I've noticed a significant amount of Gay in several recent anime releases.

Granted, adding pretty men to an anime as fan-service is not a new phenomenon. In recent years, however, it has become a more common occurance to the point that it seems required in order to draw female viewers. The longevity of the fandom of many shows now seem to be tied to the amount of potential boy-on-boy action there is for fan girls to glom onto. Now that anime has achieved popularity stateside, The Love Who's Name Cannot Be Said has become the Love That Won't Shut Up.

It's been speculated by many American fan girls that yaoi fandom got its first surge of popularity with the boys of Gundam Wing in 1995. These girls would be wrong; horribly, horribly wrong. In Japan, earlier samples of yaoi followings became prominent with the popularity of Saint Seiya. The series featured loads of pretty boys in combat armor fighting, including Misty, the fabulous fellow in this article's header (A guy? Yes, a guy). In the U.S., "slash" fan-fiction was already a fandom staple, with various tales of Kirk and Spock from the original Star Trek series floating around.

In the Gay? is here to rate and speculate the latent fruitiness of your favorite shows and stories. We'll be covering some obscure and unexpected characters to determine, for the sake of otaku research, whether they are In The Gay (tm).

DUKE FLEED x KOJI KABUTO (UFO Robo Grendizer)

Okay... we start off with Super Robots, possibly the least Gay things in existence. However, even in this classic Go Nagai series, we can find various flavors of fruit. Besides, fangirls around the world hunt and find less material in other series to form their boy/boy fantasies upon, so we'll go ahead and follow their scientific method as well.

We start with Duke Fleed himself, a dashing protagonist who maps to the Noble Warrior archetype fairly well. Fleed was the prince of his own homeworld, which was ravished by the alien Vega invaders. Worse, he was forced to pilot the robot constructed from the science and technology of Planet Fleed, the awesome Grendizer, Vega's ultimate weapon to conquer the galaxy. Duke escaped with the robot to Earth to lead a peaceful life and never fight again... until he discovered that Earth was Vega's next target, prompting our tragic and Noble Hero into action again!

Design-wise, he's about as close to bishy as Go Nagai ever got. Duke Fleed's human form, Daisuke Umon, has long brown hair and has the whole 70's Cowboy look going for him, complete with the requisite stylin' bellbottoms & collar.

 

Next in our One True Pairing is Koji Kabuto, the Brash Hero from an earlier Go Nagai robot show, Mazinger Z. Here, he serves as a co-protagonist, investigating UFO activity and the incoming Vega invasion. Naturally, this will put him at odds with Daisuke, resulting in various verbal standoffs and the occasional fisticuffs...

This would bring us to one of the major factors of finding whether characters are In The Gay: determining how much they hate each other. As the new Gundam and monster trainer shows have proven, the more heated a rivalry is between two characters, the more likely they are to be In Gay. If they outright want to kill one another, it's just a given that they want in one another's pants.

Eventually, our two manly heroes reconcile their bitter rivalry, once Koji learns Daisuke's secret identity, and team up, using their Blazing Friendship to combat the alien hordes. In fact, on of Grendizer's major power-ups requires him to combine with Koji's ship, the Double Spazer, for extra speed, mobility and fire power.

 

It could be said that there comes a point when something is so manly it loops back around to being fruity. Duke and Koji come close to that line, but never gets too overboard to the point of more testosterone-powered programming like Dragonball Z and professional wrestling.

What makes this speculation more curious is that Grendizer actually aired in the US briefly during the 80s, as part of the Force Five line-up of programming, alongside Getta Robo G, Gaiking, and Dangard Ace. Perhaps if the anime boom had hit a few years earlier, we'd be seeing Fanfiction.net littered with Duke x Koji fics, or ones starring the Getter pilots.

And considering that Hayato Jin's dub name was "Hummer" would anyone be surprised?

 

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