Midnight Remedies

Making Kinosaki act and dress up as a woman for the whole story can appeal to prejudiced people and gradually make them warm up to the dynamic between the main characters and provide an opportunity for them to see queer people in a better light. However, at the same time Kinosaki not having to conform to the stereotypical image of men for him to identify as a guy is also a breath of fresh air in its own, especially for a deuteragonist in a shonen. I think (or at least I hope) it is a stepping stone in paving the way for more open queer representation in shonen in the future.

This is one of the reasons why I think Gerosaki ending up together is important to the themes and story itself, and making Kinosaki a biological woman who just pretends to be a guy for the plot, as some theories suggest, takes away from the story and how it handles queerness cause in that case we would go two steps back instead of a step forward when it comes to queer representation.

It would be nice to have a shounen that breaks away from the usual expectations and MarriageToxin does not shy away from writing queer people openly, Gero's sister is openly a lesbian and in a relationship with a woman for example, and this is so important to me because I need people to stop associating the idea of queer people existing solely in works categorized exclusively as bls or gls. It is only when it comes to queer-coded ships or queer-coded characters that people have a negative stance towards and tell you to pick up ''gls '' or ''bls' instead, but they won't tell you to pick up a romance if there is a straight pair in a story despite the main genre not being romance.

And this is a shonen anime. A harem shonen anime. They not only made one of their two main characters unabashedly queer, but the series depicts him as the exact person we're meant to see as Gero's romance interest. We are meant to view him as the ideal partner, the beautiful, alluring, kind, good person who we want our protagonist to end up with in the end.

Imagine finding out you have 90 minutes to tie up a love story that's developed over thousands of years. You create something beautifully in character and completely on point for the plot. You pay homage to the original writer's legacy in a fitting and poetic way and create an ending that not only shows the depth of two people's love for each other but the wider love they have for the thing that brought them together in the first place.

And then you go online to find the loudest outcry is that everyone hates it and "THEY DIDN'T EVEN KISS!"