I did a couple of entries about when I was watching DC's Young Justice on HBO Max a couple of months ago. There is one other thing inspired by that. In my first entry I mentioned one of the main characters is Kaldur'ahm, an Atlantean/human who is Aqualad in Season 1, then in Season 2 is undercover with his father Black Manta's crew, and then in Season 3 is Aquaman and leader of the Justice League on Earth.
It's after about 20 episodes of season 3 and 66 episodes total when during a montage near the end of an episode we see Kaldur'ahm kissing some Atlantean guy named Wynnde. And it's like, wait, Kaldur is gay? This came out of nowhere! Seriously there was no real indication that he was gay. In Season 1 when he returns briefly to Atlantis he meets with an ex-girlfriend who was also former Aqualad Garth's fiancee until she got killed off between seasons 1 and 2. I don't even remember seeing this Wynnde guy before. Maybe he was in that Atlantis episode but if so he made no impact on me. So when did he and Kaldur start going Brokeback Mountain?
I find something like that annoying. Not because I hate gay people. It's the way it was done, just thrown into a montage with no setup at all. It feels patronizing really. Like they realized they didn't have a gay character the first two+ seasons so they just threw this in there to say, "Oh, hey, look Kaldur's gay! We have a gay character!" If that were the case all along, why did you wait until season 3--nearly at the end--in a montage to just toss that in there? Why didn't you develop this the way you developed Wally West and Artemis's relationship? Or M'gann and Conner Kent's relationship? Those took whole seasons to come together but this you just toss into a montage after 66 episodes.
There was something similar in the third rebooted Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, where Sulu gets off the Enterprise and we find out he has a husband and kids. A lot of people, even George Takei, were unhappy about this. And again it wasn't that all (though certainly many did) hate gay people so much as the ham-handed way it was done. Like the Young Justice show there was no setup in the previous movies; they just threw that in, probably hoping they would win brownie points.
Though of course the championship example of this was JK Rowling waiting until all the Harry Potter books were out--and maybe all the movies too--before announcing Dumbledore was gay. Um...really? I guess we have to take your word for it since you wrote the books, but it just came out of nowhere. And what was the point of it? I haven't read past the first book, so were there no other gay characters that she had to retroactively make one gay to placate people?
That's the thing that I said in the title: these are all hollow gestures. They feel so forced because there was nothing to set them up like other relationships. So in the end it feels like you're just doing it to prove you're inclusive instead of being actually inclusive. It's like when the NFL passed the "Rooney Rule" forcing teams to interview at least one non-white person for coaching and front office jobs and teams would find some token non-white guy to interview before they hired the white guy they really wanted. That's the difference between giving lip service to inclusion and being actually inclusive.
Lip service (literally really) is throwing a gay kiss into the end of an episode. Real inclusion is to actually treat the gay character's relationship the way you treat straight character relationships and giving it equal development. Otherwise it feels like when someone outed as a racist says, "I have a black friend!" Then stages a photo op with said black friend so we can see that he or she is totally not racist. That's always cringe-worthy.
Just to make it clear, I don't want to not show gay people on TV or anything. I'm not one of those people who says to boycott a product just because they feature a gay couple in the ad. It's just if you're going to have someone come out as gay in a show or book series or whatever, you need to actually set it up instead of just half-assedly throwing it out there in Season 3 or movie 3 or after the whole fucking book series. That's all I'm saying.
2 comments:
I think as writers we recognize this as something that is not involved with the plot. Forcing something is never good writing. Anyway, there are some gay characters on Star Trek Discovery, and I really liked the story of those characters because they were gay from the start, and it was much more involved than BTW so and so is gay.
I've seen Young Justice but for some reason I don't remember this storyline about the gay character. I do remember Star Trek Beyond, though
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