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femperials · 2 years

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did dynasty elaborately use their last gay character standing being biphobic as an allegory for how demanding and ungrateful they believe their gay audience is? is this just another piece in a long-term pattern from dynasty to get back at their lgbt audience? am i giving them too much credit by thinking they’re smart enough to be that evil? let’s discuss.

(this post will contain un-tagged talk about biphobia within the lgbt community as well as community infighting in online queer spaces. it’s pride month! if talking about those topics is going to (reasonably) bum you out, please skip this post at least for now!)

this is the most negative thing i have ever written about dynasty and will likely be the ONLY post of its kind that i ever write. it’s impossible not to talk about the writing, cast, crew, etc of this show and be 100% just about the plots because there will often be overlap in terms of the how and the why of it. this will be the only post that i put here that focuses on critiquing the overall running of dynasty’s production and patterns of poor decision making over the course of the past five years. as i say on all of my fandom social media, often, i have overwhelmingly positive feelings about dynasty and find heavy comfort in it. if i want to write 4.1k words about something about it that has always felt a little ‘off’, im gna do that. :)

back during the final stretch of season 4, i distinctly remember talking with some friends about our feelings towards the show (as we often do) and while i'm possibly the least jaded in both my circle of friends and my online circles of other dynasty viewers, i do have some lines that i would absolutely drop the show like a hot pan for.

they're SUPER distinct and clear lines that are less personally-triggering and moreso things that would feel distinctly like the writers either a) were intentionally trying to hurt certain demographics of their audience or, possibly just as bad, b) were genuinely too out of touch to realize the ramifications of. dynasty features plenty content that i find triggering on a personal level but as a general rule, i know that there is a separation between things that upset me individually and things that are related to doing more serious damage. sometimes these things overlap (an example, which i'll obviously be talking about liberally in this post, being homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, etc). so, while i have certain things that i wince away from every time dynasty shoves at us - looking at you, the beaten-to-death horse known as 'people being drugged against their will as a comedy trope' - i put up with it.

as a sidenote, i think that the twitter timeline during episode 5.15 was a really great example of what sorts of buttons people won't allow others to push. the biphobic comment in the episode was hurtful enough for bisexual people to have to hear at all, but on top of that, the who - what - where of it all was even more insidious than it may have seemed on a surface level to people who saw their mutuals talking about it without being part of the dynasty sphere.

in 4.15, we were introduced to eva. she was cute, she was fun, she was there to be fallon's new assistant (funnily enough, the replacement for allison - the only canonically wlw character at the time since amanda wouldn't appear until the following episode), and then of course, to be a foil for falliam. the concept of there being any credible foil to falliam was ALREADY laughable at this point. i'm not even going to bother touching on how deeply predictable and boring the very concept of the writers thinking any of us truly believe they would do anything interesting or dangerous with them. i was bopping along in season 4, minding my business, discussing my theories with my friends and other people online and hehe-ing about how boring the eva-likes-liam thing was when i woke up in a cold sweat one night with a horrifying thought: what if the writers shake things up for fucking once in terms of falliam? what if this won't be their 500th predictable stupid storyline? what if eva is going to try to break up falliam because she likes fallon and not liam?

it turns out i was giving them too much credit in that department, so i lived to keep watching the show another day. that had been my own paranoid theory that i immediately jumped into the groupchat with to say ‘ok i found it, i found what i would stop watching dynasty for’. they were already pushing the stalking angle with eva and fallon’s previous stalker had been the only east asian representation on dynasty ever. if they said ‘ok lets do that storyline again but with a creepy predatory GIRL KISSER’ i think i would have had to tap out.

another sidenote - i love hearing about people’s ‘what i would stop watching dynasty for’ moments. everyone’s different thoughts are so different and every time someone has told me one of theirs its usually something i didn’t even consider, but realized their fear of it happening was definitely still rooted in logic based on the way certain storylines go in this show.

dynasty's relationship with its lgbt audience has always been shaky at best and borderline emotional terrorism at its worst. from the outright refusal for a wlw character (which even then, was still a bit of a 'gotcha' at the audience) until its final stretch despite long ago having shifted from a series about the scandals of business with social and emotional stories woven in to a nearly sitcom-esque y.a. romance, or the fact that sammy jo is literally the last gay standing, the lgbt viewers have long resigned to a state of refusing to expect anything and shitposting about it for fun to keep things light. it's a cw show. plenty of the audience for dynasty - cishet AND lgbt - have experienced them before. for the lgbt audience, we're all seasoned veterans when it comes to navigating passive-aggressive feedback from the production teams and sometimes even cast members, not to mention the blatant and aggressive homophobia from other fans who don't fit into the same minority groups that a lot of us do and have no lived experience to draw any empathy from.

