I just finished watching She-Ra, and I loved the gay characters because being gay wasn’t their personality, but they were, in fact, complex, interesting characters that happened to be gay. Owl House is definitely on my list of shows to watch in the future.

PUT A CHICK IN IT AND MAKE HER GAY!

Jokes aside, I’m gay too. Personally, I love LGBT stories. I LOVED Rocketman, a whole damn movie about a gay musician.

When Hollywood, Disney, all of that put gay people in things for the sake of diversity points, and censor it for other countries that don’t accept it, it’s obnoxious. It’s fake representation. That’s the pandering. Real representation is what is important.

As A gay Fish …
I agree.

seems like disney can’t add gayness without pandering.

Being autistic atypical really helped me feel like I’m not alone in some sense. Kind of pathetic maybe but I really enjoyed it.
Put a chick in it. Make it autistic too.

alien,aliens how to do a strong female lead. just do it and not make a big deal about it.

its like the saying a tough guy is the one who is not telling every one how tough they are.

https://preview.redd.it/xemohrs8sa3c1.jpeg?width=124&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79ce952d88d4bc7a85768f1ac91d68975de9be7e

Niceeeee

How awesome would it be if they had LGBTQ characters in media that were just normal people and it wasn’t their entire character arc that they’re gay. Like yeah, AL is gay, but he also runs a super cool animal sanctuary and he volunteers as a scout leader too. His gayness is secondary to all his other cool attributes. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had characters like that?

I agree about the lazy pandering, but there are so many people out there who really need to take Cartman’s words to heart – it’s just as lazy to hate everything woke on principle. It’s very frustrating that now, any time we do something gay with a character who wasn’t presented as unambiguously and explicitly flamingly homosexual in their first appearance, it’s going to be accused of pandering. Tim Drake (a.k.a. one of Batman’s “Robins”) is a sixteen year old boy who recently came out as bi. Lots of people don’t come out of the closet before age 16 – there’s nothing weird about a character coming out of the closet at any age, but there’s especially nothing weird about a character not coming out of the closet until their teen years. But nobody seems willing to accept that Tim likes dudes too. They have to scream and cry about how it’s “pandering.” Which is just silly. Tim is allowed to kiss boys.

To me, the point isn’t that you can’t have gay characters, it’s about WHY you’re starting to include a ton of gay characters more than anything. If you’re remaking every Disney movie but making every single main character gay, claiming it’s for diversity and inclusion: it no longer is. It is literally to make people who wanna see more gay people watch your movie, and to create conversations by people who don’t.

If you change the race or sexuality of a main character of an established movie or series, some of the internet will outrage, and some of them will be excited. But the angry people talking about will automatically create more publicity either way. And if they happen to make very stereotypical, outgoing gay people (where being gay is their whole personality and reason the piece of media exists), then the homophobic viewers can claim that gay people are being shoved down their throats, and it kind of… creates even more homophobia? Because it’s enforcing this view instead of showing them that newsflash: gay people are literally just people.

I’ve been getting annoyed because you can’t claim to do something for diversity and inclusion, but only include the same group over and over. Like it’s so cool that they made the little mermaid black. But if you remake every single princess movie and make the main character black every time…. you’re still not representing tons of other races who also deserve to have representation.

Side note: I’ve never left my opinion on this on the internet, because I’m so afraid of it being taken badly. It’s okay to remake movies and change how the characters look. It’s also okay to have outgoing gay characters. And obviously homophobic people will be homophobic either way, same for racism, but I feel like sometimes media is created just to enforce the idea that there is some kind of gay agenda (or whatever other kind of agenda) being forced onto viewers? Like they are purposely furthering the divide by creating content that nobody asked for, and then hiding from critique by claiming they did it for inclusivity, etc. Anyways, I hope people reading this actually try to understand what I mean instead of taking each piece of it at face value, because this is very hard to articulate properly :)

As a trans lesbian I too love when representation is done correctly ala She-Ra, the Harley Quinn TV show, Owl House etc. Not shit that is gonna give me a character and expect a pat on the back because that one minor character was gay and had no other defining characteristics besides that they are gay.

Gay man here. Absolutely agree that there can be homosexuality included in a show without it being “pandering”. Craig and Tweek have evolved without really pandering. They’re kids, like all the others. And they happen to be gay. That was how I grew up myself, a gay kid in a relatively conservative white bread suburb. Personally, I like stories with compelling LGBTQ characters. One that don’t pander. Schitt’s Creek was a good example, too.

As a gay man myself, I have a lot to say about the modern landscape of LGBT+ rep in media and how I personally don’t feel represented by them.

But what I’ll say for now is that when getting into stories, I want to care about—you know—the story. Give me a reason to care about the characters and plot. Make me feel invested in that. Whenever companies like Disney mention anything involving the representation of marginalized people, I see it as a sign that the writing is going to be trash and they’re trying to make up for it with representation. That’s exactly what anime fans correctly predicted with Crunchyroll’s original series, High Guardian Spice.

For me, I generally don’t like remakes at all, but if you’re going to do it you better do something to make me not wish I was watching the original. Making a character a different color or orientation is fine but that better not be the only thing.

It’s like in the new little mermaid how all of Ariel’s sisters are a different ethnicity, king trident must have a harem