“So many stories have a queer subtext, are inspired by queerness, or are about the struggles of queerness, but they make it comfortable by having it be about straight characters,” 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Molly Ostertag tells me at Thought Bubble Comic Festival sat alongside partner 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:ND Stevenson.
Between them, the duo are responsible for graphic novels like Nimona, The Witch Boy, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Girl From The Sea, and Lumberjanes, while their television work includes 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:She-Ra and The Princesses of Power to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Owl House. Queer media has cemented them ea🧜ch as beloved figures in the world of comics and animation, carrying forward torches of diversity that they hope to use in lighting the brightest path poss🎀ible.
A core part of progressing queer repr🐬esentation is unlearning the habits we developed as children, engineered to put us in simple boxes with clean labels. It’s to interrogate andဣ admire in equal measure, knowing that it is still okay to welcome media that once wronged us, and embrace problematic visions of the queer community that not only reflect reality, but endeavour to better it. When I put the future of queer representation to Ostertag and Stevenson, their view is one of loud determination.
“You can’t just put queer characters in straight stories, but at the same time, I really 🔥would like to see those same epic romances and epic adventures because those themes absolutely will work in those movies with queer characters,” Stevenson says, referencing the likes of Titanic and Sweeney Todd as movies drenched in queer subtext, that come from a place of societal ostracisation and struggle that so many LGBTQ+ people experience. “Queer stories also resonate with straight audiences. Like with Nimona, I’ve seen people who don’t relate to being a teenage girl who are like, ‘I feel like that’s me, I’m always having to perform as someone’. With my Dad, I was trying to explain the queerness aspect of the movie to him and the movie really helped us have that conversation. But at a certain point he was like, ‘So queer means you don’t quite fit in the world, does that mean I’m queer?’ and like, yeah, a little bit!
"We’ve always been here, our stories have always been told, one way or another,” Ostertag says. “There never was a time when our stories were not being told, because queer people are the a🌄rtists, we are the culture makers"
“If that’s what helps you understand, a lot of people feel like they can’t. Even if it’s someone wh♊o says I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a strong man. Cis people have those struggles as well. Those stories are universal, and can be textually queer and still be universal.”
Ostertag adds, “It’s about recognising that these stories are already so compelling, already so entrenched and beloved, and how do we turn up the dial and turn up the focus to show ourselves more in ways that can be universal but never alienating. But also, I’m okay👍 with making people uncomfortable because I want to see more butch lesbians, I want more fat characters, I want more visibly trans characters, I want more super femme gay men. Like, make other people uncomfortable, but we’re just like hanging out and existing.”
Many of us are afraid of flawed queer representation, depicting the messy reality of living as a queer person figuring out your identity and finding a place in the world to belong. It’s never simple, light, or without adversity. So who are we to deny these interpretations, or to try and pretty ourselves up so cisgender heteronormative groups are more willing to accept us? Ostertag believes that, “the key to stories is showing the hearts of characters and placing the viewer inside their lives”, because regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or anything else, human struggles are a universal constant we shoul🎀d all relate to.
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Ostertag’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Darkest Night, originally released on Substack in the form of regular updates, will be published in physical form by Scholastic in 2024. The story explores mature and queer themes with an unflinching eye, and while far from explicit, compared to Ostertag’s other work it’s a different beast. Now known as The Deep Dark, it will be fascinಌating to see how an infinite scroll webcomic takes on physical form.
“It was a laborious, really annoying process turning this infinite scroll into a graphic novel, but I’m actually really stoked on how it works,” Ostertag explains. Coming in at 480 pages, The Deep Dark is a long story, but one with characters and arcs that feel suited to digesting over multiple sittings. Changes to dialogue🔯, storylines, and themes are also made possible with the coming publication, allowing further curation that a regularly updated webcomic can’t always facilitate. Protagonist Mags is a butch lesbian, joined by childhood friend and trans woman Nessa, as they reunite to piece together an ancient family mystery. It’s the sort of queer stories both creators want to see more of, even if it means lighting the spark themselves.
“I definitely started making it from a place of frustration,” Ostertag admits. “About getting tired with what I was doing and wanting to do something else. I’ve drawn so many graphic novels and things for a bo𓆉ok format, and also things that were made for middle grade or YA, and I’d just gotten off writing for The Owl House, which you have to write in a very specific way for animation. I wanted to let loose, to make something a little bit darker an๊d weirder and where I wasn’t holding myself back from the contents.”
As for Stevenson, aside from the huge success of Nimona on Netflix and the busy schedule promoting it, he has been toiling away on a new project soon to break cover. I knew it was queer and involved pirates or something judging by , but ended up letting them explain the rest since th💮ey’re close to turning t𒀰his project in for the first time.
