Okie I finally finished my Clankie redraw and I did it before pride month ended which is great in my opinion considering how my life has been going lately which does make me feel a bit better, not perfect but better. This was originally supposed to be a quick sketch but I kept finding myself going back to add more onto it because drawing this brought out both a type of peace and frustration out of me yknow.
Seeing them casually dance makes me think of a type of happiness I wish I had in relation to my own personal queerness especially since I chose the name Frankie from the original iteration of the character in G1, so to see G3 Frankie not shy away from their queerness makes me hope for a better future if that makes sense. Even though the future currently looks bleak I want to hope that like these characters I won’t have to hide who I am inside and be proud of who I am fully and truly.
Kipo kind of ruined me because now I’m never going to be satisfied with queer representation if they’re not at least as gay as Benson
like,, they could have just left it ambiguous. They could have left it at soft puppy dog eyes with Troy in the background without confirming anything beyond subtext.
but not only did they have Benson straight up say “I’m gay,” “boyfriend,” etc they went and did goofy shit like having him shoot rainbows out of his mouth while daydreaming about a pool party filled with boys. Like how fucking sick is that. This is the bare minimum now
Too bad Kipo continued the trend of having the gay characters become secondary characters that only give each other puppy dog eyes, until literally the last episodes of the series. That’s not good representation. Sure they use the actual couple terminologies. But if you continue the trend of only allowing them to get together in the end. Then sorry to say but you are still not good enough representation.
If Troy and Benson had gotten together at the beginning of season 2, with the rest of seasons 2 and 3 to flesh out their relationship. Then this would have been a monumental step towards actuall good representation, compared to everything else that came before. But since the show insisted on teasing till the last few episodes, this is just another case of repeating the same type of bad representation that lgbt couples in media often get.
can I just say, what the hell are you talking about?
Do you really, genuinely believe this is bad representation? What were you expecting would happen? This is a show about a post-apocalyptic world on the brink of war between humans and mutants, with a FEMALE protagonist of color that can turn in to a giant pink jaguar. The entire show is only 30 episodes long. This was not a slice-of-life story that allowed opportunities for you to watch characters go on dates. By all means, there shouldn’t have really been room for any romance of any kind.
And yet, this show MADE a lot of opportunities to remind you that, yes, Benson is gay. Even before he and Troy start dating. Like the pool party dream I mentioned before. The fact that he has an entire coming out scene with Kipo. The fact that he does say he has a date with Troy, and continues to talk about him when he can’t go. The fact that he spends multiple episodes fretting overthe most romantic to ask Troy to prom??? The fact that he’s the only character that has (multiple!) on-screen kisses. And yes, Benson isn’t the titular protagonist, but he’s still one of the main ones?????
And on fop of all this, Benson is still given a lot of time to have meaningful relationships with the rest of the cast, and he has plenty of screentime to develop his character arc as an individual, rather than making every scene with him about him existing as a gay person in love with his boyfriend. So I don’t know what you mean by it “insisted on teasing until the last few episodes,” because clearly it did not. It showed more than it needed to show based on what was necessary to the plot.
A breakdown of how Troy and Benson’s relationship is not “teasing”:
Episode 6: Benson outright says “I’m gay.”
Episode 7: Benson has the pool party fantasy shown in the screenshot above, belching rainbows and imagining a houseful of cute boys cheering on his DJ skills.
Episode 10: Benson has his first on-camera encounter with a human boy his age. The camera goes all soft-focus and romantic music plays.
Episode 11: Interactions between Benson and Troy hint at a mutual crush, but they don’t have time to do much about it on account of the emergency situation they and their friends are in. They part ways talking about how much they look forward to meeting again.
Episode 17: Benson meets Troy’s dad and tries to impress him in hopes he’ll approve of Benson potentially dating Troy. Once Troy’s dad understands why Benson asked Wolf and Dave to talk him up, he makes a playful comment to Benson about how great Troy is.
Episode 20: Troy and Benson meet again, but once again it’s during an emergency so the episode focuses on resolving that.
Episode 21: Benson mentions “I have a date with Troy,” implying their relationship has been developing off-camera during the time jump of several months since the previous episode. Benson worries their relationship will suffer because they keep ending up in emergencies that keep them from spending as much time together as they’d like to.
Not much happens between them for episodes 22 through 27, because Troy doesn’t get a ton of screen time in those, but he and Benson are usually next to each other whenever they’re in the same scene.
Episode 28: Benson spends most of the episode trying to think of a romantic way to ask Troy to Prahm. When he finally does so, Troy reveals he was also trying to think of a romantic way to ask Benson to Prahm; cut to Troy’s dad standing by with a big flower arrangement.
Episode 29: Troy and Benson have an on-camera date.
Episode 30: The epilogue sequence shows Benson and Troy still together five years later.
So there are four subplots in the series directly revolving around this ship, and 10 out of the show’s 30 episodes make note of Benson being gay.
But sure, <sarcasm> how dare Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeastsnot relegate the plotline about ‘attempting diplomacy in the face of two centuries of interspecies tension and mistrust’ to the background, in order to better focus on the romantic relationship between a protagonist and a secondary character. </sarcasm>
Steven Universe: Eh, I don’t really feel like saying “girlfriend” or “wife”. Maybe they’re together. They have a special connection…
(gets violently shoved aside)
The Loud House/Craig of the Creek/The Owl House: Pfft, amateur. “My GIRLFRIEND Sam and I…” “I’m texting my GIRLFRIEND, mind your business.” “Luz’s new GF showed her…”
Can we not do this thing? Do you realize that Rebecca had to fight for what we got with Rupphire and literally risked her job? and Pearl and Rose. Like, there is no need to knock other shows down because of Lumity.
These kids today, I tell you what. In my day you had to bury your girlfriends under subtext and then end the series when the truth was revealed.
Risked her job, hell, it’s an open secret now that the Rupphire wedding (which, may I remind folks, was the first queer wedding in a kids’ cartoon, which is a BIG DEAL) is why everything about the rest of the series felt rushed. They had to scramble to tell the rest of the story because they took a gamble and the network retaliated by shortening their production time.
Rebecca Sugar and the crewniverse risked the entire show getting flat-out cancelled in order to show that wedding, only for people to say it “wasn’t progressive enough” and was “giving in to stereotypes” to put Ruby in a wedding dress. Never mind that Ruby kept getting dubbed over as a guy in localization, Sapphire was unmistakably feminine in every version, and putting Ruby in the dress was a flagrant way to say, “fuck you, you can’t pretend this is a straight couple; this is a queer couple and a queer wedding.”
Dana Terrace has said that The Owl House only exists with its intended queerness because of what Rebecca Sugar and her team accomplished with Steven Universe. Hell, there are multiple members of the Steven Universe team who went on to work on the other shows mentioned in the OP–Steven Sugar, for example, who is Rebecca Sugar’s brother and inspiration for SU in the first place (as well a background artist on the show), is currently an artist on The Owl House. There are people who got their start on Steven Universe who now only have the opportunity to tell more queer stories because of Steven Universe’s success.
I’m not even 30 years old yet and I’m still old enough to remember when being gay was fully illegal in the United States. Not gay marriage, but literally just BEING GAY. It wasn’t that long ago, and the fact that today in 2021 I can turn on the TV and watch gay cartoons intended for children? I never thought I’d see it. Fucking ever.
So let’s stop pitting queer creators and media against each other, shall we?
