#he's like a queer-coded disney villain

[crabussy]

handy checklist of why you shouldn't watch the new lilo and stitch movie (even hatewatching it. don't do that. do something fun instead)

completely destroys the entire moral of the movie by making nani leave lilo alone at the end. holy shit.

most if not all allusions to colonisation being harmful to hawai'i is gone or changed to be more "palatable"

beloved character got turned into a shallow villain who doesn't even get redeemed all because they COULDN'T AFFORD TO ANIMATE THE ORIGINAL VILLAIN???????

the gay-coded couple get completely destroyed (one of them turns out to be evil and irredeemable. and we don't get the drag scene anymore. they killed their queerness entirely)

lilo's autistic traits are extremely toned down to make her more "likeable"

the pacing is abysmal and they've removed a lot of important plot points (stitch's ugly duckling scenes for example)

a lot of characters have been completely rewritten. agent bubbles is no longer a deep and interesting multifaceted character. he's now just kind of mean and unfunny for no reason???

stitch's model isn't even faithful to the original movie. THEY PUGGED HIM!!!!!!!!

all the beautiful lighting and compositions from the original movie got put in a WOODCHIPPER. boy I sure do love bright white lighting instead of gorgeous pink dusky hues for the surfing scene

the actor for nani isn't native hawaiian. she's white and filipino and also WAY paler than nani in the original movie. she seems lovely but I think maybe for the movie about native hawaiian oppression they could have cast a hawaiian actor

stitch's character is flanderised and toned down too. he STARTS OFF loveable and less violent and antagonistic. instead of how he was in the original movie- an aggressive creature that BECOMES loving and caring as the movie progresses. his entire arc gets squashed flat so that he can be cute and cuddly for marketing

lilo's whole thing about photographing tourists as a coping mechanism for feeling like a novelty attraction to tourists is just Gone. they make the guy she takes a photo of hawaiian for no reason when he was originally a white tourist

disney made it

disney has a resort on hawai'i that spans 21 acres of hawaiian land with close to 400 rooms that costs over 600USD a night for the cheapest room. this movie is a one hour and forty eight minute advertisement for a resort that contributes to hawai'i's struggles with over-tourism.

[crazy-pages]

I'm going to throw my two cents in to the conversation about why James Somerton didn't get caught earlier. Part of the answer is of course that he did get caught, he just bullied and lied to get away with it for a while, but I know a lot of people still express confusion. And of course he went out of his way to make sure his audience didn't know about other queer history sources other than himself. But still. How could he have so many viewers of his videos and none of them had seen X source material?

Well. To be blunt, most of his videos were pretty basic. He tended to copy the highlights of what he was plagiarizing, not the really advanced stuff. And insofar as he copied the advanced stuff, he had a tendency to chop it up and serve it out of context alongside other plagiarized work. The material he was presenting was revolutionary to an audience unfamiliar with queer history, but like. I'm guessing 'Disney villains are queer coded' is not exactly a new concept to the kind of people who read multiple books about queer coding in film.

Now I'm not a film studies person, I'm a physicist. But you know what I do when I get a video in my YouTube recommendations about some fairly basic physics concept?

I skip it. No shade to the creator, but like. I hit that topic a decade ago and I've added literally thousands of hours of studying and research to my brain since. I'm just going to give it a pass, all right?

These kinds of videos self-select for an audience which isn't going to be familiar with the source material. The people who know it are unlikely to keep listening after the first minute or so.

And you've got to remember how much of this content the experts have consumed! With very few exceptions for weird little things that stuck in my head after all these years, I would probably not notice a physics explanation plagiarized from one of my textbooks! Not because I wasn't intimately acquainted with the textbook, but because I was intimately acquainted with many such textbooks. Spend enough time learning this stuff and it all blurs together a little bit. Does this explanation sound familiar because you've heard it before, or because you've just read books which cover this specific topic seven different times? And does that wording or that example ring a bell because it's plagiarized, or because it's common to the field?

Catching this kind of plagiarism requires having the kind of people who are already familiar with these sources, and therefore uninterested in video summaries on the topic, to watch the video. And among those people who do, it requires them to match Somerton's words to one specific source on the topic out of many, that they probably read quite some time ago. And then you have the filter of how many of those subject matter experts have the source on hand to check, to turn a vague "...hmm" into something solid.

If you know enough about queer history to say that some of his plagiarism was obvious, now that you've watched the video, then you should remember that there is a reason you probably weren't one of the people watching his videos! And because YouTube promotes videos through algorithmic engagement, none of this stuff has to pass the sniff test for any other expert in the field before it gets released. No experts have to like it for it to get published or for it to get good reviews or for it to get a recommendation in, I don't know, the New York Times.

The only people who have to like the videos for them to get traction are people who are just trying to learn introductory queer history and film theory. The exact people who aren't going to notice this. And for those of you who to whom it is obvious, ask yourself. When was the last time you watched a basic level queer history introduction on YouTube?

[amageish]

The funny thing to me about Moana 2 is that I imagine, at some point in development, Matangi probably was supposed to be a capital-T Traditional queer-coded Disney villain... but I guess plans changed and so she's now like 5% villain and 95% queer-coding.

Girl is just a queer elder with some good advice who happens to deliver her advice via a villain song (where she also happens to call Moana "babe" in the chorus)... and she also kidnaps Maui, sure, but he was being a bit hotheaded - all's well that ends well, right?

[raccoonnutella13]

i think what makes the great mouse detective stand out from other disney movies is that the protagonist is just as enjoyable to watch as the villain is. basil and ratigan's animation is equally as expressive; i mean obviously ratigan's flamboyancy is exaggerated just a little more because of queer-coding, but i still think basil shows a lot of the same traits too, and it just makes him so so fun to watch when he's being all dramatic (in his very first scene he collapses into his big ass armchair and starts playing sad violin music cuz he reached a dead end in his case; if that doesn't scream "dramatic gay" i don't know what does)

also a lot of people really eat up villains who genuinely obsess over what they do at the expense of others, and it's interesting how in tgmd we can not only see that in ratigan, the main villain, but also in basil (not to mention how this makes basil and ratigan fit into the "we're not so different" trope, adding even more depth to basil's writing beyond his primary role as a hero). we're still rooting for basil at the beginning because his end-goal always remains the same, but we know he can do better with how he goes about it. this really makes him fun to watch but also complicates him as the hero of the story because we want him to move past his negative traits. idk i just can't think of any previous disney protag who was flawed in the same way basil is and i think it makes him all the more enjoyable as a character

it's just like, disney villains are almost always the star of the show, and i cant think of a lot of movies where the hero is on a similar level except for in tgmd. i think more protagonists should be dramatic and gay and flawed in some way tbh

[wisteria-lodge]

And now for a HP fandom question - do you have any thoughts on queercoding in the series and if JKR ever actually intended it, and then backtracked, or if it was always completely unintentional? I'm thinking specifically about Lupin and Tonks (as individuals, not as a ship) Inspired by your post about the intention vs how fans perceived Draco Malfoy. Thanks!

So the first thing I want to do is make a distinction between femme-coding and queer-coding. They're tropes with very similar histories, and a lot of works treat them as the same thing. But Harry Potter doesn’t, and I think we can chalk this one up to JK Rowling’s habit of grabbing aesthetics and visuals without really thinking through the history behind them. 

(Like - the goblins. She says she didn’t mean to write an antisemitic thing, and I actually do believe her. But did she use a lot of tropes and images with a long history of being tied to antisemitism? yes.)

