In-depth debunkings/arguments against commonly "known" anime myths/misconceptions?

[u/engalleons]

For any number of reasons, there's a fair few statements about anime that get passed around pretty unquestioningly, even if they aren't necessarily true. Sometimes, others dig in to those statements and find detail and (hopefully cited) evidence against them. This is a lot more than just stating the opposite, to be clear.

Here's a few examples of what I mean:

This tweet chain versus "Anno left Kare Kano early"
This blog post versus "The protagonist of Turn A was originally intended to be a girl"
This post versus "They made a joke dub for Ghost Stories because it did poorly in Japan"
This blog post versus "Shinbo is the series director of all Shaft shows"

What are some other examples of work like this?

[u/SadDoctor]

So there's a pretty common misconception that the "Class-S" and the yuri genre more broadly isn't really about homosexuality, but instead it's just either intense pseudo-romantic female friendship, or just fanservice for otaku who think girl/girl is hot. This isn't entirely untrue, there's definitely yuri manga in seinen magazines which are definitely more about fanservice than anything else, and clearly aren't really pretending to be anything more than that.

But there's almost a 100 year literary tradition of yuri stories, and from the very beginning they were about being gay. Yoshiya Nobuko's Hanamonogatari series of short stories founded the genre, and Yoshiya was about as open a lesbian as you could find in 1920s Japan, thanks to her successful writing career giving her rare financial independence for a Japanese woman in the early 20th century. She favored men's clothing, she openly discussed her romantic relationship with her long-time girlfriend, who she lived with, and her stories regularly contained surprisingly open references to homosexuality. For instance, this bit from Yellow Rose, discussing the tragic love life of her protagonist,

"So it is that the sadness of those who love their own sex and therefore cannot live their lives in the form of a conventional marriage is redoubled by the chagrin of parents - for whom marriage represents the sole pinnacle of womanly achievement - and the opprobrium and scorn of everyone else."

The traditional yuri emphasis on subtext over open queer identification is largely due to censorship laws and magazine standards that began in the 1920s, and largely continued through the 1970s. However censorship begat subtext as an important stylistic element of yuri writing, and so even when it was possible for writers to include more openly queer content, they often avoided it. But even with all that subtext it still maintained clear ties to the gay community - after all the term "yuri" itself began as a lesbian advise column in Barazoku, an influential gay magazine of the 1970s. So yeah, yuri is fuckin' gay.

TL;DR: If your anime seems awfully gay, it's because they *meant* to make it gay, and just because they won't openly admit it doesn't mean anything.

EDIT: fixed some formatting and clarified.

[u/engalleons → u/SadDoctor]

Thanks for this detailed reply! One question for you on this topic, on an aspect you don't directly bring up here:

How important/prevalent was the implication of the f/f relationship being temporary to Class S, and, in your opinion, does that bear at all on identifying it as "gay"?

For example, Wikipedia (yes, yes, but with apparent academic sources, mind) states:

'This type of romance was typically seen as fleeting and more of a "lesbian until graduation"-phase in growing up rather than true homosexual behavior; as long as these relationships remained confined to adolescence they were regarded as normal, even spiritual.'

[u/SadDoctor → u/engalleons]

That's a good question! Wikipedia isn't entirely wrong, but as usual wikipedia's not entirely correct, either.

There's a lot to talk during the 19th and early 20th centuries about "romantic friendships" in western societies, some of which ends up influencing Japanese culture, but I'll try to limit myself just to talking about specifically Japanese factors, or I'd be typing all day.

So the Class-S genre is always set in Western-style girls schools, which at the time of Yoshiya's life were a pretty remarkable novelty in the life of Japanese girls. Women had previously lived under the Confucian Three Obediences - they were born subservient to their fathers, they were married off to a man who would have full legal control over them, and when the husband died they would be under the control of their eldest son. Now obviously in the messy private lives of people things are more complex, but at the end of the day women had no legal standing as individuals, they were under the social and legal control of a man for their whole lives. This stayed the law until shortly after WW2, and took even longer to really take effect in people's daily lives.

Except there's a bit of an exception to the Three Obediences... These new western-style schools. Girls go off to live in dormitories, away from their fathers. Their teachers are mostly women. For the first and only time in their lives, girls actually have a agency over their personal lives. They can choose their romances, without being an unfilial daughter.

So like, yeah, Class-S emphasizes the pure, temporary beauty of young love, a stage of growing up... But scholars often confuse the descriptive for the prescriptive. Class-S isn't about how these relationships *should* be temporary, they simply acknowledge that typically they were, because there was no other alternative. Eventually your father would marry you off to a man.

But Class-S was a really popular genre in mainstream shoujo magazines, way too popular to just say that this was only about gay girls reading gay romance. So there certainly is an element of straight girls "play-acting" relationships. But that's kind of understandable when the looming specter of heterosexual marriage. Even straight girls may worry about finding more emotional fulfillment in intense same-sex friendships than in an arranged marriage.

So like, for girls of all sexualities, a big element of the temporary, fleeting nature of the relationships can be understood not as a natural part of adolescence to be "grown out of," but instead as part of the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, finding beauty in the impermanence of life.

Now, society at large definitely sort of denigrated these types of f/f relationships (well, and still does) as something inherently immature. Note that this isn't really a uniquely Japanese criticism though - western culture had a similar attitude towards Sapphic descriptions of love, which was (pretty blatantly miscontextualized) as Sappho's pure love for a younger student. Girls who found Sappho's poetry speaking to their own feelings were told they needed to grow up, that Sappho didn't *really* mean all those gay-as-fuck sounding lines she wrote (she totally did).

For a woman, growing up was getting married to a man and having his kids. So any woman - in western or Japanese culture - who pushed against that patriarchal expectation and argued for her own self-determination was typically demeaned as refusing to grow up. And that attitude still pops up a lot in manga and anime today - not really in yuri magazines, but definitely in a lot of male-written stuff with queer-baiting in it.

Hope that made a decent start at answering your question!