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. 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. “Hey there, Princess Undercut,” Raya says with a smirk. “Fancy meeting you here.”
If that sounds more flirtatious than ferocious there’s a reason for it. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
“I think if you’re a person watching this movie and you see representation in a way that feels really real and authentic to you, then it is real and authentic,” Tran says. “I think it might get me in trouble for saying that, but whatever.” Disney films have been tiptoeing around the perimeter of queer representation for some time now whether it be the “exclusively gay” millisecond of Beauty and the Beast, a fleeting, sapphic background kiss in The Rise of Skywalker, Thor: Ragnarok’s allegedly bisexual Valkyrie, Onward’s brief mention of a female cop’s girlfriend, or Elsa’s totally platonic friend Honeymaren in Frozen II.
Queer fans eager to see themselves finally fully represented in a Disney film may well pounce on Tran’s interpretation of the Raya and Namaari relationship. The fact that Raya is introduced in the film wearing what looks like cosplay for Nickelodeon’s TV series The Legend of Korra—which famously features one of the first canonically queer leads in a kid’s show—may only feed that interpretation.
But The Legend of Korra ended back in 2014, which puts Raya and the Last Dragon fully seven years behind. That show’s creators, two straight men named Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, explained at the time that the show’s romance between Korra and her “close friend” Asami had “organically blossomed” under the “notion, another ‘unwritten rule,’ that we would not be allowed to depict that in our show.” They fought hard for that ending, which still includes plausible deniability that it’s all platonic for anyone who wants it—and for them it was worth the push. “This particular decision wasn’t only done for us,” Konietzko wrote at the time. “We did it for all our queer friends, family, and colleagues…I’m only sorry it took us so long to have this kind of representation in one of our stories.”
The world of American TV animation wouldn’t break through beyond Korra and Asami until a few years later when the creators on three shows—Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Netflix’s reboot She-Ra and the Princesses of Power—all had to fight tooth and nail against resistant networks to include queer characters and, even more significantly, queer love in their shows.
Rebecca Sugar, the non-binary artist and storyteller who both worked on Adventure Time and went on to create Steven Universe, says that when they first started on the former in 2010 “don’t ask don’t tell” was still a national policy and legalized same-sex marriage was still five years away. Sugar was encouraged by the creative team to put their own life experiences into the character of Marceline, but when that lead to a planned romantic storyline between Marceline and Princess Bubblegum (yes, Princess Bubblegum, this is, after all, a kid’s fantasy show), Sugar says, the executives at Cartoon Network slammed the door: “We were told something along the lines of ‘don’t you understand you work for a company?’ So I began to see where the walls and ceilings were.”
In 2012, when it came time to branch out from Adventure Time and into their own show, Steven Universe, Sugar was determined to be strategic about making “queer couples and narratives that were inexorable from the story and impossible to censor.” A central character named Garnet wasn’t revealed to be the “living embodiment” of a romance between two characters named Ruby and Sapphire until 2015, when the show was already 52 episodes into its run.
Even then, Sugar had to fight Cartoon Network: “The hammer came down internally—I was asked to make Ruby a boy, told the characters could never kiss on the mouth, and that Ruby and Sapphire’s relationship could not be romantic. It was made clear to me that if I or anyone on the crew spoke about it publicly or confirmed that the characters were LGBTQIA+, it might lead to the show’s cancellation.”
Sugar refused to be cowed. By not including those stories, they say, “there would just be more of what I grew up with: content for kids that imagines a world where LGBTQIA+ people do not exist. And when you grow up seeing that, you get the message at a very young age that you are not supposed to exist. I couldn’t stand that anymore. So I began to talk publicly about why I felt so strongly that kids deserve these stories, and that they aren’t ‘subversive’ or ‘adult,’ but as lovely as any of the thousands of heteronormative love stories we always tell to kids.”
Sugar eventually won that fight with the support of Steven Universe’s young fans and the muscle of GLAAD behind them. Steven Universe’s exploration of queer identity via fantastical storylines that blur the boundaries on gender identity reaches far beyond Ruby and Sapphire. In the 2015 episode “Alone Together,” Steven and his pal Connie accidentally fuse into Stevonnie, a character who opts for neutral they/them pronouns (rather than he/she) and who is shown to attract both males and females. But Ruby and Sapphire did, eventually, have their day in the sun. And in 2018, the same year the Ruby and Sapphire wedding episode of Steven Universe aired, Sugar’s Adventure Time avatar Marceline finally got to kiss Princess Bubblegum in the series finale.
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. Stevenson, also, was strategic about the central queer narrative of her show. She always saw plenty of queer-coded representation in the original ’80s cartoon, but she had something more ambitiously representative in mind.
“Studios and networks tend to be cautious, and never want to stick their neck out farther than they have to. It’s easier to convince them if this is something that other shows have already done. There was a lot of fear at first,” Stevenson says of the first season of her She-Ra. “There always had to be plausible deniability, with the exception maybe of Bow’s two dads, because other shows had been including gay parents. It only started changing once we started getting positive, vocal support from fans of the show. They picked up on all the queer subtext, and they wanted more.”
That groundswell of support for a central queer love story that had, up to that point, been merely implied, gave Stevenson what she needed to pitch executives on ending She-Ra’s run with big swing. “When I was like, look, we want this queer relationship between the two leads to be the climax of the entire show—a fairly big ask—instead of getting a hard ‘no,’ I got a ‘okay, sell us on it.’ I was very very grateful for that trust and that opportunity.” By the time Netflix and Dreamworks launched Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts in 2020, casually queer characters were part of the story’s fabric from the very beginning.
