Was Pixar Queerbaiting Fans With 'Inside Out 2'? 

Even if they don’t outright say Riley is gay or bi curious or whatever, I’m about 99.99% sure Disney will at least insinuate she is.

This just reminded me of the shit that was popping off around the time of Captain America Winter Soldier where folks were shipping/insisting that Steve and Bucky were queer and the discussions online were getting really nasty and heated. Its really tiring seeing this sort of thing happen because sometimes its okay for people to just be best friends or to admire someone or look to someone as an inspiration without wanting to fuck them. Sometimes things can be wholesome and simple and we dont need to overcomplicate them with a bunch of coded messages and all this other baggage, especially when it comes to a childrens movie. Lets let kids be kids while they can be because the world is going to destroy them at some point with a barrage of nonsense once theyre old enough, just let them have those moments and keep your libido out of it for fucks sake. I say this as someone who is a non denominational hedonist so I dont have anything against characters or people being queer or wherever else they fall on that particular spectrum. Not everything needs to be about sex and attraction and all that other shit.

Great points - it is creepy that people are so obsessed over a 13-year-old's orientation and romantic woes. I blame the publishing industry for starting this mess with romance. The lines used to pretty clear between adult fiction and children's fiction. As a child, I knew when I was breaking the boundaries by sneaking peeks into adult romance books. Now, because of Twilight and its ilk, we have young adult, new adult, and all kinds of other adults obsessed with teen romances in books because corporations kept trying to create new target audiences and blurred the boundaries. As a female writer of adult fantasy with a little romance, it was incredibly difficult to get published back in 2010 unless I tried to market it as young adult, which it wasn't. But agents and publishers were obsessed with finding the next Twilight. Now 50-year-old women are gushing over young adult romances, and it's strange to me. I try not to judge others' reading tastes, but I don't understand the appeal. Whatever happened to all the lush historical family sagas and romances written for adults?

baiting of any kind has no place in media directed at children.

I think Nate Jones should ask himself why he, an adult man, is so desperate for a 12 year old cartoon character in a children's film to be a lesbian. Just completely normal stuff for an adult to be neurotic over!

I really don't know what you mean. I was watching this video on volcanic eruptions but I had to turn it off because they wouldn't say which layer of Earth's surface is the most queer

I really hate the people shipping Val and Riley and it makes me deeply uncomfortable because Val is a senior and Riley is a freshman.

Came back to add another comment. If one wants to create well-rounded, complex characters, it's important to explore all sorts of relationships - family relationships, friendships, enemies. Being over-obsessed with this one dimension of human experience, even in a specific genre like romance, does not make for deep or interesting stories. I'm so tired of shallow storytelling.

The fact that people are out there having to apply a sexual definition to a family/kids movie is insane. This same person will probably rewatch old Disney movies like the lion king or Pinocchio and look for undertones that aren't there. Society is forcibly attempting to make sure that everyone is ok with every gender race and sexuality that it sometimes forgets that just seeing things for what they are is the simplest answer. My Lord. Can the world just relax.

Just came here to say *nope, they weren't* go rewatch the first movie if you disagree. Why would she have an entire machine that literally prints boyfriends if she wasn't straight?

it's perfectly OK to take a break from the culture wars and just enjoy a movie for what it is, not for what we may want to to be

All this talk about queerbaiting and isn’t Riley like… 13 years old?! These people are disgusting. Please stop sexualizing children. Children can have role-models that they admire.

If this movie had come out 30 years ago, nobody would be having this discussion but it’s 2024 and everything has to be sexualized even when there’s nothing there.

I get that we have all been conditioned to sniff out corporate diversity efforts as they can harm the enjoyment of the movie if done incorrectly (which Lucas Films seem to just botch every time). That being said I think we all need to chill. My 9 year old goes gaga over teenage girls, not because she is a lesbian, but because teenage are just soooooo cool. By all accounts Inside Out 2 is a fun movie for kids, so stop being mad about nothing and just take your kids to it. (Pixar should be rewarded for good movies right?)

