Shōgun, FX’s period drama-action series on Hulu, has drawn comparisons to Game of Thrones, thanks to its shocking violence, like people pulling out their own guts with swords and others being boiled alive slowly. Unlike that brutal flight of fantasy, however, Shōgun is based on the 1975 historical novel of the same name by James Clavell — which was inspired by true events during the late Sengoku period (1467–1615) in Japan. In other words, there’s something real to this horror.

This time was ripe to be fictionalized, defined by civil wars among different liege lords across the land — called daimyō — and social upheaval. In the show and book, John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), a rough-mannered English sailor, washes up on the shores of a Japanese fishing village and finds himself helping the frightening and strategic Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), who aims to win control of Japan, end the infighting, and become shōgun, a military dictator. While the events are dramatic, the history the show is anchored in is quite real. 

Blackthorne is based on William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan, and Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose shogunate ushered in the Tokugawa period, which is known as a time of economic growth and internal stability after generations of feuding samurai clans. Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), a powerful and graceful Christian Japanese noblewoman who is Blackthorne’s translator (and love interest), is inspired by the very real Hosokawa Gracia, who served a critical role in Tokugawa’s war. 

In the show, Mariko is somewhat loyal to the Catholic Portuguese missionaries who converted her (although ultimately she gives near-total obedience to her liege lord, Toranaga). Blackthorne, a Protestant, worries that Mariko’s loyalties to the Portuguese will interfere with their budding romantic connection, not to mention his reliance on her as one of the few people in Japan who serve as his translator. In an attempt to make his Japanese captors/hosts distrust his Catholic Portuguese rivals, Blackthorne dramatically reveals to Toranaga and Mariko that the Portuguese aim to colonize Japan, and that they already have colonies in Macau, shocking the Japanese nobility. 

This is a piece of colonial history in East Asia we rarely see in the mainstream media, so let’s unpack it. What’s the real story of Portuguese presence in Japan? 

Did the Portuguese try to colonize Japan? 

Yes. Because of the fierceness of the warrior class and Japan’s distance from Europe, the Portuguese didn’t have the ability to conquer Japan through force, the way they did in places like Brazil and parts of India. Instead, they used religious conversion and trade to try to accomplish a cultural and economic conversion, exploiting the fractious nature of the warring lords to expand their trade routes. In fact, Japan still bears marks of Portuguese contact. As Morgan Pitelka, professor at UNC Chapel Hill and expert on late medieval and early modern Japan, notes some Japanese food dishes have names derived from Portuguese, like pan for bread, karumeira for caramel, and hasuteira for pie crust. Other sources even attribute the name and recipe for the Japanese dish tempura to the Portuguese, although Pitelka says that is up for debate.

Some might think that the lack of military force means there was no attempt at colonization, but it’s important to understand that conquering a society doesn’t always require armies. “If you think about conversion as a colonizing mission, it means someone is saying ‘Your religion is wrong, come over to our religion,” says Nicole Freiner, associate professor of political science at Bryant University and author of The Social and Gender Politics of Confucian Nationalism: Women and the Japanese Nation-State. “The records say that the Portuguese probably converted thousands of Japanese. Even though the Tokugawa shōguns tried to eliminate all Christianity, it did persist.” So, yes the Portuguese did try to colonize Japan. They just weren’t successful, ultimately. And we’ll get to why they weren’t successful later.

Did the Portuguese enslave Japanese people? 

The show has not yet made mention of this history, but it did happen. To get more clarity, we spoke to Liam Brockey, professor of early modern European history and historical consultant on the 2016 Martin Scorsese film Silence, which is about two 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel from the Portuguese colony in Macau to Japan to find a missing missionary and spread Christianity in Japan. Brockey says that there are “concrete references to Portuguese buying slaves in Japan.” The Portuguese also captured and paid for enslaved people from China and Korea.

According to Pitelka, many of those enslaved people ended up in Macau, now an autonomous region on the south coast of China. In the show, when Blackthorne plays the hero and informs Lord Toranaga and Mariko that the Portuguese have a colony there, the Japanese nobility are shocked. But in reality, this was not only common knowledge but was actually encouraged by Japan’s rulers who saw the Portuguese as beneficial to their economy — for a time, anyway. 

Brockey says enslaved Japanese sometimes ended up as far away as Portuguese colonies in India, such as Goa and Cochin, or they were moved and sold again elsewhere in East Asia. Brockey says this was a “vibrant slave trade,” but with a few differences from the trans-Atlantic slave trade of West and Central Africans. “There was an understanding in Japan and China that you could make enough money at some point to repurchase your freedom.” However, he stresses it was not indentured servitude, but slavery. 

Did the Portuguese and British fight over Japan? 

It is this backdrop of attempted colonization that forms much of Blackthorne’s journey as an Englishman in Japan. The show opens by saying, “For decades, Portuguese Catholics have richly profited from trade in Japan. They have kept its whereabouts hidden from their sworn enemies — the European Protestants.” While Adams’s letters to his English wife back up that they were in search of the “East Indies,” it’s not true that the location was completely hidden. Brockey says that maps printed by Dutch cartographers in the late 1500s clearly showed where Japan was. “Where Japan laid was no secret. But how to get there, and how to get past all of the fortifications that the Portuguese built between Europe and East Asia, was a totally different challenge,” he said. 

Letters from Adams to his English wife — Adams stayed in Japan for the rest of his life and started a Japanese family — show that he considered landing there to be a great achievement and the ambitious daimyō Iyeasu to be a prized ally. “I showed unto [Tokugawa Ieyasu] the name of our country, and that our land long sought out the East Indies, and desired friendship with all kings and potentates in way of merchandise, having in our land diverse commodities which these lands had not,” Adams wrote to his wife. 

According to Pitelka, the portrayal of Blackthorne’s extreme animosity toward the Portuguese sailors and missionaries and his race to make himself and the Protestants the center of trade there reflects the times, when conflict between Catholics and Protestants engulfed Europe after Martin Luther’s Reformation movement began in 1517.

Pitelka says these conflicts were not just about religion. They were about money. “This is the moment when capitalism is beginning. The corporations that are formed through these explorations of the world — the Dutch East India Company and British East India Company — are the first capitalist corporations, and they are partially sponsored by their governments,” he tells Vox. 

However, the show implies through Blackthorne’s accusations and warnings to Toranaga that the British and Dutch alliance have more innocent aims in Japan, which isn’t true. The British didn’t have good intentions for East Asia, but they were more focused on conquering land and trade routes in South and Southeast Asia. “Their goal was to extract resources from the rest of the world to conquer, to create colonies so that they could keep fighting in Europe. It’s the dysfunction in Europe, the fact that they’re all constantly waging war with each other that drives this colonial expansion around the world,” Pitelka explains. “The Spanish and the Portuguese are in Asia because they want to either enslave people or find gold and silver, or take spices and porcelain and silk back to Europe and sell it to beat their rivals. The English and the Dutch are exactly the same way.” 

And Pitelka confirms that this colonization was happening in multiple arenas — through trade domination, religious conversion, and military conquest and expansion. “[Blackthorne’s] animosity toward the Portuguese and the Spanish and their animosity towards him is one of the most accurate parts of the show,” he says.

And in the end, Adams got his way. “He encouraged the Dutch to send trading ships to Japan and they were eventually able to do so in 1609,” Pitelka says, adding that for the rest of the Tokugawa period, the Dutch Protestants replaced the Portuguese Catholics as the primary European trading partners in Japan. After the Shimabara Rebellion — an uprising of Japanese Catholics — in the late 1630s, the non-Christian Japanese rulers set limits on Christian power, and the Portuguese were banned from trading in Japan.

Was seppuku common? 

One historical practice raising eyebrows and questions in Shōgun is seppuku — a Japanese form of ritual suicide by disembowelment, which plays a huge role in shaping the story. In the first episode, one of Toranaga’s vassals speaks out of turn at a meeting, causing conflict. His solution when he realizes his mistake is to immediately offer to kill himself and his infant son, ending his family’s line. He and the other vassals are even annoyed at his wife, Fuji (Moeka Hoshi), for protesting her son’s murder; she, in turn, never expresses any anger at her husband or her liege lord for their responsibility in his death. 

But was seppuku really this brutal or common as the show makes it seem? And did those who were commanded to perform it or watch their family members perform it put up so little dissent? 

Pitelka says that we shouldn’t think of it as commonplace, but rare due to the exclusivity of the samurai class, who were military nobility. “In this period, the samurai are probably less than 6 or 7 percent of the population. And only the most elite of the samurai were obsessed by issues of honor and status to the degree that they would pursue seppuku.” However, he says that among this small group, seppuku was a real practice that happened the way it’s depicted in both Clavell’s book and the show. “There’s a famous example from the life of Tokugawa Ieyasu,” he says, “who’s the real warlord Toranaga is based on, where his son did something to disgrace him and he ordered his son, and his son’s mother — who was his wife — to kill themselves.” 

As far as willingness to kill yourself whenever a lord told you to, Pitelka says seppuku was preferable, because by the time it was commanded, death was certain anyway. “The only alternative to seppuku was execution,” he says. “The idea is you have shamed yourself. Rather than being executed where your power over your life is taken away, they are respecting your position as a samurai and letting you take your own life, which in the samurai code of honor, is a better way to die than a firing squad.” 

Pitelka says there wasn’t a lot of pushback because this was “a profoundly militaristic society,” without “any notion of individual liberties or freedom.” This matches the world Shōgun portrays, where Toranaga has absolute control, and we see minimal negotiation or rebellion. 

Pitelka points out a torture scene from the beginning of the show, where an English soldier is slowly boiled alive until he dies. And when you put it that way, it makes sense why someone might choose seppuku. 

Why did the Portuguese not ultimately succeed in colonizing Japan?

Well, the answer to that not only lies in how difficult it was to get to Japan from Europe, but also the military culture characterized by seppuku. 

