Have you ever queerbaited with your life on the line?: or, Queerness in Sports Anime
by Diya P
There’s a somewhat notorious Tweet that I like to remind myself about every so often: “getting queerbaited by shonen anime is like losing chess to a dog.” Sometimes, though, the dog is really good at chess.
For example, in the case of sports anime. My first anime was Haikyuu!!, and I’ve watched a fair amount of sports anime since—across them all, I’ve started to notice a sort of trend. Specifically, that there seem to be quite a lot of queer characters in sports anime—or rather, sports anime seems to give the impression of having a lot of queer characters. As someone fairly entrenched in the fandom side of things, I thought it would be interesting to step back and take a more objective look at the amount of “bait,” for lack of a better word, that the different sports anime I’ve seen have. This ranking will begin with the anime I think has the least amount of queerness, to the anime that I think has the most.
1. Kuroko no Basuke
Despite KnB having a fairly strong fanbase devoted to shipping, I found that there was relatively little in terms of canon content intended to be interpreted at queer. Obviously, there are some heated moments of dialogue, but I think nearly all can be attributed to the sport more than a romantic connection between characters. The most egregious this show got is with their eyecatchers at the end (as seen above), for which I have… no defense.
2. Haikyuu!!
If anyone was in the Haikyuu fandom in 2020, you’ll know it’s a bit notorious for having a staggeringly large shipping fanbase. With romantic ships being explored between virtually every combination of main characters, you might have the impression that there’s a lot of canon content to work with—on a rewatch, I found that this is not actually really the case. I think the reason Haikyuu has such a fanbase like this, though, is simply because every relationship in the anime is so compelling. Even though the anime only ever really presents these relationships as platonic (unless you’re squinting a bit), they leave a lot of potential to interpret those relationships as romantic. So while the canon content isn’t overt, I think it’s by virtue of Haikyuu having such strong characters and relationships that people are able to interpret outside of that material.
Also, the actual queer characters of a different anime, given (Mafuyu and Uenoyama) were at least in part inspired by Kageyama and Hinata, so—clearly, there’s at least something there.
3. Sk8 the Infinity
There’s a pretty substantial gap between Haikyuu and Sk8 in this list despite being right next to each other, and this is pretty obvious a single episode into Sk8. Whereas both KnB and Haikyuu have relatively little canon content indicating queerness, six out of eight of the main characters of Sk8 are pretty heavily implied to be queer. This is especially enhanced in the dub with some sentences purposefully trailing off in ways that you can easily interpret to be romantic—in other words, whether you’re looking for it or not, the characters in Sk8 easily read as queer. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent the second season of this anime leans into this compared to the first, but if the recently released OVA is anything to go off of, with the final shot being the main characters looking up at a rainbow, we’re all in for a treat.
4. Blue Lock
I think queerness in Blue Lock comes in two different brands: one is the collection of manga panels above, where you have characters repeatedly saying some eye-raising things in the middle of a match, and the second is whatever is going on with Nagi and Reo. The first can maybe be reasoned away by players saying things in the heat of the moment (but when you look at the frequency with which this happens, you have to wonder if there’s something else we’re supposed to read from it), but the second… could be an article of its own. All I’ll say is that if someone says “everything that’s happened since I’ve met you has been the treasure of my life,” you kind of have to ask if we’re really still talking about the sport.
Honorable Mention: Yuri!!! on Ice
It feels remiss to write an article on queerness in sports anime without mentioning the queer sports anime—and indeed, what distinguishes YoI from the rest of the anime on this list is simply that it had the courage to present characters that are unambiguously queer. Hopefully, one day MAPPA will remember their roots and resume production on the prequel movie…
5. Free!
And yet, despite it all, somehow—Free ranks highest on this list. The specifics of this could also be an article of its own, but I’ll leave it at the fact that this show consists a lot more of teenage boys aggressively yearning than it does of any actual swimming. The fact that they’re usually not wearing a shirt while doing so does not really help.
Of course, at the end of the day, the real question is whether any of this supposed queerness in these anime is intended to be anything other than bait for a specific demographic. It would be nice to see more shows follow the footsteps of Yuri on Ice, but so far, it seems to be the only anime willing to make things unambiguous.
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