“It’s a two-book series, and actually a🎀 very old story for me,” Stevenson says. “When I was a kid I started writing this novel, I was probably 12 at the time when I first had the idea, then I read Christopher Paolini’s Eragon. He was a homeschooler who published a book, and I was homeschooled, so I was like ‘I can do this! I can do it better!’ so I set the goal for myself that I was going to finish it by the time I was 15. I did, and it was a 600 page monster.”
We talk about the nostalgia of returning to childhood stories but also not wanting to unearth a previous passion that might not have the life left in it you’d hoped. For Stevenson, that was a slew of pirate characters w൲ho have gradually been coming to life online in picture form, but now we have a rough idea of exactly what narrative they will come to be a part of.
“I left for school, and it end﷽ed up being this .zip file on my computer for the longest time, and I was afraid to read it because I loved it so much,” Stevenson recalls. “But She-Ra had ended right before lockdown. So not only was I stuck at home all the time, the most intensive job I’d ever had just ended, and 💎I literally had nothing to do for the first time in my life.”
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:She-Ra and the Princesses of Power’s final season on Netflix coinciding with covid meant there wa🅠s no “closing ritual” for a project that Stevenson spent years of his life on as showrunner. Aside from sneaking over a few crew members to share drinks and watch the finale, they found themselves with a void that suddenly proved hard to fill.
Stevenson continues: “So I finally opened that .zip file a𝄹nd I didn’t hate it. I just started going back into it and trying to find those characters again, and my agent found out since they found out about everything. I’ll be turning those 600 pages into two books. They’ll be illustrated, and it’s been something I’ve been working on that’s become a big passion project. I haven’t talked about it much because it feels like I’m not quite ready to share it yet. I still need to figure out exactly what it is, but it’s there now, and I’m finally about to do it. It’s just 20 years of my life, 🍌so no big deal!”
Stevenson and Ostertag are known for sharing vulnerable parts of who they are through their published graphic novels and similar work, but even this feels quite alien. “I just have to try everythin♉g,” Stevenson admits. “It♏’s become this conversation over time with me and my younger self because it’s such a complicated book and I’m like, ‘You little b***h! Why didn’t you write an outline? Where are you going with this? What does it mean?’”
Touching on their upcoming projects brings us back to the topic of past, p𒀰resent, and future queer rep♋resentation across all media, and where we expect and hope for stories like this to go in the years to come. It’s a tough question with no straight (sorry) answer, but often there is so much to learn simply by looking back at characters and stories who, in some way, have always been queer.
“We’ve always been here, our stories have always been told, one way or another,” Ostertag says. “There was never a ওtime when our stories were not being told, because queer people are the artists, we are the culture makers. We are the ones making the culture and setting the tone and challenging society and the work that we make is the work that sticks around. To realise that, when you look at the history of art, it is also the history of queerness, which has been making me really emotional because we’re living through our own weird time and seeing a lot of transphobia and homophobia in th♛e States, but also this little golden age of queer representation on TV, and we’re seeing the reaction to that as well.”
“People are afraid right now,” Stevenson says. “We’ve ended up in a place right now where people feel like they have no control, and partly a way of dealing with that is going ‘these are the bad guys and these are the good guys’ but as anyone who is queer or has queer friends will tell you, there isn’t a world where everyone is making the right decisions all the tꦅime."
Ostertag touches on characters like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson or Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings and how, intentional or not, t👍here is a queer subtext to be seen in so many works across history that have always represented our thirst for diversity and desire to be seen for who we are. Greater representation in the mainstream shouldn’t take what this means away, because LGBTQ+ people have existed for all of recorded history.
“To look back and see when there were actual laws penalising these things, and seeing how people continue to live and thrive and realising that we’ve always been here. It’s persona🐻lly giving me a lot, and then there’s this inspiration that I’m trying to channel into a book that’s like, that conversation between the past and the present.”
Queer people also love, and often have an obligation, to rebel, even if that comes merely from reframing stories we grew up with to serve queer themes and characters. It’s a hobby o☂f Stevenson and Ostertag that has extended to taking trips around the w🥃orld to visit historic museums or gushing about cheesy action movies together at home. It ties into how queer representation was frequently something we had to glean through subtext, ignoring harsh stereotypes and discrimination to find even a morsel of self in the media we consume.
“It’s fun to see someone like Herman Melville, who wa൩s very queer, and wrote tragic and very horny letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Ostertag points out. “Or Moby-Dick, which has also held up as this masculine white man novel and just be like, ‘No, he’s one of ours, we’re taking him. We’re taking this. We’re taking that. It’s not yours anymore’. There’s a power also in not setting myself up in opposition to these power structures, but more like, 🐎‘I'm going to take all of your best guys’.”
