raya and the last dragon and implicit queerness

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1 min readMar 15, 2021

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Raya and Namaari in Raya and the Last Dragon.

I liked Raya and the Last Dragon pretty well, overall. Drift partner and I saw it last weekend at a drive-in (drive-ins are an absolutely blessed thing during the pandemic, I must say) and, while we had some questions and thoughts, we talked them through on the drive home and were left with the thought: holy crap, this cartoon was gay*.

For a refresher, Raya and the Last Dragon is about a fictional pan-South Asian world. Once upon a time, the area was called Kumandra and was populated by both humans and dragons; some shadow monsters called the Druun attacked, freezing people as statues, and were only repelled by the dragons’ sacrificing themselves. The last dragon, Sisu, fought the Druun off with a magical orb. Then the kingdom splits into five kingdoms, each named after part of the dragon — Fang, Heart, Spine, Talon, and Tail — and each vying for control of the orb. It stays in Heart for five hundred years, and that’s where our story starts.

Full story here.

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if you throw things away, I make them gay

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