So when I say “femme” I mean giving a male character traits stereotypically associated with femininity. Heightened sensitivity/emotionality, an interest in hair, clothes and being attractive, a love of lace/pink/frills, a dislike of violence and physical confrontation, and a preference for the soft power of manipulation, character assassination and poison - versus the hard power of direct confrontation and physical prowess. Are these things super stereotypical? Yes. But they’re ALSO traits you see all the time on male villains, especially ones that you don’t want to seem that threatening. Femme-coded villains show up a lot in children’s media, or as the Big Bad’s #2. They’re not meant to be heroic or sympathetic (since all these feminine traits are not desirable, especially for guys.) But they also aren’t scary, and you can pretty much always play them for comedy. 

For example: see almost every male Disney villain. And JKR was writing children’s literature in the 90s, so of course she’s pulling from the same zeitgeist as the Disney Renaissance. 

JKR loves herself a femme villain. The absolute gold standard is of course Lockhart - who wears pink, wants to start his own line of hair care products, is self-centered, vain, obsessed with popularity… but he sucks in a fight. His entire MO involves manipulating people into thinking he has these traditional masculine qualities when he just doesn’t. But there’s also fussy, prissy Percy wearing his prefect badge on his pajamas. Bitchy, emotional mean-girl poisoners Draco and Snape (especially early book Snape - which is Snape at his most villainous.) Draco, Percy and Snape are also unusual for being male characters who we see crying for reasons other than grief. 

Lucius Malfoy is an interesting case because he starts off quite masc. He’s threatening to curse people, the governors are scared of him, etc. But, as the books go on… and he gets less powerful… he also gets more femme. When we meet him in Book 5 he’s no longer threatening people, but bribing them, spreading rumors, and giving interviews to the Prophet casting Arthur Weasley in a negative light. He's also getting really into peacocks. In Book 2 he was a major threat, but as he gets recast as Voldemort’s #2 he becomes a more femme, soft-power villain. When he leads the attack on the Department of Mysteries, he absolutely bungles it, which defines his character (and relationship with Voldemort) for the rest of the series. And it makes sense that Lucius is given this kind of treatment! It’s a way of communicating that there's a new villain in town, a real villain. 

So, are any of these femme-coded villains additionally queer-coded? I’m actually going to say no. Queer-coding is (like it says on the tin) finding ways to imply that your character is specifically gay. Like maybe giving them a same-sex relationship that is written romantically, but not explicitly called out by the text. Or pairing up all of the characters except them. Maybe have other characters joke about them being gay, and use that as a way to talk about the subject with some plausible deniability. Or they could just play suggestively with a cigar, or a walking stick. There are different strategies.  

But Lockhart doesn't get any of that. Honestly, I think that if JKR actually thought of him as gay, she would have been a lot more wary about a scene where he keeps Harry alone with him in his office for way longer than he’s supposed to. And she might have skipped this joke: 

“Harry was hauled to the front of the class during their very next Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson, this time acting a werewolf (...) “Nice loud howl, Harry — exactly — and then, if you’ll believe it, I pounced — like this — slammed him to the floor — thus — with one hand, I managed to hold him down — with my other, I put my wand to his throat (...) he let out a piteous moan — go on, Harry — higher than that — good —” 

Like. At least she would have picked a different word than “moan,” right? Which unfortunately has slightly sexual connotations. Especially if she wanted to keep Lockhart a buffoon, to properly set up the twist at the end. 

Slughorn also gets femme-coded in a similar way: he loves his candy, his parties, his smoking jackets, his lilac silk pajamas, his web of connections he can use to get stuff (Lucius style.) We are introduced to him squatting in specifically a “fussy old lady’s” house. He’s also unusually emotional, getting weepy at Aragog‘s funeral. But I don’t think we’re meant to read him as actually gay, or else his relationship with Tom Riddle might’ve read a little too close to Tom seducing/trying to seduce him. Which is a beat JKR does subtly play out with Hepzibah Smith, but idk. by that point at least Tom is a legal adult.

(As a side note - the Harry Potter series got so lucky that all of its adult characters are played by absolutely top-shelf actors who are aware of the connotations and history behind various symbols, and do consider these things in their performances. Kenneth Brannagh and Jim Broadbent are good enough to make sure there’s not even a hint of iffy subtext when they play Lockhart and Slughorn.)

Draco, Snape, and Percy all have a case of the not-gays. Percy has a girlfriend (we don’t really see her or anything, but we’re told she’s there.) Snape of course gets his whole thing with Lily, and Draco… after one too many beats where it’s clear that Pansy is into him, but he’s not into Pansy…  gets a scene where he’s talking to his buddies with his head in her lap. (JKR uses “no one‘s good enough for me” beats with Blaise, Draco and Sirius, and the idea there seems to be more that they have undeservedly high opinions of themselves, and less that they don’t like girls.)

But, I do agree that a lot of JKR's characters do come across as a little more queer than intended. It boils down, I think, to the general lack of any kind of romance in the Harry Potter books and JKR being generally bad at/uncomfortable with writing male attraction directed at women, BUT being perfectly happy writing attraction directed at pretty guys. And because of that… yeah, it can sometimes feel like maybe Harry has a thing for Cedric. Especially when Dudley goes on to tease him about Cedric being his boyfriend, which I believe is the only actual mention of gay people in the entire series.  

So is there any intentional queer-coding in the book? It’s really subtle, but yes. I think Dumbledore is queer-coded. He is unusually emotional/cries unusually often for a Rowling guy. He is also given a scene which emphasizes his “flamboyantly” cut plum-velvet suit, and his relationship with Grindelwald is implied to be romantic for one book and two movies before being actually confirmed in Fantastic Beasts 3. (With the line of dialogue “I was in love with you.” Big step up from “We were closer than brothers.” which is an odd thing to say about someone you are interested in romantically.) 

But you brought up Tonks and Lupin, two characters very commonly interpreted as queer. So let’s get into that. JKR has said that she considers Lupin’s lycanthropy to be a metaphor for stigmatized diseases like AIDS. And… as incredible as it is to say… I actually do not think that she made the jump from there to thinking that maybe the character suffering from AIDS should be gay.

Because the narrative places so much weight on Lupin being bitten young and then on maybe not being allowed to attend school, I’m pretty sure that he’s not intended to be queer so much as he’s meant to be Ryan White, the literal poster child for AIDS activism who got infected via blood transfusion when he was two. Tragic, absolutely. But not gay. Honestly, I hope JKR was thinking of ‘lycanthropy’ as a metaphor for stigmatized illness in the abstract and not as a comment on gay people specifically. Because otherwise, Greyback’s thing about biting children becomes a mash-up of two of the biggest homophobic boogeymen from the 80s: gay men infecting people with AIDS on purpose because… idk, they hate the world or something. And the influence of gay men somehow “turning” children gay. Both absolutely real, if ridiculous, moral panics.

On top of that, Remus and Sirius do get a pretty clear case of the not-gays early on (“He embraced Black like a brother.”) Buuuut Alfonso Cuarón did think through those implications for Movie 3, absolutely saw Lupin as gay, and directed David Thewlis to play him accordingly. No reports confirming or denying whether Alfonso Cuarón ships Wolfstar, but I think that if I’m an actor trying to make sense of Lupin’s motivations… and I know he didn’t show Dumbledore the Marauders’ Map and didn’t tell anyone Sirius was an animagus… and then I’m told my character is gay… well. Anyway, I think there are absolutely hints of Wolfstar in that performance. 

