we’re going to talk about “dont worry, honey. most guys think what you was thinking, first time they see me.” today and i’m not excited about it but i really don’t want my stance on the really ugly undertones in fantastic beasts to be spread out across more than one post. it’s all happening here.
we’re just going to call this issue a.
while i love the fact that queenie is introduced to the audience in a setting that’s comfortable for her, it’s so riddled with the male-gaze that it’s a little sick. i love that she’s happy in her own skin, wandering around her apartment in her cute slip and not really caring when two strange men show up. i think it’s fun.
what’s not fun is the way that joanne uses this as the first meeting for the back-burner couple that can give the audience a dose of old-fashioned romance while newtina slow-burns. it’s uncomfortable, both what jacob thinks about queenie and how queenie responds.
because no human woman would ever be okay with guys creeping on them. i don’t care how “used to it” she is, do you know how depressing that sounds? her wording is also very specific.
don’t worry. most guys. this line dismisses any real, serious negative implications her powers have. this line allows jacob to be accountability-free for his thoughts because most guys do it. not because she likes it, not because she finds it cute.
i understand that we aren’t in control of our thoughts, honestly. i understand he’s not expecting her to actually hear them. but he never apologizes, only is allowed to feel ashamed for a second before the focus turns elsewhere. i wouldn’t care if the script didn’t acknowledge that there was a problem only to do absolutely nothing with it.
it’s disrespectful to queenie, a character who is repeatedly one put down by herself and others. i don’t know why it would be so unrealistic to have a man meet a pretty woman and think something that would not mortify him but evidently that’s too much to ask.
this is a smaller issue i suppose but it deals with the unfortunate implications of a certain deleted scene.
on the left is jacob’s ex-fiancée, cut from the movie. on the right is queenie. the implications that this deleted scene gives to the entire function of jacqueenie is staggering and calls into question a lot of his behaviour.
i honestly wish they’d left this in. it would’ve thrown a woman under the bus unnecessarily but it would’ve also given jacob and queenie something approaching an arc.
because it makes sense with this why he falls for her so fast. queenie bears a marked physical similarity to a woman he’s just been broken up with. it would’ve been fascinating to see him be initially attracted to queenie because of this, only to realize that there’s not much similarity at all.
this would give him a chance to learn and grow, to find out more about the woman he’ll end up married to by the next film. more focus would be put on what queenie says and does that makes her different. that would require more time spent on these characters however which is again too much to ask for.
so if the intention was never to really develop jacob and queenie, i understand why this scene was cut. if she looks just like his fiancée with no real effort to distinguish one from the other, it absolutely reads like jacob just replacing one blonde woman with a physically similar duplicate.
i take it back, i’m glad this was cut.