If you want to see more exciting & interesting queer art you're going to have to support independent queer creators and look at the stuff they make.
Y'know how The Owl House is such a great show, but they put one trans character and one lesbian romance in there and the Mouse was like "nah" and tried to hamstring the entire thing?
Imagine, if you will, a world where the Mouse just isn't involved at all
That world exists already in a thousand thousand beautiful variations. You only haven't heard of it because none of us have the budget for marketing.
I had a conversation with an anarcho-sybdicalist friend about whether The Owl House was moral because of the way it was produced and who is profiting from it. And it hit me as we talked that, for me at the time, the medium of animation was a large portion of the enjoyment of TOH. And that got me thinking about how difficult it is for indie queer creators to gain any foothold. Because, I can write a queer and trans novel, but it's not going to reach the same audience as TOH, not just because of marketing, but because I cannot leverage entire animation studios to put my story in a medium people want to engage with.
This isn't a "touch grass" message about how people should stop watching kids' cartoons to get queer stories, but it is sad to realize I had so easily fallen into the trap of thinking an animated queer story was inherently more entertaining than a novel or comic or any other more democratized medium.
Animation can be democratized, but it's got the same problem as AAA video games. Both games and animations studios leverage their power and resources to make "the best of the best". Artistically, it sets the bar of quality to a degree that no indie animation group could ever compete with - in terms of length, finished art, voice acting, sound design, etc. We have no problem watching poorly filmed tiktok videos done on cellphones, but almost no one consumes animatics: an early cut of a storyboarded animation with sound, usually in black and white, with no animation break downs. Animatics are like single pictures with dialogue over them, and the pictures don't move that much.
People also don't watch black and white animation, which is much easier to make. Or boiled line/sketchy animation.
Everyone could be watching amazing queer animated stories if you all got into art where the hand of the artist is visible. Commercial entertainment works hard to erase the thousands of hands that go into it, and the expectation in animation is that the artist isn't present at all. Democratized art means accepting and expecting the artist to be present in the roughness of the presentation, including their skill weaknesses. If you can accept awkward, unedited grammar in indie writing (I've read some fanfiction, you all put up with a lot), and terrible lighting/sound in a tiktok video, then ask yourself why you don't accept raw animation or video games. You're missing out.