Pitelka stresses that the distance of Japan shielded it from much of the “cancerous European expansion and extraction” that other countries endured. “There was never a full naval invasion of Japan by Europeans. At most, they could send one ship with some priests and merchants per year. Some years they couldn’t do it at all because the ship sank, [or] the ship got stuck someplace.” 

But it wasn’t just geography. Daimyō and the shōgun had absolute power over their people, and Japan was a military dictatorship where resistance meant death. Pitelka tells Vox that “the attempts to penetrate that did occur encountered fierce displays of strength and a very strong desire to protect Japan from outsiders.” While the show depicts the Japanese nobility as being shocked and then passive about Portuguese expansion, they actually began to grow deeply disturbed at the pressure to convert and the Portuguese accumulation of silver.

“Japan was one of the main sources of silver in the world at this time. So they wanted to protect their economy as well,” Pitelka says. “And once the samurai started to learn that the European Catholic nations were invading and conquering other countries like the Philippines, they immediately realized this was dangerous and they had to isolate and control the Europeans.” It was the frightening violence, the control, and the military skill that Shōgun depicts that enabled the Japanese to do that. 

Pitelka stresses, however, that we still shouldn’t glorify the samurai or shōguns, because they were military dictators who were very cruel to lower classes, and their legacy has often been used for more disturbing projects of Japanese nationalism, like the occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 or the current attempts to remilitarize its own society. It’s a sobering reminder that our history should never be used to justify going backward in the present. But it is rich material for one of the best new shows of the year.

For 35 years, Soul Train was the beating heart of Black pop culture in America, considered appointment television for the millions of people who tuned in to discover the latest trends in music, dance, and fashion. In its more than 900 episodes, it launched musicians like Teena Marie, Curtis Mayfield, and the Jackson Five, and others like Vivica A. Fox, Jody Watley, and Rosie Perez, to new heights of fame. Now, 54 years after the groundbreaking show’s premiere, its impact on culture and history hasn’t diminished.  

Soul Train was an ensemble show, featuring musicians, dancers, comedians, and special guests who came together to put on a grand show. It was glittery and glamorous, but also intimate and personal, with celebrities like Patti LaBelle, Elton John, and Little Richard mingling with the dancers in the audience. Simply put, you couldn’t miss it. Richard Gay, the producer of a soon-to-be-on-Broadway musical called Soul Train, tells Vox, “The day Soul Train was supposed to come on, we all knew we needed to have our chores done and everything together so we could watch. … Then you got older and started tuning in so you could use the dances at the parties that weekend.” 

I was too young to really engage with Soul Train during my childhood (and wasn’t even alive during its peak). Still, its legacy lives on for me. From reruns, I can recall with ease the intro, with the animated train, the screech of “The Soullll Trainnn!,” and a smooth voice calling it “the hippest trip in America.” I have vivid memories of Don Cornelius, Soul Train’s founder and legendary “conductor” or host. And the iconic Soul Train line, where people make a corridor and one person has the spotlight, dancing wildly and passionately down the line as everyone claps and cheers, which showed up at so many of my family functions and parties at my alma mater, the historically Black Howard University. It’s undeniable that Soul Train has been a huge part of my life, and that of many others, even long after it stopped airing. 

Bethonie Butler, author of Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond, writes that the variety music program started as a local show on Chicago’s WCIU, a TV station that’s now part of The CW, featuring local musicians like Jerry Butler, the Chi-Lites, and the Emotions. The small local show, often described as the Black version of American Bandstand, an ensemble show that was once only for whites, quickly took off due to the culture’s hunger for the show and its host’s hunger for success. (Don Cornelius’s son said Cornelius wanted to be the “next Black Dick Clark,” the host of American Bandstand.)

“Once people start to hear about it, then the big acts wanted to be a part of it. I know for a fact his initial bookings of the show were not the biggest acts,” Tony Cornelius, Don’s son, told KCRW. “But the biggest acts decided that they wanted to be a part of it and it became the place to be, because everyone started to hear about this phenomenon.” 

Its tremendous popularity — it remains the longest first-run syndicated television series in broadcast history — and a key partnership with Johnson Products, the makers of the Afro-Sheen hair care brand, led to its status as a radical show for the times, slotted next to commercials that proudly showcased natural hairstyles like glistening Afros and fluffy tresses in spite of the pressure for Black hair to conform to European standards. Suddenly it wasn’t just Black music or dance on the national stage, but our hair as well. 

Black fashion was also a huge part of the show’s success. When people came on Soul Train, they dressed their best. Rich and bright colors, textured fabrics of thick satin and corduroy, dashikis and sequined blazers with shoulder pads and gleaming gold buttons, sharp angles and soft leathers. The fashion was unique and bright, consisting of bell bottoms, exaggerated collars, and flowy blouses. It was a richness of style that felt like seeing the best of ourselves in a time when Black people on TV were often reduced to minstrels — characters that exaggerate negative stereotypes of Black people — or weren’t included at all. 

In his 20s, when he was still working for WCIU, Don Cornelius reported on social unrest and met figures like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tony Cornelius told KCRW, “My father initially just wanted to do a show that presented Blacks in a positive light, because there was nothing like that going on. I mean, the only thing that you saw about African Americans was on the news where they were being arrested or something.”

Gay, who stood in the lobby after every performance of his musical in the Bay Area, was surprised when Fredrika Newton, the widow of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the revolutionary Black Panther Party who was murdered in 1989, came up to him to thank him for the nod in the show to the civil rights movement, including the Black Panther Party. “She was almost in tears and she was like, ‘Me and Huey used to watch Soul Train every Saturday. It would bring us joy.’” 

Cassie Taylor, a musician whose upbringing was greatly influenced by Soul Train and her father, blues musician Otis Taylor, told me, “Black culture was demonized by the majority of white media, and Soul Train was a place for people to safely express themselves. … It retains its iconicism because the joy is contagious.” Taylor, who has had a supplemental business from flipping vintage clothing in the past, said her childhood memories of Soul Train informed what she looked for in vintage and thrift shops for her customers. 

Entertainers like Bill Withers, Al Green, Bobby Womack, Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye all furthered their careers by appearing on the show. From Soul Train dancer Jeffrey Daniel, Michael Jackson learned the robot and “backslide,” which was renamed the moonwalk, Jackson’s trademark dance. Part of Aretha Franklin’s great fame came from her appearance on the show. After Don Cornelius’s death in 2008, Franklin told ABC that “An appearance on ‘Soul Train’ meant, what it could mean, a person being virtually an unknown person to an American sensation overnight, very similar to ‘American Idol.’” She said, “It was like if you had a record that sold maybe 10,000 copies, to be on ‘Soul Train’ meant it might sell 100 to 200- to 300- or even 500,000 or more.”

Despite — or perhaps because of — its emphasis on joy and togetherness, Soul Train was a response to an incredibly bleak time for Black Americans. When it premiered in 1970 in Chicago, Black Americans like my grandparents were still fleeing racial terror and poverty in the South as part of the Great Migration. Segregation had ended legally, but its disastrous effects were still felt in Black communities everywhere.

Veronica McComb, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bryant University, told me in an interview that “Black bodies were constantly in danger to a high degree. To be in a safe and protected space to express themselves physically in the form of dress and dance was just, as they say, it was everything.”  

Soul Train premiered at a time when those who had already migrated were still trying to find community and navigate new racial discrimination in different contexts. “If you’re away from home, like many African Americans were as part of the Great Migration, Soul Train definitely gave you that stronger sense of home,” McComb said. The act of watching became not only a space to gather but a conversation point the next morning at school or work, a way for Black people to find each other in all spaces. 

Segregation continued socially, with Black people being chased out of white neighborhoods and schools, while Black neighborhoods and schools remaining overpoliced and underfunded. Lynchings continued, and sundown towns didn’t cease their violence toward Black people. Meanwhile, those who managed to integrate faced their own set of challenges — some of which were intensified. “Integration wasn’t necessarily the wonderful thing that it was intended to be in terms of creating better equity and equality for African Americans,” McComb said. “In some cases, it created a lot of inequity and even more discrimination. … Soul Train having a space for African Americans was a form of resistance against the forces that would say, ‘You are still not equal; you are still not valued.’ It was a way to say, ‘Yes, we are indeed.’” 

For most of its airing, non-Black performers and guests on Soul Train were rare. “It had to be a very particular type of entertainer that was valued by the Black community to be accepted onto Soul Train, because it was such a protected space for Black expression and Black entertainment,” McComb said. 

Gay’s Soul Train musical delves into the entrepreneur and visionary Don Cornelius’s biggest project. “He was a kingmaker, right? At the show’s height, you had people like Elton John going, ‘I have this giant audience that knows ‘Crocodile Rock’ that doesn’t look like me. How do I reach them? Well, Soul Train was the answer to that,” said Gay.

On May 17, 1975, Elton John became the first white performer to appear on the show. After that, Soul Train became a sort of litmus test for all musicians but especially white ones. There was a difference between only making music for white people and making music that Black people could jive to as well, a sort of encapsulation of the radicalism of Soul Train. Here, in this integrated space, Black folks made the culture and determined who could cross over into our spaces, an act that truly could transform singers and widen their audience. 

It was also a time when popular forms of Black creativity were more accessible. It didn’t cost three months’ rent to see our biggest stars in concert, and spending hundreds on an outfit was unheard of. Pictures of Soul Train from its height show the special environment it cultivated. One in particular shows Marvin Gaye in the crowd, at the audience’s level, smiling and interacting as equals. The fashion was textured, layered, quality, and unique. It was a kind of fashion culture that would be hard to reproduce today because the way we make and consume clothes — in factories with labor exploitation, producing waste that is contributing mightily to the existential climate crisis, and simply making clothes less stylish — has changed radically, for the very worst. 

