Along with people just not expecting the dark humor of Ranpo Kitan, Iāve also noticed a number of people who mention how the amount of gay and crossdressing in the show when they say how they donāt like the anime.
And this coming from the dudebro types who are inclined to assert that close male friendship does not equal gay. They still think Ranpo Kitan is super gay.
The show is unapologetically gay. And unapologetically cool with crossdressing.
Ranpo Kitan doesnāt come with the romance or yaoi genre labels slapped on it, so dudebros are going to be blindsided by the two gay couples in the anime. And the boy (Kobayashi) who doesnāt give a fuck about gender roles and wears dresses because he wants to, damnit.
Now granted, Akechi and Namikoshi are less obvious than Hashiba and Kobayashi but given that the anime canonically has gay romance in it, itās not hard to see Akechi and/or Namikoshi possibly being in love with the other.
A critical piece of context that people often seem to miss when watching Ranpo Kitan is that itās an homage to mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo and his works.
And who was Edogawa Ranpo and what he did he write?
Edogawa wrote gay male characters in his stories. Edogawa himself was possibly gay, as he wrote of having had romantic love for other boys in his youth, and feeling incapable of truly loving women. Either way, Edogawa researched homosexuality and wrote both fiction and nonfiction about it.
And Kobayashi is based on one of Edogawaās characters who is a detective who crossdresses.
So in other words, having gay guys and crossdressing in Ranpo Kitan is part of the homage and is not at all āforcedā as some uninformed viewers may have alleged.
It may even be arguable that not having any homosexuality in the anime would diminish it as an homage to Edogawa.
