A little weird question I must ask

Voyeur 2019-12-25 09:12:13 UTC #21

"... And they were roommates!"
"Oh my god, they were roommates!"

As a creator who's gay, I'm of two minds when people say of fictional characters "prove it".

Dumbledore's post-mortem gay reveal and endless queerbaiting was the real tragedy of Harry Potter
But still, why don't we ever tell people to prove a character's straight?

I was a quietly gay kid and my goodness, that did not stop all my peers and family from picking up that this one might be a little, ahem, ~quaint~.

DokiDokiTsuna 2019-12-25 17:56:10 UTC #22

I didn't think of @kritsu60's mention of "proof" in that way...I thought they meant just 'make it relevant and present in the story'. Like don't do an episode where the character randomly decides to admit they're gay and everyone goes 'ooh' and 'aah' for a little while and then it's never mentioned again.

Like, if you really want a reveal, have the other characters show up at their home and meet their spouse. Or have them go to a club and start a casual conversation about who they're attracted to. Make it actually fit into something that's happening in the story.

droidmonkey1 2019-12-27 11:40:52 UTC #23

I'm sorry it's not.
what I tried to say is what you said later

A lot of shows use this as some sort of a "selling point". there are shows that the romantic life of the characters has no Bering on the stories beside in fan fiction. the more we treat LGBT+ relationship like how we treat heterosexual relationship the more it will become mainstream. like in star vs the forces of evil when during a concert you saw couples gay or not kissing in the background, that is what I'm saying they where like any other couples no one focused on them.
And for the recorded if you look through history when tv shows didn't put characters from "communities" in the spotlight but did show them and interact with them, they became standard and sometime got their own shows and started to change the world.
tl;dr
treat LGBT+ relationship as you do heterosexual ones in the media, and it will become a standard
I don't care if a character is straight or not especially if it has nothing to do with the story.

DokiDokiTsuna 2019-12-27 13:01:26 UTC #24

This might be beside the point, but I'm wondering what historical TV shows you're referring to...? Because as I often claim, I watch a lot of old TV, and writers were doing "the black character" and even "the gay character" well into the 80s and 90s. Wanting characters of different ethnicities and backgrounds to be simply 'included' rather than highlighted is more of a recent phenomenon, if you ask me. =/

Also, I would be reluctant to hold up "getting their own shows" as a desirable result or end goal, because at that point it's fairly easy to end up with just 'TV segregation': y'know, where people can start de-legitimizing inclusion along the lines of "if you want to see black/lgtbq/female characters, just go watch that show (where most or ALL of the characters fit into that group), and leave our NORMAL shows alone!"

...That sounds like a step backwards to me.

droidmonkey1 2019-12-27 19:04:29 UTC #25

All in the family was spun off to The Jeffersons they where the neighbors of the bunkers The Jeffersons had more the 200 episodes and an prominently feature a married interracial couple.
Perfect strangers spun off to family matters. in the second season of perfect strangers "Harriette Winslow the Elevator Operator at a newspaper editorial building in which Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous the main characters on Perfect Strangers also worked. Reginald Vel Johnson would make cameos on the show as Harriette's husband Carl Winslow, a Chicago Police Officer"
and in the 90's more gay background character appeared with one of the stereotypes of feminine behavior or they are good in interior designing but slowly after shows like will and grace, the way they were represented started to change slowly.