Marcelline and Bonnibel was deliberately hinted at - but only hinted at - by the exceptionally queer staff of Adventure Time. Initially just showing they knew each other (with Marcie introducing Princess Bubblegum's given name) but eventually they got a whole musical episode revealing unspecified past conflict. Someone on the non-televised and non-canonical after-show joked that maybe they'd been girlfriends. Cartoon Network fired that guy - ended the after-show - and didn't feature Marcelline for the rest of the season. Those assholes spent years suppressing the barest fucking suggestion that these two cagey immortals had any kind of meaningful relationship, everrr.

Adventure Time recently had some spinoff movies. One prominently featured Marcie & Bonnie being all domestic and shit. Why would it possibly be a big deal? Honestly the funniest part is that Princess Bubblegum is probably asexual. Cartoon Network threw an industry-shaking shit-fit over the idea of two women hugging.

Korra and Asami were written as a properly slow-burn romance between two bisexual women. Possibly not from the start? I think the writers noticed their chemistry and leaned into it. The showrunners had a coy attitude toward queer content, seeing what Nickelodeon would let them get away with, but never really pushing their boundaries. (Honestly both Avatar series had enough trouble staying funded. Every cartoon becomes a tie-in for another company's toy line.) The shipping chart for the four protagonists was deliberately fluid and melodramatic, early on, and arguably teased some M/M stuff via Bolin not being able to tell apart Desna and Eska. Nonetheless it took until the back half of season two for Korra to say "I've never had a girlfriend like you," with a big fat dollop of plausible deniability on the colloquial meaning for "girl friend." And despite going through some shit in season three, they only held hands and walked off into the sunset at literally the last second, in the finale episode that wasn't even aired on actual television. Bryan Konietzko had to tweet that yes, that was supposed to be confirmed for gay, no seriously, we did the thing.

Adora and Catra... listen. The pitch meeting to Netflix might as well have been ND Stevenson announcing "We're gonna re-do She-Ra and it's gonna be gay as fuck." All the animators who'd been told to stop hinting at queer stuff were still in the industry, and they said, okay - we'll stop hinting. So She-Ra is a universe where even the genocidal bad guys don't express homophobia, the apparently-inevitable prom episode has an F/F/F love triangle going on, and all these gay creators who know gay stuff is just not a big deal put their efforts into weird plot shit. Oh, and neurodivergence, because that's harder to get right. So the one straight-ish character I can think of is the autistic-coded, robot-fucking... lavender eldritch horror. The show also makes the shapeshifter nonbinary, and fans have decided there's at least one polycule, and the only reason Perfuma isn't canonically trans is that they cast a cis voice actress.

The Owl House got Disney - Disney! - to acknowledge bisexuality, nonbinary people, and a central lesbian ship. Which sounded amazing from a distance. Yeah no, turns out Dana Terrace had to fight tooth and nail for all of that, season after season, until the finale was dragged into existence one episode at a time. Whenever a popular cartoon has a random hiatus, you can infer the creators are quietly calculating how long they'd spend in prison if they murdered everyone in Standards & Practices. Dana decided the answer was too long and is now venting about it via the Glitch animation Knights Of Guinevere.

Everyone even tangentially related to these shows will probably disagree, but: this is why neural network video tools are exciting and necessary. Cartoons cost a million dollars. Anything which brings that down will rob these corporate motherfuckers of control over the medium. If drawing one frame per second gets you animation, then you only need a comfortable tablet and a fancy video card, not a contract for your soul and a pipeline for merch. If the robot gets a part wrong... add more drawings.