Romance & Bromance

Anime Romances are not about Romance

A big misconception that is going around when it comes to animated romances is how they are not really about romance. A typical romance is about the lives of established couples, the lovey-dovey things they do, and the issues they face as they live together.

Anime romances on the other hand are about the awkwardness of people who are too shy to admit they love someone, or too dense to realize someone loves them. The entire series consists of nothing more than waiting to see if they finally admit that they like each other in the last episode. And almost always, you don’t even get that. Meaning, anime romances end, where normal romances begin. The romance part becomes an objective, and not a constant theme throughout the series. Meaning, most anime romances are in reality nothing more than comedies based on misunderstandings.

Or more specifically, it’s about harems and ecchis. Some idiotic teenagers live in the same house or dorm, and they constantly bump naked onto one another, and they obviously want to kiss but they never do because something always interrupts them, and the male always ends up embarrassed and beaten up, and ten minutes later he is forgiven, and the cycle repeats itself all over again. The living under the same roof trope is not about romance, it’s about lust with no payoff. And weirdly enough, most anime fans think this is romance.

My point is, your average live action sitcom has ten times more romance than almost every anime that calls itself a romance. And it’s pretty funny when you realize that the closest thing I could find to an actual romance is Futari Ecchi, an educational comedy about the sex lives of people in a relationship. Stay classy Japan.

When Bromance is Gay and Heroes are Faggots

Bromance is a very misunderstood concept. What is supposed to be camaraderie amongst men is perceived as yaoi by most. The only way to explain why it isn’t, is by showing you how series were like in the glorious past decades.

My first contact with Batman was that silly series from the 60s. It wasn’t dark and edgy, it was light and silly fun regarding good guys in costumes beating up bad guys in costumes. It was your standard empowerment fantasy for little boys and nothing more.

But this changed when the moral committees of that time insisted on calling such shows as immoral trash that promote homosexuality to children. I mean, look at all these superheroes, they don’t have wives or girlfriends, and they are being too friendly to each other while wearing skintight clothes. This is clearly gay porn which destroys the innocence of our youth.

Thus it was forced upon the publishing houses to include romantic interests with members of the opposite sex, just for the sake of making it clear that their heroes are not faggots. This seems like nothing fundamental has changed or that it made the heroes far more realistic for showing some basic sexual attraction. At the same time, this was really lame for most children. When you are eight years old, you don’t want to see Superman going out on a date with Lois Lane, you want to see him fly around and blow up shit. And when your hormones eventually kick in, you don’t think about romance, you think about sex. Romance is something for mature adults, not for ten year olds who are reading comic books. So this new addition was actually taking out a lot of the fun of the action. All in the name of making sure the heroes are not gay, something which never crossed most children’s minds unless the adults told them so.

And it doesn’t stop there. Since superhero stories are aimed at boys and are drawn by men, women weren’t even treated properly in most of them. They were mostly meaningless background decoration. You wouldn’t get any actual kissing, since they are still part of a kid show, and they can’t show such things. They were just there as platonic girlfriends, which means they were pointlessly taking away screen time from the action, which was always the main reason boys are watching these shows.

And even when later on most of these girlfriends were given a more active role in the show, they were almost always nothing more than damsels in distress. Aka, a mere plot device for the hero to waste his time, and test our patience. Instead of getting cool missions about the hero preventing some doomsday device, we have to suffer through these rescue missions which make him look like a selfish idiot. Yeah hero, spend 20 episodes trying to survive the traps of your enemies instead of protecting the world, and do it all to save some chick you are not even going to kiss. But hey, at least you proved this way that you are not gay. You are just a sexually frustrated idiot who pisses his pants at the thought of kissing a girl. Our hero people, the future of the planet is on his hands. All children would prefer this over bromance.

In other words, we had a fine formula of manly men showing their appreciation as brothers in arms, while they fight their way through cosmic threats. But because some geniuses decided that this was too gay to allow it, they changed it to some sexually frustrated idiots trying to save a pair of boobs. Oh woah, such a great improvement, I bet this makes women feeling proud for existing as trophies. I guess the undeniable objectification of the female body is way more preferable to the implication of men being gay, as it is proven by all the evidence moral committees found after they carefully searched their straight asses.

And we don’t need to limit bromance to anything that involves GAR. Why do you think is HXH and FMA the best shonen of all times? Because they have no rescue missions. Brofist!