not what was written, but what was there

[typingnoise]

there’s a particular way queer people look at stories. not just the ones written for us (rare, strange, often softened by compromise), but the ones that weren't — the ones that forgot us, misnamed us, or pretended we weren’t watching.

we still watched.

sometimes it’s in the gaps: a friendship that runs too deep, a rivalry that brims with tension. the girl who won't speak of why she left, the boy who won’t let anyone in. we know those silences. we fill them in with our own.

other times it’s not subtext at all — it’s just no one else saw it. or maybe they did, and they chose not to say.

we find each other like that. in the margins, in the misreadings. in scenes where something cracks and light spills through. where someone touches someone else’s wrist and the moment lasts too long. where longing outpaces language.

queer reading isn’t about “what the author intended.” it’s about what we needed. what we saw because we were looking for it. sometimes it's survival. sometimes it's reclamation. sometimes it's just delight — the kind that tastes like recognition.

i’ve been thinking lately about how queerness reshapes time in fiction — how chosen families resist linearity, how queer characters so often orbit love at strange angles. how the ending we’re given isn’t always the one we accept.

we rewrite them, quietly. sometimes in fic. sometimes just in the way we remember them.

sometimes i go back to a story i loved as a teenager and realise what i was actually looking for. how the ache between two characters mirrored something i hadn’t named yet. how it wasn't a crush on the lead actor, but something softer, more sideways. how the villain made more sense than he should have. how the girl who ran away was the one i followed, always.

queer reading is a kind of ghost-seeing. it’s knowing there’s something else underneath the surface — something that speaks in our language, even if it wasn’t supposed to.

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tell me — what’s a scene you’ve never been able to unsee?