Sanda’s Latest Episode Confronts Both Class S Tropes And Anti-Queer, Pro-Natalist Politics

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 4, 2025 | 10:47am

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Sanda’s Latest Episode Confronts Both Class S Tropes And Anti-Queer, Pro-Natalist Politics

Speaking broadly, anime has a complicated track record when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation. On the one hand, many iconic series had queer characters well before this was seen as “acceptable” on American television, something that resulted in censorship when many of these series hit NA airwaves. One of the most infamous examples was how the Cartoon Network broadcast of Sailor Moon S removed an implied romantic relationship between Sailor Neptune and Uranus, with the dubbing work embarrassingly portraying them as “cousins.”

Beyond this, there are plenty of great manga centered on queer romance, and while it used to be relatively rare for these to receive anime adaptations, it has become increasingly commonplace in recent years—for instance, both The Summer Hikaru Died and Watanare aired just last season. And when you factor in implicit relationships and queer subtext, the list of applicable anime is nearly endless, whether it’s the close bonds between “roommates” or hot-blooded rivalries found in sports series. All of this is likely at least part of the reason why a poll by Vox Media found that a large percentage of American anime fans identify as queer.

However, despite all these positives for anime’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ topics, there are nearly as many pitfalls. While going back decades with just about any form of media will lead to randomly being bombarded with the most homophobic thing you’ve ever seen, many old-school anime are particularly rough in this regard. And it’s not like these problems are relegated to the past, because it’s not uncommon for contemporary series to either be deeply heteronormative or include subtle jabs at queer characters.

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Sometimes, even when there is explicit LGBTQ+ rep, the conservative suits financing the series try to gaslight their audience into believing the contrary. For instance, after Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury unambiguously ended with the main character marrying another woman, the higher-ups at the company that produced the series, Bandai Namco Filmworks, censored an interview referencing the pair’s marital status and asserted that their relationship was up for interpretation.

Beyond this, a more subtle, but nonetheless toxic element found in many series is an underlying assertion that many characters who are clearly queer will “grow out of it” as they get older. This is a particularly common trope regarding female characters in school settings, so much so that it ostensibly became its own literary genre in Japan: Class S fiction. To directly quote Alex Henderson’s excellent piece on the subject:

Class S is a genre quite specific to Japanese media, focusing on young women (mostly middle- and high-schoolers) having deep, intimate friendships during adolescence. This genre stems from the idea that young people redirect the emotional energy that would normally manifest as romantic interest towards friendship. It also comes with the expectation that these relationships will end when the girls transition to adulthood (where that emotional energy will “naturally” channel back into heterosexual romantic love).

It’s a pervasive, long-standing trope that has tortured many overseas anime fans (including yours truly), in part because it’s exceedingly unclear if a particular story is trying to be implicitly queer or whether it’s emulating these Class S plot beats, as unreasonable amounts of yearning lead to absolutely nothing (damn you Sound Euphonium!).

Moreover, it simply feels fairly rare for an anime to have LGBTQ+ side-characters—basically, there are plenty of romance series entirely focused on queer relationships, but it isn’t particularly common in other genres. There are examples to the contrary, but you’re still probably more likely to see a homophobic jab than a normalized queer relationship.

It’s for all of these reasons that the latest episode of one of this season’s most interesting shows, Sanda, feels particularly remarkable: it suddenly made its sapphic longing explicit and entirely central to the series’ narrative. For those who haven’t heard of it, Sanda is a weirdo show about a teenage boy whose superpower is that he can transform into a yoked version of Santa Claus. While powered up, he can withstand extreme temperatures, regenerate from almost all injuries, and summon razor-sharp sled-rails from his feet like a reverse Wolverine.

In the first episode, Sanda vows to help his classmate Fuyumura find their missing peer, Ono, who went missing months ago. In a series of flashback sequences, we see just how much Ono meant to Fuyumura, and how she was the only one who saw past her seemingly outwardly gloomy appearance to what was underneath. In her memories of these moments, the frame takes on a rosy hue as the pair eat ice cream together, stare longingly into each other’s eyes, and engage in other “roommate” behavior. While the subtext here is clear enough that I noted it in my episode one premiere of the series, subtext isn’t the same as text, and like many anime fans, I’ve been trained by hundreds of disappointments to assume this may not go anywhere, or if it does, it will take dozens of episodes.

