Peppo

Character
Name:	Peppo
Occupation:	Various
Relationships:	Luigi Vampa (father figure), Albert de Morcerf (love interest)
Fandom:	Gankutsuou
Other:
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Peppo is a supporting character from the Gankutsuou anime.

Canon

Peppo serves as a double agent on several occasions during the show, and later reveals romantic feelings for Albert that prompt her to help him rescue his fiancee from an arranged marriage. She's shown working as a model in the show's epilogue.

In the novel The Count of Monte Cristo, characters named Beppo and Peppino mentioned very briefly. Beppo plays the same role as Peppo in luring the novel's Albert into a trap; it's implied that Beppo is in the habit of seducing men as a woman or a girl. Owing to the time period and the character's overall unimportance, no statement is made about Beppo's gender identity.

Fandom

Early fandom took the Count at his word and generally thought of Peppo as a boy, and Peppo x Albert as a yaoi ship. Modern viewers with greater awareness of trans identity usually consider Peppo a trans girl, given that she presents female 24/7 and looks upset when the Count brushes her chest. Some sites like TVTropes dispute this and list Peppo under tropes like Ambiguous Gender.

The fact that Peppo survives the series and is given a happy ending has been cited as something significant in media depiction of transgender characters, despite the fact that her introduction plays into many unpopular tropes:

Instead, she openly expresses her feelings to Albert, and, though for much of the series her character arc, like those of many fictional trans women before her, revolves around what she is willing to do for the man she loves and who does not love her back, she does, by the end of the series, live a life independent of Albert, and with some success in her career as a model. She therefore takes after Eugénie in her ability to live out her independence as a woman.

Though her portrayal is far from perfect, considering the general ignorance about trans experience even in the early 21st century, that a trans woman character should be strong, independent and even heroic merits some praise for the series, and almost compensates for the needlessly tragic vision of LGBTQ life in its portrayal of Franz.

Rather than view Peppo as some sort of compensation for Gankutsuou‘s version of Franz, however, it might be better to see her as a manifestation of the same strengths and weaknesses present in the book’s version of Eugénie. In other words, Peppo, like the original Eugénie, is a problematic portrayal of an already maligned population whose narrative nevertheless ends up subverting some of the audience’s presumed misconceptions and even winning their sympathy.

A Thousand Good Excuses: LGBTQ representation in Gankutsuou vs. The Count of Monte Cristo, an essay for Anime Feminist discussing LGBTQ text and subtext in Gankutsuou

Fanworks

• Hot Tin Roof, a fanmix by funnuraba

Doujinshi

• Orange Iro to Yubikiri (2005)

Other

• Character tag on AO3
• Character tag on Pixiv