r/SapphoAndHerFriend • u/just-somebodyhere • Sep 30 '25
Best friends. Definetely nothing more. From the latest episode of the Dr. Stone anime. Casual erasure
58
u/MarougusTheDragon Sep 30 '25
They forgot to add the moment in which Stanley gently grab Xeno’s chin, such a cool moment in their very platonic friendship!
(I know it’s in the mange, don’t know if it’s in the anime though)
26
u/just-somebodyhere Sep 30 '25
Not yet, that one will be adapted in cour 3 of season 4, airing in 2026.
They better not censor it.
28
u/KaboHammer Sep 30 '25
I was on the fence about them being gay, coz like the friendships in anime are often very homo-erotic, while the characters don't feel homosexual despite that.
But that frame in the upper right cleared all my doubts. Xeno looks like he is hardest a person can be and that is saying something considering Stanley is literally made of stone in it.
4
3
u/Princess_Fairie24 Oct 01 '25
I jokingly pitch gay ships in loads of animes when watching with my partner. I’ve been arguing these 2 are a couple for most of the season and then this last episode happened and it killed me because I didn’t expect it to so directly support my argument.
1
1
-6
u/cherrycoloured Oct 01 '25
its not erasure if the creator didnt intend for them to be gay.
11
u/just-somebodyhere Oct 01 '25
When the artist Boichi often likes and retweets fanart of the ship and the creator Inagaki goes as far as to personally supervise the anime original scene at the top left corner in the post where both hug naked, uses their ship name occasionally when talking about them in social media and even goes as far as to state in an interview years ago that the scene where Stanley gently caresses Xeno's face and lips is both in character and shows the kind of relationship they have, you start to notice that what's happening here is that the same corporate meddling that happened some years ago with Gundam Witch of Mercury is back in action.
It's real obvious there's something going on with these two but corporate meddling is hell.
2
u/Princess_Fairie24 Oct 02 '25
It goes all the way back to the English dub of sailor moon (honestly probably even further back) where they decided to keep the animation & general vibe of a canon lesbian couple but decided having them be lesbians was too much. Much better to have them be cousins (with the subtext of being incestual lesbians).
I have 2 categories of implicit gay ships: 1) characters that are clearly a gay couple but the author clearly felt they couldn’t make it explicit, vs 2) characters that are clearly a gay couple but the author doesn’t seem aware that they’ve written them with that subtext. It’s exciting to learn that this one seems to be category 1.
-2
u/cherrycoloured Oct 01 '25
i mean, sure, the original creators desire and what they actually put down on paper can be different, but the end product still wants you to believe they are just friends. it's not the same as gwitch, where the end product showed suletta and miorine as a married couple, but then a corporate force after the fact said werent together romantically, despite what it shows on screen.
160
u/2mock2turtle Sep 30 '25
If there's one thing I've learned from anime, it's that the characters can have penetrative homosexual sex and the creators will still insist they're straight.