And there's Tonks. Tonks is introduced during a very spooky segment in Book 5: Harry has been going through it, been left alone at the Dursleys while having what sounds like a depressive episode. It’s dark, he hears intruders. It's a really good piece of writing. But JKR knows that it’s the good guys who are coming and thinks, okay. Let’s make that as clear as possible from the word go. And so the first thing Harry sees is Tonks' pink hair. And what kind of person has pink hair? A young adult. A punky young adult. And what power would a teenager think was cool? Well, the ability to change the color of their hair at will. That, by itself, would have worked perfectly fine for this character.

But then (for reasons best known to herself) JKR goes further. Even though Tonk’s hair changing color is easily 90% of the transformations we see and there is no plot reason her appearance needs to change more than that, we see her drastically change her age and body type. When you think about this power for more than five seconds, it becomes kind of OP. For worldbuilding reasons alone, my instinct would’ve been to tone it down a bit. 

But no, we have this counterculture character who seems interested in her career and not in a relationship, who can easily change anything about her body, and (if her ability works anything like Polyjuice) that means she should definitely be able to change her gender. Cool.

Then, in everyone’s least favorite romance, Tonks and Lupin are paired up. I have heard the argument that this was meant to walk back queer-coding, or to punish people who thought they were queer... but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think JKR expected these two to be fan favorites, and then was kind of surprised when everyone wanted to hear about their continuing adventures. 

(There are a handful of characters who JKR clearly really enjoys - and really enjoys writing - that fandom honestly could not care less about. Mundungus Fletcher and Ludo Bagman spring to mind. But the reverse is also true. She had one story for Lupin and people wanted to see more. Tonks is probably supposed to be her comment on immature young adults: she is loud, in your face, causes mild destruction and is “a little annoying at times.” But the fans fell in love with her.) 

So JKR has these two fan favorite characters and nothing for them to do. A romance is something for them to do. JKR also has a kind of weird pattern where good people need to either have kids or take care of kids. It’s not good to be a woman who isn’t involved with taking care of children in some fashion: see Rita Skeeter, Dolores Umbridge, Bellatrix Lestrange. This is also (I think) why Harry names his kids specifically after Severus, Sirius, and Albus. Since they’re good men, JKR had to find a way to give them kids after the fact. 

So yeah. I think we were meant to read Tonks and Lupin having a kid as kind of a reward, or at least as proof of their intrinsic goodness. There also just isn’t another guy in the right age range to ship Tonks with. The only other option is Sirius. 

(Harry in the books and Lupin on Pottermore both suspect that Tonks/Sirius is a thing. Completely forgetting, I guess, that they're cousins.)

[edwardteachswombtattoo]

Its been said before, but it bears repeating. If this had been almost any other show, Stede would have been the antagonist/much beloved side character playing second fiddle and/or villain to the more traditionally masculine main character. There has been a long history of queer-coded villains, often feminine men or overtly butch women or any character who is explicitly meant to be read as GNC, whose femininity/gender non-conforming behavior is either meant to disgust or horrify the audience. There are some very very long essays out there about how queer audiences tend to identify with monsters (werewolves, vampires, etc.) and villains in fiction due to how queerness is seen as perversion and deviance from "proper" society and the massive amount of queer-coded villains in popular fiction that we tend to latch onto.

I think what first fascinated me about the writing in OFMD is how Stede has all the hallmarks of a queer-coded villain in an old Disney movie....but without the implied derision/disgust the audience is meant to feel. I'd like to point out there is a very specific stereotype of the "white upper class aristocratic gentleman" who is often vain, engages in flamboyant behavior, and is gently or more overtly coded as gay. This stereotype has many origins in popular culture, one of which is (arguably) how a lot of things associated with the "upper class" of society (decadence, waste, caring about one's appearance, fancy fine fabrics, etc.) also came to be associated with femininity and womanhood specifically. White upper class aristocratic men weren't out doing "man's work" (like farming), they were sipping wine and worrying about their hair. There is also a whole can of worms I could pry open about "homosexuality is an indulgence of the upper classes" being a legitimate political belief held by certain people throughout history.

Stede of course isn't gay-coded, he's literally just gay with a capital bundle of sticks. And the sincerity is why the writing in OFMD works so well. Stede is an actual honest-to-goodness character. He has layers and his flamboyance, his femininity, his gender non-conformity? These aren't treated as anything more serious than character traits, they aren't meant to disgust or horrify the audience. And we know this from the second Blackbeard (the supposed manly masculine big bad tough pirate guy) says he fancies a fine fabric.

[croik]

Am I an insane person or does Malevolent kind of have like. A thing with queer coded villains. Not in a positive or reclamatory way either; it genuinely reminds me of like, old Disney movies and 2000s anime where all the most evil and inhuman male characters would also be written as campy and effeminate. And it seems like Harlan has no idea that he's doing it which is... interesting...

Like. Kayne is the most obvious example ofc. He's flamboyant and flirty and gives John and Arthur pet names. And at first I really liked it but the more it became clear that Kayne was a major antagonist and not just a mysterious neutral actor the more it started to put a bad taste in my mouth. It honestly still could have been okay if Harlan had maybe leaned more into the idea of Kayne and Arthur being parallels/foils but that ended up not really being a thing at all. Atp in the podcast I just get this really strange vibe where Kayne is simultaneously an incredibly violent, deceptive and predatory individual, and he's being written as basically canonically attracted to Arthur and it just. Seems like those two things are kind of connected. Again maybe I'm seeing things that aren't there but it seems like there are some "predatory creepy gay without boundaries" stereotypes being expressed here.

Similar issue with the Butcher. He actually has the closest to any sort of textual queerness of any Malevolent character, since he "falls in love" with his victims. Ummmm I kind of thought we had progressed past the "gay/queer serial killer who has an erotic fixation on the people he murders" trope. Apparently not. Again Harlan almost does something interesting/subversive by making our Perfect Protagonist have a weird connection/companionship with the Butcher, but in the end it seems like everyone agrees that they didn't actually have that much in common, obviously Arthur is unequivocally morally better than him, and then the Butcher gets his head exploded.

It's been longer since I listened to seasons 1-3 but Larson definitely had some similar queer-coding going on with him, as well as some other minor villains (Kellin comes to mind). It just seems like a pattern of Arthur being contrasted with characters who are not just morally corrupt but also written as (subtextually sexually) predatory or creepy, especially towards Arthur. And then Arthur is disgusted by their unnatural desires and heroically defeats or evades them. I could be making something out of nothing but it just feels... icky.

You are absolutely not an insane person of any caliber, this is something fandom has murmured about for a long time! It is definitely a thing in the show that just about any character that encounters Arthur becomes immediately obsessed with him. When it's an ally, like Noel, Oscar, even Daniel and Alia, they are almost immediately convinced of his goodness and go to great lengths not just to help him, but to reassure him that he's A Good Man (tm). But when it's the villains? It's this invasive flirtatious thing, where they're threatening not just to kill him but to lock him up in their basement or something, intimate tortures and such. (Larson maybe less so - he seems more like Southern Gentleman approach but much less handsy than Kayne and Collins). And then there's Antoine, whooo boy. If Antoine really is meant to be gay, and thus was also gay in Arthur's prime timeline when he was a Supervillain? Yeesh I don't want to think of the connotations from CoC1.

