The Paper folded turns into a Skull. A Pirate Flag if you want; Roses and Feet beein the Bones and the Boobs beein the Eyes. The inner Feet Socks are the Teeth.
the joke of this episode is kinda like that one tweet that says "...I kissed a very attractive twink in Brighton and then found out she was a lesbian who thought I was a lesbian."
I think you missed a bit of context about Roller Derby, the sport is inextricably linked to the Gay Rights Movement of the 70's, and basically every prominant player was an open lesbian, and that holds true to this day
Oh, and the number of trans women who don't want bottom surgery and are happy with everything else is high enough that Steve's reasoning at the end is just absurd.
Yeah it didn’t need an answer at the end, honestly. Steve could have just realized that gender questions don’t need to be all that we’re about, and if other things are more important to them right now and there’s been no “aha!” moment, they can just leave it as a question for now. And even if they do find something that feels right, something else might feel more right tomorrow and that doesn’t make today’s feeling wrong. Doesn’t ruin anything to end it on a status quo reasserting joke, I don’t think. Just another “we could redo this more interesting now” for the pile
It's a typical "going back into the closet because transition is too scary" argument. It doesn't need to actually hold. And it was triggered by the alien obsessing with cutting off Steve's penis - which also is not how bottom surgery works at all.
I don't like how Steve gets over being trans by being attracted to women. I mean i am down for bottom surgery. But i am also exclusively a lesbian. I feel like people that identify very hard with a set of gender roles are also more likely to be gay. Like again if you tend to mostly spend your time with only members of the same gender. and your values hobbies mannerisms and asthetics align with stereotypical gendered roles.
Its so sad. I was so close to getting it when I saw this episode. The stupid status quo ending ruined everything. Even though I see this as a mostly positive trans episode, that trans medicalist approach kept me in doubt/denial for several more years. I still give this episode credit, because it was the first time where I was this was a thing and not just a joke and its ok.
There's a lot of difference. What is a boy, if not your genetics? How do you know you "feel like a woman" if women can be anything? What happened to everyone being different from each other? Everyone of an entire gender are not the same person, so saying "I feel like a woman" comes off as tone-deaf as "I feel like I'm Chinese/Jewish" to me
It'd be pretty difficult. Either get someone not trans to start portraying a trans character, or get a trans person to dress as their AGAB and cause discomfort
@@oliversmithlawrence I don't know about live action sitcoms, but it could definitely be done with an animated one. There are plenty of trans voice actors in the industry who don't mind playing parts for characters with their AGAB, likely due to it being just voice rather than full body acting + the fact that roles outside of one's gender aren't exactly uncommon for cis voice actors either.
Not a sitcom, but Umbrella Academy did that. Elliott Page in the middle of production and the show runners basically rolled with it. The character they were playing was all about rediscovering oneself, so the idea of the character transitioning felt true to the character as well.
i avoided american dad for years thinking it was just family guy 2.0. when i gave it a chance during the 2020 lockdowns, my mind was blown at how progressive and well written it is the majority of the time. i also love how unhinged both roger and francine are.
Francine is one of my fav characters and American dad has very different writing and humor than family guy. I love the absurdist approach, no cutaway gags and that they have a lot of Canon changes for a sitcom and over arching stories like Jeff in space or the golden turd
I'll never get over that one episode where Francine is folding laundry in the dark, smoking a cig while she can hear Stan doing surgery on Haley's face in the basement
Funnily enough, growing up as a trans man,i was friends with a bunch of roller derby lesbians, while it may be a bit stereotypical there is a relatively high percentage of lesbians in the roller derby circuits. For the local highschool team, at least 7 out of 10 were some flavor of sapphic. As a result, the roller derby circuit is a lot more queer friendly than most sports!
It's funny to me, how I didn't know what that episode was growing up. They never said 'transgender', they said 'you're a girl trapped in a boy's body' which as a kid, sounded no less insane than Stan and Francine turning Steve different ages with a syringe. Only when I rewatched it as a teen, did I understand how common this situation was irl. Also, I love how they got around the censors. They even titled the episode 'LGBSteve'
"there were a lot of moments to be transphobis but they didn't do it" kinda feels like an understandable yet really sad thing to put in as a positive point
33:19 There is also a bit of Steve's historic characterization. He had a bit of gender self examination, that turned into physical self examination and in his post nut clarity he realized he was a boy who felt like a boy with his boy penis. The dichotomy of "genitals dont matter" with "my genitals are part of me" is something I have seen in people exploring their gender and is part of why "bottom surgery" is so important to some trans people and so unimportant to others.
Something I have often find interesting in the talk about bottom survey is that people never talk about how many trans people often don’t get bottom surgery because of the risks associated with the surgery and the results are oftentimes less than ideal. Furthermore there are plenty of people who do transition who later go on to regret their transition. Oftentimes such individuals reveal that the idea of them being trans came from an outside source (like a friend group) and they were pressured into transitioning because they were told it would make them feel better. I like the message the episode ends on of that while Steve is extremely feminine, he’s still a straight cisgender male and that just because he enjoys doing feminine things doesn’t mean he’s a girl.
People being "pressured to transition" Is mostly a myth created by the right wing who try to claim being trans is a social contagious harming children and is used to prevent gender affirming care. Gender affirming care is not easy to get and you can't just get it because your friends said you should. @@dandereninja4750
@@dandereninja4750The transition regret is really low (something like .2%) and the infection by friend group is a terf myth. It’s just birds of a feather flock together.
@@dandereninja4750 not trying to start anything here but if you can be peer pressured into going to your doctor and seeking gender affirming surgery, waiting 3 months to receive a call to confirm you want to be put on a wait-list, spend 12 months to 4+ years on that wait-list to receive your first consultation with a psychologist, and then attend 5-7 more sessions over the course of 5+ months and then wait 4 or more months to be referred to another psychologist for another assessment (possibly twice more depending on how many surgeries/how much gender care you want) and then, if they do in fact declare that they think you are truly of clear mind and your seeking gender care is caused by dysphoria and not outside influences, trauma or mentall illness, then you can 1-5 years or more to actually receive the surgery, and if you go in for surgery and at no point during preparation for the surgery raise concerns that would alert the staff. They literally do like a thousand tests to ensure you actually want the surgeries, and if you fraudulently confirm your consent to these surgeries with enough skill to fool several psychologists, and wait 3-7 years for surgeries you don't want, I'm not sure peer pressure is the biggest problem in your life. As for regretting surgeries, all surgeries have higher regret rates than you'd think, especially dental surgery, heart surgery and knee surgery.
@@dragoncatoverload idk about myth, I literally thought I was a trans boy when I was 17 bc of some trans content that I consumed and I kind of related to it, but after some more introspection I was like "idk man, I don't feel anything wrong when someone calls me by my birth name or uses fem pronouns, I just hate having periods and the ability of getting pregnant". If you mean specifically about getting pressured into transitioning then I could see how that could be a myth, but even then you can feel pressured without the other person or persons intentionally pressuring you. Maybe not a myth, but extremely uncommon
So I think that the fold-in advertisement is meant to look like a skull, perhaps a skull and crossbones. The gag here might be a combination of american-centric and outdated. There's this magazine called MAD that was kinda popular in the US up through Gen X when magazines died. It was a comedy magazine, generally considered kinda low-brow, did lots of pop culture parodies in the form or comics. They usually included a page with a drawing and caption on it that, when folded like Stan does, would produce a new image and text. Kind of an interactive political cartoon, though not necessarily about politics. Here, the joke is that Stan, being the Bush-Era conservative fossil that he is, is frightened by the "illusion".
as an american dad fan, stan is usually played as a simpleminded fool. I think stan wasn't scared by the content of the image so much as folding the paper caused another image to appear.
Yeah, as someone who used to watch the show regularly this is how I interpreted that joke as well. It's less what appears on the paper and more just Stan being spooked by something small like that, that seems more on brand for him.
Love the Lily cannon about loving rats! It warmed my heart that you took a moment in your nuance criticism of the show to appreciate the rat shenanigans.
@@LilySimpson Misfits has an incredibly transphobic episode where the target is a trans man. It comes so close to getting it, but just wildly misses the point to an offensive level.
Oh, yeah, most bigots don't actually care enough about transgender individuals to come even close to realizing that not all instances of being transgender = being a transgender woman. Every time I talk about being trans, I always get the "you will never be a real woman!" comment from some idiot. I'm transmasc. Makes me laugh my ass off. I always say thank you to them and hope they are confused by me more than they already were.