We are in a similar state of despair as the one that Soul Train was born out of. Covid-19 isolated people for months and killed more than a million Americans. Economic instability and student loan debt are crushing people’s hopes for the future. Police brutality is a constant worry for Black people and other marginalized groups. Our court system appears ever more imperiled. We are watching devastating violence take place overseas. This has all taken a tremendous toll on the collective psyche. In the face of such despair, it’s natural that people express a rising dissent against the disappointments of this world, and are actively looking for artistic spaces to express that dissent. “We are in a post-pandemic world and we need a reboot of Soul Train,” Taylor says, adding that the horrors of late-stage capitalism make this more urgent. 

Soul Train was revolutionary, but Cornelius was a skilled businessman who went after numbers. Yet Soul Train feels anti-capitalist in some ways in retrospect, not because it was created that way, but because we live in a more flagrantly exploitative and consumerist society than ever before. The show was still revolutionary because of its assertion of Black people’s right to joy and unbridled expression in the face of forces meant to destroy our bodies and souls. 

Much of why people loved Soul Train was the intimacy and spontaneity. We live in a time when much of our culture is intensely curated by algorithms and trends, where fast fashion and cosmetic surgeries have produced an eerie sense of sameness, and when public images are more carefully managed than ever before, making it difficult to assess who artists truly are. “Soul Train wasn’t very structured,” said McComb. “There’s an element of spontaneity to the show that just doesn’t exist much anymore. … There’s this very strong sense of control that exists in American entertainment, broadly speaking, that didn’t exist at the time of Soul Train.” 

McComb said that when the spirit of Soul Train truly returns, we likely won’t see it through the same medium. “It may not be on television that we will see protected spaces where people can be their authentic selves. I don’t have much hope for American public entertainment to provide that space,” she said. 

She points out that one of the places where this kind of self-expression is seen most often is in spaces that fly under the radar of pop culture. “When people take over warehouses and abandoned buildings and host parties there, that is a means of transgressing and rebelling against the structures and the controls of American capitalism. That’s the closest thing I can think of to Soul Train.” 

However, this isn’t necessarily a negative for McComb (although she stresses that she doesn’t endorse the takeover of abandoned buildings). “We’re at a saturation point in American entertainment where there’s just so much messaging and stimuli, that maybe it is the lived experience of that unbridled authenticity that will have a revival.” 

The beauty of Soul Train was that “it was the kind of unbridled celebration that you would see in your own home or in your own community, but on American television,” McComb said. For now, then, offscreen, Soul Train lives on in the impromptu line dances we do at weddings, parties, and any function where Black people feel joy and freedom.

What viewers might want or expect from Ridley Scott’s Napoleon — epic scenes of war, sexily torn bodices, and a very short emperor — won’t be exactly what they get. The battle scenes drag on, the ruler is shown to be a truly appalling lover — neighing as foreplay and thrusting like a hammer — and Joaquin Phoenix is a perfectly reasonable 5-foot-8. What they will get, however, besides a difficult-to-place tone and the sight of a horse exploding from cannon fire, is a whole lot of Napoleon’s (Phoenix) relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), his wife of 14 years and the empress of France. The movie goes deep into their love story: his letters, her affairs, his affairs, and ultimately their very strange divorce ceremony, necessary because Josephine — six years older than Napoleon — couldn’t give the upstart emperor an heir. 

In the film, the ceremony is attended by luminaries and family, and stresses the couple’s love for each other even through the dissolution of their union. “You have embellished my life for 15 years, the memories of which have been etched in my heart,” Napoleon reads during his speech. Josephine tries to get through her similarly loving speech and the insistence that they’re doing this for the good of France, but she struggles and Napoleon shakes and slaps her, telling her to do it for her country. Bizarre, to say the least. It leaves viewers wondering how much of this relationship — and its undoing — is fact and how much is fiction.

But before we dive into that divorce ceremony and whether it really went down like that — and why — a little background on the world’s favorite little man in a funny hat. 

Napoleon didn’t start off as royalty, but rather as a French army officer from a minor Italian noble family from Corsica. But he was a voracious reader and brilliant military strategist, which caused him to rise further in the ranks. Louis Sarkozy, son of former French President Nicholas Sarkozy and author of the upcoming book Napoleon’s Library: The Emperor, His Books and Their Influence on the Napoleonic Era, says that Napoleon was “an amazing, multifaceted character.” 

After the infamous French Revolution that deposed (to put it gently) King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, via guillotine, Napoleon’s power and influence grew with his military and political victories, eventually leading him to stage a coup and become first consul of the French Republic in 1799 — alongside two other consuls, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Pierre-Roger Ducos, who were mere figureheads — before declaring himself Emperor of France in 1804. Legend (and the movie) says he snatched the crown from Pope Pius VII and crowned himself, an unheard-of act that demonstrated a lack of respect for the Church. (Perhaps this was the error he sought to correct by handling his divorce very — some might say too — respectfully.) 

As a member of the aristocracy that France had turned on — Josephine was once imprisoned in the Bastille, as the movie shows — Napoleon’s choice of wife was beneficial for him politically. Katherine Astbury, professor of French studies at the University of Warwick, tells Vox that “Josephine was an important part of Napoleon’s policy to reconcile those who had been on opposing sides during the Revolution. Her position in society enabled her to smooth over political differences. As wife of the first consul and then empress, her role was to enhance the glory of the regime.” Josephine was a dazzling host and diplomat, presenting France as a prosperous and sophisticated nation during a time when many were wondering if the recent executions meant it had turned barbaric. In fact, Astbury says, Josephine spent far more on clothing than Marie Antoinette, famously reviled for her extravagance. 

And during his reign, Napoleon did a lot. “He invented the [Corps d’Armée] system, a way to move armies in the field, which was absolutely revolutionary,” Sarkozy tells Vox. “It’s why he won so many battles in the beginning. It was virtually copied by everybody. His Egyptian expedition pretty much created modern archeology, and his discovery of the Rosetta Stone led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs.” Sarkozy goes so far as to call him a “sublime genius,” albeit one “full of faults.”

One of those faults, it is necessary to point out, is him reinstating slavery in Haiti after it had been abolished. This is one of the many reasons historians, like University of Virginia African Diaspora Studies professor Marlene L. Daut, caution us against making a hero of Napoleon. “Napoleon Bonaparte theoretically embraced this notion of revolution and breaking the chains of human beings everywhere. But he reinstated slavery in Haiti after it had been abolished in 1802, so he seemed to believe that actually that should only be the case for white people,” says Gillian Weiss, professor of history at Case Western University and author of Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. 

Josephine was born to a noble family in Martinique, a Caribbean country and French colony. The movie shows Josephine having a Caribbean multiracial maid but doesn’t explore her family’s connection to slavery: They owned a sugar plantation. In 2020, antiracism protesters in Martinique tore down a statue of the former empress that had been commissioned by Bonaparte’s nephew Napoléon III in 1859. The statue of Josephine had also been decapitated in 1991, so safe to say Black Caribbeans are no big fans of the Bonapartes. Josephine is a complicated character in the film as well, although not for her family’s economic interest in oppressing people: She’s shown — accurately — to have had affairs that became the talk of France and a feature of the newspapers. Surprisingly, this wasn’t what led to the divorce, which Astbury points out was actually an annulment.

Like any conqueror, Napoleon needed an heir. However, because Napoleon was self-crowned and self-made, having children was arguably even more crucial to his reign. Sarkozy tells Vox that Napoleon’s urge to secure his reign was the primary reason for the divorce. “He used to always say that the Bourbons, the French kings who were before him, that they had a thousand years to build their legitimacy. He did not have a thousand years. He barely had 10. He wanted to cement his dynasty. So, how do you do that? You have a son. And unfortunately, Josephine was unable to produce a son.”          

As much as he loved Josephine, being six years older than him, she was unable to have any more children — she had two with her first husband, the Vicomte de Beauharnais, but none with Napoleon. In the movie, Napoleon’s overbearing mother forces him to have sex with an 18-year-old girl to see if he can get her pregnant, determining if the lack of pregnancy was Jospehine’s or Napoleon’s fault. In real life, cheating on Josephine wasn’t as unpleasant or forced a task. “I think we count throughout his life about 22 to 24 mistresses, including two or three illegitimate children,” says Sarkozy. 

But children born outside of marriage can’t inherit the throne. The movie even shows Napoleon considering pawning off one of his other kids as Josephine’s child. But ultimately, the political mastermind knows he must have an heir from his marriage to protect his legacy. So he pushes on with the annulment and the ceremony: public display, speeches, and all. He then went on to marry the sister of the Austrian archduke, Marie Louise, duchess of Parma, making her the new empress of France. 

“Legislation was introduced in 1806 to strengthen the idea of a hereditary empire, and one of the clauses said that members of the imperial family could not divorce,” says Astbury. “It took a lot of maneuvering for Napoleon to get out of his marriage to Josephine in order to have an heir.” She points to an 1807 police report that gives an indication of how people felt at the time, with some at court saying that the empress is an asset to the empire, while others feel that the need for an heir overrides other concerns.  

It was out of this mixture of his love for Josephine and the importance of making sure he didn’t appear to discard her that the divorce ceremony was conceived. Astbury says the ceremony was “politically useful … Josephine shows that she is doing this of her own free will. The speech she gives has been carefully prepared in conjunction with Napoleon so that Josephine is not humiliated by her inability to bear him an heir.” In real life, Josephine’s speech read: “I know how much this act, called for by politics and greater interests, has pained [Napoleon’s] heart; but glorious is the sacrifice that he and I make for the good of our nation.” To prevent her from even more humiliation, Josephine had the title of empress dowager after the divorce, got to keep their residence Malmaison, and received a hefty allowance. In real life and in the movie, Josephine seems to accept this halfway position she has in Napoleon’s life — not a wife but not quite an ex either. “One day you will know what I have sacrificed for you,” she whispers to Napoleon’s son, Napoleon François Charles Joseph, when he introduces her to him. 