I don't believe it's intentionally homophobic, necessarily. I think these villains all represent pretty common horror tropes from over the decades, and Malevolent just co-ops them without thinking that deeply about it. In the same way that the entrance to the Witch's home is a smelly vagina wall: vagina walls have been gross in horror movies and games forever! It's here because it's a thing that all people find gross, right?? I don't think it's any different to him than shoving Arthur full of maggots, or the guy in Deviser having his fingernails torn off. These are default things people are scared of you can plop into almost any horror plot.

But in 2025 it's not wrong to want a writer to actually think about the greater context of the "things everyone thinks is scary" they put into their work, like straight men being threatened with sexual violence, or old women living in filth. Yes horror has been here hundreds of times before. But does it need to be here again? When the sexual violence is the only overt queerness on display and half of all women on the show are old and live in filth?

And of course, the fandom is doing really deranged and kinky shit with these villains, which I 100000000% support. But I don't think he fully grasps the difference between "fans making things legit queer for their own amusement and wish fulfillment" and "the creator playing at making things queer because it's creepy."

Thanks for the ask anon <3 It's very interesting stuff to talk about, especially as a queer person who sometimes writes horror.

[spenglernot]

STORIES TELLING: NED LOWE AND THE DEATH OF POOR REPRESENTATION IN OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

In history, Ned Lowe was one of the most sadistic and violent pirates in the early 18th century, so he’s an obvious choice for a villain for season 2, episode 6 – Calypso’s Birthday.  What is interesting is what the OFMD writers chose to do with him.

Lowe announces himself to the crew of the Revenge with great fanfare (cannon ball attack) and gets right to the point.

Ed is thoroughly unimpressed.

Cut to Ed and Stede tied up while Ned attempts to set the mood so he can monologue about why he wants to kill Ed.

Ed knows what’s coming. He is going to suffer but he still can’t be arsed to meet Ned with anything but vaguely bored dismissiveness (and Stede is happy to play along).

Up on the deck, Ned prepares the crew for his big, dramatic moment of symphonic torture.

Note that the Revenge crew is tied down, braced by vices and generally unable to protect themselves from imminent torture and possible death, but their spirits are up. They don’t seem terribly fussed.

Then Stede uses his people positive management style to happily orchestrate a worker uprising in Ned’s crew.

Ned’s crew responds instantly; severing their allegiance to Lowe and telling him off.

The crew sails away and talks profit sharing while Ned dully threatens to hunt them down.

Ned is now a prisoner of the Revenge crew and seems entirely disinterested in his own survival.

And Ned sinks to the depths, without struggling at all.

There is a lot going on in this episode: pay and labor equity direct action, gay love engagement bliss, kink humor, Stede being a hero and saving his crew by playing to his strengths, then having to decide whether to kill in cold blood and feel the consequences of that choice. Ed having one more reason to be done with piracy (while being so impressed with and fond of Stede), and then watching his man make a fraught choice and having to deal with the fallout from that. (And, damn, I haven’t even mentioned the passionate sex bit.) Anyway, back to the point.

Now for the the meta part

The Ned Lowe sequences are perfectly in keeping with OFMD’s signature blend of madcap violence, humor, and big emotional gut punches. But something about Ned Lowe just strikes me as off for this show.

Ned is seriously threatening the crews’ lives, so why don’t they take him seriously?

Why does Ned have such a boring, throwaway backstory?

Why is Ned so nonchalant about his own death; like it’s a foregone conclusion?

Why does Ned have a silver violin and silver spurs on his slip-on dress shoes?

Why is Ned sartorially monochromatic?

And then I realized who Ned reminds me of.

This guy,

Earnst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (1971)

And this guy,

Scar in Disney's The Lion King (1994).

And this guy,

Xerxes, 300 (2006).

And it sure seems like Ned Lowe isn’t just an episodic villain. He is an archetype of the one-dimensional, stereotypical queer-coded villain that has been endemic in film and television throughout history. The OFMD writers have a lot to say about what to do with this kind of character:

Don’t respect him.

Feel free to openly mock him.

Don’t let him take your joy, even though he will hurt you.

He won’t disappear on his own. You have to throw something at him (take action) to make him go away.

Once he’s in the water, he’s content to drown. He’s not into what he’s doing any more than you are.

Oh and, just to be clear,

The LGBTQIA+ community has a very long history of turning shit media into better stories. So, hey, big media, prepare to have your crap characters wrecked (improved).

Now, back to our transformative pirate show with rich, complex queer characters and a multi-layered plot that surprises me every week and makes me feel big feelings - most of all, joy.

Final thought: I do wonder if Ned Lowe is monochromatically silver as a tribute to/poke at, Hollywood and the silver screen.

This meta was written before OFMD season 2 has fully aired. No idea what’s going to happen in the finale (and I’ve generally fled social media to avoid spoilers). I’ll be back, looking at everyone’s fascinating posts after episode 8 airs.

[kerokasa]

re: the language of queerness in project sekai

i’m specifically using queer here to denote a type of subject-position/relationship to society, rather than any specific identities a character might hold. i don’t think a game like project sekai is particularly interested in ever putting straightforward labels on characters, even though a character like mizuki clearly reads as trans to many players.

which ofc is my entire point… the game communicates a lot of information about mizuki without a lot of direct references to identity, instead using the language of difference as a euphemism for transness/queerness.

an event like “beside unchanging warmth” ultimately points to a trans story without stating anything explicitly, and i think it’s interesting to read it while paying attention to what the word choices are actually doing here.

in flashbacks to elementary school mizuki, the word “weird” (変/hen) is doing so much heavy lifting. it’s a word that inherently calls up a certain kind of relation/power dynamic between what is considered normal vs abnormal. the language is walking this precarious line of saying-not-saying, where nobody actually defines what makes mizuki “weird”; the responsibility is placed on the reader to infer that mizuki wearing frilly/cute (feminine) clothes is seen as transgressive by her classmates.

it feels important that mizuki seems especially hurt by the word “weird” in this flashback, and i think the line delivery supports this as well. contextually, i can’t help but read it as a stand-in for more overtly derogatory language/transphobia, softened and sanitized by replacing anything specific with a comparatively broad adjective like “weird.”

(this raises a lot of interesting questions for me wrt what makes queerness legible in translation / in my experience, anglophone fans are often looking for specific markers of identity when said identities generally originate from a certain class of euroamerican queer culture and academia! which is not to say prsk should or should not be more explicit in depicting trans characters; it’s just another point of discussion)

all this leads me to other instances in which the game draws attention to weirdness/difference — and the reasons i believe both mizuki and rui’s storylines evoke queer coming-of-age plots.

this might be slightly controversial to say, but it’s hard not to draw the connection given their middle school friendship, and how much rui’s background emphasizes the same ideas of weirdness/difference. even their final kizuna rank, which is correctly translated in english to say “i guess we’re both different” (僕達も変わったものだね) returns to that word 変 that upset baby mizuki so much.

i’ve seen some people argue that rui’s backstory should just be read as an indicator of his neurodivergence and well. for what it’s worth, i’m gay and neurodivergent like every other goddamn person on this site and within the context of rui’s arc throughout the game, i think there’s still a very strong argument to be made that mizuki and rui bonded over their shared experience of being queer.

after all, why is mizuki having “weird” taste in clothes taken as unassailable evidence of her transness if rui’s “weird” thinking cannot also be read as queer (or queer and neurodivergent)?