@@lolrentz that happens to me too lmao! I’m a trans man and I pass really well, which makes transphobes beleive I’m a trans woman. I’ve accually gotten rude comments in the woman’s bathroom bc people assume I’m a trans woman. It’s whack
I honestly think, that Devin and the other girls in the roller Derby didn't think Steve had to be a transwoman specifically. They were aware he was amab, that he acted a bit fem and was comfortable and interacting in a queer fem space. He never explicitly stated he was a woman. They used she/her pronouns with him, and his sibling used fem honorifics like sister. The way I viewed it was that they thought Steve might be a woman, or enby or exploring and had no problem with it. This made the early scenes for me feel less creepe. Now I first saw this episode when it came out and I was 13 and I wouldn't have recognized the creepyness. And when I saw it again over the years I already new the 'twist' which is how I largely came to interpret the episode this way. I know this isnt how most people would interpret the events and probably not how it was intended but I just liked it that way. I loved the inclusion of not only queer womans spaces but also showing them as trans friendly. Showing 'lesbian transwoman' as a real possibil identity for a character and it being accepted by the queer women in the story. The queer women don't see Steve as infringing on their space but part of it. Which is the opposite of the TERF narrative it seemingly plays into. It actually supverds that narrative by showing the queer woman's reaction. Steve doesn't gets pushed in a gay man role and his questioning of his genderidentity doesn't happen or comes with questioning which gender he is attracted to. It separates gender and sexuality while also showing the alignment of oppressed gender/ sexuality minorities. My view on this ep is pretty bias because it opened my eyes to see trans people as also possibly gay (I know that is stupid, but I only learned about trans people a year early) And see acceptence in a queer space for someone who is just figure things out or doesn't have a label. Another great thing was a queer space as the setting. Instead of having a queer / trans character come into the cis straight spaces of our protagonist and feel kind of uncomfortable there. It reverses it and has the cis straight cast come into a queer space where they are welcomed but they feel a bit uncomfortable while the queer people get to feel save and in there element.
It is true that the episode makes fairly clear that the other derby girls had realized that Steve was amab pretty much from the get go. (I believe that Devin specifically stated it during the "reveal"), though it's a bit complicated because of the fact that Steve does consider himself a male "infiltrator" right up until they present the possibility of him being queer, at which point the rest of the episode is introspecting on that idea. At the same time it is clear that at the end they don't feel an problems at the end where he does decide that he's cis, but one would imagine the scene would have felt rather different if for some reason Steve had rejected the notion of being trans outright during the "reveal" and confirmed Haley's assertion that he was a cis man pretending to be a queer woman. All and all I would say that it's far from perfect representation and there are some elements that probably should have been reconsidered rather than just doing "bog standard cross-dressing comedy with a trans-positive twist at the end." but it is a pretty big leap compared to the standard set by a lot of other shows.
@@evansageser6943, I don’t know. Leaning into those tropes is uncomfortable during that beginning, but it also makes that twist in the middle land so much harder
@@evansageser6943 I think to supervered a trope effectively one has to play into a bit. And I would argue this is a great superversion of the TERF narrative that transwoman and amab people figuring out their gender are unwelcome in queer womans spaces. Also doing the reveal Steve first says that he is a guy. A straight guy. But the girls don't dislike him but open his eyes for other possibilities. After this episode Davin also became a semi regular background character which shows that the creators probably liked the character. Before I figured out that I am a queer transmasc person I read and wrote a lot of mlm and was drawn to these stories. But I felt like a straight woman invading these spaces or like a voiarised. The time line of when we figure out or question our identity and when we are drawn to theses people or spaces is often not linear or as clean cut as we like it to be. Only after going in these spaces and talking to people in them did I start questioning my gender identity and why I wanted to be there. This episode is messy and not perfect but so is life honestly. This episode speaks a lot to me because it is flawed.
Having never seen American Dad, and just assuming it was a carbon copy of Family Guy, already had my expectations very low. And with how the episode went up till that point, the bar I had set for the show was pretty much on the floor. So the roller derby women being supportive of Steve, hit like a truck. It was like watching a little kid running towards that bar that was laying on the floor, being afraid they'd trip over it, only for that kid to do a double backflip over it and stick the landing. In other words: I was impressed. And even if I didn't like the conclusion of the episode all that much, I gotta say that my respect for the show has significantly increased with how well it handled the scene where Steve got exposed.
Steve really said “I can’t be a lesbian because I like girls” 😔 I’ve been eagerly awaiting this video ever since I discovered your channel. When I first came across this episode I was so taken aback that I seriously considered writing a whole essay about it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it for a while. But I’m glad that you did all the work for me instead.
The other characters actually calling out the person who acts like a TERF and exposes another person’s genitals to “prove” their gender instead of being disgusted is SUCH a breath of fresh air after seeing a bunch of media where said trope played out in the same bigoted way (cough cough Danganronpa and Ace Ventura). Glad to know that American Dad was actually somewhat decent with this sort of topic after seeing how Simpsons and Family Guy handled it.
Wait, when the hell does anyone's _genitals_ get exposed in Danganronpa?! I remember Chihiro being outed and everything about that being weirdly and badly handled due to localization nonsense for the first game, but I don't remember _THAT._
@@lalas181 That’s pretty much the same except instead of showing them to everyone she forces Sakura to fondle Chihiro’s corpse (which is honestly even worse imo especially with Sakura’s reaction despite having a transphobic joke thrown towards her by Makoto at the start of the game) Plus that was in all versions, not just the localization.
@@super8bitable Ah. Yeah that's definitely gross, to say the least! Almost as gross as the way they handled that ultimate nurse character in the second game, imo! The language used and the handling of Chihiro being trans or not trans is what I was referring to localization-wise, because I remember seeing a few Japanese trans people saying things about the differences in presentation of the rest of it due to cultural perceptions of gender and whatnot years ago, but also _we don't have time for me to try and remember/unpack things I read literally at LEAST four years ago from probably deleted posts lol_
@@peterversiononeAce Ventura doesn't have any free will. The writers created a scenario in which Ace sexually assaulting a trans woman was justified by the narrative.
I think the key point in all this is that weird thing where you cant really tell WHERE the joke is supposed to be The fact that Hailey is MEANT to be a toxic feminist who uses her values as a weapon, and Steve is CANONICALLY feminine and ambiguously gay lets them be put in more honest situations The jokes can quickly vasilate between the situation being absurd, to people being horrible to each other, to characters being called out
American Dad is a weird case of a show not getting its legs under it until like season 3 but then going completely off the rails and staying off the rails. Started as a family guy clone then developed into a great little crazy show
i think what helps is how whee family guy will have crazy and silyl things happen ina vacuum the majority of it is lie jsut normal (though wacky and extreme) regular world shit, American Dad leaned and more and more into wild and crazy shit from a combination of Stan being a part of amen in blackstyle orgnaisation and shit like klaus and roger existing and they were like"you know, elts go crazy with it", allowing the episodes to experiment a bit more while also making fun of stupid far right bullshit.
I got distracted by the rat appreciation segment - I have pet rats myself, and they are absolutely wonderful! They love giving me little kisses, and climbing up my sleeves, and building nests with tissue paper, and solving those cat/dog food puzzles, and seeing how many ways they can climb up to places they shouldn't be. Best gremlins!
my hamster is very smart and comes to say hi every morning when i open her cage up. she has so much room to run around and spends all day tearing cardboard apart in the corner lol
This was somehow the only episode I’ve seen of American dad: I just happened upon it one day in high school when I was flipping through tv channels. Funny how a few years later I came out as trans. I remember at the time the episode made me both uncomfortable and happy somehow. I think because I was already crossdressing in private at the time so I was very afraid of coming across as a creepy guy intruding onto women’s spaces. While also wishing very much I could just be a gay woman existing.
I literally said "Jesus Christ!" out loud when the derby team nailed the issue of gender identity. It took me 33 goddamn years to come out...mostly because I had convinced myself I had some weird fetish and because I liked girls, I couldn't be "transexual". I'd read all sorts of descriptions online, and shitty 90s trans representation in media, and was fully convinced that a transexual woman was just like, "Gay++"...but since I liked women, I had to be a straight crossdresser. All these stupid like boxes in my head, and I stuck myself in that one...and literally I all I needed was to realize that trans lesbians exist. Bam. Gender issues sorted.
Even though this episode is not great it helps show what makes american dad so different and so good. American dad isn’t cynical, it doesn’t have the bad intentions of family guy its why i love it
I think that’s why I think a lot of it will stand the rest of time better than its predecessor. A lot of the characters do horrible shit in it, but despite that there’s still a beating heart or least plenty of crazy shit that they only get do to find worthy looking back on in ways it’s felt Family Guy hasn’t for a long time.
@@gravityfails4628I think one of the key reasons is that Family Guy started with plain, loving characters and had to keep amping up the absurd and outrageous cutaways, in the process completely reshaping the characters. Heck, FG is more cutaway than story. In the meantime, American Dad established its kooky cast in the beginning, but in every story they meticulously craft, the characters still seem real and caring towards each other after all the crazy stuff they do. (Except Roger, he’s a sociopath.)
