Warbler said:
Vaderisnothayden said:
vote_for_palpatine said:
That's twisting the situation. I'm hardly saying gays should only be portrayed in a positive light. In this situation their gayness was a subject of mockery and it was clearly portrayed as being a negative trait.
"That's twisting the situation" implies some sort of intent to perform a takedown on you, and that's not what I was trying to do. I simply thought your first statement seemed extreme, but then you clarified it with the above statement, which was 100% reasonable.
But then you said this:
But his being portrayed as an eejit is part of the anti-gay thing.
This reads as though you mean to say that it is an anti-gay thing to portray gays as idiots. This is not necessarily true. A great number of eejits happen to be gay. I hate to say that and risk being labled as some sort of bigot, but idiocy runs rampant throughout humanity, regardless of gender, race, socio-economic status - or sexual preference.
Maybe it was irrelevant to the larger point of the movie, but I think it goes to show what a despotic bully Longshanks was.
I did agree that the movie was stacked against the British, as though the Scots were pure as the driven snow and the EEEEEEEVILLL British existed only to commit atrocities. History is rarely so one-sided.
You can portray a gay person as an eejit (not idiot, not precisely the same thing, includes a side of jerk in there too) and have it come off like they're an eejit who just happens to be gay. But you can also portray a gay person as an eejit in such a way as to imply that they're an eejit because they're gay, and that's what I think Braveheart does there.
And I think you're really supposed to be cheering on Longshanks when he kills the guy.
the movie may or may not be anti-gay, but it is pretty clear you are never supposed to cheer for Longshanks. He's the bad guy of the film. Maybe the film was anti-English, but the Brits have done some pretty bad things at times. Its a movie about Scotland fighting for independence from England. You can't it expect it to be pro-English. I am not offended and I am of English decent.
Longshanks being the villain doesn't mean you're never supposed to cheer for him, no matter how much he's the bad guy. I think it's very clear from that scene that you're supposed to enjoy him killing that gay guy.
And I know very well what shitty things England did, to Ireland, Wales and Scotland. But the film strikes me as encouraging real anger against English people, anger which could be dangerous for ordinary English people. Attacks on people for being English are not unheard of.