Also, I fail to see the point of bringing up "Bloom Into You", that was explicitly a series about romance, it called it such since the beginning, and the whole point was that the main couple went beyond mere friends
Have you ever considered judging a work by what actually happens within the text of the work rather than whether or not a scanlator places an explicit label on it to tell you how you're supposed to feel about it
Hagino calls the story "girlship" and prefers not to label it a yuri work because, to her, the story is about the feelings that exist between our two lead girls, and she doesn't want to confine those feelings by putting specific labels or expectations on them. That's all she's said on the matter as far as I'm aware. Maybe that means they won't ever come out and kiss, maybe it means that they will but that they don't want to be simplified to just that, maybe it means any number of things. Mostly it means we should judge the text by what the text itself does rather than obsessively parsing the occasional author's tweet or bookstore genre label to tell us what we're supposed to think about the story.
It's gotten really tedious to see every thread on this story go back and forth in a frenzy of "BUT SHE SAID ITS NOT" instead of ever actually discussing the actual manga IMO
What's there to discuss about the manga itself? Wow, another chapter of angsty drivel where the two girls wallow around in sadness and fail to communicate. Truly, the peak of drama writing.
Not going to lie, after hearing that the author said something that it wasn't a Yuri then I guess this whole manga would be about Angst and sadness by people who have problems with their issues bla bla,,, DEEP FRIENDSHIP and ANGST!
Well nothing else to expect, I doubt the author will take the Yuri route so I am going to stand in the corner, sipping tea and eating popcorn while watching the ship lost in the middle of ocean.