Things I really love about the WLW ship of Spencer Carlin and Ashley Davies in ‘South Of Nowhere’.
1. That they’re not treated any differently to the het ships in a teen drama unless it’s designed that way for the storytelling itself. Their drama is realistic, logical and necessary as it’s about THEM as characters and what they go through individually. It’s not just drama made up for the sake of them needing to have drama.
2. They repeatedly make it clear that Ashley is bisexual and not gay even though no one ever mentions it. It makes sense within the actions and motivations of the character that she keeps flipping from guys to girls. It’s not a “gay or straight” thing. She’s attracted to both. She has feelings for both at the same time. But I like how the other characters don’t really understand this. I like how Ashley is the only one that understands this about herself and that she’s not apologetic about it. This was very early days when we just got over the “don’t say gay” rule. Now it was more of “don’t say bisexual”. Buffy also suffered with this rule with the character Willow but ‘South Of Nowhere’ does not make apologies for it. It does not let up and force Ashley to choose between “gay or straight”. Ashley is BISEXUAL whether anyone else understands this or not. She simply says “I’m not into labels” and that’s that. It’s fantastic that they knew that they needed no further explanation on this for her. Ashley is a mess in many other ways but she was rock solid about this and the other characters never really understand this about her. That’s great. That’s the reality for many bi people. You are known as “in-between” in their heads. But it’s not even like that and Ashley defends this position and it’s fucking nice to have a bisexual character doing this!
3. When Spencer finally realizes that she is gay she is constantly in defence of her position on this in that she challenges her family - her mother most of all. She does not let any kind of coercive influence scare her away from this identification and declaration of her sexuality. That was really important for people to see then. Her standing up for herself. Not just other people doing it. Not to give major spoilers but she even does it when broken up with Ashley and getting with another girl. She is absolutely steadfast in her position of how she thinks and feels and that is a really important thing to see because it’s not about Spencer being in love with any particular girl. It’s about her being attracted to girls.
I think they NAILED these things in the writing of the show and I was very impressed with it both in writing and acting. We make no apologies or compromises for who we are when it comes to accepting our sexuality.
As you can see it’s very important to me that fictional female characters that represent real life people are not weaklings in mind, heart or body. This show is amazing because it defends its positions over and over again all the while not messing with the storytelling vehicles to get us to the point that we want to be within the show!
They got all that SO RIGHT and I really love them for it because it gave the love story between them depth!
You could truly believe in the hard work that it took. This is the problem with so many WLW ships these days. They don’t feel like they could be a real couple because there is so much missing from the storytelling and the representation combined. It feels really empty and perhaps it’s because they don’t have to contend with censors and debasers. Perhaps it’s because there’s nothing real there to challenge them into good writing.
Perhaps it’s because they simply want to tick off boxes.
Well,… I don’t accept that and I never will support that.
Representation is NOT tick off boxes.
It’s what this show did! It’s what Xena did. It’s what Buffy - in its own slightly confused way - did. 👍👌
It wasn’t supposed to be simple and easy.
Nothing worth it ever is simple and easy.
I need people to care about good writing in TV art/entertainment so I am not forced to watch garbage and I lose the hope of ever coming across quality like this.
This is incredibly important to me. The most important.
