Is it time for a gay Disney princess?

[Unorthodox]

http://www.newsweek.com/giveelsaagirlfriend-turning-frozen-princess-weak-compromise-lgbt-fans-455192

Didn't read all the way. 

Guess people want Elsa to come out as gay and get an on screen girlfriend for Frozen 2. 

Her preference never even crossed my mind watching the movie...


In other news, there's going to be a Frozen 2 cashgrab (guessing theatrical release since this is news at all, and they ALWAYS do sequels, just usually straight to video). 

[Buster's Uncle]

Those are technically for children.

[Unorthodox]

Those are technically for children.

That's where I'm a little confused. 

I mean, plenty of Disney princesses don't exactly come up in "Normal Family" situations.  But the whole husband/wife normality thing is the 'goal' for most of them.  I guess that is the contention?

Personally didn't start thinking about anything regarding sexuality until my teens.  At which point, wouldn't some of the OTHER Disney properties (live action TV series, perhaps) be a better avenue to reach girls struggling with feeling different?  Or would a foundation of childhood programming showing such things as normal give a better foundation? 

Article quotes someone claiming 1 in 5 children are gay, but only 1 in 10 feel free to act on it.  I've no idea where that statistic comes from, and openly question it till there's a source since 95% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

At the same time, would I be concerned about these messages in something my own daughter watches? 

I already let them watch the short-lived cross-dressing hero cartoon...As tame as Disney is with their hetero relations, I can't imagine anything I'd object to in a lesbian one. 

[Buster's Uncle]

If Elok looks in, he's going to say something about the culture wars, and he's sure not wrong.

[Elok]

Really, there's plenty to object to about Frozen already.  Extensive childhood trauma?  Can be undone with no lingering side effects by literally smacking yourself in the forehead, saying "of course, love" and presto, no scars!  Sibling estrangement/broken families?  Well, sure, she blames you for caging her for half her life, but she'll get over it quite quickly.  And if you fall for a smooth-talking psycho who controls you with lies, the best thing to do is punch him in the face--there will always be guards around to keep him from retaliating with his superior physical strength, because YOU ARE A PRINCESS--and move on to the next dude without bothering over taking time to heal.  Even if you know the next dude only slightly better than you knew the psycho.

So, if they want to signal their political virtue by shoving a gay love interest into the sequel, eh.  She couldn't screw up the story much more than reindeer boy screwed up the first one.  But I doubt Disney will have the nerve.  The very fact that they felt obliged to shove a romantic interest in there at all is a sign of their essential conservatism, and there are still a lot of little girls with conservative parents who would never buy a branded lunchbox/doll/backpack if it endorsed icky gay stuff.

[Buster's Uncle]

I dunno - Disney went pretty stridently gay under Eisner...

[Unorthodox]

Really, there's plenty to object to about Frozen already.  Extensive childhood trauma?  Can be undone with no lingering side effects by literally smacking yourself in the forehead, saying "of course, love" and presto, no scars!  Sibling estrangement/broken families?  Well, sure, she blames you for caging her for half her life, but she'll get over it quite quickly. 

Isn't this a fairy tale norm, though?

Cinderella.  Snow White. Sleeping Beauty.  It's not like normal childhoods are common.

The only Disney princess with a half normal childhood I can think of is Tiana, but they'd rather shove her aside and not market that because she's the token black girl who's prince wasn't black enough. 

I mean, really, Disney parks have a New Orleans street serving the very pastries Tiana was 'famous' for in the movie, and you can't so much as rename the place to her restaurant? 


Oh, wait.  I'm pretty sure they officially made Mulan a princess to shoehorn an Asian princess into the ranks...

The very fact that they felt obliged to shove a romantic interest in there at all is a sign of their essential conservatism

My understanding was the romantic interest was there from the get go, and they dropped it's conclusion to shoehorn the whole 'oh wait, Elsa is actually good and sister love works too' after they recorded 'Let it Go', deciding it worked better as a heroine song than a villain song.  Plus bonus, double the princesses to market. 

[Elok]

Ah.  Perhaps I was giving Disney too much credit.  The only thing that was really clear from watching it is that it had too many writers.  It went in eight directions.  I assumed that the dark core of the movie was the poisoned Elsa/Anna relationship, and that they chickened out and threw on a wuv interest despite it not making sense because these stories need a wuv interest.  I mean, every aspect of Sven is essentially tacked on to the core story; he gets little buildup until he appears as a deus ex machina in the shop, and mostly tags along as a background participant for the quest itself until he's called on to have a song with the trolls.

