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This is inspired by two flawed essays I read recently:
BaitWorks – How DreamWorks Engaged in Predatory Marketing Towards LGBT Fans
I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)
Both make some good points about how media corporations manipulate fans with half-assed tokenistic gestures towards inclusivity. The second focusses more on how fans are complicit in this: the way bland, heteronormative blockbusters like the MCU get a free pass while messy indie queer women are attacked for actually trying to express themselves.
But they both also act like queer creators working within the corporate system to make moderately queer, if somewhat corporate art like Steven Universe or She-ra is exactly equivalent to entirely bland, heteronormative corporate works which only make tokenistic gestures towards queerness. Also they both erase the specific issues around non-binary representation and creators.
And I feel like this is part of a broader problem in how we discuss the intersection of Corporate Art and Queerness.
People want to act like Real Queer Art and Empty Corporate Pablum are two neatly defined sets, and similarly for Real Queer Artists vs Corporate Shills. But we're all working within capitalism here, even those of us who give away our work for free: Capitalism controls who can afford to work for free, and what audience gets to see the things we create. And let's be honest here: most indie queer creators would absolutely work for Dreamworks or Cartoon Network given the chance, and capitalist concerns of market and saleability affect people on every level, if not always in the same ways.
And while it's totally valid to criticise the specific decisions Noelle Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar have made in their shows, they are clearly trying to make those shows more queer than the default for those networks, and what queerness does manage to get through is seen by a huge audience. If you would personally rather sacrifice that sort of audience in exchange for more creative freedom, that is entirely fair, but the high profile work they're doing has value too, and is worlds away from the sorts of tiny easy-to-cut tokenistic gestures you get in say the MCU.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't defend the right of more independent, and thus vulnerable, artists to make wilder, messier works. Nor is it to say we shouldn't critique both corporate queer works like Steven Universe, and the stifling heteronormative environments they're created in. But it should be possible to do those things while acknowledging the good things some queer creators are managing within a corporate context. And it should definitely be possible to do that without erasing or belittling the creator's queerness itself.
I've also seen some very unfortunate edges to criticisms of works by other queer creators. Sometimes I even agree that the works themselves are terrible, but am still uncomfortable with the way people use this as an excuse to act like the creator's queerness doesn't count. See for example the way some people talk about Mark Gatiss or Jeff Davis: I'm definitely not saying Sherlock or Teen Wolf made great strides for queer representation, but that doesn't make those men not gay. And it gets messier with queer creators who make works which are definitely queer but also very deeply flawed in how they handle that queerness (and also...everything else), like Ryan Murphy or Russel T Davies.
And those are cis men making deeply flawed works. I am even more uncomfortable with how people talk about queer women and non-binary creators who are, in my opinion, mostly doing pretty well considering the limitations they're working with.
Ok, so! That's my basic point explained. Now I'm going to just poke at these two specific posts, tbh more because they annoyed me because I have anything very deep to add.
So, first: "BaitWorks – How DreamWorks Engaged in Predatory Marketing Towards LGBT Fans".
I'm not going to address the stuff about Voltron, because while some seems true and some a bit questionable I don't know or care enough to say which is which. I only skimmed through on my reread just now. I only watched the first few seasons of Voltron, but I did get the impression they way oversold how queer it would be then did the absolute bare minimum, and leaned into some unfortunate homophobic tropes while they were at it. I'm not sure whether they actually committed fraud but...eh. Not what I want to talk about.
What annoys me is the way he talks about She-ra.
"Like with Voltron, the show was positioning itself as gay friendly, without any primary gay characters."
The Voltron creators spent like 7 seasons saying "there would be queer characters" without saying which, then made a big deal in promotions etc about Shiro being gay, then afaict had it come up briefly in canon and has literally no other queer representation.
Within it's first season, She-ra had a secondary f/f couple. They are kind of ambiguous in canon at that point but the creators very clearly said that yes, they were an established couple, and by season 2 made them more unambiguously queer. In season 2 there is also a secondary but very unambiguous m/m married couple, parents of one of the main ensemble, who have a whole episode center around them. In season 4 a canonically non-binary secondary character is very central.
