Gotham’s Oswald Cobblepot/Young Penguin is such an amazing character.
I’m not excusing the fact that he does terrible things or that he is canonically a villain, but within the context of the show in particular, as a guy in his late twenties/early-mid thirties he’s almost equal parts anti-hero. He’s a queer, disabled man and first generation American, the child of an immigrant who identifies more with people raised in the lower class and has greater contempt for people raised with money. He’s a small, frail, handicapped, not-conventionally attractive person who becomes a one man army.
He’s coded early on as someone on the asexual/aromantic spectrum, which, while it doesn’t interfere with the comics, as comic Penguin generally doesn’t care about sex or relationships, and the few times he expresses an interest in someone it ends poorly, but is played by an LGBT actor who comes from a place of empathy for his character, for being a character actor who has been bullied particularly over his sexual/romantic orientation and physical appearance and grew up in a very conservative area, and that is part of it. When it’s revealed he’s romantically attracted, for the first time in his life, to someone, and that it’s to another man, we want in spite of everything he’s done for it to work out. Even people who didn’t see the subtext between him and Edward Nygma before, how Ed seemed to pursue Oswald and seem attracted, emotionally, physically, or both, to a brilliant, wonderful, terrible and complicated person who had never expressed explicit interest in anyone of any gender, we were rooting for it to work out. We wanted him to find love.
Partly because one of the most intriguing aspects of Gothams’ take on the Penguin is his capacity for love. He doesn’t always go about it correctly, that’s true. When he finds out his father’s death was a murder, he goes full Titus Andronicus on the family responsible. His revenge for his mother’s death is more rational, but still is a visceral, violent reaction. When a woman the man he loves has been dating starts exhibiting signs of obsession, stalking, and an inability to accept that Ed feels uncomfortable dating her and feels that continuing their relationship will cost him his sanity, Oswald hires someone to have her killed–quickly and without much pain, but killed nonetheless. Point is, his love and capacity to love, his devotion to those he loves has been considered a redeeming quality until the latter.
Then there’s the pain he feels as the only confirmed queer male character on Gotham; his love interest manipulates him into coming out and, while he has his own valid reasons to be offended and leave, has Oswald thinking that, after falling in love for the first time in his life, that he’s inherently disgusting for loving another man. He has no context for Ed’s departure except horror that, sin of sins, a man fell in love with him. Him begging Ed to forget everything isn’t him saying, “Forget the object of your newest obsession who I had killed” but “Forget this part of my identity. I’m willing to lose you as the love of my life as long as you are willing to stay friends with me.” And he does this even as Ed presumably decides to use Oswald’s love for him as a means to ruin his life. Gotham has done quite a bit of wrong to its queer characters, and this is not the only example, but we know that Oswald never meant to hurt Ed; as terrible as he can be, he wanted more than anything to protect him, and that’s the thanks he gets.
I propose that, as horrible as he is, as much as he will suffer for killing his love interest’s love interest, that he’s still the best character on Gotham. No matter his arc, no matter how inconsistent his writing gets. From the beginning we’ve seen a man who’s done whatever he can to survive, and has given more dimension than any other production in any other medium the kind of humanity, gravity, and glory Batman’s Penguin deserves. No matter how much I disagree with the show, I fucking love Oswald Cobblepot, and I fucking love Robin Lord Taylor (as an actor, a character actor, and a fellow member of the LGBT community). He is one of the best and most fleshed-out villains I’ve seen on TV in a very long time.
