There’s allegedly an Ace character in The Hangover and we hate everything

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And boy oh boy. When we started this podcast, I did not have ‘talk about the Hangover movie franchise’ on my to do list. But here we are.

Royce: And how exactly did this land on your radar again?

Courtney: That thing that happens, that has been plaguing me for years, happened where certain ace spheres of social media were getting very excited about ace representation in the media and doing, like, listicles and infographics, and here are all the ace characters and da-da-da-da-da. And one of these was like, “The character Alan from the Hangover is asexual. Hooray!” And I remember watching the Hangover, the first one, in the year 2009. I specifically did not watch the second one. And I didn’t even know there was a third one. But of course, I had to investigate this claim. Obviously, I knew from having watched the first one there wasn’t any sort of mention of this whatsoever.

Royce: I assume your memory of the movie was not so great.

Courtney: It was not so great. I remembered guys get drunk in Vegas at a bachelor party do not remember a wild night they had, wake up in a hotel room, and a tiger is there for some reason. A song about what do tigers dream of and a lot of crude humor. That’s about it.

Royce: I’m pretty sure I had not seen it before we watched it, but I think that I got the gist of everything you just said from all of the commercials about it around that point in time.

Courtney: Yes, some of the most memorable, like, lines and moments from it that had stuck in my head all these years, I’m pretty sure were in the trailer for the movie that was just played on cable television advertising the movie coming out. So of course, before we sat down to watch it – because of course we’re gonna sit down to watch it – I did a quick little google to try to figure out where this was coming from. And I thought it was really funny that one of the first responses was, like, a script from, like, a WatchMojo YouTube listicle type video talking about asexual characters in the media. Apparently they threw that in there. And it turns out it’s because it’s on the damn Wikipedia page for, “List of fictional asexual characters.” So I’m sure every listicle type thing that’s ever been made has just been looking at this Wikipedia page with no level of scrutiny. So we are here today with scrutiny in abundance because we’re going to talk about exactly how terrible this is on every front. This is a terrible example of an ace character. It falls into a lot of the things we would criticize and say this is acephobic, this is how not to write an ace character..

Courtney: We can also criticize it for not actually saying that the character is ace in the media, and we can criticize its director for doing that thing that people do where they don’t portray it in the show at all, and just say on a one-off interview, “Oh yeah, this character is ace.” So all the things we like to criticize are represented here.

Courtney: And don’t get me wrong, we have so few ace characters in movies, especially in movies. We’re doing a lot better these days in the last few years at characters in television. And characters in books have always far exceeded that, especially when you consider, like, self-published and indie authors. But yeah, the Wikipedia page has 12 asexual characters in movies and almost all of these, if you look on the chart in the notes, almost all of them are just like, “Oh yeah, director said this,” or a writer said that or this person confirmed this in an interview. Like almost none of these actually say it in the movie and I haven’t seen all of these movies, but I’m sure a good number of them an ace person could watch and not be like, “Wow, that is so obviously an ace character.”

Royce: What are the characters listed? I don’t know that I’ve seen any more of the movies than you do, but…

Courtney: A lot of these I’ve never heard of for one. But let’s go down the list because I do think it’s interesting. And a lot of them are very new, and I wouldn’t be surprised, if I looked these up, if a lot of these did not actually get like a proper release. Maybe they’re still on like an indie film circuit kind of a thing. Because this one year, 2023, the title is called Cat Person and the character is named Clay. The notes on this one does say that the character says, “I’m an ace.” So if true, possibly one of the first characters in a movie to ever say that. We’ve got Something In The Dirt, a character named Levi, from 2022. The quote here in the notes is: “I’ve never been attracted to anyone, and that is a very hard thing to explain to people that you’d be interested in dating.” That sounds ace enough. I’d give it a pass for not saying the word probably. But again, 2022, and I have not heard of it until now. Then we have Slow from 2023.

Courtney: This one we’ve heard a lot about. There’s been a lot of hype. It’s been on my list to try to find a way to watch for a long time being on the film circuit. It was always expressed to me as a film being about a relationship between an ace character and an allo character. So it’s got that mixed orientation nature about it. I’ve heard whispers since from some folks who have been lucky enough to see it, that they didn’t actually say the word ace or asexual in it. I think that’s the movie I’m thinking of. There is another movie that we’ve seen recently that was billed as like first asexual character in a movie, and the movie was not bad. I enjoyed it a lot, but I also do not think they said the word ace or asexual in it. And I also don’t think we can really talk about that one yet.

