Oh yes. Soapbox time.

I made myself laugh with my own subject title.

But yes. I don't particularly want to try and justify what I write in a vindictive manner, but I just thought it's worth explaining the outlook I take on my fiction, especially fantasy fiction. Or even life, for that matter.

Sexuality is, obviously, a large part of my life, as it is everybody's. Everybody is, at times, driven by their sexuality, "be they heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, bisexual, trisexual, quadrisexual, pansexual, transexual, omnisexual or that thing where the chick ties the belt around your neck and tinkles on a balloon". The point, as Dan Akroyd's ever-miserable character in that movie goes on to say, is that "It has absolutely nothing to do with who we are as people".

That's a mantra I like to live my life by--not the balloon thing, the second part. I wasn't inspired by Akroyd, he just happened to put it amusingly and well. You see some homosexuals who go out and about dressed like they should be in Narnia and put a pink and, I might add personally, totally unwanted stain on the notion of homosexuality.

Myself? I just live my life like a normal person. Some men ogle at women when they go past, or have a list of top 5 chicks. My eye can be caught by a guy, and I have a top 5 list of men, but so what? If somebody asks me if I want to see a movie, I'm not going to say 'Sure! So long as it's a gay movie!'. That's just suffocatingly antisocial. And gay, obviously.

The main point is, I act like any normal person (I'd say like any straight person, but straight people are weird too). The boundary of 'gay' and 'straight' is purely sexual, and has no bearing on how I act. I don't claim to want to change the world, but I think if all sexualities were just normal--with our individual human quirks, obviously--then this world would be a lot less torn up. This is what I try to convey in my writing.

Not to say the worlds in which I'm writing in aren't torn--they most definitely are, but I am saying I like to enjoy the idea of a certain ideological utopia with regard to sexuality, which I convey in my writing. Men will like men, and women. The women likewise. People aren't going to break bones about it, and it's not really going to be questioned a whole lot. Not everyone will be gay, so I'm not trying to push any agenda other than a certain general respect people should have to at least one thing in life.

I suppose the lack of any organised religion in these premade fantasy worlds goes a long way to abolishing sexual persecution and nurturing understanding, but I'm running the risk of stacking a second soapbox on top of the one I already have, so I'll leave it there.

Oh, and to be clear, I won't be changing the sexuality of any of the main characters in Find Your Way. I will absolutely respect the fact that Tetsuya Nomura probably created them straight, even though half the teenage girl fanbase wants otherwise. Baaawh.

I apologise for being really preachy here, at least it seems so to me, but there are a few things in life I'm particularly passionate about it, and writing and sexual/racial tolerance are two of them. I figure by combining those factors I can create a society that I think is above the one we have now, by and large, if only on paper. If you don't like my ideas, then don't read my work.

- P

This journal entry brought to you by me. If it was by the Gay Rights people I'd have been forced to include the suffix 'ariffic' to certain words.