But divorcing Josephine was arguably useless, mostly because the alliance with Austria was a failure.  “It was a mistake because Austria’s conflicts with France were irreconcilable,” says Sarkozy. “The two areas where Austria wanted to extend its influence were the same areas France wanted to extend its influence, northern Italy and Germany. So even though he married the daughter of the archduke, a couple years later, he was already back at war with them.”

Like many historians and Napoleon’s advisers of the day, Sarkozy thinks Russia would have been the superior choice of ally; he should have married the Tsar’s sister instead, as he is shown in the film requesting. “Had Russia been chosen and seduced by France and had the continental blockade not been imposed, I think it would’ve worked out a lot better,” Sarkozy says. “Although I’m speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Who knows what decisions I would’ve made were I present in 1810?”

As for preserving his dynasty, well, it’s complicated. While he had a son with Marie Louise, Napoleon’s reign ended after he lost in Russia and went into exile on the island of Elba, then reclaimed his power and lost again at Waterloo, going into exile for good this time on St. Helena, a small island in the middle of the Atlantic, 1,200 miles from the coast of southwestern Africa — France really wanted him out of there. His son, Napoleon François Charles Joseph, had a short and disputed reign as Napoleon II for only 20 days , eventually being succeeded — with a king in between — by his cousin Napoleon III. (Napoleon III was, ironically, the son of Josephine’s only daughter, Hortense, and Bonaparte’s brother Louis.) After the third and final Napoleon, France went back to being a Republic with a proper president, and the short but memorable Bonaparte dynasty was effectively over. 

Who do we blame for the fall of the empire and Napoleon? Could it be that maybe the “greatest general of all time” wasn’t really all that? Were they unavoidable military and political miscalculations? Or did the empire die the day of that divorce ceremony?

The movie plays with the idea that Napoleon’s fall was due to him divorcing Josephine. When the then-general first hears of the affair Josephine carried on while he was in Egypt, he comes to her and tells her to say she is nothing without him. Tearfully, she agrees, but later that same night, turns it back on him. “You want to be great. You are nothing without me. Say it. You are just a brute that is nothing without me,” Kirby’s Josephine tells Phoenix’s Napoleon, and he says it back. After she dies and he is in exile, he hears her voice from the dead saying, “I let you loose and let you come to ruin, next time I will be emperor and you will do as I say.”

However, Sarkozy refutes the idea that the divorce led to Napoleon’s ruin. 

“That’s absolutely bogus,” Sarkozy says. “I know Ridley Scott focuses a lot on their love relationship, and there’s a good reason because, listen, it’s an awesome story. I mean, his letters to her are amazing. But the idea that the fault of the empire is reducible to him divorcing Josephine is complete nonsense. The empire fell because of crucial military and political decisions. It did not fall because of his personal life.” Astbury also says that Josephine didn’t have much influence over Napoleon politically. 

However, Astbury says that the desire for a son and the fulfillment of that desire may have made Napoleon more autocratic and imperialist, which ultimately did lead the empire to fall. “Most historians agree that the Empire was at its height in 1807 and things deteriorated after that as Napoleon became more and more autocratic. The desire to leave France in safe hands became a growing concern (he didn’t feel his brother Joseph was the right man for the job) and intensified after his son was born in 1811,” says Astbury. 

Hyperfocusing on his legacy made Napoleon reach further and further across Europe to expand his empire, which Astbury says made Britain, Austria, Prussia [now called Germany], and Russia “finally unified in their desire to do something to keep him in check. Each of the other monarchs would benefit from France being pushed back. Russia wanted to regain control of Poland, Prussia was keen to expand its borders, Austria wanted to reassert its power, and Britain was keen to expand its colonies. Forcing France back to its natural borders (that is to say up to the Rhine) or even further back to the borders of 1790 would rebalance the geopolitics of the continent.” 

Astbury’s conclusion is this: “The birth of an heir accelerated the fall of the Empire, but I think the Allies would have decided to act sooner rather than later anyway.” 

The moral of the story, then, seems to be that unchecked ambition and rampant imperialism, all fueled by the desire to leave behind a legacy and a male heir, is what led to the fall of the French Empire. This might be where the idea that the divorce led to Napoleon’s fall comes from, even if historians agree that’s not quite accurate — or at least not the whole story. 

Poetically, though, Napoleon expressed feeling as though the loss of Josephine impacted him politically. “Napoleon used to always talk about his star, his star meaning his luck that allowed him to rise,” Sarkozy says. “And toward the end of his life, in exile, he does make a comment that his star began to fade when he divorced Josephine. But I don’t think he would have agreed that it was the reason why the empire fell.” Still, it makes for a heartwarming last line in a movie that otherwise offers little insight into the notorious ruler. As Scott’s vision of Josephine intones from beyond the grave, “Come to me, Napoleon, and let us try this again.” 

Jenny Han’s young adult trilogy The Summer I Turned Pretty, and its Amazon Prime TV show adaptation, depicts a classic love triangle, with a few notable twists. Teen protagonist Belly (Lola Tung) is caught between the love of two brothers, Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). In season one, Belly was deeply in love with the quiet, brooding Conrad: the ultimate symbol of the unavailable boy you just have to have. Because Conrad was reticent about his feelings, Belly ended up making out with his brother Jeremiah — a bubbly, blond, Abercrombie model-esque boy next door whose affection came more easily. 

I’m a huge fan of love triangles, but even I have to admit that The Summer I Turned Pretty is a little … intense. All this romantic turmoil happens while the boys’ mom, Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), is dying of cancer. Add to that Belly’s mother, Laurel (Jackie Chung), is best friends with Susannah. They raised their children together as fictive kin, and it makes the whole thing feel slightly incestuous. Still, while it gives me a tummy ache, that tension and taboo is partly why this series is so beloved and why viewers are locked in. As viewers and readers of romance, many of us are drawn to love triangles more than any other trope. 

For writers and showrunners, there’s a clear financial benefit in feeding our hunger for love triangles. It’s more likely to lead to more books, TV seasons, and movies, and it increases reader/audience engagement. This is what Ethan Calof, PhD candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice at Vanderbilt University, calls “social community formation.” 

“If you’re drawing out a tense, emotional love triangle plot through multiple books, it strengthens community formation by encouraging readers to join teams for a ship war. And ship wars are not an accidental happenstance,” they say, citing Twilight and how Team Edward and Team Jacob generated countless fanfiction and merchandise opportunities. (Remember Nordstrom’s Twilight clothing line?) Even in The Summer I Turned Pretty, the fourth wall is broken a bit when Belly’s brother Steven (Sean Kaufman) and her best friend Taylor (Rain Spencer) argue about whether they’re Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah, echoing online fan defenses of the respective love interests. 

Calof says that literary binaries and tropes provide readers with “a sense of comfort, a clear debate to weigh in on, and a digestible sense of conflict that keeps a story propelling forward.” They explain, “Joining a broader team is just a manifestation of this instinct — the comfort of being part of a large group, and an exploration that deepens as each sequel is published.” So that callout to the fandom, while a bit ham-fisted, was purposely meant to continue the lucrative communities that can build around love triangles. 

Despite how this shows up in the digital age, love triangles are a centuries-old obsession. “When reading a love triangle plot through a monogamous lens, each potential partner represents an aspect of the protagonist’s personality, or a moral choice, or one side of a binary,” Calof says. “Most of Jane Austen’s novels feature a female protagonist choosing between two or more men, one virtuous and one immoral, with her protagonists eventually choosing the virtuous side and resolving a moral dilemma,” they point out. “Anne Elliot from Persuasion chooses the clever but less pedigreed Wentworth over her manipulative cousin William, Elizabeth Bennett chooses the shy and wealthy Mr. Darcy over the charming adulterer Mr. Wickham, Emma chooses the honest Mr. Knightley over the shallow Frank Churchill.” 

Despite our love of building community around uniting behind one love interest or the next, or our general consensus that one love interest is superior — no one likes Wickham over Darcy — some might say that our interest in love triangles might point to a wider cultural desire to explore polyamory. While I don’t doubt that many are curious about exploring options outside of the dominant form of monogamous relationships, I disagree that the classic love triangle is a good example of this. For the most part, love triangles are the antithesis of what most people say polyamory is intended to be about: loving multiple people equally and simultaneously. In contrast to this definition of polyamory, love triangles are hyper-focused on the act of choosing, the ebb and flow of affection and attraction. Aimée Lutkin, an entertainment writer for Elle magazine and author of The Lonely Hunter: How Our Search for Love Is Broken, says, “There’s still a real monogamous bent within these love triangles. They have to choose one. It’s very rarely that the ending is like, ‘Yeah, I’ll date both the brothers.’” 

Many forms of polyamory are also centered around the idea that love shouldn’t be hierarchical. But the love triangle as a trope is about the constant battle for primacy. As one potential lover rises in esteem, the other falls. It’s either a roller coaster or a steady, depressing road trip of rejection for one party (Jacob from Twilight never stood a chance), not a stable and equal development of love for all involved. In fact, the person in the middle of the love triangle (in this case, Belly) usually doesn’t love both equally. One is usually a more comforting, safe love (ahem, we’re looking at you, Michael from Jane the Virgin ) and the other is their fated lover that their heart can’t live without, the OTP, or One True Pairing, like Joey and Pacey from Dawson’s Creek. And, spoiler alert, in this series, it’s so obviously Conrad. Keshav Kant, romance novel consultant and executive director of Off Colour, says that love triangles are reminiscent of “fake open relationships where you want to test the waters to see who else is out there because the one you got at home is starting to get a little stale.” 

In other series too, the brooding older guy usually wins over the younger, more exuberant one, a pattern that might suggest that love triangles are often about leaving youth behind for adulthood. One notable exception is Outlander, where Claire rejects the love of her serious dark-haired academic husband Frank, going back in time to 18th-century Scotland and falling in love with the younger, red-haired, mischievous Jamie Fraser. In that case, Claire’s choice might reflect a desire for adventure and youth, and a rejection of the traditional trappings of adulthood and womanhood. 

