What a Surprise! New Disney Reboot of an Old LucasFilm IP, Willow, Features a Teen Lesbian Relationship "Front and Center:" "It was just organic," Claims Screenwriter

So organic! It was also completely organic when Disney made gay teen relationships central to all of their other children's shows in the past two years!

It just happened! The Muse just spoke to the writers and producers, and just kept saying: 70% of the world's teenagers are gay, or at least should be!

Disney's Willow puts a queer romance front and center -- and it was 'just organic,' says creator A princess and a lady knight never got together in George Lucas' original, but for Jonathan Kasdan, it was an obvious next step

By Susana Polo@NerdGerhl Nov 29, 2022, 12:15pm EST 6 Comments / 6 New

...

This time, Willow is accompanied by a whole ensemble squad of mostly teenagers, each pulling and pushing against fantasy tropes that will be excitingly familiar to an audience in an era where D&D is mainstream and YA fiction is full of plucky heroes and heroines....

Willow's two mains are Kit and Dove, both young women who wrestle with the legacy of Elora Danan. But Kit's own bildungsroman may come to overshadow Dove's in conversations about the show, as a good part of her journey is realizing that she's in mutual love with her best friend. In a long overdue and welcome development for fantasy cinema, television, and the Disney corporation itself, Kit (a self-centered tomboy princess who spends most of the series dressed like the Dread Pirate Roberts) and Jade (an orphan girl who wants to become her country's first female knight) are as though someone took every tomboy fantasy heroine in the YA literature canon, tossed them in a blender, and flipped a big mad scientist lever from SUBTEXT to TEXT.

Polygon sat down with Kasdan to talk first and foremost about being the first true franchise on Disney Plus to really center a queer story -- and also about weird movies from the 1980s, the road from there to modern YA fantasy, and the flip side of the fantasy hero coin: truly terrible villains.

Polygon: How did a queer relationship come to be the core of this show? When did it enter the process and was there any pushback?

Jonathan Kasdan: There was no pushback. What's interesting is -- I hope and I believe we're at a moment where you're going to see a paradigm shift in that. And hopefully, the way that it's gonna happen is that these kinds of [queer] stories, particularly like this one, that were just organic to the narrative we were telling, find their way in, and it becomes less of a surprising and unusual thing to see.

It's very unsurprising. It's in literally every Disney project aimed at children. It's in Willow, it's in Strange World, it was in Lightyear, it was in Beauty and the Beast, it was in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, it was in Thor: Love and Thunder, it was Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker.

Oh, and Solo, co-written by Jonathan Kasdan and his father, featured a pansexual Lando Calrissian who has sex with an SJW robot. (Strongly implied in the script, and stated outside the film in interviews.)

"Organic!" It just happens! The ink just sashays out of the pen, gaily!

There would be "pushback" from Disney if there was not gay messaging in a project aimed at children.

posted by Ace at 04:12 PM

| Access Comments