Heteroooo Mia [and other headcanons]
May. 24th, 2025 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenslayerbeeOn tumblr, I was recently asked about nsfw headcanons about my darling Mia Dearden (among other characters I have yet to get around to). I'm just going to c&p them over here, because this is a fandom topic I've been thinking about a lot, and I'd welcome more discussion.
Initially, I was going to insert here some jokes about Heteroooo Mia; comment on why I see her this way, and on certain fanon trends that go against this and why.
This got long, and I have a few more nsfw headcanons I wanted to share. Luckily, I got another ask about Mia, so I’ll be dividing this and posting the second part in a moment (ETA: here it is!). Also, given the character and the topic, warning for mentions of csa and child trafficking.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about fandom’s approach to sexuality, about “queer headcanons”; about how I’ve personally moved further away from said approaches, if I ever followed it anything more than half-heartedly in the first place. And Mia happens to be a good case study to illustrate my points.
Fandoms are built largely on shipping. That’s just a fact, and it’s not something I particularly object to. I understand why it’s bothersome when that’s all there is, especially if you run countercourse, and especially in fandoms where everything is reduced to one pair of characters (or a trio involved in a ship war) to the detriment of everything else. But I can’t say I haven’t had my fun in the eternal game of smashing dolls together in various combinations. Dynamics and interactions between various characters happens to be one of the main things I’ll pay attention to in any given story; I enjoy a well-written romance, and I love to ask myself “what if…”, in any shape of form. My main fandom, all my previous main fandoms, are built on large, expansive casts, where there are several characters and countless relationships that hold my attention, and in those I’d be called a multishipper, even if usually, when I walk away, all but the few dynamics that retained most of my enthusiasm fade away in my memory.
So this is not an indictment against shipping, by any means. But there are approaches to shipping that I find less and less fitting to my own way of reading texts.
One is the “queer (most often bi) until proven otherwise” approach. Not because I think us queers are these freaks of nature, these aliens that don’t fit with the rest of the human experience. But because the vast majority of characters in the fandoms we move in, like it or not, have been written, with varying levels of awareness, with the intent of portraying heterosexual characters, and that has shaped them.
Some of them, taking a Watsonian approach in mind, wouldn’t change much, if they suddenly were queer, be it thanks to their particular personality or circumstances, or thanks to the context of the universe they live in. Such is life. But in many cases, likely more than I think fandom likes to acknowledge, this would be a more than significant alteration. And, instead, because it’s often filtered through shipping and which dolls we want to smush together to the detriment, and not alongside character exploration, a lot of m/m and f/f fandom content comes across as two straight people who just happen to fuck people of their same gender. And “fuck” might be a strong word, because sometimes any inkling of raw desire feels utterly absent.
Going back to Mia: I read her as heterosexual because that’s what’s in the text. This is a woman (a girl, when she starts) that likes men.
That is attracted to them, that gets passing crushes on them, that develops stronger feelings for them. Her interest in men over women isn’t limited to the romantic territory: her stronger bonds are with men. Ollie and Connor, of course. Dinah is her closest female bond, and that one is built largely off-panel and clearly not on the same level as the other two. She admires Roy and wants to take his mantle, follow in his steps (not just as Speedy II, but also on Roy’s activism and advocacy, by sharing her own personal stories, as he did). On the Teen Titans, the characters she has the most significant interactions with are Victor Stone and Tim Drake. It’s been a while since I read this, but I remember little to no bonding with the female Titans, barring a couple jokes to Rose on her very last appearance. We see one female friend of hers at school, very briefly.
I think it’s fair to say that Mia has an easier time interacting with men. And I can think of why easily. Yes, men are the people who hurt her most. They’re also who she was most used to. And I can see how her past as a trafficking victim, engaging in survival sex works while living on the streets, wouldn’t have been conducting to building solid friendships with other girls and women. Those bonds can be beautiful, but I can picture the kind of competitiveness she was facing in that environment, especially at 15 and younger. She tells Oliver that she took drugs to stay awake, a practice they all did to prevent assaults or robberies -the latter, at least in part, likely from each other. Because you can’t trust anyone 100%, because no one is trustworthy. Not even Mia, in such a dog eats dog world.
