If you look through the Tumblr tags for the Descendants movies, you’re more likely to see fan content made for Mal (Dove Cameron) and Evie (Sofia Carson) together than for Mal and her canonical boyfriend Ben (Mitchell Hope) or Evie and her canonical boyfriend Doug (Zachary Gibson). The main canon heterosexual pairing for the franchise, Ben/Mal, only comes in third place. At time of writing, the two most popular ships were Mal/Evie and Jay/Carlos, both non-canon and non-heterosexual pairings.
Perhaps this is best shown through the statistics for Descendants fanfiction on Archive of Our Own. Mal (Dove Cameron) and Evie (Sofia Carson) in Descendants.ĭespite being as clean-cut and heteronormative as every other Disney Channel movie, the Descendants trilogy has acquired a vocal LGBTQ fandom. Maybe–just maybe–it’s because we’re not straight. There has to be a reason why we’re all still so obsessed with these movies.
Furthermore, it’s not as if Descendants is a new classic like the High School Musical (HSM) trilogy (2006-2008) it’s too much of a cash grab based on intellectual property rights to even compare to the innocent sweetness of HSM. Many of these people are in their late teens or even older– definitely not the target audience for a Disney Channel movie. There is so much more (and better) media discuss in this day and age, yet I can still find people on Twitter talking about the end of Descendants 3 like it just came out yesterday. It has been almost four months since the final Descendants movie first aired, and despite my short attention span, I still find myself thinking about this franchise. Yet, my love for these movies is r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s. The trilogy’s metaphors for American politics is clumsy at best. I am not going to pretend that Descendants makes sense.
It has even cashed in on reboot-remix fever through a series of Disney Channel Original Movies: the Descendants trilogy (2015-2019), which revolves around the children of all the famous Disney heroes and villains, who inexplicably live in a world much like our own. It has earned a fortune retelling not only classic fairytale stories but reboots and rewrites of its own retellings that few people need. Disney, in particular, has made a name for itself following Twain’s words to the letter. Twain’s words, first recorded in the nineteenth century, ring especially true in the current age of reboots, remakes, and retellings. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations”. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
Author Mark Twain once said, “There is no such thing as a new idea.