#but I think as long as Flanagan and co don't pull a joss and say 'what I did in 1998 constitutes perfect progress' then

[novelconcepts]

I thought of something, based on an answer of yours I saw yesterday. I don't know if you're into videogames, but Last of Us 2 came out recently and it has a transgender character. A trans boy. I won't bore you with plot and setting, but this character goes through immense suffering which is directly tied to his trans identity. And a bit of a ruckus happenned. Discussions about tokenim and trans representation in media.. And I, myself, am not trans. So I could understand to an extent-(1/4)

(2/4)-but couldn't sympathize and, by extension, care too much. Now what I do identify with is being gay. I still struggle with my identity, but I know this about myself. And I've experienced watching a show just because it has queer characters, I've been queerbaited, I've cringed and eyerolled at rehashed hetero romances. Y'know, things all lesbians go through. Now the Haunting anthology series are of the horror genre. I didn't watch them expecting to be punched in the feels.

(3/4) I knew Bly was gonna be good when I started watching, but what they gave us... Nothing short of iconic. A milestone even! And where I'm going with this is, comparing Dani and Jamie to this trans character I understood the problem of the trans audience. What Dani and Jamie went through had nothing to do with their attraction towards one another! And they were never used and paraded around in media months before the show even came out. Sometimes people use this dumb argument that goes-

(4/4) "I don't see color/sexuality/religion." Of course you do. We all do. And we should! A pretense of homogeneity isn't the answer! But what they did with Dani and Jamie is exactly the way it should be done! I sent this again, because I suspect it didn't reach you the first time, I hope it did now!

I actually played TLOU2 in entirety this summer, and the Lev stuff was definitely on my radar. It’s always a concern in any piece of media, that someone who isn’t part of a particular community will include that community as a scrap or a token--or, worse, as a cautionary tale about that “kind of person”. I’m also not trans (technically, I guess; I dunno that I’m anything where gender is concerned, but that’s a conversation for another day), but the critiques of what the trans community feared going into a story that violent with a character they were going to be instinctively protective of were reasonable. And, yeah--I feel the same whenever queer characters of any kind turn up in darker genres, especially. 

Because, like, if a gay character turns up in a sitcom or a rom-com, they might be a joke. And that’s shitty. But if they turn up in a drama? A horror? A post-apoc zombie game? Then you run the risk of being a joke AND being shown tragedy and pain and told, “Hey--this is for you. This is your future. Say thank you.”

Bly, for me--a white gay person--does feel like a milestone. For how it painted queer love specifically, it does feel like it took into account love and humanity and not “well, Dani was always going to die because she’s gay.” It felt like “Dani’s going to die, because the thesis of the thing is that humans are made to die, and to tell this kind of story, this is just how it goes. But we can make sure she’s loved and happy while she’s here.” And while the creative team/actresses keep saying they just went in valuing human love and not thinking about the gay aspect as much, I find them doing that--coming at the story from a human center, instead of a label place--still allowed them to tell a story that really resonates with the queer experience. The coming out fears, the care of two women learning to trust one another, the found family aspect--that’s all very close to the heart of even modern queerness. They didn’t sacrifice the reality of the thing, they just didn’t focus so completely on the queerness that they turned the story into a plastic representation of what gay love is. It balanced. 

Still, it isn’t perfect. The other thing to consider with darker-tone stories is: is this happening to everyone? Is the violence just targeting the minority group, and everyone else is left safe and sound, or is everyone being damaged because that’s just the kind of story they’re telling? It’s a complicated conversation, and different people are going to have different answers. Bly is a sad story: Owen and Jamie are left without the respective loves of their lives, the kids are tormented by adults they trust, Dani suffers and ends up at the bottom of a lake. The genre comes for everyone, as it were, but I don’t know that we could say it does so equally. The Black community might not feel as kindly toward Bly, for example, since both Rebecca and Hannah wind up horrifically dead without getting to really enjoy happiness, as opposed to the white queer lead getting a lifetime of relative joy before meeting her end. There’s a lot to unpack, and those conversations are important. Like you said, a pretense of homogeny isn’t beneficial when it comes to forward motion through fiction. Or life. I do think starting from a place of humanity and moving outward is helpful for getting a story right, but I also think there’s more to it than just patting yourself on the back for getting one kind of story right. It’s an interesting conversation that’s important to keep having, to keep from seeing storytellers hit the point where they can say “we already did this, and now we’re done.” I would hope, seeing how Bly handled the love story, the next project the team takes on would just keep building on that foundation.