Poprocks

Connor Storrie didn't magically become 6'3" because he gave a great performance; we discovered that Ilya didn't need to be exactly 6'3" for the things that matter about Ilya to remain intact.  François Arnaud's hair can be dark instead of blond without losing anything meaningful about Scott, and Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova being a woman of color expands representation without taking away something important about Svetlana- her being blonde isn't doing any particular work in the story.

Harris being stocky is different, (and I want to be careful not to turn him into something he's not in order to make the argument).  Harris isn't described as an enormously fat man; he's short, stocky, soft-bodied, and very much not built like a professional athlete, which matters in a world overflowing with professional hockey players and professional hockey bodies.  Troy is smitten with Harris JUST AS HE IS.  Harris doesn't need to lose weight, get ripped, get a makeover, or become more conventionally attractive; his body isn't a problem the story needs to solve.

So what do we lose when Harris becomes thin?  We lose the chance to see a short, stocky, soft-bodied man be the romantic lead, desired just as he is.  That's something mainstream romantic television gives us far less often than another thin romantic lead, and “Justice Smith might be amazing!” doesn't answer that criticism.

Justice Smith may indeed be amazing.  I hope he is; he could understand Harris perfectly, have incredible chemistry with Charlie Gillespie, and give the performance of his career, but he will still be thin. “Will Justice Smith be a good Harris?” and “What did we lose by making Harris thin?” are separate questions.  The answer to the first may absolutely be yes, while the answer to the second remains the same: we lost the chance to see Harris's body occupying Harris's romantic space.

Before “Justice can gain weight!” enters the chat: sure, he can, but Justice Smith doesn't owe anybody a physical transformation, and the suggestion almost perfectly illustrates the problem.  Hollywood has spent decades celebrating the opposite transformation: Chris Pratt goes from soft, doughy Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation to ripped Marvel leading man in Guardians of the Galaxy, and the transformation itself becomes part of his ascent to leading-man status.  We know that formula: soft guy gets thin and muscular, soft guy becomes leading man.  Book Harris offered something much rarer: soft guy stays soft, and he was already the romantic lead.  The whole point is that Harris didn't need to change.

I'm also not buying the argument that casting Justice Smith adds racial representation and therefore criticizing the choice means objecting to that representation.  I'm glad the show is adding racial representation, but representation is not Pokémon; you don't trade one quality for another until you've "caught them all."  Unless I'm forgetting something, Troy isn't canonically established as white, so why not cast a Black Troy and a stocky Harris?  More obviously, Black and stocky aren't mutually exclusive categories (intersectionality exists!), so racial diversity and body diversity were never an either/or proposition in the first place.

Instead, when it came time to put this story on television, the uncommon body was the thing that became optional, and (sarcasm font) funny how often that happens. Rachel in The Girl on the Train is heavier in Paula Hawkins's novel and becomes Emily Blunt on screen; Harold Lauder begins The Stand overweight and becomes substantially thinner in both major television adaptations; Norman Bates in Robert Bloch's Psycho is middle-aged, overweight, balding, and bespectacled, while Hitchcock gave us young, thin, handsome Anthony Perkins. Norman obviously isn't analogous to Harris as representation (nobody is arguing that overweight men desperately needed to see themselves represented as Norman Bates), but he's a striking example of how long adaptations have been comfortable moving characters toward conventional attractiveness.

There's an asymmetry here that's hard to ignore, because we don't seem to get a parade of canonically thin romantic leads becoming stocky because a larger actor happened to give the best audition. Not to say it never happens, but somehow “the actor doesn't have to look exactly like the character” gets invoked a lot more easily when the change moves a character toward Hollywood's preferred body rather than away from it, and then we're told appearance doesn't matter and we should focus on the performance.  Harris isn't even extraordinarily large, which makes the choice more striking rather than less; apparently even short, stocky and soft can fall outside the conventional romantic-lead template.

We've already seen queer television demonstrate that it doesn't have to work this way.  Our Flag Means Death populated its entire romantic world with people who look like PEOPLE: different races, ages, genders, heights, faces, bodies, physical abilities, and degrees of conventional attractiveness, without dividing them into “hot people who get to have sex” and “diverse people we're very proud of including and who have great personalities.”  Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi are middle-aged men carrying the central romance; Kristian Nairn is an enormous queer man whose body isn't hidden or treated as a problem; Vico Ortiz is a nonbinary Latiné actor playing a romantic character; Leslie Jones gets to be powerful, sexual, funny, and terrifying.  The diversity isn't decoration around the edges of the show; it's built into who gets to be complicated and desirable.

For example- look at Oluwande.  Samson Kayo does not have a conventional Hollywood leading-man body, and the show never acts as though this requires explanation.  Olu is kind and funny and competent, Jim is attracted to him, Zheng is attracted to him, and nobody has to deliver a speech explaining that what really matters is what's on the inside.  He's just a desirable man.  His race doesn't require the show to make him thin, his body doesn't prevent him from being romantic, and neither one consumes the entirety of his characterization.

Black Pete makes the same point from another direction.  Matthew Maher doesn't look like the man Hollywood traditionally casts opposite a romantic lead, but Lucius wants Pete; Pete gets sex, tenderness, insecurity, swagger, comedy, and love, and their relationship isn't a joke about Lucius being enlightened enough to overlook Pete's appearance. Pete simply gets to be desired.  Put Pete and Olu together with Stede and Ed and Jim and Zheng and Wee John and the rest of that beautiful crew, and you get a queer world in which there isn't one approved body for being desirable.

That's the part of Our Flag Means Death that feels so relevant here.  It didn't prove that audiences will tolerate unconventional bodies if you explain them properly; it simply assumed that all sorts of people can be desirable and trusted its audience to understand that.  It also makes the “but Justice adds racial representation” defense particularly frustrating, because OFMD demonstrates that racial diversity, gender diversity, age diversity, and body diversity can all exist at the same time.  You don't have to choose which kind of human variety you're willing to put on television.

That's what makes the current Harris situation so frustrating.  Heated Rivalry didn't have to invent an opportunity to challenge Hollywood's usual beauty standards because Rachel Reid already wrote one for them.  Harris was right there: short, stocky, soft, funny, kind, and adored by a professional athlete.  They didn't need to do anything revolutionary; they just needed not to erase what was already on the page.

THAT is where I think the fatphobia criticism has teeth.  I absolutely don't think somebody necessarily sat in that casting room saying, “We can't have a fat guy."  Fatphobia can also look like an industry that has spent decades deciding which bodies audiences will accept as romantic and sexual leads and repeatedly arriving at the same answer; in this case, the departure from the source just happens to move Harris toward the body television already overwhelmingly prefers.

“He gave the best audition” doesn't entirely answer it either, because casting doesn't begin with every actor on Earth competing in some objective Acting Olympics.  Someone decides which characteristics are essential, what the casting call says, who gets invited into the room, and which departures from the source they're willing to consider.  At some point, somebody decided Harris being stocky was negotiable; maybe Justice Smith walked in and was so completely Harris that everyone said “that's him,” and maybe I'll understand exactly what they saw when Season 2 airs, but that doesn't mean nothing was lost in making that choice.

Which brings me back to “In Jacob We Trust.”  I think Jacob Tierney did extraordinary things with Heated Rivalry, and some choices people questioned before Season 1 aired worked spectacularly well, but all that means is Jacob Tierney made some extraordinary choices; it does not mean he is infallible. “Trust the showrunner” isn't an argument, it's blind worship.

That's also why Rachel Reid's Instagram response bothers me.  “Thinking about all the people last summer who told me the casting for Ilya and Shane was wrong and bad...” doesn't address what people are actually saying about Harris.  We learned that Ilya being exactly 6'3" wasn't important; Harris being short and stocky mattered to readers because they almost never get to see bodies like that portrayed as uncomplicated objects of desire.  Maybe, when people tell you that something represented them and they're disappointed to see it disappear, “remember the last time you thought we were wrong?” isn't a particularly good answer.

Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie may be magical together, and I genuinely hope they are.  I'll watch the show, I'll probably love the show, and I'll give Justice every opportunity to make me love his Harris, because “Will Justice Smith be a good Harris?” and “Was something valuable lost by making Harris thin?” can both have the answer yes.