Melancholy “Mel” Hill is the main character in the Australian indie animation series, The Gaslight District.
The series from Glitch Animation focuses on the eponymous district, an area on Earth in a post-apocalyptic world populated by Rotlings — a debaucherous set of former humans that have become purple-blooded eternal zombies. They never experience death but can easily reattach any limbs that go missing.
Mel is an adoptive daughter of Ken the Butcher. Ken is head of the crime family, the Smiling Dead, and also runs a restaurant that Mel works at. She is funny, sarcastic, clever, protective of her Smiling Dead family members, and scrappy — great to have on your side during a fight. She is also impulsive, does not always think things through, and can act recklessly.
Mel is also the result of a prophecy — the sole living human who bleeds black blood born every 10,000 years and destined to destroy the District to create a new world. Her human identity is kept secret in part by her bandage outfit (which hides any bleeds and also the fact that she has never lost/reattached any limbs like the Rotlings).
Determined to keep her human identity secret and protect her Smiling Dead family, Mel hatches a plan to go up to Heaven and steal an egg that they will make look like the Human Egg of lore, and destroy it in front of the District to stop cold growing allegations that she is human.
Mel’s bisexuality is prominent from the pilot. The opening car chase sequence stems from a coworker witnessing her looking at a nude women’s magazine and getting so turned on she gets a nosebleed — revealing the telltale black blood. Her father also notes he has had to kill staff who learned about Mel’s human secret due to her telling her ex-boyfriend, a dishwasher named Romeo, who started to blab to other co-workers. While bisexuality is an important core part of Mel’s identity and starts the engine of the show, it is not the sole or major facet of who she is. In short, her bisexuality is key, but it also does not define her.
