I knowwww! It would have been so perfect! It doesn’t take much at all to see it, right? It really–okay, I know I’m biased toward that, obviously, what else am I going to say, but I do actually still love the first and second movies, and they didn’t have any subtext, I can appreciate a plain good story. It hurt the movie to have these two similar age women forced into these roles, when it could have just done what came naturally. It had to work to no-homo a dynamic that was already established as romantic in the first movie.
I think what gets me about it so much is that what better time would there have been than now? What are these big franchises waiting for? These little background characters, that’s not progress, it’s not an actual step forward until it’s a significant part of these movies. And this franchise in particular, built on Sarah Connor, casting two more women as the new leads, why not? What would it have cost them to go all the way and just make it a love story? The people they’re afraid of already didn’t want to watch, they didn’t like that it was so female-centric and had a Latina lead and didn’t portray border patrol sympathetically. They could have done it and really stood out and be remembered forever and set a new standard.
All the same, I am glad and super grateful that Mackenzie Davis and Natalia Reyes absolutely played up the knight/queen dynamic and gave us this much. I’ve actually not yet really dipped my toe into the fic, but I probably will get into it once I’ve fully ~experienced~ the HD movie and extras.