#Gosh sorry I'm sure you weren't expecting an essay!

[deadsince1973]

OMG, thank you for asking! I’ve been hinting about this in my tags for a while now and nobody’s ever asked, so I’ve been really debating about whether I should post this or not! (Although, to be fair, it was also because I knew this was going to be long, and I felt too lazy to type it all up.)

I just want to start by saying I cannot emphasize enough that I don’t want to take away from anyone’s love for the Captain! If you find him positive representation and relatable, then I support your happiness in this!

But, that being said, I think Them There/Six Idiots’s representation of gay and trans characters is not very good. I could bring in examples from their other works (i.e. Yonderland and Bill), but I’ll try to limit myself to the Captain.

I’ve seen people say things like, “It’s so great to see a gay man where his sexuality isn’t the joke!” But, it is the joke. It’s the whole joke! Okay, to be fair, it’s only half the joke, because the other half is how militaristic he is. But when the joke is about him being attracted to someone, the whole joke is that he’s gay! Take for example when he first sees Mike. Humor exists in the subversion of expectations. Thomas says, “Let me pluck out my eyes, for I shall never see such beauty again,” as the camera shows Alison. Then the Captain says, “Yes.” There’s a pause, where the audience assumes he’s also talking about Alison. But then he adds, “He’d make a very fine soldier,” and we laugh because our heteronormative expectations have been subverted. The Captain is gay. That’s what’s funny! The Captain then clears his throat. We understand that he’s not out and proud. He’s not unashamed of his lust, the way Thomas and Kitty are. The facade of a straight man is maintained, allowing the show to continue to exploit the gap between the behavior expected of a straight man and the Captain’s behavior for laughs. If the joke goes beyond his being gay, it’s that he’s gay and closeted.

Now, you could argue that that wasn’t the joke, that the joke was that he was so invested in his military lifestyle that he conflated it with his sexuality. In other words, the joke was that he was attracted to soldiers, not all men. But that’s not the case at all, because no other case of him combining his fascination with war with attraction to anybody is ever shown. Additionally, because of the heteronormative bias we’re all immersed in every day (not to mention the very real behavior of military recruiters and real-life soldiers), we just more firmly expect a person with an unspecified sexuality to be straight than we do for an army captain to not look at the world and every person in it through a military lens. In other words, there’s more of a gap between our expectations of his sexuality and its subversion than there is between our expectations of appropriate behavior for an army captain and its subversion to exploit. Therefore, even though both his being attracted to a man and the reason why/the way he chooses to express that attraction are humorous, the bulk of our laugh comes from the realization of his sexuality. In order to exploit his expression of his lust in the form of military recruitment for laughs, the writers would have needed to remove the question of his sexuality from the joke altogether. To do this, they would have had to establish his sexuality explicitly and unambiguously before this scene. They did not do that.

You could then argue that that was the first joke, and it established his sexuality, and none of the jokes about his attraction afterwards exploited that expectation. But, as I said above, they still did not make his sexuality explicit. He pretends to be straight, and so we expect him to act straight. That’s as good as actually expecting him to be straight before the first joke for the purposes of laughs. Either way, we expect him to act straight, and so when he acts gay, he subverts our expectations and makes us laugh. Again, the whole joke is that he’s gay.

I’d like to turn now to the way his sexuality is treated in the serious parts, how it’s treated outside of the jokes. I do want to add the caveat here that I don’t find this show emotionally compelling at all, the way a lot of people do. So I am coming at it from that point of view.

After the first season, I said I would be more okay with them exploiting the Captain’s being closeted for laughs if they actually seriously addressed what it’s like to be a closeted gay man. For the record, I know Ben Willbond said in at least one interview that he didn’t want to “ge[t] too deep about it because it is just a comedy.” Personally, I don’t agree with that point of view. I believe that if you’re going to deal with a socially sensitive issue in a comedy, you should give the weight it deserves. I don’t believe everything in a comedy has to be for laughs. Perhaps if you find the Captain emotionally compelling, you would disagree with me that his experience with his sexuality needs to be treated earnestly (and you probably agree with me that not everything in a comedy has to be for laughs). I can respect that opinion, but I’m afraid I do not share it. I would have liked to have seen an explicit depiction of his experience and struggles with his sexuality.