Courtney: We’ve got 2022, The Artifice Girl, a character says he is asexual. Then we’ve got The Hangover, Alan Garner, 2022. Girl Picture, this is another, in an interview, the actor said that although the character’s sexuality is not explicitly stated, she could be asexual or demisexual. Not going to count that. Not gonna count that. Nymphomaniac from 2013. I Am What I Am, 2022. The note just says the film is about Sobata’s life within amatonormativity. That’s a very ace community word that we use a lot because we feel the pressures of it disproportionately to others in society. So I want to know more about that. What does that mean? Queens of the Qing Dynasty, 2022.

Courtney: And then 2019. We did actually watch this one, Royce, Selah And The Spades. Which after watching it, we know was not stated in the movie at all, but this one, again in the notes, the writer and director says, “I think Selah is asexual.” 2019, Straight Up: the writer and director stated, “While personally I do see Todd as on the ace spectrum, I don’t know when another label is in the cards for him.” Okay, you personally see him as ace, did you say that in the movie? Did you make it explicitly, abundantly obvious in the movie? I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. Maybe I’m just being judgy. But then the Re-Animator Franchise, 1985-90 and 2003. [reading] “In a 1996 interview, Combs stated that Herbert is asexual on an unconscious level. Probably.” Cool, cool. So I think it’s fair to say that any and all movies that have overtly stated that the character is asexual are few and far between. And have only been released within the last two years. Which would mean the first Hangover movie coming out in 2009 could have/would have been groundbreaking.

Royce: That’s an odd word to could have/would have put on the movie franchise we just watched.

Courtney: Yeah, it wouldn’t have been my favorite example, but let’s be honest, it would have been three years before the dreaded House episode which we talked about. Which, even though this character is– would have its flaws as, quote, ace rep– Well, let’s, let’s just get into talking about the movie and why it would be a terrible example of ace rep and what almost maybe could have saved it. But I’m just not a fan of this franchise in general. So just know that we’re starting from there.

Courtney: First of all, rewatching it in this the year 2024 was quite a journey. [sighs]

Royce: Yeah, there’s a certain kind of comedy that was all over the place in the 2000s that I don’t even want to say that it aged poorly, because it was intentionally cringy when it was written.

Courtney: But it did age poorly, also. Like, it was in poor taste at the time, which makes it an even poorer taste now. Um it’s– It was hopelessly 2000s. It was so 2000s that it hurt.

Royce: Oh, the soundtracks really got you.

Courtney: Oh my gosh! The soundtracks… Numa Numa…? And I’m not gonna list off the entire soundtrack, but every time a music played I was like, oh my god…

Royce: Every time a music–

Courtney: Every time a music played I was like, [groaning] “Oh no!” I remember this period of my life so viscerally. But yeah so, character of Alan in the first one. The immediate impression you get from him is that he is the weirdo, he is the butt of the jokes, and he’s immediately put in this place. Not only by dialogue and proximity to other characters, but just right out of the gate with the framing. There is an established friend group here and he is the new guy, he is the outsider.

Royce: Yeah, the reason– The whole reason that he’s in on this trip is that the person who is getting married in the first movie is getting married to his sister. And so the core group of friends is Doug’s, his about to be brother in law’s, group of friends, and they are urged to take Alan along with them for the bachelor party.

Courtney: Yeah, and he’s immediately set up to be very weird, very cringy, very suspicious too. Like, at first he’s just sort of a goofball who maybe doesn’t understand social cues, but then he starts saying these things– Like, they’re parked outside of a school and he’s like, “I’m not supposed to be within a certain number of miles of a school or a Chuck E. Cheese.” And so like, little lines like that. It’s like, “Oh, you’re a like registered sex offender.” What?

Royce: Yeah. What started out as a bad portrayal of what the script indicates is ADHD, just gets, like, worse as the trilogy goes on.

