‘Us weirdos have to stick together’: Wild magic, queer time and queer spaces in Dana Terrace’s The Owl House

This article analyses American animator Dana Terrace’s series The Owl House (2020–23) through the concept of wildness, as mapped out by Jack Halberstam in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020). The article moves beyond simply enumerating the genderqueer characters on the programme and instead explores how ‘wildness’ functions at both the thematic and aesthetic levels of The Owl House as it presents wild queerness and wild magic as emancipatory subversions of restrictive social norms. The article places The Owl House within the tradition of the coming-of-age narrative, exploring how its content both subverts and complies with the genre’s conventions. The project also investigates queer time in The Owl House’s narrative before analysing the programme’s depiction of wild magic as a liberatory practice.