#and that is by casting famous goodlooking het couples

[caffeinated-tater-art]

Hi kapatid, I'm Filipino too =) Raised in the US, but Ilocos represent!!! I really want to get another Filipino's take on Juliantina since our culture is very similar to Latin America. How do you think Filipinos would react if there was a same-sex relationship on prime television? I know there isn't much LGBT representation in the media and we have no choice but to look outside the country, so I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Oh boy— I can tell you that Ph TV tried back in 2015(?) with the telenovela The Rich Man’s Daughter( wc involves a story quite similar to juliantina with the social class difference dynamics) and one before that which was My Husbands Lover (this one I’m not too familiar with but its mlm) and both novelas were definitely a train wreck tbh. 

TRMD still has a place in my heart, but that story is a reflection of how shallow the PH media sees LGBT characters. Without sugar coating anything, that story had no buildup at all (im aware that the plot reasoning was the whole soulmate plot device thats why they just gravitate towards each other) but the whole novella spent most of its time hurting the couple more than it built their love story. And by hurting, I mean having a violent manipulative homophobic dad, one of the couple attempting suicide, one of the couple being a battered wife to a very violent ex husband, kidnapping, almost dying, manipulative male fiancee, you name it. So that whole experience watching all that week by week wasn’t a very pleasant one. On top of all that, it was personally irking to me that it was kind of Biphobic, given that the one bisexual character there was portrayed just as the cheating ex of the protagonist, and was always commented on sticking to one team etc. Also, the butch character who had a loving family with a wife and an adorable adorable daughter at the first act of the show was unjustly treated when the biological dad appeared out of nowhere for drama and took away their wife and daughter.

There is a lot more to this but the take away is that, the writers themselves are not responsible enough to make a healthy lgbt rep or lgbt centric storylines to help alleviate the wrong perception of lgbt people in the ph. That’s why the general idea of the mass audience regarding lgbt couples/characters are limited to comedic relief gay man or the macho butch. The worst part is that the gay man would somehow “find�� the right woman and fall for her, similarly to the butch lesbian being “corrected” by another man. 

Ph has a looong way to go, but sadly I dont see that changing anytime soon. Its because the media here is partly monopolized and the content they churn out are targeted to the older and middle/lower middle class and lower class people. Which consists of very conservative audience given that its largely a catholic population. The safe route of story line that they always choose is to have is the typical het plot with the current famous IT couple. Sadly, the series here is not about the story, rather its about the famous good looking het couple who would star in it.