Credit: HBO
Even though the new season of Insecure starts Sunday night, a lot of us still haven’t gotten over the hurt of last season’s finale. As if watching Issa cheat on Lawrence wasn’t hard enough, we were all too through when Lawrence slept with ol’ girl from the bank who’d been plotting and planning all along.
Let me be the first to admit I was more pissed off at who Lawrence chose for his revenge p-ssy than the fact that he made the move at all. And, upon careful self-examination and review of last season, I see now that that makes me a hypocrite. I was so busy being annoyed at Tasha for trying to weasel her way into Lawrence’s life that I completely overlooked the fact that Daniel did the same thing — and succeeded.
I was alerted to that fact today when I checked out Essence magazine’s interview with the actor who plays Daniel, Y’lan Nolan. In talking about how fans react to the show and his character he said,
“It’s funny how polarizing it is. They’ll be people in the streets that are like, ‘Yo, I hate him. He’s a devil. He should die.’ It’s not necessarily their dislike for Daniel, they’re just showing how much they appreciate Issa and the authentic nature of her relationship with Lawrence. Then the other people —especially the dudes that come up to me— and be like, ‘Yo, I’ve been that guy before’ and they relate.”
At first I thought, devil? How? And when Noel offered this explanation for Daniel’s motives I was even more willing to give him a pass.
“I see him as being somebody who follows through with what he’s interested in, whether it be music or, obviously, Issa. He’s sincere. He doesn’t sit on his emotions —which I think is incredibly inspiring. He’s also very single minded. Not selfish, but single minded. He doesn’t know Lawrence or anything about that guy. He’s just concerned about him and Issa’s relationship.”
But not knowing Lawrence or anything about him doesn’t negate the fact that he knew he existed. In fact, in episode 4 when Molly begins questioning Issa’s involvement with Daniel, she tells her girl, “Daniel knows I’m with Lawrence.” Molly retorts, “Do you?” And the answer to that question didn’t much matter because by episode 5, Issa and the devil, I mean Daniel, were having sex.
In all honesty, I’m still not looking at Daniel in any particular way and I think that has a lot to do with how we’ve been overly conditioned to see women who sleep with men in relationships in a negative light. Just think about it, we have terms like mistress, sidechick, and homewrecker which, although it doesn’t denote a particular gender, is almost always assigned to a woman. I don’t even know what you call a man who involves himself with a woman in a relationship. And that fact alone illustrates how these men get a pass.
Similarly, we’ve also all been conditioned to believe men cheat more than women, which is why tales of “the other woman” are so frequently told. But there are plenty of “other men” out there too and Daniel is one of them. That doesn’t make him more responsible for the demise of Issa and Lawrence’s relationship than she is. But ‘ol boy wasn’t exactly an innocent bystander. He got caught up in a few of Issa’s lies, but he also willingly jumped in that web and should be crucified as such, the same way we hang women on the homewrecker cross.
I completely agree with Nolan’s deduction that Daniel is single minded; most people are. And as women I believe a lot of us saw his unyielding pursuit of Issa as romantic rather than disrespectful to Lawrence and he and Issa’s relationship. I’m not going to pretend like I hate him for it, but I will have my sideeye ready when he comes on screen Sunday night.
How do you feel about Daniel?
The post On A Scale Of 1 To Devil, How Do You Feel About Daniel On Insecure? appeared first on MadameNoire.