Marcelline and Bonnibel was deliberately hinted at - but only hinted at - by the exceptionally queer staff of Adventure Time. Initially just making it a reveal that they knew each other (with Marcie being the first to mention Princess Bubblegum’s given name, IIRC) but eventually having a whole musical episode where they had unspecified past conflict. At which point, someone on the non-televised and non-canonical after-show joked about how it sounded like they used to be girlfriends. Cartoon Network fired that guy - ended the after-show - and didn’t feature Marcelline for the rest of the season. Those assholes spent years suppressing the barest fucking suggestion that these two cagey immortals had any kind of meaningful relationship, everrr.
Korra and Asami were written as a properly slow-burn romance between two bisexual women. Possibly not from the start? I think the writers just noticed some chemistry and leaned into it. The showrunners had a coy attitude toward queer content, seeing what Nickelodeon would let them get away with, but never really pushing their boundaries. (Honestly both Avatar series had enough trouble staying funded. Every cartoon becomes a tie-in for another company’s toy line.) The shipping chart for the four protagonists was deliberately fluid and melodramatic, early on, and arguably teased some M/M stuff via Bolin not being able to tell apart Desna and Eska. Nonetheless it took until the back half of season two for Korra to say “I’ve never had a girlfriend like you,” with a big fat dollop of plausible deniability on the colloquial meaning for “girl friend.” And even though they went through some shit in season three, the show only let them hold hands and walk off into the sunset at literally the last second, in the finale episode that wasn’t even aired on actual television. Bryan Konietzko had to tweet that yes, that was supposed to be confirmed for gay, no seriously, we did the thing.
Adora and Catra… listen. The pitch meeting to Netflix might as well have been ND Stevenson announcing “We’re gonna re-do She-Ra and it’s gonna be gay as fuck.” All the animators who’d been told to stop hinting at queer stuff were still in the industry, and they said, okay - we’ll stop hinting. So She-Ra is a universe where even the genocidal bad guys don’t express homophobia, the apparently-inevitable prom episode has an F/F/F love triangle going on, and all these gay creators who know gay stuff is just not a big deal put all their effort into weird plot shit. Oh, and neurodivergence, because that’s harder to get right. So the one straight-ish character I can think of is the autistic-coded, robot-fucking… lavender eldritch horror. The show also makes the shapeshifter nonbinary, and fans have decided there’s at least one polycule, aaand if Stevenson casually mentioned that Perfuma was trans it’d be zero percent surprising.
Adventure Time recently had some spinoff movies. One prominently featured Marcie & Bonnie being all domestic and shit. Why would it possibly be a big deal? Honestly the funniest part is that Princess Bubblegum is probably asexual. Cartoon Network threw an industry-shaking shit-fit over the idea of two women hugging.
Admittedly this reading glosses over Stephen Universe being deliberately set-up to force Cartoon Network to acknowledge gay stuff. All the gems are allegedly nonbinary, but consistently she/her. Their relationships literally fuse people together. One of the central characters is the red/blue pair in the center… three seasons in. Rebecca Sugar, hot off Adventure Time’s corporate case of the notgays, got to reveal that there’s a been married lesbian couple onscreen since episode one.
Aaand Cartoon Network Europe still yanked their funding once that red/blue pair got an actual wedding.
The bottom row is a story in three acts.
Marcelline and Bonnibel was deliberately hinted at - but only hinted at - by the exceptionally queer staff of Adventure Time. Initially just making it a reveal that they knew each other (with Marcie being the first to mention Princess Bubblegum’s given name, IIRC) but eventually having a whole musical episode where they had unspecified past conflict. At which point, someone on the non-televised and non-canonical after-show joked about how it sounded like they used to be girlfriends. Cartoon Network fired that guy - ended the after-show - and didn’t feature Marcelline for the rest of the season. Those assholes spent years suppressing the barest fucking suggestion that these two cagey immortals had any kind of meaningful relationship, everrr.
Korra and Asami were written as a properly slow-burn romance between two bisexual women. Possibly not from the start? I think the writers just noticed some chemistry and leaned into it. The showrunners had a coy attitude toward queer content, seeing what Nickelodeon would let them get away with, but never really pushing their boundaries. (Honestly both Avatar series had enough trouble staying funded. Every cartoon becomes a tie-in for another company’s toy line.) The shipping chart for the four protagonists was deliberately fluid and melodramatic, early on, and arguably teased some M/M stuff via Bolin not being able to tell apart Desna and Eska. Nonetheless it took until the back half of season two for Korra to say “I’ve never had a girlfriend like you,” with a big fat dollop of plausible deniability on the colloquial meaning for “girl friend.” And even though they went through some shit in season three, the show only let them hold hands and walk off into the sunset at literally the last second, in the finale episode that wasn’t even aired on actual television. Bryan Konietzko had to tweet that yes, that was supposed to be confirmed for gay, no seriously, we did the thing.
Adora and Catra… listen. The pitch meeting to Netflix might as well have been ND Stevenson announcing “We’re gonna re-do She-Ra and it’s gonna be gay as fuck.” All the animators who’d been told to stop hinting at queer stuff were still in the industry, and they said, okay - we’ll stop hinting. So She-Ra is a universe where even the genocidal bad guys don’t express homophobia, the apparently-inevitable prom episode has an F/F/F love triangle going on, and all these gay creators who know gay stuff is just not a big deal put all their effort into weird plot shit. Oh, and neurodivergence, because that’s harder to get right. So the one straight-ish character I can think of is the autistic-coded, robot-fucking… lavender eldritch horror. The show also makes the shapeshifter nonbinary, and fans have decided there’s at least one polycule, aaand if Stevenson casually mentioned that Perfuma was trans it’d be zero percent surprising.
Adventure Time recently had some spinoff movies. One prominently featured Marcie & Bonnie being all domestic and shit. Why would it possibly be a big deal? Honestly the funniest part is that Princess Bubblegum is probably asexual. Cartoon Network threw an industry-shaking shit-fit over the idea of two women hugging.
Admittedly this reading glosses over Stephen Universe being deliberately set-up to force Cartoon Network to acknowledge gay stuff. All the gems are allegedly nonbinary, but consistently she/her. Their relationships literally fuse people together. One of the central characters is the red/blue pair in the center… three seasons in. Rebecca Sugar, hot off Adventure Time’s corporate case of the notgays, got to reveal that there’s a been married lesbian couple onscreen since episode one.
Aaand Cartoon Network Europe still yanked their funding once that red/blue pair got an actual wedding.