In fact, any and all queerness was ironed out of any Japanese imports across media, so Japan appeared to be some kind of shining bastion of acceptance thanks to gay Sailor Moon characters being forcefully transformed into women and/or cousins upon localization. If something was remotely “gay”, it did not make it across the Pacific. Japan did have some significant, deliberately queer JRPGs in its past (Eternal Filena comes immediately to mind). So how did such a thing happen? Let’s take a detailed look at Asellus in the context of SaGa Frontier and 1997 in general. Is it any wonder that, in such an environment, an oblivious Goggle Bob would fail to pick up on context clues?īut, dang, even my dumbass younger self noticed that Asellus is gay as hell. It may be hard to understand now, but it took us a long time (and many awful Futurama episodes) to get to the point where a character could just “casually” be gay, and it not be the entire focus of their existence. And, to blame my environment and not my own ignorance, outright homosexual (or, heavens forbid, trans) representation primarily only existed at the time as jokes or characters that were designated as “the token gay”. This was true for nearly all media consumed, and, until roughly the release of Final Fantasy 13 in 2009, I consistently assumed gay characters did not exist unless they were starring in a “very special episode” of Friends. Or, put another way, I watched the entirety of Revolutionary Girl Utena, and picked up on exactly zero subtext. I admit that, in my teen years, I was frustratingly heteronormative. Given SaGa Frontier Remastered just came out this year, and you may have missed it the first time, just giving you a head’s up. This post contains a detailed look at one scenario in SaGa Frontier.
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