Courtney: Yeah, I noticed that too. Because as we were watching the first movie, which was the only one I saw at the time, I came into this with the new lens of ‘this is allegedly an asexual character.’ This is allegedly one of our first asexual characters in a movie ever in history. So if I apply that in hindsight, how am I looking here? And there were times I was so trying to give that claim the benefit of the doubt by at the very least saying, like, sure, he might be a problematic character, but literally everyone here is problematic. Nobody here is the good guy. They all suck. Everybody sucks here. At least this is the most interesting character. He’s the guy people are going to remember the most in 15 years when they watch this again. Like, he’s the one that has the weirdest lines that are going to stand out and stick in people’s memory, so.

Courtney: I often say to myself that when I’m trying to decide what I like about asexual characters in media, I try to say, you know, I want their personality to be more interesting than their orientation. And oftentimes we get very flat ace characters because they aren’t– They’re the orientation first. They aren’t a well-developed character who is also asexual. They’re sort of there to teach the audience that asexuality is a thing. So I was at least saying if they make this more explicit in the second or third one, in a way that I can identify, yes, he sucks, but he’s the most interesting guy that sucks. But that– that little bit of good faith, did– did– did not last long. We were what less than 10 minutes into the movie and we already heard two slurs.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: And this– It’s– It’s so hard to critique a movie that’s so obviously trying to be edgy and awful. Like, we heard multiple slurs. We can’t even be like, “This movie’s ableist.” Because, like they weren’t trying to not be. They just– They just are. It was ableist. That was queerphobic. It was like there were so many just horrible things. Which, like you said, wasn’t great at the time but definitely a lot worse now. Is there a, is there a word for this type of comedy movie? Like, is there a specific comedy genre? Because I think you’re right that there were a lot of movies like this around this period of time, more so than there are now.

Royce: I don’t think that there is like a theatrical subgenre of comedy, but there were a lot of what I would consider to be the more edgy, like, adult focused comedies. Like, it’s the same director many years prior directed Road Trip, which was, specifically, it was both a road comedy and a sex comedy. So there are sub genres there.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: But I don’t really know of something to describe the style of humor that was present at the Hangover and in a lot of other movies at the time.

Courtney: It’s very bro-y. It’s very frat house. It’s very offensive, but it’s trying to do the thing where it’s like, “Well, if we’re offensive to everyone, is it really offensive?” Yes. But yeah, on, like the ‘this is the new guy and this is the weird guy’ front, like the main friend group, very quickly, is making comments like, “Is he all there? Like mentally, is there something wrong with this guy?” And yeah. Then you do have the weird little, like, very sexually illegal comments that he makes. They aren’t even just raunchy, they’re criminal. Like the, “I can’t be this close to a school or a Chuck E. Cheese.” Then they’re talking about card counting on the way to Vegas, and someone makes the false claim that, “Oh, card counting is illegal.” And he pushes back and says, “No, it’s not illegal, it’s frowned upon, like masturbating on an airplane.” And it’s those, like, super specific things that just constantly has you going like, “You did that, didn’t you?” And also, that is illegal.

Courtney: And I do not want to hear any of you – any of you! – out there trying to defend any of this by saying, “But some aces do have sex! And some people are hypersexual! And aces–” Don’t. Don’t– don’t do it. Because the broader context of the show, like, the butt of the joke is someone, like, calling everyone gay boys. And going like, two of these friends going to pick up their third friend, call him like Dr f-slur. And they’re just all straight guys. Like they’re– they’re– they’re dropping homophobic slurs at each other and like that.

Courtney: This isn’t a queer friendly movie. And that’s sort of what gets me sometimes about media analysis online. And this tends to happen more often in, like, really fandom heavy pockets, not just a random movie like this from 2009 that was really popular at the time. But sometimes people will try to defend, like, “Well, this character that isn’t stated to be ace explicitly in the main content could still be ace because aces are very diverse, and some aces do– and some people–”

Courtney: And as much as we know that, almost certainly the writers, directors, producers do not. Why would you give credit to, “Yes, this character is actually ace,” on the grounds of actually the person writing and portraying this is so tuned into the ace community that they know not only the ace 101, but they know all the nuances of the entire spectrum? Don’t– don’t give them that credit. They don’t deserve that credit. Make them prove that they deserve that credit. Because for how short that list was on the Wikipedia page of characters in movies, and how few of those movies actually had the character say that on screen, we don’t have any movies out there that are giving us a really rich, deep, layered, nuanced portrayal of a certain element of the A-spectrum. It’s not happening yet.

