my exhaustion with big-budget queerness
Or, “Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places — Disney is Shit at Queer Characters”.
This article contains minor sexuality-based spoilers for Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. I will not spoil the plot for either of those films.
After much trepidation, I saw Avengers: Endgame a few months back. I’ve been a Marvel fan for a few years now. Yes, I know that means I lose some geek cred because I’ve not scoured the earth for rare comics or gotten a tattoo of Tony Stark’s birthday or whatever, but on a whole, I enjoy the MCU. Generally, it’s a pretty good time, and I think Endgame was a fairly solid movie let down a bit in its third act.
But I digress.
There have been some murmurings recently on various sides of the internet about Marvel introducing a queer character in Endgame. The character Valkyrie, from Thor: Ragnarok, was going to be shown as explicitly queer within that film, however Marvel execs cut that scene before the movie aired. The Eternals, an upcoming Marvel product, is rumoured to have a gay lead character.
However, there was a fair amount of ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’ around the potential of having a queer character in Endgame, and certain parts of the internet were quite excited about it. I’m not stranger to shipping, personally, and I’ve written my fair share of fanfiction. I’m not ashamed of that, and I will never be ashamed of that.
But my desire for a queer character didn’t stem from selfish means.
It’s nice to see oneself on screen. I’m a queer, unwell woman, and I don’t see myself on screen very often. It’s cool to look at a piece of media and go ‘hey, this person looks like me, I feel seen’ and that just doesn’t happen, except in pieces of media that tend to get horribly maligned by dude critics.
It’s also nice to see queer people who have an important role to play in a film, who end up happy, who don’t die or get AIDS or are abused or depressed, who serve the story for more than just “progressiveness points”, whose existence feels real.
However, queer characters don’t happen in Disney films, really. Or, of late.
I’m writing this article after not seeing Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. I might end up seeing it in a few days, if I can spare three hours of my life, but I also might not. The Last Jedi wasn’t the best film I’ve ever seen, but it certainly wasn’t the worst, so perhaps I just have franchise fatigue.
Regardless. I’ve not seen The Rise of Skywalker. All things I’m remarking on come from word of mouth, many reviews, and comments from friends.
After days of news articles about “Star Wars’ first queer character” — you know what we got? Two extras smooching in the back of a celebration scene. A moment so short that it took ages to get a shot of it because it was only on screen for a handful of frames.
It is. Weak. I didn’t expect Finn/Poe to become canon, despite the fact that both actors were lobbying for it, but it would have just been nice to get something that was more than… this.
Avengers: Endgame was the final portion of over twenty movies and ten years worth of filmic content.
It was also the introduction of the MCU’s first ‘queer’ character.
In the sense that said character was one of the directors of the film playing a bit-part role wherein the character had one line about losing his husband during the events of the film.
Now, I’m not knocking this as a character. Honestly, if the character was developed enough, that’d be a legitimate enough motivation for a revenge arc or something.
But for a role lauded by media as the ‘MCU’s FIRST QUEER CHARACTER’?
It’s weak.
Marvel can do better. Disney can do better.
God, just give me queer narratives.
Because, there’s never any — are there? They’re never going to go viral, make it to the New York Times’ best seller list, they’re never going to be thrown in as references in Comedy Central specials.
They’re always indie, they’re always smaller, they always end up as a one-week run at your local theatre, and they never make it to the big time.
Or, they’re controversial. Portraying age gaps that straight Hollywood has no problem with, made by directors who see lesbians through a male eye, or who make everyone die at the end.
God, I just want queer narratives. Ones that don’t end in tragedy or death and destruction and sadness. Where characters cry over the closing credits, as Oscar voters viciously masturbate into their voting pads — because the film’s never going to win an Oscar but it might just get nominated.
I want queer narratives. I want two engineers in a spaceship to fall in love, I want a rom-com with two women, I want characters to act on the homoerotic tension that’s already there — I. Want. More.
Because love stories, by and large, are shit. They’re wish fulfillment, 2 and a half star fantasties for the romantic in all of us.
But queer ones can be shit too.
They don’t even have to be good. They just need to exist.
We shouldn’t need to plead to be seen.
