one big problem i have with the new heathers series is that its premise is centered around the assumption that there is any average high school in america in 2018 where the popular clique of “bullies” consists of a nonbinary person, a black lesbian, and a plus-sized girl. It heralds itself as being “subversive” by making people of marginalized identities its antagonists on the grounds that we now live in a society in which these groups are no longer oppressed, targeted, or have hate-based violence directed against them. Unfortunately, this is far from true. There are possibly small internet communities on places such as tumblr where lgbt people, people of color, and other marginalized groups have a bigger voice and hold more power than they do in the outside world, but even that is arguable, and homophobia, racism, transphobia, and fatphobia still 100% exist even within these small microcommunities.Â
And this DEFINITELY isn’t the case within american high schools. I’ve been out of high school for years now but i’d be willing to bet that if i walked into a random sample of average high schools across the nation, at least 90% of the popular cliques and “bullies” would be comprised of white, straight, cis, skinny girls. So to keep the sympathetic hero as a straight cis white girl (who is also now apparently blonde too for some reason on top of everything else?) but cast the villains with diverse races, sexualities, and gender identities does a service to no one and subverts nothing. Additionally, it misses so much of the original point of heathers which was a commentary on class, privilege, and the social order of white middle class teens in the 1980s and really only works if the heathers come from a high place of money, privilege, and status (which is one of the things that fuels JD’s, and partially veronica’s, bitterness). We don’t live in a society where black women, lesbians, nonbinary people, and fat people hold an inherent level of privilege over heterosexual cisgender white kids, therefore this part of the narrative is frankly nonsensical and useless to what drives the story in the original film.Â
(and please don’t try to argue with me over any of this with the fact that in the musical heather mcnamara turns out good in the end, or that JD is a villain too so that it doesn’t matter that he’s white. The fact is that within the majority of the narrative all 3 heathers are meant to be seen as antagonists and, additionally, even though he’s a villain JD is still a character that people will inevitably sexualize, romanticize, and woobify, and him being a white boy definitely doesn’t detract from that)
it’s plain as day that the creators of this show have a very poor understanding of generation z and are dangerously projecting the idea that we live in a post-racial, post-gender, post-sexuality society onto their misguided riverdale/glee fever dream. This show feels like if somebody took one of those old “what if tumblr was a high school” posts and used it to pitch a tv series. I know some people are inevitably going to celebrate this show for its diversity and representation when it premieres but i can’t believe we still have to go over this concept: representation doesn’t help anyone if it’s bad representation. If you’re only including nonbinary, lesbian, black, and plus-sized characters in your story as villains, then you’re just perpetuating dangerously harmful ideas that many people already still hold that people of these groups deserve to be mocked, attacked, or discriminated against.Â
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