Ping Pong and Devilman Crybaby Are Basically the Same
By: Elizabeth Simins
Tags: Ping Pong, Anime, Anigay Summer Issue, Devilman Crybaby, LGBTQ

Above, not to hit you over the head with it too hard, but: There’s Smile, smiling (and crying) as a child, smiling (and crying) during his match with Peco, and then smiling casually as an adult. And there’s Ryo, crying, thereby proving that sorrow exists, and (by his own logic) that love also exists. Both stories have, if in unexpected ways, been resolved.

So. It’s been established that both Devilman Crybaby and Ping Pong are about newly surfacing tensions between two boys who have been close since childhood, one of whom is capable of expressing emotions and one of whom is not, who must face off in a climactic battle before the series is over though in the end, the results of the battle are overshadowed by the fact that the emotive half of each pair has finally taught the non-emotive half how to feel and express their emotions. Phew! But, why should it matter that Masaaki Yuasa seems to have a penchant for telling almost identical stories about… what I just said?

At the beginning of this post, I said that the similarities between DMCB and Ping Pong had implications for understanding implicit queerness in anime generally, and that DMCB made me way firmer in my belief that Ping Pong is an intentionally queer work. And if you follow my logic above, it’s pretty clear that DMCB and Ping Pong have an overarching roadmap in common — the only substantive difference is that DMCB’s roadmap is explicitly queer. Though Ryo doesn’t say the magic words (“I love you”) directly, his evolution into a person who can cry explicitly tells us that he’s in love with Akira. There’s a big gay X at the end of the DMCB treasure map. But what can that tell us about Ping Pong, which (I haven’t forgotten) came out several years earlier?

My cousin and AniGay/Icebergs colleague Rebecca Black has said (no seriously, I swear she has, and someday she will write about it!) that an implicitly queer narrative is like a mystery story with the final reveal missing: The clues are laid out for you along the way, and just because you lost the last ten pages or whatever and didn’t get to read the author’s words telling you directly Who Did It, that doesn’t mean the clues weren’t there to lead you to the missing conclusion. Though Ping Pong stops short of using the word “love” in reference to Smile and Peco’s relationship, the fact is that the emotional and plot beats leading to Smile’s transformation are nearly identical to those that tell us that Ryo loves Akira. The final queer reveal may be missing from Ping Pong, but the clues are all there. And because of DMCB, we know where those clues lead.

Yuasa’s two most recent series are an easy way to explore this analogy because they do have so much in common, not least of all their director; it doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that Yuasa might have been hiding queerness in plain sight before he went all in on a new interpretation of a franchise that has been exuberantly queer since the 1970s. But implicitly queer narratives that feel like mystery stories missing their last ten pages are common throughout anime and media in general. The societal increase in acceptance for explicitly queer narratives is, of course, beneficial in itself. But it also has the potential to provide us with the keys we need to untangle and decode implicitly queer stories, a vastly larger category that, while no less valuable than its more direct counterpart, does tend to need some legwork before it’s clear that queerness is, in fact, what’s really going on.

After all, I believe it’s in the spirit of almost-but-not-quite revealing the queer truth that adult Smile, when asked by a side character if he has a girlfriend, declines to answer. Instead, he leaves both the questioner and the viewer with the enigmatic: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” And as viewers, at least, I think we already have all the information we need for that.