Komi Can’t Communicate is a thoroughly delightful and wholesome anime that’s well worth your time for any variety of reasons but one aspect of it that stands out, in particular, is the casual way in which it treats its LGBTQ+ characters. Their existences are made unremarkable by the narrative and the overwhelming weirdness that most of the characters possess makes any perceived queerness seem like a minute detail in comparison to their other more obviously bizarre traits. LGBTQ+ representation still has a ways to go in anime but Komi Can’t Communicate shows promise in portraying queer characters by allowing them to be three-dimensional weirdos along with the rest of the cast.
The show follows a girl named Shouko Komi (Aoi Koga) who is perceived by everyone around her as the picture of perfection but, as the title indicates, has a hard time communicating. In fact, she has social anxiety so extreme it’s nearly debilitating. But after having a long (written) conversation with her classmate Hitohito Tadano (Gakuto Kajiwara), he agrees to help her try and overcome her fears and achieve her goal of making 100 friends. And so we begin to meet our colorful cast of characters who will help Komi come out of her shell.
One very important thing to note about Komi Can’t Communicate is that all the characters fall into a type–embodying types of stock characters often seen in manga. Tadano, for example, is a mob character. He’s a very generic guy whose typical role in a story is to be ignored. This knowledge of character types comes into play when discussing the LGBTQ+ characters because the show resists any temptation to simply make a character's gender or sexuality their character type, instead making that a secondary trait. This is a simple but effective way that the story is able to avoid stereotyping and allows the audience to see all the characters in a more complex way. But who are the LGBTQ+ characters exactly?
As of the end of season 1, there are only two of any real significance right now (though there are more later): Najimi Osana (Rie Murakawa) and Ren Yamai (Rina Hidaka). Najimi is the second person Komi makes friends with after Tadano and is nonbinary while Ren is a later addition and takes a bit longer to become friends with Komi. At this point in the show, these are some of the most significant characters we have yet to encounter, with Najimi appearing constantly and Ren being a common secondary character in quite a few plots.
First, Ren Yamai. Ren puts out the outward appearance of a cute, popular girl who holds Komi (or rather the perfect image of her all her classmates seem to hold) in high regard. But things are not what they seem. As mentioned, almost every character in the show falls into a stock character type of some sort and Ren is the yandere girl meaning she’s got a hidden dark side fostering an obsessive crush on one of her classmates. Her crush? Who else but the school’s idol: Komi Shouko.
At first glance this could seem problematic–the lesbian character with an obsessive, creepy crush on the main character is certainly a trope we’ve seen before. But the show is able to avoid this by placing the emphasis on Ren’s character type rather than on her being a girl. Basically, by having her be such a stock type like many of the other secondary characters her obsessive tendencies don’t come across as a symptom of her homosexuality as they might in a less carefully written story. And with so many characters being based on common manga stereotypes it’d be weirder if the classic yandere character wasn’tobsessed with the main character. The show also goes on to show Ren becoming real friends with Komi after repressing her yandere tendencies. Her crush is still clearly present and at one point she declares her love for Komi to the whole school to which the reaction is an uproarious agreement with her sentiments. If Ren had simply been a one-off yandere character, this could easily have been a case of another tired trope but by having her adhere to the formula of the show and begin growing through her friendship with Komi like the rest of the cast, Ren’s queerness is made an incidental part of her character rather than the crux of it. The lighthearted way the show treats Ren’s queerness carries over into the handling of its most central queer character, Najimi.
Najimi Osana may be one of the best nonbinary characters we’ve yet seen on the screen. As arguably the third main character of Komi Can’t Communicate they are a constant and essential force within the show. Najimi’s gender is left intentionally ambiguous and characters refer to them with neutral pronouns so while the word “nonbinary” was not used explicitly within the show, that is how Najimi’s gender is shown to the audience implicitly and thus how they will be referred to in this article for the sake of brevity.
Najimi is the popular kid. They are friends with everyone in the class (maybe everyone in the school) and basically has the gold standard for social skills. Najimi is confident, fun, and always trying to push Komi out of her comfort zone in good-willed but ill-fated attempts to improve Komi’s own communication skills. Najimi’s gender is first remarked upon by Tadano who went to middle school with Najimi and, as Najimi had used the male uniform throughout middle school, Tadano remarks that now Najimi is wearing the girls uniform. Najimi proceeds to tease Tadano for not being able to tell what gender they are and playfully says they were a girl the whole time.
The significance here is that the joke isn’t on Najimi, it’s on Tadano. In truth, it doesn’t matter what gender Najimi is, and they know Tadano doesn’t really care, he’s just such a straightforward person that he gets caught up on technicalities like that. The joke in that first scene, and similar ones that follow, comes from a place of laughing with Najimi over the mischief they cause rather than laughing at Najimi for being different.
This setup is reused a few times throughout the season like when they go to the pool and briefly tease at a joke about which changing room Najimi will use before skipping over it entirely. Najimi’s gender is never weaponized to make jokes about their gender or to make them seem weird, it’s simply another personality quirk that their friends remark upon the same way they do about Najimi’s obnoxious Starbucks order. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a character be so obviously gender-nonconforming but never be the butt of the joke for that reason alone. Oftentimes anime will fall into offensive stereotypes for LGBTQ+ characters especially when their queerness is tied to their gender but Komi Can’t Communicate sidesteps those tired tropes entirely and as a result creates something that feels fresh, a subversion of how we normally see jokes about a character's gender played.
To even call the characters in Komi Can’t Communicate “representation” feels like a disservice to the show's efforts to make their queerness so unremarkable, so normal. Najimi and Ren aren’t just representations, they’re full-fledged characters with just as much depth and strangeness to them as the rest of the cast. Their existence as LGBTQ+ characters is remarkable exactly because the show doesn’t treat them as such. With more LGBTQ+ characters set to be introduced in the upcoming season, Komi Can’t Communicate will continue to do the groundbreaking work of making the presence of LGBTQ+ characters feel less like a groundbreaking move and more like a normal occurrence.