i will note that rui’s insecurities have never centered around an inability to communicate with his classmates (unlike nene, whose arc is VERY much about her becoming comfortable around new people and realizing that they want to be her friends). although other students are afraid of him, rui is a skilled communicator in public and doesn’t appear bothered by social interaction.

rather, rui’s insecurities center on this idea that he is dangerous to the people around him / he expects to be punished for expressions of vulnerability or intimacy.

fan communities nowadays sometimes forget the origins of “queer coding” as a concept in cultural criticism. going back to classically queer coded disney villains, romantic/sexual interest isn’t really a huge part of what makes these characters queer coded. rather, it’s about presentation — stereotypically effeminate mannerisms, ursula’s visual resemblance to drag queens in the little mermaid, vocal inflections that audiences (often subconsciously) associate with gay men in particular.

queer coding is shorthand that tells the audience these characters are sinister, untrustworthy, duplicitous. it’s rooted in a history of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric that paints queer and trans people as insidious, contagious (as in the AIDS epidemic), corrupting and luring innocent straight youth into degenerate queer life.

which brings me back to why i think a queer interpretation of rui’s backstory makes it so much richer and more meaningful. starting in the main story and then really coming to the forefront in wonder halloween, rui has internalized this belief that he is a danger to his peers. that his desire for closeness will always inevitably cross a line and he will end up rejected and alone.

this mirrors a really common, familiar experience of being a closeted gay teenager and the fear of how the people around you would react to your identity. in many cases, people are afraid of coming out because of how their friendships will inevitably be sexualized, or they’ll distance themselves in order to prevent anyone from misinterpreting their relationships and intentions.

personally speaking, i really identify with rui for these reasons, even if the story uses his inventions/directing as the stated reason for his fears. it’s really not until the formation of wxs (and meeting tsukasa specifically, as mizuki and the pandemonium trio have pointed out) that rui begins to feel safe enough to be honest and vulnerable about his desires both on and off the stage.

and it is important that it’s tsukasa in the end! tsukasa flips the script that rui is used to — rui has cut himself off to avoid rejection, but tsukasa is the one who seeks rui out, invites him into the troupe, works for him to stay. tsukasa recognizes something in rui and for the first time, someone isn’t reacting from a place of fear or simply not understanding the scope of rui’s vision, but instead he wants the very thing that rui thinks he needs to suppress. it’s also significant that tsukasa is another boy, and it’s significant that the idea of “weirdness” comes back in the form of “oddball 1-2”, which reframes difference as something that connects rui and tsukasa as a unit. he is no longer alone because he’s too weird, but now that same weirdness brings him closer to another person.

i also think it’s so fascinating how mizuki and rui bond over their shared difference or “loneliness,” and the game presents it as these 2 people who really have nothing in common besides their loneliness — i think mizuki says something along the lines of being happy that rui has found people that can relate to him outside of simply being lonely. it reminds me of my own experience being closeted in high school and somehow drifting into spaces with other kids who eventually came out as queer/trans, and how we were each on our own parallel journeys without ever really talking about it with one another, or how gay/lesbian communities in small towns are often very close out of necessity (unlike in big cities, where gay/lesbian communities don’t overlap as much because they don’t need to). it’s as if rui and mizuki have a shared understanding that even if the other’s particular experience is inaccessible to them, they have to be each other’s support system.

all this is to say. mizuki’s story only really makes sense to me as a trans story. similarly, rui’s story is so much richer when read in a queer context. nobody has to agree with me and i don’t really care about the game’s ultimate intent, but i just wanted to articulate how i personally find a lot of value in interpreting these characters in this way.

[mumuscae]

SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!

Rant on Storytaco's bad writing of dark skinned characters. Specifically Sirius.

I wanna start this out with saying, I do not hate Sirius as a character. He's one of my favorites and I feel like he had wasted potential being in the hands of Storytaco. I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying Sirius as a character either! I believe however that we can enjoy media, and look at it from a critical lense. There are good things about his character and I enjoy a lot of how he was written lore wise!!! Otherwise I wouldn't be so violently obsessed with him since the age of 15 lol. But again. There are a combination of things that I can't really see as a coincidence.

If you have anything to add, or disagree with any of my points, please do not be afraid to say so! I wanna have an actual discussion about this. please I do not bite. I stand pretty firm on my points at this very moment, but I'm entirely willing to listen and change.

Uh. Apologies if my points come across poorly or if my writing is incoherent. There's a reason why I did bad in school lol.

My criticisms are below here. Have fun

Anyways.

Fuck Storytaco?

Uh. This is 100% inspired by recent discussion on the fandoms treatment of Sirius. But I'd like to discuss why this treatment is actively perpetuated by the developers of Arcana Twilight. Which is much more disturbing to think about when you consider their games are often marketed towards minors.(There are other issues with storytaco marketing towards minors too. Uh, idk if those are relevant for this post though. Maybe later cuz it's high key disturbing!!! 😃)

Sirius was written very inconsiderately. Like I know he's a villainous/morally gray character. However I feel like there needs to be a lot more tact when your only dark skinned character is written to be not a good person. Especially in comparison to the light skinned characters. I feel like they just applied every negative trait on earth to him, then turned around and went "jk guys! He's not actually bad. Hes like this cuz he's an orphan." 😭 Like some of these traits would be fine in their own if balanced out with other things, but there's so many combined together that I can't help but feel suspicious of their intentions and bias.

He's the most provocative out of all the love interests. He's consistently initiating suggestive situations, is labeled the "sexyman", and is constantly making innuendos. The game has a lot of fan service in general (even though it's rated E), but Sirius is disproportionately portrayed this way and is just constantly going "hehe sex 😁" Which making him the provocative one is both an issue with him being queer coded and dark skinned..double whammy 😟

He's the dangerous, unpredictable and violent one. He SHOT!!! SHOT the mc within the first few floors. And like. There wasn't even a good reason behind why they decided to write that in other than to make us think he's violent/dangerous/untrustworthy. There are times when it's portrayed that he can't even be trusted alone in a room with the mc, even prior to the villain arc. 😐

He's a pretty much a domestic terrorist.... 😐

He was a wanted criminal for half of the story. Idk if I need to explain what's wrong with that either 😐

He's potentially the only one killed off at the ending depending on your interpretation.

In the clan equivalent of Americans (cough. Guns + eagles + the lazy unlikable rebellious group that just gets into trouble) which is just. Silly. 😭😒

Again he's the "untrustworthy one that nobody wants to be around." This is a point constantly driven in by the characters he's surrounded with. they drill that into the viewers head so so so much.

He's the "party animal" of the group??? Which isn't really portrayed beyond him drinking a lot but was definitely advertised as such.

He's 100% queer coded you cannot convince me otherwise. Which. Now we're falling into queer coded poc villain territory. Double whammy again! Disney is that you?