Courtney: If you want that, and you want to champion that, go find these fabulous A-spec indie authors who are writing in nuanced and depth, who haven’t made it into mainstream. Because it’s out there, it’s just not the big box office shit. It’s not. And it won’t be for a long time.

Courtney: But yeah, so there’s really not even much to say about the plot, because the plot is: they wake up the next morning in Vegas in a trashed hotel room; there’s a tiger there; one of the guys is missing. Basically, the entire movie is trying to find the guy who’s missing by piecing together what the heck happened last night, because we don’t remember any of it. And, spoiler alert, Alan, our beloved ace representation, is the one who drugged them all. He thought it– What– What did he think it was? Did he think it was ecstasy?

Royce: I think he intended to buy ecstasy.

Courtney: But what he actually gave them was “Roufalin”? [laughs]

Royce: Oh yeah, we were trying to figure out where the writers of the show got that word.

Royce: Coutney:

Royce: Where did you get that word?! I cracked up when a doctor was like, “Yes, we found Roufalin in your system.” I was like– and they were like, “Are you kidding me? We got Roofied?” And I was like, “Are you talking about Rohypnol?” Like, they’re clearly talking about the date rape drug. Yes, but Roufalin. What the heck is Roufalin? I have never heard that word before outside of this movie. But yeah, another aspect of watching this now post-2020, is the tiger in the hotel room. The tiger that they use. Because, wow, what a thing to watch after the cultural phenomenon that was Tiger King.

Royce: Yeah, there were a few uses of animals in the movie that are just different now.

Courtney: Different now… And yeah, so one of the guys, as they’re trying to find their friend and figure out what happened last night, they get all these little pieces and start making a timeline. One of the guys ended up, like, doing a shotgun Vegas wedding with a sex worker, I think?

Royce: Yes...

Courtney: And so he wakes up and finds out that he’s married now. And like he gets really angry at one point. I think, after he learns that Alan drugged them, and he just yells, “I married a whore!” And Alan did snap back and said, “How dare you?! She’s a nice lady!” And I actually kind of respect that for 2009. That’s really sad, but true.

Royce: The dynamic of the movie did go back and forth a bit because, yes, the writers were intentionally doing or saying bad things for the purposes of comedy. Like, I mean, there were the more casual uses of slurs that were just common in the 2000s, during that period. But then there were also cases of Alan saying something very inappropriate as a joke, because the whole– his whole character is being neurodivergent.

Courtney: Off the wall, yeah.

Royce: And oftentimes it was one of the characters being the straight man to all of these things being like, “That’s not okay. You can’t say that, that’s inappropriate.” But that would be– It would just be a line there and it would get brushed off, you know? [Courtney ums in agreement] But at least in the first movie, Alan did have a lot of lines like that of, “How dare you? She’s a nice lady.” Or this person– I mean, at one point in time Mike Tyson shows up because he was the owner of the tiger and he punches Alan in the face upon meeting them, and everyone was like, “Oh, Mike Tyson was so cool, he was surprisingly a nice guy.” And Alan was just like, “I think he’s mean.”

Courtney: [laughs] “I think he’s mean.”

Royce: But that is something that Alan sort of loses in the second and third movie, as he’s shown to be just a– a like–

Courtney: Horrible person? And–

Royce: Very unempathetic.

Courtney: A creep and a jerk. Yeah, it was– that was the thing, because he had what were arguably very endearing, like little moments, just like, little glimmers of like, “Okay, in this situation you’re the cool one.” Not in every situation, but in this one you’re– you’re the one who’s thinking right.

Royce: The neurodivergent stereotype that they went with in the first movie was more childlike innocence.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: And the neurodivergent stereotype that they went with, mostly in the third film, but I think also to some extent in the second one, was not possessing empathy.

Courtney: Yeah. I was kind of shocked at the beginning of the second movie the direction they took his character in. Because it was like, is this the same Alan? [chuckles] What happened? Why did you make him worse? Which I think we should talk about too. Because the second movie was the first movie… It was like they took the first script and decided to just, like, play Mad Libs with it.

Royce: Yeah, they just replaced all the nouns and verbs.

