“Oh, hey, look! Kintyre and Bevel!” Elgar says suddenly, eyes pinned on something back in the hotel foyer.
“What? Where?” Pip asks, head whipping around to follow his line of sight. My heart squeezes in my chest, and I stumble after him, juggling the luggage and scanning the crowd for my brother. He is tall; he should stand out. Or above, at any rate.
“How did he get here?” I ask, unable to see what Elgar is pointing to. Kintyre is nowhere in sight.
“Cosplayers!” Elgar turns back to us, face filled with childish delight. “They look perfect!”
Pip and I look at each other, disappointed and self-conscious, and follow his pointing finger. We both realize at the same time that we have been hoping my brother and his trothed had somehow found a way to traverse the realms and join us here, found a way to help us with this fight.
Elgar’s delight shrivels, however, when the two women dressed as Kintyre and Bevel kiss at the urging of a crowd of fans with their cameras out. The crowd crows and squeals with delight, flashes snapping, as the Kintyre dips her companion.
“Wrong way around,” Pip mutters, grinning.
Elgar scoffs and turns away. Then he stares up at the numbers above the elevator doors, as if willing the car to come faster. It appears to be stopping at every single floor on it’s way down to us, however.
“What, it’s not like they’re wrong or anything,” Pip says. “This is Con-Inclusion, don’t forget. Kin and Bevel are a thing. Hashtag Binky lives.”
“Yeah, but, it’s not that it’s . . . it’s the way they’ve always done it,” Elgar mutters, pouting in his exhaustion. “Fans and the fetishization of male homoromantic and homosexual identities, and all that other stuff.”
Pip’s eyebrows jump. Pip, the woman I fell in love with, resurfaces from behind the mask of Lucy Piper, concerned and overstressed warrior-heroine. “I didn’t know you knew those terms,” Pip says, grinning at Elgar in parental approval. “Nice use of the ten-dollar jargon.”
“I did read your thesis, didn’t I?” Elgar says. “It’s up on the web and everything. I even understood it. Well, most of it.”
“Aw, you do care, Uncle Gar,” Pip says, grinning and perhaps even blushing a little. It is easy to forget that my wife once admired my creator, quite genuinely. Seeing her change in demeanor and energy is like a sharp slap to the face, and I realize all at once how very shut down Pip has been since our return to the Overrealm. How much her concern about the Damoclean sword, the proverbial other shoe, the hurricane outside of this artificial eye, has thrown a muffler over her naturally bright, energetic attitude.
“Yeah, just . . . not so much for that,” Elgar says with a huff. “It just feels like they’re . . . devaluing what I wrote.”
“I suppose it is fetishization in a way,” Pip admits. A small crowd of people are starting to appear around us, waiting for the elevator. More than one of them has their ears tuned into Elgar and Pip’s conversation. I wonder if I should put a stop to it. “But don’t forget that if fans want to make something with a romantic theme, then the audience-favorite characters are going to be overwhelmingly male, simply because a significant percentage of main characters in mainstream media texts are also male. The characters the audience identifies with or loves are mostly dudes, because overwhelmingly, the main characters are just dudes.”
“But my characters—”
“Elgar,” Pip interrupts gently, and around me, more than one eavesdroppers’ eyes pop wide. “Fan fiction has nothing to do with you. Sure, it’s about using your characters and worlds as building blocks, but it’s. . . . Fan fiction is a place where a lot of women of all ages learn about and experiment with their own sexuality, and using male characters not only gives them a sort of anonymizing distance, but frankly, it’s a bigger reflection of what it is women want in a relationship, rather than what they think a relationship between two dudes is actually like.”
“Okay, yeah, but—” Elgar grunts, and flings his good arm at the cosplayers, who are beginning to move on. “I mean, like, is that fair, to do that to someone? To just pretend they’re gay for fun? To impose on their identities like that?”
“But Bevel is gay,” I remind him. “And Kintyre is bi.”
Elgar makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat. “There’s a difference between knowing it and . . . I mean, knowing that they’re together, and Paired, and there’s a kid and everything, and . . . and, you know . . . seeing it.”
Pip’s eyebrows turn down. “Careful, Elgar. You’re skirting awfully close to sounding like a homophobe.”
“I don’t hate the gay stuff!” Elgar protests. “I just hate when people make stuff that isn’t gay into gay stuff because . . . because . . . I don’t know, like, what’s wrong with friendship, right? Why does every intense and close relationship have to be romantic and sexual? Why do people devalue male friendships so much? Why do fans? I mean, if I meant them to be gay together, I would have written it that way!”
“But you did,” Pip says. “They are.”
“Well, I know that now, but I just . . . I don’t know how to . . . my head hurts,” he complains. “I can’t . . . think right.”
“Sorry,” Pip says gently, patting his hand. “Sorry. I know you’re scared and just looking for something to lash out at. I get it, okay? It’s fine.”
We fall into silence then, everyone side-eyeing us, wondering if that’s the end of the dispute. I appreciate this bizarre respect for privacy that celebrities seem to engender in Canada—everyone looks, but nobody bothers. And when the elevator doors open, and all the other passengers are disgorged, only one man stops to
