Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-206.248.102.212-20130711220058/@comment-11123708-20140807185126

I can barely start counting all the points where this discussion rubs me the wrong way, but I will attempt to try.

1. No matter how much bromance and queerbaiting and hints and implications we see, Free! is not a shounen-ai. It's highly slashable, but tbh I haven't seen a single sports anime that isn't. The entire point of sports animes is to be slashable. Ever seen Prince of Tennis, or Kuroko no Basuke? You will find the same thing there (especially in PoT) although in maybe a slightly lesser extent. Free has a lot of eye-candy, which can and/or doesn't have to be seen in a romantic way. Whichever you chose, it's your choice. If you say NO GAY, JUST FRIENDSHIP, fine. If you say OMG THEY ARE ALL SO GAY I SHIP THEM ALL it's also fine. It's about your preferences and personal likes, and in an extended sense your taste, and there's just no arguing about that. It's pointless, it doesn't present a solution, just fills up pages of discussion posts and floods the admins mail with spam. You don't like something someone else likes? That's your prerogative, but don't hate on the other person because of it. If you do, you're an asshole, nothing else. This goes for both groups.

2. To the discussion at hand. Gou's character. I must admit I agree with points that both sides have made. Gou is obviously the "girl for girls". Put very bluntly, sports anime is for girls to oggle bishies and for boys to watch boys do sports. Hence the producers will include in the character list boys who do sports and girls who are there to watch them do it (most of the times as club managers). '''This is not a bad thing. NEITHER DOES IT MEAN THE GIRL IS A BAD CHARACTER OR THAT SHE ISN'T NECESSARY.''' Call it natural selection, or whatever, but this is how things go in japanese anime and manga industry. That doesn't stop them though from making the character interesting. I like Gou because she is not the typical *insert female romance character* (like Sakuno from PoT, as an example -now THAT is a completely unnecessary character deserving a bit more development IMO), who will only fawn and blush and stutter, while she gets ignorance in turn because boys are boys. "Sportsbakas" especially lol.

Gou manages the club and so far doesn't seem to have a romantic interest in the boys (club managers from sports anime usually don't). Her character is more comparable to Aida Riko or Momoi Satsuki from KuroBasu. The supporting female character.

Not really irreplacable (club manager is something boys can do to and Rin could have a little brother instead) or very plot defining (though she has her own importance in relation to characters and does contribute to the plot, it's not something the producers and script writers couldn't do without her), but there's little reason why she should be a male, or just not be there at all.

Why shouldn't she be there? Why is it so bad to have a female character in a sports anime? Sure, we can say "all the unnecessary side-characters should go away" but where would be the fun in that? Do we keep only the main cast? The club members? Or we can just do only with Rin and Haru. Yeah, I'm sure that would be a very interesting plot. Just enough for two Prime Time OVAs, right?

3. The depth and development of her character. For the supporting female character, she's developed, trust me. She could have a bigger role, I agree. She could have more in depth characterisation, yes. Momoi and Riko from KuroBasu have their insights and a bigger role in comparison to her, this is true. But the thing is, they are featured in an anime, that developed from a manga and adapts the plot of the manga. Hence, there was an author who wrote it, who thought about her characters, who had the space to give them screen time. This then got shown in the anime.

Free is an original anime, based on the novel High Speed. But it doesn't adapt the novel (if we don't count the flashbacks) directly, but represents a sequel. This can be a double-edged sword. It means that the episodes are better paced, because they don't have to a) include fillers to fill the 24 minutes required for an episode b) think about what everything they will include from the manga in terms of character developement, what has to be included, what can be left out. Some will try to include everything (KuroBasu season 1). That is generally a good thing, but it also means that they won't develope side-characters where they don't have to. There's literally no source telling them to (and usually not enough fans to demand it). Of course there are people who are in charge of character development (or I believe so), but yeah. They will opt to develope the most popular characters and the main characters and focus on their storylines if that fills the 24 minutes, that's where they'll stop. And to add it, Free! is a 13 episodes per season anime, so there's even less space.

Considering all this, Gou is really fine. She has her place, isn't generally annoying, or wastring her screen time blushing and stuttering and her weakness for muscles is refreshing too. First club manager I've seen do that (openly) really.

To sum it all up.

Yes, Gou is an insert character to represent a certain group of girls, or just girls in general. This is not a bad thing. Neither does it make her a bad character, or a boring character, or an unecessary character. She is as necessary as characters are necessary to make a story and girls a part of this world and a population group of high schools.

She's not the best female character I came across, but she's most definitely not the worst.