okay this has been reiterated a lot today
but anyways here are my two redundant cents i guess:
i still cannot believe that the ground-breaking, never-done-before, trope subverting thing the execs & the writers prided themselves preemptively for – was in fact so tone-deaf and old and just trope abiding it’s just so ridiculous
and like no one on the writing staff ever heard of intersectionality i guess??? yea one could try and boil quentin’s character down to the ‘white male protagonist’ only, but he’s so much more than that?
they really wrote themselves into a corner when they gave us a fleshed-out male lead who happens to be a bisexual, who’s suffering from depression with suicidal tendencies – and then just off him in the most crude way; and then the fact that they had him explicitly state that he’d found a way to kill himself – it wasn’t some hypothesis that fans had figured out on their own, that with his depressive spiral this season & the speech from 4x12 – no, this was pronounced by the character himself, leaving no room for any doubts
what kind of messed up message of hope is that?
and what makes it so much worse, while MI part of his character was consistently present & represented throughout the entire series – only just with 4x05 we got a solid confirmation of quentin’s sexuality. here one might argue that this side of his character was known and shown before that – it’s just that to a casual viewer it might not have been so, not before 4x05. to a casual viewer it might seem as if quentin was ‘high on emotions/inebriated’, so it didn’t count. or it was in another timeline/reality that’d never happened, so it was never real.
and while often it’s clear when a character is not straight – the magicians are not the type of show to explicitly state a character’s sexual orientation. sometimes it forces you to play mental gymnastics & speculate a lot
but no matter what, considering how tremendous 4x05 was overall – it’s just so sickening that, from the get-go, the set up was for quentin to die in the end anyway.
and with that speech in 4x12 you’d think the real subversion would've been seeing a MI character cope, and live, and live out a life… but instead they decide to kill him off. and not just that – they decide to make sure & tell us it was a suicide
tl;dr the real subversion of the trope would’ve been allowing your bi, mentally ill, male protagonist to live out a life, letting other people like him see that there’s hope
