Oh yeah, people don't think twice if straight kids in media have a crush/puppy love storyline. It is indeed a homophobic agenda to insinuate that depicting a queer kid having a same sex crush in the same manner is the g-word or whatever nonsense homophobes come up with. That kind of insidious "concern" should never be tolerated.
I'm just not sure DC animation will actually go there with 11-year-old Jon in a Super Sons movie though. I may be wrong, in which case I would be delighted and this would be pretty groundbreaking for superhero stories, especially for those aimed at younger kids.
On one hand, I like Chaos so DC should have Jon crush on Damien so I can see people attack each other over it.
On the other hand, I prefer the friendship angle of the comics and the GNs so I'd rather they stick with that.
"Cable was right!"
I didn't mean Damian specifically - it can be Damian, sure, but Jon can have a gay crush on literally anyone, even a superhero older than him, because it's just a crush so the film can decide if it wants to make it a relationship or if it wants it to stay within a simple crush that may only be on-screen for about five minutes.
What a lot of media and people don't get is that rep is so easy if you treat the characters like you would straight/cis characters because those characters are allowed to do things like tease each other and make jokes, so even if the writers don't have the characters develop crushes or romantic relationships, their sexuality is still conveyed (most writers don't even think notice this)
Jon's bisexuality could be conveyed just by a simple conversation between him and Damian where Damian teases him for having crushes on people (ex. present crush male, past crush female)
Most people don't notice how heterosexuality in media is always explicit/overt. I didn't even start to until a movie reviewer kept making reverse-style jokes about how Disney romances were forced heterosexuality/heterosexual agenda.
After so much bad and/or weak rep through the years, especially in children's media, I want actual content before I consider it legit representation. I don't want Word of Gay, I don't want "subtle," I don't want allegories or metaphors, I don't want "Slow Burn" - I just want LGBTQ characters who are treated with the same open writing as straight/cis characters.
That's my personal thing, though.
Last edited by TheCasualReader; 07-04-2022 at 07:41 AM.
One amusing side benefit of depicting Kid Jon as having same sex crushes is it's gonna foil the bigots who insist he should be deaged just because they don't want him dating a dude, and separate them from the folks who genuinely prefer Lil Jon to Teen Jon for non-homophobic reasons.
Jon's sexuality has more of a chance to come up in the Legion cartoon than in this in my opinion.
Speaking for myself as a gay man, I don't want GAY characters (though I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth), I want gay CHARACTERS. And that's a ridiculously easy thing to do, you just make a character as you would any other character. How often do stories featuring cishet characters actually focus on the fact that they're cishet? I'd rather they explicitly say words like "gay" and "bisexual" (something that is sorely lacking in all the stories featuring aged up Jon), but they don't need to say those words specifically in order to be queer. There's a myriad of non-verbal ways of showing queer rep.
The Hollow
Amphibia
The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Actually, the character in The Hollow does flat out say he's gay, but that screenshot is the first shot we see of that character in the second season, so a pride flag in a character's bedroom is a good indicator of a character's sexuality. Stickers and pins are also just as valid depictions of queerness, so as long as Jon is a character in the movie (which he is), we're not totally bereft of options for representation without having to shift the entire narrative of the movie to include a forced romantic storyline (something I despise even with cishet characters).
I'm not coming to BoSS for the same queer rep as the Owl House. I'm coming for the Super Sons, a story about the friendship of the sons of Superman and Batman. I don't need the movie to make a point of Jon's queerness like the Owl House does with having Luz and Amity constantly reaffirming and referring to each other as girlfriends after an entire season of them befriending each other and later discovering they have feelings for each other (a real Slow Burn if I've ever seen one) because that's not the point of the Super Sons. In terms of Super Sons storytelling, Jon's bisexuality is just as relevant as his black hair. It's just a fact about the character. There's more to the character and the story than his orientation and that's what I want out of the movie.
I'd love for stories about Jon's bisexuality, but I don't trust anyone at DC or WB, except for maybe James Tynion IV, an actual bi man, to even attempt to do that, so I would go with more stories with queer characters than stories about queer character, but those would be great too so we should elevate the works of queer creators that do tell those stories. Until then, just increasing the number of queer characters in media is just as important as telling queer stories.
Well there seems to be plenty of disdain for established couples like Ivy & Harley especially on this forum.
Comics are for fun. They aren’t always unless you think a title like Maus is supposed to be funny. Sorry it’s a pet peeve when people describe comics as just funny titles.
No Luz and Amity do not just define themselves by their queerness, and nor does the show. They have characters outside of that. Nor is it a slow burn in fact by the terms of these shows it is actually quite quick considering in a lot of past shows same sex couples often don’t get together until the final episode. If you’re going to make a point try and not do it by misrepresenting something else.
Thanks for sharing the video and btw, I didn't know that Grazer is bisexual.
Thanks for your feedback. It helped a lot.
Okay, you're right. (When I made the comment "comics are for fun", I was referring to American superhero comics written about fictional characters.)
BL and comics fan. 🌈 ----- For those saying BL is "pandering to fujos! Too girly! It's fetishization!!!" --> https://www.fujoshi.info/ (a website with academic resources on Queer Media Studies in Asia and LGBTQIA+ history)
The queer body has been used as a battleground, has been criminalized, ostracized, and many times erased from their own histories. -- Alesha Byrne (University of San Francisco)