WARNING: The following article includes spoilers for Deadpool 2, in theaters now.


For those Marvel movie fans still clutching their stomachs after the emotional gut punches of April's Avengers: Infinity War, the rebelliously funny relief of Deadpool 2 couldn't come soon enough, giving us all a chance to forgive Josh Brolin for turning our favorite Spider-Man into the world's most depressing meme. But there's also a politically significant reason to embrace the film: It's the first superhero movie with a big release to feature a same sex, super-powered couple -- Negasonic Teenage Warhead and her fellow X-Ma-- oh, sorry Wade, X-Person, Yukio. (Hi, Yukio!)

The way this relationship is introduced in the movie really underplays what a watershed moment this is for a genre that, as GLAAD put it, "too often renders LGBTQ people invisible." With a characteristic mixture of apathy and abrasion, Negasonic gestures to the smiling girl standing beside her in the X-Mansion. She informs Wade Wilson that she is her girlfriend before immediately bashing his "intolerance." Negasonic and Yukio (Hi, Yukio!) continue to appear periodically together throughout the the movie, holding each other's hand in a way that feels distinctively greater than anything that could be mistaken for platonic, but with the casual air typical of a chill Millenial couple who don't need to put a label on what they have together.

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Considering where we are with LGBTQ representation in mainstream media today, this balance couldn't be more important to get right. Leave a queer character or relationship without explicit definition and you're in danger of erasure, ala Dumbledore. Linger too long on the sexually explicit and you're in danger of voyeurism, ala Blue Is The Warmest Color.

The representation that has been so sorely lacking from superhero filmmaking has been thriving in superhero television. The CW's Arrowverse is particularly admirable in its cross-universe effort to include LGBTQ characters who are good, bad, serious, silly, promiscuous, married, divorced, friends. In other words: normal people.

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Normalcy is absolutely the priority, and it's encouraging to hear from the team behind Deadpool 2 that it was for them, too. Negasonic actress Brianna Hildebrand told TooFab.com, "When Ryan [Reynolds] messaged me about it, the only thing I requested it that it not be made a big deal and so I think that's part of what makes it so special, it's just mentioned and it is what it is. I hope the fans can appreciated that about it." She added, "as a member of the LGBTQ community myself, it feels awesome to be paving that path."

While Deadpool 2 deserves the applause it's receiving regarding its approach to sexual progressiveness, we shouldn't ignore where it sits in the wider picture -- something that might not be so positive. It's notable that the first LGBTQ couple in a widely-released superhero movie comes from an R-Rated one.

Deadpool™ is controversial, edgy and risk-taking, which frames this landmark moment in the same context by default. This unintentionally works against the normalcy that the actors and writers want us to view this relationship in. You could argue that the message of the film -- finding your own family in a bunch of a misfits -- holds a mirror up to the place that LGBTQ folk sadly still occupy in society. But while queer characters might be distinctly "on-brand" for Deadpool movies, it's important not to make them the exclusive home for queerness. Particularly if that home has been built in such a nebulous place in the X-Men movie universe, a cinematic universe that, let's not forget, has failed to give us even the barest hint of a bisexual Mystique across six films.

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Normalizing LGBTQ characters and relationships in the superhero genre means having it run through media aimed at every kind of audience, not just orbiting around the fringes. When we look at the repressed tokenism Disney thinks passes for an "exclusively gay moment" in Beauty and the Beast, or the missed opportunities of inclusion in Marvel's Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, or the barely-explored lesbianism in Wonder Woman, or worse, the deliberate closeting of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter spin-off series, the message is loud and clear about where LGBTQ characters belong and where they don't belong when it comes to mainstream, family-friendly cinema. We can hardly say that the Deadpool series isn't mainstream considering it's record-breaking first entry, but it isn't remotely family-friendly -- no matter how many underage viewers sneak into screenings or watch blurry cam footage online.

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As it stands, explicit gayness is for adult eyes only in the world of modern superhero blockbusters, which feels more like a compromise than equality. For Deadpool 2, including queer characters falls into the series' unique selling point of getting away with what every other superhero movie can't. Until the rest of the genre can answer that challenge, the message here will be that LGBTQ relationships are not child-friendly enough to be seen anywhere else other in those that feature the titular hero being ripped in half, forcing Colossus to drop an F-bomb.

In theaters nationwide, director David Leitch’s Deadpool 2 stars Ryan Reynolds as the titular Deadpool, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, T.J. Miller as Weasel, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Stefan Kapičić as Colossus, Zazie Beetz as Domino, Julian Dennison as Russell and Josh Brolin as Cable.