I’m genuinely impressed with the stories the Druck team has chosen to tell in this new generation.
I remember how touched people were in s3, because they had never seen a sex scene involving a gay man and a pre-op trans man wearing a binder on a mainstream show before. Not in Germany, and not in any other countries.
It kinda seems like the team took note of this representational first, and have sought to portray underrepresented experiences, chosen not for their flashiness and impacting visuals, but for their potential when it comes to helping people, normalize experiences, break down taboos and answer questions.
For s5, they portrayed a dissociative disorder. From my cursory google search, all I’ve found when it comes to previous examples are portrayals of dissociative identity disorders. That is, characters with multiple personalities, such as Jekyll & Hyde, Two-Face, Gollum, Niki Sanders or Steve Urkel. It seems that Nora is a TV first when it comes to portraying a dissociative disorder involving physical feelings such as temperature, or emotions. They also normalized therapy, with both Nora, Kiki and Josh having gone to therapy at different points in their lives.
For s6, they portrayed a character with an invisible disability without telling us that’s what the season was about. Fatou’s portrayal hasn’t been defined by her disability. She has rather been compared to an axolotl and paralleled with a tortoise, as well as defined by her talent for music and affinity for animals. We have come to understand how her specific disability impacts all aspects of her life, from work to school to even her difficulties with telling time and find her way around the city.
What’s more, I too googled characters with dyscalculia and was only able to find only one previous depiction of such (dyslexia being much more common), which was criticized because it depicted dyscalculia as a jumble of numbers (much like dyslexia is often portrayed and defined as people seeing letters backwards, etc). Instead of going for an easy visual way to portray dyscalculia, Druck went for the less flashy approach of just showing how ubiquitous numbers and spatial awareness are in our regular lives. In turn, people came to understand why dyscalculia is considered a disability without being told explicitly why. Fatou needs assistance because our daily lives require constant use of numbers.
Fatou is one of the first ever characters with dyscalculia on a mainstream show, and she isn’t a white straight boy, but a black lesbian. And a little tax-funded show in Germany did that!
The fact that the Druck team noticed what questions German teens were asking themselves, found the answers for them and delivered them in story format is super appreciated. That they chose these stories not because of their flashiness or shock value or misery pxrn potential, because in fact viewers have noted how low-key (even boring) both seasons are, but because these were experiences that had yet to be normalized and represented on screen. And the fact that they cast minority actors for both main and secondary roles, even roles as small as Nora’s doctor. That pretty much every white actor they’ve cast is white for a reason (the camping owner, the Physics teacher, Karin, Mailin, Sporty Spice, even Nora when she texted Mailin about racism and allyship), when in most shows, it’s the other way around, most of the cast is white and minority actors are cast because their being a minority is central to their character.
I wish the Druck team a lot of success and I hope they get renewed for all the seasons they’ve planned for this gen. I can’t wait to see what they still have in store.
baratheonpilled
stormborns
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
kaledo-art
gummygunk
origamiaround
