- Oh, hello.
I didn't see you there.
I've just got back from watching Captain Marvel,
which was a great film, however,
I have some thoughts, particularly about how gay it was,
and also, how it refused to acknowledge how gay it was,
and normally, when I think that about a film,
I go back, I calm myself, I do some research,
I script a video, I film, I edit.
(clapping) Not tonight.
Tonight, I have thought that couldn't be contained
within an A4 page, or within my brain.
So, you know what?
We're getting up.
This is a walking round.
First of all, we're gonna start with some facts.
Fact number one: Carol and Maria are in a relationship.
They are raising a child together.
That is fact number one, fight me.
So here's the thing.
A lot of people have been talking about this movie
as queer-coding.
Queer-coding is not quite what it is.
I will acknowledge you're right,
there is some queer-coding in this movie.
So queer-coding is the idea
that you code characters with attributes stereotypical
to a queer, to queerness, I guess.
And I would acknowledge the fact that she does,
Carol does steal a leather jacket and a motorcycle,
which is real gay.
However, what I think we have a case of here,
more than queer-coding, is romance-coding, right?
Romantic coding, that goes beyond,
it transcends sexuality, it transcends gender.
Romance coding is outside of gender and sexuality.
If something is coded as romantic,
it doesn't matter what gender you are,
because it is still coded as romantic,
and that is how Carol and Maria are coded.
Fact number two: this adds a caveat to fact number one,
'cause fact number one is not confirmed explicitly
in the movie, but it's pretty damn clear
in the subtext, in the implied text, it's all there.
What evidence do I have for that?
Let me tell you.
Two-A.
(clears throat)
Yes, we've got another list,
we're breaking down the points here.
The next-of-kin slash personal effects element.
So here's the thing.
Carol is presumed dead.
She's crashed, as far as anyone knows, crashed the plane,
even her dogtags have been destroyed.
But where do they send the remaining piece of the dogtag?
Hmm, to Maria, of course, her next-of-kin.
Not to her father, not to her family, but to Maria!
Okay?
Two-B: amnesia storyline.
So here's the thing about amnesia storylines in films.
Normally the idea is that you get your memory jogged back
and put back inside your head,
because you go and search out something
that you can't bear to be without,
something that a fundamental part of yourself
is yearning for, like you have no memories,
and in a lot of cases, philosophically,
the idea of like, you have no self,
and yet you are still striving, yearning, burning
to get towards that thing that means the most to you.
What is that thing, I ask you?
Why, it's Maria, and the child
they have been raising together.
C: the memories, this ties into this point.
The memories, the amount of memories that Carol has
with Maria, having fun together, laughing together,
flying together, being in the Air Force together,
together, together, together, as a family,
as a couple, hmm?
Point D: Auntie Carol.
I feel like this needs to be talked about again.
They are raising a child together.
I feel like we need to sit with that for a second.
And think about how that is quintessentially
the most relationship-code-y thing to happen.
And E: and this, I think, is possibly the most persuasive,
so we're gonna have to go into the other room.
Come, come, come, come, come.
Okay, so, here's the thing.
Point E: (drops papers) the motherfucking Skrull.
So.
Here is the situation, you've got Skrull-man number one.
Skrull-man number one, he's very sad, he's like,
"Oh, no, I'm so sad!
"You have to take me to the coordinates
"so I can get the Tesseract!"
And then, surprise, they're not coordinates, it's in orbit.
Double surprise, it's not the Tesseract he wants,
it's this, ooh!
Lady Skrull, and this,
Baby Skrull, okay?
'Cause it turns out, ooh, he's got a family, right?
Or are you wrong?
Because, I mean, I'm very hyped up on gay ire right now,
but I do not remember in this scene him saying,
"Hello wife, hello child."
It was just implied, there was an implied relationship
that happened here, when they were reunited.
(clears throat)
Keep this in mind.
So over here, we have Carol.
She's sad 'cause she don't remember anything.
And suddenly, she's fighting, she's like,
"Oh, well, you know, I'm trying to get somewhere.
"I wonder what could it be about?
"Probably not about my family."
But surprise, here she meets her funky little friend,
it's Maria, right?
And the little baby girl who lives there as well.
Okay, can you see the parallels here?
Right?
So it's like, oh no, here is someone who I'm coming back to,
returning to, who I was fighting to get back to,
and it's implied that we're a family unit.
Why?
Because we are coded as a man and coded as a woman.
Here we have two women,
I am fighting to get back to you,
I literally haven't seen you in six years,
and I remember you even after having stuff
sucked out of my brain,
and being made not to remember things by alien powers.
You are the person I come back to,
you and the child we have been raising together.
Right?
This to me, this is absolute proof of the idea,
that both of these situations are so similar
and so romantic-coded, but you will have thought
automatically without being told,
that this was a romantic family relationship,
and that this was a child that they were raising together,
and therefore it made them a legitimate family,
and this you're apparently made to think that
they're just gal pals having friends, being fun,
kind of like this child, I don't know what it's doing,
it's just, it's apparently attached to this woman,
and has no interest in this woman, who is also raising her.
Can you see how ridiculous this double standard is?
Okay?
This is my, the proof.
So, we're gonna go a little bit on a tangent here
and talk about Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Because I've also heard,
you know what, we're done with this,
we're done with this wall, we're going back.
Here's the thing, Don't Ask Don't Tell.
This was put in place in the 90s, right?
