Representation is a Minefield — The Queer Safety Aesthetic
By: Eleanor Amaranth Lockhart
Tags: Violence, Queer, LGBT, Representation, Animation

Representation is a Minefield — The Queer Safety Aesthetic

Being queer is scary, and 2020 is a particularly scary time to be queer. When I was still deeply in the closet in 2005, a friend and I went to see “the new Wachowski film,” by which we meant the Lilly and Lana Wachowski-produced, James McTeague directed Alan Moore adaptation V for Vendetta, and the film crystallized many of the fears I had around queerness from the hostility of my rural Wisconsin high school teachers, the attitudes of my peers, and above all the comments of recently re-elected President George W. Bush about “family values.”

© Warner Brothers 2005

The film opens with a blistering rant by Lewis Prothero, the talk show host pictured above, whose rhetoric today would seem at most mildly unusual on FOX and not at all unusual in a tweet from the current President of the United States. He talks about how his government carried out the extermination of “terrorists, Muslims, and homosexuals,” who had to go. BRITAIN PREVAILS! Later, we see the life and death of a lesbian actress named Valerie, who is interned and killed in government-engineered pandemic experiments, and hopes only that someone will remember her and bring back the hope she once felt when she first was able to come out and be herself.

Oof. These days, I find myself reminded my friends that “V for Vendetta was not a prophecy” — because it’s sometimes really hard to remember that myself, and to believe it. It’s almost impossible to feel safe as a transgender lesbian when both my right to health care and my right to legal recognition of my relationships are under siege. Escapism is both justified and needed, which is why I’m an avid gamer, TV watcher, and movie buff, and frankly I try to keep my conversations with friends as much as possible within these fictional worlds, rather than in this real one where we have so little power. But that gets a bit difficult, when people like me — in any regard, transgender, lesbian, any adjacent identity — are still nearly invisible in media.

And queer media has become a minefield for queer people. The acceptable boundaries of depicting us have become an internal political battle and even media not about queer people has become part of an aesthetic battle that I find difficult to even name or describe — hence the, I fear, awkwardly vague title for this piece. I considered a number of referents to describe what I find concerning — I considered talking about “cottagecore,” but was warned by more knowledgeable folks that this describes both a much wider and somewhat narrower object of discussion than what I’m aiming for; I considered “pastelcore,” which is my casual term for what I’m talking about but which is probably inaccurate; and I thought about calling it “safetycore,” but ultimately just decided to drop the “-core” and come out and say what I want to critique today.

There is an overwhelming desire in queer media consumers today to see media which presents queer people in a position of safety, in contrast to the dangers which we face simply by existing as ourselves in reality. This desire is not reflected in the desire of every queer viewer/player/reader/listener, but rather is imposed somewhat hegemonically (through peer pressure). As much as I hesitate to borrow the metaphor, a certain “false consciousness” exists in today’s queer media consumer: the assumption that their interests are definitely served by something that depicts safety (which is not the same as making the viewer feel safe). This false consciousness (and I use that term only very loosely, it’s not really a deep ideological structure as in Marxian false consciousness, but rather an illusion of consensus which convinces people who step outside it that they must be wrong) has in some cases led to harassment of creators and fans of creators whose media suddenly, from the point of view of a consumer exhibiting the desire for the depiction of safety, veers outside of certain constraints.

In short, V for Vendetta was a classic film of the Bush era, regardless of its misappropriation by the same people who tried to ruin Fight Club. Even without knowing at the time that its creators are queer, we seized upon the fears it presented about the lack of safety we knew we actually faced. When I worked the political campaign trail in 2008, I had in my mind a desperate desire to avert the kind of future that Valerie and Ruth experienced. Even from the closet, the film inspired me to fight — because I knew danger was real. But, also, watching it gave me hope because V himself was heavily implied to be a gay man, and he achieves vengeance and justice (I, personally, like the specific changes made to make V a bit more righteous than in the comic, but I’m not really here to fight an Alan Moore fans vs. Wachowski fans battle.) When I feel in danger as a queer person, seeing a story where a queer person is threatened and fights back and survives is thrilling and rare. We don’t get to do that much — and now, opposition to such depictions exists on both sides of the queer/anti-queer spectrum, perhaps more strongly on the queer side. Queer media consumers are calling out not for stories of empowerment, but of being protected. Meanwhile, dark, thrilling, and liberating stories are falling by the wayside.

