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I've been watching season one of X-files (also Xena. At this rate I'll get into Battlestar around 2020) It's been pretty good.
But when I saw the title of this episode I thought "Oh man, this is not going to be good". And certainly the episode could be read as playing into trans panic and the whole "bisexual men will kill you with their deadly sex" AIDS thing (especially with this being from 93) On the plus side the gender-ambiguous character's gender-ambiguity wasn't played up as being extra-specially scary or weird, they were scary because they went around killing people, and the plot was actually kind of interesting (what we saw of it, a lot wasn't really explained), on the downside it was still "gender ambiguous character kills people with sex" which..yeah.
I don't know if anyone reading this will REMEMBER this episode but hey :)
Anyway, I had some not very deep spoilery thoughts:
( WARNING: maybe somewhat triggering? SPOILERS: For Gender Bender and Eve )The main reason I avoided X-files at the time was that I was imaging Mulder being all smug and annoying and fey and always right, the way spiritual types-vs-skeptics tend to be in "Everything's real!" fictional settings. But he has a sense of humour about his own wierdness, and Scully is awesome and not stupidly skeptical when it makes no sense to be. And the episode before this Mulder was the skeptic because he just really disliked the psychic, huzzah.
As much as I'm enjoying the cool female characters in this and Xena it's a bit depressing that tv reached that in the 90s and still sucks overall. Every time I hit something in X-files that reminds me of Supernatural I keep expecting the women characters to die or be evil and they (mostly) don't and it's awesome. (Apologies to my Supernatural fan friends, I realise the show has a lot of unique things going for it, but for me and my tastes X-files is "Like Supernatural, but good". The fact I prefer sf to fantasy and het to incestuous slash probably helps)
I don't know, maybe the fact it's so old means I'm willing to cut it more slack.
But when I saw the title of this episode I thought "Oh man, this is not going to be good". And certainly the episode could be read as playing into trans panic and the whole "bisexual men will kill you with their deadly sex" AIDS thing (especially with this being from 93) On the plus side the gender-ambiguous character's gender-ambiguity wasn't played up as being extra-specially scary or weird, they were scary because they went around killing people, and the plot was actually kind of interesting (what we saw of it, a lot wasn't really explained), on the downside it was still "gender ambiguous character kills people with sex" which..yeah.
I don't know if anyone reading this will REMEMBER this episode but hey :)
Anyway, I had some not very deep spoilery thoughts:
( WARNING: maybe somewhat triggering? SPOILERS: For Gender Bender and Eve )The main reason I avoided X-files at the time was that I was imaging Mulder being all smug and annoying and fey and always right, the way spiritual types-vs-skeptics tend to be in "Everything's real!" fictional settings. But he has a sense of humour about his own wierdness, and Scully is awesome and not stupidly skeptical when it makes no sense to be. And the episode before this Mulder was the skeptic because he just really disliked the psychic, huzzah.
As much as I'm enjoying the cool female characters in this and Xena it's a bit depressing that tv reached that in the 90s and still sucks overall. Every time I hit something in X-files that reminds me of Supernatural I keep expecting the women characters to die or be evil and they (mostly) don't and it's awesome. (Apologies to my Supernatural fan friends, I realise the show has a lot of unique things going for it, but for me and my tastes X-files is "Like Supernatural, but good". The fact I prefer sf to fantasy and het to incestuous slash probably helps)
I don't know, maybe the fact it's so old means I'm willing to cut it more slack.
