Many of these works were of a homoerotic nature and featured characters from known franchises or even real life Japanese celebrities like idols.
![canon gay anime characters canon gay anime characters](https://cdn.myanimelist.net/s/common/uploaded_files/1454628146-7d1ac52ed41bfc9630816d4bad666261.jpeg)
![canon gay anime characters canon gay anime characters](https://honeysanime.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Wonder-Egg-Priority-Wallpaper-700x392.jpg)
Quickly after the meteoric popularity of Year 24 Group’s work, amateur mangaka began laying the groundwork for the doujinshi (self-published or fanworks) at the newly formed Comic Market fair. It lies in direct contrast to shounen manga (aimed at young boys) in which sharp and rigidly drawn characters have firm gender identities. This softness lends characters in shoujo manga a natural androgyny, in which they can slip easily between genders while maintaining a neutral base. Bodies are warped and exaggerated to the point of being nearly inhuman, with later artists like CLAMP elongating legs and thinning bodies in hyperbolic ways. Many panels have non-existent backgrounds, with characters floating in a sort of dreamlike haze of shading. Within their bibliographies, we can see many motifs that are present in shoujo anime today: a fascination with high society France, an excess of flower petals, sparkly doe eyes which cry thick, milky tears and a lighter, more blurred art style.
Canon gay anime characters series#
Mangaka like Keiko Takemiya pioneered the Boys’ Love genre with her popular series Kaze to Ki no Uta, while Riyoko Ikeda published her proto-Girls’ Love series Rose of Versailles. According to Boys Love Manga and Beyond, a cohort of female manga artists known as the Year 24 Group revolutionized the space of manga and formed early notions of what would become a shoujo canon. Much of this has to do with the way censorship laws worked in Japan in the ‘60s and ‘70s. That said, most queer characters you’ll find in anime will most likely be from these shoujo anime, particularly ones that are adapted from manga written by women. Despite Sailor Moon’s relatively good representation for its time period, it also deploys queerphobic tropes to develop a lot of its supporting cast. This coupled with the ease in which we can read Fisheye as a trans woman implicates transness as being duplicitous and dishonest.
![canon gay anime characters canon gay anime characters](https://miro.medium.com/max/1200/1*BVdIL35iE_-7u4UoyvLN7g.png)
Animation has a long history of queer villains, but Fisheye in particular acts in a predatory way towards Tuxedo Mask on multiple occasions. In SuperS, we’re introduced to a gay villain named Fisheye who wears feminine clothing. Zoisite is portrayed as jealous and insane when Kunzite off-handedly compliments a woman. The blatant queerphobia of these dubs sometimes distracts from the other, more subtle problems present in portrayals of gender-nonconforming and trans characters in shoujo (aimed at young girls) anime. As you might imagine, it’s completely ridiculous and only draws attention to the inherent queerness hiding in the series. Their voices change from baritone male voice actors to lilting female voices, as if to emphasize the difference between the civilian brothers and Sailor Scout sisters. In the dub, when the Sailor Starlights transform, they are physically replaced with their twin sisters, who supposedly are just waiting in some astral, in-between phase to be summoned. It’s easy to read the Sailor Starlights as genderfluid characters, given their distance from Western ideas of gender presentation as well as their unique ability. When they transform into Sailor Scouts, their physicality alters back to their original selves. In particular, the Sailor Starlights are able to physically alter their bodies into male forms. The season is meant to play up how large the Sailor Moon universe is-the Sailor Starlights are from a distant planet in a far-off star system, and the powers they possess are unlike anything the main cast of Sailor Scouts can do. In the show’s final season, Sailor Stars, we’re introduced to the Sailor Starlights, a group of three Sailor Scouts who disguise themselves as a boy band in order to find their lost ruler, Princess Kakyuu.
![canon gay anime characters canon gay anime characters](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/c4/04/8cc4043aad46cf55099a520446c01a2f.jpg)
Perhaps the most ridiculous example comes from the Italian dub. Sailor Moon’s censorship doesn’t end there either.