Because of all this, it was to my great surprise that episode 4 more directly broached the subject, as Fuyumura remembers recoiling from Ono’s attempt to kiss her out of fear of romance, sex, and adulthood. Then, Episode 5, “A Typhoon in a Snow Globe,” goes much further: Ono suddenly returns, passionately kisses Fuyumura, and then remembers an erotic dream she had featuring her crush. Her reappearance is shocking, as it seemed to abruptly solve the overarching goal of the narrative. Of course, this only set the stage for deeper issues.

The broader context for Sanda’s setting is that it takes place in a future where Japan’s current real-world trajectory of declining birthrates has led to rapid changes in the country: children, who are seen as the country’s only hope, are both prized and controlled with meticulous scrutiny. They are intentionally kept young, both via a domineering and possessive schooling system that gives them little to no agency, and via a lightly explained medical process that forestalls puberty as long as they don’t sleep.

In the pliability of this extended childhood, the education system can mold them into “model” adults. They’re assigned marriage partners at birth, and having children is seen as a borderline requirement, a “national duty.” Unsurprisingly, in a society obsessed with children, same-sex marriage is implied to be even more of a “taboo” than it already was.

While this may sound odd and specific, it all works as both a parody of Japan’s aggressively natalist politics (i.e., former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s obsession with declining birth rates), as well as a commentary on the country’s conservative governance writ large. Despite a large base of support, especially among young people, gay marriage still isn’t legal in Japan at the federal level, despite 72% of the public supporting it in a 2023 poll. Much of this comes down to the fact that the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party has maintained a vise-grip on the country’s political apparatus with few intermissions since the end of World War II.

In Sanda, we see how the children at the center of the story react to this extreme extrapolation of where these oppressive forces could lead. Fuyumura, afraid of Ono’s advances due to an intentionally ingrained fear of things considered “adult,” recoiled from her kiss (ironically, politicians like Abe were simultaneously obsessed with birth rates, but also with maintaining children’s “innocence” regarding things like sexual education).

In this episode, we also learn that Fuyumura appears to have some degree of body dysmorphia because her androgynous appearance doesn’t adhere to traditional gender norms. Later in the episode, Kazao, who is Sanda’s state-arranged fiancé, points out to Fuyumura that she’s probably bisexual.

Meanwhile, Ono, who is deeply in love with Fuyumura, internalizes her queerness as a grievous “wrong” due to what she’s been taught. When her body suddenly undergoes puberty after she falls asleep, something that their school’s principal ominously said would result in a grave punishment, she says it’s as if “my body has taken on the weight of all I’ve committed.”

At this point, we learn that Ono didn’t disappear because she was kidnapped; she ran away voluntarily out of body shame and misattributed guilt. When she returns and kisses Fuyumura, she does so with a knife in hand (hello, toxic yuri) because she thinks they’d both be better off dying while young. She’s deeply afraid of getting older due to the society they live in, as well as out of grim resignation regarding the seeming impossibility of a fulfilling queer romantic future, something that directly references the “Bury Your Gays” trope. It should be noted that in the erotic dream Ono has while undergoing puberty, she and Fuyumura vow to be together forever, something in defiance of Class S tropes, this fictional world, and real-world Japanese politics.

Of course, we don’t know how any of this will resolve: after Fuyumura talks down Ono from doing something rash, the menacing principal suddenly appears, implying Ono will be locked away in the rumored school basement where the “bad” children go. However, regardless of where events ultimately end up, this episode very directly confronts and refutes Class S baggage and rotten ideologies alike, while explicitly weaving queerness into the narrative.

I don’t know if it will stick the landing, but whatever happens, this anime about a kid who transforms into buff Santa Claus continues to surprise, this time with an episode that approaches social conservatism with the scathing criticism it deserves.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.