next to the many silly things about that post, um. i might get pushback for saying this, but i don't really think craig of the creek or the owl house are automatically queerer for saying the literal word girlfriend / wife / etc.
like... this is hard to describe, because it brushes with queerness as opposed to just the lgbt+ acronym, and queerness itself is tricky to define. but steven universe is deeply queer, labels aside.
its certainly good to have more shows with representation, but i don't think any of them really nails the 'queer sensibilities' of SU. everything from how it deals with gender, how the characters themselves relate to the hierarchies and strict social roles of homeworld, and its storylines and the very open secret of the metaphors of things like steven being misgendered and being feminine and the gems not quite understanding human society, even if not strictly 'literal'... there's just a deep well of underlying queerness about steven universe thats extremely hard to replicate, i think.
Very Big Agree. (And disclaimer: I also don’t think those other shows are bad at all or that they Do Queerness Wrong whatsoever--they’re doing great too.) There’s something to be said for absolute confirmation using language, but it’s really gatekeepey to say that’s the only way something queer is confirmed queer. ESPECIALLY for something like Steven Universe in which a) the relevant characters generally don’t call themselves “girls” or “women” in OTHER contexts either (though they don’t object to others labeling them), so use of feminine-term-based relationship language is weird to expect of them; and b) the fundamental, quintessential queerness that the show grew up in is something far more relatable to many of us who also didn’t have language for ourselves but were able to see “us” in this.
Rebecca’s talked about what a journey they’ve been on, and how others were able to use this show to have wonderful conversations with their loved ones even though REBECCA hadn’t been able to get there. She went through denial and grief and a whole heaping helping of impostor syndrome, thinking she wasn’t queer enough because how could you even want to be called bisexual if you were with a man and everyone thought you were a woman, thinking she was bad deep down because the messages she related to and the relationships that resonated with her were branded dirty, inappropriate, or just “not for you” in a way that felt shameful. Out of that came Steven Universe, a show where nobody had to specifically name it to see it, feel it, and recognize it.
These alien Gem characters ALL had the experience of being gendered “woman” and not relating to it but not disliking it enough to specifically say “don’t call me that,” and they were outside human concepts of gender in a way that made space for similar human viewers to say “that’s me.” It’s okay that sometimes the aliens called “she,” the trans allegories that paralleled Steven’s journey, and the same-sex relationships we saw onscreen did not map letter for letter onto real life, because all of us knew what it was inherently, easily, joyfully. It’s so strange that anyone looks at this show and creates a whole new gauntlet for it to run based on a very specific type of “confirmation” and develops asinine rules about what a show should have to do to qualify as legitimately queer. Nobody’s asking for THEIR permission, and nobody agreed that THEIR rules are the recognized measure of queer representation. Not a damn thing was subtle about the multiple queer relationships in the show--and the haters were so fixated on how it Didn’t Call Them Girlfriends that they utterly missed the fact that straight couples were also not described by that language.
This show was SO MUCH. It’s baffling--and laughable--that anyone would create an absurd test structured for This Show to “fail.”