Television

Of that same era (just a year before):

https://www.npr.org/2012/04/13/150566153/airbender-creators-reclaim-their-world-in-korra

As for Korra herself, the show's creators imagined their headstrong heroine as the kind of girl you might meet on a snowboard. "She's muscular, and we like that," Konietzko says. "It's definitely better than being a waif about to pass out. I know, I look like a waif — who am I to judge?"

Some Nickelodeon executives were worried, says Konietzko, about backing an animated action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won't watch shows about girls.

During test screenings, though, boys said they didn't care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.

Not to speak of the fight over two girls holding hands in one scene.

Fair Warning: Long gushing rant ahead.

Steven Universe is an amazing show. The fact that there was any push back for LGBTQ+ representation is pathetic and sad, and it's sadly far worse now, but I truly believe things will get better.

I'll just say that as a cis hetero man, I still felt seen by Steven Universe. The main character, Steven, has an incredibly healthy emotional intelligence rarely seen in full grown men IRL, let alone in fiction.

Usually in fiction, men's isolation and rejection of their emotions are often portrayed in a positive or at least as a "beautifully" tragic necessity. But Steven Universe shows how nuanced and complex male emotions can be, and it even foregoes the concept of gender identity when they pursue the nonbinary fusion character Stephanie (amongst many other fusion characters that are featured throughout the show). It really is a great exploration of gender, the throwing away of gender norms, and how freeing it can be when you just don't even consider being judged about that because the world you live in is just that lovingly accepting. And there is so much more explored in the show that doesn't even have to do with any of that.

Again, I'm a cisgender heterosexual man, I am comfortable portraying myself as such. But I recognize how limiting and illusory "being a man" is at times.

All gender norms, and by extension, cultural norms, are ultimately performative.

They can make you feel included, excluded, can be uplifting, or constricting. They can also be dangerous when enforced on others against their will, and it's limiting when you don't question it, deviate from it, or change because of fear of going against it.

Steven Universe, and other shows like The Owl House and Dead End aren't the brainwashing shows the far right piece of shit fascists want you to believe they are. They are shows that give us a glimpse into worlds where we are free to be who we want to be and love who we want to love. Anyone who thinks that's a bad thing or naive is a coward or a bigot, and either way they lack the imagination to believe a better inclusive world is not only possible, but inevitable.

They are wrong. We are better than that, and I have an unwavering faith we can and will bring such a world to fruition.

Odd that this is an article now? Everyone was talking about it back then with hiatuses and all.

Meanwhile, on Adult Swim...

"What can we do to pander exclusively to all the straight young men?"

I guess it's just not all that shocking that they have been incredibly hostile to LGBTQ+ representation.

Gay rep in cartoons has been ongoing proof that bigots still want to stop us, but can't.

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.

The Emmy, Peabody, and GLAAD Media Award-winning show is also considered the first Cartoon Network series to have been created by a woman, though Sugar, who is bisexual and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, has since said that she does not identify as a woman.

Ah yes, the bisexual gender.

The show wouldn’t be complete without them!! 💞