If American Dad was more serialized and less episodic I think the writers would’ve eventually made Steve Trans. The hard reset that episodic shows tend to do doesn’t allow for character arcs
Watching this episode for the first time as a trans person sat next to my conservative dad who doesn’t accept me was an emotional roller coaster. I’m so glad you covered it lmao
I don't think the lesbian joke is that roller derby is a traditionally masculine sport, but that it's a very stereotypically lesbian sport, to the point where you can use it to queer code a female character (see: Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey)
seth macfarlane also has a show called The Orville, it’s like a Star Trek parody. There is one species of aliens who are all male (and thus all gay) and once in a million births have a female baby. The whole episode discusses whether the dads want to take the baby through a sex change surgery, while the human doctor aboard the spaceship refuses. I found it a pretty interesting concept, I’d love you hear your opinion on it. Love your videos!
I didn't watched all episodes of it, But is the "one in a million" true? Or is it maybe that the concept of "male species" was a myth and that they force all females to do a sex change? 🤔
That might fall a bit out of the scope of this series as it stands more akin to an intersex experience than a trans one (altho the intersex and trans communities often have overlap- plenty of intersex people consider themselves trans, there is a little gray area where some intersex people consider themselves neither cis nor trans) However I think that ep is interesting from a trans perspective on how the audience reacted- it seems like bc of the hypervisibility of trans people everyone read the episodes as about us, when they were clearly more relevant to intersex people. Perhaps this is bc the lack of visibility of intersex people, the lack of desire by cis perisex people to engage with the reality of what they do to intersex kids with forced surgeries, or the general desire to categorize intersex people as "just deformed" and therefore needing "fixing" (things I have actually heard from people who are also often transphobes. There's also something about ableism here I just don't have articulated yet) Anyway, those aren't really "trans episodes" except bc cis perisex audiences at large don't want to acknowledge or know about intersex people
@@KufLMAO Couldn't find a direct quote right at the moment, but a couple of people online say since Season 1. I'm also almost certain she says she's 19 in one of the Grubhub episodes.
I think part of why this went more positive than a lot of other shows around the time is that the main group being interacted with in the episode is other queer folks that the writers would assume to be on the side of the trans person rather than confused and "tricked" cishets.
I always loved how queer coded Steve was. There was even an episode where he kissed his friend Snot. I don't remember the details but it was at the end of the episode and they were having a conversation. I think Steve did something to be a bad friend and was apologizing and explaining the lesson he learned. Snot forgives him or in some way validates him, then they go in for a quick kiss and a hug. It wasn't played up, it wasn't even expressed as gay, just a super casual, platonic display of friendship. [Edit] I googled it and it's the episode Licence to Till, and yes Steve was a jerk but Snot forgave him and they had a quick kiss before finishing their section of the episode.
Also there's an episode where someone time travels and they're married, it was because of a "if we're single by this age we'll get married" pact, but there's stil the fact that they both agreed to it
I think the skull joke is more about the allusion towards Mad Magazine than anything else. I think the punchline is that Stan is the kind of person that would view this simple illusion as magic.
Ngl the disconnect between what the derby gals told the kid and what the kid based their conclusions on feels far too real XD In the "being in denial" sense, that is. Doubt it was on purpose, though, and your prodding at it as a weird turnaround was well-merited. Thanks for the video!
Incredibly embarrassed to admit that the Steve roller derby episode was a massive revelation to me. I had never realized that you could just be trans. I never really identified with trans people in the media (cause there were only like four and they were all caricatures), but I identified with these roller derby girls, and they treated trans girls as like them. If that makes sense
It's definitely a jumbled message, but I think the AD writers tried to make a decent message while still being irreverent. Not a trans episode, but AD later made an episode, Smooshed: A Love Story, where the guest character Ali is voiced by Patti Harrison, a trans woman. Ali isn't described as being trans, but I think her inclusion and relationship with Steve is a nice progression with how the AD creators want to be trans inclusive in a more honest way.
I think it's important to recognize how important the lesbian community is in LGBTQ history. (yes, they're the first letter for a reason let me say my point). I work as a depanneur cashier as a trans woman (only had to press charges against someone once lol) and the lesbian community in my small town has been nothing but supportive of me in my journey. But something I've also noticed, I see far more AFAB trans/enby people than I ever do AMAB trans/enby people day to day, including 2 coworkers who are/were transmasc, and I can't help but feel this is thanks to all the fighting and work the lesbian community has done to normalize alternative gender expressions. The Butch Lesbian stereotype is a stereotype but not untrue and is evidence of how widespread gender expression has been fought for by the lesbian community, something that lets AFAB people feel more comfortable in exploring their identity publicly. Lesbians have done a lot for 4D object that is the gender d20, even now it is butch afab women who experience the most harassment from gender bills because those bills do not attack trans people but attack EVERYONE who doesn't fit into the gender norm... Sorry lily, I didn't mean for this to turn into an essay, I'll leave those to you XD lol.
Seth had very little to do with the show outside of sticking his name on it and getting it made in the first place. That's why this show is actually good and showcases voices you won't see in his other shows (or at least try to). Especially since leaving Fox and ending up on FX they've been able to get away with a lot more stuff that Fox generally won't touch. Also the poster is supposed to be a skull.
I think the mixed messaging at the end might be because American Dad frequently feels the need to return to status quo. It sucks that it underlined the earlier message if the episode.
I love this episode and it really made me think back in the day. Helped show me that people could treat me as I'm supposed to be. One of the reasons I love that show more than the others.
11:52 I want to point out that in the show, Steve isn’t shown as masculine. and outside of sexuality, is barley hitting puberty. So I don’t think they are showing that woman as masculine as much as they are depicting Steve as feminine
Tis a skull and cross bones my darlin. Also, id be really interested to see your opinion on the trans storyline from The Orville. EDIT: I think what happens here is the show needing to adhere to its characters. Steve cant be trans because that would interupt and change the continuity of the unchanging, episodic sitcom. So they have to back down and walk away from whatever realizations or changes they may introduce in an episode. If the show was more character driven rather then situational, Steve being trans would likely play a larger role. But since its a sitcom, thats not gonna happen. I dont think the alien (or non-human) character being the one to fuck with gender and identity is necessarily bad. I would make sense that a species not like ours wouldnt have those same concepts... But i think that makes it more interesting that Roger fucks around like he does. Hes seen our concepts of gender and identity and flipped us the bird essentally. Which is kinda facinating to think about... buuuut even with all of that said, its really annoying to see ONLY the non-human characters be trans because ya it does make being trans seem like an alien or inhuman trait.
Also Roger having no problem with Switching between male and female characters Also if American_dad wants to be more storyline, they should have returned that plot when Steve was pregnant 😅
Because I watch so much American Dad, I absolutely took this episode as indicating that Steve is probably trans... but he's forced back into the closet because his family's the toxic representation of America (child abuse included), and it would be incredibly dangerous for Steve to actually acknowledge the reality of her identity... so Steve uses biological essentialism to convince himself that he's a boy and survive in his family. It also conveniently keeps the shows format.
I think they genuinely tried their best but because of the status quo, they weren't sure how to really stick the landing on their message. The ending could have had a better dialogue of Steve still owning the fact he feels comfortable as a boy with a penis but maybe also make a somewhat crude joke like "and this boy is gonna use his penis to bone" per the usual steve crude humor. So he's confident in his own body and still able to make some generic joke on hahaha penis. This all does remind me of a tumblr post though saying its healthy and should be encouraged that cis people question their own gender and how they want to present themselves with that gender even if you end up just feeling confident in the fact you have whatever genitals you were born with. As a cis woman myself it just makes me feel sort of better about myself and Im not just blindly going with what society says but owning who I am and that I'm happy with myself.
15:26 I think it is more laughing with for "Whole team is LGBT" not laughing at. Roller derby is itself a very inclusive sport and American Dad is also super aware of its heightened reality. Everyone and everything is super sexualized and horny. I'm not here to tell you how to feel about these jokes, just to give a bit of context for the show.
I have to wonder if they just talked to someone involved in roller derby who told them about the general acceptance of trans people, and if that's the difference between this and other contemporary pieces of media
the folding image joke is that it's a skull and crossbones with fire in the eyes. I think the joke is at the conservatism of Stan and his to this point total lack of artist appreciation (hence a simple card trick is "dark arts" that or a skull and cross bones is some inside LGBTQIA+ thing im not privy too since i'm not a member of that group)
It is true that men's sports don't typically get the same association with queerness, but as a lifelong wrestler I can say that wrestling is an exception to the rule. 😂
Sounds like Steve/Stevie didn't get to even consider being nonbinary. Going from "I must be a girl, everyone says so" to "I'm not a girl and never was" to "But I'm not a guy either , really" was how I got to identifying as nonbinary because at that point I knew that was an option. Feels like nobody actually told steve/stevie that was an option.
The folded together imagine is a sugar skull, a celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexian culture. That's my take on that anyway. I saw this episode when it aired, have to say I was shocked at the end of it. At the time it was easier to ignore all the stuff that came before, because I was gobsmacked that they got it right at the end, and fairly heavy handedly too. Glad to see you got a sponsor.
