#good shit good shit
So here’s the thing about Our Flag Means Death, which like 87% of Tumblr I have binged in the past couple of days. Despite all the quotes from David Jenkins and Taika Waititi talking about how it’s a rom-com and how they developed and pitched the whole show around the romance from the start…I still sort of expected it to be like, an action-comedy workplace sitcom about pirating with a prominent queer romantic subplot. Which sounds fun! But that’s not what the show is.
I didn’t really get until I was about halfway through the show that like. The romance is the main plot. The “A” plot if we’re getting TV-writerly about it. The story is a capital-R Romance and they committed to that. The main storyline is about these two dudes realizing they’re in love with each other and trying to find a way to be together, and all the other plot elements, from the other romantic subplots to running afoul of British imperialism, are there to support that emotional story. And that’s so much more surprising and interesting than what I was expecting!
(It’s also, I think, why the show feels particularly, for lack of a better word, fic-like. Because fanfic is often about elevating a romantic storyline to the level of the main plot in a genre and/or universe where it would either be a subplot or nonexistent.)
The rom-com formula is such a common movie storytelling format that most of us can recognize it quite easily by now. But it’s not a common TV format–partially because it has an expected beginning, middle and end, unlike a sitcom structure where the situation is the story engine for generating potentially infinite, relatively self-contained little plots involving the same set of characters. This doesn’t mean sitcom characters can’t have character growth or relationships with each other that change and develop over time, but we’re talking about two fundamentally different story structures here.
And once we understand what kind of story we’re in…
(and here we’re going under the cut because spoilers)
the last few days i’ve been trying, like many, to really put my finger on exactly why ofmd feels so different from any other queer show that’s come out in the last 10 years, and I think this is a big part of it.
because it’s not as if there’s been no queers in media, y'know? we’ve had gay romantic storylines in tv shows before now. maybe they weren’t always great, and there’s been a lot of truly shitty ones, but there ARE good examples to be found. but even the shows we have that are explicitly about the queer experience have never felt like this to me, and I think that’s in part because none of those stories are romances by definition. even in stories like she-ra or steven universe where we have explicitly queer romances that end happily, they weren’t the point of the show. ofmd is maybe the first show (at least I can’t think of any others) in which the queer romance IS the plot, is the point. there would literally not be a show without it, which I don’t think I could say for any other piece of media with queer rep in it. and I don’t think any of us realized how starving we were for that kind of explicit representation until it was in front of us.
