There’s a moment — when you’re queer, you know the one — where you’re watching a film you’ve seen fifteen times and something snags. Not the plot. Not the hero. The other one. The character you weren’t supposed to want to watch. The one who moves differently, speaks differently, takes up space in a way that feels almost illicit given what the film is about to do to them.
You didn’t have language for why. You just knew you couldn’t look away.
This is what I want to talk about. Not whether the Disney villains are queer coded — they are, that’s not a debate — but what it meant that they were. What it did to us. What it built in you before you had a single word for what you were.
Jafar is my case study, and I want to be precise about why.
Ursula gets cited constantly in this conversation and I understand why — she’s spectacular, she’s a sea witch, she was animated by a man who based her on the drag queen Divine. But Ursula has been so thoroughly reclaimed as a queer icon that she’s been somewhat defanged as evidence of damage. She’s a celebration now. She’s a Halloween costume and a tattoo and a feminist reading about women who take up space. All of that is true and valid and also not quite what I’m talking about.
Jafar is flamboyant in a way that is never commented on by the film.
His robes, his silhouette, the particular quality of his gestures — fluid, precise, aesthetically deliberate. He moves like a man who has constructed his presentation carefully and is not apologising for it. He speaks with flair. He is, unmistakably, a certain kind of man — expressive, femme in register, magnetic in a way the film doesn’t know how to account for except to make him the villain.
And then there is the marriage plot.
Jafar wants to marry Jasmine. This is his plan. This is what he’s working toward. But watch what happens when he’s near her — there is no erotic charge. No possession, no desire, no threat of the kind every other Disney villain who pursues a princess carries in his body. He wants what the marriage means. The sultanate. The legitimacy. The social architecture that a strategic heterosexual arrangement provides to a man for whom desire runs elsewhere.
Whether that was conscious or not, it’s legible. And Andreas Deja, the openly gay animator who shaped Jafar’s movement and physicality (and Jafar was voiced by openly gay voice actor Jonathan Freeman), also animated Gaston, also animated Scar. A gay man, handed the villains, brought something to each of them that made them the most interesting figure in the frame.
I doubt the studio did intended to make queerness magnetic. It happened anyway.
Here is what I want to say about the heroes.
Aladdin is more of a blank. He is charming in the way that leads actors are charming — functional, accessible, designed not to snag on anything. You slide off him. He is the vehicle through which the story resolves into its correct heteronormative shape: boy gets girl, family is formed, the wrong kind of man is destroyed.
But Jafar has presence. He has wit and fury and aesthetic intelligence and a parrot who functions as Greek chorus. He is, by every measure of narrative interest, the more compelling person in the room.
The queer child watching knows this. Before they have language for it, before they know what they are or why this particular figure pulls at them, they know. They keep watching the wrong scenes. They find themselves, obscurely, not quite wanting the hero to win.
This is not a minor thing. This is her first map.
Disney is an American cultural export, and this matters more than it might seem.
The films don’t present themselves as ideology. They present themselves as stories — as the way stories work, the shape narrative takes when it’s doing its job correctly. Boy and girl. Love as destiny. Family as resolution. The elimination of the threat to that structure as the condition for the happy ending.
For an American child inside that value system, the grammar might be invisible precisely because it’s ambient. For a European child watching the same films, there’s a particular kind of alienation available — the sense that something is being presented as universal that doesn’t quite match the world you actually live in. The values aren’t yours. But they’re delivered with the full authority of the dominant cultural export, in the most beautiful animation you’ve ever seen, with songs you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
And inside all of that, the only character who feels like something is the one the story is about to destroy.
This has turned into a fandom moment.
The Loki over Thor phenomenon (Loki got his own spin-off, Thor did not), the villain-lover reading circles, the morally complex antagonist as the character everyone actually cares about — this isn’t a new taste. It isn’t a generational quirk or a social media trend or evidence that audiences have become too sympathetic to bad people.
This is the long tail of a generation of queer children who found themselves in the wrong character and never forgot it.
They weren’t loving the villain. They were recognising something. They were watching the only figure in the frame who moved like they moved, who wanted things sideways, who didn’t fit inside the story’s moral universe and was punished for it — and they felt, without words, that one, that’s the one that’s like me.
The villain got destroyed. We watched it happen. And we went back and watched the film again.
This is what I mean when I say queer-coded villains are a pedagogy.
Not a deliberate one, necessarily. Not a conspiracy. But a lesson delivered at the level of narrative grammar, repeated across every major animated film of a generation, consistent enough to constitute a map: this is what you are. This is what happens to what you are. This is how the story ends for you.
The queer child doesn’t receive this as politics. They receive it as story-law. As the way things work in the world around them.
And then they grow up and find language and look back at those films and understand, with a retroactive fury, what they were being taught before they could consent to the lesson.
The damage and the recognition are not separate things. You don’t get to have one without the other.
The villain was the most alive person in the room. That was real. The pull you felt toward them was real, and it was telling you something true about yourself before you had any other way of knowing it. The fact that the story punished them for being alive in that particular way is also real. You absorbed both of these things simultaneously, at an age when you had no framework for either.
You weren’t loving the wrong character.
You were finding yourself in the only one they gave you.
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One snake bite. One moment of clarity she really didn’t ask for. Sasha Barrett has survived two years at the Praetorian Academy — turns out her captain was always going to be the most dangerous thing in the field.
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