The way the media has been treating Ryan Reynolds and Josh Brolin’s dynamic during the Deadpool 2 promotion tour is giving me an insight into how all these homophobic fanboys can look past how blatantly queer the film is:
They think it’s all a fucking joke.
Josh Brolin has said repeatedly that he’s had a crush on Ryan Reynolds for a long time. That he admires him, that he finds him attractive, that his feelings for Ryan are complicated and unrequited but real.
And yet all I’m seeing are articles and youtube compilations about Josh’s “hilarious” “man crush” and how “funny” it is every time Josh talks about Ryan or they interact.
And I would suspect it was intentionally meant to be part joking and part queerbaiting for the purpose of fanning the movie’s hype except that:
Josh is out there correcting people who call it a bromance - saying “It’s a real romance”.
He’s having to tell people that “It’s not a joke”.
He’s calling interviewers out for laughing.
He’s saying that the only reason he feels weird admitting it is because people are treating his crush as funny.
And this audience attitude is the same one that allows Deadpool to come onto Colossus with the exact same context and tone he came onto Vanessa in the first film, and still lets straight fuckboys think it’s a joke.
It’s why Cable and Deadpool can explicitly flirt, and even have Cable do something as hugely self-sacrificing and romantic for the other man as he does, but there will still be people hypothesising that their strong connection is because Cable’s wife is Deadpool’s daughter or something.
At first I was annoyed that the film was too chicken to end with the two characters getting together, even though (without spoiling it for you) it wouldn’t have felt quite right for the plot so soon.
But now I’m suspecting that even if we’d had a passionate, candle-lit sex scene between Cable and Deadpool, these douchebags would still think it was some hilarious joke.
The franchise can capitalise on that homophobia to get more queerness into the movies, and to be honest it probably already has.
But I’m doubtful that they can do anything that’ll get through the thick skulls of these fuckboy-fanboys.
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