Feel Free About Something
Free! Iwatobi Swim Club is an anime adapted from a novel involving young male swimmers. The novel however featured some of the same characters as children and the anime adaptation that went into production before the crapstorm in 2013 aged up the characters. The advert for the upcoming anime series was mistaken for a short promoting the mad skills of a certain animation studio. It caused controversy among some anime fans who can't stand the sight of scantily clad, sexualised male characters even if anime is generally more forgiving of sexualised pretty boys than the superhero genre is. In fact, there were precedents to the Swimming Anime phenomenon though they're not that well-remembered and hardly as controversial as Free is.
Sometime before Free, there was an obsessive female following for the anime Weiss Kreuz. Weiss Kreuz involved four young assassins who work in a flower shop and confront a similar quarter. The anime was featured in an essay on smuty fan fictions involving gay couples as done by women. It's interesting since Weiss Kreuz is nearly forgotten these days despite having an influence on the 2000s slash fan fiction scene. The same could be said of a certain incarnation of the Gundam series that did the same minus the scantily clad men Free is infamous for. Another example would be the Hunter x Hunter series which involves the adventures of little boys and their battles with older men.
If one is not mistaken, one of the antagonists is something of a sex symbol among some fans if it weren't for his muscles and habitually showing them off. Hunter x Hunter got a reboot in 2011, with one episode making him into an even bigger sex symbol and this predated by the Free furore by several months, possibly even earlier if count both the original animated series and the comics they were adapted from that did the same. And he's (usually) more muscular than any of the boys from the swimming anime. That didn't get as controversial and infamous as what Free got, even if it actually outdid the latter in terms of muscle definition and beefcake. It did inspire dissent but not to the same level that the swiming anime got which says a lot about female characters usually being more scantily clad in any time than males are. Scantily clad females and cheesecake are normal, beefcake is acceptabled if it's tamer and marginal just like what happened in Hunter x Hunter.
What Free gave us is something almost out of the ordinary. Not so much in having ugly character designs like what you get with misunderstood and overlooked anime like Ping Pong and Aku no Hana but the fanservice was mostly focused on the male characters. Even most bishounen anime like Weiss Kreuz don't go anywhere near this level of beefcake which is why it's easy to handwave the existence of prior anime that did the same. Ditto bara gay porn. Ditto Hisoka. Ditto Patalliro. Ditto Captain Tsubasa slash fan fiction. In hindsight, I think it's unfair to see Free get the blame when prior anime did something similar to its male characters though it's safe to say that what they did is rarely anywhere near the level Free got. Up to this day, Weiss Kreuz remains the unmentioned elephant in the room in light of bishounen fanservice.
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The Controversy Over A Swimming Anime
Non-FictionIt's damning when you realise that there are anime that did the same and yet rarely cause the same controversy that Kyoto Animation's Swimming Animu did two years before. But it's not what you think it is.
