dear universe

[kindkit]

Please send me a show in which everyone is lesbian, gay, or bi. Not a show like Queer As Folk or The L Word that's specifically about a queer community, but an ordinary show that's about space adventures or pirates or demon fighters or cops or lawyers or boring white suburban middle-class couples. Just, all of them are LGB (some of them could be T, too, because that would be awesome, but they're also L, or G, or B). No straight people. Even the incidental characters with just one or two lines have to be wearing a Pride button or something.

A show like that might, just possibly, begin to make up for all the shows (even now) without any queer characters, or the ones where the queer characters are speedily killed off, or the ones that queerbait and then say "Nope, these characters are straight," or the ones that have an unspoken quota system for queer characters so there can only be so many.

I eagerly await your response in this matter.

Sincerely,

Me

Comments

[rydra_wong]

*bounces and claps hands at chance to babble*

too many voyeuristic and vaguely exploitive shots of women's half-naked bodies?

IIRC, you're through the worst of that already; it's dire in the first few eps then drastically improves (there's also a modest uptick in male nudity; bless certain cast members for being willing to get their dicks out for the sake of equity).

Excessive plot twists: the show has twisty plots (and a fair few betrayals) throughout, but it's a lot easier to follow and care about, when, you know, you've had a chance to know who the characters are and give a shit about them.

(I was saying elsewhere that with hindsight, I think you can make a case that the scene where Max asks Eleanor to leave with her and she refuses may be the single most important scene in the entire show, because of the way it resounds and has emotional consequences for those two all the way through to the end of S4, but also because of how it introduces thematic stuff that'll be at the core of the show.)

And the general grim-and-gritty -- it is a gritty universe throughout, with a high level of violence. But it very much isn't the grimdark dark-n-edgy "everything is awful and everyone betrays everyone and women just get raped a lot because REALISM" that you might assume from S1.

If you can make it to 2.01, you're definitely good (the show gets instantly markedly better then, and also has an immediate increase in canon queerness). But the last few eps of S1 (6-8) aren't too bad and have some good things in them (and a couple of very important things).

What are your feelings on spoilers? I got through S1 by dint of being heavily spoiled; I would very much like to offer some mild/generalized spoilers that I think help a lot, e.g. knowing very roughly about the nature of Max's arc and how the show treats her for the rest of its duration, because it's not at all what you might (reasonably) assume from the early eps, and it's wonderful.

Comment threads in my DW have covered "When The Show Stops Being Rape-y" and "Possibilities For Getting Through Season 1".

And I'm reccing selenak's Black Sails: Why Everyone Should Watch It! (written after S2 and before S3) as useful for people who want some targeted spoilage (including the Big Backstory Reveal from mid-S2, which makes some of S1 much more enjoyable when you know it), to give you some pointers about what the show's got going for it while leaving you completely unspoiled for later seasons.

(Note: selenak refers to all the queer characters as bisexual; I think some are confirmed by later canon to be strongly/exclusively monosexual in their preferences, while others are definitely bi. There's also fannish Discourse over whether certain characters should be called lesbian/gay or bisexual, and in general I think "queer" is especially appropriate given that none of them have access to 20th-century terminology to describe their identities.

However, I just wanted to note that this is extremely NOT the thing where the show gets to have the titillating f/f scenes as long as it's made clear that the women are still sexually available to men. ETA: hopefully obviously, I am not intending to imply that bisexual women are "sexually available to men", but that this is a way shows sometimes seem to like to use/portray characters.)