Thread:Dipset4eva/@comment-32769624-20181208173805/@comment-995426-20190906153600

Dipset4eva:

First of all, please don't call other users stupid or other forms of personal attack. It's uncivil.

Now, you seem to be confusing the concept of unrelated adult men who liken each other as brothers, with the concept of siblings in an immediate family under the. The Westermarck effect reverse-sexually-imprints young children to make incest with immediate family members (and thus inbreeding and genetic disease) less likely. Adults who meet for the first time as strangers, even if they are genetically related, have not undergone the Westermarck effect. The absence of the effect was how Leonardo (2012 TV series) and Hamato Miwa (2012 TV series) plausibly continued having an attraction even after finding out that Hamato Yoshi (2012 TV series), the adoptive father who raised Leo from infancy, was also Miwa's biological father. (The weird and rather squicky thing about it all is that adults who meet each other for the first time are actually more likely to form an attraction the more closely genetically related they are&mdash;the Westermarck effect usually prevents that in childhood, so adults have to rely on the observance of cultural taboos preventing incest.)

Where gay and bi men are considered, plenty in a romantic or otherwise intimate relationship will sometimes characterize each other as "brother" in a flowery sense or "bro" as a term of endearment. This is not because they're genetically related or grew up together, but because they share a solidarity and camaraderie with each other, and may even love and accept each other unconditionally.

Now, if Warren and Hypno were reliably hetero, that would probably be that. But their episode goes out of its way to repeatedly and very unsubtly portray them as a romantic pairing, in a way not just obvious to adults, but actually most obvious to young children, who already recognize and accept LGBT people far more readily than previous generations did. Even the episode's title references an easily-recognized playground rhyme about romantic love. Anvil after anvil is being dropped on the audience's attention, with more anvils dropped for good measure in case we didn't notice the first umpteen times. When we write wiki articles about this episode and its characters, there's just far less mental gymnastics involved in using straightforward descriptions and calling a spade a spade when we see one.

I mean, there are still a lot of things we can't safely assume about Warren and Hypno. For instance, we can't say that they got married and are husbands, or intend to do get married, as these assumptions require a lot more speculation than the details provide. It may even be possible that, as much as they love each other and already treat each other like boyfriends, they might not have formally decided to consider the two of them to be Boyfriends™&mdash;plenty of couples wrangle other over relationship labels and levels of commitment. But it is fair to call them love interests, and it is also fair to socially liken them as a couple/pair as long as they behave like one.