occupyvillengard:

odysseiarex:

can we take a moment to discuss the possibility of female benedick

• openly lesbian
• but totally a misogynistic butch
• really pretty disdainful of most other women and the possibility of a romantic relationship with a woman
• because in the boys’ club that is don pedro’s army, she can’t show any weakness or sign of femininity — she has to be Just Like The Boys except, yknow, female
• so she makes sexist jokes and objectifies other women with the rest of the lads. “love ‘er and leave ‘er, that’s our ben!” they cry in her praise
• and when claudio starts going heart-eyed upon seeing hero, she is OUTRAGED. why does he get to be soft when she doesn’t? why does he get to be tender when she can’t? she knows they’d tear her apart if she ever regarded a woman as more than an object — or if she ever let a woman regard her in that way.
• and then you have beatrice. she came out as queer long ago, but doesn’t like to make much of a show of it — “confirmed bachelorette”, she calls herself in jest, and comfortably declares “he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, i am not for him”
• (don pedro’s gay too — the masquerade is probably his fifth or sixth proposal to her. it’s something of a running joke between the two of them)
• (benedick doesn’t know that, though — unlike her, don pedro likes to keep his personal life to himself)
• when pedro suggests the prank, it’s as much of a joke as it is in the original — my god, these women HATE each other, wouldn’t this be funny?
• but when it happens to benedick, it’s not a joke
• she feels a fluttering in her heart she hasn’t felt since she was 14, with a desperate crush on her schoolmate and no way to relieve that aching but with terrible poetry, poetry so bad that even now it makes her giggle, and she hears her own giggle and claps her hand over her mouth lest anyone hears it and then realizes what she’s just done and thinks, oh my god, i’ve been such an ASSHOLE
• and beatrice — stand i condemned for pride and scorn? — beatrice who realizes that she’s HURT benedick, that twisting the knife in verbal wounds wasn’t what benedick needed at all, maybe benedick just needed another woman to call her friend
• so benedick opens herself up to love, to the possibility of being friends with other women, she opens herself up to hero and hero’s pain and makes the leap of trust
• and when beatrice screams O GOD, THAT I WERE A MAN
• benedick reminds her — we don’t have to be