Something that’s really getting me about the She-Ra finale is that, for what feels like the first time in my media life, the heterosexual couples were left with the ambiguity the queer ones usually get. They had no full on kisses, they had declarations that people are saying, ‘I thought it felt platonic’ about, and some were kind of not mutually even explicitly expressed.
It just feels like one of the first times we didn’t have to write essays featuring an extensive list of the times they held hands or did everything that is coded romantically had they been a hetero couple. In Star Trek: DS9, where we all spent hours raging that the sweet goodbye exchange of chocolates and cute smiles would be instantly read as romantic if it had been the male/female Riker and Troi duo the show so often trotted out in its prior incarnation, TNG. We don’t have to ask the actors if they ‘played it gay’ or ‘thought there was something more’ or even be terrified or embarrassed to do so.
She-Ra’s last season we got one woman saying, “My wife,” when referring to the partner people were still managing to read as her girlfriend at best, roommate at weirdest. We got ‘I love you,’ and ‘I love you, too’ and a world saving center stage unambiguous Kiss from the main characters after enduring trauma after trauma.
Have I ever watched a queer romantic relationship become canon?? I don’t think like this. I watched Adventure Time, and was I psyched about Marceline and Bubblegum? Yes! But the story hadn’t been about them and a long term complicated relationship, even though they had had that both by word of god decree and the few little snips we got as unaddressed background. We got Marcie and PB by on the fumes of ‘this would be read as a hint if they were two different sexes’ and whoops this kiss is here annnnnnnnnd now it’s from the back and you can’t see the whole thing and we are cutting back to the world ending disaster. They did the same getting by on fumes with Korra and Asami in Legend of Korra. Was I astonished Korra got to have Asami in the end and not Mako? Yeah, because I had never been given that. But I also wasn’t even sure I was given it because it was given as, ‘we can’t give you this directly, we haven’t even been allowed to focus on it or build it up as falling in love, but you can have it be in literally the same shape as the hetero wedding that fades out before it, that’s the best we got’.
I’m so used to us all being ‘already established background’ or ‘developed on the fumes and desperate clinging hopes in the background only to rear a head like Nessie at the 11th hour before vanishing again’ and not several seasons showing obvious connection, obvious distress at being separated and each other’s bad decisions, obvious re connections and longings, jokes and clear joy being together when the worldwide war and abusive parental figure isn’t creeping in all around them.
I wanted that for Pearl or Peridot in Steven Universe, I wanted ‘now here is the story of me falling in love with someone, complete with my obvious crush on them and our progression through those feelings, from start to finish.’ We got close, and that’s in no way ragging on Steven Universe because I love it and it brings me such joy, it was just still that the safest way to go is ‘pre-established relationship’, and not ‘watch these two have complicated feelings that finally get to be an explosive kiss for several seasons’. I”m sure there are essays being drafted as I type this about toxic and problematic left and right, I’m just choosing instead to marvel at a thing that brought me great joy and more feelings about people like me look like in media than I had expected, even with how gay it had been up until this point, which was Pretty Gay.
It’s all the stuff we write in fanfiction, and I mean that in the positive way. not the pseudo insulting derogatory way it’s often trotted out as. What do people make in fanfic? Long stories with lots of emotions and connections and elaborate, ‘here is how these two idiots fall in love’ scenarios. How wild to see it in a show. And be there and important.
So yeah, that kiss hit me like a meteor and a mass extinction event.
(Please don’t yell at me or throw a disc horse, I just want to have some head boggling emotions about a show I really love!)