At one point, Mia brazenly references a sexual act she did involving other girls… and it was in the context of male clients paying for titillation. There’s absolutely no hint of Mia thinking of it beyond that. And a key detail here, is that this moment, not to mention the bulk of Mia’s character, especially pertaining her relationship with sex, was written by Judd Winick. An author who has never once been subtle about queer subtext (and, when allowed to, text). He even has a character of his own creation, Grace Choi, with a similar background to Mia as a trafficked child, a queer woman who only dates women. And yet, with Mia… nothing. Not even an inkling that she is remotely interested in anything but men.
Queer!Mia, and especially lesbian!Mia, aren’t readings that are accomodated by the text. They are, if not going actively against the text, at least way beyond its boundaries.
And that’s perfectly fine. But it means that you have to build them up, apart from the text.
I find that more and more, I prefer some kind of stronger foundation to built upon for these things, be it subtext (intentional or not, death of the author and all that) or, yes, shipping. Because seeing how a given characters interacts by members of their own gender vis a vis the other is something to build upon. There’s preciously little (nearly nothing, really) of that with Mia, and not seeing anything there to go from means I am not interested in that process, but that’s a matter of personal preference, if anyone else is, go ahead.
Go ahead with the awareness that a queer Mia, and especially a lesbian Mia (and, especially, as I’ve seen before, an amab Mia), is a different character. That these are non-canon readings. Ask yourself, how could this change her reactions to her trauma? Her relationships with Ollie? With Dinah, if she had latched on a safe, older woman to explore her feelings? With her diagnosis? With the Titans, maybe with her heroism? With the world?
Sadly, this isn’t what I see when I spy a lesbian!Mia headcanon in the wild. It’s either lip service, betrays a deep discomfort with the way this csa victim expresses interest in men, or *checks notes* becomes a rhetorical weapon against us ten Jason/Mia shippers.
And fuck, if that isn't boring. Not to mention quite offensive, as a lesbian, ngl.
I dug deep on my Heteroooo Mia headcanon in my last post, so I’ll take advantage of this one to talk a bit about Mia and sex, especifically. Warning for allusions to csa and child trafficking.
I’ve talked about this with other shippers but I think she’d love very involved roleplaying. She likely has past experiences with those kinds of games, and not good ones (yet, at the same time, pretending someone else can afford you some distance), so she might’ve been unsure at first, but to her surprise and delight, it’s immensely fun. Especially with costumes involved, which is something she ponders and jokes about out loud with other capes, Because.
I think she and Jason would feed into each other with this (because you know this would be a shared kink). Through anyone else’s eyes, the result is way too convoluted and complicated. These two are building up an entire film, a saga. They’re enjoying themselves immensely.
I also have this headcanon that her limits, her comfort zone, are in constant movement. Not static, shifting, hard to predict. What sometimes feels right, other times becomes a hard limit. If sometimes giving head feels active, feels like being in charge, feels like indulging in how much she can affect the guy, other times the posture itself feels degrading. If sometimes certain possessiveness makes her feel wanted and desired, as herself and not just a body and a means to an end, there are other times when it feels like ownership and she gets the urge to escape. Or simply, physical touches that usually cause pleasure will suddenly, without her being able to find an explanation, feel awkward and immensely unsexy. It’s a headache and a half, and something that can add to her insecurities about being too “high maintenance” (unlovable) in a romantic relationship.
Heteroooo Mia
Initially, I was going to insert here some jokes about Heteroooo Mia; comment on why I see her this way, and on certain fanon trends that go against this and why.
This got long, and I have a few more nsfw headcanons I wanted to share. Luckily, I got another ask about Mia, so I’ll be dividing this and posting the second part in a moment (ETA: here it is!). Also, given the character and the topic, warning for mentions of csa and child trafficking.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about fandom’s approach to sexuality, about “queer headcanons”; about how I’ve personally moved further away from said approaches, if I ever followed it anything more than half-heartedly in the first place. And Mia happens to be a good case study to illustrate my points.
