SpongeBob ends up decimating Jellyfish Fields, while a lone remaining jellyfish ends up catching (and jarring) SpongeBob, leading him to the factory where Mr.
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Krabs, implores the young sponge to capture as many jellyfish as he can so as to feed their “whole ecosystem full of hungry paying customers,” thus conflating nature with the market. SpongeBob uses the jelly to dress his Krabby Patty-the flagship burger at the Krusty Krab, where SpongeBob works-and, when some other customers get a taste, SpongeBob’s manager, Mr. “Jellyfish Hunter” begins with a scene ripe for the kind of semiotic reading to which Banet-Weiser alludes: SpongeBob catches a pink jellyfish and tickles it with a fuchsia feather until it “sneezes” purple jelly into a jar (Fig.
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That SpongeBob’s gayness floats between economy and ecology is unsurprising, given that the series has often dramatized the tension between those “most ill-fated bedfellows” (Wright and Nyberg 2015, 2) in our ever-hotter century. The nature of that gayness lies both in the show’s marketing and promotion and at the bottom of the ocean: a queer ecology whose depths we’ve only just begun to plumb. And SpongeBob’s gayness, I want to suggest, is similarly (hetero)flexible: both household product and poriferan, manufactured and natural, prepackaged and wild.
SpongeBob is nothing if not “flexible”-even in his sponginess, since he seems to belong both in a kitchen sink (by all appearances) and in the sea (Banet-Weiser 2007, 200). Significantly, though, Nickelodeon declined to comment for the CNN story to quote Cathy Renna (of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) in her response to the original Wall Street Journal piece: “He’s a sponge how can he be gay?” (Susman 2002).
In 2007, Sarah Banet-Weiser affirmed that SpongeBob’s “adult fan base … as well as the campy, kitschy nature of the program, has resulted in a semiotic reading, by some, of the show as a ‘gay show’” (2007: 200). A CNN story inspired by the tweet (“SpongeBob SquarePants gay? Nickelodeon just reinforced that theory”) opened by noting the “long debate about sexuality” (Frances 2020)-a debate that dates at least as far back as an oft-cited 2002 Wall Street Journal piece attributing the gay speculation surrounding animated icon to the show’s “sunny optimism, weird psychedelic world and peculiar humor,” as well as to the SpongeBob merch apparently flying from the shelves of New York’s gay novelty shops (Beatty). Cohen (of Henry Danger fame) and the bisexual animated character Korra (first seen on Avatar: The Last Airbender ) in a much-favourited tweet (Fig. On June 13, 2020, Nickelodeon, the longtime home of SpongeBob SquarePants (Stephen Hillenburg, 1999-), wrote that it was “Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies,” setting a rainbow-tied SpongeBob alongside trans actor Michael D. Last summer, SpongeBob came out-in a way.