Anime’s Censored LGBTQ Couples Get Honored in Viral Post

Anime may be having a resurgence in the West these days, but fans should never overlook the medium’s history. Anime and manga have been around for a long time, and their first entries into the U.S. came decades ago. With series like Dragon Ball and Gundam taking off, licensors were quick to adapt any anime they could for Western audiences, and one post is honoring some of the censors’ worst victims.

Taking to Twitter, user BoricuaDesiree got fans buzzing with their ’90s anime tribute. The writer-editor shouted out two couples from classic anime series which Western fans may not have known were romantic.

“Shoutout to the 90s anime couples that were censored as cousins or bros who are now living their best gay lives in their reboots,” the fan shared.

As you can see above, the couples shown should look familiar to shojo fans. To the left, you can see Haruka and Michiru from Sailor Moon. Better known as Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus, the girls were branded as cousins in the English dub way back when, but they are canonically lesbians.

The other couple is none other than Touya and Yukito from CardCaptor Sakura. The boys shared a rather pure romance in the actual manga, but the anime’s English dub scrubbed their lovey dovey moments from existence.

For involved fans, they might have learned on their own time about how censorship changed these couples, but many casual fans never found out. While the recent re-dub of Sailor Moon has been straightforward about its romance, CardCaptor Sakura never got such a gift, and many of the show’s other neutered romances suffered a similar fate. Now, this viral tweet is re-educating anime fans and letting these couples celebrate their love in an unabashed way.

Of course, this is not the only way anime has been censored. During anime’s great importation during the 1990s, there were all sorts of companies licensing shows and censoring them into something unrecognizable. Yu-Gi-Oh had its Shadow Realm censored for some time, and Pokemon has to scrub several of James’ cross dressing antics. Even today, gore continues to be censored in series like The Seven Deadly Sins, but there are far fewer instances of LGBTQ romances being snuffed for some dub’s sake.

Did you ever know how badly these series were censored? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to talk all things comics and anime!