Have you ever watched a movie or TV show and wished you could get your time back? Well, that’s how I and many others felt about the indie animated movie “Lesbian Space Princess,” or LSP. It recently gained popularity because of the controversial way the creators portrayed the LGBTQ+ community and the stereotypes that were used throughout the movie.

Directors Emma Hough Hobbs (“Talk to Me,” “Gold”) and Leela Varghese (“I’m the Most Racist Person I Know,” “Science+”) partnered with the South Australian Film Corporation to co-produce the movie. The producers and directors aimed to make LSP a Sci-Fi, LGBTQ+ adult comedy movie. They did meet that mark, but their comedic style offended many people.

Despite the controversial opinions, LSP was successful in its early days.

Production began in 2023, with four preview screenings taking place at the Adelaide Film Festival in October the following year. The preview screening was successful, and Film Lab: New Voices Initiative granted $600,000 for further development. LSP was officially released on Oct. 31, 2025.

The creator’s synopsis of LSP is: “A space princess is thrust out of her sheltered life and into a galactic quest to save her bounty hunter ex-girlfriend, Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel “Class of ‘07,” “Swift Street”), from Straight White Malines.” but this doesn’t even scratch the surface of everything that happens. The blurb doesn’t cover that the protagonist, Saira, voiced by Shabana Azeez (“The Pitt,” “Tales from Outer Suburbia”), travels across space to a nightclub, crash-lands on a planet, nearly dies, and decapitates someone.

While I love that they tried to give the LGBTQ+ community a spotlight in a movie, I wish they handled it differently. Instead of making them likable characters and showing them in a positive light, they made Saira nearly unlikeable due to the amount of stereotypes they use and how she treats other characters.

The movie starts with Saira talking about her and Kiki’s past relationship through scrapbook-style pictures and graphics. We see in each picture that Saira gets more clingy as time goes on–a popular lesbian stereotype. The movie also gives Saira another stereotype: all lesbians cheat because they “can’t choose.” This is exactly what happens with Saira’s love interests, Kiki and Willow. You could argue that because Kiki is Saira’s ex-girlfriend, that it’s not ‘cheating,’ but it’s stated many times that Saira still loves Kiki–enough to travel the galaxy for her.

After Saira crash-lands on a planet, she meets Willow (Gemma Chua-Tran “Heartbreak High,” “Ladies in Black”). After they save her from near death, Willow decides to join Saira on her quest. They hit it off before they get to Kiki, which proceeds to a messy love triangle and an unsatisfactory payoff.

The directors decided to make the main characters in LSP female and part of the LGBTQ+ community. This could have been a cool concept; what dulls it down is that being straight is treated like a flaw. For example, Saira’s mothers comment many times that they’re lucky that Saira isn’t straight, and that she has a girlfriend, showing how little they think of straight people. This portrayal of the straight characters adds to the controversy.

This controversial portrayal is cemented by the main antagonists, a group of aliens called the “Straight White Maliens.” These maliens are meant to be men who want female attraction and will do anything to get it—even kidnapping, stealing, and lying.

In their introduction, they are seen kidnapping Kiki to use as bait to lure Saira to their ‘mancave’ or lair. They need her Labrys to power their “chick magnet” to “get the hot chicks” since they haven’t been able to for “thousands of years.” They are seemingly unknown to everyone, despite saying they were once powerful: “We used to be the most powerful beings in the whole universe… until you stripped our ancestors of all their power and you, you left our kind for dead.”

I get that this is meant to satirize the “Male Loneliness Epidemic,” but in this type of movie, it just feels wrong that they are the main antagonists. It feels like they only used the males as antagonists and don’t prove anything else, except some unintended comic relief.

Another example of a flawed male character is the “Problematic Ship,” voiced by Richard Roxburgh (“Van Helsing,” “The Rake”).

This is the ship Saira takes to go on her adventure. He is portrayed as an old, male-owned spaceship. He speaks through the ship’s speaker and seems to control the whole ship, like an AI system, and he is shown to be very misogynistic. Saying that women can’t drive and shouldn’t even be on the ship to begin with when Saira has trouble steering. Later, when Willow asks Saira where she got the ship from, Saira jokingly responds, “from the 21st century,” and he agrees enthusiastically.

Some people may see the “Problematic Ship” character as a reflection of Saira’s character arc. At the beginning of the movie, he was cynical and rude to her, purposely taking the wrong routes on their quest. Just as Saira didn’t believe in herself at first and didn’t know where she wanted to go or do in life. But as the movie progresses, Saira begins to accept herself and master the use of her Labrys.

The Labrys is something else that people are on the fence about. The Labrys symbol is a double-headed axe that symbolizes feminine strength for lesbian communities and can be inclusive to trans-lesbian communities. Saira struggles to summon the Labrys at first, until she visits Blade (Kween Kong “Drag Race Down Under,” “Body Blow”), a drag queen who specializes in making weapons. Blade helps Saira become confident enough to summon it–only for a new problem to arise.

“[Lesbian Space Princess is] an hour and a half of cringing at borderline offensive stereotypes. Whilst the theatre was filled with howls of laughter, I could not help myself and feel secondhand embarrassment at the film. As a queer woman myself, who is not afraid of making fun of her own identity, this crude South Park-level attempt at comedy was even a step too far. Remember the whole “Pickle Rick” meme that took the internet by storm a few years ago? Imagine that but rainbow-washed and less clever (if such a thing is even possible).

Not all was bad, though; had it been a 5-minute YouTube video I would probably have enjoyed it, but just as vanilla extract can be delicious in your recipes when added sparingly, adding too much makes the dish gross. Some of the character interactions did get a chuckle out of me and the character of Willow was rather delightful, but unfortunately that was not enough to redeem it, let alone make it a worthwhile watch.” This was a review written on IMDB back in 2025 by the user “muckbangcakelover69.”

I wanted to include this review because it most accurately matches my view about the movie. The movie definitely had its flaws, but it isn’t outright bad. There are many more reviews on Letterboxd and IMDB, and they are all mixed. Some say it was the worst thing they’ve ever seen; some say people were too harsh and they loved it.

Overall, I saw what the movie was intending, and I think the attempt was good. Being bisexual myself, I did see this movie as cringeworthy, nearing offensive, and sometimes funny. The voice acting was great, but the original songs throughout didn’t contribute to the plot. It’s a mix of flaws and strengths. If the directors try to make another movie, I would definitely be interested. But with LSP, I think they could have done better.

“Lesbian Space Princess” is rated TV-MA for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence/gore, and pervasive explicit language. It is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.