“Losing At Chess To A Dog”
(Speaking as a white person but-)
There’s this pattern happening in MCU fandom that feels kinda racist, really. Regarding the handling of queer characters in that franchise, there’s something I keep coming back to – Loki and Eternals came out in the same year. Loki had the main character make one comment about being bi and everyone loved it, but Phastos in Eternals was taken much further, he had a husband! Who he kissed onscreen! And yet he Didn’t Count as a queer character for some reason.
I saw so much of that, he just… Didn’t. I saw a lot of “Well, that character created the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima :/” (he didn’t) but at the same time everyone was falling over themselves about Loki being queer, when Loki has murdered and enslaved countless people on screen and was vaguely compared to Hitler once. (Loki’s more horrifying crimes have been completely forgotten these days. He’s never expressed much regret for them either in canon either IIRC.)
So Phastos Didn’t Count, and his Middle Eastern non-superhero husband Ben also Doesn’t Count it seems, for… What reason?! Both are canonically queer characters and their sexuality had a hell of a lot more time dedicated to it than Loki’s did. (I still wonder about Eternals. That bit of misinformation about Hiroshima spread so far and wide it makes me think it was deliberately being promoted by bad actors. The ‘go woke go broke’ crowd HATED that movie and they got to crow about a victory when it flopped.)
And now – Wakanda Forever isn’t even out yet and people are already making excuses as to why Michaela Coel’s character Aneka isn’t going to Count. There’s an interview with Coel going around where she states her character is going to be queer in the movie and people started posting that meme response “being queerbaited by the MCU is like losing at chess to a dog”…which feels incredibly mean and racist when posted in direct response to something she said: it’s like they’re implying she’s the dog. Plus, why do you think it’s queerbaiting? You HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE! Nobody has yet!
So yeah. I feel like when people started saying “We want queer characters in the MCU” they meant “We want WHITE queer characters in the MCU” because the mental gymnastics people have done to not accept the queer characters of colour has been ridiculous.