Going off the queer coded point, he's falling into "predatory gay man" territory. Hes shipped with basically every man in the game by storytaco for promotional and bait reasons. But it's always displayed as Sirius making the other party uncomfortable and getting in their personal space. Making unwanted advances. Like... Y'all don't got a do that

Ok this is possibly nitpicky but deadass why'd they make him a basketball player in the highschool au thingy. He's a theater kid. Nothing about him reads as liking sports. Please do not wear dangly earrings while playing sports??? It bothers me so much 💀

Okay so the sassy, violent, deranged, perverted terrorist... is the only romance-able dark skinned man in the game. ??? NONONO just think about that for a good moment

HE HAS OTHER THINGS IN HIS CHARACTER. THERE ARE GOOD PARTS ABOUT HIS CHARACTER!!! I LOVE SIRIUS SO MUCH. HES VERY COMPLEX AND INTERESTING.. but this is such a horrible combination of very specific negative tropes that it's hard to ignore. Especially when thinking about how this game is advertised to minors who, more often than not, are easily subjected to subconscious bias in media and are easily influenced due to our lack of ability to critically analyze media we're haphazardly consuming. (Sorry fellow minors. As a senior minor aka 17 yo it's the hard truth y'all gotta accept. we've all been there and we've been influenced by media whether we're aware of it or not. I'm not mad at y'all or belittling. Keep having ur funsies with ur silly star men I'm not stopping you lol? This is legitimate concern and criticism towards a company that is promoting weird stereotypes to us)

And I don't think Sirius is just a one off weirdly written dark skinned character from Storytaco. Thuban (WHO IS GREEEEEY. Big issue on its own 😰😭) is depicted as lazy and rude.???? Like he has a single redeeming moment but again. Just reads as "domineering rowdy black man." Especially when you look at the whole great hero trio .. he's supposed to fall within the fantasy "Fighter" archetype with his big ass mace. Compared to Polaris who is like a Cleric and the Wizard/Ranger Schedar.

Also shout out to storytacos other grey men.....???????? I was only able to find four dark skinned men (not just tanned a bit) including Sirius when I went thru Storytacos game catalogue. Two of them are grey. 😐

Anyways Sirius was a huge motivating factor in why I wanted to make Extraterrestrial... Fucked up potential of a character. There are 100% biases showing through how he was written. These were all conscious decisions made on the writers part and I don't think it can be kept behind "he's a morally gray character who's going thru it" because there were so many good ways to show that and his grief without going to every. single. extreme.

--

[pikabysss]

I love Bang's winning quote against Hazama.

He's really calling Hazama a limp wrist and floppy. He's so floppy.

Just prove to me that Hazama is queer coded like an old Disney villain.

Bonus:

Kagura's winning quote against Hazama...

Wtf do you mean, Kagura? Caliber of men? (English is not my first language, or it's just badly translated)

[sleepynegress]

Meta About How Fandom Dishonestly Talks About Wanting "Queer (It Only Counts When it's White Male!) Rep"....

Fandom always looks like fandom...

The above tweet is dishonest. They are only talking about the characters they want to see be gay or queer in media, coincidentally white men. Mind you, Loki said he was into men and women in his show, they had bisexual lighting, and classic queerbait w/ Morbius and (sorry shippers but I gotta be honest about just my opinion, continue to ship away tho) ZERO chemistry with Sylvie. ...A lot of fandom ate that bait up back in the day, because that's as far as the media for these fandoms would go, back then. Given that Wiccan literally only just appeared with zero indication of his sexuality in MCU, beyond the character himself being portrayed by a gay actor (which I've written can be limiting as an assumption for gay actors, shout out to J Bailey playing love well, regardless), and having in-community affect (if there is a more appropriate term, let me know). Loki, if we're judging them by the same rules... And really, Loki is ahead since he outright said he likes both... The big difference I see is Loki gave classic queer (Disney) villain "coding" which is based in times when queerness wasn't allowed to be played outright as much, while Wiccan is simply giving gay teen existing. So, about that queer rep in the MCU... You mean Phastos and his whole husband and kids in The Eternals?

or Ayo literally being kissed by her partner in Black Panther 2 but we know it only counts to fandom if it's a white male... *sideeye* There's Val and her big gay energy... Hell, Taika went as far as cutting out some tongue action with Thor, which kept her bi much less obvious, and pushed the sapphic energy much more forward:

*the difference between coding and bait is these two confident acts, the second while winkingly gazing at the audience for a beat vs. Carol and Maria's "gal-pal" montage...it don't always have to be intimacy with the same sex* All this to say, you cannot claim to honestly want queer rep while ignoring explicit queer rep that ain't white male... because then it's obvious that you just want to see white gays in a hot make-out session... Which IMO is just the fandom version of straight dudes watching two girls kiss, and that ain't about rep, especially when deeper rep already exists and you ignored it. As for Loki, to me he always came off sort of vaguely slutty/flirty when bound, hit, or challenged in some way.

His energy has always been that, but I will give you, that the only person Loki actually *penetrated* onscreen was a man... not Mobius, but Agent Coulson... Once again, it's coding.

As for Wiccan, I think it's too early to say what the MCU will do rep-wise. YES Agatha All Along is giving EXPLICITLY gay energy. And yeah he's a gay character played by a gay actor, but will he get to be explicitly and honestly be attracted to another boy onscreen? I hope so for him, it would be qt and I would be chin-hands all the way for it.

...But again (same show!), I feel the same about Agatha and *spoiler*I know who Aubrey Plaza is playing but I'll be quiet *spoiler*

[onesidedradiostatic]

Prev. https://www.tumblr.com/onesidedradiostatic/768663529880436736/re

Oh I see what you’re saying now! There’s been no “positive integer” of ace Mammon in the show! And you’re right!

I personally don’t hold out any hope that the show will ever cover or explicitly bring it up, outside occasional secondary/metatext, like the pride piece or social media. (I feel similarly about Alastor.) Can’t feel let down by the absence of something you hoped for if you never let yourself hope for anything! <— I tell myself, curled up on the floor. The old and factually incorrect “can’t miss what you never had” fallacy. /sarcasm

I’ve got aroace goggles but they’re not rose-tinted…. Likewise,

“(also having the "good" characters tell the ace character he's unfuckable and that he should keep fucking himself kindaaaaa doesn't sit right with me, I really don't want to read bad faith into mammon being made ace rep but it gets kinda hard like this)”

I feel this too, and nihilistically I feel like it’s just another one of those commonplace things that Hellaverse-style writing tends to use for comedic effect that inadvertently (or via unexamined bias, ie “this came so quickly and naturally to you that you didn’t pause to think about how this could come across to other people in your target audience or if there was a more effective way to do this before giving the go-ahead and locking it in? Ok.” Disclaimer: this is common in lots of media! I don’t intend to say it’s something unique to the H.verse writing. It can happen to anyone, like catching a cold, but it’s the hope that the writing and editing process will catch these instances and make them better, but stuff can slip through, it happens. No offence intended) implies something Less Than Ideal like a harmful stereotype or perpetuating casual bias and then assigning them Morality etc. We don’t need an aspec rendition of the Hays Code/Disney/dudebro film “queer-coded villain who you can tell is bad because they’re queer and that’s bad because it’s not good like the good guy!”

The “You like/don’t like sex/romance? What’s wrong with you? I’m the normal one!” can be toxic/dehumanising in both directions when one side thinks it’s superior to the other. But the common M.O is

- the old “If sex/romance = value/virtue/humanity, Then less/no sex/romance = less/no value/virtue/humanity”

- (Bonus points when it equates sex/romance with the capacity to love and be loved!)

- which when used as an insult is basically just a rehashed cousin of those nice-guy “fuck you you’re ugly anyway” and manosphere “I don’t want to fuck you therefore you have no/negative value”

- weirdly but not that surprisingly, it shares a few vibes with ablism, probably because certain people see aspec as something “missing or defective”. Which has historically been thrown at all lgbtqia+ so it’s sad that it persists from within the queer umbrella

- But, loosely speaking of theoretical connections to ablism… I’m not claiming that fidget toys are exclusively for one type of neurodivergence/or ASD. But there is enough fodder for a potential bad-faith reading “show implies aspec symptom of neurodivergence/ASD, says they’re unfuckable and less valued than neurotypical amatonormatives! correlation does not equal causation!” type thing. I’m too sleepy to go there.

