Welcome back to Reality in Anime Week. ^_^

We’ve already discussed The Power of Hope ~ Precure in Full Bloom~‘s honest look at adult life. Today we turn once again back to I’m In Love With the Villainess, for an episode that many people hope will change anime for the better. (And some people threw tantrums about, but that’s a different conversation.)

In Episode 3, Misha turns to Rae and says, “Are you what they call ‘gay’?” In Japanese, the word used is douseiai (同性愛), homosexual. Rae then answers this with honesty. At which Lene mentions that gender isn’t really the issue and Rae explains that gender does matter for her. The English dub is radiant here, with a line about “love is love” is not wrong, but gender does matter for those people for whom it matters. Ironically, we had had this very conversation the night before on the Okazu Discord. ^_^

I’m going to take a second to digress here and say that the English dub for this series is absolutely outstanding and I recommend watching either or both. Hannah Alyea as Rae is brilliant and Lindsay Shepphard is incandescent as Claire.

I spent most of yesterday reading the comments for the sub and dub (which turn out to be different! Why, Crunchyroll?) and people were positively glowing with praise for the frankness of the conversation. A few people were moved, many were surprised (I guess they haven’t been reading my reviews. ^_^;). Some folks inevitably mentioned that this has never been done before in anime – that is not 100% true, but this scene definitely broke some walls and of course anime fandom memory doesn’t go very far back as new fans never know what they missed.) I want to assure people that these walls were broken with intention – this series is not done providing realistic commentary about both queer lives and social and financial inequality. This is a show that I expected to knock people’s socks off and so far it has not disappointed.

Given that King Records thinks this series Blu-ray will sell well enough that they already have opened pre-orders, I think this may be a real moment of changing tides in an industry that has regularly utilized queer content, without accepting the people whose stories it tells. Media companies in general are conservative, and otaku are often, weirdly, also very conservative.

In a year where Kadokawa (a company that regularly profits from fannish pairings of same-sex characters and manga that portrays queer stories) backtracked on the relationship between Suletta and Miorine …a relationship witnessed by viewers worldwide, no less… this is a story that Ichijinsha is giving room to be exactly as queer as it wants and needs to be.

That’s worth celebrating.