Which brings me, of course, to Redding Weddy. Frankly, I think the Captain throughout the entire show is barely one step away from queerbaiting. Yes, at least there’s never any hint of his actually being heterosexual. That’s a slight improvement from most queerbaiting. But they still never make his sexuality explicit. To my knowledge, none of Them There have even said the words “gay” or “homosexual” in an interview in relation to the Captain. It’s an unspoken understanding between the show and the audience, and that leaves the character open to interpretation. There are allegedly fans out there who still do not believe the Captain is gay. And to my mind, Redding Weddy just gives those fans ammunition.

Redding Weddy is ambiguous. The Captain is clearly as horny as a goat for his lieutenant. But at the same time, even then, even in a flashback, even when the Captain is alone with the audience, we get no explicit confirmation of his sexuality. The Captain’s explanation of Operation William is unclear. It could be taken at face value. In that case, the Captain never wrote a letter to Havers, he really did just bury blueprints with the mine, and all the hinting that he was in love with Havers was just misdirection. At best, we can believe that both were true: that the Captain was in love with Havers, and the misdirection was in the story’s focus on his feelings to distract the audience from the fact that he was really buying secret blueprints. At worst, the whole thing was a misdirection, and he was never in love with Havers at all. I don’t believe that, but it is a perfectly reasonable interpretation. It could also be that the Captain was lying about the blueprints. In that case, he really did write a love letter to Havers and hide it with the mine, only concocting the story about the blueprints and the whole operation being called “Operation William” at the last minute when he needed to explain the mine to Alison. That makes less sense to me, because why would he need to mention the paper and the name William at all, now that it had been blown up? However, you could still explain that away by him being afraid that the letter survived and trying to pre-empt any questions, should the letter ever be found. That’s a bit too much of a stretch in my opinion, but still not a totally unreasonable explanation. I think it’s significant that none of the other ghosts weighed in on the story, even though at least one or two of them must have seen or heard something. I think the story was kept deliberately ambiguous in order to keep the Captain’s very obvious sexuality as vague as was still possible. I don’t like that.

What I would have liked to have seen, more than anything else in regards to the Captain, is for them to have treated his sexuality the same way they treated Kitty’s race: as completely inconsequential. I’m not good enough with history to know exactly when Kitty lived and died, but she’s supposed to be a noble, or at least rich, Georgian woman, right? Google tells me that slavery was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833, under the reign of William IV (who, as I know we all remember from The Monarchs Song, came after George IV). Would a black woman have been granted dignity and respect in the heart of an empire built by the labor of people enslaved with no justification other than the color of their skin? If I’m wrong, please correct me, but I don’t expect so.

I do understand the need for both types of stories. I understand that there’s value in stories about a person of color, or a woman, or a member of any other minority or disadvantaged group fighting for equality and gaining ground. It’s good to have stories that explicitly support equality. But it is my opinion that there’s also value in simply presenting that equality, as unrealistic as it might now seem. It normalizes that equality, and it lets people who identify with one of the disadvantaged groups feel included. That’s why I love seeing a black woman being a Georgian noblewoman, because why shouldn't black people be able to dream of belonging to any period of British history that they want to? None of us can time travel, so it’s no more unrealistic for a black person to dream that than a white person. And that’s why I would have liked to have seen the same thing with the Captain. No, of course homosexuality was not accepted in the 40′s. But why shouldn’t we be able to pretend that it was? Why can’t we just see a gay man being treated completely equally to everyone else, irrespective of his sexuality? Why can’t we let gay men and maybe even others who identify as anything other than cis and straight dream of being able to be themselves in any historical era that they want to? That’s why I would very much have preferred if the Captain was just out, that they used a word like “gay” or “homosexual” on the show in reference to him, and if the whole joke of his character was just his military ways. Possibly mixed with how horny he is, just like Thomas or Kitty. But, in that case, as with Kitty and Thomas, the joke would not have been that he was gay, it would have just been that he wanted carnal satisfaction when he had no physical form. That would have been much better representation in my opinion.

This has all be in answer to the question above, posed on my post about how the Captain dancing with a gay couple at the end of season 2 was magical. I stand by that. I want the Captain to be out and happy, and him indulging himself and being comfortable with his sexuality makes me happy. But the fact that his sexual orientation is so often the butt of jokes, that they never address his struggles about getting comfortable with himself, and that they never dignify him by saying his sexuality out loud makes me feel frustrated and disappointed.

