XO, Kitty and the start of the queer character evolution.
(Spoilers for XO Kitty Below!)
I’m always one for teen dramas. It’s a guilty pleasure that I take much delight in. Classic rom-coms like 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless have always been my favourites. But to me, they always felt too straight. Too much heteronormative things and none of the queer rep I always wanted, even in more modern films and TV Shows in the genre.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has always been one of my favourtie movies, so, when I found out about the spin off series XO, Kitty, I was ecstatic. Kitty had always been a character I resonated with and I loved all of Jenny Han’s other work.
Going into it, I expected the classic two boys fighting over one girl love triangle, a gay best friend and the girl best friend that I always seem to ship the main character with. I had predicted most of the story from the start. Until.
XO, Kitty is far from the ‘girl meets boy’ I was familiar with. It’s a queer love story and a coming out story and a self-discovery story. Definitely not the black and white romance i thought it would follow.
We have Q, the GBF, who is far from the feminine male sterotype you see in teen TV. He doesn’t give Kitty fashion advice and makeovers (which isn’t a bad thing btw), but a jock, the atheltic scholarship kid, who sure, does know a good dress when he sees one, but takes on a character that’s still such a worthy queer person without having to fall into the feminine sterotype.
Then we have Yuri, the Korean ‘it’ girl, also the girl best friend. She’s not the bimbo pick me girl you think she might me. She’s complex and interesting and she’s gay. Her storyline is something you don’t see often, and they really delve into the struggles of what it’s like being queer in a place and family where you’re not allowed to. Her journey is beautiful and powerful and reflects the coming out struggle in such an honest way, without making her story as a queer person just about coming out. She says the line ‘I have to live a fake life just so you’ll keep loving me’, when coming out to her mum and that encompassed so much of my current queer experience, especially as a person of colour. I think that it was for me, a sort of ‘Hey! we’re in the same boat’ thing and really made me feel so much more seen. She’s a well developed queer character that isn’t reduced to a ‘placed there just for representation’ character.
And we have Kitty herself. The main character. I honestly did not expect Netflix and the producers to go in this direction, but Kitty is queer. At first, I didn’t know if they were just sorta doing it for the sake of it. It didn’t feel like a deliberate decision. Maybe more of a thought that crosses her mind during the show. But Kitty has a crush on Yuri, and the way they address it is so different. They don’t exactly show that coming out to yourself thought process (which I kind of wish they did), rather, Kitty likes Yuri and she just accepts that, which I think is cool. I like now we don’t always need this big revelation moments (although, they’re still cool), but I think it shows the progression of how we treat queer characters as not spectacles for the audience, but just, people. Kitty’s crush on Yuri also felt very resemblant to my own crush on my friend which was probably why I related to her so much but just in general, it felt so natural to just have a queer main character in a non-queer focused show. Like, this wasn’t Hearstopper. No one expected it to be, yet, here we are, and I’m so happy about that.
This evolution into organically created queer characters is something we defnintely need more of and I’m so glad that Netflix is taking the step to do so. ALTHOUGH I REALLY HOPE THIS IS NOT BECAUSE THEY’RE TRYING TO GET REDEMPTION FOR CANCELLING ALL THE OTHER SAPPHIC SHOWS.
I also feel like though, that Jenny Han is just like a great person because whenever it’s her books being adapted, there’s always this like ‘organic queerness’. Like, in The Summer I Turned Pretty, there’s this guy Jeremiah, who in her book is presented as this straight guy, but in the show he just like kisses some guy and it was a dileberate from of causal representation (if that’s even a thing). Like kissing that guy didn’t add to the plot, but it wasn’t queerbaiting either because (well for me personally) I felt like the directors were like ‘This is Jeremiah. He’s queer, and he’s a main love interest’ and being queer didn’t like shatter the earth around him, it was just a part of him, as it is for all queer people.
But XO, Kitty itself aside from Kitty and Yuri is so good (maybe because I’m a sucker for these things), but everything about it just makes me squeal. I feel like teen TV is taking a turn in terms of creating realistic characters. And while we still have a long way to go (GENDER DIVERSE AND CULTURALLY DIVERSE PEOPLE!!!! CMON NETFLIX), XO, Kitty feels like a really big win for queer (and especially QPOC) people.
