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George Takei, it's possible to hold two differing concepts in your mind and accept both, Star Trek, Sulu
Okay like I’m not gonna lie.
It’s really upsetting to me that George Takei is openly against Sulu being gay in Star Trek Beyond.
Like I respect he’s allowed to have opinions on a character he once played but I 10000% agree with Pegg that introducing a new character and making them gay ran the very likely risk of them becoming The Token Gay. It takes a lot of time to establish a new character and if you introduce a character and the first thing you know about them is that they’re The Gay One then that’s all the average audience is gonna absorb about them. They’re the Gay Character. That’s it.
But when you reveal that a long standing, established character, with a long history, also happens to be gay, like that’s a big fucking deal.
And not only that but this great, well loved character is a POC, and not only is he gay but he’s married, with a child.
That makes a statement. That sends an important message to the audience. Queer people are everywhere. They’re your barista and your taxi driver and your doctor and your lawyer and your neighbor and your friend.
And now they’re the senior helmsman of the USS Enterprise.
I mean, I think a lot of it comes from George Takei being from a different generation. No, really, it applies to gay men too. I run into a lot of older gay male Sherlockians, for instance, who don’t get shipping. They’re perfectly happy with that “close friendship” thing. It’s a very important relationship to them, but they don’t always really get why it would be important for the relationship to be explicitly romantic. The desire for media representation is very generational.
Also, I think Takei is also looking at it like this: if Sulu is gay, and was never shown as being so in TOS, than Takei was playing a closeted character, which he’s not happy about.
That’s how I’m thinking it through, anyways.
That’s pretty much what he’s said, I think. And I get that. He’s not some sort of backwards, regressive guy just because he doesn’t like this particular character interpretation. For him, I’m sure there’s a personal element of pain, since when he was playing Sulu he WAS a closeted gay man, and to think about Sulu also being closeted at that time (and yes, I know about the whole ‘multiverse’ thing that Pegg is talking about), has got to be uncomfortable.
I don’t think there’s really a right or wrong here. Pegg is doing a thing he feels is right, Takei disagrees with how he’s going about it. We can disagree with either side too–doesn’t make anybody the devil.
Honestly, I’m very uncomfortable with how people are responding to Takei. Fifty years late, AU Star Trek is like, “we’ll have a gay character now that it’s fairly safe to do … oh, how about the one with a gay actor?” And the actor in question strongly opposed using his specific character for this—not because he doesn’t want representation to exist in ST, but because he didn’t want it to be Sulu. And he was ignored. Yet somehow ignoring his express wishes is supposed to be a gesture of respect for him, and he’s being blamed for not being grateful or socially aware or whatever enough.
*mutters about how Jim Kirk was already semicanonically bisexual why not him under her breath*
This is really one of those things where I can see both sides, but also feel like this wasn’t handled very well by anyone.
I’m sure the creators and decision-makers were motivated by their personal respect for Takei and his activism and that’s why they wanted the character to be Sulu. Let’s not pretend that the story would be equally interesting if they’d done it to Chekov or Nurse Chapel instead – Sulu was the obvious choice, not for any in-universe reason but because of Takei’s real life. He’s a public figure who brings visibility, publicity, and good will, and the fact that we all associate him with gayness AND Sulu also probably makes it a smaller cognitive leap in the minds of many established fans. It’s blurring the line between the actor and the character.
And if Takei hadn’t been against it there wouldn’t be any problem whatsoever with that, I want to underline.
But he IS against it, and while I almost completely agree with the OP here – I also can’t blame someone who is so associated with the fictional character they portrayed for taking it personally, when the rationale for choosing this character is so tied up in his personal life.
This decision is literally profiting from his personal life, his personal history of pain from being closeted, and all the immense amount of work he’s put into his career and visibility and activism. They’re getting publicity and progressive brownie points for this for the individual creators and they’re also getting potential money for the evil megacorporation behind the whole production.
So I don’t think he should be upset for the sake of the original Sulu, and I don’t agree that making reboot Sulu be in a committed gay relationship makes Takei’s Sulu’s canon sexual and romantic interest in women false or puts him in a closet, nor do I think that it is disrespectful to Roddenberry’s “vision”, I also don’t think Takei is being inappropriate by expressing his feelings. I kind of wish he had handled it differently, but I definitely don’t think he should have sucked it up or refrained from speaking to the press, after the sequence of events he describes.
Nothing is as relevant to this situation as his feelings because this wouldn’t be happening if he hadn’t come out: if they’d chosen Sulu without the context of Takei’s public life and without knowing about his sexuality, the story would be completely different. We’d be talking about the history of gayness in Star Trek and Roddenberry’s progressivism exclusively right now instead of Takei’s thoughts and his personal life.
#important #this is all complex guys #don’t demonize takei for having an emotional reaction to a situation that at it’s core is about him #doesn’t mean you have to be against gay sulu too #just means you have to try and empathize with a fellow human
(preserving @iamgwenslongroadhome‘s tags because those are honestly my thoughts about the situation, too)
Reblogging simply to capture this intelligent, insightful conversation which acknowledged and accepted two differing opinions regarding Sulu in the new Star Trek reboot.
whatdoyoumeanitsnotawesome 