While the increase in queer rep in cartoons is wonderful and I'm glad it's growing more each year, one thing that bugs me is the lack of queer vocabulary.

We have several gay characters now but you won't ever hear the word "gay" uttered in the cartoon itself.

And I think the vocabulary is important, because if we're hoping for queer kids to see themselves and learn that the way they feel is just as valid as anyone else's they also need to hear it said. We need to end the stigma that the words around queer identities are bad words.

Like, even today a word like lesbian will be blocked as if it was a swear in most word filters and it's absolutely awful.

If My Little Pony can have mares dating and even show a wedding for one of those couples but the word lesbian is not child friendly then there's a problem.

And frankly, with how we're moving more and more towards original content made for digital streaming services I don't buy "we can't do it because it won't pass TV network approval" as an excuse.

Like, don't get me wrong. I love She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and I think it's doing tremendous work.

But we're four seasons in and despite everyone and their mother knowing how gay it and several of its staff members are the word "gay" has not been uttered once.

I'm sure Netflix has a set of rules for what shows filtered for their kids accounts can include but if that means they can show gay content but not speak of it then that is a BIG problem.

And you could argue that it's just because there's not been a natural way to include such vocabulary into the context of the series and the dialogue.

But any queer person will tell you that's bogus, we say the words describing us at any occasion we can provided we feel safe.

Like, you can't convince me for a second that Double Trouble wouldn't talk about Catra's "little gay heart being broken" or something to that effect.

Of course they would.

And I'm not saying that kids need to be exposed to every reclaimed slur and whatnot.

But basic words of identity that can help them find themselves?

Yeah, duh, obviously.

Like, it's really not a good thing that kids are more likely to first experience words like gay, lesbian, trans and so forth with either queerphobic rhetoric and abuse or internet porn than they are with an accepted valid identity unless they come from a queer home.

Granted, I grew up before western cartoons was as gay as they are now and I also grew up in Sweden.

But I first heard gay as a slur. I first heard lesbian used as an offensive punchline. Hell, any trans vocabulary I heard until *my 20s* was essentially relegated to slurs.

And that's not acceptable.

It's great that Adventure Time, She-Ra, My Little Pony, Twelve Forever, Star vs the Forces of Evil and so forth can have visible queer representation in its characters.

But they need to be heard too.

(And yes, this is not just a western issue. For all the praise I give to things like PreCure or PriPara for having queer characters they too avoid any vocabulary identifying said queerness.)

((And it's also not just a cartoon and kids show issue. Look at all major movies and how their big gay moments and characters somehow never actually mention sexuality in the script...))

Okay, so, hi. This is an addendum to the thread because this blew up several days later.

Apparently She-Ra staff retweeted my thread and that caused this to happen. Thank you, I'm glad my thread is appreciated by people whose work I love.

So, allow me to add something to this.

A series I didn't mention and really should have was The Legend of Korra, which of course has a bisexual leading lady who ends up dating another bisexual lady at the end.

Which is fantastic!

However, the reason we know that Korra and Asami are specifically bisexual is not because the show told us. The show ends ambiguously enough that somepeople argued when it aired that they were not even a couple.

Their sexuality and status as a couple was confirmed later.

And I feel that perfectly highlights the problem. We had two canonically bisexual women and yet the show couldn't say they were bisexual, we had to hear it from staff after the show ended.

Going back to My Little Pony, a writer on Equestria Girls recently confirmed that Sunset Shimmer from said series is bisexual and was always intended to be bisexual.

But again, not mentioned. A kid watching MLP would not learn through it what bisexual means.

The closest we've gotten, as far as I know, to a kids cartoon directly referencing a sexuality specifically is OK K.O.!'s Enid who is bisexual and has a bisexual pride sticker on her bike and helmet.

In fact, her entire colour scheme is bi pride themed.

And that's super cool but ultimately won't tell a kid who is bisexual but might not know what bisexual means anything.

It's just a cool thing for those of us who know what the bisexual pride flag looks like to notice.

Another thing people brought up was Double Trouble's pronouns.

For those who don't know, Double Trouble is a character from She-Ra and they're non-binary and uses singular they/them.

Every character respects this, even the villains, and that's wonderful.

However, at no point does Double Trouble introduce their pronouns. No one asks about their pronouns. Everyone instinctively knows they use they/them or such details were given off screen.

From a storytelling perspective this is fine. We don't have to see Double Trouble inform anyone of their pronouns, it's not important to what's going on that we do.

However. Highlighting their pronouns that way could inform children a lot about personal pronouns use.

Most of us, even bigots who claim otherwise, use singular they/them in regular English speech without thinking about it.

But having a character say that's how to refer to them would tell a kid directly that it's just as personal as he/him or she/her.

And that is also part of what I'm referring to when I say that queer language is important to queer representation.

You can have characters of various sexualities, genders and trans status but if you're not conveying these things directly you are mostly preaching to a choir.

I get super happy and giddy when I see a queer character or couple in a show, because I'm queer and I know what these things are already.

A kid whose only exposure to queer language might be slurs and political discourse? They might not know it from just the winks and nudges.

That's my addendum that I wanted to make.

Thank you for sharing the thread, I'm still amazed that it got popular several days later but I'm glad it did.

I guess I should plug something here at the end because that's what people do when something gets a lot of retweets.

So here's me talking about trans and non-binary characters and coding in anime and other Japanese media.