i think a lot of writers for television - a lot of which are specific to the cw though if i were to start naming examples from their recent catalogue, i would be here all day - learned fairly early on that blatant homophobia causes outrage which obviously causes buzz. this makes for great television writing because it very much gives the straight audience something to be surprised by and interested in. often the best of the self-proclaimed straight allies often for some reason love to see an act of homophobia and yell "i am NOT like that, by the way!" without doing much else, but it makes them feel good at the end of the day nonetheless. they get to think about the hardships that lgbt people face for a few minutes, go "oh jeez, how awful" which obviously makes them incredible people and there you have it. this is great news for television writers, as being the writer puts you in a position to 'make up a guy and then get mad at him' (for the record, this is bad when people do it random political discourse, not in television for the most part. 'make up a guy and ___' is sort of the basis of writing, that isn't the issue here). the thing is, those scenes where lgbt people face discrimination are not 'feel good' moments for the lgbt audience, usually. just like in real life, the other shoe dropping where the writers add in a little "and then the homophobe gets his just desserts" doesn't really heal the shock or hurt for anyone except their straight audience. when i get yelled at or threatened in public and a well-meaning ally steps up and tells the person harassing me to go fuck themselves, i still just experienced being harassed. i may be thankful to the person who used their power to help me, but i still was, for a moment, in a position where i needed help.

homophobia exists, obviously, and shows set in the real world will obviously have moments where it is appropriate to weave it into the story. no one is arguing this much. the issue is that certain shows, and dynasty is not the only show that deserves this critique, will not have any real intention to dedicate time or care to this issue. i've spoken a lot about how i prefer that the newer seasons of dynasty stop trying when it comes to touching on serious issues because their track record of trying to do things tactfully hasn't been good since season 1.

the other side of this blade is that we've now experienced two instances of anti-lgbt rhetoric from within canon, and both times it has been from lgbt characters.

in season 2, we had beto - cristal's brother who is aggressively homophobic specifically towards sam but plot twist! it was because he was into sam and was just shamefully closeted all along. audiences pushed back HARD against that across social media and explained why the rhetoric that lgbt people are really our own worst enemies was so dangerous - the cast or crew obviously didn't comment, which they generally don't so that wasn't strange - but the cishet audience did make sure to put on their best meat-gargling britches and let the lgbt audience know that if we were so unhappy with what we got, we could go watch something else and leave them alone.

in season 5, we got the pride party episode. i call it the pride party episode because while the actual pride party took up maybe about 8 total minutes of screen time, it was what the cast and crew posted the majority of their behind the scenes content from and it was obviously meant to be the draw as it did air during pride month. for those who haven't watched yet or have been scouring for spoilers after seeing the tweets and different social media posts talking about it, here's your context:

sam begins to feel like he's an irrelevant gay in atlanta so he enlists the help of kirby and culhane to throw the biggest pride party of the weekend and get his status back. kirby and culhane put together a big party but same is unhappy with it (in their defense, his 'theme' was call me by your name / twink / leather daddy realness. with a drag performance. i think that since THAT was such a word salad of gay terminology that make no cohesive sense together, they just assumed he didn't know what he was talking about and was going to be cool with rainbow streamers and edm). he blows up and refers to culhane as a 'bad ally' and calls kirby 'just gay whenever it's convenient' - both comments he later apologizes for in the same breath because they were OBVIOUSLY on the same level of offensive (he also, at one earlier point, refers to them as allies together and while i don't know if it was intentional or not, it kind of felt more like a writers flub moreso than a dig at kirby but i could be wrong. kirby was sam's token straight for so long that it might just be muscle memory). he gets a quick pep talk from angeria paris vanmichaels and admits that he was actually just insecure about his gayness.

i've already said that it's harmful for straight people (though gay people also parrot this rhetoric too sometimes) to either make jokes about or outright seriously claim that people who perpetuate the most homophobia are insecure or closeted gay people. add on top of that that dynasty has now TWICE ‘addressed’ homo/bi/transphobia and both times have been by lgbt characters. i’m also in the conspiracy-theory camp of believing that fanworks for dynasty have, in the past, influenced the direction of the show or inspired plots and tropes used, and while kirby anders was always an icon for the wlw audience since before she was even introduced, fanworks that featured fan-interpretations of her as a wlw character often weren’t shy about talking about the implications that that would have if it were to fit into the canon of the show. some headcanons and fan-created works became common use among the wlw fandom and while they had no basis in canon they were considered ‘canon’ in the fan-verse where kirby was wlw - all of this pre-wlw-canon kirby, of course. a personal favorite in a lot of wlw fanworks for dynasty was the concept that alexis carrington, historically not a homophobe, would be perfectly okay with her daughter (either or, depending on your persuasion) dating another woman - but NEVER if it were kirby, turning the homophobic character trope on its head.