I'm always excited for a Lily Simpson video, but I realized there's this level of complexity towards certain issues she's able to elaborate on in a way that always catches me off guard. Her humor is incredibly goofy, while maintaining its tone of importance and making me really think. I've watched so many of the things she talks about but somehow haven't thought deeply about them nor knew how to. Thank you for making videos!!!! P.S I am a transwoman who loves her parts (shlong) so the ending is super silly and wack cuz girldick is the only dick I know of??
I would say that the main difference between family Guy and American Dad is that American Dad stays a bit more plot relevant like the older seasons of family Guy whereas family Guy has gone on to basically just be a bunch of cutaway gags
I was thinking, there's another way the episode could've ended, even within the sitcom "nothing really changes" limitation. Steve could've decided "I haven't really figured myself out, gender-wise. But I know I like skating with you. Can I stay on the team, even if I don't know whether I'm a girl?" And the roller derby people could've been accepting, and there we go. No big changes, episode wrapped up. The whole "you have to decide, boy or girl" is just unnecessary.
The general vibe I’ve gotten from Family Guy and American Dad is that Seth and co are ultimately progressive people. They just also believe that no joke should be off the table. Which, leads to a very mixed bag.
Seth McFarlane is in no way progressive. He is almost certainly a liberal, which is a faction that straddles the political center. He'll in one scene paint the right as corrupt, moronic, and incompetent, then immediately follow it up with a bigoted caricature that you're supposed to laugh at.
When this came out I was a kid and this episode was the reason I ended up loving this show, particularly the ending sequence of stan and steve washing a car to pour some sugar on me.
I remember being impressed for the most part with this episode when I saw it. Steve deciding he's a boy for the reasons he did is certainly eye-rolling, but in terms of trans representation, American Dad gets a distinct mark of "there was an attempt", which is considerably more than can be said for most of the shows and episodes you talk about.
Just wanted to encourage you to keep it up. I’m not LGBT+, or even someone that watches TV. I just like storytelling, im more of a moviegoer and reader, and like to see coherent stories that everyone can enjoy. Your channel is pretty great and im excited for the next video.
So based off Steve's screams as the team tapes him down one last time over the credits; I always got the feeling that the cishet man who invaded their space got a comeuppance.
I've been looking forward to this. AD is a show I have binged. idk how many times Pre and post egg cracking I still don't know how I feel about this episode.
I think you make a lot of good points in this video, and having watched the show before, I appreciate looking at it through your critical lens. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the videos of yours that I’ve watched and I look forward to see what you do next.
Subverting the transphobic tropes at "the moment" by giving an actual insightful perspective is a really funny and smart bit, and a prime signifier of how AD is more than just a FG clone
Hi lily! I loved your video! I wanted to suggest an idea for a trans video because its so complex i cant wrap my head around it. There is a point in one peice where sanji gets sent to an island of trans women who are all like hairy and portrayed as masculine men in dresses who chase him around and forcibly trans him, but theres a scene where hes in a dress and getting spun around in flowers and he realizes that it just feels right to him? But its so complex cause he calls all the trans women on the island not real women and they are portayed as ugly when in actuality okamas were very pretty and that was the point. Sorry for the tangent, thank you for reading have a nice day.
thank you for making a american dad one! I wanted to hear your opinion on this episode and i appreciate that you tried to exclude roger (more of that "its ok to be queer as long as its not human thus making it not relatable" trope)
I'd like to add that the dark arts comment is a likely reference to the fact that the paper is made to be an illusion. That making a new image when folding the paper is magic, dark arts. It being a skull is part of that but not the entire framing of the joke and may be related to another reference entirely or just be thematically "cool" looking
Honestly looking back on this episode, it was probably one of the best trans episodes EVER made by Seth. Honestly that moment they just accepted steve no questions asked blew me away.
The folded flyer looks like a skull with poison leaking from the eyes, and flanked by two roses. If you have poor eyes or let your eyes go out of focus it also looks like a demon skull. Edit: now that I have finished the video I wanted to say this episode was almost what cracked my egg. I wound up going the same path Steve did. It took me years after this show to have that oh moment, and accept myself. I also think that ending on a status quo hurts sitcoms, because they can never show actual character growth. My head cannon is that like me, Stevie also has an oh moment after a few years.
according to the american dad wiki: "Stan's folding the flyer to make an image of a skull recalls a long-time running gag in Mad magazine in which the back cover folded in to create a different image"
8:05 Lilly, for a bit of cultural context from the US: Roller Derby isnt a masculine sport it is a super lesbian sport. Not as a joke, not because its poking fun at it being "manly", but just because Roller Derby is literally a woman only sport that has always been super progressive and inclusive and part of American lesbian culture. Like a Subaru
Great video! I was wondering if you were going to visit any old horror movies with trans themes, like Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, Dressed to kill, or Silence of the Lambs? I'm essentially curious about your thoughts on how each movie tries to hand wave the issue (he's not really trans, he's...) and how this affects the narrative/immpact the movies have.
I do appreciate that the team's reaction to Steve deciding he's cis is to respect that he thought about it. You don't have to end questioning your gender identity by realizing you're trans, and it's helpful for cis people to think about it as well.
Grab Atlas VPN for just $1.83/mo + 3 months extra before the BIG DEAL deal expires: get.atlasvpn.com/LilySimpson
9:20 look s like a skull the socks make the teeth and the eye sockets black
The Paper folded turns into a Skull.
A Pirate Flag if you want; Roses and Feet beein the Bones and the Boobs beein the Eyes.
The inner Feet Socks are the Teeth.
@LilySimpson There was a TRANS episode?! 😱
DO YOU SUPPORT FULLY AUTOMATED LUXARY GAY SPACE COMMUNISM?
So off topic but glad to see another Minthara simp-
the joke of this episode is kinda like that one tweet that says "...I kissed a very attractive twink in Brighton and then found out she was a lesbian who thought I was a lesbian."
true mlm wlw solidarity right there
Shenanigans like this are why I believe in free-love, lmao
Okay now that's hilarious
@@Dust514rocks please explain more about this concept. I want to understand more about your thoughts and free love in general.
I also thought of this immediately
i’m crying it’s a skull and crossbones
Which is, kinda cool of a joke. His objection isn't because of lesbianism or girl power... it's just that it's violent.
@@kinyutaka yeah lol
That is what I was about to comment
Pirates?
Mfs just wanted to find the one piece why would the dad react to it like that?
The best part about dissecting a Seth MacFarlane joke is realizing it wasn't really that funny to begin with
I think you missed a bit of context about Roller Derby, the sport is inextricably linked to the Gay Rights Movement of the 70's, and basically every prominant player was an open lesbian, and that holds true to this day
Wow this is interesting, good to know thanks!
The term "Derby Dyke" was coined because, well, yeah all the roller lesbians
Roller Lesbians are legit iconic
I was gonna comment this. Like yes it’s a stereotype, but also roller derby is soooo gay lmao
The Roller Derby team in American Dad=Actually the most poggers Lesbians.
To answer your question, I believe it was supposed to be a skull that Stan was looking at, not a pentagram.
OMG AN ANARCHO-BLUEYIST BASED AND BLUEYPILLED also you are correct i believe
Yeh it looks like a skull and crossed bones ‘☠️’
It's not as clear as it probably should be but it's definitely a skull and crossbones thing.
I think also the joke is the fear of the magic if the image appearing
This was my guess as well.
Oh, and the number of trans women who don't want bottom surgery and are happy with everything else is high enough that Steve's reasoning at the end is just absurd.
Yeah they had to veer hard into a transmed pov to keep stauts quo
Yeah it didn’t need an answer at the end, honestly. Steve could have just realized that gender questions don’t need to be all that we’re about, and if other things are more important to them right now and there’s been no “aha!” moment, they can just leave it as a question for now. And even if they do find something that feels right, something else might feel more right tomorrow and that doesn’t make today’s feeling wrong. Doesn’t ruin anything to end it on a status quo reasserting joke, I don’t think. Just another “we could redo this more interesting now” for the pile
It's a typical "going back into the closet because transition is too scary" argument. It doesn't need to actually hold. And it was triggered by the alien obsessing with cutting off Steve's penis - which also is not how bottom surgery works at all.
I don't like how Steve gets over being trans by being attracted to women. I mean i am down for bottom surgery.
But i am also exclusively a lesbian. I feel like people that identify very hard with a set of gender roles are also more likely to be gay. Like again if you tend to mostly spend your time with only members of the same gender. and your values hobbies mannerisms and asthetics align with stereotypical gendered roles.
Its so sad. I was so close to getting it when I saw this episode. The stupid status quo ending ruined everything. Even though I see this as a mostly positive trans episode, that trans medicalist approach kept me in doubt/denial for several more years. I still give this episode credit, because it was the first time where I was this was a thing and not just a joke and its ok.
Using they/them for roger is actually so big brained
I really love the line you said about "what is a boys body except a body that is claimed by a boy?" Just made me smile today.
