Are Non-Romantic Stories Anti-Love?

Image description: An image of Elsa in the Disney film Frozen 2. The Frozen films and Elsa herself are incredibly popular, something which becomes interesting when you consider that Elsa is a non-romantic heroine. But are all Disney fans ready to accept a lack of romance for these characters, especially from a studio that used to feature romance so prominently? Today I have the unpleasant task of unpacking these attitudes more fully, using a video I watched recently as the jumping off point.

I’m going to be honest – the post I’m writing today is not at all the post I want to write. Back when I first started the blog, writing posts about negative topics, while not exactly fun, was something I considered important and valuable. In a way, it felt almost cathartic to tackle these subjects head-on, like something I was doing to empower my younger self who didn’t have the ability to discuss these things, and something I hoped would empower others too. Now, after running the blog for over five years, I have to admit I’m tired of writing posts about these types of topics and that, rather than feeling any type of catharsis, these topics are honestly just kind of exhausting.

In my last post, I was riding something of a high, having come across some incredible videos discussing the equally incredible works of Studio Ghibli. These videos were chock full of amazing interpretations about the mature and often aromantic ways (their words, surprisingly, not mine) that the legendary Japanese animation studio portrays love. But even better, they discussed why these portrayals are more valuable than the more traditional interpretations of love we’re used to seeing, especially here in the West. One of those common sources of romance is Disney movies, something I grew up on, and it was interesting to see them analyzed compared to the very different works of Studio Ghibli, something I discussed more in that post.

However, for as happy as that post and the videos made me, a different video from a completely different channel led me to this topic today – a video, ironically enough, about Disney. Unlike my previous post, this was not a video that filled me with delight and a burning desire to talk about a subject; rather, this video left me feeling exhausted and dejected. It left me feeling that, after the beautiful step forward of the Ghibli videos, this was just a giant step or two backwards. For that reason, unlike that previous post, I’m not going to shout out the video that inspired today’s post, since my analysis of it is not going to be positive.

However, I do believe the person who made the video did so in good faith, even though I think her analysis is extremely flawed. In a pinned post in her comment section, she emphasizes that she’s not trying to say Disney films should be romance only, but rather it shouldn’t be all romance or all non-romance. She also admits that much of what she’s saying is geared towards her own preferences and, by her own admission, it’s not that deep. As such, I don’t want to misrepresent or shame her; her channel seems great and she seems like someone who wants to create thoughtful analysis. However, the things she discusses in the video are things I deeply want to unpack because I know this is a much larger issue and much more serious than the video’s lighthearted approach would have you believe.

For those reasons and more, I also admit that this post is going to be somewhat more rambling than my previous post. Most of it is just going to be me unpacking certain points from the video, often with my own branching thoughts, and I admit I’m not writing this post with a great deal of emotional objectivity. As I said, these topics have left me feeling very drained lately, and I know that’s going to show in the way I analyze this topic. However, like I used to back in the day, I’m doing so in the hope that maybe discussing it all will help me organize my own tangled thoughts and, if I’m very lucky, feel a little better.

Spoiler warning!

Frozen & Frozen 2

Brave

Moana

Wish

Various other animated Disney films like Cinderella, Mulan, Tangled, Encanto, etc.

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One Step Back

In my intro, I mentioned that watching The Take’s amazing Ghibli videos last time felt like a step forward, whereas watching this Disney-centric video made me feel like I was taking a big step or two back. But what is it about this different video and different channel that has me so irked? In the most basic terms, this video centered on the more recent Disney trend of de-emphasizing romance in their movies, going so far as to declare (in a way the narrator herself admitted was a bit dramatic) that Disney is now “Anti-Love” and claiming that this is a problem.

Now, something I want to make perfectly clear is that of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion and having different forms of analysis is not only important, but essential. But what frustrates me so much about this video is not that the narrator believes Disney is at its best when it’s romantic – an opinion I can understand, even if I don’t agree with it. Rather, what bothers me about this video is the fact that it reflects a world that still doesn’t understand how diversity or representation work, which is a topic that upsets me in every form and every outlet, and is definitely not just a problem in this video.

To elaborate, within the video itself the narrator discusses the fact that romantic storylines used to be a staple for Disney, referring to the fact that for decades, every single Disney princess had a love story, compared to its most recent heroines, who have no love interest at all. Specifically, the video centers most heavily on Merida from the Disney/Pixar film Brave, Elsa from Frozen, Moana from Moana, Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon, Mirabel from Encanto, and Asha from Wish. It then goes on to wonder why Disney seems to be conflating the idea of characters being strong with also being non-romantic, and wonders if these films are trying to say love or falling in love is weak.

