The contrasting daily life and bedroom energy dynamic is always fun

Sometimes taking interest in your partner's hobbies gets a little intense lol

Also nice to see this artist getting another upload

Late night kissing

Ah the art that I think set the homophobes in the Blue Archive fandom off, the art is cute, and the people that attacked the artist are weird and mean.

^Gotta catch all the Touhous

The kiss was already heavy damage and the lean in that added tongue was the lethal blow

The darker haired girl looks to be more interested in the other girl than she does the icecream

Very cute, couples sharing music is always a classic vibe

Shadow kissing in an advanced flirting strategy

i view yuri bait as fundamentally different from het ship teasing, because of historical/societal treatment

Yeah there's a difference in treatment and historical/societal treatment as you're saying, though sometimes relationship teasing is the best that the creatives can do due to the people in power and companies in charge of things. A lot of times creatives are forced to work with companies that provide money but have a lot of say over the project, it's often a difficult relationship that restrains the hands of creatives. I often find there's a lot of nuance and so forth to these situations, which I think that's a big part of why I don't want to classify creatives as insincere without having all the facts. That's also part of why I don't want to use "Bait" as freely as you do, I see that term used so commonly for so many pieces media and relationships that to me it feels like it's commonly doing more harm than good at this point.

these days

I'm generally not a fan of this sentiment myself, because in my opinion there's a lot of sincere media out there that's being made. Also that in my experience people look back at older media very fondly through the lens of nostalgia, while ignoring any problems, and saying basically no or very little modern media has any value. I see people say all the time that there's been no good music, anime, movies, books, tv, games, so on made in the last 20-30 years, and statements like that genuinely make me sad and frustrated, because I've seen passionate creators making fantastic media every year, including media that I'm personally not into but other people love. I believe there's always been a mix of things no matter the time, and it depends on where you look.

With same sex relationships in modern media, there's two somewhat recent live action show adaptions of manga that are focused on lesbian couples that come to mind, and I don't think we would have gotten those back in the day. Or the various upcoming anime adaptions of Yuri series such as Green Yuri. Even the marriage elemental in GWitch feels like a massive step forward even with the series not showing a lot, they are in fact a married same sex couple. I don't think GWitch or the people that directly worked on the show are insincere about the relationship, more so that there's a lot of red tape people still unfortunately have to work with, including that dumb Bandai producer that was an ass about the relationship, and yet creatives are still making important progress. With the West you have people doing their best as well, Disney screwed over Dana Terrace and her team with Owl House, and yet she still made an incredibly sincere and fantastic series with a wonderful same sex couple. People are trying, we're getting more progress bit by bit in some ways, and unfortunately companies and people in power want to push things back, the best we can do is keep pushing forward.

^Ew, Shinji should only be shipped with a garbage can, and even then I'd still feel bad for the garbage can

Ah ha so it was a fake out lmao

Her plan was...roundabout when she could simply communicate with her girlfriend, good intentions but very silly way to go about it. I'm glad the overhearing something and it leading to drama trope was avoided, and the chapter ended cutely.

I guess it helped the fact she believed Luxi was talking to her mom, it's a bit silly but they are a silly couple, and some cultural stuff is also there in the mix.

I love them, they are so silly and adorable

Yeah Luxi wanted it to sound authentic. Anybody can say nice things to make you feel better but overhearing a random conversation where your GF is "privately" defending you to her mom is a bit different. It's like hearing your friends praise you behind your back. Feels good in a unique way.

Fair lol

was controversial...

LycoReco is a ship I love and I never expected them to even be as close as they are in canon, and even if there's not romantic progression there I'm personally content with the relationship, though I'd be happy if it went further. I'd personally only call it bait if they introduced a male love interest or two for our main duo, that would genuinely piss me off. Also I do love that Chisato has a canonically gay adoptive dad that's supportive of her, Mika is cool

Cross Ange

Ugh, I forgot about that and instantly took mental damage from remembering that whole mess just now

@juanelric If I remember correctly Medusa is also canonically Bi. For me I love Artoria x Rin and Medusa x Sakura as my two main OG Fate ships. Shirou can get shipped with uh....Issei lol, or I suppose if we're working with the Fem/Shirou fan design she can get poly shipped somewhere.

@Moedred That's fair, I know a lot of MC ships are self insert focused, though going off of our previous convo of how I personally see the MCs as their own character that at least makes it easier to work with ships such as Fem/MC with another girl in games. Gudako there is easy for me since I base my characterization off of things such as the manga adaptions as I mentioned, and with Gudao I just go the Riyo comic route of Gudao x Astolfo. I think JAlter x SAlter is at least up there for works when compared to Gudako x Fem/Servant. There are a lot lof Fem/Servant x Fem/Servant ships I love and I wish got more fan works though.

At the end of the day though anything is possible with the power of headcanon and imagination lmao

^I'm not really sure what the comparison here is since there's not a canonical fem Shirou

Though there is fem Shirou fanart, and well I personally find the original Fate VN easy to Yuri ship. Maybe we're on the same page there at least, of shipping being easy if you put your mind to it and work with your options lol

Ah ha so it was a fake out lmao

Her plan was...roundabout when she could simply communicate with her girlfriend, good intentions but very silly way to go about it. I'm glad the overhearing something and it leading to drama trope was avoided, and the chapter ended cutely.

Appreciate good fan translations, anyway... the variance is high, perhaps higher than in the past.

