Not to be like, "Person who has only felt represented by Lumity, experiencing representation for a second time: Wow... Getting real 'Lumity' vibes from this...", but I feel as if my relationship to Garylee now is quite similar to that of Lumity, when The Owl House was still coming out. I was still identified as exclusively sapphic (not as both WLW and MLM, as I do now) for most of when it was releasing, and it was my first time experiencing seeing myself on a screen in the way that I did. This sort of soft and cute love story; young love personified. I was Luz and Amity's age when the show began, and I identified heavily with Luz, as she was a young bisexual girl who had been the victim of bullying, and whose portrayal of neurodivergence was a reflection of myself on-screen to an extent which I had never seen before.

Now, Fionna and Cake is out, and we have a soft and cute love story between two male characters, which came out rather soon after I began to identify as MLM. I am the same age as Gary and Marshall Lee, and I identify heavily with Marshall Lee. He's a bisexual artist who has a relationship with his mother that I heavily relate to. I had never seen a portrayal of a mother-child relationship so similar to mine and my mother's before.

On top of this, though, I think there's an aspect of these characters being older pieces of queer representation, which were never allowed the time to be fleshed out, that really makes this story special to me. Marshall Lee and Prince Gumball were always intended to be canon, just like Princess Bubblegum and Marceline were. But, because of the time where they were aired, and the limited amount of material that the Fionna and Cake universe had, they weren't given any moments on-screen. The only hints that were given for the two of them were in the rather obscure comics, while Princess Bubblegum and Marceline got to kiss on-screen. To see them together, officially, and finally share their long-overdue on-screen kiss, was genuinely very healing to a small part of me that was still sad that the two of them had been left ambiguous.

A big contributor to the feeling of connection that I have, too, is the fact that this is the genuinely the first piece of queer men's representation in animated media (which is my favorite form of media, and my special interest) that wasn't either the detested "gay dads" trope, or shoved to the side / only briefly shown (with these tropes often going hand-in-hand, as well). I know that queer representation is not a competition, but when I grew up watching The Owl House, She-Ra, OK KO, and Steven Universe, I simply couldn't help but take notice that WLW relationships were finally being represented on a large scale, while MLM ones were usually left as subtext to be confirmed on Twitter, if they existed at all.

There was Kipo's gay couple, but they were VERY much overshadowed. Dead End's couple was cute, but Logs is hardly a character at all, instead playing the role of the 'generic love interest'. And, besides, they were often pushed to the side in favor of the plot. And the fact that these are the ONLY two examples that I know of a MLM couple shown explicitly on-screen should show you the extent of the problem that I describe.

So, it felt like a breath of fresh air to finally get a MLM couple in animation where their love story is explicit. It's relevant, it's not pushed aside. It's dwelled on. It's soft, sweet and filled to the brim with cutesy romance tropes (meet-cute, grand romantic gestures, giving up everything for each other, the classic falling-in-love montage) that I've never seen applied to MLM couples in animation before. That, plus their inclusion feeling like righting the wrong of them being overshadowed previously (in the media I consumed as a kid), plus the intense connection I feel to the portrayal of Marshall Lee's relationship to his family, plus the series releasing at a very rough point for my mental health (giving me something to be happy about), plus their relationship being the type of queer representation that I've always felt the most connection to (sweet, soft, and low-stakes), PLUS how I see my own relationship in theirs, has left me attached to Gary and Marshall Lee to an almost comically intense degree. My emotional support queers, if you will. Everybody say, "Thank you, gay people."