In this idea of choice, there are also lessons. Sometimes people get focused on one option, thinking that there is only one romantic partner for them. That obsession can be unhealthy, leading people to eschew others in favor of chasing someone who might not even be the best fit. That’s why dating around is healthy.

It’s the toxicity of the situation that makes a portion of the Summer I Turned Pretty fandom criticize Belly, often calling her selfish and narcissistic for pitting two brothers against each other during their mother’s terminal illness and even after their mother’s death. There’s an argument to be made that perhaps Belly and the boys are engaging in their own self-destructive tendencies.  

Unsurprisingly, our attraction to love triangles isn’t always a wholly positive thing. “Love triangles can sometimes appeal to our narcissistic tendencies as they place us in the center of a conquest and divide strategy,” says Avigail Lev, psychotherapist and founder and director at the Bay Area CBT Center. Who can forget Jules’s selfish scheming in My Best Friend’s Wedding, where the well-being of everyone else took a back seat to her desire to get with Michael? “We become the focal point, the object of desire for two individuals who compete over our affection,” Lev says. “This dynamic can give us a sense of satisfaction, as if we have conquered something, triumphed over others.” 

An interesting part of this love triangle is Conrad and Jeremiah’s deceased mom Susannah’s culpability (and by extension, the other two dads and Laurel’s, since none of them intervened). Susannah, who considered Belly a daughter, made it clear to Belly, from her childhood, that she knew Belly was “destined for one of her boys.” It’s an immense amount of pressure to put on a child, and I pointed out to Lutkin that it felt almost like incestuous grooming to me, since they were raised as cousins. Lutkin responded, “I’m glad you said the word ‘grooming’ because I was definitely not putting that word to it, but I was thinking about how manipulative it was of Susannah. … It was incestuous and bizarre how Susannah was pushing this idea that she was gonna end up with one of the boys, especially so close to her death, which is obviously gonna be a stronger blow to Belly [if those relationships don’t work out].” 

There’s also the added pressure of the beach house, an absurdly expensive home in coastal Massachusetts that Belly and Laurel have been constantly told by Susannah is their house too. Season two revolves around Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah attempting to save the house as Susannah’s older half-sister Julia (Kyra Sedgwick) attempts to sell it. But crucially, even if they save the home from being sold, unless Belly marries one of the boys, this home will never belong to her. It adds an unspoken layer of pressure that likely makes her hesitant to branch out outside of these two boys, because if she does, she’ll have to contend with another woman eventually being the head of a household that she was led to believe was hers her entire life. Through this lens, Belly’s choice to engage in this love triangle takes on a new dimension. If she chooses the wrong brother, she loses a major part of her identity and an inheritance that ethically should be partly hers. 

Within that, there is insight into why the love triangle might appeal more to marginalized groups. “Generally people go to [the romance genre] to seek what they want or what they’ve been denied,” Kant says. “If you love ‘enemies to lovers,’ [you might] want someone who’s gonna love you even if they see you at your worst. If you love ‘friends to lovers,’ you are someone that wants comfort and security because maybe that’s been missing for you.” For traditional love triangles, she says what people are likely seeking is the feeling of being desired. 

Due to desirability politics that usually (and falsely) spread the idea that people of color, trans people, disabled people, fat people, and people with mental illnesses are unworthy of being these sought-after objects of desire, it might feel validating for viewers to see protagonists — especially if they exist at one of these marginalizations — being desired by not just one, but two love interests. Part of why women of color enjoyed shows like Never Have I Ever, Jane the Virgin, and From Scratch is because they featured South Asian, Latinx, and Black women at the center of a love triangle — and therefore at the center of desire.  After days of people sharing on Twitter about how common the trope of the “disposable Black girlfriend” is, it’s no wonder viewers are hungry for something different. The idea of choices can feel alluring and empowering for anyone, but especially for people who’ve been told their choices are limited or even nonexistent. Still, even though Belly is half-Korean, she doesn’t really exist at many other intersections of marginalization. It’s not lost on viewers that the center of a love triangle is still nondisabled, conventionally attractive, or light-skinned. 

Readers of the trilogy like myself know how this love triangle is going to end, but viewers are waiting with bated breath to see the resolution in season three. And in the meantime, despite ourselves, we’re all drawn to the drama. As Lev says, “The drama surrounding a love triangle can be addictive, drawing us in and making us feel like active participants in the romantic turmoil. It evokes intense emotions, heightens the stakes, and adds excitement to our lives.”

My confession is this: There’s nothing I love more than a love triangle. I was raised on Joey/Pacey/Dawson, Elena/Stefan/Damon, and Bella/Edward/Jacob. I was #TeamRafael for every second of Jane the Virgin, and Kal Ho Naa Ho makes me cry every time. But even though love triangles can be useful sources of life lessons, they’re probably best left in fiction. In real life, they can make things hurtful and complicated. Date around, have lots of lovers, and be polyamorous if you’d like, but resist the urge to be the center of this kind of story. 

Nylah Burton is an award-winning travel, entertainment, and lifestyle writer with bylines in New York Magazine, Travel + Leisure, and Vogue.

Editor’s note, July 31, 4:30 pm: Edited to remove spoilers about season two of The Summer I Turned Pretty.

The first time I heard someone call Charlotte, Queen Consort to King George III, the “first Black queen of England,” I thought they were taking the piss. But even though the evidence for Charlotte’s Black heritage is weak, many do genuinely believe it. And now, millions more will believe it too. 

The premiere of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, a Shondaland production based on the romance novels by Julia Quinn, tries to cement the public image of the monarch as an undeniably Black woman. The prequel series gives Queen Charlotte (India Amarteifio in youth and Golda Rosheuvel in her later years) the spotlight. Here, she is a Black teenager whose interracial marriage to the mentally ill King George III (Corey Mylchreest in youth; James Fleet as the older version) led to an event called “the Great Experiment.” In Queen Charlotte and the original Bridgerton series, the Great Experiment refers to Britain’s (clearly fictional) decision to fully integrate Black people and other people of color into their society, including the noble class. In Queen Charlotte, the stakes of the Great Experiment are most vocally echoed by Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh in her later years and Arsema Thomas as a young woman), who is revealed to be African royalty with wealth that exceeds that of most of the British nobles but has to fight to be accepted among British nobility. 

Most people know this didn’t happen. It’s common sense that Black people were not accepted into all levels of British society in the 18th and 19th centuries. And, if Meghan Markle’s experiences as part of the royal family are any indication, they’re not accepted among British nobility now. Although people widely understand this element of the story is fantastical, many do consider the real Queen Charlotte to be Black. And Netflix and Shondaland are fanning that flame. Netflix even threw a royalty-themed event with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to celebrate the premiere. The messages Queen Charlotte sends about the politics of wealth, interracial relationships, representational politics, and empire are dangerous. At the core of its danger is the choice to double down on the likely false idea that Queen Charlotte was Black. 

The weak evidence for Queen Charlotte’s Blackness

Although Charlotte and George did not have an interracial relationship that changed the course of history, there was public debate about Charlotte’s appearance. Some accounts and portraits of her suggested that she had fair skin and “European” features, others showed her having slightly darker skin and “African” features. She was also often called ugly and plain. In A Tale of Two Cities, referring to George and Charlotte, Charles Dickens wrote: “There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England.” Her physician reportedly described her as “small and crooked, with a true mulatto face.” Sir Walter Scott wrote that she was “ill-colored.” A prime minister once said: “Her nose is too wide and her lips too thick.”

The show reconstructs the vague reports of her appearance into Charlotte experiencing both racism and ties of kinship with other Black people; King George III’s mother Princess Augusta (Michelle Fairley) complains about Charlotte’s skin being “very brown” and a minister meekly replies, “I told you she had Moor blood.” Her brother admits that no one who “looked like” them had ever married into the British royal family (even though Charlotte and George in real life were related), wedding guests murmur in shock at Charlotte’s jewel-encrusted Afro, and Lady Danbury has a wide-eyed look of joy upon seeing the new Queen is “on our side.” 

Even though Queen Charlotte’s contemporaries made it clear that they thought her face didn’t meet their beauty standards, there are almost no records of anyone explicitly saying that Charlotte, born into the royal family of the northern German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had Black parents, Black siblings, Black cousins, or Black ancestors on either side. In 1997, historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom claimed his research showed she was descended from the “illegitimate son of King Alfonso I of Portugal and his Moorish mistress [Madragana].”

However, King Alphonso I was born in 1109 or 1111, and Queen Charlotte was born in 1744. That’s more than 600 years of distance between Queen Charlotte and her rumored African ancestor Madragana — who cannot conclusively be proven to be Black or related to Queen Charlotte, as art historian Amanda Matta explains on her podcast, Art of History. Some amount of inbreeding might account for these features to endure for a few generations, but not enough to be significant. And with King George III and Charlotte sharing close ancestors, it’s poor logic because it would mean that swaths of British and European royalty, including Prince Harry and Mary, Queen of Scots, would now have to also be considered Black. Are we prepared to say that Charles, who will be crowned King on May 6, is also Black? Should we say that any royal with full lips or wide nostrils is presenting evidence of Madrigana’s endlessly enduring genes? It sounds ridiculous, but that’s the road that race science and faulty genealogical methods lead us down. 

Also, while both Madragana and Queen Charlotte were called “Moors,” the word had a vast range of meanings. Originally, it meant the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages. But it also meant someone with darker skin, sometimes referring to people who would be considered Black today and sometimes referring to people who would be considered European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Latinx today. Steven Pincus, historian of the Global British Empire and professor of history at the University of Chicago, tells Vox that the term “Moor” as a static racial or ethnic category “is subject to much dispute,” adding that Sephardic Jews were sometimes also called Moors. 

