After years of hints and being embraced by the queer community, Velma, the bespectacled brains of the Scooby-Doo team is canonically a lesbian.
In the new movie, Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, Velma’s famous glasses are figuratively — and literally — steamed up by a female character named Coco Diablo. The clip has already gone viral. “OMG LESBIAN VELMA FINALLY CANON CANON IN THE MOVIES LETS GOOOOOO,” read one tweet that got more than 130,000 likes.
The official revelation, however, isn’t news to the orange sweater-wearing character’s fans. In fact, James Gunn, who wrote the live-action Scooby-Doo movies before embarking on the Guardians of the Galaxy films, had tried to make it official back in 2001.
Linda Cardellini played the character back in the original and its sequel, which starred Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy and Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne.
For his part, Gunn retweeted a Variety story on the news, which quoted now-deleted tweets from the filmmaker.
“In 2001 Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script,” Gunn wrote. “But the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down” with Velma’s sexuality “becoming ambiguous [in] (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) & finally having a boyfriend (the sequel),” referring to 2004’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.
Tony Cervone, who was a supervising producer with Gunn on the series Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, corroborated Gunn’s take in a recent Instagram post. “…Velma in ‘Mystery Incorporated‘ is not bi. She’s gay. We always planned on Velma acting…out of character when she was dating Shaggy because that relationship was wrong for her, and she had unspoken difficulty with the why.”
Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! debuted Tuesday on digital.
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