okokok this is about to be a piping hot take. but i honestly think if h2o were made today it wouldn't have been nearly as gay as it was back in the early aughts

hear me out. western media in the early 2000s was soooo homophobic that the mere existence of gay people was consistently called into question. we're talking about a virulently homophobic, lesbophobic, and biphobic culture that failed to represent The Gays except maybe as the butt of some deeply unfunny joke. watch any episode of friends and you'll pick up what i'm putting down. now i'm not saying we've like cured homophobia at a structural level this decade but we have made such great strides in representation since then with canon gays in children's media and conversations about the importance of lgbt kids seeing themselves in media hitting the mainstream

in a weird, roundabout way, the pervasive homophobia of the early 00s actually contributes to a plausible queer reading of the text. the h2o writers likely would never have considered that emma and rikki's banter, chemistry, and dynamic could be construed as romantic since conversations about sexual difference weren't anywhere near mainstream back then. it wouldn't have even crossed their minds that the girlies could be gay for each other. perhaps someone who was in the trenches of the h2o fandom back in the day can speak to this, but it is hard for me to imagine even older viewers noticing some of the queer themes at play given the homophobic culture that dictated media, and vice versa

how and ever if h2o were made today i strongly feel that the gay of it all would have been dialled down substantially. parents watching h2o with their kids would have clutched their pearls at emma and rikki's interactions or heard the girls reiterate time and again that they are more important to each other than boys and alerted the censors. if h2o was written and aired in the early 2020s, thinkpieces would circulate about whether rikki and emma actually qualified as gay rep, and the steven universe/v*ltron/she ra industrial complex would be discoursing to high heaven about the queer themes present in the text. i honestly feel that the writers would have tried to avoid this outcome in the first place by making the show significantly less gay, thus avoiding having to implicate it in such discourse and hand-wringing from concerned parents

'but tumblr user hoziersgf,' i hear you cry, 'mako mermaids is a part of the same canon and aired around the time when conversations about lgbt rep in children's media began to gain traction in the early 2010s. those girlies sure were not even remotely heterosexual yet the terminally online gays never got a hold of mako mermaids!' to that i say that mako mermaids never reached the same levels of success and acclaim purely from a numbers standpoint as h2o, but i don't really have an adequate rebuttal that isn't just 'the overall quality of mako mermaids is objectively worse than the likes of a lot of children's media with canon gay rep from the same cultural moment'

anyway it is very sad? funny to think that homophobia likely played a part in our enjoyment of the gay mermaid show many years on. none of this is to say that the h2o writers were all violent homophobes, but we are all conditioned by the culture which we inhabit, and the deeply rooted homophobia of the early 2000s actually lends itself well to queer readings of the text. whether the h2o girlies 'count' as gay rep is probably discourse better saved for another post. what i will say is that i see myself in emma, in rikki, in cleo, in their bond and their sisterhood and the secret they share, whether the writers intended for me to feel seen in that way or not