gildedbadger:

a-series-of-awkward-moments:

Queer Coding Male Animated Villains by The Princess and The Scrivener

Female villains are usually cold and powerful, regal and impressive. But male villains, how often are they flirtatious or predatory? Manipulative, physically weak, and easily frightened? How often are they sassy, or thin, or well-dressed?

These aren’t a smattering of random characteristics, these kinds of traits are grouped together pretty frequently in the form of what’s known as the “sissy archetype.” A “sissy” is defined as a person who is effeminate or cowardly, usually used to insult men by saying they have feminine qualities. TV Tropes refers to this as the “Camp Gay” trope.

Now there’s nothing wrong with being an effeminate, fashion-loving gay man. But when it’s the predominant representation of the queer community, it leads to negative and restrictive stereotypes of an extremely diverse community. And to take it one step further, the problem is even worse when this kind of character only appears in children’s media as the villain.

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Yeah okay…all of these are also examples of Jewish coding, effeminate/cowardly/manipulative/physically weak/etc all the things pointed to in this post are all stereotypes about Jewish men and are all things used to code characters as Jewish. And, they have been for a long long time – associating something you wanted to be seen as negative with Jews is a tactic people have been doing for centuries and it results in people coding characters as Jewish in order to have people have a negative response to them, including homosexuality (there’s a reason the ‘sins’ of sodomy and ursary were historically considered linked by the church its because they associated both of them with us) and including, very much so, gender nonconformity, amoung a lot of other things.

This also happens with female villains, Mother Gothel is a very very clear example of Jewish coding in a female villain. She has very stereotypically Jewish appearance and traits and she experiences the same gender nonconforming coding as a lot of male villain examples given.

It doesn’t have to be deliberate, coding (any kind of coding) often isn’t but it’s still there, and in this case of talking about coding missing the massive overarching example is a big oversight (particularly if you think Mother Gothel isn’t an example of negative coding, somehow)