It's important to consider that Japan, the source of most of this manga and anime we consume is actually less LGBTQ+ friendly than a considerable number of western countries. There's culturally acceptable phenonema like S-.
When consuming Yuri, it's important to keep in mind that the genre was born in a culture with different norms and quirks. It's a genre that's evolving to this day. Maybe one day we'll see more kiss scenes that are designed for tittilation of the audience but a confirmation of affection between two characters.
Considering Japan's highly homophobic society, sometimes it crosses to me that it's a miracle that we got the yuri genre(Imagine if Anime was chinese lol.), and that's why I love yuri and hate when people treat it like a sexual genre. All those yuri authors kept fighting and writing stories despite of the discrimination and hate they got, I really do respect them.
However, in Yuri series it's really hard to tell if the girls are lovers or just being r
Manaria Friends is somewhat of a special case though. It's a spin-off to a larger franchise that is mostly based on gacha bullshit. Gacha games are designed as waifu generators. What may seem like an obvious decision to us is a legitimately dangerous gamble to the people at Cygames. Making ANY pairings canon (gay, lesbian, straight) is extremely detrimental to keeping up interest for a large portion of pathetic waifu and husbando collectors.
Japan is just especially creepy about this. Their culture also enables "super friendships" and "playing lovers" between girls. These things are slowly shifting, but that's at a snail's pace. They know that the Japanese fans will be satisfied with implications and subtext as they always are.
I'm rather conflicted on Manaria Friends in particular, because you could tell the director/writer was only doing this freaking anime to endorse the ship and have fun with it. They gain almost nothing from making that anime and their decision to only focus on these two and not even go for the actual Rage of Bahamut Mysteria Academy event tells volumes of the purpose of this show. The way they got people to buy it was to bait players with special tickets in the BD release btw.
So overall Cygames has the longest lever here. The fans are gonna buy it either way for the rewards, the continuity is not connected to any of their franchises and the entire purpose of this anime was to ship AnneGrea. Then why did they still not have the guts to cross the line? I think... Cygames just doesn't want to set a precedent. They don't want to be the first ones to make a commitment like that. Because the second they do, all the shippers in the world will point at Manaria Friends and say "You did it for these two, why the hell can't you do it for my ship too??"
For all their money, influence and exploitative tactics, Cygames is still the most afraid of taking risks.
That makes sense to everything, When I was watching the anime I was like, come on? they're gay right? is it that hard to have them kiss each other? well, it turns out it might upset lots of fans who consume their products(even tho it might upset the minority who support yuri.), It's really a tough job to please a fandom, when you make a franchise or a work and not set it in stone that the main characters are gay in the beggining, it might piss off a great deal of fans because they might feel deluded(the case with RWBY, no one cared or complained about the yuri shippers in the first volumes because they thought their ship would never happen but the moment it did, you see lots of fans rage out against them and the creators like they deceived or betrayed them, and accuse yuri fans of being fanatics when it's clear that they are in the minority and blame the story writing to cover their homophobia), but it's also tough for gay people when you give them obvious hints that heteronormative people can't pick up and then mislead them in the end, but since they're in the minority, maybe it's not that important for the creators, they only need to bait them with what little they have for them to feel they are being represented.
last edited at Jan 5, 2020 6:10PM
.jpg?1544180736)