>>149232734
This makes no sense. The story is about a boy who is abducted by aliens and is pretending to be Earth's leader. How does removing his "queerness" make the story worse? How uninteresting was the space adventure to begin with if Elio being gay was the lynchpin of the movie, and even that was fucking awful because it bombed with test audiences.

I think this is a peak into why Pixar sucks now. This should be a general story about being the odd kid out who now has to represent an entire planet of people he doesn't understand and who doesn't understand him. This idea should be relatable to many people across different spectrums of life. Gay? Sure. Anti-social? Yeah. Weird interests? Absolutely. Disabled? Why not. Abnormal hobbies? You betcha. You should be able to plug-in-play any variant of Elio into this story and the message still works.

But if you are HINGING him on being discovering his queer identity in your fucking kids space adventure to the point that removing it "ruins" the story, then it wasn't a story worth telling. It was just a vanity project from the get-go. Now, if this was a high school coming-of-age story about love, then yeah, that would make more sense.