Some extremely complicated feels.

[bladespark]

Okay, so this is my new obsession, even though I can't play it (I did this with Undertale too, though I think Hades is already ahead of Undertale, I never managed to get an Undertale story finished, and I've got, ah, two Hades stories now? Though one needs a final couple of paragraphs.) And the playthrough I was watching finally, near the very end, ran into Thanatos, and I immediately went "Ah! Okay, yes, obviously" about the billion Thanatos/Zagreus stories and artworks I've seen.

I've been this route before, I thought as I hunted down a complete Than/Zag dialogue video and started watching the two of them bounce off each other. And hey, honestly I don't mind me some gay-baiting, it lets me imagine happy pretty gay people together, so why not, so long as it's not burying your gays? Don't think gods die permanently in this thing, so I'm safe there!

And yeah, most of the dialogue was just what I was expecting, stuff that definitely had a flirty edge, if you wanted to see it that way, but you could write it off as platonic. Typical canon stuff that's at least not homophobic and afraid of it looking like flirting.

Then I hit the point where Zagreus asks Achilles for advice about what to do about Thanatos, and got gobsmacked when Achilles outright talked about it being love.

My brain here going "...wait, what?!" That's now how this goes!

Than and Zag then have several conversations about defining their relationship and what they want to be, and though they're both obviously avoiding "love", none of this can be dismissed as platonic anymore. That arc ends with Zagreus saying he'll wait as long as Thanatos needs.

When they pick back up again... I'll just share the screenshot, honestly.



I had actually seen this on Twitter a couple of days earlier, but I'd assumed it was a fan edit. Nope! It's real! And you should hear the voice actor. He is definitely playing a guy in love. Then in response to that, Zagreus crosses the room, which by the way is his bedroom, to stand right next to Thanatos, and then they fade to black, after which, I kid you not, there's the sound the bed makes when you poke it with your mouse in game, and the two of them laughing quietly, and then the picture comes back, and they say a pretty affectionate goodbye and you go back to the game.

I probably sound way too shocked about that, I realize. But I am shocked!

I can hardly process my feelings about this. I mean sure, I knew you could build relationships in the game. I knew people had said it had "gay rep", I knew all that. I knew everybody put these two together. But everybody puts like...Thor and Loki together too, you know? I'm used to a wink and a nod, and maybe a script writer going "Yeah, I was thinking of them as gay." I'm used to having to dig up Michael Sheen saying he was playing Aziraphale as being in love, I'm used to subtext, not outright, "we want to make sure absolutely nobody makes a mistake about what is happening here" text.

And that's a big part of why my feelings are so complicated. I'm fucking 42, and this is the first media thing that I've gotten into where I've seen an actual, canon, gay male couple! Why did I have to wait this long? Why? Why is the world like this? Why are people like this? If I'd been seeing this all my life, how much easier would things have been for me? How much earlier might I have realized that I'm a gay man if I'd been able to see beautiful things like this? It is beautiful. The voice actors really put some emotion into this, even if the rest of it's just kind of awkward game sprites standing near each other.

Why couldn't I have had this all my life?



There's more, I could write an entire essay about why this makes me want to cry in about four totally different ways. But hey, I guess better late than never, right?

Now, off to go finish my first Than/Zag story. And the first time other than Link/Zelda that I've written an explicitly canon ship*!

*The pedant in me notes that canon ships have appeared in my MLP stories, and some of my main pony story ships are almost canon, like Fluttershy/Discord, but hey, there's that "well, it could be platonic" doubt that I'm used to seeing!

Comments

[the_siobhan]

Have you seen The Old Guard? Two of the major characters are a gay male couple and it's never a plot point. They just are.

[bladespark]

I have not. :P

[storme]

Your reaction feels like mine was a couple of decades ago to Vanyel in The Last Herald-Mage. It's amazing the way it breaks your entire world apart and puts it back together a little better and brighter.

[bladespark]

Hah! I did read those books, but at the time I thought the gays were fantasy along with the telepathic horses? So they kinda just floated by unnoticed. And they feel so obscure these days, I keep having to explain who Mercedes Lackey is to people!!!!

[storme]

I grew up with a lot of gay men in my life, but I'd never seen them in media that wasn't making fun of them somehow until Vanyel. And I got the first book via a school book club (there was a catalogue involved) which span me out no end in my methodist boarding school. :D

[bladespark]

Oh wow, I can imagine!

I wouldn't have been permitted to meet an out gay man as a kid/teen. Nooooooo way. My mom was anxious and dubious when I did a theater class in college at age 25, because we all know theater has gay people and...???? I'm not sure what the "and" was, really. And something, something sin and corruption, I guess!

[storme]

My mother used to take me on pride marches in my pram, and I went to gay clubs as a babe in arms. My mother's best friend when I was tiny was a drag queen who did a Margaret Thatcher impersonation, and her best friend in my teens was a lesbian. Very different backgrounds, huh.

(My mother's inability to deal with my trans/nonbinary realisation, considering how A-OK gayness was to her, still baffles me. But there you are; early wave feminism is all for gays and horrified by transgender folks, see also JK Rowling.)

[silveradept]

It took far too long for people to be willing to see other people as loving and gay and without plausible deniability that it was platonic, but huzzah for actual content where nobody gets buried or killed or denied or otherwise is anything other than who they are.