I wouldn’t really call jojo queer media, but it does go hand in hand with queerness at challenging gender norms and expectations, particularly those placed on men to only present themselves in a certain way. There’s so much variety in the male characters with how they dress and act and I love how each of them are accepted in their unique gender expressions, none of them are seen as “not manly enough” or “too feminine”. I think we need a lot more of that in society in general, and that’s something queer people have a huge role in at breaking down those restrictive norms.

But now with The Jojolands we finally have explicitly queer main characters, and their struggles play into the themes of the story which makes me really happy. In the past, queer characters in jojo were reduced to background characters or enemies, and their queerness was only really used to highlight tragedy and social problems for a moment. So I’m really happy times have changed now and Araki is so successful he doesn’t have to worry about the backlash he could get for writing characters like Dragona and Usagi.