When I was very very young I was into The Smurfs (who knows why) and Woody Woodpecker (I liked the theme song). Interestingly, I dressed up as a Smurf for Halloween when I was about five. And even more interestingly, I wasn't Smurfette--I thought she was annoying--and I didn't even choose a particular Smurf to be. Just some random Smurf. I was very excited about it.
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| Me with my little sister, who's dressed as a witch. |
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| She's the yellow one who's smaller than the others. Hmmm. |
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| And I wanted to be an Ewok princess but let's not talk about that. |
I loved She-Ra, Princess of Power. She-Ra was a blonde white girl. I loved Jem and the Holograms. Jem (well, Jerrica, when she wasn't being Jem) was a blonde white girl. I loved Inspector Gadget and I wanted to be Penny. Guess what?
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| Blonde white girl. |
Good thing I had a ton of characters to choose from, huh? Blonde white girls are everywhere, and though there were some exceptions to my interests and they diversified a TON when I got older, when I was a young child I mostly identified with characters who looked like me.
If you scroll up and look at that Rainbow Brite cast shot, you might see that if you're a brown girl, none of the color kids look like you except Indigo (and she probably doesn't look like you unless you're a very specific type of brown girl). Well, it turns out that's ridiculously common. What's up, She-Ra?
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| White girrrrrrrrls. |
And hang on, what's up, Jem and the Holograms?
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| Oh wait, looks like they did better. Why? |
There was still a tendency to tokenize the non-white characters in the 1980s shows, but it sure was nice that Jem had an Asian girl (Aja), a black girl (Shana), and a Hispanic girl (Raya), though it kinda makes you raise your eyebrows when you realize that Jerrica (white girrrrrl) is the lead singer and the leader of the band AND her family literally took the black and Asian band members in as foster children. But to be honest, for some kids, just seeing someone like you on TV in a fairly regular, central role is nice, though I'm sure it was probably disappointing that they were almost never the "leaders" or "primary/central" characters.
Some shows did a good job getting more representation in for stuff like chronic illness and disability, but they were usually featured as a Very Special Episode and seemed more like a chance for the protagonist(s) to show they care and spread "different is okay!" messages. And you can pretty much forget anything that depicted relationships that weren't hetero. Relationships between girl or boy characters were strictly friendships even on up into shows aimed at teens, but even tiny child characters could be presented as having a crush on cross-sex partners.
Now let's skip to today. There's a ton more diversity on television now, but what's come along with it is massive accusations of "pandering" and "PC police." People sometimes get upset about this--that if there is enough diversity on television that we're starting to notice how not-white or not-straight or even not-cis the landscape is looking, then it must be because the liberal agenda is corrupting the mainstream and trying to push an unrealistic "diverse" population that doesn't truly reflect our world. A while back I was in one of those fun Facebook arguments where someone was arguing a point like this, and that person said in REAL life our groups of friends do not tend to have mixtures of races and non-cis genders and non-straight orientations and various disabilities, and that if we present them as such, it comes off like a "college recruitment poster with forced diversity." Uh, well, no.
I'm gonna depart from cartoons for a second (forgive me!) because I don't have anything else to make this example, but let me tell you about a show called Huge. It only ran for one season and that's a shame, because the representation on it was great, and what's more is that it generally was not tokenized. The most obvious thing is that nearly all the featured characters were fat (because it took place at a weight loss camp, but that aspect was rarely focused upon), and that finally gave fat characters a chance to be something other than the fat one. My goodness! They got to have personalities! And not just limited to being the funny one!
They all had different relationships with their bodies and comfort levels with being fat (Will was there against her will and referred to the attitude there as body fascism, while quite a few of the others wanted to lose weight), but they also had a ton of other things going on. The casting choices were really interesting and the writing was amazing. Without going into too much detail (because, you know, I wanna talk about cartoons), they didn't fall into casting the black girl as the loud sassy friend; she was actually kind of a bookworm and the biggest nerd at the camp (all the way into LARPing), and there was a Jewish character who didn't define himself as "the Jewish one." Most interesting, I think, is Alistair.
Now, he used male pronouns on the show and I don't know if he was supposed to be canonically transgender, but he definitely said some things that suggested he thought of himself as having an inner self that was female, and what's amazing is that this was not his entire character arc. Something unrelated was introduced about him first, so the audience got to know him and got to understand him as a person, before the gender hints were introduced and enriched the character more instead of singularly defining him. They don't even come out and say Alistair is trans or not; it's okay that they weren't explicit, because honestly he may not have even known. Usually with trans characters, if they're not pitched as a joke, they're very clear about their identity and there's no room for a questioning, unsure young person who's possibly closeted or confused. It's also clear he's attracted to men, but it's not explained whether he is attracted to men as a gay man or as a straight woman (or something else if he likes more than one gender or isn't strictly a man or a woman himself).
Which brings me back to cartoons. (Whew.) Can we talk about Adventure Time? Oh I think you know where I'm going with this.
There's also been a lot of noise about how two of the characters on Adventure Time are gay. I don't know if "gay" is the right word (because who knows, they could be bi or pan, or might not have considered their relationship romantic, etc.), but it's pretty clear that two female-identified characters had an intimate relationship of some sort before the events of the show. Does it really matter that one is a demon/vampire and the other is a princess made out of bubblegum?
The subtext is pretty obvious with them, especially if you listen to Marceline sing about PB. But since they don't explicitly say anything about them "being gay" or show them kissing or anything, this can still be shown in places that don't allow non-straight relationships to be presented to children. But they can still admit that Princess Bubblegum has one of Marceline's tee shirts. That she wears to bed. And sniffs sometimes. And keeps in her closet with a photo of the two of them.
But here's the thing: Adventure Time has tons of complicated relationships. Most of them aren't romantic. This is just another one, presented as a normal part of these ladies' past that they're struggling with, and they all have multiple issues like this. Finn has to get over liking someone older and uninterested in him, and finds someone his own age but is still incompatible in some ways. Marceline has a weird relationship with someone who took care of her as a child and is now a huge jerk that she feels like she owes something to. And Jake the dog, with his relationship with a rainicorn (half rainbow, half unicorn), seems to have the most well-adjusted romance on the show, even if it's visually kind of disturbing.
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| Lady Rainicorn is pregnant here. Jake's the dad. Google their puppies. They're pretty weird looking. |
Now let me touch on The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. The most striking thing about this pair of shows is that there is not a single white person in the cast. NONE. And despite being made for American audiences BY American creators and run on an American network, it didn't have to be whitewashed to succeed. I'm sure some people interpret some of the characters as white because they're used to it, but they're all clearly alternate-universe versions of East Asian and Inuit folks. There are no people with light-colored hair unless they're elderly (unless you count Yue, but her hair was turned white for a very specific reason). And though most of them have light eyes, it seems to be an artifact of their living in an alternate universe where people control elements, so people from the Water Tribe have blue eyes, people from the Earth Kingdom have green eyes, Fire Nation has gold/amber or red-brown eyes, etc. (I don't think it's a rule, but it's common.)
Many of the most powerful characters are women/girls, especially when we get to the second series--Legend of Korra, where the central character is a teenage girl who is dark-skinned and not incredibly traditionally feminine (especially since she's shown to be muscular, the way a fighter generally would be).
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| Lin and Suyin Beifong, awesome badass silver-haired sisters with a troubled history! |
Some people freaked out about how a "kids' show" is "pushing the queer agenda," but nobody thought it was inappropriate on the previous series when preteens expressed their love for each other; that was a heterosexual relationship, so it was sweet and relatively innocent and totally appropriate for children's television. They're used to seeing that boys and girls get together, so it makes sense that they get to kiss while they're busy saving the world. For some reason even very slight hints of romance between same-sex characters imply GAY SEX while an actual kiss between cross-sex characters is not implying any sex at all, except in the way that all simplistic heterosexual relationships in this context imply that innocent birds and bees "happen" offstage and that's all fine and good to make reference to.
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| Aang and Katara got to kiss. Asami and Korra just got to hold hands. |
And then we come to the latest addition in my already overflowing cornucopia of cartoon faves, a lovely thing that is taking the world by storm these days: Steven Universe.
First, I've written a lot here about positive messages for girls and women, but let me talk about the Steven character here. He's a little boy whose mother ceased to exist when he was born (long story, and I'm not gonna tell it), and his mother's friends from space look after him. So he has three mother figures. But this is a fantasy/SF show so of course he's also helping save the world, and he happens to have access to some of the powers and tools his mother had. Basically, Steven is the only male fighter in this group, but everything from the style to the function of his role in the group is traditionally feminine. All his tools are pink and/or related to flower imagery, and they are mostly protective; he has shields and healing abilities and bubbles to stop others from getting hurt.
And meanwhile the feminine-coded characters all have offensive weapons--Amethyst has a whip, Pearl has a spear, Garnet has gauntlets that let her punch the hell out of things. Interesting that they're presenting this sort of thing with a boy as the hero but presenting a surprisingly gentle way of fighting that is all based on the same love and protectiveness his mother had, and interesting that the show's narrative and characters never suggest this is surprising or unusual for a boy. (He also does traditionally boyish things too, like collecting action figures and craving "adventure," without any apparent dissonance.) So that's a nice little dose of a less traditional masculinity for little boys who watch--especially if others were to follow the example of not telling similar little boys in their real lives that their interests or inclinations are "for girls."
