Turning Red’s version of teen lust is refreshingly weird

polygon.com:

There’s a scene in Pixar’s Turning Red that made me want to sink right through the carpet and into the afterlife. The protagonist, 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl Mei, has started doodling fantasy images of her crush, 17-year-old Daisy Mart clerk Devon. Her mother finds that fan art, and goes to chew out Devon for corrupting Mei. Mei’s mom has no idea these doodles were all the product of imagination, rather than reality — of a crush running free across the pages of a notebook.

Since the advent of television and movies, media have dictated the terms of being considered attractive, and most screen media in particular has left out the broader, messier spectrum of desire. This is true for onscreen girls and women, who for decades mostly conformed to a set look — white, thin, and able-bodied — and were attracted to boys and men who conformed to a similar set of norms. But that homogeneous idea of attractiveness left out how completely one-sided, truly fictitious, and often pretty weird so much young pining is, when crushes are first being formed. Only in the past few years has girlhood lust made its way onscreen, complicating the media landscape with wild, imaginative, and often cringy scenes that make for much more human storytelling.

Puberty is when many of us first start to think about what it means to be attracted to other people. Being horny for the first time is confusing and overwhelming, and Turning Red’s frankness and exaggerated lust captures this moment of life with hilarious finesse. When Mei Lee doodles the cute boy who works at the corner store, she begins with some fairly standard ideas: his muscled arms, his endearing bucket hat. But the doodling intensifies. And soon she draws him as a merman, melding