on tina belcher

i analyze the similarities between me and the beloved bob's burgers character

Like you, I had a hard year this year. 2024 was a record rough one for me, but I made a couple personal records as well– number of Bob’s Burgers episodes watched in a row being the most monumental.

Bob’s Burgers plays in the background of a lot of my memories. My mom’s side of the family was known for quoting it at the perfect times. Before attentively watching the show I thought my aunt had masterfully created the name “little king trash mouth” for the raccoon in her yard, and when my cousins imitated Linda’s cries I didn’t always catch on. As an adult I began getting into the show more and more, watching while at my family's house, and celebrating the Christmas episodes each winter. This year, after returning home from an uncomfortable stint in the hospital in July, I dove into a rewatch of the 15 season show. I watched sporadically, sometimes episode after episode after episode played while I laid in bed or sewed or wrote, and sometimes I didn’t watch it for weeks, but it was always there for me. Currently, I’m on the last episode of season seven– and already dreading my rewatch coming to an end. Those of us who watch Bobs know that the characters are quirky, but not everyone realizes that boy obsessed Tina Belcher is a nonbinary lesbian.

Now, of course when most fans of the show hear Tina and lesbian, they would say something like “what about Jimmy Junior,” her self described “on again off again” boyfriend (s7ep15), with whom she is imagining a bit of a boy next door, Romeo and Juliet sort of situation. Jimmy Junior is the son of her dad’s biggest bully/enemy, Jimmy Pesto. Jimmy Junior is 13 just like Tina, he loves dancing, and wrestling with his best friend Zeke, and only really tells Tina his emotions in the episode where Tina test drives zoom school by sending a robot version of herself to class (s7ep8). Most of the time Tina is obsessed with Jimmy Junior’s butt, which makes for a lot of close ups of his cheeks as he dances or bends over or does any daily task that accentuates the bum. Tina would love the butt of a girl her age if she knew she was allowed to look at one, but she has yet to have her “ring of keys moment” because the producers of this show knew it would be too powerful to unleash.

When I was 13 or 14 I “dated” a boy. I dropped off a present at his house when I returned from a trip to Universal Studios, and he handed me a Hogwarts letter where rather than telling me I got accepted to a fake and terf-y wizard school, it told me I was accepted as his girlfriend. I instantly texted him saying yes, and we continued texting back and forth throughout the next couple of days. Like Tina, I was infatuated, but more so with the feeling of adulthood, that I was cosplaying being a grown up. It was the true adult thing to do to have a boyfriend, and now I had one. I don’t know if I liked him or the idea of him, but I know that that feeling is replicated in sweet Tina Belcher.

My eighth grade boyfriend and I went on one date, to our old elementary school playground. If memory serves me correctly, I invited my best friend at the time, and the three of us talked for thirty minutes on the wall ball courts, before walking back to our respective homes. Throughout the time we were there, our date was crashed by many of our acquaintances who lived in the neighborhood and reunited at Sexton Mountain Elementary. After our uncomfortable chats and brief game of basketball, he tried to walk me home. I declined a kiss and gave instead the half arm hug, the same awkward kind that I used on my parents. The thrill of a secret boyfriend made me feel older and sort of special, but I didn’t really like boys. I broke up with him on the way back from sleepaway camp in Washington because without my phone and the constant barrage of texts from the boy, I barely even thought about him.

We had dated two weeks, one of which I was away at camp.

I’m not sure what I got out of the relationship, but I do see this storyline as a similar one to Tina’s. Her feelings for Jimmy Junior revolve more around his looks, and other superficial ideas such as the fact that he is close in proximity. She rarely appreciates him for the things he says or feels, more or less putting him up on a pedestal because she is looking for the sense of adulthood that she believes comes from having a boyfriend.

When I was thirteen my notebook for language arts was covered in pictures of boys. My favorite boys were Newt from the Maze Runner, played by Thomas Brodie Sangster, and Will Herondale from the Infernal Devices series, which had not been adapted into a movie, so I was left to cast it in my mind. Deviantart images mixed in with handsome actors to cover every inch of my once green notebook.

I wrote fanfiction about my favorite dystopian novels, while Tina writes erotic fanfiction about her friends and Boyz 4 Now. The two of us used our creativity to put ourselves in a new world, writing love stories between us and our imagined boy toys. The only difference between us is that I got to grow up. Tina is stuck in a groundhog day type loop of always being 13, as the special nature of an animated show allows. She never ages and we don’t get to see her discover her sexuality. So here I am, left to pick up the pieces and put them together into a lesbian pie.

I wrote fanfiction because I wanted to escape my chronic illnesses. I wrote myself into these stories where the characters held the fragments of the world together with their bare hands because I wanted my pain to have meant something. Tina is also awkward, neurodiverse and well intentioned. She writes fanfiction to escape the monotony of serving customers in her dad’s restaurant and attending eighth grade for fifteen seasons. The two of us share a common desire to be the main character, and we model our fanfictions off of everything we had read, all of which seemed to state that a main character must have a male love interest. 13 year old me and 13 year old Tina were both sad and anxious (cut to Tina making her signature “UHH” sound) and we had to use our imaginations to make it through the struggles of middle school.

Compulsive heterosexuality and a lack of lesbian representation in our lives led the two of us to focusing on romance with men. In the seven seasons of Bob’s Burgers that I have watched straight through, there has not been a single lesbian role model for little Tina. Tina embodies the boy crazy stereotype because she thinks that’s what a teen is supposed to do in order to unlock popularity, following the lead of school mean girls Tammy and Jocelyn.

Like the other girls in the show, Tina has a couple of love interests– all men. There’s the episode where she dances with Justin at Tammy’s bat mitzah, an episode where she begins a romance with a ghost, an episode where she dates Henry then falls for Duncan, a fake dating episode with Darryl, and an episode where she spray paints the land ship with Jordan. All of these boys are one dimensional, demonstrating that her crushes are simply on a boy, not on THAT boy. She sees the love between her parents Bob and Linda and works to emulate it. Although she has many flings, the common through line of the series is Tina’s love for Jimmy Junior. But is it love?

Tina sees Jimmy Junior’s obvious comfortability with meshing masculinity and femininity, as he dances (literally) to his own drum. She focuses on him not out of love but more out of infatuation with the idea of androgyny. She lusts after Jimmy Junior, believing she wants to kiss him, by the campfire (s7ep8) and while he is on the trampoline (s7ep9) and in other episodes throughout the seasons. She protects her family through it all, shooting him with a t-shirt gun when he tries to ruin her family’s parade float (s7ep21) proving that she holds no allegiance to him, but rather to the idea of him.

Jimmy? More like enby, right? Tina views Jimmy Junior as a sort of nonbinary Gandalf, an example of what could be. This brings up the queer person’s age old question– do I want to befriend you, date you, or be you? Tina doesn’t know it yet, but she wants to BE Jimmy Junior. It may not be canon, but based on the many similarities between me and Tina, the pervasive power of internalized heteronormativity, the lack of representation and the desire for her to be comfortable in her own skin, it is clear that Tina is a nonbinary lesbian.