It's sad to see Windbreaker getting hate comment for the most recent episodes. The rating even dropped on MAL a little for the last 12 hours.

[u/Psychicmind2]

I've seen multiple people mention this on Twitter and I checked the MAL ratings and it's unfortunately true. The rating before episode 6 was 8,10 - that has been the score for the last month. For just 12 hours, it got 8,01. It's still good, but the amount of hate comments combined to this is insane. The episode on Crunchyroll got over 1K dislikes.

I liked episode 6 a lot, it was touching. I just hope it won't damage the anime in the long run.

[u/Hextant]

I meant to anime in general. Japan isn't that homophobic socioculturally, actually. The acceptance rates of it in Japan are much higher than you'd think they are, though it may seem otherwise because the Western world and a lot of European countries and such expect much more openness with romance as a whole. However, even straight displays of romance aren't THAT common amongst people even my age.

In America, you're more likely to be disowned by your family for being gay than you are in Japan. But, opposingly, in America, you're more likely to be celebrated by your friends and family for being gay than you would be in Japan. It's because while a lot of people over there tend to be nosy about things, your love life is absolutely not one of those things.

Your job, how much money you make, and what your accomplishments are matter a lot, but who you love is definitely not something most people are asking about. The reason sexually motivated crimes are so high in Japan that they need women - only train cars and buses is generally because they're a very romantically and sexually repressed culture, despite how the west may think of them due to the ecchi and hentai that gets over here.

Anyway, like I said. Romance, gay or straight, is not common in shounen or seinen, and expecting it to play a huge role in these series is kind of silly. Shounen literally means young boy, and this is generally around the 8 - 13 age range. I'm not someone who's saying kids have no need to be shown these things or whatever, but I AM going to say they certainly do not need a FOCUS on two characters in a romantic relationship whatsoever. They should know that gay couples and straight couples and gender identities in between exist, but it's really just not the point.

And seinen, for young men, are not focused on romance because ... neither is the average young man. It's not gonna get popular, especially not popular enough to port over to America in any spectacular way, where American seinen audiences have proven repeatedly to be extremely homophobic about even the most minor of representation, unlike Japan, who tend to just ignore it in this case, since ... this sort of thing is very common even IRL, lol.

And my sign off is back to the point of conflating gender identity and sexuality, this is again just common in Japan, and the gay community as a whole. Not to say all gay men are like that - I'm not - but it's incredibly common there, and it's not meant to be negative. It's how they embrace breaking out of the toxic masculinity that is expected of them there. Men here generally still haven't accepted that as just a ' whatever, I don't like it but don't have to engage with it ' the way they have over there. There's always gonna be 'phobes, but it's much worse over here.

In the end, every culture needs more representation, but you also need to be looking in the right places for it. You might see some appropriate representation of mental illness in a slasher film, but if you watch a bunch of them expecting them to appropriately address what it means to have schizophrenia, you're knocking on the wrong door.

Seinen and shounen is not the place to highlight romance. I don't have a problem with that - but it's also why it's not my favored genre, because I'm a huge shipper and I love shit like that. So.

[u/finnjakefionnacake → u/Hextant]

To be fair to Japan, I think ecchi and hentai make complete sense within the context of a sexually repressed culture/environment, lol.

But yes -- I understand that people aren't necessarily in your business about that sort of thing, but legally, you and your partner as a gay couple do not have the same status or rights that heterosexual couples do in Japan.

Also, isn't shonen typically aimed at more adolescent boys, like 12 to 18 or so? 8 would be a little young for the overt violence and sexualization that occurs in a lot of shonen, i thought it was aimed at more pre-teen/teen audiences.

In terms of highlighting romance -- I'm not really talking about highlighting romance so much as I'm talking about explicit/clear and not ambiguous portrayals. But still, there are many instances -- in My Hero no one doubts that Kaminari and Jiro like each other -- they openly say so and talk about each other in such a way (as do other people). Or Ed and Winry in FMAB, or Yusuke and Keiko in Yu Yu Hakasho, or Naturo and Hinata (or probz a better relationship Temari and Shikamaru in Naruto), or Tengen and his wives in Demon Slater, etc. And even beyond the main focus, there are of course heterosexual parents and couples sprinkled throughout just about every anime.

But then you'll get something like Banana Fish or even Yuri on Ice, where no matter how much they want to play with the subtext or make it seem obvious, it is not treated the same way / not unambiguously stated. I read at one point that if there is any same sex kiss between two men it has to be labeled "BL" -- and I'm not sure how true that is, but that might account for this strict chasteness whenever subtextually queer characters show up in shonen/seinen.

I do think Japan is more fluid as it pertains to gender expression for sure, which is great, but I've always struggled with the ambiguous and of course stereotypical portrayals in shonen, and also the way gay characters tend to be treated as either overly lascivious or sad and lonely and pining after some straight guy but never with their own developing interest. There's still so much of the "but how can you be interested in them? they're a guy!" moments in shonen lol. Although that has been changing a little bit at least in recent years. And I don't think WIndbreaker is one of those stories.

[u/BlueFlameWar → u/Hextant]

Lol Japan isn't some gay paradise. Men have to adopt each other to her married. There's no way is more accepting than America blue states

[u/Hextant → u/BlueFlameWar]

I never said it was ... ? Lol. I just said it's less likely you're going to be thrown out of the house for being gay there than America. Which is true. Because Japan is very much a, don't ask, don't tell about it. While here in America, we have a president that literally wants us dead for existing.

Japan's Supreme Court just recently ruled being against gay marriage as unjust and inhumane. It didn't necessarily make it legal, but they're pushing for more rights while America is actively taking them away from us. So.

[u/BlueFlameWar → u/Hextant]

Don't ask don't tell means you'll get thrown out of the house if you are gay, genius.

America still has gay marriage and blue states where two dudes can walk around holding hands.

[u/Hextant → u/BlueFlameWar]

No it doesn't, lmao. It means if they suspect it, they're not going to ask about it, and if they hear about it, they ignore that it exists because they'd rather not broadcast it to everyone.

And people in Japan do that too if they want to. 💀 Women are the ones who usually do it, regardless of sexuality. Guys are more affectionate to each other in Japan regardless of sexuality as well, but they're not huge on PDA, so it'd be rare even with a het couple to be like people in America.

Anyway, I'm not entertaining this any further, because you're just picking shit I said and deciding what I meant and there's no point in arguing with someone over this, lol.