There's a lot of difference. What is a boy, if not your genetics? How do you know you "feel like a woman" if women can be anything? What happened to everyone being different from each other? Everyone of an entire gender are not the same person, so saying "I feel like a woman" comes off as tone-deaf as "I feel like I'm Chinese/Jewish" to me
@@kylespevak6781because gender is socially made up, genders are pretty much aesthetics and we all express those aesthetics with our identities
@@kylespevak6781 average commenter-with-music-icon-in-name
@@kylespevak6781who asked lol
@@kylespevak6781if you say “I feel like a woman” that would likely mean you just want to have a body that possesses a feminine appearance.
I wish there was one sitcom when a character figures out they’re trans in an episode and then it actually sticks
It'd be pretty difficult. Either get someone not trans to start portraying a trans character, or get a trans person to dress as their AGAB and cause discomfort
@@oliversmithlawrence_[Evil genderfluid laugh]_
@@oliversmithlawrence I don't know about live action sitcoms, but it could definitely be done with an animated one. There are plenty of trans voice actors in the industry who don't mind playing parts for characters with their AGAB, likely due to it being just voice rather than full body acting + the fact that roles outside of one's gender aren't exactly uncommon for cis voice actors either.
there is one but I think it should stay in France (I can't remember if its tv or web series but my friend showed me an episode as shock humor)
Not a sitcom, but Umbrella Academy did that. Elliott Page in the middle of production and the show runners basically rolled with it. The character they were playing was all about rediscovering oneself, so the idea of the character transitioning felt true to the character as well.
i avoided american dad for years thinking it was just family guy 2.0. when i gave it a chance during the 2020 lockdowns, my mind was blown at how progressive and well written it is the majority of the time. i also love how unhinged both roger and francine are.
Francine is one of my fav characters and American dad has very different writing and humor than family guy.
I love the absurdist approach, no cutaway gags and that they have a lot of Canon changes for a sitcom and over arching stories like Jeff in space or the golden turd
@@mjberlinawp141 i can be in the worst mood then put on Wild Women Do or Gold Top Nuts and it will completely turn me around
Same. I can't believe I was just sitting on this awesome show for so long.
Yes Francine crept up on me.
I'll never get over that one episode where Francine is folding laundry in the dark, smoking a cig while she can hear Stan doing surgery on Haley's face in the basement
Funnily enough, growing up as a trans man,i was friends with a bunch of roller derby lesbians, while it may be a bit stereotypical there is a relatively high percentage of lesbians in the roller derby circuits. For the local highschool team, at least 7 out of 10 were some flavor of sapphic. As a result, the roller derby circuit is a lot more queer friendly than most sports!
High School team?!? Your HS had roller derby??
@@RaptorFromWeegee well not really, it was a local youth team that was local highschoolers lol. I wish schools had them though!
It's funny to me, how I didn't know what that episode was growing up. They never said 'transgender', they said 'you're a girl trapped in a boy's body' which as a kid, sounded no less insane than Stan and Francine turning Steve different ages with a syringe. Only when I rewatched it as a teen, did I understand how common this situation was irl.
Also, I love how they got around the censors. They even titled the episode 'LGBSteve'
Also Steve had bewbs before because of hormones
And was pregnant before too 😅
"there were a lot of moments to be transphobis but they didn't do it" kinda feels like an understandable yet really sad thing to put in as a positive point
Is a "I mean they had a gun and didn't kill anyone, good for them" kinda vibe
33:19 There is also a bit of Steve's historic characterization. He had a bit of gender self examination, that turned into physical self examination and in his post nut clarity he realized he was a boy who felt like a boy with his boy penis.
The dichotomy of "genitals dont matter" with "my genitals are part of me" is something I have seen in people exploring their gender and is part of why "bottom surgery" is so important to some trans people and so unimportant to others.
Something I have often find interesting in the talk about bottom survey is that people never talk about how many trans people often don’t get bottom surgery because of the risks associated with the surgery and the results are oftentimes less than ideal. Furthermore there are plenty of people who do transition who later go on to regret their transition. Oftentimes such individuals reveal that the idea of them being trans came from an outside source (like a friend group) and they were pressured into transitioning because they were told it would make them feel better. I like the message the episode ends on of that while Steve is extremely feminine, he’s still a straight cisgender male and that just because he enjoys doing feminine things doesn’t mean he’s a girl.
People being "pressured to transition" Is mostly a myth created by the right wing who try to claim being trans is a social contagious harming children and is used to prevent gender affirming care. Gender affirming care is not easy to get and you can't just get it because your friends said you should. @@dandereninja4750
@@dandereninja4750The transition regret is really low (something like .2%) and the infection by friend group is a terf myth. It’s just birds of a feather flock together.
@@dandereninja4750 not trying to start anything here but if you can be peer pressured into going to your doctor and seeking gender affirming surgery, waiting 3 months to receive a call to confirm you want to be put on a wait-list, spend 12 months to 4+ years on that wait-list to receive your first consultation with a psychologist, and then attend 5-7 more sessions over the course of 5+ months and then wait 4 or more months to be referred to another psychologist for another assessment (possibly twice more depending on how many surgeries/how much gender care you want) and then, if they do in fact declare that they think you are truly of clear mind and your seeking gender care is caused by dysphoria and not outside influences, trauma or mentall illness, then you can 1-5 years or more to actually receive the surgery, and if you go in for surgery and at no point during preparation for the surgery raise concerns that would alert the staff.
They literally do like a thousand tests to ensure you actually want the surgeries, and if you fraudulently confirm your consent to these surgeries with enough skill to fool several psychologists, and wait 3-7 years for surgeries you don't want, I'm not sure peer pressure is the biggest problem in your life.
As for regretting surgeries, all surgeries have higher regret rates than you'd think, especially dental surgery, heart surgery and knee surgery.
@@dragoncatoverload idk about myth, I literally thought I was a trans boy when I was 17 bc of some trans content that I consumed and I kind of related to it, but after some more introspection I was like "idk man, I don't feel anything wrong when someone calls me by my birth name or uses fem pronouns, I just hate having periods and the ability of getting pregnant". If you mean specifically about getting pressured into transitioning then I could see how that could be a myth, but even then you can feel pressured without the other person or persons intentionally pressuring you. Maybe not a myth, but extremely uncommon
So I think that the fold-in advertisement is meant to look like a skull, perhaps a skull and crossbones. The gag here might be a combination of american-centric and outdated. There's this magazine called MAD that was kinda popular in the US up through Gen X when magazines died. It was a comedy magazine, generally considered kinda low-brow, did lots of pop culture parodies in the form or comics. They usually included a page with a drawing and caption on it that, when folded like Stan does, would produce a new image and text. Kind of an interactive political cartoon, though not necessarily about politics. Here, the joke is that Stan, being the Bush-Era conservative fossil that he is, is frightened by the "illusion".
Another horrible part about pulling someone's pants down is that not only are they SA'd, it's also SA on everyone who sees it.
as an american dad fan, stan is usually played as a simpleminded fool. I think stan wasn't scared by the content of the image so much as folding the paper caused another image to appear.
It's also a skull, but I agree, Stan is super simple-minded and I can never be sure what he's actually reacting to.
Yeah, as someone who used to watch the show regularly this is how I interpreted that joke as well. It's less what appears on the paper and more just Stan being spooked by something small like that, that seems more on brand for him.
Love the Lily cannon about loving rats! It warmed my heart that you took a moment in your nuance criticism of the show to appreciate the rat shenanigans.
And how can you ot love rats. They have little rat hands
Ratties are the best
I find it really odd that every trans episode lily has talked about is about a trans woman. It sucks that there is so little rep of trans men
This is not a dig at Lily btw, It’s a dig at the fact that no tv shows have trans man rep
Yeah its a bit sparse but I would advise looking forward to the Two and a Half Men episode
@@LilySimpson Misfits has an incredibly transphobic episode where the target is a trans man. It comes so close to getting it, but just wildly misses the point to an offensive level.
Oh, yeah, most bigots don't actually care enough about transgender individuals to come even close to realizing that not all instances of being transgender = being a transgender woman.
Every time I talk about being trans, I always get the "you will never be a real woman!" comment from some idiot. I'm transmasc. Makes me laugh my ass off. I always say thank you to them and hope they are confused by me more than they already were.
@@lolrentz that happens to me too lmao! I’m a trans man and I pass really well, which makes transphobes beleive I’m a trans woman. I’ve accually gotten rude comments in the woman’s bathroom bc people assume I’m a trans woman. It’s whack
I honestly think, that Devin and the other girls in the roller Derby didn't think Steve had to be a transwoman specifically. They were aware he was amab, that he acted a bit fem and was comfortable and interacting in a queer fem space. He never explicitly stated he was a woman. They used she/her pronouns with him, and his sibling used fem honorifics like sister.
The way I viewed it was that they thought Steve might be a woman, or enby or exploring and had no problem with it. This made the early scenes for me feel less creepe.
Now I first saw this episode when it came out and I was 13 and I wouldn't have recognized the creepyness. And when I saw it again over the years I already new the 'twist' which is how I largely came to interpret the episode this way.
