Just rambling thoughts inspired by @celluloidbroomcloset post
It’s as if OFMD wasn’t made for the straight male gaze. I mean, can you imagine how the kiss between Jim and Archie could’ve played out?
But in all seriousness, most media is focalised through a heroic straight, able-bodied, white male lens. Everyone else is othered. Even when we get given shows where the main characters diverge from this, writing teams are often made up of dominant groups telling ‘othered’ peoples’ stories. Sure, we get token folk consulted, but does anyone really understand?
That the show runner of OFMD identifies, I’m presuming, as a straight white male, but had the lack of ego to help put together a diverse writing team and listen to lived experience is what’s so groundbreaking. Because this is what true collaboration and representation looks like. This is life told from a female lens, a queer lens, a nonwhite lens, a disabled lens, a neurodivergent lens, a trans or non binary lens, an anti-colonial lens.
‘a’ not ‘the’.
I know other shows have done this. But I have never seen a show do all of this in one go with such emotional realism, and do it so damn effortlessly! And it’s not that every straight white man is a villain, but they’re not always the hero, either. Sometimes there are no heroes. There is more than one way to tell the story of the human condition. And it needs to be told.
History is written by the victors, and so is most media. To have the ‘losers’ tell their story, I think, is what has elevated this beyond a tv show really. We can all feel it. We know something in the universe shifted here. It’s why we must never stop making noise about it.
