This post was submitted by Jack

I should probably never write about my future writing plans because I always seem to break them.  I do, however, still think that the question of why the creators of Avatar chose to write Jake as using a wheelchair is an important one.  I don’t think it was to accurately represent scores of wounded veterans or to empower people with disabilities, though both are within the realm of possibility.  Anyhow, this week my pen was not moved to speak on that topic, but rather to get a bit introspective (and a bit emo, gomennasai) on my interest in team stories.

I really discovered the world of Doctor Who relatively late in the game.  Being a life-long science-fiction fan the series had always loomed large in my awareness of the overall fictive terrain, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t go near it until a couple of years ago.  When I finally did I discovered that there were two distinct series I could start from (now I know about others, but at the time I was working with two) – Doctor Who, the original show, and Torchwood, its spinoff.

Fans of the two shows could probably list and describe innumerable differences between them.  Who dates back to 1963, while Torchwood has only had three seasons.  Who has always been billed as a family show where Torchwood takes on more mature themes.  Etc. Etc.  But the real difference that has been the most meaningful for me is that Doctor Who revolves around a single character, The Doctor, who is usually joined by one or, at most, two companions, while Torchwood’s premise is based in a team dynamic.

I am obsessed with fictional teams, particularly ones that fight crime, have super powers, or otherwise protect the world or humanity.  With Torchwood, we get to track Gwen’s relationship with Owen as it goes from romantic to mutually-annoyed and eventually friendly affection, but we also get to see her relationship with Jack, with whom she has flirtations but also fears.  We see Tosh’s secret crush on Owen and eventually also find out Jack’s connection to her past and her family.  In the first season we unearth Ianto’s skeleton in the closet – a killer cyborg (ex)girlfriend – discover his bisexuality, see him fall in love with Jack, follow his coming out to his sister, and watch as he is instated as a full member of the team.  Every single relationship among the five characters is given development and screen time, and even when there are no aliens, even when there is no magic, and even when the special effects are cheesy and the overall feel is over the top (wait, that would be most of the time…), at the end of the day, the human connections are what I love.

The first time I became aware of this obsession with (fake) group dynamics was around the second grade when it became very clear that my preference was for X-Men comics over any of the other titles I also read like Spider Man, Thor, and Captain America.  Not coincidentally that was the same year I was introduced to the term gay by an educational documentary and I was finally able to articulate the feeling that I related to boys and girls differently than many of my peers.  I might be going a bit out on a limb here, but I think that in that moment and perhaps even before then, even as a very young child, I experienced a kind of mourning and a kind of disconnect that made me feel like I would never be able to be a part of most groups because of my difference, which, in turn, fed a ravenous craving for narratives of teams working together through thick and thin.

Of course when I left for college I anticipated having access to scores of queers, who, like myself, had always felt a little bit outside of straight society and perhaps who had even retreated into the same fiction that I did, but that’s really not what happened.  Not that I haven’t always had LGBT friends.  In fact I’ve probably had a great deal more than a lot of people, which has been a wonderful privilege, but, also like many others, I have experienced what it feels like to be excluded from this or that microcosm of The “Gay Community.”

Even today as I think about my life, I still find that groups both fascinate and repulse me.  They frequently seem to end broken like when the Love Rhombus of Woldverine-Jean Grey-Cyclops-Psylocke finally hit the fan in the early Nineties.  and still today I read X-Men and I value Torchwood and Power Pack and Wild C.A.T.S. and Star Trek and Glee and, of course, my beloved Harry Potter threesome more than ever.   As a tangential thought, this may also contribute to my interest in polyamory, particularly triads and quads, in (fan)fiction and in life.

I’ll close by pointing out a couple things that are very much wrong with all of this.  First of all, I’m usually pretty unwilling to boil down my interest in anything, particularly in media content, to such simplified explanation.  I do think that our desire for certain narratives, characters, and relationships are deeply personal and very much located in the id where we can’t easily get at them.   This belief colors my media politics around everything from pornography to violence and transformative fanworks.  In this case though, I suspect that it really might be this simple.  The other issue is, though, that I usually hate whiny blog posts like this.  I really am happy to be queer and if I were selecting attributes for myself in life prior to inhabiting my body, I’d definitely do it all again and be just as proud, but I do firmly believe that that doesn’t have to mean that we don’t have a critical relationship to ourselves as queers and see where it’s been a stumbling block.

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