The Gaslight District (2025-) is an indie Australian supernatural crime comedy animation series, available on YouTube. The series, which consists of eight half-hour episodes, focuses on an apocalyptic future where the Earth of long ago is a faint memory, and the District is an island that floats above a flooded world. All the denizens of the eponymous District are debaucherous, eternal zombies who cannot die. They call themselves Rotlings, and if any of their limbs fall off, they can sew on other ones, and they quickly come back to life.
At the center of the story is the Smiling Dead, a crime family that includes the daughter, Melancholy “Mel” Hill, who may be at the center of a world-ending prophecy as the sole mortal human on earth who could destroy it all.
Mel is one of three children of Ken the Butcher, a gangster who also runs a restaurant where Mel works. Word is starting to get out that Mel may be the one human on the island born every 10,000 years and is doomed to destroy them all to create a new world. Determined to protect her family and become a member of the Smiling Dead, Mel hatches a plan to lift the supposed Human Egg up in Heaven (the show is full of Dante Inferno-esque lore like this) and destroy it in front of the island’s denizens to take heat off of the human allegations.
Mel is smart, ambitious, funny, sarcastic, calculating, and protective of her crime family. She maintains a massive sense of agency, coming up with a shrewd plan to keep her and her family safe from her human secret being found out.
She is also reckless, foul-mouthed, and impulsive. She doesn’t hesitate to kill — which, weirdly, we won’t necessarily dock her points for because everyone in this world is already dead, and everyone in this series is ultra-violent.
Regarding her queerness, Mel is seen in the pilot reading adult magazines with naked women. Mel also foolishly told her secret about being human to her ex-boyfriend, Romeo, whom the family quickly had to “cement” (give cement shoes to and dump into the ocean) to keep the secret from getting out.
The voice actor for Mel, Alannah Fitzgerald, has also succinctly confirmed that Mel is bi on Twitter:
The show has been a monumental success since its debut. The pilot for The Gaslight District dropped in April 2025 and has garnered over twenty-three million views at the time of writing.
Animation, even these days, rarely goes into LGBT representation. So to have a bi lead in The Gaslight District, a decidedly adult animation series, is a rare example of a bi lead in modern animation.