Why Bisexual Erasure in Media and Fandom Matters

When the popular anime Yuri on Ice!!! first came out, there was a lot of discourse about the main characters’ sexuality. This only proved that many people don’t seem to realize bisexual people exist.

While many people today realize the main characters, Yuri Katsuki and Victor Nikiforov, are in a same-sex couple, many fans feared the series might be queer-baiting audiences by teasing a same-sex relationship, much like how another sports anime, Free!, teased fans. Things were made more complicated when Yuri, in the first episode, expresses having a former crush on his female friend, Yuuko. Victor in the Japanese version later talks about romantic partners, using gender neutral terms exclusive to the Japanese language. When this was translated, this became Victor referring to girlfriends.

So the discourse, up until the end of the series, was either that the whole series was an elaborate queer-baiting (because the characters expressed interest in women and therefore couldn’t enter a same-sex relationship) or that the creators deliberately trolled audiences by implying the characters were straight before subverting expectations by presenting two gay men in a relationship.

The option that Yuri and/or Victor might be bisexual or pansexual — or even asexual — never once occurred to these individuals.