#but only as long as they gay guys play the role of their token bestie and act femme and like watching stage race with them

[musclesandhammering]

Perpetually annoyed by the attitude straight women have about gay men and the gay men who encourage it 😒

[army-of-mai-lovers]

hello arthur!! tbh people are being terrible in your inbox and the last ask killed my brain cells so this is your free bingo card to talk about anything you like. also sometimes googling sharks with human teeth (exactly what it sounds like) helps!! much love <3

oh my gosh I’m OBSESSED with these photos they’re so cute!!!! and thank you for the bingo card Effie I appreciate it so much. I’m gonna rant about Deadly Class (a show I definitely don’t like and thus don’t run a fan blog for....smh) bc it’s on my mind and it looks like it’s just going to go quietly into that good night instead of being made fun of and dissected and I think that should change bc goodness gracious that show does not deserve a dignified death. also I’m gonna put this rant under a readmore bc this is gonna be long and it has nothing to do w atla. warnings for discussions of racism, callous mentions of murder and death, swearing, discussion of Nazis, discussion of gore, abuse ment

Okay so for those not in the know (which is probably everyone considering the show was on Syfy and it’s being canceled due to low viewership) Deadly Class is a teen murder drama set in the late ‘80s starring Lana Condor, which makes it sound like it was engineered in a lab to appeal to me. Literally my friend and I were in the middle of watching Schitt’s Creek, which I adore, and she was like “well I heard about this show called Deadly Class” and described it and I was like fuck Schitt’s Creek we’re watching this. It had a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes, which usually makes me nervous, but I was literally like “I don’t care because I know I’m going to love it.” 

And well. I did not love it. 

I truly do not understand how one fucks up “teenagers (mostly) of color go to murder boarding school in the late ‘80s” that bad (I mean the Russo brothers are involved and they fuck up everything they touch so perhaps it was just that). I haven’t read the comic the show is based on but it does appear that a *lot* of the issues of the show stem from the comic, which is...disappointing. Basically, our MC, Marcus, starts off the show homeless after his group home burned down (and it’s heavily implied that he was the one to do it) and gets hunted down by these elite teenage murderers who invite them to their murder school. 

Already, numerous problems are starting to show themselves. First of all, Marcus is Latino, which, yes, it’s very cool that the MC is Latino, except he is literally the white-passingest man I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen my dad. I didn’t realize that he was Latino until they showed his extremely stupid backstory in a shitty animated sequence and whoever was voicing his dad did this really, really thick Nicaraguan accent and I was like wait a damn minute. So then, I looked it up, and the guy playing Marcus is named Benjamin Wadsworth, which immediately made me think that they had pulled a Noah Centineo and made me think this fully white actor was half Latino (and yes, Latinos can be white, but I think Marcus is supposed to be a nonwhite Latino, and I thought Benjamin Wadsworth was both white and non-Latino). But you know, as an light skinned ethnically ambiguous mixed kid myself, I thought I owed it to him to dig a little deeper, and turns out our pal Ben is mixed (also, he’s like six months older than me and married, which is a trip). And like, okay, I guess I’m glad they didn’t get a white non-Latino man to play a Latino character, but they literally got the whitest looking Latino they could think of to play him. He originally auditioned for Billy. Billy’s the token white. And the producers were like “wait you have Latino ancestry?” (how they found that out I don’t fucking know) and let him go for Marcus. And like. Okay. The character in the comics is light-skinned but he does not look white, and Benjamin is not a good enough actor for them to just pass on the actors who surely auditioned for that role and were more visibly Latino but like. Okay, I guess. 