Image description: Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon

To be fair, I do agree with the video on some level – chiefly in that falling in love is not a weakness and characters who do have love stories should not be seen as such. For many years, I think it was rather chic to view Disney princesses such as Snow White or Cinderella as being weak or critique them for their love stories, and I believe the more nuanced look that many fans take nowadays is often quite refreshing and more accurate. If the video had stopped there, I might have been okay with it, even if I do think some of the video’s arguments are extremely reductive just because of its eagerness to defend the concept of the classic Disney love story.

However, where the video’s argument really falls apart for me (and why it’s barbed uncomfortably in my brain for the past three weeks) is the way it casts modern Disney heroines using the description of “loveless” and views these non-romantic stories as making a commentary that strong women would be weighed down by love. The narrator even goes on to mention her belief that a non-romantic protagonist like Elsa would have been better off getting a love interest in the second Frozen film – even though she admits this might be something of an unpopular opinion.

Admittedly, she does also mention that Disney’s non-romantic characters are important and that she appreciated Disney moving away from romantic storytelling. However, she adds the words “for a time” after that sentiment, which only manages to compound my annoyance with this idea. As the video itself mentions, it used to be that every Disney princess fell in love, meaning that pretty much all of Disney’s best-known films included love stories. From as early as Snow White to as late as Rapunzel in Tangled, these stories featured diverse romances, dozens of times or more. But the video mentions half a dozen instances of princesses/heroines without love interests and somehow that’s supposed to be more than enough?

While I don’t think the video intended to imply this, nor do I think it was the narrator’s intention to be dismissive, I think the analysis demonstrates an inability to acknowledge why non-romantic storylines are so important. This video makes it seem like non-romantic storylines are a quaint novelty that should run its course in favor of “normal” storylines – ones that include romance. This is not a simple issue limited to just one YouTuber talking about why they love love and wish to see more of it in their media; rather, this is a legitimate issue I’ve seen time and again in fandom spaces and in media itself, one that I think needs to be addressed if things are ever going to change for the better.

My Take On This Take

I have mentioned this story on the blog before – chiefly in my “Non-Romantic Disney Heroines” post – but for the topic of today’s post, I think it bears repeating. In 2012, when the Pixar film, Brave, came out, I was seventeen years old. I had only been defining myself as asexual for a few years at most by that point, and had much more recently come to understand and embrace my aromantic identity as well. More unpleasantly, I was beginning to recognize how much media, even media I loved, was not meant for me or was even sometimes actively hostile to me. Thus I was excited for what Brave had to offer – a strong heroine who seemed unconcerned with romantic love in a way I hadn’t often seen, especially as someone who had largely grown up on the more romantic movies of the Disney canon.

While I still loved romantic Disney movies and absolutely still love them to this day, Brave spoke to deeper hunger in me than I realized, and I eagerly went to see the movie in theaters. About halfway through the movie, however, I began to get paralyzed by doubts. What if I had the entirely wrong read on things? What if the headstrong Princess Merida, who boldly declares she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be ready for a relationship, ended up in one by the end of the film regardless? It’s an all-too-common trope, after all, that a character insists they’ll never fall in love only to find the perfect person by the movie’s end.

I watched the rest of the movie with my trepidations mounting, awaiting the inevitable rug pull… only to get to the film’s conclusion and see that no, there was no love interest for Merida, no turn towards a more “normal” happy ending, no commentary that she would eventually need to find romance. As far as I could be concerned, Merida was like me and the movie respected that. Sitting there as the credits rolled, I cried – tears of joy, tears of feeling seen, and tears of knowing what it felt like to be represented.

Since then, Merida has always been deeply important to me as a character and Brave has always meant a great deal to me as a movie. Even as an adult, what Merida means to me is so transcendent that I can’t help but feel like a child meeting their hero whenever I see her. A few years ago, during a trip to Walt Disney World with my best friend, she commented on the picture we took with the face character for Princess Merida, noting how happy I look to see her. This is because she’s an amazing character, of course, but most primarily, it’s because of the representation she gave me.

Image description: Merida from Brave

Admittedly, I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have Merida as representation. Since I was already coming to terms with my aspec identity, it likely wouldn’t have affected my ability to get in touch with that side of myself; I admit I also did have other things that were helping me on that journey, so she wouldn’t have been the only outlet. But if I feel this way about the character, I’m sure there are other aspec people who felt the same way, and for whom Merida may have been the character that allowed them to come to terms with that side of themselves. The idea of someone not being able to have that simply because someone else prioritizes seeing a romance on screen more is admittedly a little terrifying.

