Oh, it's another manga with subtext from Yuri Hime, you know, a yuri magazine.
The "subtext" vs "yuri" distinction made here, encouraged by the tagging system is pretty stupid. It's a yuri manga. In the chapters so far the yuri is subtext rather than explicit, but it's early and it's likely to turn into romance. How many chapters was Girl Friends "subtext" for?
Except you missed the mark. If you want an example, and a fairly notable one at that, you should have gone with MGLN. There, despite an absolute mountain of doujins, fan art, fanfics, and similar fan-produced representations, the actual canon never rises above subtext. That is to say, although having a ton of indirect evidence to corroborate the romantic nature of their relationship, it is never outright stated as such, never openly confirmed. Works tagged with subtext are almost always like that from start to finish.
"Girl Friends" is not subtext, it never was subtext, it was not written as a subtext work. Gradually falling in love is not subtext. If love is the 'text', then falling in love is that text being written, and in "Girl Friends" that text was never 'sub', it was right there, in the open, as the central theme of the entire work, even when the characters themselves were not yet fully aware of the nature of their feelings. It is an open romance work, things are not left vague, even when the characters are miscommunicating, angsting, and discovering themselves.
In short, subtext tag is a mighty useful one, because it differentiates between works were romance is in the open, acknowledged as such by the work itself, and those where it remains unspoken, unconfirmed, and is mainly left to the reader to extrapolate it.
last edited at Jul 15, 2017 6:44AM
