Japan has some issues with transness and such due to culture- I'm no professor this though so take my word with the Dead Sea's salt. Pretty much the same reason why Nintendo had to Scorched Earth with confirming that Shiver of Splatoon 3 is explicitly female, despite having insane nb vibes.
??? I don’t think writers explicitly using trans themes in their stories but refusing to actually make their characters canonical trans women is the same thing as people looking at a character design and saying it looks queer and being told no
Ah so it was actually the Americans who were erasing queerness there