I know this isnt how most people would interpret the events and probably not how it was intended but I just liked it that way.
I loved the inclusion of not only queer womans spaces but also showing them as trans friendly. Showing 'lesbian transwoman' as a real possibil identity for a character and it being accepted by the queer women in the story. The queer women don't see Steve as infringing on their space but part of it. Which is the opposite of the TERF narrative it seemingly plays into. It actually supverds that narrative by showing the queer woman's reaction. Steve doesn't gets pushed in a gay man role and his questioning of his genderidentity doesn't happen or comes with questioning which gender he is attracted to. It separates gender and sexuality while also showing the alignment of oppressed gender/ sexuality minorities.
My view on this ep is pretty bias because it opened my eyes to see trans people as also possibly gay (I know that is stupid, but I only learned about trans people a year early) And see acceptence in a queer space for someone who is just figure things out or doesn't have a label.
Another great thing was a queer space as the setting. Instead of having a queer / trans character come into the cis straight spaces of our protagonist and feel kind of uncomfortable there. It reverses it and has the cis straight cast come into a queer space where they are welcomed but they feel a bit uncomfortable while the queer people get to feel save and in there element.
It is true that the episode makes fairly clear that the other derby girls had realized that Steve was amab pretty much from the get go. (I believe that Devin specifically stated it during the "reveal"), though it's a bit complicated because of the fact that Steve does consider himself a male "infiltrator" right up until they present the possibility of him being queer, at which point the rest of the episode is introspecting on that idea. At the same time it is clear that at the end they don't feel an problems at the end where he does decide that he's cis, but one would imagine the scene would have felt rather different if for some reason Steve had rejected the notion of being trans outright during the "reveal" and confirmed Haley's assertion that he was a cis man pretending to be a queer woman.
All and all I would say that it's far from perfect representation and there are some elements that probably should have been reconsidered rather than just doing "bog standard cross-dressing comedy with a trans-positive twist at the end." but it is a pretty big leap compared to the standard set by a lot of other shows.
@@evansageser6943, I don’t know. Leaning into those tropes is uncomfortable during that beginning, but it also makes that twist in the middle land so much harder
@@evansageser6943 I think to supervered a trope effectively one has to play into a bit. And I would argue this is a great superversion of the TERF narrative that transwoman and amab people figuring out their gender are unwelcome in queer womans spaces.
Also doing the reveal Steve first says that he is a guy. A straight guy. But the girls don't dislike him but open his eyes for other possibilities.
After this episode Davin also became a semi regular background character which shows that the creators probably liked the character.
Before I figured out that I am a queer transmasc person I read and wrote a lot of mlm and was drawn to these stories. But I felt like a straight woman invading these spaces or like a voiarised. The time line of when we figure out or question our identity and when we are drawn to theses people or spaces is often not linear or as clean cut as we like it to be.
Only after going in these spaces and talking to people in them did I start questioning my gender identity and why I wanted to be there.
This episode is messy and not perfect but so is life honestly.
This episode speaks a lot to me because it is flawed.
Having never seen American Dad, and just assuming it was a carbon copy of Family Guy, already had my expectations very low.
And with how the episode went up till that point, the bar I had set for the show was pretty much on the floor. So the roller derby women being supportive of Steve, hit like a truck. It was like watching a little kid running towards that bar that was laying on the floor, being afraid they'd trip over it, only for that kid to do a double backflip over it and stick the landing.
In other words: I was impressed.
And even if I didn't like the conclusion of the episode all that much, I gotta say that my respect for the show has significantly increased with how well it handled the scene where Steve got exposed.
Steve really said “I can’t be a lesbian because I like girls” 😔
I’ve been eagerly awaiting this video ever since I discovered your channel. When I first came across this episode I was so taken aback that I seriously considered writing a whole essay about it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it for a while. But I’m glad that you did all the work for me instead.
"More shows need musical numbers, and I'm not just saying that because I'm gay"
🤣 I love you, Lily
I remember Seth McFarland getting roasted and they said "nobody can make a show with that many musical numbers and not be gay" 😂
The other characters actually calling out the person who acts like a TERF and exposes another person’s genitals to “prove” their gender instead of being disgusted is SUCH a breath of fresh air after seeing a bunch of media where said trope played out in the same bigoted way (cough cough Danganronpa and Ace Ventura).
Glad to know that American Dad was actually somewhat decent with this sort of topic after seeing how Simpsons and Family Guy handled it.
Wait, when the hell does anyone's _genitals_ get exposed in Danganronpa?! I remember Chihiro being outed and everything about that being weirdly and badly handled due to localization nonsense for the first game, but I don't remember _THAT._
@@lalas181 That’s pretty much the same except instead of showing them to everyone she forces Sakura to fondle Chihiro’s corpse (which is honestly even worse imo especially with Sakura’s reaction despite having a transphobic joke thrown towards her by Makoto at the start of the game)
Plus that was in all versions, not just the localization.
@@super8bitable Ah. Yeah that's definitely gross, to say the least! Almost as gross as the way they handled that ultimate nurse character in the second game, imo! The language used and the handling of Chihiro being trans or not trans is what I was referring to localization-wise, because I remember seeing a few Japanese trans people saying things about the differences in presentation of the rest of it due to cultural perceptions of gender and whatnot years ago, but also _we don't have time for me to try and remember/unpack things I read literally at LEAST four years ago from probably deleted posts lol_
Didn’t Ace Ventura have to do that so he didn’t get arrested, and solve the case?
@@peterversiononeAce Ventura doesn't have any free will. The writers created a scenario in which Ace sexually assaulting a trans woman was justified by the narrative.
I think the key point in all this is that weird thing where you cant really tell WHERE the joke is supposed to be
The fact that Hailey is MEANT to be a toxic feminist who uses her values as a weapon, and Steve is CANONICALLY feminine and ambiguously gay lets them be put in more honest situations
The jokes can quickly vasilate between the situation being absurd, to people being horrible to each other, to characters being called out
American Dad is a weird case of a show not getting its legs under it until like season 3 but then going completely off the rails and staying off the rails.
Started as a family guy clone then developed into a great little crazy show
i think what helps is how whee family guy will have crazy and silyl things happen ina vacuum the majority of it is lie jsut normal (though wacky and extreme) regular world shit, American Dad leaned and more and more into wild and crazy shit from a combination of Stan being a part of amen in blackstyle orgnaisation and shit like klaus and roger existing and they were like"you know, elts go crazy with it", allowing the episodes to experiment a bit more while also making fun of stupid far right bullshit.
I got distracted by the rat appreciation segment - I have pet rats myself, and they are absolutely wonderful! They love giving me little kisses, and climbing up my sleeves, and building nests with tissue paper, and solving those cat/dog food puzzles, and seeing how many ways they can climb up to places they shouldn't be. Best gremlins!
my hamster is very smart and comes to say hi every morning when i open her cage up. she has so much room to run around and spends all day tearing cardboard apart in the corner lol
They’re banned in my province, which makes me sad because pet rats are adorable.
This was somehow the only episode I’ve seen of American dad: I just happened upon it one day in high school when I was flipping through tv channels. Funny how a few years later I came out as trans. I remember at the time the episode made me both uncomfortable and happy somehow. I think because I was already crossdressing in private at the time so I was very afraid of coming across as a creepy guy intruding onto women’s spaces. While also wishing very much I could just be a gay woman existing.
I literally said "Jesus Christ!" out loud when the derby team nailed the issue of gender identity. It took me 33 goddamn years to come out...mostly because I had convinced myself I had some weird fetish and because I liked girls, I couldn't be "transexual". I'd read all sorts of descriptions online, and shitty 90s trans representation in media, and was fully convinced that a transexual woman was just like, "Gay++"...but since I liked women, I had to be a straight crossdresser.
All these stupid like boxes in my head, and I stuck myself in that one...and literally I all I needed was to realize that trans lesbians exist. Bam. Gender issues sorted.
Even though this episode is not great it helps show what makes american dad so different and so good. American dad isn’t cynical, it doesn’t have the bad intentions of family guy its why i love it
I think that’s why I think a lot of it will stand the rest of time better than its predecessor. A lot of the characters do horrible shit in it, but despite that there’s still a beating heart or least plenty of crazy shit that they only get do to find worthy looking back on in ways it’s felt Family Guy hasn’t for a long time.
@@gravityfails4628I think one of the key reasons is that Family Guy started with plain, loving characters and had to keep amping up the absurd and outrageous cutaways, in the process completely reshaping the characters. Heck, FG is more cutaway than story. In the meantime, American Dad established its kooky cast in the beginning, but in every story they meticulously craft, the characters still seem real and caring towards each other after all the crazy stuff they do. (Except Roger, he’s a sociopath.)