Is this the same as having a member of the main ensemble be queer? No. But it's also pretty significant. Especially because there's very little romance or relationships shown of any kind. Except for one m/f couple, one of whom died before canon, pretty much all the m/f is romantically ambiguous friendship which is treated exactly the same as the same sex romantically ambiguous friendships. Of which there are multiple, and they are very shippy.
The general interpretation in fandom is that the show-runner, Noelle Stevenson, is pushing to make the show as queer as she can get away with, but in the mean time is just treating all relationships as equivalent regardless of the gender of the characters. And in my opinion this is not the same as queer-baiting, and is actually pretty progressive and pro-queer. This is very different to Voltron, which from what I saw implicitly assumes everyone is straight unless stated otherwise and treats m/f relationships differently to m/m and f/f.
Is the marketing department trying to queer-bait by implying more queer representation than Dreamworks has any intention of providing? Plausibly! I am not saying Dreamworks aren't a bunch of homophobic assholes, because afaict they are. But that does not make the show itself bad, nor it's creators.
"While Stevenson did not go into the show with the intent to manipulate LGBT viewers, the source confirmed Stevenson allowed it to proceed, and intentionally played up romantic subtext between same-gendered characters (like Adora and Catra) to queer fans."
Because she ships them. It is very clear that the (largely queer women) making this show are making it as femslashy as they can get away with, and genuinely take these pairings seriously. It's possible that the pairings will never be unambiguous canon, but "publicly sincerely shipping a pairing that may not be canon" seems like something queer creators should be able to do without being accused of being manipulative liars.
By contrast, afaict the Voltron writers seemed open minded about fans m/m ships but not actually into them.
Which is all very subjective, I'll admit. But this post jumps quickly to a really mean-spirited bad faith interpretation which seems largely motivated by being angry about Voltron and taking it out on the next big Dreamworks show, rather than attempting sincere engagement with She-ra on it's own merits. This is especially unfortunate when the show-runner is a woman, and the blog author is a man who seems uninterested in engaging with gender or sexism and just divides everything into queer and not-queer.
Like "Stevenson has been much more careful to tease without promising, to provide herself with deniability". OR MAYBE SHE DOESN'T WANT TO MAKE FALSE PROMISES.
Should she be more circumspect to avoid getting people's hopes up? Arguably. But maybe she's hoping enough fan enthusiasm will help persuade the network. And regardless, it's a jump from "should be more circumspect" to accusing her of being creepily manipulative.
Also, Double Trouble isn't just "a queer character", they're an explicitly non-binary character, who uses they/them pronouns and is played by a non-binary voice actor. That's a big deal!
With the changed screenshot: (a) Huntara and Adora are also pretty shippy (b) Catra and Adora may not have had that SPECIFIC moment together in canon, but they have PLENTY of angsty moments staring at each other intensely, and their messy relationship is central to the plot of season 3, and much more central than Adora and Huntara's relationship. That promotional image is in no way false advertising.
He says Dreamworks has a "lack of actual inclusive programming compared to its competitors"- does it really? Steven Universe does a bit better than She-Ra, but I don't know of any other kid's shows from the last few years that do. Also, why focus on a show made by a queer creator without discussing any of Dreamworks' other current shows? Afaict most of them don't mention queerness at all in canon or promotional material- is that better? (I've heard Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts recently had a character come out as queer but I have no idea how significant he is, and it happened after the essay was written)
Now for "I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)".
This essay makes some good points, which I'm not going to engage with much, but just because I don't have anything to add. The way so many people embrace bland art from mega-corporations while being hyper-critical of art by queer women is really messed up!
But I don't like the "corporate art" vs "art made by real artists" dichotomy. People making corporate art are real artists. Not necessarily the world's best or most creatively sincere artists, but they hardly have have a monopoly on insincere money-grubbing within art circles either.
She has a point about the main targets being women rather than men, and normally I wouldn't be picky about the implicit erasure of non-binary people, except she holds up Steven Universe as a primary example of Bad Art, both in the header image and as her final example. But it's a show with a non-binary creator and the most non-binary characters I've pretty much ever seen in anything. How is it not Real Queer Art?