Yeah translating is not easy and of course not every fan translation is equal or good, but at the very least you're not paying for an allegedly professional product that is the supposed definitive version, only for that official release to be subpar. I try to support the official release but it will be become increasingly difficult to do if companies really try to cut workers and costs by relying on machines that aren't even good at the task. I love and greatly appreciate good human translators and I want them to be hired and payed properly. Also stating the obvious here but companies that license and publish media in another language it is their literal job to properly translate the media, if they're not translating properly there's no point in the company existing.

This type of tl notes/discussion is why I absolutely adore fan translations, and wish that professional translators would do tl notes as well. In an era of machine translation encroachment it's a great way to highlight all the important labor that goes into these types of projects, which is kinda hidden otherwise.

It's crazy to me that official translations from what I remember used to be terrible, and we had to pretty much completely rely on fan translations, then over time we've gotten better official translations but usually still not on the same level of quality as fan translations (for the reasons you mention as well), and now the times are approaching a cliff of going back to awful official translations for largely greedy reasons. So the importance of fan translations being accurate, nuanced, and giving important extra information, will in theory be more important than ever.

^I really wish we got more with Velma and Marcie or Coco in a new movie or series, I'd be happy with either. An actual relationship and so forth, and I will say I'm biased towards Coco myself and I think her design is so good.

last edited at Jun 5, 2025 10:34PM

^Enjoy, it's been a fun series imo

Part of me says "Aww, that is cute." The other part of me wanted the Aunt to give in to her desires and show her niece the passions of a woman.

Lmao, tbh I'd expect an afterwards type of page where the aunt is passed out in bed and the girl is next to her smoking a cigarette saying "she really does have bad taste"

^Mio dyed her hair blue or something, idk lol

last edited at Jun 5, 2025 3:48PM

She's really come so far...

Yeah it's cool to see her building confidence and learning more about sex in a way that feels positive

The woman wanting to rise to the top can eat dirt, and I really hope we see her get fired or something at some point. She deserves less than nothing for subjecting our main duo to harassment, very likely including a lot of homophobia, and possibly destroying their careers and lives.

She was actively trying to get the man to not do this. She's not pure, but she's not the reason this happened.

The impression I got was that he eventually talked her into going through with it, even if she didn't feel good about it. So she still did it and what I'm understanding is that it was her idea in the first place, with that in mind that man is an awful piece of shit. I think the man here is some generic bastard that probably won't be an actual character, the woman is an actual character though and she will probably or at least hopefully have to come face to face with the repercussions of her actions. I'm focused on her for that reason since I think she at the very least has the possibility to grow, though I want the truth to come out and for there to be some consequences for what she did. The man though can get hit by a meteorite for all I care.

i'm not a gundam fan so this is purely about the question of what is and isn't bait, and i do think intent matters a LOT. and it can be difficult in many cases to tell, because very often we don't know the behind-the-scenes of any given work.

my take is that subtext becomes bait when they could commit, but instead go for the "plausible deniability" thing for demographic and marketing reasons. a clear example of the latter is love live, which toes the yuri line just enough to rile up shippers without ever actually being romantic. framing here is really important. if the subtext people point at is all fanservice, casual physical affection, or Super Best Friends statements, chances are it's bait! and imo bait itself isn't a bad thing at all so long as you know what you're getting into -- and that includes scummy rug pulls from canon.

subtext that is not bait, however, resembles straight romance in framing and writing. an easy example i can give is clannad's anime, where they're never shown kissing, and all the romance and love is in those small gestures that are given immense weight. this isn't to call clannad itself subtext, but to say that sincere subtextual yuri follows the same cues.

one case i enjoyed is in fresh precure, which has this scene where setsuna (in a moment of peril) calls out love's name... and love immediately wakes up from sleeping, implying this soulmate level connection. over in aikatsu, ichigo and mizuki's relationship is such strong subtext that it became text and bamco made them backpedal (because they're homophobic). secret moonlit meetings alone together, mizuki's name for her gradually changing (ichigo-chan -> hoshimiya -> ichigo) as it develops, and all the writing in season 1 that framed them as something fated and perfectly matching. good subtext doesn't need to say "i love you" out loud to clearly show two people in love.

i probably wrote too much, but... it's something i think about a lot myself, so hopefully i'm making sense here lol

I think you're making sense. It's also a matter of perspective and opinion, people will view things differently and use words differently. In your case it sounds like you use bait a lot more than I do, for example you think Love Live is bait and I don't. I know Love Live won't have canonical romances but will provide solid fuel for fan artists to work with, to me that's not bait as I'm not getting baited by anything, I'm merely consuming media where I know my reaction will be "their relationship is cute and I can easily imagine more". For me that's more so a branch on the tree of subtext. I'd only use bait if Love Live introduced men that came in and swept the girls off their feet after the series produced all of that relationship fuel between the girls. Along those lines it's why I generally view bait as a negative term and typically a bad thing. As media that wants to reel you in with a promising same sex relationship but then swerves into a hetero one feels like a homophobic "gotcha" to me. So I think all of these terms are various cases of millage will vary.

Reminds me also that in my opinion Flip Flappers is Yuri, a lot of subtext though I thought the relationship was clear. Yet I saw another case today where people were calling it bait, and personally I found that frustrating. Alas though, arguing is generally not worth the time. I have my views and others have their views.