Even though the real Charlotte was, at best, ludicrously removed from Blackness, Queen Charlotte leans heavily into representational politics while still making egregious errors of substance. It’s especially hard to feel good about shallow representation when we spend three episodes watching Lady Danbury be raped by the husband she was forced to marry as a child, sometimes multiple times in a single episode. This means that the only characters to have been raped in Netflix’s Bridgerton universe are both Black. 

For some Black women, this all makes the series feel emotionally manipulative. “Shonda [Rhimes] is probably playing very heavily into the correlation between what’s currently happening with Harry and Meghan Markle, and what she would like us to envision was happening back then, even though it’s not historical,” says April Morris, editorial director of Off Colour magazine.

What it means — and meant — to force a narrative of Blackness onto Queen Charlotte

So, if Charlotte most likely wasn’t Black, why did the theory become so popular? The rapid expansion of the slave trade in the late 17th century through to the end of the 18th century plays a role. Pincus says of this time period, “Slavery became a much more prominent feature of the British empire. It was also increasingly the source of unbelievable accumulation of wealth.”

Slavery is notably absent from the world of Bridgerton, although vague mentions of “the colonies” are peppered in so quickly that you’d likely miss it. In the Bridgerton universe, none of the Black people are concerned about human or civil rights. Rather, they want to host balls and be invited to hunts. They want to marry white people without sassy comments from the ton and be given noble titles and more land. They don’t even want money — they just want the opportunity to be treated like the monied people they already are. For Morris, these questions of wealth and assimilation are part of “parallels that [Shonda Rhimes] is trying to draw for the Black upper-middle class of today.” Pincus, although he says he enjoys the show as a relaxing watch, points out that “it is clearly a show which is targeted to the wealthy.” 

This is perhaps the most salient and cohesive political framework undergirding the Bridgerton universe: the love of money. And the love of money is also what defined the British Empire’s relationship to Black people. By the time Queen Charlotte became consort, the British Empire was struggling with slave revolts in all its colonies, and economic concerns (which outweighed the moral arguments) pushed more people to become interested in ending the slave trade. The heightened discussion of slavery, slave rebellions, and abolition fueled debate about Queen Charlotte. “In the time period in which she was Queen, there was increasing concern regarding abolitionism,” Harris explains. “And one of her portrait painters [Allan Ramsay] was a noted abolitionist who may well have been interested in exploring these ideas that she had African ancestry within the context of discussing and debating slavery.”

When Lady Danbury finally wins her battle to host the ball of the season, it takes a while for the crowd to thaw, with white people on one side and Black members on the other. Then, after seeing Charlotte and George dance, more and more interracial dancing pairs join the floor, to the tune of Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You” on the violin. After the ball, George and Charlotte are in her bedroom and George declares in wonder, “With one evening, one party, we have created more change, stepped forward more, than Britain has in the last century,” adding that with Charlotte by his side, he can do anything. And of course, in the original Bridgerton show, interracial marriages are now so commonplace due to George and Charlotte’s example that no one even considers race or ethnicity something worth mentioning. 

Again, even though the series is obviously ahistorical, these messages we receive matter; they stick with us. Viewers may logically know that this scenario didn’t occur, but it functions as a nod toward an incredibly deep-seated belief, one that says Britain and King George III ended slavery out of moral concerns and altruism. When really, it was the resistance of slaves and colonized people that led to abolition and the withdrawal of British troops from the colonies. 

According to Gerald Horne, professor of history and African-American Studies at the University of Houston, slave rebellions were rising during the Georgian and Regency eras, which had a tremendous impact on Britain finally ending slavery in 1834. “The Haitian Revolution was decisive in abolition’s fortunes … London felt they could either move to circumscribe the slave trade in 1807, three years after Haiti’s triumph, or … [run] the risk of having enslavers liquidated physically. Wisely, they sought the option of delimiting the slave trade, then abolition by the 1830s.”   

This is a rich and complicated history. Reducing it to “interracial love saved the world,” even for a romance, feels cheap and intellectually bankrupt. It’s necessary to point out that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels — save the one she questionably decided to write about Queen Charlotte post-Netflix series — feature white people only. During a panel, Quinn once said she only wanted to write happy stories and chose not to have Black characters because their “unhappy” stories weren’t the kinds she wanted to tell. Given that she and other writers on the show evidently couldn’t tell Lady Danbury’s story without a shocking amount of marital rape proves perhaps she should have steered clear. 

To not want to write about racism is not a morally depraved stance or even an illogical one. To not write about people with identities you can’t relate to is perhaps a wise choice. But to refuse to write Black characters for most of your career because you can’t imagine them happy, and then rake in momentous amounts of money by emotionally manipulating Black people with shallow representation years later does feel morally bankrupt. If Netflix and Shondaland wanted to portray Black people being happy during the Regency era, Beverly Jenkins is just one example of an author of steamy, loving Black romances set in the 17th-20th centuries. Why do studios not invest in developing her stories for the screen? 

The answer is clear, if depressing. Queen Charlotte was never about representation for Black people or telling Black stories. It was about money, and about reifying empire and wealth, and placating Black people by claiming that we too can have a place among the most powerful. To recast a queen who — whether she was sympathetic toward enslaved people or not — presided over a vast empire and lived a life built on genocidal labor as a Black woman fighting for her people is a coherent and abhorrent neoliberal political statement. It seeks, above all, to protect the institution.

In 2013, when I was a freshman at Howard University, one of my friends was borderline obsessed with Childish Gambino’s music. Before that, I hadn’t heard much about Gambino — or his alter ego, then-comedian Donald Glover — but I was surprised when, in the midst of a conversation praising his artistry, my friend, who is also a Black woman, flatly said that the rapper didn’t like Black women, something she said was evident not only in his dating choices (at the time, the rumor was that he only dated Asian or white women) but in his lyrics. “Everyone knows that,” she said dismissively, with no anger or jealousy in her voice. 

Now, a decade later, I remembered my college friend’s words after I finished watching Swarm, the new Amazon Prime TV show about a Black woman serial killer superfan named Dre (Dominique Fishback) co-created by Glover — who has since established himself as a talented creator and director — and Janine Nabers. Nabers, a Black woman, previously worked with Glover writing for his FX show Atlanta, a series that has been praised for its tender and complex depictions of Black men and widely critiqued for its caricatures of Black women. 

Swarm — with its two-dimensional main character, storyline cluttered with misogynistic and racist tropes, and dubious conclusions about Black women fandoms — is perhaps the show that, for me, solidified the opinion my college friend expressed a decade ago. Glover’s hostility toward Black women no longer feels like an allegation. Because his work is so obvious, it serves as the archive of this aggression. Glover all but confirmed these concerns when he told Vulture that he had given Fishback very little direction or insight into Dre (she confirmed this in the same article), telling her, “You don’t have to find the humanity in your character. That’s the audience’s job … Think of it more like an animal and less like a person.” 

Referring to a human being as an “it” or an animal is almost always a red flag that points to an individual’s deeper feelings, and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Glover, who has continuously been criticized for dehumanizing portrayals of Black women, would quite literally hinder an actor’s ability to find the humanity in a Black woman character. 

Not only did Glover relate Dre to an animal, but he specified which one, after dismissing the character of Dre as not “that layered.” He said, “I wanted her performance to be brutal. It’s a raw thing. It reminds me of how I have a fear with dogs because I’m like, ‘You’re not looking at me in the eye, I don’t know what you’re capable of.’” With these damning quotes, Glover’s misogynoir is no longer subtext. It’s canon. 

Even though Swarm was co-created by a Black woman, featured a stunning performance by a Black woman (Fishback), and had Black women like Malia Obama in the writers’ room, Swarm’s misogynoir felt like a deeper, more direct insult to Black women than Glover’s previous projects. Instead of merely popping up on the occasional lyric or episode,  hostility and mockery toward us permeate the show. 

Swarm is set in Houston, Texas, and follows Dre, a young superfan of pop star Ni’jah (Nirine S. Brown), who in the show serves as a cringey mirror of the real-life Beyoncé. Dre has two important women in her life: Ni’jah and Dre’s foster sister, Marissa (Chloe Bailey), and they’re fatally intertwined. After listening to Ni’jah’s surprise release visual album about her rapper husband Caché’s infidelity (sound familiar?), Marissa dies by suicide, seemingly so impacted by both the album and her own boyfriend of three months (played by Damson Idris) cheating on her that she cannot live any longer. 

With Marissa, the object of her psychosexual obsession, gone, Dre starts to unravel. Grief-stricken and kicked out of the funeral by Marissa’s biological family, Dre sets out in pursuit of meeting Ni’jah. This transforms into a cross-country killing spree, with Dre murdering people who speak badly about Ni’jah. “Who’s your favorite artist?” becomes her villainous catchphrase. If the answer isn’t Ni’jah, you’re likely to get a lecture on why it should be, and then bludgeoned to death. Dre finds her victims anywhere: her dead sister’s cheating boyfriend, Black male influencers and mechanics in the Twitter comments, a coworker’s white abusive boyfriend, the co-worker herself. Her murders aren’t complex. Anyone who is against Ni’jah, annoys Dre, or stands in Dre’s way of seeing Ni’jah doesn’t tend to live long. This, Glover says, is his attempt at examining extreme fan culture, whose adherents are often referred to as stans, a term originating from a classic Eminem song (I’ll return to that later). The problem is that this depiction of stan culture isn’t just problematic, it’s inaccurate. 

There are countless issues with Swarm, but perhaps its most glaring one is how it fails to understand or speak truthfully to its supposed subject, employing what feels like irresponsible misinformation. Each episode — save episode six, which is a mockumentary about Dre’s violence — features a facetious play on the classic Hollywood disclaimer, asserting the events in the show as true and claiming “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.” This switcheroo immediately feels tired and unoriginal, like what a sophomore-year film student might find desperately inventive. It also confuses viewers in a most unproductive way. There were even a few people online who seem to be wondering whether Dre is a real killer still on the loose. 