She says "There's nothing wrong with not wanting to or not being able to engage with art about horrific things." but then ends with
(which also seems to contradict the title but never mind)
She's entirely conflating indie status, maturity, representation, dark themes, and discomfort.
Steven Universe is a children's show from a major tv company, it's pretty good representation, it deals with difficult subjects like abuse, it's overall cheerful and heart-warming, and has no sexual content. That's not exactly a shining example of work which is immature AND heteronormative AND unchallenging etc.
It's also very controversial with the depiction=endorsement crowd, because they don't like how it deals with abuse etc. If anything, it's an example of a work by a queer non-male creator that gets held to overly harsh standards.
There are overly harsh standards applied to sexually explicit works, but that doesn't make liking things that aren't sexually explicit immature or unwoke. And I'm not convinced horror elements or being aimed at adults have any significant correlation to being attacked for being impure.
It just feels like she likes works which are horrific and aimed at adults in addition to being queer and dealing with messy subjects, and so for her all those things are linked. But Steven Universe is a pretty good counter-example, and holding it up as as The Worst Art instead of, say, the MCU, feels like bitterness that so many queer people like something so child-aimed and fluffy and thus not to her personal taste.
"There should be space for messy, confronting, sexually explicit queer works": yes, definitely. "If you don't consume messy, confronting, sexually explicit queer works you'll be unable to understand yourself or learn to love": No! You're being just as rigid as the purity people in the other direction.
And this is all separate again to indie status.
I feel like there's more to unpack here but this post is already pretty long and I think I've made my point.
So yeah. I absolutely think people should critique the way corporations pretend tokenistic queerness is Representation, and the way fans eat this up. But these essays are an example of some of the ways these critiques can fall down.
BaitWorks – How DreamWorks Engaged in Predatory Marketing Towards LGBT Fans
I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)
Both make some good points about how media corporations manipulate fans with half-assed tokenistic gestures towards inclusivity. The second focusses more on how fans are complicit in this: the way bland, heteronormative blockbusters like the MCU get a free pass while messy indie queer women are attacked for actually trying to express themselves.
But they both also act like queer creators working within the corporate system to make moderately queer, if somewhat corporate art like Steven Universe or She-ra is exactly equivalent to entirely bland, heteronormative corporate works which only make tokenistic gestures towards queerness. Also they both erase the specific issues around non-binary representation and creators.
And I feel like this is part of a broader problem in how we discuss the intersection of Corporate Art and Queerness.
People want to act like Real Queer Art and Empty Corporate Pablum are two neatly defined sets, and similarly for Real Queer Artists vs Corporate Shills. But we're all working within capitalism here, even those of us who give away our work for free: Capitalism controls who can afford to work for free, and what audience gets to see the things we create. And let's be honest here: most indie queer creators would absolutely work for Dreamworks or Cartoon Network given the chance, and capitalist concerns of market and saleability affect people on every level, if not always in the same ways.
And while it's totally valid to criticise the specific decisions Noelle Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar have made in their shows, they are clearly trying to make those shows more queer than the default for those networks, and what queerness does manage to get through is seen by a huge audience. If you would personally rather sacrifice that sort of audience in exchange for more creative freedom, that is entirely fair, but the high profile work they're doing has value too, and is worlds away from the sorts of tiny easy-to-cut tokenistic gestures you get in say the MCU.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't defend the right of more independent, and thus vulnerable, artists to make wilder, messier works. Nor is it to say we shouldn't critique both corporate queer works like Steven Universe, and the stifling heteronormative environments they're created in. But it should be possible to do those things while acknowledging the good things some queer creators are managing within a corporate context. And it should definitely be possible to do that without erasing or belittling the creator's queerness itself.