Now I'll get to the alien characters in a minute, but in this show there are a ton of human characters who are from various cultures and are different races, and just like with some of the other cartoons I mentioned, their variety and diversity is actually incorporated into who they are without being the focal point of their characters.
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| The cool kids from Beach City |
Of the three characters who look after Steven, two of them look like they are coded as women of color. And all of them are voiced by women of color. On top of that, they present with a variety of body types (which is especially interesting because their race can shapeshift, so you know they are more or less choosing to look the way they do). And even though their bodies have a lot of feminine signifiers, they pretty much never present as sexualized even when they stand or pose in a way that's traditionally "girl being attractive," which I find really, really interesting. (Probably has something to do with the smart choices made by the female creator of the show.)
So here you have a skinny, not-at-all curvy body type; a short, chubby body type; and a very tall sort of small-waist-giant-hips body type (or, er, whatever that is). None of them actually appear to have breasts, which is appropriate since their species isn't mammalian, and even though they're all quite different, they still seem feminine in their own ways. (Doesn't stop fan artists from drawing them with more traditional and sexualized bodies, of course, but what can you do?) The character design shows so many different ways to be a lady, all equally valid. It's a far cry from so many other animation projects that stick boobs and long eyelashes on female non-human characters (even animals!) to distinguish them from male characters (while male characters don't need any signifiers to be assumed male).
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| And she'll just do this instead of telling you she hates your music. |
It's pretty great that the group's fearless leader doesn't have to be a loud or "sassy" stereotype to still be read primarily as a black woman on the show, but they don't feature black characters by entirely subverting the tropes either; you see both common and uncommon depictions of characters of color. And they also manage to make them really complex and multi-layered; I mean, most of the time my fave Garnet there is extremely stoic, but there are moments of real intimacy and emotion even with her, though when she actually puts on an expression other than cool cucumber even her companions don't know how to react. (There's even a very complicated scene where Steven's guardians admit to themselves that they don't really know what to do when it comes to raising him.) It's really nice to see people--even cartoon aliens based on rocks--behaving more like real people than most characters do, showing off different ways to have family relationships and handle the difficulties that arise.
And speaking of relationships . . . yes, this one also has some pretty incredible same-gender relationships too, if you allow that the Gem characters are all the same gender (and look feminine to viewers). One of Steven's guardians had what appears to be a very strong attraction to and devotion to Steven's mother before she disappeared (though it's unclear if it was reciprocated), and in one powerful episode at the end of the first season, two characters were depicted searching desperately for each other and kissing joyfully when they were reunited, leading to other awesomeness.
What's really notable about all these more recent cartoons that I adore so much is that they aren't about representation. It's casual and just part of the world--like it should be part of ours, and actually is if you know where to look. People who aren't white blonde girls can find themselves on TV, and families that aren't nuclear can find examples of their members thriving, and people who don't have traditional heteronormative relationships can see that sometimes that happens in the world--and hopefully it isn't as much of a fantasy as, say, sentient space rocks and waterbending powers and dogs that can shapeshift. They can see themselves, and everyone who watches can learn that people they're not familiar with don't have to be marginalized, othered, or treated like perverts.
And even though we aren't saving the day on a global scale like our cartoon heroes, we could be saving lives and building confidence with these inclusive messages. I certainly want the cartoon world to reflect leaders who aren't white blonde girls, women who don't have to be passive or sexualized to be considered women, and groups of friends who don't all look the same and sometimes have same-sex relationships or non-binary genders.
But it has to be done from the ground up--it can't be tacked on with "hey, we added a new token character!" or it will feel inorganic. Authenticity is key when providing representation of diverse populations in media, and it must be built into the foundations of the work. It should not be an afterthought or a deliberate attempt to mollify progressive audiences that the creator thinks are bullying them into doing it. It should be presented inclusively because that's how the world actually is. Regarding the straight white cisgender non-disabled male character as the default unless there's a plot-relevant reason to change them to something else is the root of this problem, despite what Nickelodeon writer Matthew Klickstein will tell you. The cartoons I profiled here are doing it right, and if more creators do it right in the future, we'll hear less of the "IT'S ABOUT TIME!" commentary from the marginalized folks who are just so relieved to see themselves reflected, and we'll also hear less "YOU'RE DOING THAT BECAUSE DIVERSITY'S HOT NOW!" from the critics.
It should have been "hot"--and natural--all along. I'm looking forward to when the people who still uphold the status quo will be routinely forced to question their sexist, racist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic ideas in groups where they are outnumbered by people who support realistic diversity, but we're not there yet. I'm glad, though, that the dialogue has been opened enough that such people are condescendingly calling it an agenda. That means they've realized there's something being said, and that like it or not, they're going to have to listen.
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