Courtney: Yeah, they were like, “All right, we’re replacing a tiger with a monkey. There’s going to be a monkey when they wake up in the hotel room. They’re not in Vegas this time, they’re in Bangkok. This guy isn’t getting married. This other guy is getting married.” It was the same movie.

Royce: Even with the same twists at reasonable points in the shows, and inevitably the same conclusion too.

Courtney: Yes, it was the same movie. It was like Dora the Explorer for frat boys. Like it’s– It’s the same steps, the same plot beats. We’re just going to make it a different location and a different item. But otherwise it’s exactly the same show. Which– Watching the second one after the cultural phenomenon that is Chimp Crazy? Very different.

Courtney: But yeah, right out of the gate, before they go on this bachelor party to Bangkok, we see Alan at home who– A guy in his 40s who is still living at home, lives with his parents, does not pay rent. We see him in his bedroom, and his bedroom is just like gamer man-cave, man-child, like every stereotype you could try to think to apply to it was there. And then just being repulsive, just being wicked, like, to his mother. Treating his mother like a personal servant and being rude to her and downright cruel. Like she’s cooking him food and bringing it to his room, and he’s, like, yelling at her that she didn’t bring him dessert. And then, when he’s done with his plate, he’s like paging her to come take away his dishes from his room.

Courtney: And in his room he has all these pictures from their, you know, crazy night out in Vegas from the first movie that they all decided were never going to see the light of day, and they were all going to look through them once and then destroy the camera they were taken on. Which was funny to see the progression of technology because they had like a digital camera in the first one, and then the second one, I think, it was like somebody’s flip phone they were taking pictures on that they found at the end. So it’s like, “Ah, the evolution I see.” And so he just has all of these very incriminating, very inappropriate photos from their first night plastered all over his wall. And these other guys are very upset to find this because they were like, “This is not okay. We did not consent to this. We thought we were going to throw away all these photos. Why do you have them? Why are they posted up?” And he’s like, “Well, no one comes in here.” And then he pages his mom to come take away his dishes and berates her for not giving him dessert. Like what? What happened to this guy? Like, ugh, terrible.

Courtney: And then, with this monkey that they had, he was just doing these very crude, very like sexual things. Like to and around other people, and with the monkey’s involvement. Like there was a monk who had taken a vow of silence that they just like kidnapped, I guess, and were trying to find a way to get information. Because we know he saw something last night. He must know what happened. And Alan, like what? Took a water bottle or something and like, put it under this monk’s pants to make it look like he had an erection, and was like, “Look everyone!” On, like, public transit. It was horrible. Sexual harassment! And then the monkey came and started, like, chewing on it and he was like, “Ha ha ha, when a monkey nibbles on a penis it’s funny in every language.” No, it was– it was terrible.

Courtney: But it was at the premiere of this second movie that we gain the knowledge that Alan is in fact asexual. And how did we learn this? Let’s investigate. This all stems from one article in Vulture that you currently need to plug into the Wayback Machine to read. We’ve really got to be more selective. Like this is how and why it made it on the Wikipedia page, right? Because they had an article they could link to. Because an article proves that it’s true. But even if you read the article, you see how bogus this is. This wasn’t like a big press release. This wasn’t part of the advertising. This wasn’t a nuanced, in depth interview with the creator of this. This was like a reporter asked someone a question on, like, a red carpet and got probably a half assed answer. If this one reporter did not ask this one question to this one guy and then proceeded to publish it in an article, nobody would ever even know that this was said. And if we didn’t have the Wayback Machine right now, we couldn’t even verify this information anymore. So what was the context in which we learned this?

Courtney: [reading] “The Hangover Part 2 is structurally similar to the first movie.” I would argue identical. It is structurally identical – [resumes reading] “But Todd Phillips wants to go in a totally different direction for the inevitable trilogy ender. ‘I have an idea, but the idea is just an idea.’ He told Vulture last night at the movie’s premiere. ‘It’s not even something I’ve talked about with the guys. My idea is serious, deadly serious. It will not revolve around a wedding and it will not revolve around a forgotten night. I’ll tell you that much. It’s just a different structure.’ We’ll see.” And apparently, actress Jill Hennessy told Vulture that she hoped in the third movie that her character and Alan’s character would get married. I couldn’t even tell you who that character was. Because all the women in these shows show up for 30 seconds. Oh no, so it was: Jill Hennessey told Vulture that she hoped the third movie would find Alan tying the knot with Heather Graham’s character from the first Hangover, which, again, I couldn’t tell you who that was, because most of the women in that movie were not real characters.

