Oh gods someone stop me from, alongside my rewatch, talking about how for all that it got touted as being so ‘progressive’, Torchwod actually often treated Jack’s sexuality and how he expressed/practiced it as a joke/like he was somehow not trustworthy in relationships/incapably of being honest and faithful (for A GIVEN DEFINITION BECAUSE EVERYONE’S TAKE ON WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THEIR RELATIONSHIP IS DIFFERENT) because I just keep coming back to little things we got that fed that and it is REALLY TICKING ME OFF.
(keeping in mind that this would be from a pansexual, non-binary person who had discussions about having an open relationship in the past so yeah, maybe rubbing salt in some very raw wounds a lot)
NO SERIOUSLY THO
Like I remember I kept up with one of those doctor who social justice blogs and they were always championing Jack as like, the ideal queer character and how great rtd was and I was like look. Jack IS great and he’s a lot better than any queer character moffat has written but Jack still falls under a lot of awful tropes and these tropes are all played straight in doctor who and torchwood and there definitely does need to be a conversation about that (and I mean. He’s still white like that does also need to be addressed when you’re holding him up as the ideal whole tosh is standing right there).
And I got COMPLETELY SHUT DOWN like they told me I was slut shaming or whatever and I was like ALRIGHT BUT IM PAN (that’s how I identified back then) I THINK I GET A SAY. I mean he is great representation but they also write him really stereotypically as, like you said, the ~slutty unfaithful pan~ without and that adds to bad stereotypes about pan (and poly and bi) people irl.
ALL OF THIS. Like, obviously Jack is super important to me even without being one of the sources of my coming to terms with my idenities like he was for a lot of people, and while in THEORY I love him being into poly/open relationships, and some of the tie in novles and things have handled it well
(I will always be grateful for the ‘I’d catch him if he fell’ ‘We’d catch him together’ exchange between him and Ianto in The Sin Eaters, that was wonderful) the SHOW was absolutely awful about it which was especially gross when set aside things like the unnamed woman he married in the early 1900s since that very least implies he can and will be faithful and presumably monogamous with someone (John could arguably be thrown in there too, even if their being together for so long was in good part based on circumstance), but just--ugh the constant implication that his eye would always be straying (particularly in Gwen’s direction–I have a lot of feelings about the fact Ianto was SUPPOSED to die in S1 and I have suspicions that Gwen would have been thrown at Jack had that panned out) without any regard to how that would affect Ianto makes me so angry, ESPECIALLY after freaking Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, when without any prompting he is the one to make the first move to make their relationship definitvely MORE AND JUST–
ARGH.
(and ugh TOSH yeah just–don’t get me started on RTD’s biphobic bullshit. At least not beyond jack because we’d be here for weeks)
I’m still upset about the transphobic bit in Greeks Bearing Gifts, tbh
