isn't there a movement to kinda divorce "women's love" works from yuri? I agree here that from this section it sounds like the author doesn't want to be bound to the genre conventions of "yuri" and just write a queer story.
Yeah, there's a big difference between Nettaigyo's "it's not yuri it's friendship" and saying "it's not yuri it's women's love."
Yuri is a pretty amorphous term, but as a genre in Japan it's generally gonna be referring to the sweet, fluffy, non-explicit schoolgirls crushing on schoolgirls style of stories. The kinda stories that might own up to it being love, but aren't ever gonna admit that hey, these two girls are gay and might date other girls in the future. Which is why Yuri is frequently not viewed as that socially disruptive for what seems to outsiders like obviously queer romance - the Japanese mainstream can interpret it as a safe exploration of female romantic feelings as practice for eventually entering adulthood and heterosexuality. A big reason why yuri titles so rarely have male characters at all - because if there were actually eligible boyfriends out there in the story universe than it would be way too queer for girls to be crushing on girls anyway.
So terms like women's love are used mostly by queer female writers who want to write stories that are explicitly queer without that layer of "j/k it's just close friendship bro" that yuri so often has. Saying it's not yuri in that context isn't a nettaigyo situation, it's basically the exact opposite, "it's not about close friendship it's about lesbians."
I can't agree with a lot of this. I've seen Yuri used for everything under the sun involving love between two women. Explicit content, SFW content. Ambiguous and Subtle relationships, confirmed relationships. Fluffy ones, sexual ones.
This also makes no sense to me when some people in the West have tried to argue for years that "Yuri is sexual content", and "Shoujo Ai is Fluffy". People have pushed against this saying Yuri in Japan embraces sexual, fluffy, and everything else. Yuri is a Japanese term and the definition is created by Japanese people, Westerners should not be able to define it for them.
Yuri manga and media for 10+ years has embraced being gay into adulthood, and relationships that start in younger years continuing into their adult lives. For awhile now many Yuri manga have time skip sections at the end where they're shown in their adult years, still together. Also, Office Lady Yuri has been a very popular subgenre for awhile now, along with Yuri manga and one-shots revolving around subjects like prostitution, along with other Yuri media focusing on adult lesbians.
There are currently successful openly gay Japanese mangaka who have no issue with using the term Yuri, and I saw one just the other day saying she makes her Yuri media for gay women. The term Yuri is valid, and it's valid for creators like her to call herself a creator of Yuri. I try to take artists at their word, and not what I think their word is.
Also this whole discussion and forum thread boils down to ultimately, Semantics. It's all different kinds of terms/words like "Women's Love" and "Yuri" that all have broad vague meanings that umbrella a lot, and all ultimately mean the same thing at the end of the day. People just have varying opinions on what these words mean and which is better. It's more or less an argument of Potato Chip vs Potato Crisp basically.
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