Bel is really pissing me off in regards to her relationship with Freddie. He’s clearly the better man, the better person. She just has lust for Hector and real, genuine love for Freddie. Stop being such a dumb cunt and get together with Freddie. You’re just dangling him there. As Lix said: “Of course. I had a friend once. Treated him like a dog. Adorable man; absolutely useless at seduction. Then he married someone else and I realized it wasn’t him that was absolutely useless. It was me.“ Girl knows what’s up.
One of my favorite things about The Hour is the way that it continually and without apology fails the Bechdel Test. It has women—all different kinds of women, career women and homemakers and middle-aged women and feisty up-starts—making the kinds of decisions that women make. Good decisions and bad decisions and important decisions and trivial decisions. Bel decides to report on the Suez Canal and Marnie picks out wallpaper and Lix drinks whisky and Sissy goes dancing and Verda puts on make-up and dates who she wants. And the reason that this show is one of my favorite shows on tv (and one of my all-time favorite representations of feminist fiction (even if it does suffer from Mad Men’s crippling whiteness)) is that it doesn’t judge women making bad decisions. Career-wise or life-wise (especially life-wise), it doesn’t cast aspersions on their character or hold them to a higher or lower standard than it does the male characters.
Now, I ship Freddie and Bel pretty fiercely but not at the expense of Bel’s character. Her relationship with Hector is fantastic if only because it gave the show its best ever scene: the one between Bel and Marnie where they talked about their relationship with him and what it said about them as women and as individual human people. Freddie’s great sometimes, but he’s also a little twat sometimes. Bel clearly has deep feelings for him, but that doesn’t mean that they’re romantic and even if they are romantic it doesn’t mean that they’re simple. I don’t like Bel with Hector because I don’t like it for Bel, not because she’s acting like a cunt and breaking Freddie’s heart. If you’re watching The Hour and this is your response to the show, you’ve missed the entire point.
tl;dr, call Bel Rowley a cunt one more time, I fucking dare you.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The idea of Freddie clearly being the better man than Hector is just…laughable. Not that Freddie is a terrible person! (Or, for that matter, that Hector is a paragon of virtue.) But this is Freddie we’re talking about - he’s rude and confrontational and for all that he can care deeply for people he kind of sucks at interacting with them.
I totally understand wanting to see Bel and Freddie together, but I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion, nor should it be. Bel obviously loves Freddie, but that doesn’t mean it’s a romantic love, and even if it is that doesn’t mean that she should automatically dump Hector for him. Freddie is a really difficult person. Freddie and Bel’s friendship is contentious, and adding romance to the mix would hardly make everything easier. So yeah, maybe Bel’s making a mistake, but she’s being understandably cautious.
Also, what the fuck with Bel stringing Freddie along? Unless I missed a scene in which she tells him “Hey, you should hang around because who knows maybe someday” she does absolutely nothing to “dangle” him. If Freddie’s following her around like a lost puppy it’s entirely his own volition. And this really shouldn’t have to be said so many times, but no woman owes sex or love to any man. Unrequited love sucks but it’s never anyone’s fault for not being in love.
So basically - thanks for trying, but next time leave your sexism at the door.
Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?: Random Thought:
