I’m so fucking sick of y’all
Been seeing this get passed around, apparently from tiktok(?):
Nah. Fuck you extremely much.
Listen, I’m glad that Luca is a good movie and that it has so much subtext that speaks to queer people. But that’s all it is. Subtext. It is not text, and not representation.
Meanwhile, CMBYN was directed by an openly gay Italian man. It is the story of two queer Jewish men in Italy (who actually ARE queer characters, not just subtextually interpreted as such) and was based on a book by a queer Jewish Italian man who drew heavily on his own life experiences of growing up queer and Jewish in Italy.
Meanwhile Luca is by a megacorporation and about a pair of sea monster boys who have never and will never exist, because sea monsters do not exist.
Who knows, maybe one of the writers intended Luca to be metaphorical for queerness and just had to hyper-sanitize it to make it a Disney-Pixar film. Maybe some of the people who worked on the film are queer. And no, we aren’t entitled to know creators’ personal lives in order to decide whether or not they’re allowed to write queer stories or not.
Luca, while being an excellent film, was so far as we know not intended to be a queer story. It was intended to be a fairly standard coming-of-age story, aka Disney & Pixar’s bread and butter. Meanwhile, CMBYN is a textually queer story about two queer characters falling in love, was directed by an openly queer man, and is based on the book and life experiences of another openly queer man.
But nah, because y’all have decided that CMBYN has a ‘problematic’ age gap (aka a completely legal pair of adults in Italy, the culture in which it takes place, having a relationship that is fully embedded in that culture) y’all have decided that you’d rather deepthroat megacorp boot rather than support ACTUAL FUCKING QUEER REPRESENTATION.
If you’d rather have sanitized subtext where you can freely impose your own sanitized, feel-good interpretations of queerness onto the text without having to wrestle with the intrinsic messiness of an actual on-screen relationship, fine. But don’t shit on the actual queer art by actual queer people that’s out there just because the mess threatens your poor little mass-consumption-generated sensibilities.
You want queer rep in your media? Try actually appreciating it and boosting it instead of shitting on it in favour of yet more family-friendly oscar-baiting Mouse content.