Suggestion to make useless lesbian a real tag lo/
I know you joke, but I feel like rambling about this, especially in light of the complaints about certain tropes, so bear with me.
Most yuri that I've seen on this site has useless lesbians. It might be easier to tag the ones where the characters specific mental hangups or other reasons stand in the way of the relationship, the ones where "just confessing" or similar, relatively simple actions, wouldn't resolve the main conflict. Bloom into You is one such example.
The "useless lesbian" phenomenon is on one hand just the lesbian edition of the cluster of romantic tropes including "oblivious to love" and "can not spit it out", but on the other hand the real life implications of romance between women puts these tropes in a different context. Not just because it's more likely that someone is oblivious to love, if the kind of attraction they are experiencing is not centered in their culture, and that they may be more afraid of admitting to those feelings for fear of repercussions.
But there's also a specific kind of isolation to the wlw experience. E.g. the size of the dating pool in your area, the assumption that "she's probably straight", the lack of access to a community, if you don't live in the right place. And that's if you are out to yourself. It's possibly worse to go through high school, not even knowing what you're missing, but that something's just not right.
I'm not saying that yuri manga authors secretly conspire to intentionally reference this experience by restricting most of their works to be about school girls, and follow the useless lesbians narrative. The publishers look for profit, and the artists most often follow their own personal influences (which are often school girl yuri), or can't afford to spend too much time with developing stories that would radically break with conventions. But at the same time, I feel like the state of yuri manga unintentionally reflects the isolation that I mentioned above. In these school girl yuri manga, teenage girls fall in love with each other, but these romances are isolated occurrences, as the stories rarely allow the girls' attempts to contextualize their feelings, or seek community with other girls and women like them. This is probably also an example of how the industry dilutes the aspects of yuri that can radically challenge the real life status quo... Most yuri readers are looking for a comfortable break from the harsh realities of the world (understandably so), so stories that take those realities seriously are bad for business. But I'm getting off topic.
Naturally, averting or subverting the useless lesbian narrative is not a bad thing - quite the opposite. Sapphic stories that are more optimistic or don't present the lesbian experience as an inherent obstacle, are absolutely crucial. I totally share the frustration with the dearth of these kinds of stories. But before dismissing these tropes as cliché, it's worth considering how they connect to real life, and in what ways they can still be relevant. What I wish for is more stories that are honest about the real life situation, but aren't limited by it. For example, Prism and Cotton Candy both offer a short but startlingly "real" glimpse at lesbophobia, despite the fact that both of them are fairly upbeat and optimistic throughout.
I do try to keep in mind why so many lead charactres i find to be boring probably are leads to begin with. Playing it safe and whatnot. This was a nice and interesting post. Really should go to bed now though.
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