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1. Have not seen Infinity War yet. Am mildly reassured by the reactions I've seen outside cuts so far, but not exactly excited.
2. Have seen the Dirty Computer emotion picture, and oh my god, I don't think I have ever seen anything that was so simultaneously 100% not for me (I am not Black, I am not wlw) and also 100% my thing (oh my god). I definitely do not regret going for that over Infinity War. (Or waiting to watch the videos until the whole thing was out.)
Also I really want to make a bracelet now but I think maybe that's part of what's not for me.
3. Have you ever had something hit you in the head about how your version of the world, especially as a fan, is just... not other people's? With sf fandom going more mainstream it seems like it would hit less often, and yet.
Example one from the last few days: I am still working on that fanmix on Spotify (At some point I will get far enough in the "excavate your mp3 collection" to do a non-spotify version, but not yet) so I threw on a whole bunch of covers of "Tangled Up In Blue", and there was this very strange one where the singer stopped in the middle and was like "Stop, stop, wait, sometimes I don't get Dylan, he's not talking about tangled up in blue, it's love! I'm tangled up in love!"
And I was like... nooooo. "Tangled up in blue" does not mean love - it's about the ghost-drift with the Kaiju anteverse, and how you can't get it out of your head but you can't figure out what it means but you know you will inevitably have to go back and feel it again, even as you know that feeling it again will be its own hell, and one of the reasons that movie caught me so hard and is still catching me so hard is because of how it plays with heterosexual expectations, how the "Alice" thing only ever worked because the line between how men in this culture are expected to talk about their girlfriends, and how they are expected to talk about the alien monsters possessing them and forcing them to destroy all they hold dear, is actually a very thin line, and that movie knows it, so sure, it's about love, but it's also about how love happens and survives despite that narrative, that toxic coerced obsession with treating the loved object as an alien other---
And then I was like. Oh wait. Probably Bob Dylan was not actually singing about Kaiju. Right. Oops.
Example two from the last two days: Janelle Monae's discussions of her sexuality have ignited the bi vs. pan discussion again and I am still confused by it because it's always been super obvious to me that the difference between bi and pan is that bi means "has the capability to be attracted to/fall in love with humans of the same or different genders" and "pan" means "has the capability to be attracted to/fall in love with anyone or anything capable of being attracted/falling in love back."
And surely for anyone who has watched even a couple of the Cindi Mayweather videos it's super obvious that Janelle Monae is perfectly open to possibility with consenting partners who do not happen to human? Why is this even a surprise?
And then I have to remind myself, right, most of the people who are reading the news articles about this are the sort of people who have never factored "but what if nonhumanoid aliens or AIs?" into their conceptions of sexuality, and would be kinda weirded out if someone else did. :/
2. Have seen the Dirty Computer emotion picture, and oh my god, I don't think I have ever seen anything that was so simultaneously 100% not for me (I am not Black, I am not wlw) and also 100% my thing (oh my god). I definitely do not regret going for that over Infinity War. (Or waiting to watch the videos until the whole thing was out.)
Also I really want to make a bracelet now but I think maybe that's part of what's not for me.
3. Have you ever had something hit you in the head about how your version of the world, especially as a fan, is just... not other people's? With sf fandom going more mainstream it seems like it would hit less often, and yet.
Example one from the last few days: I am still working on that fanmix on Spotify (At some point I will get far enough in the "excavate your mp3 collection" to do a non-spotify version, but not yet) so I threw on a whole bunch of covers of "Tangled Up In Blue", and there was this very strange one where the singer stopped in the middle and was like "Stop, stop, wait, sometimes I don't get Dylan, he's not talking about tangled up in blue, it's love! I'm tangled up in love!"
And I was like... nooooo. "Tangled up in blue" does not mean love - it's about the ghost-drift with the Kaiju anteverse, and how you can't get it out of your head but you can't figure out what it means but you know you will inevitably have to go back and feel it again, even as you know that feeling it again will be its own hell, and one of the reasons that movie caught me so hard and is still catching me so hard is because of how it plays with heterosexual expectations, how the "Alice" thing only ever worked because the line between how men in this culture are expected to talk about their girlfriends, and how they are expected to talk about the alien monsters possessing them and forcing them to destroy all they hold dear, is actually a very thin line, and that movie knows it, so sure, it's about love, but it's also about how love happens and survives despite that narrative, that toxic coerced obsession with treating the loved object as an alien other---
And then I was like. Oh wait. Probably Bob Dylan was not actually singing about Kaiju. Right. Oops.
Example two from the last two days: Janelle Monae's discussions of her sexuality have ignited the bi vs. pan discussion again and I am still confused by it because it's always been super obvious to me that the difference between bi and pan is that bi means "has the capability to be attracted to/fall in love with humans of the same or different genders" and "pan" means "has the capability to be attracted to/fall in love with anyone or anything capable of being attracted/falling in love back."