Second of all, this show is mega racist and it starts to reveal itself when you look at how the murder kids are styled in literally their first appearance. What struck me the most was the fact that the Latina (whose name is fucking Maria, for heaven’s sake) was wearing a sexy red dress and Day of the Dead makeup, which, I’m sorry, huh? That just so happens to be the Mexican girl’s murder outfit? I’ve tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and speculate that maybe she wears it to like, subvert people’s expectations, but at this point idk how this is subverting anyone’s expectations nor why she’d be so invested in that. Also, she’s supposed to be a teenager. It’s fucked up to sexualize any of your child characters but it really hits different when it’s your Latina character (and yeah, I know the actress playing Maria isn’t a teenager, but still, it’s the principle of the thing). And then of course, the Black guy, Willie (no he’s not related to Billy they were just like yeah two guys with rhyming names in our main cast sounds legit) is a gangbanger dude who talks the way that white people think Black people talk. I keep waiting for this guy to have one line that’s not complete garbage, but I’m five episodes deep and so far nada, which sucks so bad because there’s like, kernels of an interesting character buried in this horrible racist trope. Also, they had him sleep with a N*zi. I hate it here. Lana Condor (her character’s name is Saya) gets off fairly okay, at least in this first shot (they don’t have her wearing a kimono to go murder people, thank fuck), but the way she behaves is super weird, like kinda flirty towards Marcus, kinda badass but not enough to actually do anything, etc. Billy’s white so they couldn’t make him a racist caricature or anything but I have no idea why he’s here. See, instead of talking about the real politics of the real world, Deadly Class makes up fake prejudice that honestly makes the lok bender/nonbender bullshit look sensible. Maria, Willie, and Saya are Legacies, which means that their families are established murderers (fun fact: the N*zi girl is also a Legacy, because her father murdered hundreds of civil rights activists. And the characters of color align themselves with her. I don’t understand.) Billy, and later Marcus when he decides to go to murder school, are Rats, meaning they have no affiliation with established murder groups. So, in this show, the people of color have privilege over the (mostly white) Rats. Make it make sense. Further, this means that Maria, Saya, and Willie should have absolutely no reason to hang out with Billy, and yet they do because the Russo brothers have heard that the kids these days like the found family trope, so they put five unlikely friends in a room together and insinuated that they could all be besties. I swear, this show is the La Croix of found family tho, in that there is absolutely no flavor whatsoever. None of the characters develop into a found family. Saya is bound to care for Marcus for reasons, Maria is using him, Willie is also using him, and Billy is only his friend because they’re both Rats. Saya and Maria are already friends (and honestly their friendship is the most compelling thing in the whole show). There are no other connections between the characters. But they’re totes a found family!!!!/s

Also, they don’t let Saya be mean. Every character says “oh Saya’s such a bitch” but do we ever see Saya being a bitch??? No! Saya is literally just a nice girl who is kinda quiet sometimes and murders people and has a tragic backstory. There’s an argument to be made for Maria being more bitchy than her tbh. And like, fine, if you want Saya to be nice, she can be nice, but stop telling me she’s mean then!!! If you’re gonna tell me that I’m gonna get to see mean Lana Condor in a leather jacket in this show then deliver bitch. 

There’s truly so much more I could talk about (Chico??? What the fuck is Chico’s arc???? What in the actual hell were they thinking when they were writing anything to do with Chico????? my DUDES WHAT IN THE SAM HELL. also making Billy straight was so fucking stupid he’s literally gay come on now, also Master Lin is so fucking useless what is he even doing here) but instead I’m going to outline the version of Deadly Class my friend and I have been talking about while we watch the inferior real Deadly Class. 

lots of things are the same actually because there are some elements of the show that have potential. Marcus is still homeless at the beginning, everybody still thinks he burned down the group home but he didn’t, Willie is still a pacifist, he and Marcus are still partners for their first murder school assignment, Saya’s mean (but like actually), Billy still has green hair and is the token white of the group (although a Billy of color.....thinking), and they all hate Reagan

in an ideal world Willie and Maria would have different names (Willie bc his name rhymes with Billy’s and that’s fucking stupid, also Willie is just a terrible name in general, Maria partially because it sounds way too similar to Marcus and I don’t understand why the guy who wrote this couldn’t make his characters have different sounding names, and partially because no Latina character of mine is going to be named fucking Maria), but for the purposes of this outline I’ll keep their names the same for clarity.

Marcus doesn’t initially have his rep. He’s on the streets when he sees a girl his age (Saya) come out of this elevator in the back of a restaurant brandishing a sword, and decides to go into the elevator, sees the stash of weapons, and decides to steal one so he can fend for himself better. 

also keeping the detail of Rory murdering a bunch of homeless kids, but now Marcus knows that Rory is actively hunting him down. 

in the process of robbing the school’s weapons collection, Marcus figures out that it’s a murder school

Master Lin catches Marcus robbing the school, they fight, Master Lin overpowers Marcus and ties him up. He says the weapons are for students only, and Marcus says he’s applying. Lin asks what his qualifications are, and Marcus says “you know that group home that burned down three months ago? all the kids that died? I started the fire.” 

(also no shade to Benjamin Wadsworth but in this version he is not playing Marcus. Marcus is not white-passing)

Master Lin initially doesn’t believe him, but Marcus presses on and eventually convinces Master Lin that this is really what happened, and so Lin welcomes him to murder school. 

Marcus’s first class is Poisons, and his lab partner is Billy, who takes a shine to him and shows him around school. There’s no Legacy/Rat nonsense, but you do have normal high school drama adapted slightly for murder school. Maria is the prettiest and most popular girl in school, Saya is the mean girl/valedictorian, Willie is the jock, and Billy’s the punky weirdo. 

