#it in your fucking art then. This entire rant is basically jus that since the writers never really explored this besides two fucking hints

[cowchickenbeefpork]

so. A year or two back I remember seeing a post talking about how mayor Oswald was based off Donald trump when he was being written and since I don’t want to rely on hearsay I looked it up and yup it’s real. Look here

I have…multiple problems with this when it comes to this source of inspiration for Oswald. I have around four or five, but the last one or two are long enough to be its own paragraph so let’s start with the first three. The first three are honestly just the first point if I’m being honest lol.

First off, Oswald is a Gay, gender non conforming man who used to be poor. All of these things make him have a different feel to him demonizing the marginalized than someone like trump, famous womanizer and said “small loan of a million dollars”, doing it. It doesn’t feel the same at all, you’re going to have to put more emphasis on the similarities between them besides that demonization and make ____ great again shit to make it land. You would need to and they just don’t ever do that in the show.

also Gotham the reason why what trump did with his generalization and demonization of minorities is bad is because people in those communities are fucking evil to their cores! That’s literally all we see of Hugo strange’s arkham experiments, so by trying to draw this connection to the demonization of them and actual minorities, you’re going to have to write them in a more complex manner, which Gotham doesn’t. Overall this writing choice of inspiration desperately needed this arc to be longer, to have Oswald’s demonization of the outcasts to have serious repercussions and consequences. But it doesn’t, it never does, the show doesn’t even bother to humanize the people they’re using as a vague allegory for what happens in real life. It’s so fucking stupid, this would need a great deal of moral ambiguity but no, the most the Arkham experiments get is at most one scene humanizing them as a whole to my memory of the show.

I’m not saying this as I wish Gotham made Oswald one to one with Donald trump, I’m not and don’t take this post as that. What I’m saying is if you want to make commentary on bigotry, you’re going to have to humanize the outsider group in question, which Gotham doesn’t do because of how much buildup that would take. Oswald doesn’t hold actual disgust for minorities when it comes to his bigotry (though he probably holds some for the poor. Don’t fucking tomato me). His brand of bigotry is more opportunistic to me, seeing the fact people are hating the out group and catering to that in order to get success.

We could’ve genuinely gotten to see a gender non conforming gay man who used to be poor use the same tactics hurled against him throughout his life against a new marginalized group and all the baggage that comes with that. But since the Gotham writers commit to nothing, they didn’t do that since it would require too much work to explore that. It just sucks, it would’ve been so cool to see something that happens in real life so often politically be in this show but it never was since the writers didn’t know how to convey that. It would’ve been fantastic and a great display on how his greed and need for praise hurts other people, but we never got to truly see that, did we?