Why The House of the Dragon Ending Left Some LGBTQ Fans Thrilled & Others FURIOUS
Added 2022-10-03 13:00:12 +0000 UTCSo lets talk a bit more about queer representation and Laenor Velaryon.
Comments
No, I'm angry about it too. It's frustrating that this is always the discourse.
Jessie Earl
2022-10-03 20:50:10 +0000 UTCOH I totally agree. I discussed as much in my essay on Our Flag Means Death, about how LGBTQ identities don't neatly map onto what we have now throughout history, but we still exist. But I didn't want to make a whole sidetrack in this video, but just state that we have always existed, as that's the only releveant piece of info for this discussion at hand. But yes, you're totally correct.
Jessie Earl
2022-10-03 20:49:54 +0000 UTCI'm already annoyed with the comments on YouTube, so I'm going to write this here. I haven't seen the show yet, but I am watching your reviews. Episode 5 was extremely depressing, and it was even more depressing after you pointed out how the camera distanced the audience from the death scene. This made me think the problem isn't so much whether or not the character dies or goes away. It's that the people making the show can't - or won't - empathize with a gay character and invest any emotion in them. I can usually tell when a writer likes a character and wants to explore their internal world, and I'm guessing that Laenor wasn't a character they were interested in exploring. He was just there, either because he's in the book, so they felt they had to include him, or because they thought showing how straight people in that society reacted to gay people would be interesting for the plot. But they weren't interested in HIM. And that's the problem that I see with so many queer characters. Yes, they get rid of them quickly, but I wouldn't mind that so much if the writers CARED. It's just so obvious that they don't. They don't do anything to make them interesting beyond their queerness and how that queerness affects the non-queer people on the show. I don't think anyone was grieving that Laenor left, like, that character was someone the writers spent time imagining and creating scenarios for, and now those possibilities are gone. I'm sure they feel that loss when other characters die. This makes me sad and angry. I am sad and angry that people are so dismissive of this problem. It's not the happy or sad ending that matters as much as the care put into the character. I'm already seeing people say, "Well, it's ok because at least he's happy." It's not ok. Even if they bring him back, it won't be ok unless they care about him. His purpose was to complicate Rhaenyra's story, and maybe he'll come back to complicate her story some more, but we'll never get a glimpse of HIS story. Sorry for the long rant. I'm angry about this. And I'm angry with the people who are like, "What do you people want? We put you in our shows and you're still complaining?" They aren't YOUR shows. They're OUR shows - or they should be - and it's not unreasonable to expect people involved in making shows to care about the characters they create. They care about the white men (and to some degree the white women.) They can care about everyone else, too.
Juls K
2022-10-03 15:19:34 +0000 UTCHey Jesse, I'm very glad that you're addressing this and I agree that we need more Laenor and queer characters in HoD and other properties. But, maybe this is parsing but I think it's important for us to not say "gay people existed in the Middle Ages" This is just historically inaccurate. There were certainly same-sex (or gender) attracted people throughout history. But those people did not understand themselves to be gay or homosexual. Nor did their societies. We can have same-sex attracted people and relationships but in a society like HoD, they would not be understood as "gay." I actually think it would be more interesting to explore how same-sex desire plays out in that context, which I think HoD did a little bit, but we shouldn't expect those relationships to look like contemporary gay relationships.
Christian
2022-10-03 14:02:01 +0000 UTC