what distinctly stood out to me once the smoke cleared from hearing the most wattpad-villain-esque overused line of biphobia from, again, the ONLY remaining gay man on the show, was exactly why sam saying it was so much more unsettling than just your run of the mill ‘homophobes are just mean gays’ tropery. earlier when i mentioned that the lgbt audience of dynasty tend to approach things in a sort of resigned way, i probably should have clarified that ‘expects nothing good’ comes in a wide range of flavours, spanning from ‘cautious but refusing to be hopeful’ (shoutout to kamanda nation) all the way to ‘blatantly giggling at all of the cw’s attempts to garner interest’. my dynasty twitter timeline and groupchats leading up to ‘the pride party episode’ since it was announced were a constant stream of shitposting and sarcastic claims that it would be a trainwreck that everyone was deeply excited to watch happen (“the cw is kicking the air right now demanding to know why they still aren’t allowed to say the f slur after putting a rainbow border on their page”).

there are plenty of common biphobic talking points. like every single group within the lgbt community, lack of understanding or empathy for one another who have different experiences than we do can cause ignorance and hurt. in my personal opinion, ‘queer discourse’, as its often all lumped together as, can do its part to help us educate one another on our own unique histories and experiences while it can also be a jumping-off point for hatred and circular, senseless arguing. also in my personal opinion, when it comes to queer discourse, or more often than not, community infighting, it should be entirely left up to those groups involved. i will listen to and value the opinion of someone that disagrees with me (to a reasonable extent, obviously) who i share a space with over the opinion of someone who agrees with me but has no idea what they’re talking about. for this reason, i obviously do not care about cishet opinions on queer issues. the internet evolves and expands incredibly quickly. online queer discourse used to be mainly reserved for deep tumblr: sideblogs and instant messages and google docs with links to talking points and sources in case one was ever backed into a corner in an argument. now, queer discourse has become such a massive part of the average twitter experience (not to mention tiktok) that its caught the attention of cishet people in a very strange way. not only have people with zero lived experience began to pay attention to what inter-community issues that the lgbt community are discussing, they’ve also pushed themselves into the discussions.

it's not difficult at all, nowadays, for any straight television writer with a twitter account to not only a) find an lgbt issue to exploit clumsily for a quick plot or b) find an lgbt issue to exploit to have their audience do the fighting for them. a personal favorite example of mine is 7-season CW hatecrime The 100. their mistreatment of lesbian character lexa and wildly archaic use of the dead lesbian trope (which, while overlapping often, is not to be confused with the bury your gays trope) upset audiences on a catastrophic level. the interesting part, though, was that the bisexual female lead would go on to endgame with the male cishet lead in the wake of the death of her lesbian love interest. this was obviously upsetting to the lesbian audience for the obvious reasons that being brutally killed off (in a very specific way, too, which is worth looking up if you’re interested in queer fandom history) in order to make room for another m/f relationship. however, any lgbt person who has spent more than a few minutes in literally any queer discourse space online would be privy to the fact that lesbians and bisexual women can sometimes carry a certain tension when it comes to discussions about validity. this is not a queer discourse blog and i’m not going to delve into the talking points surrounding this, but it is important for me to point out that those talks DO take place in a lot of queer online spaces, and since online fandom is often a relatively queer space itself, the discussions do bleed together sometimes. that’s why it was so genius (in a sociopathic sort of way) for the cast, crew, and writer’s room of the 100 to listen to the lesbians crying about the representation being yanked out from under them and go “you hear that, bisexual audience? the lesbians are mad because YOU aren’t gay enough for them on this show.”

i didn’t watch the 100. i was about to start it the week that they killed off lexa which i personally think was one of the top 10 bullets dodged in history. but EVERYONE in online fandom spaces, myself included, knows what happened and experienced it in some regard. the 100 became a piece of history for the resulting terrible pr that they got for the writing choice as well as their unprofessional and batshit insane handling of the aftermath. the cw to this day has never made a mistake so serious again but the lasting effects of pitting one’s lgbt audience against each other to avoid accountability has never left, and the cw specifically is famous for its use of audience infighting to avoid effort and quality when it comes to lgbt storylines. sam’s biphobic comment hit hard in that way, because the writers got to throw that in and step back and go “whoa now hey it wasn’t us! it was the gay guy. obviously!”

and his phrasing, “gay when its convenient” - while also not an uncommon biphobic soundbite - was hilariously something that dynasty’s lgbt audience have been saying for years. after steammy was wiped off the map as a couple and sam was written into a few forgettable guy of the month romances with minimal screentime to keep cashing in one being able to put SOMETHING in the ‘we promise we have diversity’ montages that the cw keeps getting fucking clowned for posting (seriously, why do they keep posting those ads? i have NEVER seen a healthy comment section under one of them) they finally seemed to find their footing to utilize rafael de la fuente’s talent in a meaningful way. his drama work is unreal. he manages to hit his comedy beats even when the writing is clearly below him and elevates it every time. this of course had to come at the cost of dropping a lot of the romance from his storyline which would be perfectly fine - perhaps even welcome especially in these later seasons - were he not the only opportunity for the mlm audience to have someone they can relate to.

dynasty’s cishet audience commenting about how the moment amanda was canonized as wlw that it was ‘too soon’ to start putting her into relationships was the usual level of tone-deaf and blatantly un-self-aware that lgbt audiences have been putting up with since the dawn of time.

