@drinkupthesunrise / drinkupthesunrise.tumblr.com
Felix Gaeta/Louis Hoshi After the mutiny, Bill Adama deals with a question of loyalty, Lee Adama deals with a question of fault, and Louis Hoshi deals with a question of love.
More returns to fic, as I really am on a quest to actually complete things this year instead just putting words on WIPs. Have the Gaeta/Hoshi post-mutiny fic I never wrote in my first go round in fandom land.
Hoshi had always figured they’d end up here. Lee Adama would be president some day, and Hoshi and Felix and Dee would run the fleet between the three of them. They’d keep Kara Thrace as CAG—all three reluctantly agreeing she was a damn good pilot and could teach the rookies how to fly like no one else—but otherwise it would be them. But it’s a picture that is incomplete without Dee in it.
Louis and Felix in ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’
I, uh, return to writing battlestar galactica fic uh, nine years after the last battlestar galactica fic I posted. this show has eaten my brain again. enjoy?
Felix Gaeta is an amputee, Bisexual, and uses he/him pronouns.
alone she sleeps...
#but can someone explain the bisexual to me? it's been so long since I last watched bsg
Right at the time BSG aired, shows were very keen on releasing little "webisode" shorts online that tied into canon.
In season 4, they made some webisodes focused on Gaeta that sort of led into the mutiny arc. They're not that great, but they did make him explicitly bisexual, with a past relationship with a Sharon/Eight and a current relationship with a male crew member, Lt. Hoshi.
So it wasn't addressed in the "main" series - and people watching now via streaming really have to go *looking* for it - but it was kind of a well-meaning effort to confirm him as a queer character before the show ended (and right before they killed him whoops). Considering it was implied that he had feelings for Baltar and a lot of fans already read him as queer and shipped him with everyone. And now you know!
Posted a thread to twitter today and you know what for posterity, I’m gonna post it here too.
I've been thinking since the last #SwRepMatters chat & this is not explicitly about queer characters in Star Wars, it's about queer characters in another sci-fi franchise that was widely considered progressive re: representation: the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot.
And like! They made some pretty good choices in casting and rebooting the characters. Making Starbuck a woman? Inspired. Know what they fell down on? Queer characters.
There are four canonically queer characters who are portrayed in relationships throughout Battlestar Galactica: Admiral Cain, Gina Inviere, Felix Gaeta & Louis Hoshi. Not that you would know that if you stuck to the main series episodes, as they're all in supplementary material
Admiral Cain & Gina Inviere - who initially appeared together in 'Pegasus' - were confirmed to be having a relationship in the made for tv movie 'Razor.' Producer Ronald D Moore was concerned about having BSG's first queer character be ... well, a bad guy.
On the commentary for Razor, he and writer Michael Taylor, had the following to say:
Moore: If anything, it's unfortunate that it's the first time it's happened on the show, that we had never.
Taylor: As far as we know.
Moore: As far as we know! That we had never, actually done anything with a gay or bisexual character before this, and unfortunately this had to be the first time.
Despite being aware of their failings - perhaps - in failing to include queer characters in the series up until this point, season four, the last season of the show, also failed to include any queer relationships.
Whilst also finding PLENTY of time for heterosexual romance. Oh boy. There is absolutely no shortage of people in relationships. Romance? Pretty integral to the whole plot of season four.
A little while after Season Four finishes, they decide to make a bonus webisode series to air in the mid-season break: The Face of the Enemy. A key plot point in Face of The Enemy is that Gaeta is seduced by one of the Cylons. A female Cylon.
There's one tiny problem with this: pretty much all of the fandom thinks that Gaeta is gay. Gaeta's actor, Alessandro Juliani, has consciously been playing him that way since day one. Gaeta has a crush on Gaius Baltar. It's basically fact.
And so, to avoid making Gaeta "straight", they decide to give Gaeta a boyfriend in the same webseries. Originally, it was intended to be Narcho, one of the pilots, but his actor wasn't available. Instead, it was Lieutenant Hoshi.
Hoshi and Gaeta had, at least, interacted on the main show before. They even share a hug in 'Revelations'. They both seem private people. The reveal works. ... until three episodes later where Gaeta stages a mutiny and Hoshi is led out the CIC and never once talks about it.
