Blue Gender

Blue Gender

ブルージェンダー
1999 -2000 AIC ASTA TV Tokyo 26 episodes Completed
Action Mecha Horror Sci-Fi Drama
Details & Synopsis
Yuji Kaido wakes up from cryogenic sleep to find the world he knew is gone. While he was under, Earth was overrun by the Blue, massive insectoid creatures that appeared without warning and dismantled human civilization in a generation. What remains of humanity has retreated to a space station called Second Earth, sending small recovery teams back down to the surface. Yuji is one of their targets. Marlene Angel is the soldier sent to retrieve him.

Produced by AIC ASTA and directed by Masashi Abe, Blue Gender aired on TV Tokyo in 1999 and ran for 26 episodes. It is a survival horror mecha series that earns its darkness, the Blue are genuinely terrifying, the losses are real, and Yuji's psychological deterioration across the series is handled with a seriousness the genre rarely manages. This is not a show about a chosen hero learning to fight. It is a show about what war does to a person who was never supposed to be in one.

The nudity and violence are not incidental. They are part of a deliberate refusal to make any of this comfortable. Blue Gender wants you to feel the weight of a world that has already lost.

A theatrical film, Blue Gender: The Warrior, recaps and recuts the series. Skip it. Watch the series. The ending will stun you.
Alt Title ブルージェンダー
Studio AIC ASTA
Network TV Tokyo
Aired 1999 - 2000
Episodes 26
Genre Action, Mecha, Horror, Sci-Fi, Drama
Status Completed
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Fansub & Scanlation History

What AniDB Actually Documents

zx Landed the Same Month as the Edited Broadcast

Complete, August 2003 · 8.31 from 36 Votes
zx completed a full DVD-sourced release in August 2003, the same month Funimation's edited version began airing on Adult Swim. Rated 8.31 from 36 votes, the most-voted Blue Gender fan release on record, this was the uncut alternative to a broadcast that had to remove exactly the content that made the show what it was.
[zx]

ACX Has the Highest Rating on Record

ACX completed a DVD-sourced release in July 2007 rated 9.55 from 6 votes, the highest score any Blue Gender fan release has, though with far fewer votes than zx's wider-reaching release.
[ACX]

A Manga Almost Too Small to Matter

Takahashi Wrote It Himself, But It Was Only One Volume

Kadokawa's Comic Dragon, December 2000

Ryōsuke Takahashi, the anime's own creator, wrote a manga companion illustrated by Takashi Hashimoto, published in Kadokawa Shoten's Comic Dragon in December 2000. It ran to just a single volume, small enough that it likely never generated the kind of scanlation demand seen on this site's other pages. [UNCONFIRMED]: no scanlation group for this specific manga turned up in what was checked here.

A Dark Horse License for a Young Funimation

One of Funimation's First Non-Dragon Ball Licenses

AIC · TBS, October 1999 – March 2000

Blue Gender, created by Ryōsuke Takahashi (Armored Trooper Votoms, Gasaraki) and animated by AIC, ran on TBS for 26 episodes from October 1999 to March 2000. Funimation's license was notable at the time as one of the company's first releases outside the Dragon Ball franchise that had defined its early identity.

Too Graphic for Toonami, Rerouted to Adult Swim

Premiered August 4, 2003

Blue Gender was originally planned for Toonami, but its graphic violence, nudity, and sex scenes made that impossible without gutting the show. It was edited and rerouted to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim instead, premiering August 4, 2003 and running through mid-September, with reruns continuing into December.

A Compilation Movie With a Different Ending

Blue Gender: The Warrior, November 20, 2002

A compilation film, Blue Gender: The Warrior, released November 20, 2002, cuts roughly the final third of the TV series' plot and replaces it with an alternate ending, a real second version of the story similar in spirit to Wolf's Rain's split conclusion, though built by removing material rather than adding it.