But none of the events portrayed in Swarm — save perhaps the incidents surrounding Ni’jah’s/Beyoncé’s husband being unfaithful — are true stories. That hasn’t stopped the creators from being coy about the falsity underlying their latest project. Glover has described the stories as “true-ish” and said Swarm is a “post-truth” TV series. Nabers told Vulture that, “The pilot story is a real event and the finale is a real event, and they exist in the world of internet rumors or a YouTube video or Twitter.”

If we leave aside for a minute that something existing as a rumor on the internet makes for a “real event” is a nearly Trumpian contradiction, as nonsensical as the phrase “alternative facts,” neither the pilot nor the finale are true stories either. As Nabers admitted to Shondaland, both Marissa’s suicide and existence were rumors that were never confirmed — although yes, the character does share the name of a woman who, urban legend holds, died following the release of Lemonade — and there certainly were no reports or rumors of a foster sister killing people in the aftermath. In the finale, Dre, now calling herself Tony and living as a masculine-presenting lesbian, runs onto the stage at a Ni’jah concert. In real life, there was a man named Anthony who ran onto the stage during a 2018 Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert, but there is nothing to suggest the real-life Anthony was a murderer or a violent person. The plotline most firmly rooted in reality is probably the one where Dre bites Beyoncé, but Beyoncé was allegedly bit by an actress, not a fan. 

These are incredibly flimsy rumors to base an entire series off of, yet they alone are the creators’ justification to declare the series to be based on reality and a reflection of stan culture. It matters that these stories aren’t true, and that even gossip versions can’t be credited to violent stans. How can you claim to write a show that is exploring fandoms and mental health when you are stuffing it with an amalgamation of rumors and partially true stories, and calling it a meaningful statement? 

Glover is an inventive and important artist (I’ve previously praised his exploration of Afrosurrealism in Atlanta), but sometimes he masks simple immaturity as a meta commentary. Consider his controversial 2022 Interview article where he interviewed himself. I’m sure he meant it to be daring. While it did cause a flurry of conversation, at its core it was tiring and confusing, and the ensuing social media noise spoke more to his troll-ish leanings than to his ability to give readers any real insight.

That interview was also one of the times that Glover addressed the criticisms of misogynoir he’s received for years. In the interview, Glover asked himself, “Are you afraid of Black women?” and replied to himself “Why are you asking me that?” Glover continued, still speaking to himself, “I feel like your relationship to them has played a big part in your narrative.” Replying again, he said, “I feel like you’re using Black women to question my Blackness.” 

It was nonsensical, but also a way to make light of the very real concerns and questions the public has had for over a decade about his portrayal of Black women in songs and on TV. Even the phrasing of Black women playing “a big part in [his] narrative” is framed as though the interest in Glover’s relationship to and with Black women comes entirely from outside his work and isn’t a reaction to deliberate choices he’s made in his work. Glover is playing the role of precocious auteur here, stomping his feet, not wanting to respond meaningfully to any criticism but still desiring to be regarded as a great artist, courting controversy and resenting the inevitable visibility the controversy garners. 

In this, Glover and even minor writers like Malia Obama are simultaneously too close and too removed from the subject matter — fame, and the people who worship the famous — to make an intelligent and compelling statement about it from a stan’s perspective. Glover admitted that they didn’t have an expert in fandom advise on the show and suggested to Vulture that the fame of some in the writers’ room qualified them to write about stans from this perspective. “We have people who are famous in the writers’ room and people you’d barely know. Everybody had a story about how they were roasted. Everyone had the same story of being like, ‘This person said something, and then some people jumped on the bandwagon, and it affected me,’” he said. 

Glover has greatly benefited from hypervisibility, and yet perhaps understandably feels aggrieved by it. But through a lens where one sees themselves as a perpetual victim of visibility, whether that is a correct assessment or not, the behaviors of  the public will perhaps always feel more aggressive or dangerous than they are.

Glover knows what his reputation is with regards to Black women, and yet with Swarm, he chose to take a Black, queer, mentally ill woman and make her the avatar of violent stans. All of those intersections of oppression — Black, LGBTQIA+, and people with a mental illness — are far more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators. 

Glover isn’t the first person to use art to explore violent fandom, but there’s reason to believe that many artists who do so aren’t critiquing society, but rather battling with their own inner conflict and guilt. Like Swarm, “Stan,” which some call Eminem’s magnum opus, was also not based on a real story. The song features the ramblings of a mentally ill fictional Eminem fan, who sees the rapper as his role model. Stan grows increasingly frustrated by the lack of response to his letters, so much so that he one day decides to kill his pregnant girlfriend and himself, emulating the song “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” where Eminem raps about murdering his wife Kim and driving their daughter to dispose of the body. None of this had happened. But the song was influenced by Eminem receiving disturbing fan mail that made him feel haunted by the idea that one of his fans would, one day, decide to copy the extreme violence depicted in his songs. “Stan” was an attempt to course-correct, an expression of guilt, rather than a true account. 

Glover’s own work isn’t nearly as violent as Eminem’s. But there’s something to be said about how, for the celebrity, perhaps the fear of the stan’s potential for great violence is more about the artist’s resentment of their own visibility, apprehension, or guilt about past actions, and the paranoia that comes with such an inhuman level of surveillance. To the celebrity, fandom is violent because of its sheer scale of demand and visibility. They lack the ability to see each fan as an individual and instead see them as a hive, as a swarm moving as one ominous cloud of danger, and through that lens, everything is magnified. 

Perhaps this is also how Glover has come to see Black women, as a dangerous horde of screeching banshees that he must endure, but never capitulate to. Through this lens, it’s also often easy for many to dismiss the concerns about his misogynoir as romantic jealousy. While I won’t deny that this can sometimes exist — a feeling of entitlement to someone sexually because of their race — it is not what is happening to Glover. Black women are not upset because he is an object of desire we want to possess; we are upset because in his work, he has made us objects of horror and ridicule, or as mere plot devices to move Black men’s stories forward.

A disclaimer of my own: I am not a member of the Hive. I tend to listen to Beyonce’s new albums about a week after everyone else. And yet, I struggled to articulate what felt so hostile about Glover (supposedly a friend of Beyoncé’s, according to Nabers) using the momentum of her upcoming tour that honors Black queer music to portray a Black queer fan of hers as a murderous “dog.” Even the image of Beyoncé that Ni’jah has been cast in feels more like a mockery and less like a respectful nod. No effort was made to distinguish Ni’jah from Beyoncé. The literalism is lazy writing, and ironically makes the portrayal ring false, since Ni’jah captures all the aesthetics and mere facts of Beyoncé’s public life but almost none of the elements of why Black women enjoy Beyoncé’s music.

The political and racial significance of Lemonade is stripped here, removing the Black Southern specificity of the album and how it explored generational trauma, slavery, and police brutality. By casting Ni’jah’s album Festival as just an album about infidelity, the work of real-life poet Warsan Shire, who penned the poems that accompanied Lemonade’s visual album, is also erased here. Provocative, haunting, and sometimes disturbing, the Somali-British poet’s work is arguably some of the best we’ve seen from a Black woman poet in decades, and bore no small weight on the intensity with which many Black women, including myself, identified with Beyoncé’s 2016 album. 

Still, no one is required to pay homage to Beyoncé. She is not sacred. However, why would a friend and peer construct a poorly made parody of what was, according to every indication, an incredibly personal album exploring infidelity, generational trauma, miscarriage, and motherhood? I have no intelligent insight to offer but this — it felt low, and mean. 

When I tweeted about the misogynoir in Swarm, countless internet strangers rushed in to accuse me of erasing the Black women who worked on the show, including co-creator Janine Nabers and writer Malia Obama. But Black women are also capable of rendering other Black women into caricatures for the screen. Furthermore, according to Nabers,  “[Glover] pitched the idea, and he directed the pilot, but his DNA is all over the show. He and I sat down before we even had a writers’ room and broke down each story together; we knew what the ending of the show was right away too. And that was great because that allowed us to have a clear blueprint to relay when we assigned our writers, all of whom are Black.” So it’s safe to say that while Swarm has many Black women on the team, Glover’s vision and philosophy are integral parts of the show and should not be dismissed. 

And yet, that is what Black women are being asked to do — dismiss the idea of Glover being misogynistic as “silly,” according to Nabers, and to also embrace this show as some symbol of female power. “At the end of the day, I would hope that Black women watch this show and feel like they are seeing a part of Black femininity they haven’t seen before, and they’re drawn to it,” Nabers told Vulture. This is in contrast to Glover telling Vulture that he didn’t care about the audience or the internet or Beyoncé stans’ reaction to Swarm, saying, “I just refuse to take that into account because then we wouldn’t be able to make the things we want to make.” 

Reading this, it feels like “the audience” or “the internet” or even the specific group of  “Beyoncé stans” are almost coded ways to both portray Black women critics — who would obviously be the ones with the most to say about this show — as too large in numbers to have their own minds worth listening to, and also so insular and irrational as to render their opinions irrelevant. 

In another comment, Nabers called the show “a love letter to Black women,” which is an actual silly thing to say. Nabers later compares the love Dre has for Marissa to the love she has for her mother and sister, seemingly forgetting that the show starts with Dre non-consensually watching Marissa copulate with her boyfriend. She says that it’s supposedly important for Black women to be seen as serial killers on screen because it’s never been done before, apparently oblivious to the fact that Swarm is merely the latest in a long line of media to depict Black people as violent animals. These are nonsensical contradictions coming from both creators, a mishmash of words about empowerment and mental health and craft, all to disguise that they were given a bunch of money to troll viewers. The only genuinely amazing thing to come out of this venture is the awareness of Fishback’s acting talent.

If Swarm is a love letter to Black women, it is the kind of love letter you report to the authorities to receive a restraining order against the sender, the kind of worrying letter sent by a fan who doesn’t really understand the artist. And if Glover doesn’t understand Black women or fan culture, perhaps it’s best he refrains from writing about either. 

