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Reviews: "Cicero", Episode 1 (Big Finish)
Sep. 6th, 2022 08:57 amThis was fairly promising historical fiction, though admittedly it didn’t ask a lot of me. First episodes often wobble as they get their sea legs though, that’s the nature of them.
What did annoy me about this (and to a degree about “Cry Murder! In A Small Voice”) is the “wahey!!” quality of the piece’s references to men fucking men. Both attempt to be normative and cool about the topic, but the pointed way they refer to homosexual encounters and the frequency with which they do so make it seem as though this is not actually a normal, assumed, textural element of the speaker’s world. You can feel the writer being spicy and Inclusive about something they’ve learned about the past and find jarring, and believe you, too, will find provocative, salacious, or funny. It’s very cringe, very het-facing. I don’t like having then-unremarkable incidents of historical queerness heavily interpolated for me via the filters of a presumed-het core audience.
What did annoy me about this (and to a degree about “Cry Murder! In A Small Voice”) is the “wahey!!” quality of the piece’s references to men fucking men. Both attempt to be normative and cool about the topic, but the pointed way they refer to homosexual encounters and the frequency with which they do so make it seem as though this is not actually a normal, assumed, textural element of the speaker’s world. You can feel the writer being spicy and Inclusive about something they’ve learned about the past and find jarring, and believe you, too, will find provocative, salacious, or funny. It’s very cringe, very het-facing. I don’t like having then-unremarkable incidents of historical queerness heavily interpolated for me via the filters of a presumed-het core audience.