The Flash ruined itself in season 1 already, by just not even bothering with a secret identity, having pretty much everyone know who Barry is including his main villain.

I just don't understand out of all the places where society could have gone after the technological revolution of the last two decades we ended picking the most mundane, irrelevant, unimportant and boring topics to debate about.

People are creeps to think about children having a sexuality when they actually don't. When humans reach an age of maturity that is when they can start to develop those feelings but not when they are too young. So in my opinion sexuality isn't even formed yet.

Well, I disagree on the romance scenes between Aragorn and Arwen. It would have been kind of weird to see that elf girl that replaced Glorfindel rescuing Frodo suddenly turned up at the wedding. Also the dreams Aragorn had/shared with her made him go on. But in most movies and many books I don't think it is important what the sexual orientation of a character is. And btw, the same goes for real life. Do I really care what people at work do in their bedroom (or elsewhere) sexually? No! Do I care if my friends are gay? No! Are Frodo and Sam gay? No, neither in the books nor in the movies. They were in a situation probably comparable to trench warfare in WW1. And I think Thomas Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in his foreword to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom described pretty convincingly that these were non-normal situations. Sam was straight and Frodo's sexual preference never came up. Can a 13 year old girl decide she is "gay"? Well, maybe, but maybe she just adores another girl for completely non-sexual reasons. I'd say she'd be pretty far ahead at 13 years to have it all figured out. But once again: Often it just doesn't matter to the story! Was Dumbledore gay? Who cares? Was Chewbacca gay? Who cares? People must steer away from that weird idea, that you can only identify with someone that has your skin color, your sexual preferences, your political views. Because it's just not true!

One question, what's with the accent? Lol

Dude! I was always wondering why it's called "shipping" 😄 Granted, English is not my native language, still strange that I never thought of the "ship" in relationship and instead was wondering how that could in any way be related to sea vessels or transportation costs 😉

I know nothing about the movie in question here but I have definitely always found it a little strange the seeming obsession with some people to claim characters as lgbt or lgbt “coded”. At best it’s kinda strange and at worst it’s downright creepy.

Where my "holding fast to deeply held virtues" fam at?

This is one of those times when you hear those speculations, roll your eyes and say "Get a life!".

I literally watched the movie today, she just seemed to idolize a player she looked up to. There was no hint of "budding romance" to speak of. What are people smoking?

Well said, man. Keep up the great content.

Amen. Every word.

I haven't watched anything Disney since The Last Jedi. Everything seems to have an agenda now, its really not for me.

I love how the film reality checked this writer at the end. And if you want to be technical, the film highlighted her sudo crush on the male video game character.

word. keep up the good work.

I saw the movie yesterday. I kept myself from all spoilers and the like. I CANNOT BELIEVE PEOPLE THINK THIS. Not even once crossed my mind or my gf's, and she is bi. Not mentioning the fact she is just 13, now platonic crushes dont and cannot exist? I will admit when I was a kid in the show Sakura many of the crushes had me a bit confused, but cmon... They do exist, my brother was obseesed with Tom Welling, and he is more heterobasic than I am. Even Ian Mcellen had a crush on a girl when little and he is one of the most gaylords of all time. I am baffled.

You can see the underlying nuances. But I think Disney really wanted to tread carefully here to keep conservative and religious audiences coming in. I don't think those audiences hate LGBT stuff, but they're usually quite protective of what their children watch for fear of activists behind the scenes. It's hard to say but I thought the movie was amazing. One of Pixar's best since the first Inside Out (which remains my personal favourite animated movie). I hope the level of thought that went into this sequel goes into other projects moving forward.

Actually, I would say no. I am a woman, I used to be a teenage girl, this is literally my experience as a teenage girl. It's called envy (which is shown in the movie), the need to be cool and look like the cool kid. I remember staring at girls and thinking "I want to look and be her", it could look like love in my eyes but it was really just envy that's why the emotion in the movie is called Envy. It is nothing sexual!! Pixar shows the literal emotion in the movie and it was anxiety, envy, boredom and ENVY! There was NO Love emotion in this movie! They spell it out for you.

