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juushikaAbout two years ago I watched the first season of Teen Wolf, and then took an enforced break.* In the meantime, I had a fringe awareness of it via Tumblr, among which was gifs of gay couples kissing at parties and little mini essays about how awesome and progressive it was that this silly teen show had such diverse representation—and that confused me, because my memory of the show was a whole bunch of predictable overacted heteronormative high school relationships. But now I'm midway through season 3 and, behold! there's an explicitly gay supporting character, and a gay relationship, and lesbians in a cold open, and implied bisexuality, so that's neat. But this the Mass Effect-effect.
This is (Teen Wolf) gay characters as a fairly distant supporting role—treated with respect, but most definitely not part of the core cast because gay people aren't protagonists. This is queer-baiting (hey Stiles, do you like boys? confused pregnant pause resolved by a male/female kiss, yes, very funny). This is the expectation of heteronormative monogamy—when the core couple has a mutual but reluctant breakup, their attraction to other people is played against their lingering feelings for one another in exactly the way you'd expect: a tension to keep the show interesting, a problem to be solved.
This is (Mass Effect) taking one or two hesitant steps forward and being so self-satisfied that we're immediately content to slide backwards, like: you can have a homosexual relationship! if you play a woman, and if you romance this hyper-sexed and -idealized all-female alien race. No consideration of how problematic it is to let sexy alien ladies stand in for diverse representation, no male/male relationships until a token one in the third game in the series, no women on the box art golly gee, and yet the gaming community was prepared to give Mass Effect a hearty pat on the back for meeting a bare minimum standard of decency, and the franchise was willing to be content with that, making little effort to continue towards decency and constantly sliding backwards into the same problematic expectations it purported to fight against.
And look, making progress is hard. Any gay relationships are progress, and yes it is cool to see that in a silly teen show. But the open-mindedness is so much windowdressing when the core is a presumption of heteronormative monogamy. The solution to most romantic subplots in all media is "can't we all just get along": it's Scott and Allison going in to see Isaac in the hospital and discovering that the feelings messy romantic feelings between Scott/Allison and Allison/Issac (and whatever you want to label the feelings between Scott/Issac) can overlap in a constructive way—it was a lovely and surprisingly gentle moment, and it's gonna receive no resolution because there's no room for something like that, here. There's room for straight white main characters to have exclusive heterosexual relationships, and the fact that there's something more diverse at the fringes of their experience is progress but it shouldn't be, and it shouldn't be a green light to keep-on keeping-on with all the rest that is problematic. The bare minimums that this media meets is so painfully low, so low it shouldn't warrant celebration; if in our desperate we do celebrate it, that shouldn't mean that either consumers or creators are content.
* The night that I sat up with Kuzco until he passed, I was watching Teen Wolf so that I had a distraction rather than just blankly staring at him and waiting for him to die—but it made the show an unpleasant reminder of that night for some time after.
This is (Teen Wolf) gay characters as a fairly distant supporting role—treated with respect, but most definitely not part of the core cast because gay people aren't protagonists. This is queer-baiting (hey Stiles, do you like boys? confused pregnant pause resolved by a male/female kiss, yes, very funny). This is the expectation of heteronormative monogamy—when the core couple has a mutual but reluctant breakup, their attraction to other people is played against their lingering feelings for one another in exactly the way you'd expect: a tension to keep the show interesting, a problem to be solved.
This is (Mass Effect) taking one or two hesitant steps forward and being so self-satisfied that we're immediately content to slide backwards, like: you can have a homosexual relationship! if you play a woman, and if you romance this hyper-sexed and -idealized all-female alien race. No consideration of how problematic it is to let sexy alien ladies stand in for diverse representation, no male/male relationships until a token one in the third game in the series, no women on the box art golly gee, and yet the gaming community was prepared to give Mass Effect a hearty pat on the back for meeting a bare minimum standard of decency, and the franchise was willing to be content with that, making little effort to continue towards decency and constantly sliding backwards into the same problematic expectations it purported to fight against.
And look, making progress is hard. Any gay relationships are progress, and yes it is cool to see that in a silly teen show. But the open-mindedness is so much windowdressing when the core is a presumption of heteronormative monogamy. The solution to most romantic subplots in all media is "can't we all just get along": it's Scott and Allison going in to see Isaac in the hospital and discovering that the feelings messy romantic feelings between Scott/Allison and Allison/Issac (and whatever you want to label the feelings between Scott/Issac) can overlap in a constructive way—it was a lovely and surprisingly gentle moment, and it's gonna receive no resolution because there's no room for something like that, here. There's room for straight white main characters to have exclusive heterosexual relationships, and the fact that there's something more diverse at the fringes of their experience is progress but it shouldn't be, and it shouldn't be a green light to keep-on keeping-on with all the rest that is problematic. The bare minimums that this media meets is so painfully low, so low it shouldn't warrant celebration; if in our desperate we do celebrate it, that shouldn't mean that either consumers or creators are content.
* The night that I sat up with Kuzco until he passed, I was watching Teen Wolf so that I had a distraction rather than just blankly staring at him and waiting for him to die—but it made the show an unpleasant reminder of that night for some time after.