To me, this is the biggest place where the video falls down. The narrator admits that she intended the video to largely be lighthearted, most of it based on her own personal love of romance and her belief that Disney used to be the best at portraying these relationships. Compared to the Studio Ghibli videos, this strikes me as very ironic, since not only does Ghibli prove there are deeper romances to be had, but a lot of what the Ghibli videos emphasized was the idea that maybe this overly romanticized version of love is doing more harm than good. For all those reasons and more, I bristle at the idea that we’re supposed to be eager to give up even these little scraps of quasi-representation just so Disney can start making love stories again.

However, all of these personal reasons aside, I also believe the video doesn’t take as much time looking at the whole picture as it probably should. Again, this is likely because the narrator intended this to be her not-too-serious thoughts on the topic, but that in and of itself is part of the issue. Advocating for more romance in storytelling, especially when you see a studio shifting away from that and into other forms of storytelling, is not something I believe can be spoken about lightly. As such, some of the video’s points end up feeling a little half baked.

For a start, I find the claim that recent Disney films have been devoid of romance to be somewhat baffling. As an example, the video makes repeated mentions of Frozen, citing Elsa’s lack of a romance… but Frozen’s secondary protagonist, Anna, does have a romance. While the creator of the video may not count that because the romance is on the side rather than front and center, that interpretation only bugs me more. It seems to imply that it’s not good enough for romance to be a secondary focus for another character, but rather that it has to be presented for the protagonist in order to be satisfying.

The severe limitation this attitude places on aspec representation is obvious. It seems to say that any aspec representation (whether overt or by proxy) should only be allowed to happen on the side or in the background, not in the forefront of a story. By extension, it seems to imply that aspec characters should always be relegated to these same statuses rather than be allowed to be the heroes or main focuses of a piece of media. Of course, any representation would be something to celebrate, whether it’s the main focus of the story or in the background, which is something I discuss a lot when I do book reviews. However, having allosexual people outright gatekeep how far aspec people are allowed to reach is extremely troubling.

Image description: Moana, from the film of the same name

I know that take sounds unnecessarily dramatic, but this attitude is something I tend to see a lot – people are okay with aspec people in fandom or aspec characters in their favorite works, as long as they themselves don’t really have to be bothered by them. As long as these things exist in the background and don’t otherwise “interfere” with the rest of the story, then people are fine with it. The minute aspec plotlines, characters, or concerns try to come into the foreground of a story, however, then it’s suddenly treated like a problem.

Returning to the substance of the video, however, and the inconsistency in what counts as a romance or not, I admit I’m curious what makes something a romantic film versus a non-romantic film. Something I talk about a lot when I analyze Korean dramas is that many of my favorites feature romance without it being the sole focus. Romance is an important part of these stories, but the unfolding plot or the development of the characters is the story’s primary concern and the romance is there to add flavor, not be the entire dish. Naturally, I think many of the best Disney films also follow this same formula.

For instance, I have always loved the movie Mulan, the story of a brave young woman who disguises herself as a man to take her aged father’s place in the Chinese military when Huns invade their country. While Mulan does eventually find a love interest in the form of General Shang, this is definitely not the primary focus of the film; instead, it’s a story about Mulan’s bravery, the friendships and camaraderie she forms with the other soldiers, and the way she learns to find value in herself by not having to define herself in one rigid gender role or another. The creator of the video even mentions Mulan as a good example of a strong female protagonist who has love alongside other things, so I believe she would agree with my analysis. However, given her analysis of Frozen, shouldn’t Mulan also be seen as an “anti-romantic” film because the romance is not as pronounced? Or is this nevertheless an acceptable amount of romance because it happens for the protagonist?

Because of these murky definitions, I can’t really make a proper comparison for how many “romantic” Disney films there are versus “non-romantic” films. One thing I can say, however, is that I find it very suspect to consider not portraying romance as being “anti-love” or “anti-romantic.” I also find it especially frustrating that only a handful of movies are being used to try and paint a picture of Disney’s attitudes towards love and romance, as if having this small sample size of films without romance is somehow too many and constitutes some kind of undesirable shift in attitude.

As stated before, I know the video is advocating for a balance, not specifically “all romance, all the time”. However, while a balance would be nice, it’s not the end of the world to have five or six non-romantic heroes, and the video seems to not understand that these non-romantic characters can be incredibly important to people like me. When we consider how many Disney protagonists are romantic versus the ones that aren’t, trying to paint Disney as somehow “anti-love” makes me not only scratch my head, but makes me wonder when and how representation will ever flourish.