They just want everybody to be a rugmuncher these days

Oh, cool - British Kain. Wutup. Not saying there's no place for romance in kid's movies: The Little Mermaid's plot centered around romance. So did Beauty and the Beast. But these are classic tales for a reason. So, where are the classic Grimm's Ghey Tales that Disney can adapt, turning a super dark, terribly tragic story of a kid who gets s0d*mized by a wolf into a story of empowerment? That's what I want to know. I'm sure there are dozens of people begging for this adaptation. Dozens! Like Billy Eichner, for instance.

Did people go see this one? I keep forgetting about it

Like even when it’s not about that. They make it about that

00:49 that lower tweet/X is really something tho. 😶

Arrow was fine until maybe season 3. And just when it started to actually resemble the comic book character more, they just trashed the whole thing. Adding Ra's al Ghul, a traditional Batman villain, turning Felicity into an annoying know-it all nagging wife, and then the creme de le creme, Damian Darkh and his hammy unbelievably insincere acting.

The bigest crime of DEI - it killed friendship. Probably was the goal.

Bert and Ernie are gay, or so I've heard for the last 40 years.

The thing is, Riley was shown as being attracted to Val in the trailer, while in the film she shows no sign of being into Val romantically. If Riley really was non hetero, the attraction part of her mind would have been filled with girls she desired, and Disgust would have had the opposite reaction to holding Val's hands. The creators did have Riley act a bit like a teen girl who was into a attractive boy who is the leader of a football team during the hand holding scene, but I think that was because who ever directed that believes that this is how all girls act around their female heroes. When in truth this is how non hetero girls act in those situations. But nothing else in the film hinted that riley was into her, so that scene seems more like a writers mistake do to being not informed about hetero female behavior. Which is understandable is the creator is non hetero, and has no real experience with how hetero women really are compared to non hetero women. About the person in the article hoping for Riley to be non hetero, I've spoken with quite a few people like this, and almost every one of them have a substantial degree of life problems that don]t allow them to think clearly.

Worshipping, relationship. Pick your poison.

I too when I hear of shipping think of the sea and how it is always right. :P

Maybe I am just old fashioned and come from before the time of 'queer coding' or coding in general, but it sounds like Riley is just trying to become friends with Val. It's called what kids do naturally. There's not a romantic/carnal subtext underneath it, and people who think there is frankly need to get out more. Then again, I also blame society replacing the concept of 'close friends' with 'friends with benefits'/'secret lovers' in the last decade and a half.

Disneys just doing this so they have an excuse to make a trilogy out of it and then probably a spin-off series

The Aragorn/Arwen romance was probably just included as the obligatory romance that they thought would be required in any film series.

This has been a trend for a long time, speculation of a protagonists sexuality, even children. When I was younger, if one of my friends had turned to me and said, I wonder if Tommy pickles wants to get it on with Chucky? Or asked if Doug and Skeeter wanted to make out since they seemed so close... I wouldn't have been friend with them anymore. Just sayin'. I mean these are literal children. Why are you even thinking about it?

Final solution to the queer question

I just saw it with both my young kids. Didn’t see any woke or gay type of anything in it. Was really enjoyable and had some good adult humor. Her friends in the movie are just her friends. I was happy to see a normal movie. Now when I saw Buzz light year with my kids, different story

Selling SSRIs the movie

My Lord Erik don't you just love to poke the bear 😅 , You reminded me of Baldur's Gate 3 that whenever maxing out a friendship meter no matter who it was they ere immediately "down to clown" was hilarious , Keep up the good work 🙇

Yeah - you will probanly get some pushback, but people need to leave the kids alone, the natural ambivalence and confusion coming of age is not an affirmative declaration of anything, let kids watch a cartoon, figure it out for themselves and stfu.

This article stinks Chatgpt...

I should’ve done research we just walked out of the movie with a refund. Where is queer baiting they’re doing this, More subtle and sickening

There’s a spot in the movie where they have “mount crushmore” if they were going to hint at Riley being queer they would have done it there… they didn’t. Riley is straight.