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This Week in Anime - So, Is Sound Euphonium Queerbaiting or Not?

There's something very wrong with the people who work there.

Generally a thoughtful article, though I do think I does miss a little bit in one aspect. The Class S genre has a long history of doing everything but confirming yuri couples, then suggesting that they will "outgrow" their yuri phase and move onto a more "proper" life with a man.

Generally a thoughtful article, though I do think I does miss a little bit in one aspect. The Class S genre has a long history of doing everything but confirming yuri couples, then suggesting that they will "outgrow" their yuri phase and move onto a more "proper" life with a man.

Panino Manino wrote:

There's something very wrong with the people who work there.

Considering how a lot of its workers were murdered in 2019 I find this sentence in particular to be rather tasteless.

The Shuuichi hate genuinely baffles me, given that he’s arguably the biggest victim in the entire series. He’s just a slightly boring dude with a crush that the narrative decided to do dirty the entire way through.

First you have season one, where Kumiko’s main reaction to him is either “urgh/geh” or just completely not recognizing his existence, with season two being barely an improvement (there’s a few scenes where Kumiko grumbles about her troubles to him in passing). Then we go from 26 episodes covering an entire year to a single movie covering the next, where his confession is dropped in the cold open, almost like a joke. Now suddenly we’re expected to believe Kumiko also shares feelings towards him, despite every bit of textual & visual imagery exclusively focusing on her intense, almost visceral fixations towards Reina & Asuka.

The poor guy has basically been forced into a romance subplot, despite every piece of information the show presents us depicting something else entire. Like, even now in his supposedly higher role as vice-president, he barely has a shot in the OP & nothing in the ED. The kid’s been royally screwed over by the narrative he exists within.

From what I understand the original book also presents Kumiko's fascination & pining towards some of her peers as pretty intimate, but as you’ve said, Kyoani’s direction under Yamada takes it to a whole other level. It’s hardly the first time she’s done this, with A Silent Voice & Heike Story also spinning the narrative in favour of her particular fixations, to the detriment of the original text (well, mostly with Voice), & when it’s done this aggressively it actively undermines parts of the original text, while over-emphasising others. So now the new staff are effectively left having to continue legacy content that has reframed & muddled up all the central character relationships.

Personally my head cannon is that Kumiko is absolutely gay (still not convinced about Reina tbh), but is trapped within the narrative, like a marionette being puppeted by invisible strings, to believe she isn’t. So after the show ends she & Shuuichi will date for like 6 months before the realisation hits her like a bolt of lightning. Then she’ll go on to find true happiness, while Shuuichi will throw a dried dog turd at Yamada’s front door for wasting everyone’s time. The end.

Like someone else mentioned, there are actual yuri shows. I don’t see why people who want to watch those shows would even bother with series like Euphonium at this point.