Recently in Japan a debate has been opened where it has been said that anime and manga fans are incredibly happy when the sales of their favorite works increase. The curious thing about this is that it has been said that many of these works belong to the demographic of romance between girls, this little detail caught the attention of the otaku public and the general public causing this little debate to take shape.
In Japan, do fanatics disagree with equal marriages?
Japan has an endless number of stories for everyone’s taste, whether you are a fan of action stories, if you like drama or romance, be sure that there is a story that you will love. And yes, the same goes for those whose tastes are focused on “craving” content, romance between boys or between girls, the range of works that you can find is quite wide and many of these are known worldwide.
To mention a few, if we talk about this “craving” genre, some of the most famous works are: High School DxD, Prison School, High School of The Dead or Ane Naru Mono, there are a lot of more examples, but with these you can already get an idea of what it is about. And the fact is that the “antojador” genre is not only famous in Japan, it is quite popular around the world, either for its stories full of dubious angles or for its “high quality” treatment.
Among the most criticized genres, but also one of the most mentioned (not only in Japan), we have the romance between boys or similarly known as Boys’ Love (BL), here we come across stories that focus on relationships where the protagonists are two boys, among some of the best known works that have the genre we can find: Junjou Romantica, Dakaretai Otoko (Dakaichi) or Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! Manga that recently received its own anime adaptation and already has two live-action versions, one Japanese and one Thai respectively.
We can’t talk about boys love and leave aside girls romances, after all this debate started by this genre, unlike the first one, the second one, also known as Girls Love, focuses on girls relationships, among his works we can highlight: Girl Friends, Citrus, Kase-san Series or Hana & Hina After School, many of these stories are known outside Japan. Returning to the subject of the debate, it seems that otakus have been very happy that specific works have increased their sales.
What’s so strange about this? Well, it is said that while they are happy to read stories where the characters share gender, they get upset when there is mention of legalizing equal marriage. According to various comments, this is largely because receiving money is fine, but two people of the same gender wanting to spend the rest of their lives together is not right.
The Japanese also made mention of the following “I am not discriminating against men who like other men, I am saying that we should not use marriage, a system meant for people who can reproduce”. It is quite curious how many people agreed with what this comment said, they said that marriage is only and exclusively for people who have the ability to reproduce, if the birth rate drops by legalizing equal marriage this would no longer be possible, then marriage would be meaningless.
In the debate, some people from Japan also stated that girl-on-girl relationships were okay, but boy-on-boy relationships were not and proposed that only girl-on-girl marriage should be legalized and then this comment was left “What kind of anime shows a society that accepts same-gender marriage?”, which is very interesting Do you know of such an anime, as for the debate, no definite conclusion was reached, but possibly we will have more discussions like this in the future.