I sincerely ask folks who may be upset by or skeptical of my premise to at least give my argument a chance. I’m using a lot of detail here because I know that a lot of my assertions may seem to be on shaky ground, and I want to bolster and support what I’m trying to say, as well as clarify what I’m not saying — but this requires a full article. To begin with, I want to start with where I think the conditions that allowed the problem to manifest began — which is not to say that what I’m about to describe, that is, the depiction of queer characters in all-ages animation, is in itself bad. It has, however, created a peculiarity which may have led to the false consensus that queer viewers desire safety, by virtue of in many ways nothing else being available for an extended period.

The Origins of the Problem — The 2010s Timeline & Animation

The 2010s were a peculiar roller coaster of a decade for queer people: speaking from an American point of view, they started in a period where we were just starting to gain access to certain benefits of having banished right wing leadership from our country, they contained moments of apparent triumph, but mostly they laid the groundwork for a plunge back towards and then beyond where we’d been in the decade before. And many people never benefited as much as I did from the positive changes that occurred at the beginning of the decade. At every point in the 2010s, we had reason to escape into mass mediated fantasy — but our choices were limited, and… peculiar, in ways I’ll get into.

In September 2011, the all-ages animated series Adventure Time aired the episode “What Was Missing,” which sent a quiet shockwave through the queer nerd community. In the episode, the Door Lord steals important items from the key characters of the series, forcing them to go on a quest to recover the items and thus, of course, revealing secrets about each character to the others. The pivotal revelation of the episode is that Princess Bubblegum, the sentient wad of bubblegum who rules the Candy Kingdom, has been keeping a band T-shirt she got from Marceline the Vampire Queen as a treasured possession. The clear implication from the episode was that the writers — who include Rebecca Sugar, the subsequent creator of the queer-theme-filled and revolutionary Steven Universe — meant to convey that Marceline and Bubblegum had had a romantic relationship in the past. Putting an allusion to queerness into an all-ages animated show wasn’t exactly unprecedented, but doing it as straightforwardly as this stood out in a major way, and queer fans of Adventure Time became increasingly engaged as the “Bubbline ‘ship” developed throughout the show’s canon, with many jumping on board specifically because of the implied relationship.

© Cartoon Network 2018

Many of us queer viewers noted that Adventure Time was doing a heck of a lot more than the majority of adult-targeted genre media at the time to bring people like us onboard. Excepting Teen Wolf — which played at homoerotic themes but ended up being labeled “queerbaiting” when it ended in the same season as Adventure Time — and Game of Thrones, which occasionally depicted same-sex intercourse but never made any real effort to make queer relationships happen, nothing on the air in 2011 would ever come close to where Adventure Time ended up (with Marceline and Bubblegum kissing on screen and entering a relationship). Video games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age — which, I must note, were from the same studio as one another — were doing a bit better, but movies? Television? No way. And of course at the time, nothing was doing explicit trans themes at all.

© Nickelodeon 2014

When the followup to Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, ended in the titular protagonist Avatar Korra explicitly entering a romantic relationship with her friend Asami (after multiple seasons of arguable “baiting”), it really seemed as if all-ages animation was where the queer themes were at. Over the years following the Korra finale, Steven Universe (again, helmed by formidable advocate and unfortunate frequent online harassment target Rebecca Sugar) and Adventure Time jumped on making their themes explicit — which in the case of Steven meant trans themes, too.

It should be noted that the #GamerGate “controversy” (harassment mob) occurred during the period when the groundwork was being laid for this queer all-ages animation renaissance. I’ve written extensively about this in my doctoral dissertation for anyone who wants the super-gory details, but there’s a lot of primers on that infernal hashtag and I think most of us already know the score on what it was as a whole — the singling out of queer and female creators of video games. It then expanded to ComicsGate and basically everything else that didn’t already have some sort of -Gate attached to it. One element of #GamerGate that’s worth noting for later, though, is that they argued in bad faith, and that one of their complaints — which I want to emphasize completely lacked merit as presented — was that video games were becoming “no longer games.” They singled out Zöe Quinn’s Depression Quest because their ex started the whole thing to get back at them, but they used the argument that it was “not a game.” (Depression Quest is a game, and a queer one; I’m not a fan, but text games were literally the first games and trying to argue a text adventure isn’t a real game is a recipe for proving who the actual fake gamer in the argument is.) The point here being, #GamerGate likely to some degree strengthened reactionary currents in media that concerns itself with pleasing people who want “real” or “hardcore” or “serious” — which is unfortunate for those of us who count ourselves among those who desire such media. In any case, though, the escape we had available to us when we weren’t fighting trolls was largely the texts I’m discussing here.