Marcus is, of course, the new kid with a reputation to live up to. 

Things kind of fall apart when Willie and Marcus are paired up for an assignment: to seek revenge on somebody. 

also Willie’s backstory is extremely different. his dad was a Black Panther, and he was murdered by the FBI when Willie was a kid. distraught, his mom moved to Texas, where she started working a corporate job and rose really high in the ranks. To maintain her status in the company, she had to do some really horrible things, including working with the FBI to take down other civil rights activists. Willie found out about this and was absolutely horrified. his mother insisted she was doing this so that he could have a better life, but he refused to listen to her, and ran away, and ended up at murder school. 

Willie got into murder school because Lin knows who his mom is, and assumes that Willie is just as cutthroat as she is. he gains a reputation as well. 

also, Willie’s extremely wealthy, and this shows in the way he dresses (preppy jock vibes)

you don’t find out about this backstory for a minute tho bc unlike Albert Kim and the Russo Brothers, I can wait until the right opportunity presents itself for a backstory drop. 

ok anyway back to what I was saying earlier

they have to seek revenge on somebody. Marcus asks Willie if there’s anybody he wants revenge on, and Willie very sincerely says no. Marcus scoffs at him and says he’s clearly had a very easy life, to which Willie replies, “Well, who do you want revenge on?” 

Marcus immediately says, “Rory.” 

So they track Rory down, and since Marcus hasn’t actually killed anybody, he hands the weapons over to Willie. Willie frowns and says that he has nothing against this dude he’s never met before, so Marcus should be the one to hurt him. Marcus says that this is a group project and Willie’s got to pull his weight, and they get into an argument

the argument gets loud, and Rory hears them fighting and starts chasing them. 

in the midst of the chase, both of them divulge their secrets to one another. Willie laughs hysterically and says that they deserve each other bc they both lied to get where they are, and now they’re going to die because of it

Rory backs them into a corner, and Marcus uses one of the swords he tried to steal earlier to shank Rory

They throw the body in a dumpster, and after this, they’re friends, and Marcus decides he’ll fit right in at murder school. 

ok so that was only one episode but things to look forward to in the version of Deadly Class that only exists in me and my friend’s heads: Marcus dealing with the emotional and moral fallout of his first murder, Willie trying to figure out what it means to be a pacifist in a world so hellbent on doing violence towards him, Saya being mean to everyone except Maria, Maria convincing Saya to relax and have fun, the gang bonding in a Breakfast Club style situation adapted for murder school and making a joke about how this is like the Breakfast Club because it’s the 80s and the movie just came out, Saya and Maria falling in lesbians, Marcus and Saya being depressing edgelord besties, Billy being gay and fighting his abusive father, Marcus and Billy being uncool weirdo bffs, Willie and Maria rolling their eyes at Marcus and Saya’s cynicism, Billy coming out to Marcus and talking about his experiences being gay, which makes Marcus think “hang on, why do I relate to that?”, Willie seeing Marcus make a sarcastic comment about kissing a guy and having a crisis, Marcus and Willie falling in love, the gang taking a road trip to Vegas to murder Billy’s dad and giving Billy a gnc thrift store makeover on the way, and eventually the gang murdering the shit out of Ronald Reagan. 

[spynotebook]

I’ve been a huge fan of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix comedy, Master of None, since its first season. However, if you’ve inhaled Season 2 like I have, you already know that this installment of Dev Shah’s story takes things up to a whole new level. What’s more, it’s exactly the kind of show that can contribute to saving the world. Or, at least saving television. **SPOILERS AHOY IF YOU’VE NOT YET WATCHED MASTER OF NONE S2**

After his break-up at the end of Season 1, Dev is single and has a life-changing time studying pasta making in Modena, Italy for several months. As was the case in Season 1, we walk with Dev (Aziz Ansari) as he tries to find love, but we’re also with him as he garners some greater success in his career. However, it’s the kind of success that’s financially lucrative, but doesn’t necessarily feed his soul. At the end of the day Dev, like all of us, wants to feel like a part of something bigger than himself in order to find fulfillment.

However, even more than was already the case in Season 1, it’s not just about Dev finding fulfillment. Ansari seems to be trying to give voice to the wants and needs of a diverse swath of New York characters. In addition to the diversity of voices, Master of None is also a platform for diverse ideas: about relationships, gender, sex, career, and aging.

Through the prism of this diversity, the show explores the very millennial fear of FOMO (fear of missing out) and how many thirty-somethings these days are struggling with needing to choose between emotional and financial fulfillment/success, and figuring out whether they’re making the right choices for their lives.