Royce: Heather Graham played the sex worker that one of the guys was briefly married to in Vegas.

Courtney: Oh… Because he thought she was a nice lady, gotcha. So a different actress was like, “I want that character to marry that character.” And apparently brought this up because people are just asking them like, “What do you want to see happen in the third movie?” And this seems to just be a lot of actors and the director just socializing, just talking, just being humans. And either in response to hearing that one actress hoped Alan’s character would get married – or being overtly asked by Vulture because they’re just interviewing several people and taking quotes it seems, and probably asking other people about them – the quote here from Phillips is: “‘Alan will never get married.’ Phillips laughed. ‘Alan’s asexual. If he doesn’t know that by now, he’s in trouble’.” That’s it. That’s our ace representation everyone. Wrap it up. There it is. Confirmed. Canon! It’s canon!

Courtney: But yeah, that paired with, like, clearly being a registered sex offender, clearly being a variety of stereotypes of neurodivergent, being– being the stereotypical, like, 40 year old virgin living at home man-child archetype, like it’s just bigotry, right? Like– He’s not thinking, “Wow, this character is asexual because that’s another layer of them that we haven’t explored yet, but it’s there.” It’s not going to be used to humanize him any further. It’s not going to be used to develop any nuance to him or his backstory. It’s just, “Look at this guy who’s the butt of our joke, who we consistently call ugly and fat and weird and mentally ill. Like, who’s talking about things like masturbating on airplanes and not being allowed near schools and being on a registry somewhere…” Like, to point at that character and be like, “Yeah, he’s never getting married because he’s asexual.” That’s– um.

Courtney: That’s on our Wikipedia page for List of Asexual Characters in Fiction everybody! How are we feeling about that? Because I’m not feeling great. Are you feeling great about that? Because that’s another sort of thing that– Like, “He’s never getting married because he’s asexual.” Like, yeah, you’re right, I’ve never seen someone asexual get married before. What a concept! But it would be futile to try to argue that with someone who’s coming from this mindset. Because in the year 2009, someone in charge of a movie like this, pointing out a character like that, that is just another example of asexual is the weirdo thing to be.

Courtney: He’s the one who can’t ever get a woman.

Royce: 2011 would be the premiere of the second movie.

Courtney: Ah…

Royce: But same point.

Courtney: Yes, yes, indeed. 2011, still before that House episode. Still according to this chart, would have been the earliest examples of an ace character in a movie. So, with that in mind, since we were told that this premiere– And again, this was one reporter from one outlet who heard one line from the director that had no backing in the movie, and just wrote it as a single quote in a larger write up about ‘these were things that were said at the premiere, this is what I heard’. If that person wasn’t there, if that person didn’t write that? It’s irrelevant. I don’t know why the fact that it was published in an online article at one time gives it credibility. We’ve got to stop doing that.

Courtney: And that– that’s, honestly, somewhat of a flaw with Wikipedia, too. Because there are plenty of things that are true and factual that haven’t been written about in a source they deem to be credible. And then there are frivolous things like this that are written with very little gravity or seriousness, that get put on a Wikipedia page forever. And it’s so hard to take away because, look, we’ve got the source, we can cite the source.

Courtney: They don’t have the Barbie movie on the list of fictional asexual characters, and there were more, much more prominent articles and intentional quotes by Margot Robbie and other cast members around the marketing of that movie that said Barbie is asexual. So I kind of feel like that was just a situation of like, man, we’ve got to fill this page out and there is not a lot here. So I feel like someone somewhere was like, “Let’s just add more things to make this feel like there’s more here.” When there really isn’t. But since he said that at the premiere of the second one, maybe he had high hopes of exploring this side of Alan in the third Hangover movie. Which I did not even know existed until recently. But I’ll be damned if we didn’t watch it anyway. And you know what? The movie ended with Alan getting married. Are you kidding me?

