The same executives supporting progressive content today could pull back in an instant, who knows what’s going on behind the scenes?”įor decades queer readers and audience members have had to rely on this kind of subtle nod to find themselves in stories. “A lot of times, when you see queer coding, there’s someone working on the project who is putting a piece of themselves into it, and crafting characters that represent them even if they’re not being supported in that.” Terrace agrees: “I know how hard it is to get stuff through these studios. “As creators we don’t always have the option of including explicit queer content,” Stevenson says. Often when the creatives are willing but the executives are weak, queer storytelling sneaks in around the margin as part of an age-old practice called “queer coding” that label could easily be applied to Raya and Namaari. Sugar and Stevenson are convinced that that behind-the-scenes support Terrace mentions is going on at every animation network and studio, including Disney feature films. Luckily, the executives I directly work with have given me nothing but support.” The stubbornness paid off and a week or two later I was given the all-clear. Life is short and I don’t have time for cowardice, I was ready to move on to greener pastures if need be. I let myself get mad, to absolutely blow up, and storm out of the room. Terrace didn’t exactly get the green light that easily at Disney: “I was sat down in a conference room and told that I could not, by any means, have any kind of gay storyline among the main characters. They picked up on all the queer subtext, and they wanted more.” It only started changing once we started getting positive, vocal support from fans of the show. “There always had to be plausible deniability, with the exception maybe of Bow’s two dads, because other shows had been including gay parents. There was a lot of fear at first,” Stevenson says of the first season of her She-Ra. It’s easier to convince them if this is something that other shows have already done. “Studios and networks tend to be cautious, and never want to stick their neck out farther than they have to. She always saw plenty of queer-coded representation in the original ’80s cartoon, but she had something more ambitiously representative in mind. Stevenson, also, was strategic about the central queer narrative of her show. That same year, queer artist Noelle Stevenson, fresh off award-winning work on LGBT comics Lumberjanes and Nimona, debuted her rebooted take on the ’80s classic She-Ra for Netflix and Dreamworks Animation.
Marceline and Princess Bubblegum kiss in the Adventure Time series finale. So I’m really excited you brought this up.” Namaari especially, with her well-muscled physique and asymmetrical haircut, feels intentionally designed to catch the eye of a queer audience. Still she was over the moon to be asked about this particular aspect of the film: “I’m obsessed with Namaari and I’m obsessed with Gemma Chan. Tran was eager to add that just because she interpreted the Namaari and Raya relationship as something more than platonic, that wasn’t the official Disney line. But for the company that started touting its “exclusively gay moments” a few years back, and whose characters have long been embraced by queer communities, Raya has felt for many like one step closer to the surface. But though Raya, like Moana and Elsa before her, is a Disney princess who isn’t saddled with a male love interest in the film, Raya and the Last Dragon is the latest Disney offering to stop short of presenting a major character as explicitly queer. Tran told Vanity Fair that when recording her role for the animated film she decided there were “some romantic feelings going on there” between Raya and Namaari. If that sounds more flirtatious than ferocious there’s a reason for it. “Hey there, Princess Undercut,” Raya says with a smirk. The two women, both highly trained fighters and, yes, technically princesses, hail from different corners of the fictional land of Kumandra and are fighting tooth and nail to protect their homes. There’s a moment almost exactly half way through Raya and the Last Dragon when the titular Disney princess (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran) strolls out to meet her longtime enemy Namaari ( Gemma Chan) in battle.