I've also seen some very unfortunate edges to criticisms of works by other queer creators. Sometimes I even agree that the works themselves are terrible, but am still uncomfortable with the way people use this as an excuse to act like the creator's queerness doesn't count. See for example the way some people talk about Mark Gatiss or Jeff Davis: I'm definitely not saying Sherlock or Teen Wolf made great strides for queer representation, but that doesn't make those men not gay. And it gets messier with queer creators who make works which are definitely queer but also very deeply flawed in how they handle that queerness (and also...everything else), like Ryan Murphy or Russel T Davies.
And those are cis men making deeply flawed works. I am even more uncomfortable with how people talk about queer women and non-binary creators who are, in my opinion, mostly doing pretty well considering the limitations they're working with.
Ok, so! That's my basic point explained. Now I'm going to just poke at these two specific posts, tbh more because they annoyed me because I have anything very deep to add.
So, first: "BaitWorks – How DreamWorks Engaged in Predatory Marketing Towards LGBT Fans".
I'm not going to address the stuff about Voltron, because while some seems true and some a bit questionable I don't know or care enough to say which is which. I only skimmed through on my reread just now. I only watched the first few seasons of Voltron, but I did get the impression they way oversold how queer it would be then did the absolute bare minimum, and leaned into some unfortunate homophobic tropes while they were at it. I'm not sure whether they actually committed fraud but...eh. Not what I want to talk about.
What annoys me is the way he talks about She-ra.
"Like with Voltron, the show was positioning itself as gay friendly, without any primary gay characters."
The Voltron creators spent like 7 seasons saying "there would be queer characters" without saying which, then made a big deal in promotions etc about Shiro being gay, then afaict had it come up briefly in canon and has literally no other queer representation.
Within it's first season, She-ra had a secondary f/f couple. They are kind of ambiguous in canon at that point but the creators very clearly said that yes, they were an established couple, and by season 2 made them more unambiguously queer. In season 2 there is also a secondary but very unambiguous m/m married couple, parents of one of the main ensemble, who have a whole episode center around them. In season 4 a canonically non-binary secondary character is very central.
Is this the same as having a member of the main ensemble be queer? No. But it's also pretty significant. Especially because there's very little romance or relationships shown of any kind. Except for one m/f couple, one of whom died before canon, pretty much all the m/f is romantically ambiguous friendship which is treated exactly the same as the same sex romantically ambiguous friendships. Of which there are multiple, and they are very shippy.
The general interpretation in fandom is that the show-runner, Noelle Stevenson, is pushing to make the show as queer as she can get away with, but in the mean time is just treating all relationships as equivalent regardless of the gender of the characters. And in my opinion this is not the same as queer-baiting, and is actually pretty progressive and pro-queer. This is very different to Voltron, which from what I saw implicitly assumes everyone is straight unless stated otherwise and treats m/f relationships differently to m/m and f/f.
Is the marketing department trying to queer-bait by implying more queer representation than Dreamworks has any intention of providing? Plausibly! I am not saying Dreamworks aren't a bunch of homophobic assholes, because afaict they are. But that does not make the show itself bad, nor it's creators.
"While Stevenson did not go into the show with the intent to manipulate LGBT viewers, the source confirmed Stevenson allowed it to proceed, and intentionally played up romantic subtext between same-gendered characters (like Adora and Catra) to queer fans."
Because she ships them. It is very clear that the (largely queer women) making this show are making it as femslashy as they can get away with, and genuinely take these pairings seriously. It's possible that the pairings will never be unambiguous canon, but "publicly sincerely shipping a pairing that may not be canon" seems like something queer creators should be able to do without being accused of being manipulative liars.
By contrast, afaict the Voltron writers seemed open minded about fans m/m ships but not actually into them.
Which is all very subjective, I'll admit. But this post jumps quickly to a really mean-spirited bad faith interpretation which seems largely motivated by being angry about Voltron and taking it out on the next big Dreamworks show, rather than attempting sincere engagement with She-ra on it's own merits. This is especially unfortunate when the show-runner is a woman, and the blog author is a man who seems uninterested in engaging with gender or sexism and just divides everything into queer and not-queer.
Like "Stevenson has been much more careful to tease without promising, to provide herself with deniability". OR MAYBE SHE DOESN'T WANT TO MAKE FALSE PROMISES.