[icarusfallsforwalls]

tbh... people would rather discuss his name than have to have more painful discussions about the role they and their faves have played in the racism he faced, lbr. a LOT of 1d fans have done racist things over the years. some of them blatantly openly racist (the ones holding terrorist signs, throwing things at him, etc) but a lot more have been passively racist (pushing ugly narratives, having double standards, believing unsourced tabloid nonsense about him that they'd instantly question about the others, the whole "he's so mysterious~ and brooding~" shit, etc).

we've ALL done it at some point, as much as it hurts to admit. i'm a woc and zayn has always been my #1, but even i'm guilty of holding him to different standards than the whites. it's a societal thing. we've all been raised in a racist world and we've all internalised certain messages, even those of us who are literally asian sjfhsjf.

it's like women claiming they shave their legs because they "want to". we all know that's nonsense and we do it because if we go outside hairy we'll be ridiculed and considered lazy and disgusting, but none of us like to admit we've crumbled to societal misogyny. "i just like having smooth legs!" we say, even thought we are all aware that when we're home alone and won't be seen, we never shave or do our makeup or anything. racism works the same - it infiltrates every aspect of life and all our interactions and none of us have escaped its web of deceit.

i mean, hell, how many of us have gone "omg i'd love a 1d reunion" or "i wish zouis would talk again" or whatever? i would NEVER talk to any of my white ex-colleagues who had stayed silent while i was being racially abused en masse, and yet, despite that fact, i still expect zayn to put himself through it just because i like louis. even if the individual 1d boys weren't the issue (zayn has the bus1 tattoo for a reason - clearly louis was his friend and not just a colleague), having to put himself back into 1d territory would undoubtedly stir up a lot of traumatic memories of things and people who WERE racist.

and we all know that! we're not stupid! we are 100% aware of the trauma he faced in that band, both from the fandom and the management and the media. and yet we still expect him to package it all up into a neat little box, tie a bow around it, and hand it to us like a gift. even those of us who are poc, who have similar trauma, who KNOW who awful that would be to go through. it's so insidious! we're all guilty!

and i think a lot of fans are stuck in a very childish mindset where you are either a good person or you are a big scary racist. (to be cringey and quote sirius black: "the world isn't divided into good people and death eaters, harry"). but that isn't how it works. no one is perfect and pure. no one has escaped the societal pressure of racism. it isn't a moral failing to put your hands up and go "damn, i'm part of the problem, i'll try and do better in future". like, that's literally all it would take! no one is expecting white fans to start whipping themselves in repentance!!! but a lot of these fans are struggling with that, clearly lol. they'd rather hyperfocus on one little line of cathartic and pretend it's a big deal, cus it's easier to talk about "zayn vs zain" or whatever than it is for them to analyse their own behaviour. but, like, their refusal to discuss the part they've played in the fandom's racism is literally just reinforcing the issue!! this is what zayn meant when he was said nobody is listening!

sfjsfhs sorry i've written you such an huge essay lmaooo. might set it to a cool beat and drop it on soundcloud, @zayn hit me up boy!!! sjfhsfjs

Oh my gosh, this was such a great read. Thank you for sending this to me! And quoting Sirius Black! And your joke at the end; this is iconic. You also touch on some very real and important points.

I have always felt so deeply for and sympathized with these issues, but I could never truly understand because while I am white and hispanic, I am white-passing and have white privilege. I hate evil and discrimination and racism, but I'm also sure I have at times contributed to it, even unintentionally. As you said, it is deeply engrained into our society, our entertainment, our jobs, our conversations, our jokes, our lives, our thoughts, our homes. It is in fandom too and I've always noticed a different tone (mainly when I'm on twitter) when people speak about Zayn. They cut him no slack. They question his motives. He is always judged so harshly. His music and lyrics are often ignored. And the Zouis breakup is usually always placed on his shoulders, even though we don't know the actual truth of what happened between the two. I've been thinking about this the last couple of days and even more so after listening to Cathartic. Zayn Malik is a grown ass man. A POC who was mistreated and discriminated against while in One Direction and still. He knows his trauma and is allowed to do what is best for him (Calamity). I wish Louis and Zayn would publicly be friends again, that is no secret, but it's not necessarily fair of me to put that on their shoulders because it has more to do with me than what is best for them. I still love and always will love Zouis, but it's in the past and that's how I'll celebrate it from now on because I do think they cared for each other very much.

@anon thank you so much for sharing this perspective. It’s always welcome and appreciated.