Hey there, it’s me. This is just me sharing my opinion on the new special since it panders towards me in a sense.
I agree with every point the special is making; not every movie needs to be this big preach.
Like, as a gay person, I’m tired of Disney, HBO, Netflix, all these big companies that make a blank state out of great material.
Of course there is great gay shows - (The Owl House, Atypical mm.) but those have something else to keep you watching where the gay is front and centre.
Let me use The Owl House as an example. A teenage girl is thrown into a world of demons and must traverse her way back to the human realm.
Cool plot point, right? However by Season 1 episode 16 “Enchanting Grom Fright” it’s made clear that there is going to be a lesbian relationship between the human girl and a demon girl name Amity.
However, they address this in Season 2, Episode 8 “Knock knock knockin on hooty’s door” where Amity and the human girl -Luz get together.
And that’s the last time that it was brought up and the show continued like normal, just with them being in a relationship
I’m getting sidetracked, my point is - there can be homosexuality and social issues in a show with out it “pandering”.
And it also feels like by Disney that they’re trying to “make up” for past homophobia so now they’re really just pushing gayness on to everything they can and use it as a sort of shield, if that makes sense.
Anyway, this is just one gay person’s opinion, feel free to comment your own - straight or not. If you read all this - thank you.
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 :)