actually i'm not done talking about what pissed me off about s4e2 of ted lasso. spoilers below the cut. also sparing my followers the scroll etc.
roy's weird quasi homophobia. blink and you miss it maybe, sure because no one else seems to be talking about it? in an episode where they're like hey look, intra-team queer women dating and alice implied to have a female partner--i don't know. the tone of roy saying to beard during ted's press conference if he wanted to go watch his boyfriend--that came off as old-school mean-spiritedness to me. especially because it came before it was revealed that the running gag was "beard is now dating (coaching with) roy and wants to return to his ex" as clarified by ted and beard's scene in the crown & anchor.
and then when roy goes to deliver his biscuits to rebecca and she asks him "what is a feminist"--not only does he treat it like a joke ("oh i know this one") the joke answer he's about to respond with is at the expense of queer women ("it's when two lesbians--"). like. there was no way that wasn't going to be a homophobic (and sexist!!) joke. like yeah maybe if you'd done all this with early-s1!roy it wouldn't have been so jarring but goddamn. before now he'd been written as having some common to cis men blind spots about misogyny (getting mad when he and keeley weren't officially an item and she slept with jamie in s1, in s3 when he didn't react well to keeley's nudes/sex tape getting leaked, etc.) but that sort of explicit nonsense is new. (and yes dating a bi woman doesn't magically erase any homophobia he might have had but there just wasn't any evidence of it before! like in amsterdam when he tells jamie that keeley has a girlfriend, he's sad because she's moved on with someone else, not because it's a queer relationship.) it's just WEIRD.
and to reiterate this point about him making the terf wizard namedrop. like i know the show has made references before. i know the s1 dressing room had a second-team player with a name from the series. but that didn't continue. it felt like they realized "oh wait this is maybe not the best thing to include in our tv show any more" as the problem ramped up in severity. but in 2026, to include it when it's such a more talked-about thing, feels so pointed! especially, like i said in the other post, when the episode's b-plot is concerned about what feminism is and what it means to support women. yes, support all women! just not trans women. that's what i'm getting. "oh you're blowing this out of proportion" fuck you i'm trans, fuck you and look up the sorts of anti-trans laws the uk has implemented thanks to that horrid woman's moneyed influence.
it sucks! and i couldn't even enjoy how much i loved alice and boots! (autism win and Huge Weird win!!) or rebecca standing in the corner. or roy's sabotage of the visitor's dressing room. or any of the red string i could have added to my "here's how rjk can still happen" corkboard.
like sorry that i felt so alienated by a show that just last week made me feel like maybe i wasn't broken anymore after my crash-and-burnout that i had a little cry about it. whatever
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