Series that focus on queer adult characters open the door to a storytelling niche that’s still relatively underrepresented despite the rich narrative potential it offers: the post-adolescence queer coming-of-age story. Or, in other words, the gay quarter-life crisis.
As yuri continues to get queerer, the existence of trans people in these stories would be one way to provide validation for trans readers in their gender and sexuality while also helping cis people understand and internalize our long standing place in the sapphic community. Yuri works featuring trans characters do exist, though their history is complex and they remain relatively few.
Yuri and the wider GL community has an increasing reach that seems to be growing each year, and it’s worth examining the ways in which the increased variety of yuri stories are representing different kinds of love and relationships. Love can be so many different things, after all, and it’s gratifying when fiction reflects that—not to mention how it opens new possibilities for storytelling and discussions of relationship dynamics.
In a media landscape where there are seldom women who have a body type like mine, seeing two very different series, in terms of genre and presentation, showcase plus-sized sapphic women as people worthy of respect and desire, was so impactful for me.
Reading through Happy Sugar Life was a therapy I didn’t know I needed. With its wild-eyed, camera-spinning melodrama, it managed to capture so many unwanted feelings of anger, sorrow, desperation, resentment, anxiety, and at times, a truly aching nothingness. I joy-rode this tour-de-madness, but even I still spent a week afterward somewhere between “destabilized” and “no bath or shower will make me feel clean.”
Miscommunication as narrative conflict is often linked with contrivance and bad writing—and no genre faces this criticism more than romance. That’s what makes Yuri is My Job! so refreshing. In the process of building a will-they-won’t-they story, it explores the gendered, neurotypical, and heteronormative expectations that are built into social interaction.
Set in 1900 England and steeped in references to both the history and literature of the Victorian era, Goodbye, My Rose Garden draws on turn-of-the-century reality and fantasy alike to highlight the intersectional struggles of queer women of the period.
It took years of consuming BL and Yuri to finally face my truth: that I am queer.
Vrai, Alex, and Mercedez go over the wealth of yuri being published on the English market and share some of their faves!
Irodori Comics launched an all-ages online doujinshi store featuring LGBTQ+ works. AniFem asked its editor to talk about the company’s future plans.
Throughout its 100-year history, yuri has uniquely evolved in and moved about multiple markets, often existing in many simultaneously. It is by and for a variety of people: men, women, heterosexuals, queer people, everyone!
The first time I read Kindred Spirits on the Roof, I was surprised and even grateful, because it often felt like the game was speaking to my questioning teenage self. It attempts to honestly portray queer female relationships, but sometimes blurs the line between depicting attraction and sensationalizing it.
“Purity” is most commonly used as a shorthand for chastity or sexlessness, and generally refers to stories that don’t engage with sex at all. Though Yamada’s sincerity and innocence is part of Kase-san‘s appeal, the way it engages with the girls’ sexuality is just as important. Sex does exist in Kase-san, and while the series focuses primarily on Kase and Yamada’s emotional relationship, it also explores their physical relationship and sexual attraction to each other from the very first chapter.
Inevitably, when I do any kind of public talk about Yuri or LGBTQ comics, someone will express dissatisfaction at mild school life romances or I’ll be asked for recommendations for manga about “real” lesbians. As we move through the 100th anniversary of the Yuri genre, it seems time to address this issue—not once and for all, as the genre is changing as rapidly as the languages that describe it, but for now.
Media presents a certain set of common tropes that informs much of our idea about love and what it “should” look like. Bloom Into You interrogates these tropes, making it a story that provides important queer representation in fiction while also talking about representation in fiction within the story itself.
The last few years have seen a boom in the English-language yuri market, with more and more manga about queer romance between women making it to shelves. But with all these choices, where does a curious reader start?
This is the story of an openly queer mangaka who really loves to write about women falling in love with other women.
It can be hard to find manga that shows both the struggles and joys of the awkward period of teen romance, especially if you’re not straight. That’s exactly why the Kase-san and… manga series is a breath of fresh air, a slice-of-life comedy that models what a healthy, queer romantic relationship can look like.
Fantastical fiction is an ideal space for working through complex real-world issues using the frame of allegory, metaphor, and a little bit of magic. Yurikuma Arashi is one such series, a step detached from reality but with something to say about real-world problems, specifically about homophobia and the societal stigmas queer women face.
In FLIP FLAPPERS Episode 5, Cocona and Papika are thrown into a world that combines Class S, a genre of sweet yuri romance, with horror. Now, what in the world could that strange combination be trying to tell us?
