Oh yeah! I remember now. It was something about how decadent queerness is historically positioned against the foils of decisive masculinity and how, with time, that’s stopped being quite so provocative (maybe just to me?) (and the villaintagonist that is Richard is now much more understandable and sympathetic, possibly because we can simply label him now as a “cunty little maximalist” and Get Him as a character.) the subversive spookiness of the twink in torment is, I think, lessened by time and context. As time passes Richard2Shakespeare will become just a little guy. All of the framing around him being Terribly Out Of Touch Because Look At Him He’s Obviously Too Squeamish and Gay will , I think, eventually fall apart.
Much like how the sitcom “Frasier” in the 1990s relied on a lot of unfunny jokes about masculinity that sound like absolutely dogshit takes today. A huge part of the mechanic of Frasier is that there are two pretentious “metrosexual” brothers and their dad is working class. Instead of examining their pretentiousness, which might have held up, most of the jokes are just about the brothers being a bit camp for straight men - according to the TV standards of the 1990s - where camp femminess involved things like “men knowing what an avocado is.” There are jokes in Frasier that simply consist of the brothers ordering a latte. Or cooking food. Or commenting on the taste of wine. Or having a mildly nerdy hobby. Or owning their own shampoo instead of washing their hair with the same bottle of body wash. Some of the jokes are just about having interests that were similar to European men of the same time. Because the intervening generations have eroded the expectations that American masculinity consists entirely of denying femininity/gayness, over time these jokes have become weirdly isolated, and the framing seems like it’s outright mean. Like ok it’s actually fine if a guy wants to pretentiously order a latte in a coffee shop, it’s okay for men to eat crepes; why are you trying to set this stuff up as shorthand for being impossibly bourgeois and out of touch and untrustworthily campy and cosmopolitan it’s a latte? Next time there’s an argument about gender with someone who was around in the 90s can you please get them to explain what “metrosexuals” was all about. fellas is it gay to get coffee.
Thus to really raw out the character of Richard2Shakespeare again, really representing him as an absolute ANNOYANCE and MENACE, I wonder if he should just be a nasty little nepo baby. Like a little Tory. Little Midwest republican boy in chinos. Surround him by gay people and make him straight.
Like I love him as the over the top, put-gold-nail-polish-on-DT maximalist. I love that this character exists for the purpose of gnawing on the scenery and having fun. But what I’m saying here is that we could love him for that possibly too much (god forbid girls do anything!!)
and richard2 still has provocative things to say about monarchy; consuming and being consumed through monarchy, the tragedy of how monarchy destroys character. Like he didn’t fail because of being a distracted little gay freak. He failed because kingship ate his brain. I don’t know