‘gay when its convenient’ has been something that the lgbt audiences have been accusing dynasty of since the first season came and went without a hint of fallon carrington looking twice at a girl, after liz gillies said that she could definitely see fallon as a bisexual woman. dynasty's answer to lgbt people asking for representation - PROPER representation - has always been met with either crumbs (rip allison!) or a sort of weird derisive 'here's what we have for you - YOU are actually VERY stupid for thinking we wouldn't give it to you and i think that says more about how miserable you all are than it does about us as a television show' vibe. fallon's offhanded comment about 'having always had a thing for princess frostine' in 2.12 was not a 'win' for bisexual representation, either. at the time, it almost felt like a smug little slap in the face to the people who were flooding online anonymous forums to scream and cry "STOP saying fallon likes girls" at the wlw audience. rewatching it even a day later felt like a slap in the face to the lgbt audience who claimed that the show didn't have enough queer characters. the line meant nothing and went no where - it was just a reminder that "she's right HERE you blind idiots, stop asking us for more gay women".

pre-kamanda, dynasty consistently told us that we had all of the representation we needed. we have a gay guy who pops in to say random gay-isms (who was once a success story about an undocumented immigrant from an abusive household that struggled and cheated and did what he could to survive among billionaires) once or twice per episode, and we have fallon, who sometimes slaps women on the ass as they walk by, or whatever. the lgbt audience came up with our own ships and our own silly in-universe ideas to keep us busy while we sat through whatever new trope the writers wanted to half-ass with falliam for the majority of the episode. and, since we thought, only having historical patterns to base our expectations on, that we were never going to get anything, we let our own fan-canon and faux-theories get wilder and sillier despite the usual obstacles whether that was the writers making them moot with canon on accident or the literal cast of the show mocking us publicly based on their own misunderstanding of the concepts at hand (as an aside: cast and crew’s of shows and movies interacting with fanworks is not only their given right but also often very welcome. that being said, at the end of the day it was never for them, though that is a topic for another day).

kamanda was not only a breath of fresh air in terms of finally having something a little more lighthearted and fun without feeling like a waste of time to focus on, but it brought back audience that had long-since jumped ship (often around early to mid season 4).

even then, there was something sort of ‘off’ about the whole feeling. these aren’t my personal opinions because i didn’t see amanda’s introduction, kirby’s wlw canonization, or kamanda in general anything other than an (embarrassingly fucking late) agreement to finally give the wlw audience what we’ve been asking for for the last five years: real (fictional) women in a real (fictional) relationship, a privilege granted to literally everyone else on the show since the very beginning, in a show that had increasingly dropped most of its plotting to focus solely on romance and interpersonal relationships. i did however see static and enter discussions about the a) aggressive cancellation season last-ditch attempt to be relatable and b) a redirect of the wlw audience’s attention away from firby - arguably the most popular dynasty ship behind falliam, pre-kamanda. i’m literally still in the middle of a giant unhinged post about the history of firby fandom and its eventual replacement by kamanda so i’m not going to go into a lot of detail about it here. the main takeaway there is that the way in which dynasty hands us our representation often feels like we’re supposed to feel bad about it once we get it. not in the ‘here’s representation but they’re BAD’ way, but in a ‘how dare you have ever doubted us, why are you even here if you’re so angry with us’ sort of way. i would consider that my own paranoia and overthinking and just assuming that i’m feeling sorry for myself had i not realized across multiple platforms how widespread that weird ‘guilty’ feeling is when it comes to being lgbt in dynasty fandom.

the biphobia is the core issue at hand - full stop. bisexual audiences did not need to hear something like that and especially not coming from a show that consistently backs out of touching on real-world issues by claiming that the show is meant to be an escape and therefore wouldn't be fair to the audience. the bisexual audience do not qualify for such escapism.

however what this obnoxiously long rant of a post is also poking at is that sam's biphobic comment not only shocked and hurt the bisexual audience but it added to an overarching message that the lgbt audience have been having yelled at us by dynasty for the past five years, usually RIGHT whenever we feel comfortable and safe, and that's that sure, this show is going to upset us sometimes but that's the real world, and symbolically, we really only have ourselves to blame.

#dynasty #fallon carrington #kirby anders #amanda carrington #sammy jo carrington #long #515

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