And surely for anyone who has watched even a couple of the Cindi Mayweather videos it's super obvious that Janelle Monae is perfectly open to possibility with consenting partners who do not happen to human? Why is this even a surprise?
And then I have to remind myself, right, most of the people who are reading the news articles about this are the sort of people who have never factored "but what if nonhumanoid aliens or AIs?" into their conceptions of sexuality, and would be kinda weirded out if someone else did. :/
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I still haven't seen it - I should, I feel like if I'm going to ship Newt/Alice this hard I should watch that one first. But I do feel like there's a ... continuum there, when it comes to humanoids? From the images I've seen of Shape of Water, it's probably all down to how the narrative treats it whether I would say she's probably pan.
I mean, I wouldn't consider Amanda/Sarek to be evidence that either of them are other than hetero. And I'm pretty sure Jim Kirk isn't pan either: for all the alien chicks he went for, he seems to be pretty much limited to humanoid women and the occasional humanoid man with a Starfleet uniform and an off-the-charts empathy rating. He loves his ship, but when he gets maudlin drunk about her, he talks about how much he wishes she had a woman's body so they could go for long walks on the beach etc. (As opposed to, say, Scotty, who would probably get maudlin drunk and rhapsodize about the enticing throb of her warp cores.)
But Janelle Monae still had to do a literal song-and-dance routine just to be able to hold hands with Tessa Thompson in public (and, like, I'm ace as hell and I'm pretty sure I would fall into bed with Tessa Thompson if she winked at me, so that one shouldn't take a lot of explaining), so your average reader of People magazine understanding about that one fic with Jack Harkness and Naraht and that this really is relevant to RL people's identities is probably too much to expect. Alas.
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(Also, I think the "does not need to resemble a human" part of pan is not really that universal - I first encountered pansexuality as a thing (pre-Jack Harkness) among people who also ID'd as SF fans, but outside the queer sf community I think they've taken it in a different direction.)
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Now that you mention it, if I were putting together a survey it'd be interesting to see what percentage of people have some amount of spite in their choice of ID. XD
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(and re your conversation elsewhere in the comments about choosing identity based on spite, during the time that I still thought I was alloromantic, I ID'd as biromantic instead of panromantic DEFINITELY based on spite, like HOW DARE people say that bi is a less inclusive identity than pan, FUCK YOU)
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But that gets perilously close to the really offensive version of the distinction that implies bi people are only in it for the genitals, which obviously isn't true, and even people with fairly restricted hardwired attractions often seem to be able to find loopholes in them if they love the other person enough to work at it.
It's easier to make the distinction if you bring in "OKAY but what if the other person was a giant mute pan pizza made of stone that drips acid, might you still look at them across the room and think 'I want to fuck that'?" and I feel like a lot of bi people would not have to think very hard before going "no" and a lot of pan people would be like "I mean, if they were sexy, then sure?"
Or, IDK, on a less sf-fandom end, there are a surprising number of pretentious literary things about people who want to fuck trees. And in some of them, Our Pretentious Literary Hero dreams of the tree as a woman and compares it to a woman etc, but in some of them, Our Pretentious Literary Hero just gets really turned on by trees.
But on the other hand I often feel like pan and ace/demi people have more in common with each other than either of them do with mono or bi people, in terms of how they understand sexual attraction - if I had never figured out ace was an option, I would probably call myself pan, because I experience no difference in level of attraction between any sort of person - but maybe I am also wrong about that.
BUT on the other hand, in this world in which there are no nonhumans who are capable of consent*, the distinction is pretty academic, plenty of people use them to mean the same thing, and there is frankly no need to fight about what the difference is between bi and pan or try to tell people which they should be, and spite is as good a reason as any.
*except MAYBE dolphins - I'm pretty sure all dolphins are pan - but even if we could communicate with them for sure, the power differential is such that free consent is unlikely.
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But it also seems to me, based on my experience with bisexual people, that narrowing the range of sentient beings who bi people are allowed to be attracted to (whether by species like you are, or by gender identity or genitals like some people want to) is invalidating of the identity of plenty of bi folks.
As far as I can remember, everyone I know irl who is not monosexual or aroace uses the term "bi" for themselves, so your generalizations don't work for me given my experience - both about who I as an aroace person feel most in common with, and whether some of my bi friends would respond "if they're sexy sure" about some pretty weird embodiments. (I have definitely had conversations with bi people expressing our mutual bafflement that gender could ever be a relevant point of exclusion in the set of "who a person could be attracted to")
It could be just one of those things where there is genuine regional variation in terminology usage, and in your area bi and pan have noticeable differences, but that is not my experience!
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It probably has as much to do with what communities you were a part of when you picked a term as anything! This wasn't really about trying to define the terms for other people, just me going "oh, yeah, not everybody learned about this stuff in the same context I did, so we're going to be interpreting them very differently."
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