Few shows were willing to tackle LGBT storylines with any degree of seriousness or sensitivity, and recent alien-focused shows like Defiance and Steven Universe have done a markedly better job at normalizing and respecting queer women. Some fault can certainly be attributed to the eras in which much of this television was produced. These are the worlds we are meant to aspire to, and it’s disheartening to see them so hostile to anything but the narrowest view of human sexuality. This pattern of marginalized queer desire, desire relegated to either harmless eye candy or shorthand for moral bankruptcy, has no place in worlds that are, in so many ways, vast and teeming with diverse life. Normally-straight characters-notably Kira Nerys and Ezri Dax-became, in their evil incarnations, more overtly sexual and interested in women in ways they, when in their normal, moral state, otherwise wouldn’t be. An opportunity for Starfleet officers to indulge in some very out-of-character behavior, some of the characters-though, again, only the women-telegraphed their ill intent by embodying another tired trope, this time the Depraved Bisexual. A vestige of The Original Series, the mirror universe was a parallel timeline in which historical events had occurred in vastly different ways, and the good characters audiences were used to were now evil. Not content with that one kiss, Deep Space 9 doubled down with the inclusion of the mirror universe. Each host is responsible for giving the symbiont new life experiences, and since the two were a (heterosexual) married couple before, Jadzia is allowed only one kiss before Lenara is unceremoniously shipped off. Their relationship is taboo not because of gender, but because they are both Trill who play host to a slug-like symbiont. Nowhere in sci-fi is this more apparent than with the one-episode relationship between Deep Space 9’s Jadzia Dax and her lover from another lifetime, Lenara Kahn. The Kiss is used purely for shock value, and its “long-term implications are usually negligible.” The series regular involved will remain straight, and the guest character will rarely stay on the show for long. This type of brief, never-repeated queer fling is used so egregiously as a method of boosting a show’s ratings-pandering to the Jayne in all of us, presumably-that it has become known as the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss and boasts a well-stocked accompanying TVTropes page. Sex worker Inara explicitly states that she rarely takes on female clients, and the two women’s encounter is immediately eroticized by Jayne, the show’s poster child for toxic masculinity. Inara from Firefly is also allowed a brief experience with a woman, but one that barely goes beyond being used as saucy, space-aged set dressing. Ivanova is then paired off with a new, male character and spends the rest of the series in safe, heterosexual territory. Babylon 5’s Commander Ivanova does confess feelings for the telepath Talia Winters after the two share heated looks and late-night conversations, but only once Talia is safely out of the picture. But that queerness, relegated exclusively to women (another feature shared by Mass Effect 2), rarely influences the plot in any meaningful way. In worlds where space flight and extraterrestrial life are the norm, queer desire can act as an added layer of the alien, the other, communicating to the audience that they are, without a doubt, not in Kansas anymore. (I ended up choosing the reptilian assassin, Thane Krios, instead, getting my heart trampled on in an entirely different way, but that’s a story for another article.)īioWare’s decision to only include straight romance options, widely thought to be a reaction to the blowback the company suffered when they made Liara, another Asari character, available to both a male and female Shepard in the first game, is especially galling given the prevalence of this half-hearted queerness in shows like Babylon 5, Firefly, and Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Sure, I could invite yeoman Kelly Chambers to my room for dinner, and later on talk about not getting a whole lot of sleep that night, but if I wanted a big, end-of-game romance with emotional weight, and one that unlocked the “Paramour” trophy, my Shepard was going to have to stick to the lower end of the Kinsey scale. No matter how hard I tried, Samara would not give in to the connection she felt between us, even if she broke both our hearts in the process.Īll of this was understandable, certainly, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, especially when I realized that the only teammates available to me as romantic options were male. But Samara was already in her third stage of life, typically a time when Asari are done with romantic attachments and take on positions of authority, and her devotion to the Justicar code left little room for pursuing her feelings for me.
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