i think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. i know i should have a very specific political response to them. and yet, while i recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—i cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. i love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. they’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. after all, they live in a world that hates them. they’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. they’ve survived. […]
there is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen, their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. it tells a single story, to paraphrase chimamanda ngozi adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. it is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter.
as it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. they become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context.
and that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. they don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility. they can be what they are. we deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.
that is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. they deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.”
— carmen maria machado, in the dream house
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
prguitarman
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