- Saying “you’re unfuckable” to someone who doesn’t want to Do The Fucks isn’t an insult in of itself, (it’s like saying “You’ll never get a girlfriend!” to a gay dude, they’d be like “that’s exactly what I want!”) but the connotation that fuckable= worth as a person, therefore they have no worth, is. Like, you could just say “you’re a worthless piece of shit” and not bring sex into it at all, but it’s Hellaverse and sex is everywhere, including the language. It’s the lingua franca… the lingua fucka?

I could assume a goodish faith usage of insulting an ace character as unfuckable/‘the only person who’ll fuck you is you die mad’* in the “I know this bothers you, so I’m using it to bother you” way. Like how in the pilot Angel used -isms to bother Vaggie. :/

*’the only person who’ll fuck you is you’ is also a bonus trope of ‘aspec people are autosexual/autoromantic or self obsessed’ 😂

But yeah otherwise it sits weird.

There’s so much one could write and explore just on the general topic of “Aspec and Othering in the Hellaverse”, it’s actually fascinating. Whether it’s a good fascinating or bad fascinating is irrelevant though. Gender and Sexuality in horror and horror-inspired media is always a blast to look into. (You can’t tell me Alastor isn’t a little horror inspired. How his aspec-ialty can play a part in his portrayed uncanny-valley not-humanness to other sinners, being part device, performance and contradictory animal, etc etc. There’s heaps to go on if anyone felt inclined. Goodnight tumblr)

(prev)

this is a lot so I don't think I can cover everything here but yeah

I personally don’t hold out any hope that the show will ever cover or explicitly bring it up, outside occasional secondary/metatext, like the pride piece or social media.

alastor was at the very least allowed a verbal confirmation in hazbin itself so I don't think it's impossible for mammon (or octavia) to have allusions to their asexuality in their show, really I accept even subtext. for mammon it's still not even subtext yet, just word of god. but again, I won't fully judge him as bad rep here because obviously the show isn't over yet so reference to his asexuality could still come up in the future, I just had some hope it would happen sooner than later y'know and also ASMODEUS got to show up in full pan wear but we don't get any reference to mammon being asexual?

but yeah sorry this one is kinda nitpicking at this point, moving on, all you said after that yeah exactly what I meant about bee saying no one wants to fuck mammon as an insult, I know it's probably not intentionally shaming an ace character for it but it still can have bad implications even with good intention as just a lighthearted canon-typical joke

and this actually

- But, loosely speaking of theoretical connections to ablism… I’m not claiming that fidget toys are exclusively for one type of neurodivergence/or ASD. But there is enough fodder for a potential bad-faith reading “show implies aspec symptom of neurodivergence/ASD, says they’re unfuckable and less valued than neurotypical amatonormatives! correlation does not equal causation!” type thing. I’m too sleepy to go there.

I'm a bit worried about the infantilisation too, I've already seen people compare mammon talking about sex as an asexual to being like a child talking about sex

and mammon's constant use of toys in the trial doesn't really help with it, I worry that the logic behind mammon as ace rep comes down to "he's too childish and immature to understand sex and just pretends to understand it when he talks about it like a child" and that's on top of the whole "I can't see him caring about anyone legitimately therefore he's ace" logic which I have ALSO seen people say in response to him being ace

I don't want to assume that these were the actual intentions behind making him ace, of course these qualities can co-exist on top of being ace but the problem starts when you start correlating them and I think it's already bad that these are takeaways some parts of the fandom have

maybe I'm judging too early, maybe I just need to wait for mammon to be referenced as ace in the show itself and see how it's treated. but just. idk. there's just a lot of factors at play that makes me skeptical of him as ace rep, I was already skeptical when he was revealed as ace rep in the helluva pride art but this episode's showing of him has made me even moreso. genuinely, I do think having a canon sex-favourable ace is good! great in fact! but I can't praise it just for that when there's no indication of him being ace that you can see from watching the episode, if there is ever an episode that indicates him being asexual while being sex-favourable then I will praise it

anyways sorry for having topics surrounding ace mammon be so negative, I feel like it could overshadow the fact that I still really enjoyed the episode!!

[nite-puff]

Hey hey your idea about Daiya being a closeted animator making the queerest character he could with Mondo sent me down a mental rabbit hole (pun unintentioned haha). It made me think of Andreas Deja, gay Disney animator who did and still does a lot of stuff for the company, but one of the things he's most famous for is for being the supervising animator on the queer-coded villain trifecta of Gaston, Jafar, and Scar. That made me think about Mondo in the context of the AU and how Ishimondo in canon has that sort of enemies-to-lovers thing going on. So, thought..... what if Mondo was never made to be Kiyotaka's love interest at all, but his queer-coded antagonist? And offscreen the queer-coding that was baked into him for a gag (or at least with the excuse that it's a gag) blossomed into something deeper with his cartoon co-star?

THATS SUCH A GOOD IDEA WHAT????

maybe they had something that was overall very similar to the ishimondo story, where their pre-determined roles as a protagonist and antagonist kinda affected how they viewed each other off set as well. because that’s how they just are outside of their cartoons as well. they were literally made to hate each other. but push comes to shove and they end up in a situation where they’re pretty much forced to spend time with each other and learn about each other beyond their roles as hero and villain. and the result of that was a cute friendship. which quickly developed into something more.

also. their relationship progressing like this really affected how they performed in their cartoons. they can’t even pretend to hate each other anymore because that’s not how they feel. it’s mondo and taka, what’re ya gonna do??

eventually the studio gets sick of it and has to make the decision to separate them, at least on set. they can’t just let go of their star, so they’re forced to fire mondo and replace him with a new antagonist. which is how mondo ends up performing in night clubs and such. his iconography is bound to attract a lot of patrons, to say the least.

all in all, mondo and taka’s love story is one the film world has never seen before. there’s never been a toon couple that wasn’t previously written to be together, let alone a hero and a villain falling in love off set. it’s a rare occurrence, to say the least, but mondo and taka wouldn’t have it any other way.

(also mondo being a villain and him also being queer-coded during a time where i believe the hays code was in full effect was definitely a big contributor to why so many people found it easy to believe mondo was cheating on taka right??? i mean, if we’re going in the direction of the original movie…)

anyways, happy pride month to them.

