At the very end of class today, I heard someone mention that if Doctor Horrible had three male characters (a gay love triangle) instead of two males and a female, some of the feminist issues wouldn't really come up, or something along those lines. Problem solved. I was mildly offended, actually. So that's your panacea? Because gay people don't have to worry about love triangles or damaging tropes, they can just have a threesome and get over it. I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect, as that obviously wasn't the intent of the comment, and I'm not even sure if I'm getting the original point right, but I figured I could just take the idea and run with it.
So, what if Doctor Horrible was about three gay dudes? Well, that would simply cause a whole other host of problems. Not only are you excluding women completely, but now you're creating three offensive gay characters instead of one offensive female character. Apart from feeding into the gay villain stereotype with the Doc, Hammer would probably be a macho closeted homophobe, and while the male Penny would definitely be something new (but just as boring), his death would be taken pretty badly, not only because of the relative scarcity of gay characters, but also due to their unfortunate tendency to die. And that's just for starters.
3 comments:
You would be able to thwart the feminist criticism but you would be opening the door to queer analysis! Captain Hammer and (male) Penny engage in homosexual intimacy and then (male) Penny gets an elongated object penetrated into his gut and dies. This would spark an argument on the affects of living a homosexual life and that Joss Whedon is against gays by killing them off, turning them evil, or sending them to the psychiatrist!
yeah, this is one of those ideas, that while closing off one thing sparks a whole OTHER issue.
It's kind of like some people have been saying Adam, I think you said this before too, that if it isn't one thing, it will be another.
Though I do think making the characters all male might stifle the feminist arguments, it would be whole new world, with probably complete opposite issues if they tried to make the males gay.
Too bad that that people would probably not be ready for that, because in a perfect world (without sexual orientation discrimination) making them all men, it would seem less "bad" that one of them was underdeveloped, as long as the other two were.
To complicate all of this a bit more, please remember that feminism isn't just about women. Feminists (at least lots of us) care about all kind of gender/sexual inequity and unbalanced power. If Penny were the (relatively) passive, undeveloped object in ANY love triangle, feminists would notice. (And they'd be right to do so!)
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