I don't want to come off like I'm bad mouthing another queer author so please don't come in with that assumption. 🙏 this is a purely (brief) critical analysis of a peer's work.
I have a lot of feelings about how modern notions about "Pride" and progress have led to movies, TV shows, and books that aim to shame closeted queer people for not being out. The way new media likes to pretend that bigotry no longer exists, and that the fears and personal reasons queer people stay in the closet are unfounded. The way these stories vilify the closeted as deceitful, and at fault for hurting the feelings of their allies who are apparently entitled to who they are. There's a new (very white) mindset that treats queer stories about queer struggles as archaic, cliche and unnecessary nowadays. "How Modern Queer Media Vilifies the Closeted" I could write a whole essay about it. Maybe I will sometime. But for now, I still like looking back to this one critical review.
Oh yeah the main character of this queer YA graphic novel is Asian too. Not that it informs the intersectionality of her experience in any way acknowledged by the story. Also her mermaid love interest who encourages her to come out is coded as white.
I also have other, harder to articulate feelings about how Ostertag's middle grade series, The Witch Boy portrays a fantasy-indigenous family as having cultural gender roles so limited by binary and tradition that the allegorically-genderqueer main character only has his more open minded queer friend from a public school to relate to. How the second book in the series involves a character who was so traumatized by the rigid expectations of their family's culture that they find relief from that by going to a public school. Just, the optics of that paired with indigenous erasure, the trauma indigenous children historically faced in educational systems, the overall colonial mindset that likes to portray indigenous cultures as having backwards ideas about gender and sexuality. All this written by a white author. And because, of course, society will always gravitate to depictions of QPOC when its filtered through a white lens, this queer middle grade series is the one getting a big animated adaptation.
(quick disclaimer: I think stories about queer cultural trauma are totally valid, I just think that kind of story should come from someone of that culture.)
Yes, I know. The Witch Boy doesn't depict any real, specific indigenous culture. It's a queer allegory. So I'll just lift a quote from game designer and writer James Mendez Hodes:
"If you find a way to scrub an explicit signifier from a racist expression, but keep the expression intact, you preserve the racist dynamic without the explicit identification. It keeps the content the same, but transforms an aggression into a microaggression—which, in polite society, is actually worse than an aggression, because it flies under the radar. Intentional racists get to spam it unchallenged. Unintentional carriers pick it up and repeat it, normalizing and propagating it."
I'm aware that Ostertag has a new book out. That it's in collaboration with a sensitivity reader, Mey Rude, who is not credited in the graphic novel's publicity. But I've been focusing my efforts on supporting QPOC authors and artists directly these days.