Loki and Queerness in Marvel

by Sam H.

Photo: Disney

There’s an ongoing joke among movie fans that there have been countless “Disney’s first gay character,” which include the unnamed gay character Joe Russo played in Avengers: Endgame. Not only does this joke speak to Disney failing miserably at providing meaningful queer representation, but it also indicates how desperate queer audiences are for representation, so much so that corporations believe that handing us scraps is the equivalent of a meal. 

I will admit that I’m guilty of buying into bare minimum queer representation, but so is the majority of online queer spaces. For example, I recently found out that Maeve and Aimee from Sex Education aren’t actually a sapphic couple as people on Twitter had somehow convinced me through their fancams. I recently had a similar realization with Loki and Mobius with the release of the new season of Loki. 

Look, I know I said that I’m not the biggest fan of Loki, so it was surprising that I gave the show a second chance. The main reason why I watched the first season in the first place was more out of obligation to keep up with the MCU, but for the second season, I only watched because I heard tons of people calling Loki and Mobius “queerbait” and pointing out the codependent nature of their relationship. However, three episodes into the new season, I noticed that it seems like, somehow, compared to the first season of Loki, the queer rep is abysmally lacking. 

Part of the reason could be that the first season of Loki was directed by Kate Herron, who identifies as queer and didn’t return for the second season. But even when she was at the helm, the only moment that canonized Loki’s bisexuality was a single line in which he said that he enjoyed the company of both princesses and princes. Lines like these is where the problem with a lot of mainstream queer representation lies: the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it phenomenon, coupled with the confirmed-in-external-interviews incidents. 

This has been a common debate for queer representation in media for a very long time and across many franchises, though they all noticeably, but unsurprisingly, seemed to be linked with Disney. In Star Wars, Lando’s pansexuality was only confirmed off screen and the scene of two women kissing at the end of Episode 9 was definitely a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Even in other Marvel media, America Chavez’s mention of her two moms and Valkyrie’s attraction to women were barely touched upon, merely throwaway lines that almost no one will remember once they leave the theater.

The one exception to this frustrating pattern is Phastos from Eternals. A central part of his identity is his queerness, mostly exemplified through his family life with his husband and his son. However, on the account of Eternals being a primarily ensemble movie, he isn’t the main focus and thus his storyline, in countries where LGBT censorship is extreme, was completely cut out. 

The argument for blink-and-you’ll-miss-it queer representation is that queerness shouldn’t be the central focus of queer characters because queerness is only one facet of identity. While this is true, queer representation should be spelled out on screen because queer representation has already been very discreet in the past and it’s time that queer representation is visible and essential to the story. Even if queerness is only one facet of a character’s identity, queerness is an inextricable part of the character that should be part of their development and story, embedded in ways that cannot be easily erased. 

The range and inconsistency of committing to queer representation within the MCU bring in the question of whether we can really trust corporations to provide us with the representation queer audiences so desperately crave, even if they have the biggest platform to have the most impact with authentic queer representation. But this also reveals the importance independent films have within the queer media ethnography as independent films have the most capability to provide that authentic representation, even if they aren’t as popular as MCU media. Ultimately, while there’s no one correct way for queer representation to exist, it’s important to consider the intention behind queer representation, especially when it comes to the fleeting moments that corporations claim we should be satisfied enough with.