brynwrites:

I know this has been said before, but with tumblr’s shitty culture of black and white and nothing in between, I think it warrants saying again: 

It is very much okay to write straight relationships.

We need wlw and mlm, and we need non-binary characters and bisexuals and asexuals and queer platonic relationships and healthy polyamory. But we also need to have good mlw relationships and straight characters present in literature, because as much as we don’t have the diversity of sexualities, we also don’t have diversity within straight characters. 

Diversity such as mlw ships in which…

• One or both characters are poc, (but neither is fetishized or ‘ambiguously tan’.)
• One or both characters are disabled.
• One or both character are allowed to be non-gender conforming while still identifying as a binary gender.
• One or both characters identify as either trans, or a binary-leaning gender, like a demi-boy/girl.
• The characters are a part of a healthy polyamorous relationship.
• The characters are in any healthy, loving relationship where both characters have equal power and agency within the relationship and the man is not worshiped as a feminist monument for accepting the woman as his equal (because men should not need to be given a prize for treating a woman like another human being, thank you very much.)

Now, if you think I’m saying you should go out and change your non-mlw relationships, then you are vastly misunderstanding me. There should always be characters with diverse sexualities in every book because there are people with diverse sexualities in every culture and every age, and because including these characters, (especially as non-pov characters), is so easy that any non-homophobic monkey could do it in their sleep.

What I am saying, is that we need to stop protesting writers who are writing amazing diversity and happen to have a straight protagonist or a mlw central ship. 

There’s a difference between a writer who adds token diversity to a straight world for brownie points, and a writer who writes with diversity while still using their stories to show that the common mlw relationships in media aren’t the full picture, nor the way mlw relationships should be.