Courtney: The reason the director said he’s never getting married is because he’s asexual. So by the director’s own logic, he’s not asexual because he got married. And aces don’t do that. This is a well established fact that we know. So does that, like, retroactively void his previous quote? But it’s not even just so much the fact that he gets married that is upsetting. Because now it’s a character based on bad stereotypes, it’s a character who’s only ace by a single offhanded quote in an article that isn’t even public anymore, from a quote that was said in person one time at a premiere. And now we have, I guess, an argument to be made of an ace character that was made not ace anymore as part of his own personal growth, which is a thing we love to see every time we see that, don’t we?

Courtney: Because they even said right at the beginning of this movie– And again, like, I remind you, this movie is bigoted, it’s queerphobic, it’s fatphobic, it’s racist, like all of these words. The second movie too. Like, don’t tell me that there was– They did the thing– Because, of course, they were copying and pasting from the movie, and one of the characters in the first movie, like, pulled one of his own teeth out, so he was missing a tooth, and they were like, well– And he was the one who got married. So they’re like, “Well, what is– what crazy thing is this guy going to do this time? How can we one-up getting married? Oh, I know, let’s have him have sex with a trans woman and let’s have all of them react in disgust when they find that out.” Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?! It’s so bad, it’s so bad. So no, these people are not our allies. They’re not trying to bring us good representation. But the start of movie three; Alan is, like, once again being cruel to his parents. He’s refusing to grow up. He impulse bought a giraffe?

Royce: Somehow, yeah.

Courtney: And then decapitated it because he drove it out on the highway. [sighs]

Royce: Yeah, we learn in the third movie that Alan has an extensive criminal record.

Courtney: Extensive. Yes, at one point they pull out a stack. Like a printed out stack of his records that was enormous.

Royce: Yeah, the other two, their records are entirely clean, aside from getting arrested in the first movie. But then charges were dropped because they basically made a deal with the cops that arrested them.

Royce: Courbey:

Royce: Corrupt the cops.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: Well, and yeah, as he’s looking through the record because someone hands it and is like, “Is this yours?” And he’s thumbing through it and he’s like, “Oh yes, masturbating on a city bus. Yep, that was me.” Like, [scoffs] our ace character, everyone, is a sex pest. But yeah, even before any hints that he might be interested in a woman, that he’s on the road to getting married, before any of that, he is just making terrible decisions left and right. To the fact– to the point where his parents are finally saying we need to cut you off if you’re going to be like this. You need to grow up, you need to move out. All these things. And so they bring in these three guys from this friend group because they’re like, “We want to stage an intervention for Alan, and he’s not going to listen if you three aren’t there.” And these guys are just like, “Oh, he doesn’t need to go to a facility, we don’t need to–” Like, one of them just said like, “Just send him to fat camp. He needs to lose some weight and meet a woman.”

Courtney: So, right off the bat, in the opening scenes of this movie, they’re like, “Yeah, he’s creepy and he’s a criminal, and– and he’s crazy and he’s ugly and he’s fat, but he just needs to meet a woman. If he meets a woman, things will be better. He can grow up. He can be a functioning member of society, if only he can meet a woman. But he clearly can’t do that looking the way he does.” No. So very cool. And then he does end up getting married. And, as much as we know that aces can in fact get married. apparently the director didn’t think that before this movie. And also when they’re going to, like, see him on his wedding day, he’s like, “She’s my best friend and my soulmate, plus she lets me mount her, which relaxes me.” And it’s like okay, all right. And that’s like about it. Is there anything notable other than what we’ve stated that’s– from that or any of the other movies?

Royce: No, not particularly.

Courtney: I don’t think so.

Royce: Not that I’m aware of. I do think that in the– if you look at the first film in isolation, I think I remember during the end of movie picture sequence that all three movies have, like, right before the credits roll, all of the pictures that they were taken from a point in time when they were blackout are revealed. And I think in a lot of those in the, like, traditional Vegas partying sequences, Alan is shown to be generally not interested in the women around him. But that’s like literally it. And I think it’s played off in an infantilizing way, as how the movie handled it the whole time.

Courtney: Yeah. Yeah, because, like you said, the first movie, it was very, like, infantilized. Sometimes almost childlike wonder, sometimes almost bordering on endearing, until he just says something very creepy. But then he just got worse and worse. And the second movie they made him cruel. And I don’t know why they made that choice. It’s interesting that they said ADHD at one point too, because in the first movie they were very clearly setting up like a Rain Man parody.