Fandoms are built largely on shipping. That’s just a fact, and it’s not something I particularly object to. I understand why it’s bothersome when that’s all there is, especially if you run countercourse, and especially in fandoms where everything is reduced to one pair of characters (or a trio involved in a ship war) to the detriment of everything else. But I can’t say I haven’t had my fun in the eternal game of smashing dolls together in various combinations. Dynamics and interactions between various characters happens to be one of the main things I’ll pay attention to in any given story; I enjoy a well-written romance, and I love to ask myself “what if…”, in any shape of form. My main fandom, all my previous main fandoms, are built on large, expansive casts, where there are several characters and countless relationships that hold my attention, and in those I’d be called a multishipper, even if usually, when I walk away, all but the few dynamics that retained most of my enthusiasm fade away in my memory.
So this is not an indictment against shipping, by any means. But there are approaches to shipping that I find less and less fitting to my own way of reading texts.
One is the “queer (most often bi) until proven otherwise” approach. Not because I think us queers are these freaks of nature, these aliens that don’t fit with the rest of the human experience. But because the vast majority of characters in the fandoms we move in, like it or not, have been written, with varying levels of awareness, with the intent of portraying heterosexual characters, and that has shaped them.
Some of them, taking a Watsonian approach in mind, wouldn’t change much, if they suddenly were queer, be it thanks to their particular personality or circumstances, or thanks to the context of the universe they live in. Such is life. But in many cases, likely more than I think fandom likes to acknowledge, this would be a more than significant alteration. And, instead, because it’s often filtered through shipping and which dolls we want to smush together to the detriment, and not alongside character exploration, a lot of m/m and f/f fandom content comes across as two straight people who just happen to fuck people of their same gender. And “fuck” might be a strong word, because sometimes any inkling of raw desire feels utterly absent.
Going back to Mia: I read her as heterosexual because that’s what’s in the text. This is a woman (a girl, when she starts) that likes men.
That is attracted to them, that gets passing crushes on them, that develops stronger feelings for them. Her interest in men over women isn’t limited to the romantic territory: her stronger bonds are with men. Ollie and Connor, of course. Dinah is her closest female bond, and that one is built largely off-panel and clearly not on the same level as the other two. She admires Roy and wants to take his mantle, follow in his steps (not just as Speedy II, but also on Roy’s activism and advocacy, by sharing her own personal stories, as he did). On the Teen Titans, the characters she has the most significant interactions with are Victor Stone and Tim Drake. It’s been a while since I read this, but I remember little to no bonding with the female Titans, barring a couple jokes to Rose on her very last appearance. We see one female friend of hers at school, very briefly.
I think it’s fair to say that Mia has an easier time interacting with men. And I can think of why easily. Yes, men are the people who hurt her most. They’re also who she was most used to. And I can see how her past as a trafficking victim, engaging in survival sex works while living on the streets, wouldn’t have been conducting to building solid friendships with other girls and women. Those bonds can be beautiful, but I can picture the kind of competitiveness she was facing in that environment, especially at 15 and younger. She tells Oliver that she took drugs to stay awake, a practice they all did to prevent assaults or robberies -the latter, at least in part, likely from each other. Because you can’t trust anyone 100%, because no one is trustworthy. Not even Mia, in such a dog eats dog world.
At one point, Mia brazenly references a sexual act she did involving other girls… and it was in the context of male clients paying for titillation. There’s absolutely no hint of Mia thinking of it beyond that. And a key detail here, is that this moment, not to mention the bulk of Mia’s character, especially pertaining her relationship with sex, was written by Judd Winick. An author who has never once been subtle about queer subtext (and, when allowed to, text). He even has a character of his own creation, Grace Choi, with a similar background to Mia as a trafficked child, a queer woman who only dates women. And yet, with Mia… nothing. Not even an inkling that she is remotely interested in anything but men.
Queer!Mia, and especially lesbian!Mia, aren’t readings that are accomodated by the text. They are, if not going actively against the text, at least way beyond its boundaries.
