One Million Moms, a Christian watchdog group that warns parents about potentially inappropriate media aimed at children, is warning against the Disney+ latest Marvel release, “Agatha All Along.” Prior to the show’s release, it was being touted as “the gayest show on Marvel,” according to Ali Ahn, who plays Alice Wu-Gulliver on the show. The show also focuses on the occult, as the titular character, Agatha, is a witch and trailers revealed the show’s heavy focus on witchcraft. “Parents presume that a streaming platform such as Disney+ is designed for children and is the last place parents would expect their children to be confronted with content regarding sexual orientation and sorcery. Issues of this nature are being introduced too early and too soon, and this type of content is becoming extremely common and unnecessary,” One Million Moms warned its supporters.
The show has been happily received by the LGBTQ+ community, with the gay magazine, Out, celebrating that Marvel “is FINALLY entering its queer era.” In an interview with Variety, Sasheer Zamata, who plays the character Jennifer Kale on the show, celebrated the show’s diversity. “Witches are queer, inherently, just because we are outcasts and set aside for many reasons. This show shows a really good representation of different types of people and that we can all use the power we have within to go forward and be great,” she said. Zamata is one of the shows many actors who identify as LGBTQ+, with Joe Locke playing openly queer character “Teen” on the show, and Aubrey Plaza, who has stated she loves both men and women. Plaza’s character, Rio Vidal, has been said to have “sapphic chemistry” with Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha, although the show has remained tight-lipped on the characters’ relationship. Plaza has stated the show “will be a gay explosion by the end of it.”
“Disney+ has decided once again to be politically correct versus providing family-friendly programming. But Disney+ should stick to entertaining instead of pushing an agenda,” wrote One Million Moms. It urged its followers to write Disney and refuse to support the company and Disney+ unless they return to focusing on family-friendly entertainment. Disney+’s move to release such and openly queer show is surprising, given recent revelations that Disney-owned Pixar pressured creators to tone down any gay undertones in the character of Riley in the smash hit, Inside Out 2. According to a report by IGN, ten former Pixar employers informed IGN that they had been given notes to make sure Riley’s relationship with Val, another female character in the movie, remained as platonic as possible. Insiders particularly pointed to the failure of Lightyear as the catalyst for the push, with many of the top brass believing that Lightyear’s highly publicized same-sex kiss led to the film’s failure. “Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay. In the film, what you saw, nothing about Riley says that she is gay, but it is kind of inferred based on certain contexts. And so that is something that they tried to play down at multiple points,” said one source. It’s a strategy that may have worked, given that Inside Out 2 made over $1billion at the box office. How audiences will receive “Agatha All Along,” remains to be seen.