>>111775669Gay characters in Japan are just that: gay characters. Gay characters in the west have a whole ton of artificial baggage forced unto them that hampers what the writers can do with them without risking a ton of backlash.
There was a long period of time in western fiction where explicitly gay or gay-coded characters were the villains, and the FACT that they were gay was meant to foreshadow their soon-to-be-revealed evilness or outright serve as the excuse for why this 'degenerate mind' was so evil in the first place. Homosexuality was essentially being used as an indicator of mental unwellness or dangerous depravity in a character.
As time went on and homosexuality became more accepted in western society, that dropped off but the looming specter of 'gay villain' stuck around, prompting a backlash in the form of positive portrayals of gay characters in media. Which isn't a bad thing to encourage but it didn't just become encouraged, it became mandatory: every gay character was seen as making A STATEMENT, even if the writer didn't want them to be.
So while people have largely forgotten how we got here, here we are: once you reveal that a character is gay in western media, nothing bad is allowed to happen to them again unless it is designed to make them more sympathtic. If they are gay and anything bad happens to them, you risk a big backlash in the form of people raging that you are pushing a regressive portrayal of gay people, even if all you are doing is portraying them as people. But western companies still want the progressive points of including gay characters, so they have to walk a tightrope to make them just gay and prominent enough to work it into the advertising, but then never do anything with them that will upset people.
Japan, meanwhile, has a figure skating anime where two dudes kiss onscreen and fans are like "fucking FINALLY" and no one else cared.