And that’s perfectly fine. But it means that you have to build them up, apart from the text.
I find that more and more, I prefer some kind of stronger foundation to built upon for these things, be it subtext (intentional or not, death of the author and all that) or, yes, shipping. Because seeing how a given characters interacts by members of their own gender vis a vis the other is something to build upon. There’s preciously little (nearly nothing, really) of that with Mia, and not seeing anything there to go from means I am not interested in that process, but that’s a matter of personal preference, if anyone else is, go ahead.
Go ahead with the awareness that a queer Mia, and especially a lesbian Mia (and, especially, as I’ve seen before, an amab Mia), is a different character. That these are non-canon readings. Ask yourself, how could this change her reactions to her trauma? Her relationships with Ollie? With Dinah, if she had latched on a safe, older woman to explore her feelings? With her diagnosis? With the Titans, maybe with her heroism? With the world?
Sadly, this isn’t what I see when I spy a lesbian!Mia headcanon in the wild. It’s either lip service, betrays a deep discomfort with the way this csa victim expresses interest in men, or *checks notes* becomes a rhetorical weapon against us ten Jason/Mia shippers.
And fuck, if that isn't boring. Not to mention quite offensive, as a lesbian, ngl.
Other headcanons
I dug deep on my Heteroooo Mia headcanon in my last post, so I’ll take advantage of this one to talk a bit about Mia and sex, especifically. Warning for allusions to csa and child trafficking.
I’ve talked about this with other shippers but I think she’d love very involved roleplaying. She likely has past experiences with those kinds of games, and not good ones (yet, at the same time, pretending someone else can afford you some distance), so she might’ve been unsure at first, but to her surprise and delight, it’s immensely fun. Especially with costumes involved, which is something she ponders and jokes about out loud with other capes, Because.
I think she and Jason would feed into each other with this (because you know this would be a shared kink). Through anyone else’s eyes, the result is way too convoluted and complicated. These two are building up an entire film, a saga. They’re enjoying themselves immensely.
I also have this headcanon that her limits, her comfort zone, are in constant movement. Not static, shifting, hard to predict. What sometimes feels right, other times becomes a hard limit. If sometimes giving head feels active, feels like being in charge, feels like indulging in how much she can affect the guy, other times the posture itself feels degrading. If sometimes certain possessiveness makes her feel wanted and desired, as herself and not just a body and a means to an end, there are other times when it feels like ownership and she gets the urge to escape. Or simply, physical touches that usually cause pleasure will suddenly, without her being able to find an explanation, feel awkward and immensely unsexy. It’s a headache and a half, and something that can add to her insecurities about being too “high maintenance” (unlovable) in a romantic relationship.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-24 04:25 pm (UTC)And yeah, she's one I tend to write for more on the het side (she wound up in a stable three with Kon and Tim in the longest AU involving her).
But you hit a lot of good points on why it works.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-24 05:57 pm (UTC)One time I saw someone tweet they liked Mia because she was a transfem lesbian with a crossbow and I thought. Okay but literally none of that is true, you're talking about an original character. Which you're more than welcome to write, just like you're welcome to go full AU in your fics and explore what that version of Mia would be like... but what's the point of claiming any of that is canon?
And often the point is that they feel uncomfortable with how Mia *is* portrayed in canon, vis a vis men. Insisting she's a lesbian often seems to be about removing all of that from the board as much as possible. And they end up with a "lesbian" character that crushes on men, likes men, talks about men, forges bonds mainly with men... because they're also not putting in any effort into exploring those changes in Mia ;_;
I don't know. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how a non-insignificant amount of characters in the western canon come across as profoundly white, cisheterosexual and christian in their demeanor and in their values, regardless of whether the author stated they were any of those things (because for a lot of them, it goes without saying), and while fandom claims to be transformative, when it comes to exploring and speculating about how any alteration from that traid could shape a character, the vast majority of what you find out there is quite surface level. Not to mention that, of course, fandom often puts more focus on how these presumed white, cishet, christian characters could be something else... than they do on non-white, non-cishet, non-christian characters LOL.