Disney Oversteps with its Pride Collection by Including Amphibia
checking off too many “diversity boxes”
Update: At time of writing, the complete series had yet to be released to the Disney+ streaming platform. At the end of the show several characters were revealed to identity as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Source: Disney
Streaming services over the last couple of years have started showcasing their diverse catalogue and Pride month is another time for them to flaunt it. But Disney’s Pride collection is coming across as disingenuous and hypocritical after the company’s several controversies with the LGBTQ+ community. Its support for the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill and cancellation of The Owl House, a show with revolutionary queer representation, for not being “on brand” are just two that come to mind. The entertainment conglomerate (and our media overlord) is now celebrating Pride month with all other corporations hoping to garner support from LGBTQ+ consumers. And they just had to throw Amphibia into the mix. (While forgetting about Loki, a confirmed bisexual and genderfluid a fan-favorite MCU character.)
Amphibia became one of my comfort shows during the pandemic, and would you blame me? The heavily serialized children’s animated Disney series created by Matthew Braly features high schooler, Anne Boonchuy who begins Season 1 trapped in a world of, you guessed it, amphibians. There she meets her adoptive family, the froggy Plantars: wild Sprig, adorably destructive Polly, and their loving thespian grandfather, Hop Pop.
Source: Disney Channel YouTube
I was unreservedly excited to see Amphibia included in Disney’s “Asian and Pacific Islander Stories Collection,” in May during AAPI Heritage Month because the show has done a lot to showcase its characters’ diverse ethnic backgrounds. Anne is a Thai-American girl who lives in Los Angeles with her parents who run a Thai restaurant. There are even episodes that revolve around the Boonchuys going to the Thai Temple and adventures in an Asian grocery store. The show also gives us bright, yet clumsy, Marcy Wu who is one of Anne’s best friends and an important supporting character. I’m sure that most of this exciting Thai and Asian representation on screen is due to Braly’s efforts as both creator and executive producer. Amphibia manages to do what many other series with Asian representation fail at: create characters who have a personality and identity outside of their ethnicity and race.
While the API collection had 58 titles, the Pride collection which launched on June 1 only has 22. The company has had a long history of erasing queer storylines to be “family-friendly,” but it seems like Disney is scrambling now to show that it cares. I have serious doubts about the marketing executives’ liberal application of LGBTQ+ to this collection when they included Amphibia in it. (Especially since Disney denies queer relationships and characters even when it’s undoubtedly visible to its LGBTQ+ audiences — I’m looking at you, drag queen Ursula and gender-non-conforming Mulan.)
Granted, the Amphibia fandom has its own headcanons for the show’s protagonists, but there is no explicit declaration of any character’s sexuality. My personal headcanons are that Anne is pansexual, Sasha a (but-I’m-a-cheerleader) lesbian, and Marcy ace. It’s also not a reach to say that the budding friendship and tension between Newtopia’s General Yunan and Lady Olivia is more than a friendship.
Source: Disney
However, so far the only confirmed queer characters are Ally, a pansexual engineer who’s helped in several of Polly’s antics and Mr. X, a paranormal hunter/federal agent (voiced by RuPaul Charles) who seeks to track down Anne and the Plantars. This leads us to the maddening part. Mr. X, a stereotypical gay man with a flair for the dramatics, is the one character whose episode is highlighted for the Pride collection. He was only introduced in Season 3 and is a minor character who serves as a plot device.
Sure, he may be a humanized antagonist who watches Drag Race, but that doesn’t stray far enough from Disney’s pattern of queer-coded villains.
Dr. X with RuPaul on his fridge
Source: Disney
Is Disney (excluding the creators, artists, and writers) so truly incapable of believing that some of their older works speak to a queer audience that it resorts to highlighting a show as queer because of one minor character?
Marshall University seems to somewhat agree with this highlight. The university’s list of “LGBTQ+ Friendly Media & Stars,” which starts off with Dana Terrace’s progressive The Owl House, includes Amphibia. The reasoning lies in the fact that “While there are currently no canon LGBTQ+ characters on this show, we still consider it LGBTQ+ friendly because it is inclusive in language and does not advertise harmful ideologies.” I’m sure that its lack of harmful ideologies and inclusive language attracts queer viewers, but isn’t that the bare minimum? A show that doesn’t attack our identities should be the bare minimum.
If Disney is looking to add every instance of canonical queer characters to their collection (like it did with Amphibia) it should add these movies and television series:
Loki — Loki is confirmed to be genderfluid and bisexual
Love, Victor — the follow-up to Love, Simon is based on Victor’s story as a bisexual high schooler
Beauty and the Beast (2017) — LeFou is gay and was supposed to have his own prequel series
Thor: Ragnarok — Valkyrie, played by Tessa Thompson, has a same-sex lover
Pixar’s Lightyear — Hawthorne kisses her female partner (and the scene was originally cut!)
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — America Chavez is canonically lesbian in the comics and her moms are shown in the movie
By not doing so, it seems like the company is choosing to erase gay characters from its Marvel and Disney princess universes.
Source: Screen Rant
Here are some Disney movies with characters so obviously and frustratingly queer-coded that it’s laughable (that I’ll actually be watching for pride month):
Mulan (1998)
The Little Mermaid
Luca
Raya and the Last Dragon
Frozen
Queer folks are going to have their “gay awakening” whether Disney says their beloved characters are a member of our community or not. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see Amphibia grow into a show that can properly fit into the Pride collection category, but for now, the multimedia corporation is overreaching by making Amphibia check one too many boxes. Just let The Owl House do some of that work.
Ivy Fan (she/they) is the editor-in-chief of juxtapose magazine. They studied at Boston University (no thanks to The Social Network) and currently lives in a shoebox apartment with her cat. In her free time, she’s probably psychoanalyzing TV show characters and her friends, making yet another Spotify playlist, or buying more houseplants.
Connect with them on Twitter @ivyzfan and Instagram @vee_fan
