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March 16, 2019
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Commentary for March 16, 2019: Operation: MAKE IT GAYER! is underway! Of course, CJ has always been gay, it’s just not been acknowledged before now. I guess Kathy’s reaction to finding out is kind of a nod to that. However, as I’ve mentioned in a previous commentary, it doesn’t matter if characters are canonically gay or trans; if you don’t ever mention it, people will generally assume they’re not (unless they’re an obvious stereotype, that is). So the onus is on creators to make this sort of thing known if they want their work to be inclusive. Yes, I’ve featured CJ in my stories since the earliest days of Eon's Comic, but any reader could be forgiven for not realising he was gay, as I never took the time to say so. And that was something I wanted to finally fix in this chapter. I imagine if this were a popular videogame and not a Sonic and Star Wars fangirl’s lifelong vanity project, there'd be certain fedora wearing bros of the dude variety complaining loudly about “forced representation”, and saying how CJ being gay is not relevant to the story so why bring it up? Well, first of all, I’m not writing Eon’s World for people who make that sort of complaint. Second, including queer characters is no more forcing representation than it is for ninety-nine percent of all stories to focus on straight cisgender white men. If anything, that’s more forced, because most people in the world don’t fall into that very narrow category. Thirdly, while CJ’s sexuality is not relevant to the overall story, neither is Captain Picard’s love of tea (Earl Grey, hot); you could remove every occasion of Picard ordering a cup of tea and not lose anything pertinent to the plot of any episode of Star Trek. But Picard’s love of tea is part of who he is; it adds to his character, if not the overall story. The same is true of CJ being gay. Finally, as I’ve mentioned in previous commentaries, representation is important. Having characters in fiction we can identify with helps people feel that they are accepted and have a place in society, and it helps to normalise a more diverse range of people and their lived experiences for everyone else. We fear what we do not know, so diversity in media helps to make the unknown familiar. This is good for everyone. Anyway, enough soapboxing. How's CJ going to get out of this one?! Is he even...? (Well, considering I think Bury Your Gays is a cheap and nasty trope, you can probably guess.) |
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Eon's World is a fan comic created by Bethany Turner. All characters are copyright
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to their respective creators. The contents of this site are not
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