it took 18 characters and 100 arrows to kill luca blight

It took 18 characters and 100 arrows to kill luca blight series#

Having found kinship in Alberto, another fish-person who lives out of the water, Luca develops a love of life on land: a passion for being out, rather than living his life hidden away.

His panic then turns into denial, but with the support of another member of his community, he’s able to come to accept both parts of himself as part of his complete identity. It’s a compelling image of a boy seeing himself for who he truly is for the first time. Luca panics about his emergence, and is terrified of the physical changes he goes through outside of the water. At that point, Luca moves into documenting his struggles to come to terms with his identity, finding a community, and feeling betrayed or abandoned by his family. Luca has a vision of trying to leave the ocean, an image which comes back time and again as a metaphor for embracing both sides of his identity, but he’s held back by an unseen force, as if he cannot bring himself to leave the stifling safety of the water.Īs Luca is finally “coming out” of the water for the first time, he immediately assumes human form. From the beginning, Luca’s family warns him against approaching humans, telling him that people will see his differences, and won’t accept him for who he really is. Ostensibly about a society of fish-people (known throughout as “sea monsters”) who live under the sea, concealed from humanity, Luca wastes little time in hitting beats that will be sadly familiar to so many people who have lived in the closet and/or had to come to terms with their own identities. It’s particularly important that these notes include several darker and oft-ignored aspects of the queer experience in today’s world, and denying that this reading has any validity risks doing serious harm to the queer community who already live these darker experiences. While Casarosa believes his story can’t be a queer romance because no characters become romantically involved, the story hits too many significant and familiar common aspects of the LGBTQ+ experience for it to be ignored as a queer narrative. In response to viewers who reacted to trailers by hoping the film might be a childhood gay romance, Luca director Enrico Casarosa rapidly shut the notion down, saying “I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things.”Īfter the movie’s release, it became clear what a reductive stance this was. But with Luca, the attempt to shut down audiences’ imaginations went a step too far. Disney’s tendency to tease its audiences with queer bait, only to yank those readings away (or have them be blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments between background characters) is well-documented. The squashing of a clear queer read was even more blatant with Pixar’s 2021 animated film Luca. While it’s important for media to depict non-toxic male friendships, his response disheartened many fans who had enjoyed their speculation on the topic, and their ability to relate to the characters in their own preferred way.

It took 18 characters and 100 arrows to kill luca blight series#

While the series said nothing definitive on the matter, Mackie quickly tried to squash the idea, bemoaning that two men cannot just be friends these days without being perceived as queer. Many fans read the close physical and emotional bond that Sam and Bucky develop throughout the show as a possible romantic stirring.

This came up recently with Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. For some reason, those creators never seem to consider the inherent value these reads provide to the community - even though they’re drawing on tropes derived from that community’s personal experiences. Often, that backlash is coming from the writers, directors, and actors behind a given piece, who seem eager to stomp out any potential perception of their work as a queer narrative. Even in 2021, in spite of a growing acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community and a steady increase in queer representation across certain sections of media, queer reads of characters and narratives are still receiving backlash. The internet age may have made queer reads of canonically non-queer media more widespread, but they’re nothing new - and neither is the reactionary resistance against them.