her story
Whose story gets told and who gets to tell it? Her Story's is a love story, a friendship story, a self-realisation story, a story of prejudice, a story of abuse, a story of overcoming, a story of understanding: it is the story of a queer community written by people from that community. Specifically, Jen Richards and Laura Zak who also play the main characters: Violet and Allie. They are instantly loveable characters, their stories spark off the screen as they get to know each other. Allie is a journalist in LA doing a story on trans women in the LA community and so interviews Violet, in doing so she gets to know her better, but also has to deal with the transphobia within her own lesbian community and Violet's own reservations about sharing her story. Running alongside this is the story of Paige, a high flying attorney who acts as a mentor to Violet and also in her own tricky dating quandary (she's played brilliantly by Angelica Ross, who also starred in Ryan Murphy's Pose). In centring trans women and giving them the space to tell their own stories we are gifted two different narratives that explore the nuances of identity and love from within a queer space. And, in Violet and Allie, we're also gifted a sublime love story. The sort of love story where you watch two people slowly peel back the layers of themselves and expose their vulnerabilities, the sort of love story where the other person makes the other person better, the sort of love story that feels inevitable and irresistible.
The series is only six episodes, each lasting nine minutes, the perfect length to be consumed in a single evening and, if you're like me, several times over. Within this time-frame, there is enough space to explore subplots and inner-conflicts within the queer community, the transphobia and misgendering by cis people of trans women, the joy of late-night ice-cream, and the difficult question of how much of yourself to reveal early on in a relationship. These are stories and nuances not seen on mainstream television. Too often narratives involving queer women end in violence and tragedy, but Her Story shows that when members of a community write and direct their own fictions the reality is something much richer, more complex, more enduring and instantly more loveable.
Watch the first episode of Her Story here
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