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CW: incarceration, discussion of racism, rape mention (also you can just assume all of these have spoilers)
( The Only Winning Move is Not to Play )
CW: CSA, PTSD, paranoia
Season 5 is arguably the most tragic season for several reasons, tragic in the sense of genre as well as content. This is because the season involves the killing of several innocents, necessitating the protagonists’ eventual downfall, and the consequences of the characters’ fatal flaw: hypervigilance. The characters have spent so long in the throes of conspiracy, traumatized at every turn, that when things do start to become less awful, they don’t trust it and end up creating new enemies to stand in for the already defeated or accounted-for ones at the first sign of trouble.
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Meta: Mourning SCOTUS (HTGAWM s4)-- DFvQ
Aug. 17th, 2022 08:48 pmCW: institutional racism and racist violence
On 24 June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed their 6-3 ruling (infamously leaked a month previously) in Dobbs v. Jackson overturning both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). A boldly reactionary move flouting the principle of stare decisis, Dobbs is one of this Court’s many alarmingly conservative decisions this session. The current court has curbed the EPA’s ability to enforce climate change regulations (West Virginia v. EPA), walked back Indigenous sovereignty (Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta), re-opened the door to in-school prayer (Kennedy v. Bremerton), struck down a concealed carry law (NYSRPA v. Bruen), and curtailed Miranda rights (Vega v. Tekoh). Despite Trump no longer being in power, the three Justices he was able to place have changed the tenor of the Court for decades to come.
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CW: suicide, deportation
Nominated for two GLAAD awards for Outstanding Drama Series and winning one, HTGAWM has since the beginning had a fairly significant proportion of LGBT characters. Connor and Oliver are the first we meet, being established as a pairing from the beginning. Several side characters are revealed to be LGBT, often clients or suspects but sometimes family members such as Aiden (Michaela’s bi ex-fiancé) or Connor’s dads. Several major characters in later seasons are also LGBT, such as Simon and Tegan. Furthermore, there’s a great deal of queerbaiting regarding Asher, Michaela and Laurel, and Bonnie. Most interestingly, in s2 it is revealed that Annalise has an ex-girlfriend, and throughout the rest of the series we watch Annalise come to terms with her bisexuality, which for a Black female main character was ground-breaking in 2015 (and still today, tbh). But one of the questions her arc raises is an important one for this project: who gets to be gay/queer, and who doesn’t?
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Meta: Apocalyptic Time (HTGAWM s2)--DFvQ
Aug. 9th, 2022 11:36 amCW: discussion of Christian theology
The planet is well on its way to becoming uninhabitable. We’re two years into a pandemic much of the western world has simply decided is over. Wars rage, injustices abound, infrastructure is deteriorating, rights are being curtailed—much if not all of the sky is falling, figuratively and sometimes literally. Which means it’s party time.
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How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM) premiered when I was halfway through my Master’s. Watching this directly after Community, I’m noticing that many of the shows I’m studying are set in schools: Community (undergrad), HTGAWM (grad), Glee (HS), Teen Wolf (HS), MPGiS (HS). TGP technically isn’t but Chidi does essentially open an ethics school for the other characters, so yeah, a little less than half of these shows are themselves about education. I think that’s partially why I connect to these shows, being an academic, but also schools are often elegant settings for writers because of the built-in constraints/obstacles, especially high schools, which are often highly regulated. Need to delay your character? Sorry, they’re still in “History of Ice Cream”. Need two random characters to have a reason to interact? They have AP Biology together. Need to nerf your characters so they can’t help the protagonist with the A plot? Time for the bar exam! The rhythm of the academic calendar, which often aligns rather neatly with the broadcast television season (historically September to May with a break for the winter holidays), is a comfortable entrée into the story world for me as someone beholden to that regime of time.
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