Monday, September 3, 2012

from dan harmon’s ask me anything on reddit

[–]glazomaniac 312 points 11 days ago

are you familiar with the concept of genderqueer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer

i have identified as GQ/transwoman for a long time, though i have never really taken steps toward it more than in mind and occasionally in dress.

the character of dean pelton continually amazes me in his complete destruction of gender norms while being in what (in a regular college, anyway) would be a position of power. he’s cartoonish and occasionally, the show slips up into areas where it seems a little too far, but on the whole, he has been a breath of fresh air.

i think there are a lot of people who laugh at his character for wearing “ridiculous outfits,” but i have always found that the funniest part of those outfits isn’t the fact that he crosses genderlines. it’s the fact that he’s the dean of a college dressing in costumes for frivolous reasons. it’s never “oh, how silly, he’s dressed as tina turner.” it’s “oh, how silly, he’s dressed as tina turner for daylight savings.”

and then, in virtual systems analysis, he comes out dressed as the dualidean of man, which is played for laughs a bit because of how absurd it is not because of what he was dressed as entirely but why (“what am i going to tell people? that i had good news and bad news?”), and then you come back around in the end in the most amazing way. when he came back in and talked about how he had one of the deepest conversations of his life…

i have no idea what his conversation was, but i appreciate that it was left up to our imaginations. in that moment, i felt like someone got it. the fact that he could, in the universe of greendale, go to the bank dressed as a man and a woman and end up having a deep conversation suggests a lot to me about the level of acceptance that exists in your work of art.

i find that the idea that the whole show is about seven very different people forming a community despite of their differences resonates all the more strongly because the concept of acceptance seems to pervade every layer of the show. the fact that gender identity, even in the absurd fashion of the dean, is part of your universe warms me.

it makes me feel that acceptance. it’s beautiful.

i know i am rambling a bit, but i don’t really know what to say except “thank you.”

[–]danharmon[S] 477 points 11 days ago

wow, thank you so much. I was especially proud of that little runner, precisely because it ended on that note, proving that it’s possible to be funny and even to laugh at “weird” people without the punchline or moral being that they’re SUPPOSED TO BE “NORMAL.” Dean Pelton goes through something we’ve all gone through - the sudden, panicked, defeated realization that we’re a joke, that all our life is spent in futility, that we’re wrong about everything, that we’re alone and nobody cares. And I find it noteworthy that it really registers as “ironic television” to have him bound in at the end with a big smile on his face having discovered that life isn’t so bad and that his weirdness was a gift to other people. It’s evidence of how messed up we’ve become as a society, the fact that in this day and age, the “unexpected joke” can be happiness. The good news is, being messed up doesn’t mean the story’s over. It means the story’s just starting, and in the end, we all find out we’re NOT ALONE, or maybe that we’re ALL ALONE and therefore united in our loneliness. I really appreciate you posting this, as you can imagine, Dean Pelton is understandably perceived by some to be a queer stereotype, like, ha ha, laugh at the gay guy, and I’m always finding myself clarifying, he’s not gay, he’s not straight, he’s an ocean-deep, planetwide labyrinth of kinks and turns. He represents the part of all of us that doesn’t get turned on by Budweiser ads, and sometimes feels a little lost because of it, but that heroically, CHARGES ON in the discovery of himself. THANK YOU!

Oh, bless, DHarm.

Posted at 10:02 PM 3 notes Tags: genderqueer dan harmon community television oh bless dean pelton

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