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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3471 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

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Not gay but I loved the episode.

Regardless of Bill being gay, this might be the most positive depiction of a conservative in the past few years of TV. Bill is a conservative prepper who distrusts the government and calls them “NWO fucks”. He loves his guns and practices self-sufficiency. He will code conservative in the mind of the viewer. And yet, he is shown as possessing great strengths and real moral value. He’s depicted as cultured, caring and intelligent. Maybe such a positive portrayal could only be accomplished by making the character also gay, but in any case I’m happy that such a powerful character was unabashedly conservative.

It’s interesting to compare Bill to another Nick Offerman character, Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation. Ron similarly codes conservative and is a much beloved character, but he’s unambiguously straight. I’ve seen posts describing both characters as models of healthy masculinity from, I assume, liberal redditors.

That was the best part imho. They spent a lot of time setting viewer expectations and then actually subverting them, but without devaluing the character, and indeed they fully confirm that yeah, he's a hardcore gun nut paranoid prepper type but, well, he likes dudes.

The quick shot of the Gadsden Flag had me a little anxious because that one has been coded hard as a 'right wing extremist' dog whistle by many recent media properties.

But to have someone come into his life that gives him something to protect and how his instincts are pretty much proven to be correct made it way more interesting. The scene where he's sitting at the table across from Joel with one hand on his gun was pitch perfect. Protecting what he built and what he loved was foremost on his mind at all times.

Indeed, the guy literally got to live out the entire prepper fantasy of holding out against the apocalypse through thorough preparation and know-how, riding out the worst of it with a person you love at your side, enjoying a quiet, self-sufficient life for a while, then going out on your own terms.

The fact that the loved one is a guy instead of a woman changes very little about it, other than removing the possibility of kids from the picture.

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