Okay honestly wasn’t going to make a super long expansion on this because I feel other people have expressed it better than I ever could, but basically I already love Michaela (even the name has grown on me a little lol) and I’m sure Masali Baduza and Hannah Dodd are going to completely smash it.
One of my concerns is that, per the show’s own canon, they’ve established that homophobia very much exists; this makes sense because in order for the marriage mart to operate the way it does in Bridgerton, there has to exist a great level of misogyny and strict gender roles within their society that wouldn’t allow for same sex relationship to be openly accepted. Now the argument I’ve seen is that, with Francesca being a widow, she and Michaela can just live as companions without arising any suspicion, and to be fair I don’t believe neither Francesca nor Michaela (or at least in the books Michael, which I’m assuming will be the same in the show) are the type to really care about making their relationship public, but there’s a not-so-good pattern in Bridgerton of giving their black female characters sad fates; not necessarily tragic, but defensively not as happy as the other female characters, especially the white women, get. Think about characters like Queen Charlotte, Lady Danbury and, more glaringly, Marina. I don’t want that kind of fate for Michaela.
Still, I’m very curious and excited about seeing how this relationship will develop, especially seeing how another couple slowly grows across the seasons, now that we’ll no longer have Colin and Penelope.