Either way, Disney won't have the guts to try something like that until, say, 2030, when today's kids are raising their own kids and social conservatism is essentially dead.  Movies are a major investment, and they have a long money-making life, as Frozen demonstrates--they're still hocking Frozen crap in every third aisle at Wal-Mart.  They really can't afford a gesture like this, and it would gain them nothing.  As the article says, Disney already has a big gay following, and they're at no risk of losing it.  Throwing them such a blatant sop would merely alienate all the families out there who don't use contraception and have eight song-squealing little kids apiece.

[Unorthodox]

Ah.  Perhaps I was giving Disney too much credit.  The only thing that was really clear from watching it is that it had too many writers.  It went in eight directions.  I assumed that the dark core of the movie was the poisoned Elsa/Anna relationship, and that they chickened out and threw on a wuv interest despite it not making sense because these stories need a wuv interest.  I mean, every aspect of Sven is essentially tacked on to the core story; he gets little buildup until he appears as a deus ex machina in the shop, and mostly tags along as a background participant for the quest itself until he's called on to have a song with the trolls.

Guessing based on what's been said and the source material for Frozen, but THEY WEREN'T SISTERS to begin with.  That is all rewrite because song is so good.  It's not entirely clear what the relationship between the two was originally.  Anna was going to the EVIL ELSA SNOW QUEEN (who looked a lot like cruella based off concept art) to save her prince, whom the snow queen had cursed (potentially accidentally).  I would guess the prince turning out to be a sleaze bag and Christoff being the twue wuv were there from the beginning, but info on that end is hard to come by.  Just Elsa = evil queen is fairly widely known from the far too many documentaries I've seen, having a girl of the appropriate age...   

[Rusty Edge]

I had tech issues last time I tried to respond.

I still think they needed to let Merida (the self-rescuing princess ) be Brave. They needed to let her be her, and not the Celtic Barbie makeover complete with the hated fancy dress they forced on her for merchandising sake.

As for Frozen, turning the heroine gay is probably a bit much. Probably best to give her happily ever after in a sequel.

Disney could do a story about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_d%27Aubigny
It could be a sword fighting musical.

[Unorthodox]

Disney could do a story about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_d%27Aubigny
It could be a sword fighting musical.

"she stole the body of a dead nun, placed it in the bed of her lover, and set the room on fire"

I would pay good money to see that in a Disney film. 

[Lorizael]

I get that the entertainment machine that is Disney creates characters for specific purposes, and from that standpoint it might make sense to construct a gay character, but to me that seems like the wrong way to go about things. We should have gay characters in our stories because gay people are people too and because they represent some slice of the human experience.

The stories I write do have gay characters, but when I'm coming up with characters for a story, there's no part of me that says, "I'm going to make this character gay because I want gay children to have a positive role model with which they can identify." I just want to create interesting characters, and it feels like it would be a distortion of my creative process to do so with a particular social aim in mind.

And yet, I think we should have more gay characters (and more of every kind of character), because we all need characters we can identify with, and we all need to expand our horizons. The solution I see is for us, as a community, to be more accepting of non-traditional (black, gay, trans, Satanist) storytellers but also to take it on ourselves to be more creative and experimental with our stories--not for a specific social good, but because we should always be improving our craft.

[Rusty Edge]

Disney could do a story about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_d%27Aubigny
It could be a sword fighting musical.

"she stole the body of a dead nun, placed it in the bed of her lover, and set the room on fire"

I would pay good money to see that in a Disney film.

So would I. It just screams "I Gotta be Me". She gets the guy, she rescues the girl, she becomes a actress/singer, she wears pants, she fences. She wouldn't be everybody's favorite, but I think a lot of girls could identify with her.

As Lorizael so wisely stated- "I think we should have more gay characters (and more of every kind of character), because we all need characters we can identify with, and we all need to expand our horizons."

[Buster's Uncle]

...This is the part where I suggest googling Nichelle Nichols, MLK, Woopie Goldberg and LeVar Burton together - same principal applies/matters, I guess...

[Rusty Edge]

...This is the part where I suggest googling Nichelle Nichols, MLK, Woopie Goldberg and LeVar Burton together - same principal applies/matters, I guess...

That was cool. I forgot she did the show.