This is a good and thoughtful post, and I hope it’s okay if I kind of jump off from it a little on another thing I’ve been thinking about, because like… there’s this whole excuse a lot of Western internationally-released media throws around, of “oh, it couldn’t have been gay, it’s going to be released in China and there’s the Chinese censorship laws!” (What a useful way to blame everything on Those Nonwhite Foreign People, Over There!) And then… well, then there’s this, and the people making it are Chinese citizens living in China and have so much more on the line than an international profit margin. And yes, they don’t kiss. But every part of the show – not just the actors but the costuming, the soundtrack, the camera angles, all of it – is pouring everything they have into making this a love story as textually as they can get away with, absolute heart and soul. Everything is saying yes, yes, look, they are in love, he loves him, and he loves him back, look, you can hear what we’re saying, right? you get it, right? you’re smart, viewers, you can see what’s in the gaps, you’re not making it up, it’s there, we mean it to be there, we’re giving you the whole equation, just do the math on the last step. We want you to make that leap, we’re giving you as much as we possibly can.
What a fucking difference. What a fucking night-and-day difference from certain creators going “haha, here’s a shot you can take out of context if you want! and look, here’s a joke where the punchline is that it looks a little gay! I want to be clear they’re not gay, but you can have fun pretending to yourselves that they are! knock yourselves out, I know you’ll figure out a way to ignore the heterosexuality we’re gonna throw in there to keep the homophobes comfortable.” What an absolutely staggering contrast.
I don’t know. This is not a particularly deep analysis; I’m not qualified to give a deep analysis. But it really hammers in what a hollow, homophobic, racist, xenophobic excuse it all is, that it can’t be queer Because China, to look at how beautiful a love story you can make in the face of those laws. If you care. If you want to. If you’re trying.
(And this is leaping off in yet a third direction, but there’s something really beautiful there too, in that enough people did choose to, did want to, did try. That people – straight and queer, I know nothing about even a single cast or crew member’s sexuality and I don’t claim to, but statistically in a group of humans large enough to make a television show you’re going to have both – these people decided “this is love, in this story, and it is beautiful, and it’s worth showing to the world as much as we can, even if it won’t be complete or easy.” And it was a runaway whirlwind hit. There’s something very what-will-survive-of-us-is-love, in that, something that says homophobia may be powerful and pervasive but at the end of the day they still might as well try to stop the tide from rolling out and in.)
(But it’s still lazy, and deeply racist, and homophobic itself, when Westerners shrug at a part of the status quo and say “can’t even try, see? you can’t be queer in China. simple as that nothing we can do.” For God’s sake, at least have the courage to own your cowardice.)
