In inspiration from gay marriage being legalized in the United States, it would interesting to examine how animation entertainment treats the LBGTQ community, in more recent years? In particular, how has the LBGTQ community been represented in children's animation? After all, The children are our future, and we should be sending a positive message of how to treat everyone like you want to be treated. What do we have do to have more gay or transgender characters in our children's shows and films, and how do we go about it?
I think that this would be a very interesting topic to tackle. From what I can tell, there is very little - if any - representation of the LBGTQ community in children's animation. In other words, there is little or no early exposure to the LBGTQ community for children. I would argue that instead of needing to represent that community to teach children to "treat others how they want to be treated", the kids just need exposure to the existence of the community; I, for one, don't think I even really knew what "gay" meant until I was ten or eleven, and I hadn't even heard of any other forms of sexuality. If anything, I'd think that, with the legalization of gay marriage in more and more countries, children need to see enough of the LBGTQ community in media to make it normal. If it's treated as an everyday occurrence (which it really is), I'd think that would promote kindness and acceptance even more than blatantly promoting it. I like how narrow this topic is. You could really have taken this in so many directions; there are so few books and movies in general that seem to represent the LBGTQ community. If you were to write about this topic, I think the major issue would not be the analysis of LBGTQ characters in children's animation (since so few seem to exist), but rather how to get around the public resistance. In that sense, this could be a very difficult topic to cover, because it's more than just an issue of children's animation; it's an entire societal issue. Could you look at a few specific tactics that could help overcome this issue? I'd be interested to see if there was a way that you could approach this topic in spite of the challenges; it's a very important one. – laurakej9 years ago