Royce: Yeah, they had him win a lot of money at a blackjack table in an unrealistically short amount of time.

Courtney: By card counting in a way that card counting doesn’t actually happen, but is the way it was portrayed in Rain Man. So, yeah, I don’t know. I want us to talk about this. I want us to brainstorm, like what actually are the bare minimum requirements for something to be considered representation? Because we’ve talked about this a bit with the GLAAD report too. Because this year’s, when we reviewed, it seemed a lot better. But previous years there were instances where it’s like they are seemingly putting characters in here that don’t even follow what they say they need as the bare minimum requirement. And that’s one where I want to say the standard should be the word ace or asexual is said. I don’t want that to be 100% permanent, but I think any examples that qualify where that word is not explicitly stated needs to be an exception and not the rule. Because I do think there are good ways to portray an ace character without saying the word. But it needs to be obvious, it needs to be better. [laughs] It needs to be better.

Royce: Yeah, I think it’s fine to say that the word needs to be spoken, but there could be exceptions for exceptional cases.

Courtney: Yes, it needs to be an exceptional case if the word is not stated. And that needs to come in the form of either, like, using a rule of three, where you’re showing three different situations where it’s just being reconfirmed time and time again, or if someone’s explaining their own internal feelings and experience and don’t use the word but explain it in such an overt way that any ace person watching it can be like, “Yes, this, this is ace.” It shows a very common, recognizable ace experience. And it’s just going to need to have a hell of a lot more than one comment from the director at the premiere of a sequel that one reporter decided to write down. Alan being ace wasn’t even the point of that article. The article was entitled Todd Phillips has something very different in mind for the Hangover 3. So the point was it’s not going to be a copy and paste of the first two, he doesn’t think. Which seems to me like this– this writer didn’t even think it was uniquely interesting to say that Alan is asexual. They were using it to back up the fact that, no, this isn’t going to be Alan’s bachelor party next time, contrary to what you might think. Because that’s what we did for the last two movies. We just copy and pasted. So now Alan’s single, maybe it’s going to be his bachelor party next time. They’re saying, “No, it’s not going to be his bachelor party. And here’s why.” Because he’s asexual. But also, the director has big plans. He has an idea for something else. News!

Courtney: So I’m officially sick of talking about the Hangover. So I think that is going to be our episode for today. I would much rather tell you about today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: Mercality, “Looks that are Chic for the Fandom Geek!” You can find all sorts of cute pieces of jewelry on here. Some of them are video game themed, so definitely fun for the nerdy amongst us, and lots of different kinds of jewelry. We got necklaces. We got earrings. I myself got a couple of very cool necklaces. I got a– a loves– a Love Bites necklace. Um, because I am going to be starting to DM a Curse of Strahd campaign. Everybody pray for me. I– If you’re a regular listener of ours, you know how our first attempt at a Curse of Strahd game went. It didn’t. Spoiler alert, there was acephobia. But I’m the DM now, so we’re gonna do better with that. But it’s– it’s very cool. It’s a vampire mouth, it’s got the teeth and a little, like, blood red crystal drop coming off of the mouth.

Courtney: And I also got a necklace with a little gold like New Orleans masquerade mask on it, because I am a sucker for a good masquerade. They’ve got a lot of different fun motifs. They’ve even got some Pride things. They’ve got, like, beads in the color of the Trans flag, the Ace flag. And then a lot of dragons. We love dragons around here. So definitely do check out this shop. Links, as always, are going to be in the show notes to find Mercality.

Courtney: And if anyone knows where the heck they got the word Roufalin, please let me know because it’s driving me nuts. And if anyone knows how to remove a character from a chart of ace characters on a Wikipedia page, let me know, because that’s also driving me nuts. I don’t know. I want more opinions. I have to imagine a lot of aces agree with me that if we’re looking at a character and so many of us are like, “Mm-hmm. No, that was not stated in the media and we do not claim it.” Are we just gonna let it be there forever? Do we take it down? What do we do? I guess we just rant about it on a podcast, huh? But anyway, if anyone figures it out, let us know. And until then we will talk to you all next week.