La Ron S. Readus
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Love, Victor vs. Love, Simon: How to Make it Better (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2020-06-22 20:00:03 +0000 UTC
Readers, after a lot of inner debate and deliberation, I decided that I was going to sit down, turn on Hulu, and watch season 1 of “Love, Victor.”
/It’s the sequel series to the 2018 coming out and coming of age film “Love, Simon” where Victor and his family move to Simon’s hometown and shares with him via Instagram Messenger his struggles of coming to terms with his sexuality now that Simon and his boyfriend Bram are living in New York, as Victor experiences his own coming out story./
And I’m just gonna get straight to the point, Readers; from what I’ve seen, this show has a LOT of potential
That’s mostly because as it currently sits, season 1 of “Love, Victor” is already a step and a half ahead of “Love, Simon,” but it still has a little ways to go before it can truly be great
The kicker is that it’s actually almost there.
But before I elaborate, I have to explain why it took me forever to decide if I was going to watch this.
And the majority of that is thanks to the movie “Love, Simon.” Both the problems that I had with it, and how I initially came to the realization after watching it that -- at its core -- it wasn’t for me
I’ll admit it. A lot of the problems that I had with Love Simon were personal.
Yes, I expected the main character to be a cis white male.
I also expected him to be part of an upper middle-class family and go to a suburban school that’s common in pretty much every teen drama in film and television from the 90’s and early 2000’s.
Yes, that even includes expecting the characters that are portrayed by actors of color to have no sense of uniqueness or culture behind them at all.
And I get it. The story of “Love, Simon” was modeled to cater to a specific type of person, despite coming out and being comfortable in your queerness being a universal thing.
At the time that I saw “Love, Simon” in theaters, I'd been out publicly for about 3 years and accepted my bisexuality for way longer.
Nevermind never dealing with the experiences that both Simon and Victor faced in their respective stories, it took me watching “Love, Simon” to realize that I’ve grown past the need for coming out stories, and want something MORE.
I want to see queer leads in action films. I want to see an innovator bring well-deserved attention to queer horror just like Jordan Peele did with black horror.
I want to see queer characters in media where they don’t have to explain WHY they’re queer or where the main character treats their queerness as this mystery that needs to be solved; they can just...be queer because they’re queer.
I wanted -- and still want -- normalization of queer characters in stories that the heteronormative population constantly see themselves in and take for granted day after day.
So the combination of “Love, Simon” being a story containing a lot of those predictable things I mentioned earlier, as well as me realizing that I’m not the target demographic that they’re trying to reach due to me growing past the need for stories like them, despite being queer myself, made me not really find my opinions regarding the narrative necessary to share at the time.
/That’s why when I found out that Victor and his family was going to be Latinx in the sequel series, I found myself becoming way more interested in it than I was before./
Especially after learning that the showrunners assembled a writers room of both Latinx and LGBTQ+ writers to better represent a voice of relatability that -- upon retrospect -- I believe Love, Simon didn’t really acknowledge.
It’s still a coming out story -- admittedly enough aimed for a whole new generation of people discovering their queerness. But the fact that it was a coming out story trying to step outside of the white light that “Love, Simon” basked under made me want to see how they handled it.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really that impressed.
Despite making the lead and his family Latinx, at least 70% of any representation and uniqueness regarding Victor’s family, ethnicity, culture and background -- along with other main characters in the show that are portrayed by people of color -- is non-existent in the overall season to the point where they could have been a poor white family instead and literally nothing would have changed regarding the narrative.
/Outside of the family regularly using Spanish around the household, the only episode that really touched on Victor’s culture and heritage was Sweet 16, when his family decided to throw a party and his closed-minded grandparents on his father’s side of the family decided to visit him and his family for his 16th birthday./
Even then, the establishment of him being Latinx was lacking to me.
/It was limited to showing us a specific type of cake and references to the grandparents immigration to the states while complaining about how they don’t like the direction the world is going when Victor confronts them about their homophobia./
Now don’t get me wrong; there are DEFINITELY characters of color in stories and settings like “Love, Victor” that are in positions similar to the ones in this series. Just like there are real life POC who fit the bill of Victor, Mina and Andrew.
ESPECIALLY in the case of Mina and Andrew. Trust me; I’m friends with pure-bred suburban black folk. There is DEFINITELY a disconnect.
But the difference between the characters and their real life counterparts, is that the characters don’t convey that there’s an identity connected to the skin that their actors are in, unless it’s either necessary for the plot of an episode or a quick throwaway joke.
Even then, in the case of the former, it’s the absolute minimum.
And I’m not gonna lie; it makes me a bit irritated.
/Because in my favorite episode of the season, they spend almost a whole episode exploring found family and being comfortable in ones own sense of queerness by having Victor travel to New York to visit Simon, Bram and their queer roommates.
/In the process, he’s shown that there’s no one way to be gay and is exposed to a variant of mainstream queer subculture that’s free of the racist and body-shaming toxicity that plagues it in real life./
But while I saw how much this episode proved that the LGBT writers brought on for the show were listened to and how well the topics were handled in the episode, I couldn’t help but wonder how much more I would’ve appreciated the Sweet 16 episode if Victor’s background and heritage were handled with the same care as his quest for accepting his queerness.
/Despite the attempts the showrunners made for the show to have proper representation in the case of its characters of color, the lack of uniqueness felt more like tokenism at the end of the day./
Does that mean that the show isn’t worth watching? I don’t think so.
Like "Love, Simon" before it, "Love, Victor" isn't my story, nor is its message something that I can benefit from considering how long I’ve been out personally.
But also like “Love, Simon,” just because “Love, Victor” isn’t a story I no longer seek, doesn’t mean others aren’t seeking it.
I also think that with season 2 being imminent, Love, Victor has the room to properly address the concerns I have with the show so that the ones who need to see this story can properly feel seen. Not just with Victor and his family, but with Mina and Andrew as well.
I mean, they’re black, y’all. Just...just let them be black!
After all, part of the reason why the production of “Love, Victor” was fine with moving the show from Disney+ to Hulu is because it allowed them the opportunity to tell more adult stories and cover serious topics when it comes to a teenager coming to grips with his sexuality. So, do it.
Let Victor see the not-so flattering side of the queer community when it comes to racism and bodyshaming.
Let him follow Simon and Bram’s example of the importance of a found family and possibly find other Latinx queers that are both proud of their queerness and their culture.
Let him be both queer AND Latinx, because he’s both.
Just because the show is about the former doesn’t mean the latter should only be grazed upon when it’s convenient to do so.
After all, the reason why the show is about Victor in the first place was because not everyone is like or is as privileged as Simon. So SHOW that.
Right now the amount of LGBT and Latinx writers that helped pen the first season is being held under wraps.
/However, the wording makes it sound like there were plenty more that were tapped on the shoulder to get Victor’s exposure to the queer experience and culture correct than his Puerto Rican and Columbian heritage, and that could more than likely be part of the problem regarding the imbalance I felt in their attempt of making this venture better in regards to representation over tokenism./ Vulture - Love Victor
But the fact of the matter is that they HAVE to get that balance of experiences right if they want this to succeed the way the showrunners initially visualized it.
/That’s going to be what separates Love, Victor from Love, Simon. That’s going to be what makes Love Victor BETTER than Love Simon. At this point, it’s the only way./
But, I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day: If you’ve seen season 1 of “Love, Victor,” write in the comment section what you thought about it.
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, a form of media you believe would be better off in the long run if they just did a better job utilizing true representation as opposed to accidental tokenism.
Whichever one you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
