sometimes sanity takes vacation time on me (keieeeye) wrote in heroes_tv,
Now that I've actually read the wank about Zach, since I was avoiding fandom so as not to be spoiled:
Hooray for non-stereotypical gay guys, even if I like the stereotypical type, shame his reps decided to be jerks about it.
I never thought that Zach was gay. I'm (mostly) lesbian, I identify with gay characters on tv, yadda yadda, but I still never thought he was gay. I thought it was a good example of the viciousness of high school, that because he wasn't popular and didn't try to be, they ostracised him and made up rumours about him. That's what kids do. In an ideal world homosexuality wouldn't be a dirty secret that people accused each other of, but guess what? This isn't an ideal world, and portraying that doesn't necessarily mean that the portrayer approves of the fact.
(There's also something in there somewhere where someone challenges someone else to provide an example of a character that changed gender - I don't want to reply over there because I barely use LJ anyway and it all went down last year, but the obvious example to me is Cat becoming female in the pilot of the US series of Red Dwarf that never made it past the first episode because it sucked donkeys' balls. Don't know that they'd have accepted that because it technically wasn't "the same" show, but the Americans changing Cat into a girl strikes me as a symptom of the (heteronormal) romance and sex infused society that's especially prevalent in the media. We can't have a show where all the main characters are the same gender because where would the sex be???)