Here are five specific ways in which Master of None is single-handedly fixing television (and quite possibly making the world a better place in the process):

It’s a Dude-Focused Unapologetic Rom-Com

Usually, we’re all about having female-led projects all up in this piece. However, when it comes to media’s role in subverting gender roles, it’s equally important that there be alternative versions of male stories that don’t buy into the cookie cutter shoot-em-up-punch-it-in-the-face destruction narrative men are constantly fed. Master of None being a genuine romantic comedy from a male perspective is hugely important. People are doing a lot of comparing to Woody Allen (ugh), but in his projects, or a zom-rom-com like Shaun of the Dead, the films feel like they’re apologizing for being romantic comedies. They’re very much male movies.

This isn’t to say that Dev isn’t “acting male enough,” but the show makes no apologies for stereotypically “feminine” qualities. It is unapologetically sweet, and kind, and the characters (both male and female) are genuine and earnest when talking about their emotions.

It Shows a Kind of Male Friendship We’re Not Used to Seeing on TV

When men are friends, they totally don’t sit around talking about their feelings. In fact, if we’re to believe what we see in media, men generally just grunt at each other and never talk about emotions at all. When they do talk about feelings, they make jokes about them, lest anyone think they’re actually talking about their feelings. All of that is true, right?

Dev and Arnold on Master of None shows us something else. These guys are plenty funny and snarky with each other, but it has nothing to do with covering up or apologizing for their emotional lives. When they’re sad or confused, they’re sad or confused, and they go to each other to figure stuff out.

When Arnold bemoans his ex getting married to someone who looks very much like him, Dev listens patiently and tries to make him feel better, then gently points out that Arnold has been on a dating app called “Hi Cuties” swiping on a full stable of women he’s been dating. He knows his friend, and he knows that as much as Arnold is lamenting the loss of this particular girl, he’s not actually looking to settle down just yet.

As Dev confronts his emerging feelings for Francesca, Arnold is an encouraging bud, but he also keeps it real and lets Dev know when he should pull back, or stop thinking about it.

And then there’s the unabashed fun they have together: singing theme songs about their favorite things, role-playing confessions of romantic feelings, Dev leaping into Arnold’s arms when he sees him after a long time away in Italy…these two are not shy about expressing how happy they make each other, and that’s amazing to watch.

It Actually Portrays New York City As the Diverse Place It Is

So many TV shows are set in New York City, and as a native New Yorker, I always find myself getting pissed off by how white the shows often are. Granted, it’s very true that people tend to congregate and form friendships with people who are like them. Girls, for example, didn’t bother me because the four protagonists were white. There are plenty of all-white small groups of friends in New York. What bothered me was that damn near everyone else around them was white, too! I was like, “What New York are YOU living in?”

Meanwhile, Master of None does two things really well. First, it portrays Dev as having the mixed and inclusive friendships I experienced in New York. He has a “token white friend” in Arnold, a Korean friend in Brian, and his childhood bestie, Denise, who is a black lesbian. He also has Indian friends with whom he can commiserate. Dev doesn’t hang with one type of person. He regularly interacts with people from all over the racial and ethnic spectrum, because that’s how you do in New York.

Second, it portrays the wider diversity of the city. When Dev dates, he also dates all over the racial and ethnic spectrum. Season 2 found him dating and pursuing white women, black women, Indian women, etc. And then there’s the brilliance of Episode 6 of the season, “New York, I Love You.”

In this episode, we stray away from Dev and his friends and instead follow a diverse swath of random New Yorkers living their lives. There’s the Latino doorman who’s privy to way too many resident secrets. There’s the deaf couple in a store signing “loudly” to each other about their sex life to the point where the mother of a child who speaks ASL comes up to them to reprimand them for saying “vagina” so often (this segment had absolutely no sound, which was an added touch of brilliance). There was the African cab driver who sleeps in bunk beds in an apartment with four or five other dudes and they all go out for a night of clubbing and end up meeting a group of pretty women and hanging out all night after-hours at a fast food restaurant.

Master of None doesn’t give a crap about making New York “palatable for middle America” by whitening it up, or only showing an affluent New York. It shows New York as it is. I moved out to L.A. five years ago, and I’ve come to love it here, but Master of None makes me remember all the great things I loved about my hometown.

