This blog was originally written years ago and has moved homes a couple of times because moddern blogging platforms give the author a headache. It was lightly updated December 2024.
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When I was younger, I didn’t understand the point of fanfiction. I don’t know why, but my brain just wouldn’t make peace with the point of creating my own truth outside of canon even though I had been perfectly capable of playing pretend as a child. I used to love to make a “Pride Rock” out of pillows for the Happy Meal toys and have a pretty distinct memory of trying to explain the Secret of NIMH to my cousin so he’d play rats with me, but some switch flipped during my teenage years that made me a purist. Why would anyone spend time deviating if canon was absolute?
Sora loves Kairi? Got it. Sakura and Sasuke get married? You bet! You’re telling me there’s nothing homoerotic about a slightly aloof mutant man and his slutty bard traveling the countryside? Of course not. Canon is correct and canon is both the church and the state, because it was made by professionals and professionals cannot be questioned.
Thankfully this was all back when my standards for female characters were much, much lower than they are now, thanks to both internalized misogyny and a healthy dose of internalized homophobia. As a fully-fledged adult with no real immunity to nostalgia, I regret to inform the creators of my most treasured childhood stories: You wrote it gay.
I am what I would call a love scholar. A romance connoisseur. I will defend Don Bluth’s Thumbelina until I breathe my last. This 84-minute musical romp features Thumbelina — you know the one — and similarly-sized Prince Cornelius, and what happens as a consequence of them falling in love in the span of five minutes. I think it’s literally five minutes. They meet, they ‘same hat’ each other because they’re both tiny, Thumbelina gets kidnapped after frog-Charo hears her beautiful singing voice, and then the search-and-rescue around a single square-mile patch of wood begins. Thumbelina and Prince Cornelius must overcome the frogs, horny beetle Gilbert Gottfried, the extremely charming mouse-Carol Channing and mole-John Hurt, and the efforts of God’s most useless swallow to reunite. It’s adorable. Barry Manilow wrote the songs. Let Me Be Your Wings is better than I Can Show You the World. Fight me.
Thumbelina and Cornelius do not deviate much from the tropes of basic fairy tale princes and princesses. Thumbelina is pretty, kind, good to animals, a bit naive, and overcomes her people-pleasing tendencies just in time to get out of marrying the mole (in spite of Carol Channing’s absolute banger). Cornelius is spunky, a bit of a rule-breaker, rides a bumblebee like a motorbike, and it seems like Thumbelina is the first thing in his life he cares enough about to fight for.
Between Thumbelina’s big doe eyes and long Marigold-colored hair and Cornelius’s bike-bee, the character designs give us more than enough information to reinforce these traits. The way they move reinforces them too; Cornelius is always jumping around, while Thumbelina’s acting evokes a willow in the breeze whenever she’s allowed to be herself. We are allowed to fall in love with these two in the same five minutes it takes them to fall in love with each other, and spend the rest of the runtime rooting for them to reunite.
The 2016 ice skating anime Yuri on Ice is a different, equally perfect beast because it has characters with more complex flaws, who go through more complex arcs. Yuri Katsuki is a depressed figure skater (relatable) who takes a break from his sport just in time to be noticed by famed skater Viktor Nikiforov. Unbeknownst to Yuri, Viktor thinks he’s in the second act of their romance because a blackout drunk Yuri made an advance at a party. Viktor arrives in Yuri’s hometown after seeing a video of him skating, offers to be his coach, and then at some point they exchange engagement rings in Barcelona? It was a lot, emotionally.
A 26-episode season of a Thumbelina anime (I’m here whenever you need me, Toho) would probably require a similar depth of development for Thumbelina and Cornelius. Yuri gets time to overcome his self-consciousness, fall back in love with skating, get to know Viktor as a person rather than his idol, and fall for him too. If we were to reduce this plotline to 84 minutes, then we’d have to sand down some of these edges and get the big beats across in a scene or two. On the opposite side of this mirror universe, Thumbelina and Cornelius may need some B-plots to flesh out their relationships with the villains and the fairy court, respectively. Same composition, different medium, different creative decisions. The important part is that these characters wade into their respective depths together.
