Yeah, that's how I saw it too--the blending and sharing mentally/emotionally is a huge part of the trope.
On the other hand, they're not the Borg. They can and do *at specific times* share some really intimate experiences with each other & from each other's point of view--languages, physical sensations including biochemical/psychosomatic ones like crying or horniness or PMS, learned skills like gun knowledge or chemistry or hacking, really personal memories. But they are all also individual consciousnesses, and I don't see any indication that they're going to end up losing themselves and becoming one big eight-bodied 32-limbed group mind.
So I think characters of different sexualities in the same cluster will have specific experiences of knowing what it feels like to have another sexuality, but that doesn't mean they're all going to end up pan all the time. (This is based on what I got from the show, not whatever word of god.) So the gay characters will get what it's like to be attracted to the opposite gender and the straight characters will get what it's like to be attracted to their own gender, and the bi/pan characters will have experiences where temporarily they feel not-attracted to one gender or another. I suppose if some of them were ace and some were not, those feelings would be shared as well. (If Riley spends a lot of time in the heads of her lesbian and straight male cluster-mates, does she feel less into men for a while? I wonder.) But at the end of the day they're still themselves. The same way Capheus can't invoke the spirit of Van Damme if Sun is busy doing something else--he's not suddenly a martial arts expert on his own. He just knows what it feels like.
But they're not the Sexuality Borg. The point of a functional cluster I think is to have all those other viewpoints and experiences *available* but not have them take you over like some kind of psychic virus. (Being able to tune into and out of that kind of connection so we don't all have to listen to Kala and Wolfgang banging all the time or whatever is also a trope in sci fi about telepathic connections, too.)
tl;dr Being in someone else's mind to the point where you grok what it's like to be them isn't the same thing as no longer being yourself, or it doesn't have to be. I think that tension is a huge part of the story (though in the two seasons + movie we got, there wasn't time to explore it all), but it's not at all a foregone conclusion that something an individual finds really central to their identity the way sexuality often is (esp for gay people who have had to defend it so strongly) will simply merge into the whole or be overwritten. I'm not even slightly convinced that it would.
(And the sexuality crossover that I noticed most was straight boy Will getting a boner over m/m and being flustered but kind of rolling with it. I actually don't remember any pressure (via the cluster, as opposed to homophobic society generally) on Nomi or Lito to be into het, much less constantly, but I could have missed stuff.)
Re: wank containment area
Yeah, that's how I saw it too--the blending and sharing mentally/emotionally is a huge part of the trope.
On the other hand, they're not the Borg. They can and do *at specific times* share some really intimate experiences with each other & from each other's point of view--languages, physical sensations including biochemical/psychosomatic ones like crying or horniness or PMS, learned skills like gun knowledge or chemistry or hacking, really personal memories. But they are all also individual consciousnesses, and I don't see any indication that they're going to end up losing themselves and becoming one big eight-bodied 32-limbed group mind.
So I think characters of different sexualities in the same cluster will have specific experiences of knowing what it feels like to have another sexuality, but that doesn't mean they're all going to end up pan all the time. (This is based on what I got from the show, not whatever word of god.) So the gay characters will get what it's like to be attracted to the opposite gender and the straight characters will get what it's like to be attracted to their own gender, and the bi/pan characters will have experiences where temporarily they feel not-attracted to one gender or another. I suppose if some of them were ace and some were not, those feelings would be shared as well. (If Riley spends a lot of time in the heads of her lesbian and straight male cluster-mates, does she feel less into men for a while? I wonder.) But at the end of the day they're still themselves. The same way Capheus can't invoke the spirit of Van Damme if Sun is busy doing something else--he's not suddenly a martial arts expert on his own. He just knows what it feels like.
But they're not the Sexuality Borg. The point of a functional cluster I think is to have all those other viewpoints and experiences *available* but not have them take you over like some kind of psychic virus. (Being able to tune into and out of that kind of connection so we don't all have to listen to Kala and Wolfgang banging all the time or whatever is also a trope in sci fi about telepathic connections, too.)
tl;dr Being in someone else's mind to the point where you grok what it's like to be them isn't the same thing as no longer being yourself, or it doesn't have to be. I think that tension is a huge part of the story (though in the two seasons + movie we got, there wasn't time to explore it all), but it's not at all a foregone conclusion that something an individual finds really central to their identity the way sexuality often is (esp for gay people who have had to defend it so strongly) will simply merge into the whole or be overwritten. I'm not even slightly convinced that it would.
(And the sexuality crossover that I noticed most was straight boy Will getting a boner over m/m and being flustered but kind of rolling with it. I actually don't remember any pressure (via the cluster, as opposed to homophobic society generally) on Nomi or Lito to be into het, much less constantly, but I could have missed stuff.)