Willow's Reviews & Thoughts

Review & thoughts on Magellan webcomic @ SA.

Hero by Perry Moore

Before I talk about anything else I have to talk about realizing there's a trope I dislike. The trope of the first true love of gayness. Heterosexuals get to kiss frogs, make mistakes, realize things work or don't work for them, grow up and make choices. In books a lot of the times there's a gay character and they either are portrayed as a) turning gay just for that one person or b) being a gay teenager who finds true love (Gays mate like Swans, yo! Never fear, just the right queer meets just the right queer).

On occasion, the one who makes their heart go thub-lub turns out to be too shallow and scared to come out, or something else that isn't villainous but is unhealthy and involves secrets and lies. But the uplifting stories? It always seems to be - and then the teenager boy was looking for love and he almost fell into the hands of a predator, or went into some 'sleazy gay bar' (why are gay bars any more sleazy than straight ones?) but lo and behold there was some virtuous fellow virgin also waiting to make with the immortal gay love story.

I don't know why I think it's more than a romance trope. But it feels like it. It feels like a message that homosexuality is only ok, if the protagonist is yearning for moonlight walks on the beach, and baking cookies with the perfect someone; lesbian or gay man. And then sparkle sparkle, there they are. It's.... it's a little too much 'We're just like you. We're the people next door.'. The whole We're Not Different. See? And To Ostracize Supposed Differences Is Wrong!

More directly related to HERO, was my shock at reading a coming out story and feeling so distanced from the experience. I found myself surprised they were cellphones and laptops in this universe because somehow this was a town large enough for a legacy epic superhero team and yet small enough that there'd be fear of being known as 'The Father of the Fag' and other societal shunning techniques. Maybe I just wasn't buying the protagonist as an actual highschool student and thus my shock was the character felt older, thus too old to be going through those anxieties in quite that way.

( Read more... )