© Cartoon Network 2018

By 2018, when Steven Universe officially ended (it would go on to have a movie and a concluding mini-series, Steven Universe Future) all-ages animation had had multiple same-sex kisses and a major trans storyline (although it’s filtered through the lens of alien technology, Steven is literally an evolution of his mother, who literally became him, which yes is a Jesus metaphor but it’s also very much a trans thing, complete with the final battle of the series being filled with “deadnaming” and “misgendering” from White Diamond, who is essentially his grandmother and refuses to recognize his identity). In the same time period, adult-targeted media had done shockingly little — a series of insulting, awards-baiting transgender movies like The Danish Girl, the undermarketed and thus underperforming Charlize Theron movie Atomic Blonde featuring a bisexual action heroine (adapted from a comic where she was straight), and the CW Network’s live action superhero shows Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow, which would subsequently be joined by that network’s Flash, Supergirl, and Black Lightning in depicting queer characters (including Nicole Maines’ Supergirl character Nia Nal, who is transgender). Overall, it is extremely slim pickings, as I discussed with Noah Berlatsky in this nifty Observer article, which has graphs showing exactly what we got in terms of movies with any LGBT representation in the last decade.

© 2020 Ellie Lockhart

The decade that contained the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States as well as the alleged “transgender tipping point” had very little to offer queer genre fans in entertainment. The decade ended with trivial same-sex relationships from characters not named on screen being presented as monumental representation by Disney in Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker. Most of the roles in the above chart are either insulting or supporting. It is no surprise at all that fans found content where they could.

Today, animation continues to be one of the most reliable places to find queer characters. Although so far, no trans-themed successor to Steven Universe has arisen, Disney XD’s The Owl House has been praised by many for its use of an Adventure Time-esque fantasy setting and inclusion of same-sex relationships. She-Ra on Netflix ended up telling a fully lesbian-centric narrative arc while also surpassing many of its influences, like Star Wars, at their own game. Even networks such as Disney’s, which had previously been resistant to allowing the depiction of queer characters, have apparently relented, according to testimony from creators.

A note on video games — I’m going to bring these up throughout this discussion, and I think certain particular video games such as Stardew Valley and The Sims are particularly important here, but the narrative of LGBT inclusion in video games goes outside the 2010s decade (with Fallout 2 depicting same-sex activity in 1998, and other RPGs such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II pushing boundaries in the direction of same-sex relationships in the 2000s, and Mass Effect portraying a same-sex albeit also cross-species romance to famous Frederic Wertham-level controversy in 2007).

© Lucasarts 2005

Video games offer the “innocence” and “safety” I’m concerned with, often but not always accompanied by queer characters. Meanwhile, many games which depict queer characters fall outside this conversation, or squarely in the crosshairs of the champions of the aesthetic.

The Problem: The Seduction of “Innocence”

Fredric Wertham, author of The Seduction of the Innocent, was a homophobic, censorious bigot who enabled the McCarthy era 1950s US government to, through threat of legal consequences directed at publishers, prohibit entire genres of comic book — “terror” and “zombies” were among the things he singled out. “Crime” comics were essentially ended, and you can blame the difficulty comics not from the “big two” publishers — including queer comics like Lumberjanes — have in selling copies in part on Dr. Wertham’s effort to “protect children” by making comics a purely children’s-oriented medium. (Wertham also did commendable work prior to his comics obsession offering therapy services to underserved Black communities, although I have to question what level of quality these services were, given his fixation.)

It’s usually seen as a bad attempt at some kind of power move to bring up Wertham in a discussion about media censorship; he’s similar to anti-video game attorney Jack Thompson in that regard, although I will say for Dr. Wertham that his beliefs were plainly sincere, something I’m not sure is true for Thompson. In any case, I’m not exactly saying anyone here is Wertham, but rather that we should both consider why Wertham was able to exert censorious influence over comics to begin with when his position was not necessarily fully consistent with the McCarthyites who enabled him; why only certain parts of Wertham’s ideology ended up getting traction; and the ways in which the “queer safety” media aesthetic would both infuriate Wertham, align with some of his views, and most of all challenge the coherence of his views.

