Representation rule

Oh I get it.

They're all cousins. /Trolololol

Remember Sailor Moon Dub anyone?

59

Yup, making them related without removing any of the subtext. So they went from being lesbians to being incestuous lesbians.

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And they were roommates

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Brad, the hottest guy at school

7

And no Owl House? Crikey...

Spoilers

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"There is no heterosexual explanation for this."

3
Possible it was drawn before Owl House got good?

Edit: and by got good, i mean got explicitly gay!

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Insane to not include TOH.

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i know all of them except the one with trans flag and the girl next to her

Also, man i wish there were as many mlm couples as wlw

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women loving men?

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- sorry just edited, meant wlw as women loving women
  
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so many of these characters were so formative for me figuring things out as a kid, it was comforting to see someone else that I felt reflected in, being able to say like "oh hey that's how I feel"

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REPRESENTATION MATTERS

(All but one character is a lesbian couple)

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Arguably, Garnet is the only character who is a lesbian couple.

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Off topic, but not capitalizing on Korrasami is one of the stupidest things Viacom has ever done, lol. Which is saying something.

How could they possibly think "No one will like this, quietly sweep it under the rug..."

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Worth noting: at the time, any reference to a gay relationship was disqualifying for a TV-Y7 rating.

We have come a long way these last several years.

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Its always a positive feeling seen.

14

I love this

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Where's muh gurl Beckett Mariner?

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The bottom row is a story in three acts.

Marcelline and Bonnibel was deliberately hinted at - but only hinted at - by the exceptionally queer staff of Adventure Time. Initially just making it a reveal that they knew each other (with Marcie being the first to mention Princess Bubblegum's given name, IIRC) but eventually having a whole musical episode where they had unspecified past conflict. At which point, someone on the non-televised and non-canonical after-show joked about how it sounded like they used to be 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.

Korra and Asami were written as a properly slow-burn romance between two bisexual women. Possibly not from the start? I think the writers just noticed some 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 even though they went through some shit in season three, the show only let them hold hands and walk 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 all their effort 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, aaand if Stevenson casually mentioned that Perfuma was trans it'd be zero percent surprising.

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.

10

Admittedly this reading glosses over Stephen Universe being deliberately set-up to force Cartoon Network to acknowledge gay stuff. All the gems are allegedly nonbinary, but consistently she/her. Their relationships literally fuse people together. One of the central characters is the red/blue pair in the center... three seasons in. Rebecca Sugar, hot off Adventure Time's corporate case of the notgays, got to reveal that there's a been married lesbian couple onscreen since episode one.

Aaand Cartoon Network Europe still yanked their funding once that red/blue pair got an actual wedding.

5

I demand a list of all the characters in this picture!... Please...

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The ones I recognize are, starting at the top and going clockwise:

Cassandra (Assassin's Creed Odyssey)

Chloe Price and Max Caulfield (Life is Strange)

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn (Batman/DC)

Princess Bubblegum and Marcelline (Adventure Time)

Korra and Asami Sato (Legend of Korra)

Adora and Catra (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)

Sailor Uranus and Neptune (Sailor Moon)

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- The blue and red in the middle are Ruby and Sapphire from Steven Universe
  
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- Okay, but who's the one with the trans flag?
  
  3

No Luz and Amity?

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I am more of a Banana Fish guy

4

I thought Harley is typically with the joker? Was that updated at some point?

2

Harley and Ivy have had an on-again off-again thing going since the late 90's or mid 00's. It's been at least decade since Harley ditched Joker in the mainline comics and moved on to greener pastures.

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- They actually first implied it during the Batman: The Animated Series, as a "Sappho and her friend" style relationship, only coming out and saying it later in the comics.
  
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- Ivy what you did there.
  
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Harley is bisexual, a demographic which often gets erased the moment they're not actively flirting with multiple people of different genders at the same exact time.

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- Shout-out to The Owl House for having a very bi-heavy cast, in addition to the central F/F ship.
  
  Kinda weird they're not in this picture.
  
  1
Harley hasn't really been a thing with the Joker since forever. The comics have had her and Ivy as a thing for years.

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The new(er) Harley Quinn animated series. it's very good. It's got big kite energy.

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- I put off watching that for a long time because I didn't really like the Harley Quinn character and her obsession with Joker and that whole abusive relationship they had, compounded by all the people who treated Harley and Joker like it was a relationship goal.
  
  But I was very pleasantly surprised when I did eventually give it a shot. Yeah, it does include some Harley and J stuff, but they kinda had to because of how ingrained that relationship was into Harley's pop culture identity. But it is done well. The series is one of my favorite in the Batman mythos.
  
  It's also kinda interesting how Ivy seems to be holding up better morally than Batman himself does. She's an environmental warrior while he's a status quo warrior, and that billionaire side of him holds up less and less well as it becomes more and more apparent that even billionaire philanthropists are really just taking credit for giving away wealth they shouldn't have had in the first place.
  
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I don't see goat f----ers represented. If everyone deserves representation, surely the goat f----ers also deserve representation. Let's not start excluding groups. That's a slippery slope. The name of the game is inclusion right?

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