15:15 the joke isn't that womans sports are inherently gay but that Roller Derby is. Roller Derby does have a large queer history
If American Dad was more serialized and less episodic I think the writers would’ve eventually made Steve Trans. The hard reset that episodic shows tend to do doesn’t allow for character arcs
Watching this episode for the first time as a trans person sat next to my conservative dad who doesn’t accept me was an emotional roller coaster. I’m so glad you covered it lmao
I don't think the lesbian joke is that roller derby is a traditionally masculine sport, but that it's a very stereotypically lesbian sport, to the point where you can use it to queer code a female character (see: Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey)
seth macfarlane also has a show called The Orville, it’s like a Star Trek parody. There is one species of aliens who are all male (and thus all gay) and once in a million births have a female baby.
The whole episode discusses whether the dads want to take the baby through a sex change surgery, while the human doctor aboard the spaceship refuses.
I found it a pretty interesting concept, I’d love you hear your opinion on it.
Love your videos!
It was actually 3 or 4 episodes.
I didn't watched all episodes of it,
But is the "one in a million" true?
Or is it maybe that the concept of "male species" was a myth and that they force all females to do a sex change? 🤔
Wait, Orville is by Seth?
@@jesusramirezromo2037 yeah, he also plays the main character
That might fall a bit out of the scope of this series as it stands more akin to an intersex experience than a trans one (altho the intersex and trans communities often have overlap- plenty of intersex people consider themselves trans, there is a little gray area where some intersex people consider themselves neither cis nor trans)
However I think that ep is interesting from a trans perspective on how the audience reacted- it seems like bc of the hypervisibility of trans people everyone read the episodes as about us, when they were clearly more relevant to intersex people. Perhaps this is bc the lack of visibility of intersex people, the lack of desire by cis perisex people to engage with the reality of what they do to intersex kids with forced surgeries, or the general desire to categorize intersex people as "just deformed" and therefore needing "fixing" (things I have actually heard from people who are also often transphobes. There's also something about ableism here I just don't have articulated yet)
Anyway, those aren't really "trans episodes" except bc cis perisex audiences at large don't want to acknowledge or know about intersex people
Hailey not only pulled down Steve's pants, it was an adult pulling down a minor's pants.
Hailey isn’t an adult what are you on
@@KufLMAObabes google it. shes 19 and steve is 14. so yeah shes an adult, and also theyre siblings, which is another layer of disgusting on it
@@KufLMAO Sure she is. 18 years old.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews since when?? I thought she was in high school
@@KufLMAO Couldn't find a direct quote right at the moment, but a couple of people online say since Season 1. I'm also almost certain she says she's 19 in one of the Grubhub episodes.
I think part of why this went more positive than a lot of other shows around the time is that the main group being interacted with in the episode is other queer folks that the writers would assume to be on the side of the trans person rather than confused and "tricked" cishets.
I always loved how queer coded Steve was. There was even an episode where he kissed his friend Snot.
I don't remember the details but it was at the end of the episode and they were having a conversation. I think Steve did something to be a bad friend and was apologizing and explaining the lesson he learned. Snot forgives him or in some way validates him, then they go in for a quick kiss and a hug. It wasn't played up, it wasn't even expressed as gay, just a super casual, platonic display of friendship.
[Edit] I googled it and it's the episode Licence to Till, and yes Steve was a jerk but Snot forgave him and they had a quick kiss before finishing their section of the episode.
Also in one of Steve's imagination, Snot was having bewbs too 😅
Also there's an episode where someone time travels and they're married, it was because of a "if we're single by this age we'll get married" pact, but there's stil the fact that they both agreed to it
I believe Roger has been confirmed to be a drag queen recently by the show, he's also been openly pansexual the entire show!
I remember in one scene Roger was joking about having no Genitals
Were the woman he was with responded with "don't worry, I have both"
😅
I think the skull joke is more about the allusion towards Mad Magazine than anything else. I think the punchline is that Stan is the kind of person that would view this simple illusion as magic.
this truly is the dad of america
Ngl the disconnect between what the derby gals told the kid and what the kid based their conclusions on feels far too real XD In the "being in denial" sense, that is. Doubt it was on purpose, though, and your prodding at it as a weird turnaround was well-merited. Thanks for the video!
my stomach is experiencing terrible diarrhea, lily had just posted at perfect timing, now in my turmoil i can enjoy quality content
LMAO TWINS
@@Iotuseater 🥺🥺🥺🤞🤞
HELP SAME RN
I remember watching this episode and going "Oh noooooo" only for it to subvert my expectations. It's brilliant.
Incredibly embarrassed to admit that the Steve roller derby episode was a massive revelation to me.
I had never realized that you could just be trans. I never really identified with trans people in the media (cause there were only like four and they were all caricatures), but I identified with these roller derby girls, and they treated trans girls as like them.
If that makes sense
It's definitely a jumbled message, but I think the AD writers tried to make a decent message while still being irreverent.
Not a trans episode, but AD later made an episode, Smooshed: A Love Story, where the guest character Ali is voiced by Patti Harrison, a trans woman. Ali isn't described as being trans, but I think her inclusion and relationship with Steve is a nice progression with how the AD creators want to be trans inclusive in a more honest way.
Omg I adore that episode. I didn't know Ali was voiced by a trans woman. That makes me love her even more.
I like to think Roger is just being sadistic there and it isn't demanding a specific type of trans.
I think it's important to recognize how important the lesbian community is in LGBTQ history. (yes, they're the first letter for a reason let me say my point). I work as a depanneur cashier as a trans woman (only had to press charges against someone once lol) and the lesbian community in my small town has been nothing but supportive of me in my journey. But something I've also noticed, I see far more AFAB trans/enby people than I ever do AMAB trans/enby people day to day, including 2 coworkers who are/were transmasc, and I can't help but feel this is thanks to all the fighting and work the lesbian community has done to normalize alternative gender expressions. The Butch Lesbian stereotype is a stereotype but not untrue and is evidence of how widespread gender expression has been fought for by the lesbian community, something that lets AFAB people feel more comfortable in exploring their identity publicly. Lesbians have done a lot for 4D object that is the gender d20, even now it is butch afab women who experience the most harassment from gender bills because those bills do not attack trans people but attack EVERYONE who doesn't fit into the gender norm... Sorry lily, I didn't mean for this to turn into an essay, I'll leave those to you XD lol.
Seth had very little to do with the show outside of sticking his name on it and getting it made in the first place. That's why this show is actually good and showcases voices you won't see in his other shows (or at least try to). Especially since leaving Fox and ending up on FX they've been able to get away with a lot more stuff that Fox generally won't touch. Also the poster is supposed to be a skull.
just watched the Bob's burgers episode and was absolutely psyched at the idea there could be an American Dad episode- and here it is :DD
I have grown to look forward to these videos each week. I audibly gasped in delight when I saw it come up in my recommended!
I think the mixed messaging at the end might be because American Dad frequently feels the need to return to status quo. It sucks that it underlined the earlier message if the episode.
undermined, not underlined.
For more continuity they should have returned to the time when Steve was pregnant 😅
I love this episode and it really made me think back in the day. Helped show me that people could treat me as I'm supposed to be. One of the reasons I love that show more than the others.
One of my coworkers was almost assaulted in a bathroom because someone thought she was a man. She's a breast cancer surviver.
11:52 I want to point out that in the show, Steve isn’t shown as masculine. and outside of sexuality, is barley hitting puberty. So I don’t think they are showing that woman as masculine as much as they are depicting Steve as feminine
Tis a skull and cross bones my darlin.
Also, id be really interested to see your opinion on the trans storyline from The Orville.
EDIT: I think what happens here is the show needing to adhere to its characters. Steve cant be trans because that would interupt and change the continuity of the unchanging, episodic sitcom. So they have to back down and walk away from whatever realizations or changes they may introduce in an episode. If the show was more character driven rather then situational, Steve being trans would likely play a larger role. But since its a sitcom, thats not gonna happen.
I dont think the alien (or non-human) character being the one to fuck with gender and identity is necessarily bad. I would make sense that a species not like ours wouldnt have those same concepts... But i think that makes it more interesting that Roger fucks around like he does. Hes seen our concepts of gender and identity and flipped us the bird essentally. Which is kinda facinating to think about... buuuut even with all of that said, its really annoying to see ONLY the non-human characters be trans because ya it does make being trans seem like an alien or inhuman trait.
Also Roger having no problem with Switching between male and female characters
Also if American_dad wants to be more storyline, they should have returned that plot when Steve was pregnant 😅
Because I watch so much American Dad, I absolutely took this episode as indicating that Steve is probably trans... but he's forced back into the closet because his family's the toxic representation of America (child abuse included), and it would be incredibly dangerous for Steve to actually acknowledge the reality of her identity... so Steve uses biological essentialism to convince himself that he's a boy and survive in his family. It also conveniently keeps the shows format.
Ah, yes, perfect timing of a new episode to keep my brain focused while I do data entry and analysis updates
I'm the opposite rn, this is helping me procrastinate working lol
Women’s roller derby is, in real life, very queer friendly so that clears up certain jokes they make here.