So Don't Ask Don't Tell was basically the idea that
you can be gay in the military, but like,
don't tell anyone about it or you will get fired.
So this piece of legislation has led to
some people on the internet that I have seen being like,
"Well, even if Carol and Maria were in a relationship,
"can you really expect the filmmakers to talk about it,
"when it's set in the time of Don't Ask and Don't Tell?"
And I say, well shittery to that, sir.
Here is why.
The audience can know things about characters
that they wouldn't tell people in public, right?
We can have a private scene between these two women
who don't enact Don't Ask Don't Tell
in their own goddamn bedroom, right?
We can have that and the audience can see it,
because the only secrets we are going to be keeping
from the audience are secrets that we want to reveal
or which are not relevant to the plot.
And here's the thing.
It is entirely relevant to the plot
that Carol and Maria might have been a couple, right?
In the same way that we have this Skrull couple over here.
Do I need to take you back to the incredible drawing
that I just did?
Right?
Can you imagine the emotional impact
of having Maria say to Carol, not just that I missed you
over these six years, but that I had to mourn you
and nobody could know why I was mourning you.
That they would all think you were my kind of co-pilot,
that you were my best friend,
but I wouldn't be able to tell anyone
that it was because you were my partner,
because I would still lose my job.
Can you fucking imagine the incredible pathos,
the incredible heartbreak that that would have brought,
and it was so implicit within the text.
It was so there.
If Carol had been a man, this would not be a question.
If it had been a man who lost his memories,
found his way back to the woman and child
that he had helped raise, it would not even be a question
that they were going to get together.
But because it is two women,
apparently this is beyond the realms of possibility.
I also say it's important to be explicit about this,
'cause I get it.
Some people might look at the Skrull thing and be like,
"Ooh, well in the Skrull thing, if you're saying
"that they didn't explicitly say that they were together,
"then are you saying it's a double standard
"that we're explicitly going to have to talk about
"the lesbians?"
Yes, yes we are explicitly gonna have to talk
about the lesbians, because otherwise,
no one would know they're there.
They'd be in the dark, they'd be hiding.
They'd be, um, which is
(closes door)
Because we live in a heteronormative world, right?
So everyone is assumed to be straight.
So if we don't explicitly say that people are LGBT,
nobody knows it's there, okay?
And here's the thing.
The MCU (sighs) has so many goddamn films.
I don't even know how many films they have right now.
I could count them,
can't even count them with my shoes on, right?
'Cause there's so many of them,
too many for my little digits.
And none of them, none of them,
have an explicitly LGBT character in it.
None of them.
Just think about that for a second.
The idea that you have this entire subsection of people,
this entire identity, that we just haven't seen
in one of the most successful franchises in film history.
Just like, just not there at all.
And then what we're given is like, Valkyrie,
who is a character who, by the way,
is real queer in the comics,
and that they filmed a scene for, for that movie,
in which it would have been massively implied
that she was queer as well, because I think
it was meant to be a woman coming out of her bedroom.
And yet, they didn't include it in the movie
because apparently it wasn't relevant.
Thrilling.
So, what we have here is an opportunity to do something
with a storyline where it's already built into the story,
they don't have to add anything to the storyline.
It is already there and yet, they do not.
And here's the thing I'm really worried about, all right?
We're gonna have Endgame next,
and I am so worried that Maria is just gonna be left
relegated to the shadows, to this film.
It's gonna be treated as a standalone,
she's gonna come back, she's never gonna look for Maria,
she's never gonna look for her daughter,
it's gonna be brushed under the rug,
completely forgotten about, or if it isn't,
it's going to be absolutely treated like it was a,
(singing) gal pal friendship aren't we great,
we were women in the Air Force together!
Which is gonna really annoy me, basically.
And we only have a couple of weeks until Endgame comes out,
so I've a couple of weeks to live,
in like flat hope, before it just crashes
like Carol did when she lost her goddamn memories!
(sighs)
So here's what I want to say.
Ahem, if anyone from the MCU is watching this.
Make it gay, you goddamn cowards.
Over and out.
(sighs heavily)
That was the end, that was the whole thing.
That was a rant crave, thank you very much for your service.
- [Cameraman] (chuckles) That's all right.
- Um.
- [Cameraman] I dunno, man, I quite liked that film.
- I'm so hot, this is.
- [Cameraman] That was the most theatrical video
you've ever done.
- (laughs) I'm like, did I even say,
yeah I guess I said all the things I needed to say.
Dear Lord.
- [Cameraman] Talking about gayness
in the gayest way possible.
Listen!
- Listen! - Here's some glitter.
- I mean, at the beginning
I wasn't even sitting on the chair properly,
which is quintessential gay culture, so I'm like,
excellent.
- [Cameraman] You know they're gay
if they don't sit properly.
There's a gay! - That is how I,
that is how it works.
I almost sat in the fridge at one point,
which I think is the gayest I've ever been.
Um, yes, so if you have any thoughts about this,
but if you haven't seen the film,
why are you watching this, first of all,
because I will put spoilers in the title.
Second of all, what did you think?
I mean, I posted this on Twitter already
and a lot of people are agreeing with me.
They're definitely gay, right?
I mean I gave you a watertight, look at this,
an absolute watertight explanation for this, okay?
Wow.
Also, just a bit behind-the-scenes stuff,
gonna expose myself, we genuinely did that,
up to that bit, three times, because I kept
calling the aliens by the wrong fucking species name.
So, you're welcome.