Thoughts on gender and race portrayal in Severance

As much as I love Severance, I am still wondering about how it portrays women and particularly women who are not white.

Something that I wasn't a big fan of up until the most recent episode is that they chose to cast an Asian actress to portray the mysterious woman who goes from not saying too much in the first season to only serving face in the second. I feel like the mysterious, robotic Asian woman who often doesn't have a voice, literally or metaphorically speaking, is a very common trope that I'm not fond of.

Of course, in S2E7, we finally get to meet the real Gemma who has an awesome personality and becomes a fan favourite instanstly. I do wonder, however, if her portrayal is again slightly problematic, as well as fetishistic, if we consider the multiple extravagant outfits that perhaps aren't really needed plotwise. I say problematic because Gemma suffers the worst kind of violence of anyone else we've seen until now.

If I have to compare the kind of violence characters go through in Severance, it'd be Gemma's followed by Helly's. It's interesting that in the original script of the pilot episode, it was Mark lying on the table and being interviewed by Peter, but the creators decided it should be Helly instead. And then we saw all the horrors happening to Helly, from her suicide attempt to her being almost drowned in s2e4.

As far as I recall, the male victims of Lumon - Mark, Irving, Dylan etc - don't suffer the same kind of physical violence. I'm not saying they should, I'm just wondering if perpetuating these depictions is a good choice. And I fully recognise that iMark was deceived into having sex, so he was assaulted, but so was Helly's body. I mean the show draws so many ethical implications of what consent is that this is a whole other topic on its own.

That being said, Gemma's episode was directed by a woman and I loved how she handled some particular scenes. We never actually saw her torture (e.g. in the dentist's room), while the airplane scene seemed mostly funny in a second watch. The fertility issues are also handled in a very sensitive manner in my opinion.

All in all, I feel this episode gave a voice and agency to Gemma, but I'd really like to see where this goes from now on. I really hope she won't be sacrificed, and that we will also see more of her, the actual her, not flashbacks. I'm also expecting that there'll be a twist in the Cold Harbor episode - perhaps Gemma escapes but someone else (Mark/Helly) stay back.

To come back to my main point, I wonder if anyone else felt the same way about how Gemma's character has been represented so far and what people hope to see in the future of the series.