I could have sworn I'd seen it tagged as such, but the sources I checked don't seem to at the moment (except ebj below). I suppose Citrus has always "felt" very shoujo to me, so I filed it with things like Netsuzou Trap (at least Wikipedia does tag that one as shoujo). In a niche like yuri I suspect a publication can't effort to be too specialized, but ebookjapan files Comic Yuri Hime related series under under shoujo/josei targeted manga so I guess it isn't totally in my head. (I also assume the now abandoned Comic Yuri Hime S male targeted spin-off was because they felt the original wasn't capturing that demographic).
Thanks for the great reply! I know that in a niche like Yuri the categorizations are a bit more flexible than usual, but there is sometimes talk of seinen yuri or josei yuri etc. So I was always kinda curious where Citrus lands on that scale. Also funny that Netsuzou Trap would be filed under shoujo - how can (old-school) Naoko Kodama with the toxic relationship galore and Saburouta fit under the same roof? Haha
Although the labeling division seems to run pretty deep in the Japanese industry, it isn't absolute, although often there is a recognizable shift in emphasis/tone. Citrus is also a bit tricky since it seems like the anime was targeted at a adult male demographic (I'd guess they are the ones with the money to burn on blurays and merch), sifting the direction and adding in fanservice.
Lol as an adult male I actually found the anime less cringeworthy when I saw it compared to the manga, but this is obviously just my personal feelings and maybe in the few years or so between reading the first few chapters and seeing the anime I've just gotten more tolerant towards the bs. Saburouta's super-expressive faces just made those non-consensual scenes so intense. I actually instantly labeled the series as shonen/seinen due to the graphic non-consensual elements, but it seems that was just my own preconceptions at work, and the series did turn out to be very different in the end... I actually kinda liked the anime, but that's another story.
It also overlaps with the author's gender and sexuality. I suppose it is one of those common cases in cultural dichotomies where although broad trends can be identified the spread of the choices is wider than the gap between them.
Yeah, this is definitely one thing, but it's actually hard to for me to come up with a comparison since all Yuri I read/watch tends to be by female creators or based on their works. With the exception of Ikuhara Kunihiko maybe, but that's a pretty special case.
That said I usually feel like I can tell the difference: eg compare Citrus to Bloom into You (shounen targeted). Both are yuri written by women, but have quite different feels around gender and sexuality.
Yeah there is an obvious difference, but personally I've always felt that Bloom into You was just more mature - I was pretty surprised when I learned that it was published in a seinen magazine. Which isn't actually that surprising since I've understood that Yuri has been a relatively "regular" fixture in seinen for many years now. Anyway, I kinda just thought that BiY belonged into the same broad category as Citrus and they definitely did not target different genders, but now that you mention it there is a obvious difference in how straightforward Yuu and Touko are with their feelings compared to Yuzu and folks. In my culture (Northern Europe) it feels like a maturity and not a gender thing, but I guess it could be different in the Japanese cultural context. I guess Citrus does have a lot more of melodrama and all that swooning over the "epic first love" kind of thing, whereas in Bloom into You people everybody skipped the theatrics for the most part and just got straight down to business.
last edited at Jan 7, 2021 5:15PM
