Rivals season 2 is failing Cameron Cook so far.
We don’t get her POV.
We don’t see her vulnerability.
We don’t get a quiet moment with her.
We know only this about her life prior to 1986:
Her mother is an activist;
Her father a teacher;
Her parents divorced when she was 14;
Her mother didn’t really want to be a mother;
Her mother’s next partner “was an asshole”;
She’s from New York;
She left home when she was young;
And she’d been on her own for a while, until Tony. And Corinium and Venturer and Rutshire.
Now when I write it out it seems like it’s a lot to know about character until you remember that we learned this 11 episodes ago in a show that’s aired 13 episodes.
We’re told she feels lonely in her relationship with Rupert, we don’t see it. We don’t see how she grapples with the fact that she almost killed someone she was in a relationship with. Someone who was manipulative, and dare I say abusive, someone who put his hands on her, tried to coerce her into sex then bribed her when the coercion didn’t work and you know what? Let’s say we take the BaddingCook out of it, just the fact that she almost KILLED a person…We don’t see her take any of that in.
And even if you want to say “oh the show is not that serious” that I “shouldn’t be expecting them to deep dive abusive relationships and power imbalances” or I’m“making everything about race”,
1. THE SHOW made her Black and its acknowledged in the material: Tony and Ginger made it a Thing in 1x01 when Declan arrived at Corinium by saying “who says no Blacks, no Irish?”; when Ginger chortled after Tony told Cameron she’d “be on the next boat back”; when she was called “exotic” by Val and Fred’s kids. All this means they should, ideally, be willing to understand how things will read differently now that there is Blackness where there was none before and that they be mindful of unconscious biases.
and 2. her writing is lacklustre this season with other characters too. I’m not going to lie, Cam and Declan being such good friends in this episode honestly took me by surprise because we don’t get more than one quick scene every other episode with trading barbs. Or Cam with Rupert, or Cam with Patrick, or any other woman.
Cameron is just there to have sex and solidify that the white right people remember in their hearts that they love their white right partners and not her. We’re five episodes into a 12 episode season and they’re only just now starting to develop her supposed endgame, Patrick, who has been markedly less into her in season two than he was last season until this episode.
Cameron is running the risk of falling into the disposable black girlfriend trope and even if she breaks up with Rupert, it’s the same trope just superficially feminist.
Right now? She’s the Jezebel trope, her entire character revolving around her romantic/sexual tension and relationships with the 3 main men (Tony, Declan and Rupert.)
She’s a girlboss, she’s a ‘ball buster,’ she’s quick as a whip, can hang with the boys and don’t forget SEX!SEX!SEX! but all that without the more human and low sides to her just make it seem to me like she’s falling into a common way Black female characters are written/viewed: good enough for sex but never for love.
As of 205, Cameron Cook is not given the same amount of well roundedness that her white counterparts are given. I haven’t completely written off this season in regards to her, I really hope the 7 episodes remaining do better and change my mind because I know Nafessa would be so good with a meatier script, and it would be refreshing to have a black female character that isn’t strong all the time. A messy Black woman. A Black woman that isn’t there to be the devil to another woman’s angel. That isn’t stagnant.
Oh, here’s a meme I made. Go follow me on twitter for Rivals season two tweet-alongs, I’m hilarious