Cheer Netflix - Tumblr Posts

wake up babe new coach beard just dropped

La’Darius Marshall and Nate Shelley

So let me preface and say I don’t want to conflate or speculate on someone’s real life (La’Darius from Cheer) but since Cheer exists as a piece of media- something edited and directed into a story- I do want to point to an incredibly similar “character arc” that exists in both the narrative of Cheer and Ted Lasso.

So in season 2 in Cheer, the conflict between La’Darius and his former coach Monica becomes tense and personal. While in season one, the two were depicted as becoming incredibly close, like family, in season two Monica leaves the team for a semester. La’Darius end up fighting terribly with the interim coach and eventually quits the team. He and Monica have a falling out which comes to a head as La’Darius starts to publicly releases damning information on Monica on social media. For Monica, this betrayal completely blindsighted her. Sound familiar?

At one point La’Darius says, “I always looked at her as my mom. I did. Like she was like...she was something very special to me. I let a lot of things go. I let a lot of things pass over, because I really wanted her to be the woman that I’ve always wanted in my life. And just this past year, I just felt like she wasn’t there.”

For anyone who still feels confused about Nate’s arc, watching Cheer may be a good way to really learn from someone, in their own words, the particular pains they experienced when the parental figure they thought they had was not there for them the way they needed. There are some obvious differences (there really needs to be an essay about how gay Black men are fetishized in the cheer community and how Cheer depicts the commodification of them) but there are certain intersections of race and class that definitely are subtexts for both narratives. 

There is also just a lot that can be learned through the vulnerability La’Darius and Monica share when speaking about their real lives.