In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on two great queer shows, GENTLEMAN JACK and EUPHORIA.
EUPHORIA did two standalone episodes during the pandemic. In the second, “Fuck Anyone Who's Not a Sea Blob” (such a great title) we’re with Jules as she tells a shrink why it is she decided to get on a train and abandon her dad and the girl who loves her.
At first it’s kind of what we would expect – all the terrible things she’s been through, all the people and events that make her afraid or make her hate herself adding up.
But then the show reveals things that went on during the season that we never knew about. Most shockingly, we find out her mother showed up clean during the season and tried to make amends. Jules initially rejected her, then with her father's help agreed to try, only to find her mother had left again. A week later she relapsed, a fact Jules found out the night of the Halloween party where in season we watched her get really crazy.
There's also the reveal that the whole season Jules was actually falling in love with Rue, too. We get the famous moment when Rue kisses her and runs away from her point of view, how much she had been wanting that moment and how bad she felt about freezing up in it.
Retcons can so easily function as just a narrative cheat to fix a problem. We painted ourselves into a corner, and so now we insert the story-version of a backdoor through which to escape.
But in the case of EUPHORIA inserting major new information works both because Jules has been such a private and enigmatic character, and because the series is so deeply embedded in Rue's point of view. In a sense the season is giving us that experience of falling in love, how you can never really know what the one you love is feeling. Our partners are always in part a mystery to us.
So rather than a fix, adding these new scenes in "Sea Blob" plays like a chance to finally see things on Jules' terms, free from Rue's POV. It works because it's something the show has denied us thus far, and that consequently we've been waiting for.
I also think it poses an interesting experiment for us as writers. Every character we write has so much of their life happening off screen.
A lot of that is extraneous. But maybe not all of it.
From time to time we might step back and ask the question, What are the other parts of this character's life? What else is going on with them? What am I not seeing?
You never know where you might find a new vein of story waiting to be told...
NEXT WEEK: DOOM PATROL'S QUEER SUPER HERO STORIES
