What’s Riley’s Deep Dark Secret?

Have you ever been preemptively annoyed at something that hasn’t happened yet — only for that thing not to happen, which only leaves you more annoyed? I have, most recently around 8:35 p.m. on a weeknight during the closing credits of Inside Out 2.

To set the scene: Remember how one of the subplots of the first Inside Out was that Riley, the tween girl in whose brain much of the film takes place, was really into ice hockey? You’d better, because you are not prepared for how much ice hockey there is in Inside Out 2. Riley is now 13, in the thick of puberty and roiling with emotions. She’s attending a three-day hockey camp, where she meets her idol, a senior girl named Val who becomes the focus of Riley’s entire life. Every move she makes is in service of getting closer to Val, and hopefully getting Val to like her.

In the text of the film, this is merely because she really, really wants to be just like Val. But you don’t have to squint too hard to see a subtext where Riley is so obsessed with her beautiful, accomplished teammate because she has romantic feelings for her.

A further hint to this possibility occurs near the end of the film’s first act, after Joy, Sadness, and the rest of the emotions we know from the first Inside Out have been evicted from the mind’s control room and replaced by more complex ones, like Anxiety, Envy, and Ennui. They’re locked away in a vault, where they meet other repressed elements of Riley’s psyche. There’s her favorite character from a little kids’ cartoon, a PS2-style video game character she used to have a crush on, and also her Deep Dark Secret, which naturally takes the form of a gigantic rock monster shrouded in a tunic, too shy to reveal itself.

By this point, a discerning viewer has put the pieces together: Riley’s secret is that she’s gay. (Or she’s bi, or pansexual, or just generally queer. Happy Pride!) Except, after Joy and the gang escape from the vault, the Deep Dark Secret never appears again in the main narrative. If you’re the type of person who gets out of there as soon as the credits start to roll, Riley’s secret is a Chekhov’s gun that never goes off. Frustrating!

However, years of experience with Disney and Pixar led me to believe…