The new Masters of the Universe movie is more fun if you read it as a queer coming-of-age story than as a standard hero's journey.
I know now that people have been calling He-Man gay since the 80s, but it works.
Adam's life on Earth isn't bad. He has a decent job in HR, a nice apartment with a roomate, and what appears to be an active Hinge account. The problem is that he's spent the last fifteen years obsessing over a fantasy world everyone else thinks he hallucinated as a child.
The movie opens with him explaining all of this to a woman on a date. and the truth makes him sound delusional.
Nobody believes him. Nobody understands why this thing matters so much to him. His friend assumes he will eventually accept he imagined it all.
Which is already a very solid basis to read it as a queer allegory.
I think the strongest evidence for this reading comes later when Adam tells his dying father, "I finally became what you always wanted me to be. Someone else."
Adam's father remembers trying to protect a sensitive child in a dangerous world. Adam remembers being taught that who he naturally was wasn't enough.
The conflict isn't that Adam's father didn't love him. It's that the way he communicated that love felt a lot like shame.
The funny thing is that this theme keeps showing up everywhere else in the movie.
For most of the runtime Adam is trying to solve fantasy problems with HR skills. He wants people to communicate. He wants people to cooperate. He wants everyone to sit down and discuss their feelings.
The movie keeps treating this as a joke.
Then the movie keeps proving him right.
Teamwork is the way to defeat the big bad.
Even the action scenes are weirdly consistent about this. He-Man surprising fights more in the style of Wonder Woman than Conan the Barbarian, blocking attacks, and deflecting projectiles with his bracers. Half the time he doesn't even seem that interested in using the giant magic sword.
Which is especially funny because the movie itself makes a joke about the sword being a penis.
The film is basically screaming, "Look at this enormous symbol of traditional masculinity!"
And Adam's response is, "I'd actually prefer to resolve this conflict through active listening."
By the end the Sorceress practically states the thesis outright. The Power of Grayskull was traditionally used through force, but Adam has shown it can also be used through empathy.
Which is a surprisingly coherent be yourself message for a movie that contains both Ram Man and Skeletor.
The movie's version of becoming a man isn't learning to suppress the parts of yourself that seem weak. It's realizing those parts were strengths all along.
Also, that boy is kind of gay.
I don't mean that as evidence for the larger reading. I just think he is sus.
The movie opens with him bombing a Hinge date by explaining the entire lore to a woman who did not ask.
The movie establishes that Teela is Adam's best friend, and most important emotional relationship. At one point he tries to kiss her.
She immediately and a awkwardly friend-zones him.
Adam is disappointed for approximately six seconds before the movie completely loses interest in the possibility of romance.
The whole interaction has the energy of somebody reaching a checkpoint in a video game and remembering he's contractually obligated to do the heterosexuality before the next cutscene can trigger.
We attempted heterosexuality.
Excellent. Now back to Skeletor rhapsodizing about Adam's juicy thighs.
Which brings me to my final point.
The reason this reading works isn't because the movie is camp. Plenty of campy movies aren't queer coming-of-age stories.
It works because Adam's entire arc is about feeling disconnected from the life he's supposed to want, being pressured to become someone else, and eventually discovering that the qualities he was taught to suppress are actually the things that make him heroic.
Also Skeletor really wants to fuck Adam.
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