by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

When I was trying to decide what anime I wanted to cover this year for Ani-May, I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to say and go from there. What I landed on was talking about queer, or queer adjacent, shows. Particularly ones that I grew up consuming during the mid-2000s anime and manga boom. They’re also ones that I started re-collecting the manga for as an adult with proper money. It was part poking at the nostalgia I hadn’t examined and part poking at the very weird world of queer representation and translation.

Both Descendants of Darkness and Gravitation are stories that I watched the anime for, but that I also read a fair amount of in their original forms. I was invested in them both and I was fairly certain which show was going to hold up better (my guess was Gravitation) but was shocked to discover that I was sorely mistaken. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. First, let’s talk about Maki Murakami’s Gravitation and what made it so wildly popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Originally adapted in 1999 into a two-episode OVA (Original Video Animation), which is basically a straight-to-video release, the first seven volumes of the manga were later adapted into a full series of thirteen episodes. The series ran in Japan from October of 2000 until January of 2001, almost concurrently with Descendants of Darkness—in particular, they both ran on WOWOW. Which makes them interesting discussion points as we head out of May and into June, aka Pride Month.

Unlike Descendants of Darkness, Gravitation is much of a “slice-of-life.” The former is a supernatural detective story, while the latter is about a guy trying to make it in the Japanese music industry. It’s not quite high school or anything, but comparatively it’s much less genre filled.

Shuichi and Hiroshi are trying to make it in the music industry. Their band, Bad Luck, have been signed, but Shuichi hasn’t finished writing the love song that’s sure to rocket them to success as their single. One night he’s in the park and loses the paper he’s been writing lyrics on. A mysterious man finds them and says some hurtful things (Shuichi has no talent, etc.) before disappearing. Shuichi, obsessed and in his head about what the man said to him, realizes that the person he spoke to was none other than romance writer Eiri Yuki. He aims to prove him wrong and ends up falling for the older man in the process. But Yuki’s past is not rainbows and sunshine. He’s engaged, though she’s been remarkably out of the picture and his life for a long period of time, and he’s got a dark trauma lurking in his past. The series goes around from there, with highs and lows of both Bad Luck’s fame and Shuichi and Yuki’s relationship.

I am reminded of one of my other obsessions from middle school: Nana. I recently re-read all the manga, which has yet to properly end and is likely never going to, and how distinctly specific the Japanese music industry seems—at least as far as mangakas are concerned. Of course, either of these stories, Nana or Gravitation, could be a complete misunderstanding of how the Japanese industry works, which often happens in American media about our music industry. That being said, Gravitation feels like it plays so incredibly fast and loose with how everything functions. There’s certainly idol-type elements here, but it’s really letting the plot and characters lead the ebbs and flow of the music industry, as presented, rather than letting the limitations and hardships of the industry inform the plot of the series. It’s not a bad thing, but it does make it feel less real and is, perhaps, the least interesting choice. Though, given how insane the series gets for what is basically a slice-of-life story, it’s maybe the least of their issues.

Okay, so let’s talk about the queer stuff. There’s this interesting trope that was prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s in yaoi, and it’s still true in present day BL (Boy’s Love), where one (if not both) of the main characters always thought they were straight until they fell for this one guy. As the story progresses, they’re either vague on having any actual thoughts about the complexity of human sexuality, or they’re just flatly gay. Which… okay! In Gravitation, I’d argue that both leads are probably bisexual, but they firmly stick to the “no thoughts on the complexity of human sexuality” bit, despite still talking about women a fair amount. It’s an interesting space to occupy and I’m uncertain if it’s a wide-spread disbelief in polysexual identities, or just about publishing in a specific time or culture.

By which I also mean American culture, not just Japanese culture. Because current American ideas of sexuality are (despite what you might have heard) still quite closed off. Particularly, where polysexualities are concerned. So, it’s no surprise that, regardless of the time period, this is still a common idea and is highly represented, despite bisexual and pansexual men existing in larger numbers than you’d think. And I think this is happening in both the original language and the translation, though certainly something is likely lost in the act of bringing it to an English-speaking audience.

Where Descendants of Darkness is yaoi adjacent, and it certainly has its issues with the deeply queer coded villain, I do think it’s a more interesting piece of vaguely queer media. However, I didn’t think that was going to be the case when I revisited both shows. I thought that Gravitation was gonna knock it out of the park and be exactly what I remembered. Unfortunately, it falls pretty flat for me now. When I finally watched the queer ice-skating anime Yuri!!! on ICE, which Megan Bailey covered for a previous Ani-May, I slotted it nicely in with my decades long love of Gravitation. An openly queer anime set deeply in a specific job: music, in the case of Gravitation. Which isn’t to say that it’s not that, but it has certainly aged in an unflattering way. Honestly, I thought the voice acting was going to be what did me in and, to be fair, it’s not great. Yuri, in particular, is super flat and it makes a lot of his interactions with Shuichi feel unwelcome. Which makes them staying together, as a couple, confusing—I feel like it probably reads more teasing than hateful in the manga. However, it’s the actual story and the way that story is told that makes Gravitation sour on the vine for me.

It’s a series that was mostly VOD in America before being released on DVD for the US audience in 2004. Which I’m certain has a lot to do with its fairly explicit, for the time, queer representation. However, you feel about the quality of that representation. Between the good music (and it is good) and the good-for-the-time (I guess) queer story, Gravitation was wildly popular. The manga, especially, was at the top of illegal scan sites for much of its North American release, absolutely bodying the yaoi selections for four solid years. Clearly something about the series was hitting, but considering they never adapted the anime past volume seven of the manga, I assume the anime just wasn’t it. Which seems wild because, anecdotally, most people who talk about Gravitation are talking about the show and not the manga.

However, there’s no accounting for the ways that Gravitation certainly shaped a lot of people’s brains, my own included. It’s an important piece of queer anime history, but I also think there were more interesting stories happening at the same time, within a similar space. And maybe we’d call some of those queerbaiting (stories from CLAMP certainly come to mind, though I’m always going to read a lot of queerness into their books), but it’s very much “of an era.” And that’s what Gravitation is, ultimately. It’s very specific and is this perfect encapsulation of what openly queer media was like in the 2000s—which is worth preserving.