Tuned in to Retro Anime / Manga!

I've often seen people discuss Oniisama E and other retro shoujo manga like it as stories about lesbianism which praise its "representation" while at the same time faulting it for implying lesbianism is just a phase or in Rei's case it leads to death. So its somehow gay and homophobic and about homophobia at the same time. Lazy internet speculation gets even dumber when they see the sisterly relationship between Miya and Rei as homosexual incest. There's literally nothing in the manga or anime that points to that. Its just a sibling rivalry.

What Oniisama E actually shows are S kankei/class S relationships: romantic friendships between school girls that were seen as a prep phase for marriage with a guy. These were normal and socially acceptable in pre-war Japan and hyped up in women's literature. They aren't equivalent to lesbianism or proto-lesbian. In both the anime and the manga, the majority of the characters are also romantically involved with men and the same gender romances are almost always between older females and younger girls who meet in school. None of these girls are lesbian, they aren't exclusively attracted to women.

All of this stems from misinterpreting Japanese culture and taking things out of context. People wind up faulting another culture for not meeting their expectations. I figure what's really interesting about this is how the whole class S phenomenon shows us how romance didn't always operate by the hetero/homo dualism of the West and much of modern Japan and the weird cultural traditions that got sidelined by that dualism. There's something about shoving 21st century idpol onto a 1970s manga that pisses me off. Maybe I'm just being pedantic? Yeah Yeah Ranma Saotome is non binary despite that idea not even existing when Rumiko put pen to paper. I'm sick of it.