There’s also a refusal to recognise inherent queerness in particular 🅷characters and stories, afraid to appear vulnerable or weak by daring to desire affection or show a part of yourself that risks straying too far from societal heteronormativity. It’s about losing control of what we’ve conditioned love, relationships, and closeness to be. Queerness has, for centuries, b🐲een trying to uproot this status quo.
“You have to start realising that these stories are queer, were always queer, were made by queer people,” Stevenson notes. “I think it’s coming from a similar way of looking for intimacy, but there’s always this plausible deniability of these big emotions and that you’d have to look in the f𓂃ace of that being a gay story. But people are just not ready for that, in their own lives.”
Ostertag chimes in by adding that, “it’s fundamentally radical to look back at that stuff, those things that are seen as the pillars of white supremacy or🌃 the patriarchy and to knock the pillars out and be like, ‘No, you don’t get to have that. Anything that is good is also queer, actually’.”
Stev♔enson quickly circles back to The Lord of the Rings, and how it goes against masculine perceptionꦑs of emotional and physical loss that men are rarely willing to express, but through the context of queerness, it can be made so much more powerful. “It’s so inspired by the trauma of war, of being a soldier and watching the people you love the most die around you. There’s an incredible heart of love and grief and loss and, especially for a lot of men, that’s the biggest love you can feel, this brothers in arms thing. And so the second you’re like, ‘yeah but you know there we gay soldiers too?’ because that feeling, this intimacy, dying is the only way you can imagine getting it.
“It’s not gay if I cradle him while he’s dying. Those emotions a🦄re not at odds with each other, those emotions are not even entirely separate things. Yes, there should be more intimacy between straight men as well, and you shouldn’t have to die to get it. But that’s not what we have, that’s not the world we live in. I think there’s a huge flinching away from the idea that queerness could even exist in those stories.”
We can’t move queer representation forward without making mistakes or looking back on the past, but sometimes we’re too afraid as a collective to take this step, or depend on stories to be told by corporations who exist in perpetual fear of being cancelled or never toeing the line enough. It’s a conversation we need to have with both ourselves and the wider world, and i🦋s one of the closing testaments of my time with the two creators.
“We’re living in such an abundant time for queer media, but people are still, especially in the bigger stuff made by major companies, are afraid of getting it wrong,” Ostertag says. “Afraid of a reaction or being problematic. We’re all afraid, but that’s why I love both the Guy Ritchie [Sherlock Holmes] films, because this is a toxic relationship, and they may be in love, but they are both really bad people, and they’re not good for each other. There is something about this that is so exciting to me because they are bad in specifically queer ways. If it was textual, at the time, it would have to be a lot softer and sweeter and there is a part of my soul which really responds to reading those much more complex, tragic, toxic stories that people are really scared to tell right now. I’m scared to tell them, and I’m trying to unlearn t🌄hat fear.”
Audiences can hesitate to engage with textually queer stories leaning into imperfect rep too, either due to dismissing such stories as problematic or 🎐unwilling to engage with toxic queer characters in media where some audiences expect us to be painted as immaculate, to avoid offense or confusion, or else be labelled as negative representation more damaging than helpful.
“People are afraid right now,” Stevenson says. “We’ve ended up in a place right now where pe𝕴ople feel like they have no control, and partly a way of dealing with that is going ‘these are the bad guys and these are the good 🔥guys’ but as anyone who is queer or has queer friends will tell you, there isn’t a world where everyone is making the right decisions all the time. Like I know very few soft queers, and the conversations we have with each other aren’t ones that couldn’t be put into the shows that we make, because we’re weird as f**k! We can’t be soft.”
While the future of queer representation 🅘and the rights we keep fighting for remain unclear, it seems Stevenson and Ostertag are ultimately hopeful about what’s to come, and many new creators growing up in a fraught but inspirational landscape for storytelling. “I want more poly stories, platonic love, hook-up love, and the kind of experiences we all share, but are kind of afraid to show to straight, cis people. I want that so badly, and I’m trying in my own way to do it but it’s very scary, but when something is scary you have to go down that road,” Ostertag tells me.
Stevenson is equally passionate when it comes to approaching stories we consume and tell from a place of unlearning, something queer people are forced to do each and every day. “In the history of s꧅torytelling, even having our whole life and our whole friend group and most of the people we interact with on a daily basis being queer and trans, we all still grew up with those same stories and we have to figure out how to unlearn certain things too. We have to try and broaden our imaginations to what’s possible because I think we are constrained by that as well.
“We talk about this all the time because we’re also trying to push ourselves, to push each other๊ to go farther and figure out what’s possible and what we can do. But we’re not going to be the people who have the final word, that’s the people who take it and run as far as we can pass it.”
Whether you’re broadening your horizons by imagining a character with a different gender to feel more seen for who you are, or interrogating the inner cop or executive policing stories in your 🍰mind, queer representation is all about questioning ingrained tr🔥opes and practices while opening the community up to voices from every walk of life imaginable.
