In the fourth episode of The Acolyte, Osha (Amandla Stenberg) meets some new Jedi and Jedi-affiliated friends. One of them is a small, otterlike creature named Bazil. Bazil and Pip, Osha’s fussy robot companion, keep sniffing and beeping at each other, interrupting the mission briefing Osha is trying to follow. After, Osha approaches Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) for an awkward exchange all too familiar to queer people watching television in the last few years:
Osha: Who is that?
Jecki Lon: That’s Bazil.
Osha: Is he [dramatic pause]… or they… with us?”
This is the latest example of what I’m going to call the Globby problem, expertly parodied on The Other Two: well-meaning writers and showrunners — some of them queer themselves — trying to awkwardly insert nonbinary or genderqueer representation into their show, usually through the show’s requisite “weirdo” character. The result is, instead, often pretty othering.
In The Acolyte, Osha only asks about Bazil’s pronouns, not those of any of the other people she meets. This reveals more about Osha than I think The Acolyte’s writers were intending; the exchange implies she is actively othering Bazil and assuming he (yes, it is later revealed Bazil uses he/him pronouns, which makes all of this even sillier) must be gender-variant because he looks odd to her.
I get that the effort is to remind the viewer that not everyone subscribes to a binary of gender expression, and Osha is trying to be open-minded about that. To be clear, I’m not asking for every character to ask every other character about their pronouns when they first meet. That would be extremely boring television! It’s very easy to establish characters’ pronouns by having other characters use those pronouns when speaking about them. This happens all the time. (“This is Bazil, they’ll be helping us on the ground” is the easiest thing in the world to put into a conversation, in a world where Bazil uses they/them pronouns.) But The Acolyte going out of its way to make a show of only asking about the character who looks the most different is quite weird (and unfortunately makes Osha kind of look like a dick). The end result is that no one is happy — toxic Star Wars fans are mad for the usual bigoted reasons, and I’m mad because it’s so thoughtless.
Because it’s not just The Acolyte! Even Star Trek: Discovery, a show that largely had thoughtful and committed queer representation and characters, stumbled with this during its recently aired final season. As Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) approaches an alien planet, she turns to a crewmate and marvels, full of awe, at how the planet has three genders. Except Captain Burnham’s ship, the Discovery, has (at least) three genders represented on board!!! Within that context, that makes Captain Burnham sound like a captain who, at the very best, forgot she has a nonbinary crew member on board, and at worst doesn’t respect that crew member’s gender identity. There is not a chance that was the intended effect of the Discovery writers room, but that’s the only way to read that line within the context of the show.
These examples clearly seem to be the result of showrunners and writers who mean well and want to be inclusive, but stumble along the way. It ends up othering nonbinary and genderqueer people even more when you consider which characters get placed in that position, and when other characters ask about pronouns. At the end of the day, while broader representation of more genders is good, making a show of asking for pronouns in your television show is not necessarily a net positive. When characters are only doing so to characters who are markedly, visibly different — even straight-up animals, in Bazil’s case — it’s weird! It doesn’t feel like an honest attempt at accurately reflecting gender and its many different variations and contexts, but instead like they’re thinking of representation as a checklist that can be achieved through language alone.
In the case of The Acolyte, it feels like at best an empty gesture and empty pandering toward queer fans, and at worst Disney weaponizing the most toxic fans in the Star Wars fan base to drive conversation by making sure they’re predictably mad about nothing. Personally, I don’t fully buy that latter theory, but I think it is notable that if Disney wanted to design empty gestures that got toxic fans mad without actually being transgressive in any meaningful way, it would look exactly like this scene in The Acolyte.
On the positive side of things, the recent Doctor Who episode “Rogue” is a good example of how to do this naturally. While talking about a former love, Rogue (Jonathan Groff) just says “I lost them” without it being some big performative gesture that he would deign to use an “unconventional” singular pronoun. And hey — maybe the person he was talking about doesn’t use they/them pronouns, and Rogue just didn’t want to be too specific. The important thing is, he said it like a person, not like he just won a GLAAD award for allyship. More shows that want to dip into broader gender representation should give that a shot.
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