Should she be more circumspect to avoid getting people's hopes up? Arguably. But maybe she's hoping enough fan enthusiasm will help persuade the network. And regardless, it's a jump from "should be more circumspect" to accusing her of being creepily manipulative.
Also, Double Trouble isn't just "a queer character", they're an explicitly non-binary character, who uses they/them pronouns and is played by a non-binary voice actor. That's a big deal!
With the changed screenshot: (a) Huntara and Adora are also pretty shippy (b) Catra and Adora may not have had that SPECIFIC moment together in canon, but they have PLENTY of angsty moments staring at each other intensely, and their messy relationship is central to the plot of season 3, and much more central than Adora and Huntara's relationship. That promotional image is in no way false advertising.
He says Dreamworks has a "lack of actual inclusive programming compared to its competitors"- does it really? Steven Universe does a bit better than She-Ra, but I don't know of any other kid's shows from the last few years that do. Also, why focus on a show made by a queer creator without discussing any of Dreamworks' other current shows? Afaict most of them don't mention queerness at all in canon or promotional material- is that better? (I've heard Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts recently had a character come out as queer but I have no idea how significant he is, and it happened after the essay was written)
Now for "I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)".
This essay makes some good points, which I'm not going to engage with much, but just because I don't have anything to add. The way so many people embrace bland art from mega-corporations while being hyper-critical of art by queer women is really messed up!
But I don't like the "corporate art" vs "art made by real artists" dichotomy. People making corporate art are real artists. Not necessarily the world's best or most creatively sincere artists, but they hardly have have a monopoly on insincere money-grubbing within art circles either.
She has a point about the main targets being women rather than men, and normally I wouldn't be picky about the implicit erasure of non-binary people, except she holds up Steven Universe as a primary example of Bad Art, both in the header image and as her final example. But it's a show with a non-binary creator and the most non-binary characters I've pretty much ever seen in anything. How is it not Real Queer Art?
She says "There's nothing wrong with not wanting to or not being able to engage with art about horrific things." but then ends with
Enjoy your popcorn movies, your Steven Universe and your X-Men comics, but ask yourself, what are you immersing yourself in by not reaching beyond those things? What is prolonged and overgrown childhood doing to your mind and to your moral sense of the world? Growing up is painful, yes, but if you want to learn to love, to open yourself up to others, to touch the deepest, rawest parts of your psyche and your sexuality, you're going to have to suffer.
(which also seems to contradict the title but never mind)
She's entirely conflating indie status, maturity, representation, dark themes, and discomfort.
Steven Universe is a children's show from a major tv company, it's pretty good representation, it deals with difficult subjects like abuse, it's overall cheerful and heart-warming, and has no sexual content. That's not exactly a shining example of work which is immature AND heteronormative AND unchallenging etc.
It's also very controversial with the depiction=endorsement crowd, because they don't like how it deals with abuse etc. If anything, it's an example of a work by a queer non-male creator that gets held to overly harsh standards.
There are overly harsh standards applied to sexually explicit works, but that doesn't make liking things that aren't sexually explicit immature or unwoke. And I'm not convinced horror elements or being aimed at adults have any significant correlation to being attacked for being impure.
It just feels like she likes works which are horrific and aimed at adults in addition to being queer and dealing with messy subjects, and so for her all those things are linked. But Steven Universe is a pretty good counter-example, and holding it up as as The Worst Art instead of, say, the MCU, feels like bitterness that so many queer people like something so child-aimed and fluffy and thus not to her personal taste.
"There should be space for messy, confronting, sexually explicit queer works": yes, definitely. "If you don't consume messy, confronting, sexually explicit queer works you'll be unable to understand yourself or learn to love": No! You're being just as rigid as the purity people in the other direction.
And this is all separate again to indie status.
I feel like there's more to unpack here but this post is already pretty long and I think I've made my point.
So yeah. I absolutely think people should critique the way corporations pretend tokenistic queerness is Representation, and the way fans eat this up. But these essays are an example of some of the ways these critiques can fall down.