqueer but it is not commented on nor are they asked anything about it. a cishet person watching will want to know what they are and WHY they’re there, instead of just accepting that they are.

shows where being queer is just normal, an everyday thing, seem to be cancelled because to cishet people it’s not an everyday thing. a lot of cishet people need to see queer people as some spectacle to understand them. to them, heterosexuality is still the norm and anything else needs to be almost taught to them.

i don’t have much else to say on this, just that i’ve seen an odd pattern of some queer shows being cancelled and others not and the differences between them.

ilysm for this bc you said it so much more like how i wanted to but didn’t.

the issue w the fact that they keep the palatable and “easy for cishets to understand” queer content and not the realistic queer content is that it then causes these people to expect that digestibility from the queer people they see every day. we are not easy to label in that way. we are not that clear cut. we are more nuanced than that. THAT’S the issue. there are queer people who do fit into the labels they place upon themselves and that’s perfectly fine too, but the issue is when media tells people to expect that conformity from us as a whole. we are not a monolith.

also, you have single-handedly convinced me to watch shadow and bone bc that sounds so dope omg