First: most people know Wertham either as just a comic book censor, or as the guy who was against comic book violence specifically. Most queer people probably know he was bigoted against us, and was notoriously sex-averse. Much of the shock he was able to create when he testified to Congress about comics was based on focusing on sexual themes in “crime comics” that we don’t remember because that genre is destroyed now, and on sexual themes in superhero comics that we either treat as jokes these days (alleged homoeroticism between Batman and Robin) or recognize as actual legit things that were in those comics (BDSM in Wonder Woman). This was all shocking and Congress was credulous and so they were willing to listen to other stuff he had to say — but bear in mind this was the 1950s, the era of Gunsmoke and good-guy-bad-guy Cold War propaganda. The other stuff he had to say includes:

The Superman type of comic books tends to force and super-force. Dr. Paul A. Witty, professor of education at Northwestern University, has well described these comics when he said that they “present our world in a kind of Fascist setting of violence and hate and destruction. I think it is bad for children,” he goes on, “to get that kind of recurring diet … [they] place too much emphasis on a Fascist society. Therefore the democratic ideals that we should seek are likely to be overlooked.” Actually, Superman (with the big S on his uniform — we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an SS) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and “foreign-looking” people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible.

(from Seduction of the Innocent)

Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is the kind of stuff that absolutely circulates in my own queer circles, it’s arguably the ongoing point of Amazon’s The Boys, it’s aligned with many of the points Alan Moore was trying to make with Watchmen. This is a really common critique from the Left of superhero comics, and, well, it was basically ignored. While the Comics Code, which Wertham got created, prohibited the depiction of a lot of things, including killing, thus limiting comics to a very narrow set of imagery that resembles the limitations put on all ages animation by broadcasters today, it didn’t eliminate this good-guy-bad-guy arguably-fascistic undertone; it in fact increased it, and also contributed to problems like “does no one consider all the brain injury Batman is inflicting with his ‘I don’t kill people but I do beat them up while growling’ procedures and hey does that have any relationship to why police think that they can fire ‘less-than-lethal’ weaponry at people for fun.”

Basically, in creating the Comics Code Authority, the publishers (who were, again, afraid Congress would pass laws regulating them) killed whole genres to make comics a “for kids” thing, and they defined “for kids” as something that included some limitations on violence but largely was puritanical about sex. This bled into the very broadcast standards for cartoons that all the queer all-ages shows I mention above had to challenge. But it’s worth considering that Wertham came in operating under the assumption that comics were, in fact, for kids, and that we’ve retained that belief system. It’s been applied to animation, every adult animation fan has complained about it at some point, and the fact that TV-MA adult cartoons like Harley Quinn exist today that break every single rule imposed on their TV-Y7 sistren doesn’t do a thing to make people take those works more “seriously.” It’s incommensurably damaged the genre.

“Queer safety” as an aesthetic calls for a lot of the things Wertham called for — avoiding violence, because violence is coded as, or, in the case of queer safety aesthetic advocates, traumatically associated with, fascism; avoiding graphic sexual depictions in the name of protecting children; and applying these restrictions medium-wide, forcing everything to be suitable for children or simply not suitable at all. Obviously, Wertham wouldn’t support the depiction of queer relationships because he was a homophobic bigot, but if I’m being honest I feel as if he would view the current situation as a big win. From the big Marvel films that drove cinema (until, you know, the virus apocalypse ended cinema) to all-ages animation, at the very least Wertham has got the values he convinced Congress and the publishers to take on in the 1950s (avoid moral ambiguity; definitely don’t tell gritty stories about crime or horror) and in the case of all-ages animation, the violent heroes dealing out justice, even non-lethally, have largely been dispensed with. In a lot of ways, the things that allegedly make the queer community feel safe are the same things that made Wertham feel safe.

And that’s terrible.

What Even Is The Queer Safety Aesthetic?

You might have noticed I haven’t actually defined the “queer safety aesthetic” yet. I apologize for that, and yet to define it, we really needed all of this context.

The queer safety aesthetic is the hegemonic belief in queer spaces that

There is a kind of mass media that has an essentially queer character, rejecting the interference and distortion of cishet depictions of people like us; The queer aesthetic is one which avoids depicting conventional cishet male media conventions, including realistic violence, serious danger as a driver of plot, individual heroism (as opposed to mutual aid and support), and anything that can be associated with political conservatism, even aesthetically (such as guns); The queer aesthetic valorizes empathy for everyone*; The queer aesthetic is family/child-friendly, because of the need to include people of all ages; The queer aesthetic has Good Politics and the imagery and aesthetic is informed by that Good Politics; The queer aesthetic provides what [allegedly] all media provides to its target audience — that is, a feeling of safety.