Master of None Zooms In on People and Things That Don’t Normally Get Attention

Rather than devote the entire 10-episode season to Dev’s search for love, Ansari chose to have standalone episodes that dig deeply into groups and situations that don’t normally get media attention. In addition to the aforementioned “New York, I Love You,” there was also the third episode of the season, “Religion,” which was entirely devoted to Dev and his family’s relationship with Islam as they are visited by devout relatives, and Dev’s dad demands that they put on a show of how devout they are while the fam is in town. Meanwhile, Dev’s young cousin wants to try pork for the first time. Dev lets him, and his cousin lets loose, wanting to go to a food festival and eat all the pork things. In the end, Dev must confess to his relatives that he’s not as devout as all that. At first, his mother is upset, not because she’s particularly devout herself, but because she sees Dev’s lack of interest in Islam as a failure in her parenting. Dev meets her halfway, and starts thumbing through the Q’uran. It’s a beautiful look at average Muslims engaging, or not engaging, in prayer and tradition, and navigating all of that in a way that I’m sure people from every religious tradition navigate those things. In fact, the episode starts with a series of children of all faiths being dragged to houses of worship against their will.

The masterpiece of the season was the episode “Thanksgiving,” which we’ve already talked a lot about. Here, we see a coming out experience for a woman of color, a rarity when so much gay media is devoted to the coming out stories of skinny, white men. An amazing performance by guest star Angela Bassett as Denise’s mom anchored a beautiful telling of Denise coming into her own as a queer woman. Over a series of Thanksgivings from the 1990s through todayin which Dev takes part every year, Denise comes into her own, eschewing dresses for baggy pants and baseball caps, realizing that her interest in hip-hop videos and Jennifer Aniston have more to do with her interest in women than it does with either hip-hop or Friends, and she eventually comes out to her mother and starts bringing girls home. Her mother, meanwhile, has that all-too-familiar push-pull of shock, and fear. Wanting her daughter to be happy, but also being afraid for what might happen to her. In the end, Denise and her mom end up solid when her mom sees her with a woman that’s actually good for her, and who actually makes her happy. And who doesn’t have a really obscene Instagram handle.

These two episodes in particular shine a spotlight on groups that deserve a spotlight, but rarely get one.

Let’s Hear It For Women and Older People!

One of the things I love about the character of Dev Shah is that he genuinely cares about women as people, and he’s not a person who’s dismissive of his elders. These are two things that don’t need one-off episodes at this point, because they’re baked into the DNA of the show.

One of the main storylines this season had to do with Dev’s latest gig hosting a show called Clash of the Cupcakes, which is Executive Produced by an Anthony Bourdain-inspired chef and TV personality named “Chef Jeff” Pastore (played brilliantly by Bobby Cannavale), who becomes a good friend of Dev’s, and gives him great opportunities, and who seems like a really cool, down-to-Earth dude…until it emerges that he’s all about sexual harassment. Dev has become friends with a female make-up artist on the show he ends up doing with Chef Jeff, and when she suddenly leaves the job, he finds her and asks her where she’s been. She tells him that Chef Jeff started getting really inappropriate with her, and that she wasn’t the first or the last.

Rather than not believing her and “siding” with his friend, he immediately gets uncomfortable and suspects that she’s telling the truth. It’s a small thing, but in a world where real-life women have trouble getting actual law enforcement to believe them about sexual harassment and assault, it’s important.

And then there’s Dev’s parents and Brian’s dad. Dev’s parents (played by Ansari’s real-life parents) were a standout in Season 1, and they are equally important to Season 2. In both “Religion” and in the episode “Door #3,” Dev’s dad plays an important role in teaching Dev the importance of devoting yourself to the things and people you love, even if it means doing things that are difficult (like pretending to be religious sometimes, or doing a TV show that isn’t exactly art). Dev’s mother is hard on him, but always lets him know that she’s proud of him and that she respects him as a person. Both parents are fully fleshed-out characters who are unique in the TV landscape.

Brian’s dad got a dating storyline this season and had to choose between two women he was seeing. The wonderful thing is that Brian talked to his dad about it enthusiastically. There wasn’t any sarcasm or eye-rolling involved, but rather, genuine interest and love. At first, Brian’s dad tried to have an open relationship with the two of them, which is certainly not conventional to portray on a TV show (especially in a media landscape that likes to pretend that older people don’t exist period, let alone have love lives), and then when they’re not into that, he at least gets to have a dog (which he may or may not have stolen from one of them).

Master of None treats all people with respect, and pays them the respect of giving their voices a platform. I desperately wish that more television shows would follow Master of None‘s example. This show proves that one isn’t sacrificing “being universal” when one chooses to be inclusive and culturally-specific. In fact, it’s being specific when it comes to race, ethnicity, body type, religion, ability, age, or class that allows a show to speak to more people.

Thank you, Netflix. And thank you, Aziz Ansari. Your world and media-saving efforts are appreciated.

(image: Netflix)

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