Promare is a 2019 Studio Trigger feature film about Galo Thymos, a firefighter with a burning soul, and Lio Fotia, the leader of a rebel group of mutant humans called the Mad Burnish, and how they stop the corporate greed of a city’s beloved hero (Elon Musk, but blonde) from bringing about the apocalypse.
This film undeniably follows the Thumbelina capsule romance model: Two simple boys (hot-headed firefighter and cold-hearted gang leader) meet in a bar (cave/giant robot), are inexplicably drawn towards each other, and live happily ever after. Trigger happily claims plausible deniability, but the studio is no stranger to homoerotic subtext and Lio literally loses clothing as he becomes more emotionally vulnerable around Galo. The boys even share a kiss of life — sure, it’s CPR in context, but I’ve never seen anyone try to breathe life into another with a gentle little chin tilt.
I won’t pretend to understand the nuances behind the way plausibly-queer media is presented abroad, but Promare is a really great example of subtext that’s basically text, with a couple of easy outs for audience members who might be uncomfortable with the idea of a queer pair on screen. It’s also a modern example of that Thumbelina fairy tale formula still very much working even when the character archetypes aren’t textbook, or are not in a cookie-cutter context that everyone will immediately recognize.
The thing that allows Promare to be effective as a romance is the same thing that makes both Thumbelina and Yuri on Ice work: developmental equilibrium. Two characters, equally fleshed out, facing some sort of conflict that is keeping them apart or forcing them together. It’s the fuse that lights tension and chemistry right up, and makes those sparks fly.
After all, how many times have we watched a big action movie where the male lead supposedly falls for a woman who has seven minutes of screen time, and feel nothing? Remember how The Rock (as Hobbs) and Vanessa Kirby (as Hattie Shaw) were supposedly in love in Hobbs and Shaw, a movie that opened with an Odd Couple-esque split-screen comparison of The Rock and Jason Statham’s domestic routines?
But, so far we’ve discussed stories where characters are directly linked by the plot and have some sort of written-in tension and little else to distract them from one another. The romance is either text or very intentional, blatant subtext. So why are there entire fandoms built around character pairings that are clearly not slated to ever be together, even when there’s a designated girl in the trio just waiting to be loved?
The cases of Sakura Haruno from Naruto and Kairi from Kingdom Hearts are comparable and instructive here: Neither girl gets the same amount of internal conflict, motivation, or screentime as their male counterparts. They’re accessories to the plot. They exist to be either loved, rebuffed, or forgotten depending on what the story requires. Meanwhile, the boys they are involved with do nothing but run around, look for each other, look at each other, desperately scream each other’s names, and merge their rainbow keyblades together into a heart-tipped dual-weapon. Or, the remnants of their vaporized arms make it look like their near-dead bodies are holding hands.
If Sakura was treated with the same care as Sasuke and Naruto, I could see her influening Sasuke toward the better and then forming a compelling relationship between a strong, resilient girl and her reformed mall goth boyfriend who shifts from his revenge quest to dedicatedly protecting the family he does have.
I would have loved to see her childhood crush calcify into something real. Maybe Naruto could have recognized the strength of her romantic feelings as an asset, and set her up for success. There are many, many workable solutions to this, but Sakura never got the apology tour she deserved, and therefore had nothing productive to do in the last half of the show. Compared to her male counterparts, she is a pet rock, and feels like an outcast on her own team way more than Naruto ever did. No matter how much we are told that she and Sasuke have a romantic relationship, they are not ever shown to be on the same emotional playing field. If Sakura was given more depth or Sasuke was sanded down, then we could be in business, but that is simply not the story that we were presented with.
Gendering conflict stunts the development of any of potentially good and memorable storylines, because it slam dunks any substantive tension into the trash. A romance is not a solo endeavor, so when one partner is dramatically underdeveloped the creators may as well have given the other a pet rock to kiss goodnight, and that’s no fun! Audiences need equal opportunity to connect with both sides of a pair to root for them. If the dynamic is lopsided, they will simply look elsewhere to scratch the romance itch — not necessarily to a character that makes sense, but one that feels right.
So, you know. If you’re struggling to bring both sides of your romantic pair to the same depth of development, maybe it’s time to ask why those characters are there in the first place and what their roles actually are, or hey. Just go full Thumbelina.