‘Shrek’ Superfans Remind Right-Wing Snowflakes That the Franchise Has Always Been A Little Queer

Conservative Shrek fans fear that the upcoming Shrek 5 will ruin the franchise with portrayals of non-traditional sexuality and gender identity because they ain’t the sharpest tools in the shed.   

In April 2001, an animated film premiered in theaters across the country that would change movie animation and children’s entertainment forever. Loosely based on William Steig’s 1990 picture book Shrek!, the Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy-starred Shrek film jump-started DreamWorks Animation’s decades-long challenge of Disney’s dominance in a giant middle finger to the creatives’ old bosses while pushing the boundary with mature humor that they snuck over kids’ heads and under a PG rating.  

As the release of a planned Shrek 5 looms in the near future, the agitated conservative forces engaged in an endlessly stupid culture war have warned DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures not to attempt to poison America’s children with depictions of transgressive, non-heteronormative, gender-nonconforming lifestyles. According to conservatives who throw tantrums over kids’ movies, only straight, traditional, cisgendered couples are allowed in children’s media, so DreamWorks needs to stick to telling stories about a talking donkey and his ass-eating dragon wife.  

Unfortunately for all the snowflakes who enjoy whipping themselves up into a vaguely fetishized outrage by automatically assuming that every new kids' movie will be a hyper-woke nightmare filled with trigender demisexual unicorns and polyamorous multiracial DEI wizards, Shrek superfans and even Shrek historians quickly arrived to inform all the pre-triggered commenters that the series has been taking a walk on the woke side since Day One.  

Seriously, thus far in the Shrek franchise, these kids’ films have featured an interspecies marriage between a donkey and a dragon that spawned chimera-like hybrid children, constant, drastic body alterations that would make the average post-op transgender person dizzy and all sorts of crossdressing, gender-roles-reversing and tradition-wrecking characters, themes and storylines. Shrek having a gay thought in Shrek 5 would be so positively tame by the standards of the Shrek universe that it would probably amount to a single one-liner in the inevitably gag-heavy final draft.  

But, as others have already pointed out, the frantic energy from a few Shrek “fans” regarding possible queer themes in the next sequel probably isn’t about protecting Shrek and Fiona’s heterosexual yet anything-but-traditional marriage from wokeness. Like too much Shrek discourse on the internet, the current conservative panic most likely comes from a darkly sexual place that the anti-woke mob isn’t ready to confront within themselves — but, for their own sakes, they should. Everyone deserves to get ogre their sexual hang-ups.