Nylah Burton is a Chicago-based writer who covers entertainment, travel, and lifestyle. She has bylines in Vulture, Travel + Leisure, and Vogue. You can find her on Instagram. 

The long-awaited third season of Atlanta aims to interrogate “the curse of whiteness,” according to head story writer Stephen Glover, who’s also the brother of creator Donald Glover.​​ The FX comedy/drama/horror series has been on hiatus since 2018. In that time Atlanta’s voice has grown more assured in Afrosurrealism, making its depiction of the monstrosity of whiteness a smart, gloriously depraved, weird, condemning commentary. 

The theme of whiteness and how it haunts and damns its own recipients becomes almost cartoonishly apparent by the first scene of season three, later revealed to be a dream within Earn’s (Donald Glover) own dream sequence. Dreams have long been the perfect medium for surrealist art. A stylistic movement developed in the aftermath of World War II, surrealism uses discomfiting, contradictory, irrational images to evoke a dream-like state of being. The subconscious takes these images and reorders them, and attempts to make sense of the images’ own reality. Afrosurrealism is, then, a movement that uses these tools to look closely at the already-surreal reality of Black people.

The opening scene features two fishermen at night — one Black and one white — and evokes the terrifying history and folklore behind Georgia’s Lake Lanier, where the government flooded an entire community, including a graveyard, so they could build a lake that would generate power and water supply to surrounding areas. In the eyes and professed experiences of many locals and visitors, Lake Lanier is haunted with ghosts who sometimes appear and drag people underneath the waters. Atlanta’s mock Lake Lanier is built on top of a Black town. 

“With enough blood and money, anyone can be white,” the white fisherman says, sipping a can of beer amidst the dark waters. “The thing about being white is, it blinds you. It’s easy to see the Black man as cursed because you’ve separated yourself from him, but you don’t know you’re enslaved just like him.” 

This is a clear thesis for the third season as well as a warning for our foursome currently traveling Europe while Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) is on a seemingly wildly successful tour: Don’t get caught up with these white people, don’t lose yourself in the money. Atlanta started off as a show about intermittently homeless Earn managing his drug dealer/rapper cousin Paper Boi’s burgeoning music career, while navigating a complex relationship with Van (Zazie Beetz), who is the mother of his child and on-again off-again girlfriend. While season three may not have stability in terms of relationships — it’s hard to know where Van and Earn stand as she explores Europe with him and his friends — it does mark the first time that the characters are not embroiled in a crisis of financial survival. 

But for anyone who thought Earn, Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), Van, and Alfred’s European travels would be a lighter romp than their adventures in Atlanta, season three quickly proves them wrong. The world of whiteness the characters are exposed to in London and Amsterdam is perhaps more frightening and monstrous than the one they left behind in the sprawling urban forest of Atlanta, surrounded by Confederate flags and monuments to slavery. This genteel horror is viscerally explored in an episode two scene where a white death doula comforts Van as a Black man lies dying. That same doula later pulls a lever that results in the Black man’s violent assisted suicide by suffocation, as a room of white people watch. It’s not transferring white souls into Black bodies like in Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out (2017), but it’s somehow more horrifying in its dream-like believability. 

Atlanta’s firm hold on reality, even within its wild plotlines, is perhaps no clearer than in the first episode, “Three Slaps.” Viewers are introduced to Loquareeous, a Black boy who causes disruptions at school. His mother and grandfather are called to the school for a disciplinary meeting, and after a harsh lecture from his mother, he is given three light slaps across the face by his grandfather. A school administrator calls Child Protective Services, and Loquareeous is then taken to live with a white lesbian couple with three other Black children. His name is changed to “Larry,” and he is starved and forced to work in the garden and at the market. 

The episode is based off the real-life story of the Hart family, who drove off a cliff with their adopted children in tow, in a murder-suicide. The children had repeatedly complained to neighbors about the starvation, abuse, and racism they faced at the hands of the Harts. Loquareeous is based on Devonte Hart, who had previously gone viral in a tearful photo of him hugging a police officer, which now has a sinister implication. While “Three Slaps” is often humorous, it’s disturbing and deeply uncomfortable when one realizes that the script is so close to the Hart murders. Black reality is horrifying, Atlanta states simply. And white people are monstrous. 

Yet, Atlanta’s strongest episodes have always been when they lean into what some rather lazily call “Get Out-esque” writing. In truth, Atlanta is very far from Get Out. It’s more ambitious and nuanced, more masterfully funny, more heartbreaking and thought-provoking. Plotlines are less obvious and yet completely familiar, weirder and more rooted in reality. As opposed to Get Out’s rather sci-fi exploration of racism, Atlanta’s most terrifying moments still manage to feel plausible and deeply familiar.

That sci-fi exploration of racism that made Get Out so successful is not necessarily a present element in Atlanta’s third season. Comparing the two might seem innocuous, but in many ways, Get Out is more Afrofuturistic than it is Afrosurrealist. Yes, the film does use Afrosurrealist aesthetics,  but overall it seems more concerned with the frightening possibilities of Black life in tandem with increasing technological advancement. 

Atlanta’s season three, on the other hand, is concerned with dissecting the present, the mode of Afrosurrealism. As writer D. Scot Miller said, contrasting Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism, “There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened … What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.”

Get Out engages the fantastic — the unbelievable, the impossible, the mind-boggling, like human souls being transplanted into Black bodies. Atlanta is rooted in the marvelous —  images of daily life made more striking, more dream-like, the wit of it all sharpened to an impossibly lethal point, while not compromising on the brutalities of reality. Think of Alfred not getting his money back from the billionaire in London with South African ties. This powerful white man preferred to pretend to be asleep rather than confront his gambling debt. He wakes to an angry Alfred, who tries to negotiate between Atlanta-style conflict resolution and European-style conflict resolution, and ultimately chooses Atlanta as he takes a chainsaw to the man’s priceless tree. 

The marvelous is a key feature of Afrosurrealism, as explored by Suzanne Césaire, a surrealist thinker and wife of French Martinican poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire. The season’s intensified dedication to Afrosurrealism, to seeking the marvelous, is embedded in the promotional poster itself, which renders the cast into abstract surrealist paintings. 

Loquareeous’s story, brutal and enraging as it is, exemplifies the marvelous in many ways, especially in how he survives at the end. That survival both mimics the fact that Devonte Hart’s body has never been found and simultaneously enters Devonte Hart into a fictional place of rest. We see this in the ending scene, where Loquareeous is watching TV and eating spaghetti. As the camera steadies its gaze on Loquareeous’s back and zooms in, the reader becomes overcome with emotion, remembrance, rage, and awe. This is the marvelous: A simple image of a boy eating the food he once rejected and watching TV, weighted with meaning. This is Black reality, made clearer by its placement within a dream. 

Atlanta doesn’t need to decide if it’s horror, or comedy, or a tender show depicting life’s daily moments of despair and triumph. For Black people, our realities enmesh all three into an absurd plateau. For other writers and creators, the absurdity might seem to mock the oppressed. But in the Glovers’ and the rest of their team’s deft hands, the absurdity becomes an indictment of our oppressors as well as a celebration of Black people’s humor. I intentionally say that Atlanta celebrates Black humor and not the way that Black people use humor as resilience, because it is the latter that Atlanta seems firmly set against. 

Anywhere there is humor and Blackness, the impulse to say the art celebrates “Black resilience” emerges, partly because of this country’s obsession with depicting Black people as hardy creatures meant to endure the worst of atrocities, all while singing and laughing. But while Atlanta constantly depicts resilience, it does not celebrate it. It scorns the conditions that make that resilience necessary, and it uplifts those who find it hard to navigate the expectation of resilience. In fact, it derives a significant part of its absurdity from the characters’ varying degrees of resilience.

The further this show’s characters get away from their eponymous city, the further they get from the intimacy between Black people that made Atlanta special. Instead, however, a new kind of intimacy is forged. A discomfiting, thought-provoking, and one-sided intimacy with whiteness. 

It’s that forced relationship to whiteness that gives Atlanta its absurdity — not just the presence of whiteness, but the influence on our spaces. Atlanta is a story of people who already knew these horrifying truths, to the point where they find them predictable, nearly boring. Atlanta doesn’t expect more from white people, it believes they are capable of anything. And in fact, it shows us, through modeling episodes based on real-life events and dynamics, that perhaps white people are capable of anything. 

“Now it’s the Blackest, the most surreal, the most hilarious. I say this shit with no fear, because I already know what it’s going to be: the most unexpected thing you have ever seen,” LaKeith Stanfield told GQ Hype of Atlanta’s junior season. “But the truth is, it’s becoming hard to make shit up, because the actual reality is crazier than the shit you could come up with.”

Intimacy with whiteness is not novel or inauthentic. It is just as much a cornerstone of the Black experience in America as our closeness with each other is — which is the most surreal thing, when you think about it. How does one feel this anticipatory closeness to one’s oppressor? A violent disinterest and boredom with them, because we know so much?

James Baldwin spoke of this phenomenon at length, perhaps most damningly here: “You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me.”

The characters of Atlanta embody this quote, in that they are constantly being forced to observe and analyze whiteness against their will. They are, even in their indifference towards whiteness, experts in the field. When Earn walks into the household of the white South African whose family owned the first bank and he sees a picture of a Black servant in the background of one of their pictures, he isn’t shocked but depressingly bored. 

Atlanta’s glorious weirdness, its dive into the surreal, is what makes the show nimble and wonderfully written. It covers a wide spectrum of Blackness, all while being relatable. If it’s hard to imagine that a show where invisible cars run people over outside the club, alligators hang out in bathrooms, and old white men profess their love for the sexual “ectoplasm” of Black ghosts could be relatable to Black people, then you’ve missed the point. Blackness is strange, inherently bizarre. Shows that attempt to depict Black life without reveling in weirdness feel too curated, too stifling and specific. Other works may represent a slice of Blackness, but Atlanta’s oddities are more legible, and manage to fit us all underneath its strange and marvelous umbrella.