Morr & the specific wlw homophobia she faces in canon and in fandom
This is something I’ve wanted to discuss for a really, really long time, and since it’s bi-visibility day, here we go.
To preface, this is not me saying anything about what I think SJM meant to do with Mor’s character, this is simply me making a textually based argument. I don’t know if SJM researched the homophobia wlw experience before writing Mor, and I’m not going to argue that she intended any of what I’m about to articulate. Nor am I saying that SJM is brilliant or right or wrong or fucked for including any of what I’m articulating. Writers aren’t always aware of what their texts are doing. So. No one @ me saying that SJM wasn’t intelligent enough to come up with what I’m articulating or something because cool but I’m intelligent enough to craft this argument from the actual textual evidence. And no one say it was fucked up that SJM included this type of homophobia—I understand that pov, but that is not the conversation I’m trying to have here.
But even if SJM didn’t intend for what I’m about to articulate to be present within the text doesn’t make it any less important or valid to discuss! And it doesn’t diminish Mor’s experience.
Pt 1: The wlw specific homophobia Mor faces in canon
This homophobia she experiences can be broken in three thematic groups:
1. She is slut shamed by those who dislike her
2. She is viewed, by her family, as useless because she didn’t successfully marry and procreate.
3. She feels as if she needs to perform heterosexuality.
The first part can best be exemplified by Eris’s treatment of her. I think that the High Lord’s meeting scene in acowar is really the best evidence for this, though we can also see it in her family’s treatment of her. She sleeps with Cassian because she knows that her family will view her as irreparably damaged if she does. She’s no longer a virgin, so she has to be a slut.
Here’s some bits of Eris treating her poorly:
(sorry it’s small but needed to get the whole passage in one screenshot)
Anyways, as @bookofmirth has pointed out previously, this can be read as Eris knowing that Mor loves women. He clearly knows that Az has a thing for Mor, but does he know that Mor won’t ever feel the same? Possibly, especially since he says he knows “why you did it” in regards to Mor sleeping with Cassian. Part of Mor’s reason is not wanting to be married to Eris, but part of it is being married to a male at all I think. Or at least, she’s terrified of her family finding out about her sexuality.
Either way, Eris weaponizes his knowledge of why she doesn’t want to marry him to make Mor feel unsafe and sad in this scene. It’s not just that Mor had sex with someone else, it’s WHY she did it- that’s what Eris is getting at here. And if he knows,—and I do think he knows—that Mor is a wlw…then his later comments about her being a slut hit a lot harder.
Bi wlw, (and I read Mor as being bi to an extent) face a LOT of biphobia in the form of “you’re a slut/easy/want to sleep with everyone.” They face this from the LGBTQ community and from straight people. Eris’s comments about Mor as a slut can be interpreted as homophobia if we accept that he knows she is queer, and even if we don’t, they still READ as homophobic because as readers we know she’s bi/wlw. Ie, she’s facing homophobia even if Eris doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing.
Eris being a douche again:
I mean Eris’s treatment of Mor is generally terrible, and toxic, but where he specifically treats her like she’s worthless because she is sexual—well it’s really tough to not read his slut shaming of her as being specifically linked to her being bi.
Secondly, I want to talk about how Mor’s family treats her:
Mor’s family specifically only cares about her and other females as being…bearers of the next generation. Her only worth is that she can reproduce. This, combined with the amount of magic she has, makes her a really valuable tool for her family- they could marry her well/have powerful heirs because of her. Queer women, who decide to be with other women over men long term, which is what Mor says she would do, face a huge amount of stigma for violating heterosexual norms and for not being available to men (its! gross! ik!). Just as women who don’t choose to have children are subjected to judgment for it, or are told that without children they have no “purpose,” queer women who choose to commit to other women are viewed as being biologically and reproductively useless. All queer people face the stigma that they are an evolutionary mistake (I lived with someone who thought this so…), and within the world of acotar, this is exacerbated by the fact that they don’t have ivf, surrogacy, etc. If Mor chooses to commit to a woman long term, to marry a woman and be faithful to her, that means she won’t have any children, and her family will thus deem her worthless. If you’re a woman and you don’t want children, you’re worthless—that’s the type of thing Mor is articulating above, and for queer women who only want to be with other women, this is particularly pointed because it’s far more difficult for them to have children together and basically impossible within the world of acotar.