Obviously, I disagree with this aesthetic as a normative ideal — that is, I don’t think it should be assumed to be the default thing queer people want or need, although I don’t oppose people having access to content that conforms to it if they want. Whenever I try to bring it up, I am met with objections that I’m trying to take away someone’s only coping strategy. My response to this here is the same as my response to it when I’m confronted with this argument in person: you have this aesthetic, or something closer to it. It is the dominant form of media that includes queer people. I can literally count on two hands the movies or TV shows that don’t cater to this to at least some degree, and also include queer people.

The queer safety aesthetic is also self-contradictory in several ways. This is probably why, while its proponents almost always identify as fans of one of the all ages animation shows I mention above, people who have seriously internalized the queer safety aesthetic tend to move into fan works, alternate universes, etc., that reduce the amount of conflict, controversial “‘shipping,” etc., in the fiction far beyond even what can be contained in a TV-Y7 rating. First of all, the sorts of media which incepted the queer safety aesthetic — the all ages shows that people like to praise — were created with heavy studio interference, so cishet people have their hands all over them. Steven Universe is in so many ways Rebecca Sugar’s negotiation, or fight if you will, with Cartoon Network over what content she would be allowed to depict. The avoidance of “conservative-coded” content which is often upsetting to queer people who are exposed to these things in the real world in a hostile context is because of the ultimately Wertham-derived, cultural-conservatism driven censorship that was originally designed to exclude queer people. The emphasis on empathy derives from that being one of the only ways to resolve conflict and stay within that rating; and some characters are still treated as jokes or are cruelly dismissed by others within the setting in many of these works. (Fans have also, as I’ve mentioned, directed harassment at creators like Sugar and Noelle Stevenson, which is hardly empathetic; in many ways the fandom that has grown up around the queer safety aesthetic prioritizes empathy and safety for fictional characters more than for any real human being.) The stories may or may not have “Good Politics,” by which I mean “whatever the arbitrary queer person who is into the queer safety aesthetic believes is Good Politics,” but it’s unlikely that any corporate product aimed at children and families will in fact embody the values of your average anarcho-syndicalist trans person. This dissonance likely drives a lot of the harassment aimed at creators.

Finally, while I think that it is correct to say that everyone and especially queer people want to feel safe, it is absolutely not correct to assert that we all gain a feeling of safety from seeing safe things. Not only do the same things not give off feelings of safety or lack thereof (I mentioned being from the boonies; the image of a farmhouse surrounded by cows, the kind of place where I learned to internalize queerphobia at the hands of my rural Wisconsin peers, creates significantly more anxiety than the image of someone carrying a gun in fiction), but not everyone feels safe by seeing other, fictional people being safe. I wrote in 2017 after the Charlottesville riot about feeling imminent threat online, and channeling this into playing the Battle Royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, commonly known as PUBG. For me, being able to directly confront the feeling of un-safety by simulating being alone or, at best, with three friends, against 96–99 other people who wanted to kill me, was cathartic because it was an extreme reflection of my fears. I’ve already mentioned V for Vendetta, which gave me hope for LGBT people someday by showing a future where we gain liberation after much suffering, but above all, queer survival narratives are where it’s at for me.

The queer safety aesthetic denies this. It says we don’t want to see queer people subjected to any kind of violence, especially not if they’re queer. It’s traumatizing, and we’re already traumatized.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re already traumatized! For me, personally, confronting trauma, seeing people like me go through trauma, is cathartic. Many people argue catharsis is a myth, but to me that is a firm denial of my lived experience. And right now, the pendulum has swung far away from catharsis, and far towards safety, which is why we find representation most easily in animation (and, I suppose, in the DC CW superhero shows, which have some of the tamest content of superheroes, even when compared to Marvel films).

Me bringing this up isn’t trying to take away anyone else’s escape — it’s defending my right to have my own.

How Did We Get to This Weird Aesthetic?

