Was it just me, or did 2022 TV shows and movies feel very gay? While it’s no secret that in modern media, Sapphic relationships often don’t get the justice they deserve (a recent painful example is the termination of first kill), it seems like they’re being replaced by something else that’s much more implicit and ambiguous.
As we tuned into some of the biggest shows and films of the year, we saw many deeply sapphic relationships that weren’t sexual. Instead, they were fueled by sexual tension, chemistry, and an intense emotional connection. While sapphism can be correlated with lesbianism, for many it is generic term about queerness and love for women. And in this Gen Z character-driven media age, it feels like Sapphic friendships — not quite queer, not quite Not queer – have a moment.
As I watched the shows and movies that followed, that very notion of “will they, won’t they” nagged at me, asking me to put down my weird lens and just enjoy — and that was part of the fun. The other part? Logging into Twitter to see everyone else sending them out just as hard, and realizing what we saw was something way more than platonic.
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From movies like That Stand out and take revenge to series like Yellow jackets, Wednesdayhouse of dragon, and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, the plethora of Sapphic friendships on TV that year validated my own deeply emotional, sometimes confusing, relationships with my girlfriends. While a fierce emotional connection doesn’t mean it’s always queer, identifying all of those on-screen relationships as sapphic was a refreshing way to reevaluate and re-evaluate all of the ambiguous connections I’ve had in my own life justify.
This year’s depictions of relationships between women felt a lot more concrete than any with their male counterparts, which begs the question: why not bring them in love? If anything, these queer-coded friendships illustrate just how intimate and complicated relationships between women can be, something that has historically gone unnoticed on film and television shows. Below we’ve rounded up 9 of the best, most suspenseful, and most talked about Sapphic friendships of the year.
The Fallout – Vada and Mia
Megan Park’s directorial debut follows Vada (played by Jenna Ortega), a survivor of a school shooting as she begins to overexert herself more time with her classmate and fellow survivor Mia (Maddie Ziegler). At its core, the film is about dealing with trauma from Vada’s relationships with others, and as a viewer it was easy to cling to the bond between her and Mia. As the two kiss, the sexual attraction between the girls feels secondary to the emotional bond they share — it’s not a film that focuses on the romantic aspects of their connection. At its core, it shows how Vada’s relationships, particularly those with Mia, help her heal from trauma.
© Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection
Yellowjackets – Shauna and Jackie
In a series fueled by so many unknowns, the relationship between young Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) and Jackie (Ella Purnell) was one that not only kept us grounded, but deeply invested. The show always had to be a bit odd as the storyline follows a girl’s soccer team stranded in the wilderness. Even with another explicitly gay lead, there was such a deep emotional connection between Shauna and Jackie that fans were begging for it to happen — there were so many longing looks between the two that it was hard to believe were not deeply in love. (And let’s not even start talking about Shauna having Jackie’s boyfriend’s baby, or that emotional death scene.)