Legendary lesbian comic Fortune Feimster is playing a beaver in Zootopia 2 and the internet can’t stop joking about it. That’s right, a lesbian beaver. Need I say more?
Last week, according to Queerty, the House of Mouse unveiled the official cast portraits for the Zootopia sequel, resembling goofy ’80’s headshots with the actor’s “floating head” behind their cartoon character.
The original film’s stars have come back, including Ginnifer Goodwin as Judy Hopps and Jason Bateman playing Nick Wilde—the character that the internet heavily debated whether or not it was okay to find him, as an animated fox, sexy.
Fortune Feimster was announced as a new cast member, a beaver named Nibbles Maplestick. Despite not knowing if the character is actually gay, the internet took that and ran with it, especially in combination with the “Disney’s first openly gay character” meme.
A post on X/Twitter by @itsgibbing wrote: “Disney’s fist openly gay character, a beaver played by a lesbian.” And because gay people love a good “Disney’s first openly gay character” joke, the post reached 3 million views.
This meme started back in 2017 after the live action Beauty and the Beast film, where Disney’s marketing team promoted extremely heavily, the “first ever gay moment” in a Disney movie. It ended up being a tiny section at the end of the film with Josh Gad’s character LeFou dancing with another man. Seriously, that’s it.
There are 17 “first gay characters” in the Disney universe, some of which starting before this Beauty and the Beast incident. There was an unnamed lesbian couple in Finding Dory, a random grieving gay man in Avengers: Endgame—not to be confused with the first gay couple in Marvel in the Eternals.
The meme peaked in 2020 with Lena Waithe’s cyclops character in Onward. It felt ridicuous to the LGBTQ+ community because not only was there another first gay character, she was a one-eyed police officer.
But the first actual gay characters in a Disney film were in the original Zootopia, with the married couple Bucky and Pronk Orynx-Antlerson who lived in the same building as Judy Hopps.
So Nibbles Maplestick is surely not the first openly gay character in a Disney movie.
Zootopia 2 is in theaters now.
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