‘The Owl House’ Let Luz and Amity Share an Onscreen Kiss!
The Disney Channel’s animated witchcraft adventure The Owl House has been unapologetically and proudly queer, so much so that I hadn’t realized that our hero Luz and her girlfriend, Amity, hadn’t actually kissed—well, until the most recent episode.
**Spoilers for The Owl House.**
Amity attempts to prevent her mother from assisting the big bad in stripping magic away from the world of the show and ends up grounded, unable to help Luz. However, Luz decides to go help her sweet potato. The two embrace and share in an onscreen kiss that’s so good it get an animation quality bump.
It’s sweet and right in the middle of the episode, so even after it, there’s more plot! And more of them calling each other girlfriends. As someone who has been watching the growth of LGBTQ representation in children’s animation, the kiss between Luz and Amity is a huge deal.
A kiss between two girls—teenage girls—calling each other girlfriends, and this moment arriving before the end of the show or during the emotional climax is a normalizing thing. For so long, same-sex kisses has been hidden in the background or just shown in one “blink and you miss the moment” in the finale. And to think I’d been happy with just cheek kisses until now.
Korrasami (Korra and Asami in The Legend of Korra) got to end the series holding hands in a very sapphic moment, but didn’t get to kiss until the comics that came after. Bubbline (Marceline and Princess Bubblegum in Adventure Time) got a kiss, after years of subtext, in the final episode, and we didn’t get more kisses until Distant Lands on HBO Max. Even She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, with its openly queer supporting characters, couldn’t confirm Catra and Adora fully until the final episode. Sapphire and Ruby in Steven Universe also found themselves being gendered differently in other international dubs.
And even with this, we are seeing a lot more representation of wlw relationships than mlm relationships, and they are still overwhelmingly cis. The Owl House is ending in a few more episodes because it wasn’t “on brand” enough for Disney, and part of that is how unapologetically queer the series has been—not to mention leaning into the darkness of the Boiling Isles. It is frustrating to see shows like The Owl House get the knees cut out from under them for delivering the same kind of romantic representation that other shows do. The Proud Family, Kim Possible, and so many other shows deal heavily with romance and romantic tension.
While Disney is leaning into its queer fandom, with a pride collection for the first time, following their tension with the Republican government in Florida, what does that mean when the company can’t support LGBTQ creators properly? If Disney is really committed to supporting the queer community, then they need to make sure, moving forward, that works created and featuring us aren’t canceled early.
And they can also stop pretending that their boring lip service in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and mainstream animated movies is something interesting. Putting “Love is Love is Love” on America Chavez’s jacket is not representation.
(featured image: Disney)
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