How did queer people, people known for rioting in the streets for our rights, for staging “die-ins” during the AIDS crisis, for grim and rebellious music, get to the queer safety aesthetic? When I try to discuss this publicly, the answer I uniformly get is “things are so bad right now that we need it.” But to me, that answer will never work, because when I think about peaceful lands like Etheria or Equestria or, honestly, even Ooo from Adventure Time, I do not feel comforted. I wish I lived there, sure; but I know I live in rural Minnesota, am slowly dying of old age, and that there are fascists who want to kill me slowly through removing my health care, or quickly by, you know, doing exactly what V for Vendetta shows them doing. It does not comfort me to see other people’s renditions of other utopias; I can imagine my own perfect utopia and I don’t need a TV show or a video game for that.

I mentioned I was going to bring up video games in a bit more detail. A couple of games that really fit the queer safety aesthetic are The Sims and Stardew Valley. I don’t think either was really intentionally made to be part of it, but because they’re set in relaxing environs (which, I should note, I find actively threatening in the case of Stardew Valley because the vast majority of queerphobia I’ve experienced has come from agrarian rural areas, and I find the increasing desire of queer people to move out to places like where I’m trapped baffling and terrifying) and involve minimal conflict, people get into them when they really embrace the aesthetic. It doesn’t really matter that The Sims basically says you win when you have more money, and that that isn’t Good Politics to most queer people; it’s relaxing and nonviolent and nobody is homophobic or transphobic. Same with Stardew. This has even grown into a thing with retro games and franchise preferences — despite Nintendo being far from a progressive company, the Switch is plainly the “queer console,” because it has a ton of games like Mario and Smash with animated violence that avoids suggesting “real harm.”

I think we’ve got here because this is what we’ve been given. The retro games thing because it’s what so many queer people grew up on, and the animation thing because it’s what has catered to us for the past ten years, while regardless of the status of our rights, mainstream entertainment media has largely ignored us. That’s kind of on mainstream entertainment media — but what concerns me is that they are getting better, and we’ve acculturated so much to the queer safety aesthetic that when something that’s absolutely inclusive and about fighting for queer rights comes out — say, a video game about a lesbian protagonist on an adventure with her girlfriend and also straight woman protagonist who teams up with a trans boy — we reject it because it’s violent and it has “zombies.” Oh yeah, one of the things Wertham specifically got prohibited. (And also, of course, because it depicts bigotry. It’s not enough to tell a post-apocalyptic story where the vast majority of people and organizations are queer-inclusive and nobody who’s LGBT and a named character dies, because a “deadname” got mentioned, and that’s just, like, a war crime, not a thing that my bank does to me every couple of months even though my name was legally changed over half a decade ago.)

Where Do We Go From Here?

Am I proposing destroying the art people love? No, especially because the art people love doesn’t actually meet these criteria. Rebecca Sugar is not, in fact, in alignment with this aesthetic; the “Stakes” arc of Adventure Time, one of my favorite pieces of work by her, is brutally violent in a way I’m shocked they got past whoever approves these things to air with their rating, but then, Sugar is obviously good at that. The ending of Steven Universe the main show is, in fact, a battle involving violent fundamentalists deadnaming a trans boy to demoralize him — it’s just that as a community, we’ve decided that if something is drawn in a particular stylized way and marketed as if it fits the queer safety aesthetic, then it’s acceptable — but if it looks realistic and people use guns, then we have a problem.

I think there are real possibilities for the all ages animation genre to reject the queer safety aesthetic altogether. Infinity Train is a lovely show that appears to fit the aesthetic, and slowly morphs into a nightmare world where the protagonist’s humanity is questioned by fascistic police who she murders by shoving under the wheels of a train and grinding their faces off.

© Disney 2019

Then, it shifts to a new perspective for its third (and unfortunately, likely final) season, that of the genocidal villains known as the Apex. The Apex are dedicated to the extermination of the magical creatures of the train, who they call “nulls” as they’re not really people, only human passengers are. This is a direct callout of network rating policies, which reaches its apex when the Apex “heroes” adopt a young apparently-human child who is being protected by a gorilla-like denizen of the train, and murder her surrogate parent by, again, kicking her into the wheels of the train. They then casually tell the child they just killed her friend and protector, and the child bursts into tears — and transforms into a “denizen” herself. Infinity Train is brutally — the scene I’m describing is painful for me to remember — calling out the ways in which detachment from reality, and from real violence, is maintained in this sort of show.

Above all though, we need the queer community to stop assuming everyone wants or needs the queer safety aesthetic. I propose that we should, at the very least, promote and accept a parallel “queer survival aesthetic,” one that recognizes that we cannot actually escape the problems of the real world through fiction — but that maybe we can confront those problems, and still have fun. This would require an embrace of tension and discomfort in narrative.