Coded gay

Queer coding may have had a negative impact on perceptions of queerness in media as villains are often queer-coded. Queer coding is a concept both in the discussion of media portrayal of LGBT people and academic research involving queer theory or gender studies. While gay men used Polari to communicate with each other, the jargon was completely unrecognisable to most English speakers at the time, as well as today.

It was a code that both protected queer folks from anti-homosexuality laws and acted as a kind of “gaydar”. Sources who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter reveal that Elio was originally a queer-coded character. This was tied closely to the film’s first director, Adrian Molina, who is openly gay. But over time, the character was changed to be more traditionally masculine, and much of the queer representation was quietly removed.

The subtextual coding of a character as queer by using recognizable LGBTQIA+ traits, stereotypes, and tropes (e.g., exaggerated femininity or masculinity, vanity, hypersexuality, intimate same-gender friendships and/or rivalries) without explicitly confirming it in the story. Explore the history and impact of queer coding in literature, TV, and movies. Learn how coded characters reflect societal attitudes towards LGBTQ+ individuals.

You you think kokichi is heavily gay coded? And if you do think so then maybe an explanation could help? I kinda want to understand a bit more! I've been over this quite a lot in older posts, but rather than saying Ouma is gay-coded, I'd go as far as to say he's canonically interested in men. At the very least, his romantic interest in Saihara is explicit in the Japanese version of the text.

This is honestly about as explicit a way of showing that Ouma is in love with Saihara as anything: it's not an optional scene, as it takes place completely within the events of the main game, not his free time events or his love hotel. It also takes place during a scene where Ouma is essentially talking to himself, with no other characters around, meaning he has literally no incentive to lie and he's already established that he doesn't like lying to himself in the chapter 3 post-trial.

It's used most frequently in old Japanese love songs and shoujo manga love confessions. More notably, the only other character who uses this phrase in v3 is Maki, describing her romantic feelings for Momota. So yeah, I think if Maki's feelings for Momota are pretty much an accepted part of canon, then Ouma's feelings for Saihara have to be taken the same way, especially considering they use the exact same phrase in the Japanese text.

If we do factor in more "optional" content, such as FTEs and the love hotel scene, then there's even more to go off of: Ouma word for word says he "stole Saihara's heart, so he's satisfied now" in his final FTE, and his love hotel is one of the few in which he sees Saihara as himself, envisioning a chase between them as phantom thief and detective. Regardless of whether Saihara reciprocates or not, Ouma's feelings are pretty explicitly clear in the text.

There's also the fact that Ouma essentially calls Amami a pretty boy at one point, and also refers to himself as a "fairy" in the Japanese text a line that was sadly cut completely from the localization, which is a shame since it's pretty cute. His use of "-chan" as an honorific for most of his classmates is also pretty noticeable, since not a lot of teenage boys tend to refer to their peers that way, especially not other boys.

queer coded villains

Sometimes younger kids don't use it, but it's not common at all for teenage boys to use it interchangeably between girls and other boys. All in all, it feels like a pretty deliberate choice considering all of Ouma's other particular tics and habits. In the end, people don't have to ship Ouma with Saihara, or even with any of the other male characters in v3, but I definitely think it's important to note that his interest in men is explicitly shown within the game itself!

Considering what an extremely popular and beloved character Ouma is, it still makes me really pleasantly surprised and happy that we got direct confirmation of him being interested in men, so I still do my best to help let people know about the actual context in the original text. Sign up Log in. Anonymous asked:.