Ronald D Moore talks about it on the commentary of the episode. And while yes, there's no contradiction - something helped by the fact that Hoshi is barely in the episode - that ... doesn't mean that the lack of impact of this decision is okay.
There is a missing element in the show now… the relationship between Gaeta and Hoshi. In the webisodes we establish that Gaeta is having - has a relationship with Hoshi, a romantic and probably sexual relationship with Hoshi, and if we had known that at the time we were doing this there clearly would’ve been a stronger Hoshi element in these episodes. There would’ve been more fallout. There would’ve been a question of whose side Hoshi was gonna be on. But that just came later… I like the idea of that relationship in Gaeta’s life, and I liked what it did in the webisodes and as we thought back of how it affected these episodes. There’s nothing in here that contradicts that relationship. There’s nothing that says, “Oh, well they couldn’t have been in a relationship because of X, Y, and Z.” And I think it’s - for people listening to the podcasts and people who are presumably fans of the show, I don’t think it takes a tremendous effort to find a rationalization that essentially we’re just not seeing those scenes. We’re just not seeing the moment of decision between Hoshi and Gaeta, and that they did occur off-camera, and that we the audience just didn’t get a chance to see them.
Characters who are incidentally gay? Great. It doesn't need to impact the plot. But lets also recognise where a character's queerness or their queer relationship should be acknowledged by the plot, and that failing to do so is a cop out.
To circle back to Star Wars: I think Poe will be queer. I really really do. I think there's such momentum behind him being queer that Disney aren't going to make him "straight". But it will be in supplementary material. It won't impact on the main course of the story.
Queer characters should not be a 'bonus', a reward for engaging with the extended tie-in materials. It should not be left to fans to write those relationships into the margins of the material - especially when het romance is integral to the fabric of your show.
We're ten years on from BSG and it's half-hearted, we tried but not really, attempts at including queer characters into a big sci-fi franchise.
We're twenty years on from DS9 looking at the romantic tension between two male characters and stubbornly ignoring it.
It's 2019, Star Wars: make Poe Dameron queer, and put it in the goddamn movie, not some book ten more years down the line.
Felix, I don’t understand. Why would you set up a meeting with him of all people? I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget it.
#13. Felix Gaeta & Anastasia “Dee” Dualla
#30. Felix Gaeta & Louis Hoshi
Gaius Baltar: charmer, wordsmith, excellent social impulses
I did say I’d stop making rambling textpost complaints and start actually making stuff for this fandom, right? Well. I get that the whole point of Guess What’s Coming to Dinner is that Gaeta is alone, in sickbay, singing this song cause it’s the only thing that keeps his mind off the pain, but if you’re seriously telling me that Dee and Hoshi weren’t there whenever they could be I don’t know what to say to you, really - and it would have been a nice way of introducing Hoshi/Gaeta as a concept, just this very quiet moment with Hoshi at Gaeta’s bedside.
Anyway. Lots of referencing going on - the shot of Gaeta is pulled directly from the ep, and Dee and Hoshi are both mostly reffed off bits from other eps.
“What are you talking about? If what doesn’t work?” “Keep your head down.” “Felix!? What are you going to do?”
“There is a missing element in the show now... the relationship between Gaeta and Hoshi. In the webisodes we establish that Gaeta is having - has a relationship with Hoshi, a romantic and probably sexual relationship with Hoshi, and if we had known that at the time we were doing this there clearly would've been a stronger Hoshi element in these episodes. There would've been more fallout. There would've been a question of whose side Hoshi was gonna be on. But that just came later... I like the idea of that relationship in Gaeta's life, and I liked what it did in the webisodes and as we thought back of how it affected these episodes. There's nothing in here that contradicts that relationship. There's nothing that says, "Oh, well they couldn't have been in a relationship because of X, Y, and Z." And I think it's - for people listening to the podcasts and people who are presumably fans of the show, I don't think it takes a tremendous effort to find a rationalization that essentially we're just not seeing those scenes. We're just not seeing the moment of decision between Hoshi and Gaeta, and that they did occur off-camera, and that we the audience just didn't get a chance to see them.” (Ronald D. Moore, "The Oath" Podcast)
Go. Feel better. I’ll be waiting.