The homophobia the CoN and Mor’s family feels is specific here, they “revile” queer people, they think queer people are “selfish” because they can’t have children. This is very similar to homophobia that actual irl queer people face—being told that since we can’t necessarily have children “naturally” we don’t deserve to be parents, being told that we are useless because of it, being told that there’s no evolutionary/natural reason for us to exist.
Third, the fact that Mor feels she must perform heteronormativity.
Now, she does say she enjoys sleeping with men for pleasure, and sometimes has the urge to. I interpret this as her being bisexual, with a preference for women. However, Mor still feels as if she must be perceived by others, and especially by Az, as being heterosexual. All queer women, to an extent, feel as if they must perform heterosexuality, and the fact that Mor does as well reflects real world homophobia. She hides her sexuality by only letting her friends know about her male partners, and she hides the female ones. This is a very true, real-life experience for many queer women.
Part 2: The wlw specific homophobia Mor faces from the fandom
1. People expect Mor to care for the emotional well being of both Az and Cass to the exception of herself, and slut shame her when she puts her needs first.
Okay so on the surface this one might not look like homophobia but after reading acowar, if you still have this belief…please reconsider? Because these discussions can get pretty homophobic pretty quickly.
Pre acowar, people loved to slut shame Mor for not deciding between Cass and Az, or for getting in the way of their friendship, or for sleeping with Cass but not Az. Basically, Mor was expected to fix everything between them, and they were not expected to do anything except be sweet hot pure bat boys. Saying a queer woman is a slut because she slept with a male friend or being angry because she didn’t is…NOT A GOOD LOOK. Even if it wasn’t intentionally homophobic pre acowar, these arguments still circulate. And even if she were straight, this treatment was never and never will be acceptable.
After acowar, some people like…continued to feel this way without being empathetic towards WHY Mor hasn’t slept with Az or told him about her feelings before. People constantly blame Mor, a queer woman living in a homophobic society (because the CoN and her family is, even if the rest of prythian isn’t) for not being out and thus causing her male friend pain. People disregard the fact that she did clearly indicate her feelings to him when she LITERALLY RAN AWAY as he tried to confess his love to her. People ignore that it’s been 500 years and she is clearly not interested. People argue that Mor should be upfront to Azriel, that she should out herself to him to protect his feelings and care for his emotional well being at the expense of her own.
Queer women don’t owe sharing their sexuality with men, just to make men more comfortable. Queer women don’t need to care for the feelings of men who are upset that they don’t want to sleep with them. Queer women owe men nothing, and expecting a queer woman to basically out herself in order to emotionally coddle a grown ass man who should have already figured out that she isn’t into him, regardless of sexuality, is homophobia. When you say that Mor owes Azriel anything, any type of explanation, it’s homophobic, because it implies that she owes him a coming out. Coming out is for the queer person in question—no one else.
Furthermore, expecting Mor to be honest about her sexuality with a man who betrayed her trust to work with her extremely homophobic father and family is ridiculous. Why would Mor be emotionally vulnerable and honest with Azriel when he worked with Keir and Eris behind her back? Why should she chance him outting her to them, or them potentially finding out through watching him?
Mor, as a queer woman who escaped a homophobic family to find happiness and community elsewhere, at Ritas and in Velaris, does not owe anyone, and any man, any information about her sexuality and sex life. This includes how Feyre presses her, even unintentionally, to be honest. Queer people don’t owe it to anyone to come out. It should be on their terms and because they want to. The “she has to be honest with Az he deserves it” attitude in the fandom is homophobic. He doesn’t deserve a coming out from her, and implying that she needs to even be totally upfront about her feelings is ridiculous, as she’s already made herself clear and any further conversation between them would include her coming out. The way she explains her feelings for him, to Feyre, makes it clear that they are inextricably tied to her sexuality.
Stop demanding that Morrigan should care more about Azriel’s emotions and making him feel good than she should about protecting herself from a homophobic family. Seeing the homophobia in the text—which I don’t mind mostly because at least our narrator, Feyre, condemns it and affirms her love for Mor—replicated in the fandom is disgusting. If SJM was trying to say something about the homophobia queer women face, then some of y’all really missed it and keep replicating it in your own takes on Mor. And even if SJM didn’t mean for the treatment of Mor in text to be homophobic, it is, it’s like blatantly there, so it should at least stop and make you think about how you treat and perceive Mor.
Tagging people on my new meta list, lmk if you want to be added or removed:
