Tonight through the queer theory lens on #LovecraftCountry , we have an extremely queer-coded Ji-Ah (Jamie Chung) making eyes at her communist lesbian best friend, who gets tortured and killed by Tic, who she then falls in love with. Conversion therapy theme on main.

Will add that with the brutal torture and murder of Young-Ja, #LovecraftCountry has now fridged two queer WOC in the space of three episodes, and both occur shortly after that queerness is made explicit. Which isn’t especially cute on the Bury Your Gays score.

And it is perhaps notable that the violence against queer characters on #LovecraftCountry is specifically being enacted on queer women at this point. Will be looking for them to address the gendered nature of this violence, most likely through the resident white feminist.

Moving back to the episode’s more explicit queerness with Ji-Ah: I can’t speak to how Koreans would feel about #kumiho being used as an allegory for lesbianism, but let’s roll with it, as #LovecraftCountry has already orientalized female queerness with Yahima.

Ji-Ah is a victim of what is implied to be corrective rape at the hands of her stepfather. Her mother, jealous that her daughter is getting her husband’s attention, has a kumiho placed in her daughter’s body in order to have it kill him, which it proceeds to do.

Problem for Ji-Ah being that in order to purge the kumiho from her body, she has to endure 100 further corrective rapes by men who she will then kill and steal the memories from (so she can empathize with them). At this point, she will be cured and able to feel love.

Ji-Ah’s inability to understand love is explicitly specified as being an inability to understand love in heterosexual contexts. There are no limitations in this regard with her best friend Young-Ja, who fully reciprocates.

We run into a furry situation with Atticus, however. Our magical main man comes on the scene, executes Ji-Ya’s coworker, and then arrests Young-Ja for coming out as a communist. He proceeds to extract her teeth as his unit tortures her, after which she is also executed.

Ji-Ah is understandably pissed, and formulates a plan to make Tic her 100th self-rapist and murder victim in revenge for the murder of her girlfriend. Alas, he feels bad about what he’s done in the war, and he likes movies. Inside, he is a good guy who doesn’t deserve to die.

So, she forces herself not to murder him, and they fall in love, BEFORE she can break her evil curse of lesbianism. Thank god for Atticus, not only did he torture and murder one lesbian, he turned another with the power of his virgin man meat! #LovecraftCountry , I have questions.

At this stage, I am continuing to offer #LovecraftCountry the benefit of the doubt in hopes that this will eventually pay off with an overarching narrative about the vilification and othering of queer female sexuality as a tool of imperialism and colonialism... Queen clown shit.