I think they genuinely tried their best but because of the status quo, they weren't sure how to really stick the landing on their message. The ending could have had a better dialogue of Steve still owning the fact he feels comfortable as a boy with a penis but maybe also make a somewhat crude joke like "and this boy is gonna use his penis to bone" per the usual steve crude humor. So he's confident in his own body and still able to make some generic joke on hahaha penis.
This all does remind me of a tumblr post though saying its healthy and should be encouraged that cis people question their own gender and how they want to present themselves with that gender even if you end up just feeling confident in the fact you have whatever genitals you were born with. As a cis woman myself it just makes me feel sort of better about myself and Im not just blindly going with what society says but owning who I am and that I'm happy with myself.
15:26 I think it is more laughing with for "Whole team is LGBT" not laughing at. Roller derby is itself a very inclusive sport and American Dad is also super aware of its heightened reality. Everyone and everything is super sexualized and horny.
I'm not here to tell you how to feel about these jokes, just to give a bit of context for the show.
I have to wonder if they just talked to someone involved in roller derby who told them about the general acceptance of trans people, and if that's the difference between this and other contemporary pieces of media
the folding image joke is that it's a skull and crossbones with fire in the eyes. I think the joke is at the conservatism of Stan and his to this point total lack of artist appreciation (hence a simple card trick is "dark arts" that or a skull and cross bones is some inside LGBTQIA+ thing im not privy too since i'm not a member of that group)
Not that I'm aware of lol (source : I'm queer af, but might also just be ignorant too =p)
This was a fascinating edition. It's incredible to see the creator of family guy doing something borderline okay 😂
It is true that men's sports don't typically get the same association with queerness, but as a lifelong wrestler I can say that wrestling is an exception to the rule. 😂
I’m honestly surprised especially pro-wrestling. Dudes in little to no clothing, greased up and manhandling one another. Sometimes dirt is involved
Sounds like Steve/Stevie didn't get to even consider being nonbinary. Going from "I must be a girl, everyone says so" to "I'm not a girl and never was" to "But I'm not a guy either , really" was how I got to identifying as nonbinary because at that point I knew that was an option. Feels like nobody actually told steve/stevie that was an option.
The folded together imagine is a sugar skull, a celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexian culture. That's my take on that anyway. I saw this episode when it aired, have to say I was shocked at the end of it. At the time it was easier to ignore all the stuff that came before, because I was gobsmacked that they got it right at the end, and fairly heavy handedly too. Glad to see you got a sponsor.
Stan's freaking out is just a jab at old people seeing optical illusions as witchcraft since the poster folds into a skull
I'm always excited for a Lily Simpson video, but I realized there's this level of complexity towards certain issues she's able to elaborate on in a way that always catches me off guard. Her humor is incredibly goofy, while maintaining its tone of importance and making me really think. I've watched so many of the things she talks about but somehow haven't thought deeply about them nor knew how to. Thank you for making videos!!!!
P.S I am a transwoman who loves her parts (shlong) so the ending is super silly and wack cuz girldick is the only dick I know of??
I would say that the main difference between family Guy and American Dad is that American Dad stays a bit more plot relevant like the older seasons of family Guy whereas family Guy has gone on to basically just be a bunch of cutaway gags
I was thinking, there's another way the episode could've ended, even within the sitcom "nothing really changes" limitation. Steve could've decided "I haven't really figured myself out, gender-wise. But I know I like skating with you. Can I stay on the team, even if I don't know whether I'm a girl?" And the roller derby people could've been accepting, and there we go. No big changes, episode wrapped up. The whole "you have to decide, boy or girl" is just unnecessary.
The general vibe I’ve gotten from Family Guy and American Dad is that Seth and co are ultimately progressive people. They just also believe that no joke should be off the table. Which, leads to a very mixed bag.
Seth McFarlane is in no way progressive. He is almost certainly a liberal, which is a faction that straddles the political center. He'll in one scene paint the right as corrupt, moronic, and incompetent, then immediately follow it up with a bigoted caricature that you're supposed to laugh at.
Also as a point Seth hasn't written for family guy for a while he just voices the characters
9:20 its a skull and cross bones
Seth MacFarlane has weird hair. It creeps me out, its like simultaneously very fine but thick and dense, its like an uncanny valley of head hair.
When this came out I was a kid and this episode was the reason I ended up loving this show, particularly the ending sequence of stan and steve washing a car to pour some sugar on me.
I remember being impressed for the most part with this episode when I saw it. Steve deciding he's a boy for the reasons he did is certainly eye-rolling, but in terms of trans representation, American Dad gets a distinct mark of "there was an attempt", which is considerably more than can be said for most of the shows and episodes you talk about.
I was actually legit upset when Steve resets back to the status quo at the end of the episode. And yeah the paper folds into a skull.
Idk if it's on your to-do list, but Zombieland Saga does a very good job with trans representation IMO
i am so ready for this. be damned my russian homework, i have stuff to watch
Man, Futurama also did an episode pretty similar to this with the whole "lesbian roller derby" thing
Just wanted to encourage you to keep it up. I’m not LGBT+, or even someone that watches TV. I just like storytelling, im more of a moviegoer and reader, and like to see coherent stories that everyone can enjoy. Your channel is pretty great and im excited for the next video.
So based off Steve's screams as the team tapes him down one last time over the credits; I always got the feeling that the cishet man who invaded their space got a comeuppance.
I've been looking forward to this.
AD is a show I have binged. idk how many times
Pre and post egg cracking I still don't know how I feel about this episode.
9:06 - i believe its a skull! pretty confusing look tho :/ anywho... a wonderful video as always Lily :)
I'm surprised this wasn't about the episode where Stan Smith got genderbent.
I think you make a lot of good points in this video, and having watched the show before, I appreciate looking at it through your critical lens. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the videos of yours that I’ve watched and I look forward to see what you do next.
Subverting the transphobic tropes at "the moment" by giving an actual insightful perspective is a really funny and smart bit, and a prime signifier of how AD is more than just a FG clone
Hi lily! I loved your video! I wanted to suggest an idea for a trans video because its so complex i cant wrap my head around it. There is a point in one peice where sanji gets sent to an island of trans women who are all like hairy and portrayed as masculine men in dresses who chase him around and forcibly trans him, but theres a scene where hes in a dress and getting spun around in flowers and he realizes that it just feels right to him? But its so complex cause he calls all the trans women on the island not real women and they are portayed as ugly when in actuality okamas were very pretty and that was the point. Sorry for the tangent, thank you for reading have a nice day.
I think the folded poster is meant to be a skull and crossbones?
thank you for making a american dad one! I wanted to hear your opinion on this episode and i appreciate that you tried to exclude roger (more of that "its ok to be queer as long as its not human thus making it not relatable" trope)
I'd like to add that the dark arts comment is a likely reference to the fact that the paper is made to be an illusion. That making a new image when folding the paper is magic, dark arts. It being a skull is part of that but not the entire framing of the joke and may be related to another reference entirely or just be thematically "cool" looking
Honestly looking back on this episode, it was probably one of the best trans episodes EVER made by Seth. Honestly that moment they just accepted steve no questions asked blew me away.
The folded flyer looks like a skull with poison leaking from the eyes, and flanked by two roses. If you have poor eyes or let your eyes go out of focus it also looks like a demon skull.
Edit: now that I have finished the video I wanted to say this episode was almost what cracked my egg. I wound up going the same path Steve did. It took me years after this show to have that oh moment, and accept myself. I also think that ending on a status quo hurts sitcoms, because they can never show actual character growth. My head cannon is that like me, Stevie also has an oh moment after a few years.
I already knew you loved Harvey Birdman. You wanna know how? .....MINDTAKING!!!
according to the american dad wiki: "Stan's folding the flyer to make an image of a skull recalls a long-time running gag in Mad magazine in which the back cover folded in to create a different image"
23:54
Your delivery, and the out-of-the-blue joke made me think SOOO much of John Oliver I almost cried British tears
I also saw a skull, but you’re not blind! Love your videos and happy to have found your channel recently! ❤
I’m begging you to do “trans representation in moral oral” it does pretty good all things considered
8:05 Lilly, for a bit of cultural context from the US: Roller Derby isnt a masculine sport it is a super lesbian sport. Not as a joke, not because its poking fun at it being "manly", but just because Roller Derby is literally a woman only sport that has always been super progressive and inclusive and part of American lesbian culture. Like a Subaru
the ol' skull and crossbones. also congratulations on the sponsor!
Omg I JUST WATCHED this with my new friend and she LOVED it! I was so glad - it's one of my favorite episodes
Great video! I was wondering if you were going to visit any old horror movies with trans themes, like Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, Dressed to kill, or Silence of the Lambs? I'm essentially curious about your thoughts on how each movie tries to hand wave the issue (he's not really trans, he's...) and how this affects the narrative/immpact the movies have.
I do appreciate that the team's reaction to Steve deciding he's cis is to respect that he thought about it. You don't have to end questioning your gender identity by realizing you're trans, and it's helpful for cis people to think about it as well.
Yes nobody should be afraid to think about it and the important aspect is to come to your own conclusion