I was thinking about Jake Peralta and Charles Boyle from B99 vis a vis Holmes and Watson and I formed a hypothesis which I have just tested. My hypothesis was correct…but I don’t know why.
Hypothesis: B99 has actually successfully prevented viewers from reading the primary m/m partnership homoerotically. To put it more simply: people by and large do not slash Jake and Boyle.
I did a search on AO3. Would you like to know how many pics show up in the Charles Boyle/Jake Peralta tag?
THREE.
For purposes of comparison, there are 1692 Jake/Amy pics on AO3 and 172 Jake /Rosas, as well as over a hundred Rosa/Ginas.
This is amazing. It’s an author-intent miracle. Yeah, I know the show doesn’t ship them, but that never stopped ANYONE. How, Moffat and Gatiss must surely be wondering, did they manage to keep Eros out of that bromance?
I have formed a few theories.
1. The inclusion of openly gay characters makes people stop looking for coded gay characters.
2. Viewers are protecting the canon ship (Jake/Amy). Plausible but does not explain the much larger number of Jake/Rosas and Amy/Rosas.
3. Both characters are given multiple heterosexual relationships. True; again, never stopped anyone before.
4. It is precisely the absurdly self-abasing intensity of Charles’s devotion that stops people from reading it romantically. Variant: it is so obvious that Charles desires to BE Jake that we don’t ask whether he wants to DO Jake.
5. Nobody wants to imagine Charles Boyle having sex. This one has merit. Despite all the girlfriends he has, his sex life is always kind of disgusting to the other characters, as is his way of introducing it very inappropriately I to conversation.
I dunno. It’s fascinating.
Tag: brooklyn 99
In one episode of Brooklyn Nine Nine, they talk about how trans people have it difficult in prison. In the very next episode the sentence “Nothing is more attractive in a woman than the clear absence of a penis” is uttered.
It’s almost like B99 is a show made by liberals for liberals and its progressiveness is entirely performative.
Just want to point out since the post kind of glosses over the fact that the last sentence is uttered ironically by a gay character who is trying to pass as straight to distract a guard at a women’s prison. The running joke is that he believes straight people are transphobic and homophobic, so when he tries to pretend to be one, he acts that way. The joke is, no one around him acts like what he’s saying is off, making further commentary on how transphobic and homophobic our society is.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 