Why This Matters

As I said earlier, this is not the post I want to be writing, and I admit I feel more than a little petty writing an over four-thousand-word takedown of an opinion analysis. At least a dozen times while writing this post, I stopped to ask myself, “is it really that deep?” But the reason why I wrote this post – the reason why my answer to that question every single time was “yes, it is” – is because these attitudes are out there, and they’re often not expressed as sweetly and mildly as they are in this video.

I know the narrator of this video isn’t trying to say that non-romantic characters should never be portrayed in media. But many of her opinions are unintentionally advocating for removing even the scant aspec vibes of these non-romantic characters and the video ignores the importance of their existence, something which I know all too well. Multiple times, the narrator says that removing romance from these newer films sends the message that love is a weakness or that it shouldn’t be portrayed. But I would counter that only showing love or overemphasizing love – or, in the video’s case, automatically viewing love’s absence as some kind of metacommentary about romanticism – sends the message that being non-romantic is abnormal, a very real and very damaging attitude.

Image description: Mirabel from Encanto

I think her analysis misses out on the fact that having a few non-romantic Disney princesses doesn’t endanger romance as a genre, but ignoring non-romantic characters does have an actual impact – the kind of impact I’ve spent over a decade of my life discussing in one form or another. So when I hear her say that she believes a lack of romance sometimes hinders these stories, it’s hard not to get both upset and very surprised.

As I stated in a previous post when talking about Wish, romance may have made that film better, but it might not have. When it comes to Disney’s recent string of non-romantic films, it can’t be said one way or another that romance helps or hurts these films. After all, some of the non-romantic films, like Wish and Raya and the Last Dragon, were box office bombs, but others, like Frozen and Moana, can be counted among some of the most successful Disney animated films of all time. Therefore, I don’t think lack of romance is a problem or that adding romance into these films would somehow magically improve them.

Again, however, this problem goes deeper. Earlier I mentioned the narrator’s self-confessed unpopular opinion that Elsa should have gotten a romantic interest, something to which the narrator herself even jokingly says people might be looking at and saying “girl, no.” I can confirm that was definitely my own personal reaction. While fan belief that Elsa should be in a romance is nothing new, and while I completely support the narrator’s right to believe this, I can’t help but feel dismayed to hear this, as it demonstrates to me how difficult it is to get non-romantic characters in the first place.

These are not films where I am actively expecting to see aspec characters, but the idea that even these non-romantic characters are treated as some kind of irregularity that stands in the way of romantic storytelling is concerning for actual aspec representation in other mediums. Not having romance in a piece of media really doesn’t, in the grand scheme of things, affect allosexual or alloromantic people; but for aspec people, never seeing ourselves portrayed or even just given basic respect does have an impact, and it’s even more negatively impactful to see allosexual fans longing to return to a time before this representation was more pronounced.

Image description: Asha from Wish

Something I’m told all the time is that if I don’t like the new direction of a piece of media (i.e., I don’t like that an aspec-friendly piece of media is getting not aspec friendly), I should just stick with the old stuff. It’s a very unpleasant thing to be told, and as such, I would never tell it to someone else. However, having heard this for years, I find it somewhat ironic that it seems like allosexual people don’t like to be told the same thing. In the case of this video and the people who are weary of non-romantic Disney characters, it would be very easy to tell them to go back to the classics or the Disney renaissance if they’re that desperate for a romance, since those stories still exist and are still incredible, and meanwhile you can leave the non-romantic Disney characters for those of us who need them. But despite this being the typical “solution” that aspec people are given, it seems allosexual people are unwilling to follow their own advice.

I’m of course not saying that every aspec person will feel seen and represented by these non-romantic Disney stories and characters; I’m not even saying that every aspec person will want or need to be represented by these stories at all. But I believe that all of these stories and characters help us get a little bit closer to being allowed to exist as ourselves, not as background players to be ignored, disrespected, and forgotten. To do that, we need more than just a few characters here and there to get us to where we need to be. Having this scant representation isn’t the full story, it’s merely a baseline, and if we want to move the needle past that baseline, we need the help of allosexual people. We need allosexual people to be willing to give aspec or aspec adjacent characters a chance. We need them to let aspec people into fandom spaces. We need them to begin redefining their definitions of what it means to be normal or what normal life should look like. 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking romance or sexual stories, or emphasizing those things in your life. But when you think everyone should want those things or that media needs more of them, I would argue this is the exact opposite of celebrating diversity and not only limits aspec people, but limits other allosexual people as well. At the end of the day, this video is merely an easily pointed-to example of a phenomenon that exists throughout media, fandom, and other spaces that I believe is a toxic limitation to creativity and storytelling far more than a lack of romance ever could be. But if allosexual people can give aspec representation a chance – and in so doing, give aspec people a chance – I believe that will be a very important start.