One of my favorite weird facts about like. media in general, is that you can trace a huge portion of weird awesome modern anime genderfuckery to a guy from the 1920s who wanted a tourist trap for his train

Did utena make you feel gay? You've been FOOLED by TRAIN MAN

note: the cultural legacy of gender in Japan is way way way more complicated then one white person like me can describe; if you take this as "here's the TRUTH about ANIME" and not "here's an interesting historical aside" please maybe fuckin don't?

ANYWAYS the history goes:

• Ichizō Kobayashi owns the Hankyu Railway company. At the very end of the line the starts in Osaka is a nice little place called Takarazuka, which has some hot springs in it; popular tourist destination. But train man isn't content, he wants it to be even MORE touristy, so he decides to add a tourist trap.

• he hates Kabuki theater, so he decides to do something with western music and do the exact opposite of kabuki theater. instead of dudes performing all the parts both male and female, he's gonna have a show of ALL LADIES. it's gonna be the best tourist trap ever

• it's actually a pretty huge success; it's called the Takarazuka revue and i do not have time to get into the details of what a huge thing it becomes. it's a 100 year old cultural institution in japan at this point that has done everything from Shakespeare to all female musical adaptations of Ace Attorney. great for lesbians.

• incidentally the guy's a huge misogynist and thinks that acting in male roles will Teach Women To Be Subservient Wives. cis ppl amirite. there's actually a ton you can explore with like, the history of sexuality in the shows; they had a huge lesbian fanbase that he panicked about and clamped down Hard on in ways that arguably still influence like, idol culture in japan

• Either way tho these shows have some GENDER. femme women staring deep into the eyes of women dressed up completely masculine's eyes and declaring their undying love stuff. fucking incredible. The sort of stuff that can really make you think long and hard about a lot of stuff.

• A kid lives in takarazuka. his mom is friends with a number of actors and will regularly help out or go to the shows. He's dragged along and sees all of the shows from the audience at a young age. his brain gets genderfucked from the very beginning. and this kid would grow up to be

Osamu Fucking Tezuka

• the creator of astro boy, the creator of black jack, the creator of manga (and anime) as we know it, the guy who influenced every single person who has ever made a manga since, grew up doing this. it shows in all of his works, there's so much weird gender in his stuff, but most of all...

• Tezuka then writes Princess Knight, a story about, quote, "a girl with the heart of both a boy and a girl inside her" who pretends to be a prince. it's deeply, deeply gendery in very complicated (not all positive?) ways. he directly attributes his time watching takarazuka as the inspiration for this work.

• Princess knight kinda... creates the shojo genre as we know it? it is arguably The First Shojo manga. It also codified the "girl dressing up as a boy and going on adventures" as a core part of shojo, which like. has been repeated by Everything

• every single other manga and anime has the seeds of genderfuckery burnt into it's veins. some more then others, like you can really obviously trace shit like Utena, but it's always there, you can't escape it

and that's how train man accidentally helped create a bunch of anime lesbians who he would have hated.