It's not really queer baiting because they already objectively made them a gay couple. IDK what to call this. Old conservatives having a temper tantrum demanding to return to the 80s?
yeah, there have been plenty of queer characters in anime since the 80s. sailor moon wasn't 80s, but things like dirty pair and ranma 1/2 were. and yoshiyuki tomino, creator of gundam, was very open about how he wanted audiences to think amuro and char (the main characters of the first series and important ones in several later ones) might be gay
The 80s were less progressive in some ways, such as the rampant sexism or the "Lolicon Boom" in the mid part of the decade, which sometimes left it's ugly traces on anime outside of Wretched OVAs.
On the other hand, the production of Anime was left to people far to the left of today in many cases. Be it unionized workers attempting to block the making of Future War Year 198X over its antisovietism, or openly anti-imperialist plots in say Fang of the Sun Dougram, SPT Blue Comet Layzner or the second Patlabor movie (1993, but still) to even outright progressive stances on LGBT+ people such as in a famous episode of Dirty Pair back in '85. Apparently Stop! Hibari-Kun (1983) features a transgender protagonist, and is full of transphobia... but the transphobes are the butt of the joke.
Then starting in the mid 90s Evangelion came and old lefty directors from the 70s and 80s started retiring, leaving the door open to Anime produced by weebs for weebs and the stuff that brought Anime infamy started showing up more and more (it was profitable). Probably peaking in the 2010s.
It's not really queer baiting because they already objectively made them a gay couple. IDK what to call this. Old conservatives having a temper tantrum demanding to return to the 80s?
Didn't Sailor Moon have some pretty openly lesbian characters?
yeah, there have been plenty of queer characters in anime since the 80s. sailor moon wasn't 80s, but things like dirty pair and ranma 1/2 were. and yoshiyuki tomino, creator of gundam, was very open about how he wanted audiences to think amuro and char (the main characters of the first series and important ones in several later ones) might be gay
The 80s were less progressive in some ways, such as the rampant sexism or the "Lolicon Boom" in the mid part of the decade, which sometimes left it's ugly traces on anime outside of Wretched OVAs.
On the other hand, the production of Anime was left to people far to the left of today in many cases. Be it unionized workers attempting to block the making of Future War Year 198X over its antisovietism, or openly anti-imperialist plots in say Fang of the Sun Dougram, SPT Blue Comet Layzner or the second Patlabor movie (1993, but still) to even outright progressive stances on LGBT+ people such as in a famous episode of Dirty Pair back in '85. Apparently Stop! Hibari-Kun (1983) features a transgender protagonist, and is full of transphobia... but the transphobes are the butt of the joke.
Then starting in the mid 90s Evangelion came and old lefty directors from the 70s and 80s started retiring, leaving the door open to Anime produced by weebs for weebs and the stuff that brought Anime infamy started showing up more and more (it was profitable). Probably peaking in the 2010s.
My mistake about when Sailor Moon came out; I assumed it was late 80s.
Char definitely set off my gaydar all along.
char and garma were definitely fucking
Season 1 of Sailor Moon was in 1992, while the last episode of the original run was on the 8th February 1997.
I'm older than that, but it felt 80s to me.
I just picked the 80s cause it sounded far enough away
retroactive queer baiting maybe?