Wow apparently the setting of Free! is before 2008. According to the Free! Creation Notebook vol.4, that’s the reason why the characters don’t use smartphones and the animators took special care to avoid electronics such as computers and tv that could date the story. And it’s because long jammers are banned in tournaments since 2009 and men’s swimsuits can only maximally cover the area from the navel to the knee, so Rin and Makoto and Sousuke couldn’t have been wearing them in the anime.
We can still kind of date the series by the phones they use though. Mobile phones became ubiquitous in Japan since the 90s, much earlier than the west. But 1999 is when they first have internet access and color screens.
This is Nagisa’s phone from season 1 episode 9, with color screen and internet access, so I’d say it’ll at least have to be 2000 or later for a high school student to casually own one of these models.
Can we talk about how dreadful Rei’s phone looks lol.
Makoto also uses a generic slide phone that dominated the Japanese market along with flip phones (which peaked at 2007 before smartphones took over).
Haruka has a similar phone too but in a different color.
In the next screencap you can clearly see there’s an ipod-looking music device:
The first generation ipod, first design of its kind, was released in 2001. And that model looks like it’s an ipod nano from 2005.
So I think we can conclude that Free! and Free!ES took place some time during 2005-2007 (or 2001-2007 if you assume that ipod is first gen). UPDATE: Apparently the tournament Rin and Haruka competed in was the 2009 World Aquatics Championship at Foro Italico in Rome, where long jammers were last used in an official tournament. Here’s a comparison post of the venue by @matsuoka-lin (thank you!). So there’s a good chance that they graduated in 2007 (since the notebook specifically noted that the show is “before 2008″) and competed as pros in 2009. :)
So if they were 17-18 in 2007, the youngest possible age they can be, they’d be 26-27 by now. :)
Also honorable mention of these playstation wired dualshock controllers from 1997 (Makoto probably never updated his console lol):
And the fact that Makoto DOES own a smartphone! The first iphone was released in 2007 so it’s entirely possible :)
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