I feel like when people make posts like this their heart is in the right place, but they go way too hard in the opposite direction and wind up accidentally gaslighting/putting down the show’s intended audience.

Because counterpoint to this:

And yes, it’s the swimming one. No, it’s not gay.

Actually it totally, extremely plausibly is? Queer viewers of this show (male AND female) aren’t wrong. They’re not imagining things. They’re reading the source material in the exact way it’s intended. Free! is written with them in mind. The gay themes aren’t liminal in the way they would be in the west because Free is not BL, which is the only genre you can feasibly feature overt gay content in japanese publishing. But they’re still...super, super there.

When people say stuff like “actually this is really good which means it is not and cannot be gay”, it’s sort of...saying a bit more than you want it to. It is really good, and it’s also specifically evocative of queer angst, development and relationships. Both those things are true at the same time.

If you watch closely, you’ll notice a myriad of metaphors throughout the show.

I agree completely. It just seems that you missed the absolutely biggest and most popularly interpretable metaphor of the show. The great big queer metaphor that the entire central cast has to come to terms with.

This isn’t how everyone will read it, but to say it’s not there is just...not a true thing.

I get it, people will often try to ‘rehabilitate’ this show because they gave it a chance and liked it. But when you do it by saying “and no, don’t worry, there’s no icky disgusting gay stuff in it’, you’re accidentally kneeing the show and its audience in the balls.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. Just be a little mindful that, in your rush to spread your enjoyment of it, you don’t flip the show’s whole audience the bird.