There are, of course, plenty of people who want both: many more canonically queer characters and relationships, and the right to queer your own reads on characters, regardless of what you’re given on the page or the screen. And it’s in this dichotomy that we see the trouble with conflating shipping and representation: they are separate acts, and we need them both in equal measure. The world that I joined when I started reading slash was one built on decades, perhaps even centuries of subtext and coded readings; our media is slowly – and at times, it feels painfully slow – making that subtext text, and allowing characters to be queer from the start.

@elizabethminkel on Star Wars, queer representation and the mainstreaming of slash.

(via elizabethminkel)