Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-4877635-20130614170253/@comment-22525977-20131004020745

Levi.goodliff wrote:

Saying that there are far more things important than being underrepresented in the media means shit to me. The problem for me is just on a wide scale all the characters are white and straight. I just want them to make/write the characters as if anyone (colour/race/gender) could play them like they did with Jacklyn from the Beanstalk and incorporate core details that connect with the essense of the character. (i hope this makes sense).

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 Its just they make it so hard for them selfes to write a gay character when its actually not, just write them as people and customize the etenicy and sexuality afterwards. -.- shouldnt be that hard? The problem is, in our culture, the subconscious default is cis/straight/white/male, so if you write a character as completely neutral in every possible way, then most consumers are going to read that character as a cisgendered, straight, caucasian man. This phenomenon is also why genderbending Jack the Giant Killer is a surprise.

It's screwed up, yes, but that's how it is, so writers who want to subvert that have to make it clear that THIS character is not this subconcsious default (and even when they do, it doesn't always get picked up on by everyone; consider the backlash the Hunger Games movie got for casting Rue and Thresh as POC, even though they were described that way in the book).

So the way to do it, in my opinion, is not from a neutral template, but from the foundation of, for example, "person whose identity includes being gay and Latin@" and write them that way. GothicNarcissus  wrote: Well, I'm not a supporter or having to jam characters of other ethnicities than caucasian, or in this case LGBT, into things just because otherwise that's not politically correct. I see it as some form of discrimination in reverse. Beneficial rather than detrimental, but still discrimination, because it is still a different treatment based on that particular thing (making a character aptly gay, as opposed to having a character who happens to be straight).

Yes, I would love to see a gay character in the show, possibly a gay man (because let's face it, it's easier to put a lesbian woman in, 'cause even the most omophobic straight men secretly like them for a whole host of ancestral biological reasons), possibly not stereotypical. But not at all costs. Not if that means to just mention it for no particular reason. If they can take a fairytale, twist it so it would be fresh and interesting with two men, or if that would provide more depth to the character (for instance, as I mentioned some months ago, what if curse-womanizer Dr. Whale turned out to have been gay as Dr. Frankestein, with all the "oh god, now what" situation that might come out of that), then fine, but not just "this is him, he does that, oh, and by the way he's gay". Having a cast with diverse races and sexualities isn't reverse raceism/heterosexism, it's accurately representing the human race.

On Whale being forced into heterosexuality by the curse: Why would it be an "oh god, now what?" situation, though? Being gay does not being unable to enjoy sex with a person of the opposite gender (it's all about nerve endings and friction) anymore than being asexual automatically translates to virgin. I imagine it would be weird, but not a revulsion response unless Whale were outright repulsed to heterosexual sex (and I used repulsed here not as a synonym for disgusted, but as the term used to distinguish an asexual who is uninterested in sex from a repulsed asexual who actively doesn't want sex).

(Though, in terms of OUaT!Frankenstein, it would be super easy to read gay (and, uh, maybe incest?) subtext into his arc, because Elizabeth? Elizabeth who?)