In the She-Ra series finale, which aired in 2020, She-Ra and her longtime antagonist Catra, finally kissed after sparking and sparring with each other all through the show. The familiar elements of this “enemy to lovers” trope (long popular in YA literature, anime, and, oh, Star Wars) jumps out in the dynamic between Raya and Namaari in Raya and the Last Dragon. It’s not hard to imagine, were this a different film studio or Raya and the Last Dragon a TV series rather than a film, that their passionate fighting might have turned into a different kind of passion before the story was done.
Disney’s feature films, which are generally so expensive they have to play to the broadest possible international audience, haven’t yet introduced a queer Princess. But on the TV animation side, they’re already there. Dana Terrace’s The Owl House debuted on The Disney Channel in 2020 with a main character, Luz, who has romantic feelings for both girls and boys. Terrace is well aware of the fellow creators who paved her way.
“I know Rebecca and Noelle had to go through hell and back for their shows and they’ll always have my respect for that. But I don’t think I could have been as sly and strategic as either of them,” Terrace says. “During development I was very open about Luz being bi and including LGBT+ characters in a very casual, normalized way. I was told by friends and colleagues that I’d have to ‘Trojan Horse’ any queer rep into the show, to hide it through metaphor and trick the executives, especially being at such a historically conservative studio like Disney. But, honestly, I suck at lying. I’m so bad at it.”
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. I let myself get mad, to absolutely blow up, and storm out of the room. Life is short and I don’t have time for cowardice, I was ready to move on to greener pastures if need be. The stubbornness paid off and a week or two later I was given the all-clear. Luckily, the executives I directly work with have given me nothing but support.”
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. 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. “As creators we don’t always have the option of including explicit queer content,” Stevenson says. “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. The same executives supporting progressive content today could pull back in an instant, who knows what’s going on behind the scenes?”
For decades queer readers and audience members have had to rely on this kind of subtle nod to find themselves in stories. “As an animation fan, I grew up saturated with queer-coded villains, and when I had no canonically queer or gender expansive characters to enjoy I found myself relating to aliens, shapeshifters and mutants,” Sugar says. “My love for queer-coded villains and monsters is bittersweet and complex. And I love to see LGBTQIA+ artists express and navigate their relationship to these tropes in their art.”
But when, in 2021, does the practice of “queer coding” veer into the territory of “queer baiting”? The latter is a term that indicates a more cynical approach to teasing gay-friendly material in order to appear progressive or queer-friendly without, as Sugar puts it, “alienating their heteronormative audience or risking international profit margins.” Terrace adds: “I see it a lot in modern anime, specifically. Like the show is almost making fun of viewers for becoming invested in a relationship that they’ve decided to build up with no intention to pay it off. They know queer storylines bring in audiences but they also want plausible deniability, politically. It’s cruel to fans and it’s creatively boring. Just make a decision. Do the thing or don’t.”
This practice of queer-baiting, seen most recently and publicly in the end of the long-running TV series Supernatural or the hubbub around Finn and Poe in The Rise of Skywalker, has become increasingly intolerable among queer audiences who finally have other stories that will offer representation without the bait and switch.
For younger audiences, it’s become imperative. Sugar, Stevenson, and Terrace all describe the overwhelming feedback they’ve received from young fans who felt emboldened by their work to discover their own identities and share that journey with their families. But queer representation in these stories are also key for helping parents of LGBT youth. “I’ve heard from parents who said it helped them understand their queer kid better, or gave them the vocabulary to introduce queer themes to their younger kids,” Stevenson says.
“Getting the chance to meet supportive parents who want to understand and respect their kids’ identities has been incredibly moving,” says Sugar who found the courage to come out to their own family after working on Steven Universe. “I’ve honestly wept at conventions, meeting these families. I grew up very close with my family, but there were big parts of myself I felt I couldn’t assert or share. It’s so amazing to see LGBTQIA+ kids who are able to share who they are and what they like with their loved ones.”
So when will Disney’s big features catch up? Terrace, who knows what it’s like to push for more from Disney, is hopeful. “Disney is a household name. It’s known as a trusted brand and they’ve created a reputation of producing high-quality, wholesome content for families. Having queer storylines and LGBT+ characters as a part of that content is a huge step forward in normalizing this very real part of human life! It would be especially cool if they stopped censoring those storylines in certain countries. Disney has no reason to fight back on any of this stuff anymore.”
But Stevenson isn’t so sure that we should be looking at Disney princesses to push the envelope forward. “I think focusing all our energy solely on big corporations for representation isn’t necessarily the best use of our time,” she says. “There are good people working at those studios, and they’re the ones working hard and sticking their necks out to include LGBT representation in the projects that they’re a part of, and I’m very grateful for those people and that is very important work.”
But change, she says, will only come when people at the top take the risk of alienating conservative or international audiences—and she’s not holding her breath. “I think our time is better spent focusing on media that gives queer creators the platform to tell their own stories in meaningful ways and proving that there is an audience and excitement for those projects instead of assuming representation is only meaningful if it comes from a major studio.”
For the queer princess diehards, though, Kelly Marie Tran is in their corner. “I want to live in a world where every single type of person can see themselves in a movie like this,” she says. “There’s a lot of work to be done in that respect. I’d love to see a Disney warrior who—I don’t know, can I say this without getting in trouble? I don’t care—is openly in the LGBTQ community. I would love to see representation in terms of someone who maybe isn’t able-bodied. And I’m hopeful. We’ll see.”
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