#this makes it sound like I hated the asexuality and the sapphic relationship - I didn't hate either I just didn't love them lol

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Song of the Huntress

historical fantasy set in 8th century Britain

follows three characters:

a woman who has spent centuries leading the wild hunt & reaping souls after being tricked into it, who disguises herself as a human to enter the kingdom

the queen of Wessex who never lives up to the demands of the court, despite leading their people in battle - and after a battlefield defeat they turn against her

and her husband, the king, deals with magic and political upheaval as his brother tries to usurp him and conflict arises between new and old religions

bi woman MC, lesbian MC, ace man MC

[archduchessofnowhere]

in the empress (2022), are the audience led to believe that archduchess sophie is possible bisexual? (re: watching her servant in an intimate moment, and then countness esterhazy trying to make a move on her (?) and idk if it was in my mind but it seemed as if it might have happened before???) sorry i just confused why they put those scenes in heh unless they were hinting at something

Hello anon! This is something that I was going to address in my review, but since you asked I'll just talk about it here: the queercoding of The Empress' female characters, and how I didn't like it at all.

As you mentioned, throughout the season there are hints that there's something going on between Archduchess Sophie and Countess Esterházy. Which was surely a choice. First of all, as far as I'm aware, Sophie wasn't attracted to women; of course we can’t never know for sure, especially since the way we understand sexuallity today it’s completely different to how it was understood in the 19th century also am I really meant to believe that King Max’s ten children were all straight? That doesn’t sound realistic. But to include this on the show was entirely a choice from the writer’s department.

Which leads me to one of the main reasons why I didn’t like this choice: we are again queercoding the villains. Sophie and Esterházy are the show’s main antagonist and they purposefully made Elisabeth’s life hell in order to “break her ''. Now, I do not think that LGBT+ characters should only be good, we deserve to have as much variety in queer characters as there is with cis straight characters. But if your only queer female characters are villains (and villains this one dimensional on top on that), I will raise an eyebrow and go "Really? This is what you're doing?".

Elisabeth, our Cool Not Like The Other Girls protagonist, gets her historical counterpart’s possible asexuality completely erased, meanwhile the cartoonishly evil villains Sophie and Esterházy, whose historical counterparts seem to have been straight, are queercoded in the most problematic way. We have that scene of Esterházy making a move on Sophie, and we also have the scene of Sophie watching the servant woman (did they mention her name? I can’t recall) having sex. With her son.

I hate this show.

The scene of Sophie watching the woman have sex with Franz Josef is weird and gross, and it’s filmed in a way to feel like that. I talked about this with someone the other day, about how this kind of voyeuristic scenes (that usually have an incestous undertone) are used to portray a character as morally corrupt in period dramas. And if I’m supposed to get from that scene that she’s into women… yikesss. And the scene of Esterházy could be read as you say, that she’s making a move because it happened before, but it could also be read as the harmful stereotype of the predatory lesbian that tries to “corrupt” the straight woman, since whether Sophie corresponds Esterházy’s affections or not is never clear. Double yikes.

And the worst part is that, like almost every plot point in this show, it goes nowhere! Sophie and Esterházy’s relationship is never fully explored, and by the end of the season it doesn’t matter because Sophie mercilessly dismissed her. Representation wins! The only explicitly sapphic character in the show ends up crying on her knees while the woman she seems to be in love with doesn’t even spare her a glance.

Speaking of queer characters, we also have the young Archduke Ludwig Viktor (it was him! rare moment of me not clowning), who in real life was as openly gay as his privilege allowed him to, and also crossdressed. He isn’t around much this season, but in the last episode we see him crossdressing (for the first time?), so if the series gets a season 2, they’ll probably explore his sexuallity and gender in a subplot. I really, really hope it receives a better treatment than whatever they tried to do with Sophie and Esterházy this season.

So are we, the audiance, led to believe that Sophie is bi? Who knows! The show isn't well writen so we can never get across what was the intent of those scenes, other than "queercoding the villains because yes".