[faelapis]

despite some concerns raised by the trailer/marketing, i am still excited for the wish movie. a lot of that has to do with king magnifico.

that being said, i approach it from a different direction than a lot of other people excited for a “classic disney villain.”

first of all, yes. i, too, love the camp and melodrama of classic disney villains. i love that they express their wishes through big bombastic musical numbers, and said musical numbers are often the best in their movies. i like how queer-coded and fun they often are. i like the sass, the drama, the energy.

where i disagree with a lot of people is with this notion that disney movies “don’t have villains” anymore. i don’t think the likes of hans (frozen) and tamatoa (moana) are less evil than "classic" villains - they’re plenty willing to kill with a smile on their face.

i think what people ACTUALLY miss is the big performance around it all. the aesthetic. someone who does these things while being a major character (so not tamatoa) and deliciously, obviously evil while having fun with it the whole time (so not hans). i think it’s that specific combination people are missing. we still have villains, they’re just either not as “fun” or not as “important.”

of course, that take is less punchy than saying disney doesn’t have villains because "steven cringeyverse destroyed western animation and now companies are too scared to make real villains >:( !1!!!"

yeah i never understood where that came from. if anything, redeeming villains is more controversial than killing them. especially in america, being punitive is the norm. forgiveness is cringe. yet so many act as if there was some big consumer and/or corporate pushback against the idea of villains…? at some point?? i guess????

someone must've forgotten to tell that to disney tv animation, where you’ll find everything from bill cipher to belos in the modern era. (also, other companies exist? dreamworks is not some indie studio, they’re fully willing to have big, campy villains.)

but yknow, people like to feel like underdogs. they like to feel like they're somehow oppressed because some animated media don't have classic villains anymore... despite there still being plenty around. you can’t just like villains, you have to make it everyone else’s problem. like disney is obliged to do the same character tropes in every movie. or villains are "dead."

what actually happened is just… some writers at disney decided they wanted to do different things. that’s it. so you now have a handful of movies where the villain is either a minor character, or nonexistent.

it’s not a conspiracy, it’s not a concerted effort to destroy villains. it’s, at most, a trend. because some writers wanted to push against the previous status quo. and now other writers who grew up with that want to have more classic villains, because that’s what they see as exciting and new. it’s just a cycle of trends and countertrends.

anyway. long tangent aside, i’m actually very excited for king magnifico. in part for a classic villain performance (he gets a song!!) - but also, it sounds like he might scratch a particular itch of mine.

which is to have a big, dramatic, irredeemable villain… who is still a human and has an understandable pov.

yes, you can combine these things. it’s not common for disney, but a lot of what we consider “great movie villains” throughout history have been this exact combination. they have to be defeated, they refuse redemption, they are 100% committed to their goals and will not budge - but they also GENUINELY BELIEVE in those goals.

what i’m really asking for here is a sincerely motivated character. someone who is a villain, but doesn’t SEE himself as a villain. someone who isn’t lying when they try to endear themselves to the hero or promise to make the world better if they join forces. it’s just that they are completely misguided about what would be good for the world, and nothing will persuade them.

whether someone is a villain, a hero, or anywhere in between, i think asking a character’s motivation - and playing those motivations straight, rather than just as a mask for plain selfishness - is key.

as i’m saying this, you might notice that it’s not actually too far off from what i like in other characters. jasper in SU is basically this in her "main arc” in season three. she refuses help, she’s a huge dick to everyone… but she also 100% believes in homeworld as an institution and is actually, genuinely selfless. even if it means her own corruption, she refuses help, because that would betray her cause. which she values above her own life. and by rebecca sugar’s own words, jasper doesn’t even believe she deserves help.

the common thread here is really tragedy. someone you can root for and against at the same time.

so how does this relate to king magnifico? well, jennifer lee (writer for this movie & also the frozen movies) just had an interview where she talked a lot about wish, and in specific, having a classic disney villain in magnifico.

she illustrates a lot of what i’ve been talking about - that there is no grand conspiracy at disney against villains. they just had different stories they wanted to tell. there was no mandate either for or against villains, not in this movie or any other. they just did what they wanted to do with those stories. (btw, that’s not me saying there isn’t pressure at disney to tell certain stories and not others. it’s just that the concept of a villain isn’t as important to the corporate side as, say, not making elsa gay.)

anyway. what makes the king magnifico portion interesting is how lee talks about exactly what i’ve been saying. they knew they wanted a classic disney villain, but it sounds like they still want him to be different from other such characters. namely, they wanted to find the benevolent side of him, how he genuinely believes what he believes and DOES want what he thinks is best for the city of rosas.

and the plot totally checks out - basically, he decides whose wishes come true. and that’s really interesting, because a wish can be anything, good or bad. it sounds like he really wants to prevent what he sees as bad wishes from coming true, and is too conservative in what he allows or not. and his way of being kind about rejection is to remove those wishes from people’s hearts if he cannot fulfill them.

that’s SUCH a great concept for a villain. it speaks to issues of control, of agency, of being in the paternalistic position of deciding what is “best” for everyone else. it gives me a little bit the wizard of oz (as in the wizard himself, who is a charlatan trying to maintain a pleasant status quo, even if it’s a lie), and a little bit white diamond (controlling the lives of others, but genuinely believing you are being selfless and heroic about it / steering people on the “right” path).

reading that interview, my excitement for this movie went from like a 2/10 to a 8/10. jennifer lee seems to have a real interest in creating characters, not just stock tropes. elsa is one of the best disney princesses (fight me) for exactly the same reason.

another great concept talked about here (which you also see in lee’s frozen, with anna and elsa as opposites) is that of duality. there’s a lot of talk about magnifico and asha being two sides of the same coin, both initially believing in this system and wanting what’s best for the city. and from there, they divert to their opposite paths in what specifically they think is right. the interview talks about them as if they were this thesis and antithesis about what’s right for the city, needing to reach a synthesis. in talking about this concept, they included this illustration:

notice the similar poses. both have their hands behind their back (commonly used to convey a character is hiding something), their feet pointed out, and give the world a pleasant smile. asha has a darker color palette in a world of light, magnifico is a ray of light in a dark space. it's interesting for its duality.

so yeah. all in all, i’m still excited for wish. i want to take alan tudyk goat out back and shoot it for a quick, humane death… but failing that, i’ll just pray his role was hammed up for the trailer. please tell me it’s not that insufferable. please.

because i do really like everything else i’ve heard about this movie!! i like that asha is described as this idealist with “dumb courage”, like maybe she’ll actually have some character flaws and need to learn?? (maybe? hopefully?) i like everything i just said about king magnifico. i like that we have this blend of 2d and 3d animation, that’s such a clever concept for a “100 years of disney” celebration.

so yeah. i will be watching. never have i ever prayed for chris pine to save a movie, but today might just be the day!

[simpingforcys]

First of all, your writing: hot 🥵 Just read your latest spicy Drabble 10/10 you cooked and I will definitely come back for second helpings.

Also, I know people like the idea of King Candy / Turbo as gay, but I’m a pan sexual King Candy truther. You cannot convince me that this touch staved mess of a man would not be down, to get down, with anyone that would validate his ego and be willing to take him to bed.

I was in a mood and when I'm in a mood, well that's what this blog was made for 🩷 BUT ALSO THANK YOOUUUUU I'm glad yall enjoy my rambles<3

I can definitely see why people (mostly, it seems) HC King Candy/Turbo as gay or even trans, like I get it, he's got that ✨flare✨ that highly resembles the classic Disney villain energy which was characterized even back then as queer coding (and why they're so memorable), but me, as a poor little bisexual panic simp, I could see him going both way SPECIALLY AS YOU PUT IT. This man is TOUCH-STARVED with that level ego. The fact there's no allusion to it because his main 'love' is racing and winning, if someone were to straight up FLIRT or touch this man romantically, he's just like "wait hold up-"

Even in Magical Kingdoms he admits he isn't the most 'marketable' (though his original cabinet image might say otherwise??), I think he LOWKEY MIGHT have image issues? I mean he made himself A KING with his face splattered on the environment. Butter him up with flirting, compliments, praising, maybe a little teasing~ this man becomes a flustered confused mess and I will take that to my grave.

I also try to make my Canon x Reader drabbles as gender neutral as I can. If it's male or female specifically, I will put it into the title, but I do try to let it be as 'vague' to let the reader use their imagination as well.