^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.

I think it's a bit hard to call GQuacks bait or not given the series isn't over yet and it's clear that at least some confrontation between Nyaan and Machu is yet to come

Though that's honestly not my main issue with the series, my main problem with it is that the pacing just feels abysmal. Far worse than G:Witch's second season pacing issues. It's blitzing through things far too quickly. Still a show that I'm having fun watching but I just can't get nearly as invested in it as I could with G:Witch.

Yeah I know GWitch gets a lot of hate for it's pacing, and I think more episodes could have helped, though I don't hate the pacing so much as I just think it could have been improved. GCucks on the other hand felt like light speed pacing when I was watching, I remember watching episodes and thinking Goodness if people thought GWitch was too fast this is way faster.

^Yeah

^I wouldn't call WfM "full" Yuri since Suletta and Miorine weren't allowed be as intimate as the straight couples even in the same series

They got married, and even have matching wedding ring merch. Plus their engagement is at the core of the story. Yes I would have liked to see more physical elements to their relationship and the wedding, but the series is still very much about a lesbian engagement and their eventual marriage. Which to me makes it a series with a lesbian heart, and that's how I will remain to feel about it until my dying days.

Unrelated to GCucks specifically and talking about the bait discussion in general, I think "bait" can be an often over used term. Especially when there's subtext, and I've seen so many cases where people think subtext = bait. A trickier one is physical intimacy in relationships that don't go as far as romantic, there's some lines and blurring, it depends also on how it's handled. I'd say I try to use bait sparingly as long as the creators aren't intentionally trying to tease a romantic / sexual relationship between 2 characters of the same sex only to drive off the road into het territory.

With GCucks specifically from the episodes I watched it felt like they wanted to tease something between Machu and Nyaan very early only for the characters to settle on a hetero love triangle instead. The series isn't over and I haven't seen all of the episodes, but from what I watched it felt like a bait and switch.

^No worries

I need to say, that a non yuri org! is a big, you know,..not good

I understand having preferences and not personally enjoying Phu Thuy's bisexual orgy, but I'd also say don't bi shame please.

^Maybe that can be remedied with mermaid magic lol

It’s so hard for me to root for Mai when Nanao is right there and so much more fun to read with Asumi. Definitely going to end with a threesome or something.

I need Nanao to be included in the end, I want to see her happy. She's probably my favorite partner of Asumi, there's something about their chemistry that simply works like magic for me. Plus Nanao is super adorable as well.

In retrospect, I should never have expected Mai to be endgame. This was always set up to be a Y: The Last Man sort of thing where the series-long quest for a lost love ends with the realization that the MC has found someone better along the way.

But dammit, Nanao still bores me to tears. Senpai route or bust.

As someone that loves Nanao I need a meme image along the lines of "A real fan of Asumi-Chan never speaks ill of Nanao" for a time like this lol

Also welp...I see people trying to now pull an American K-On fandom situation with Umamusume since the franchise is getting more popular in the West, and the game is coming to English. Where self proclaimed nazis are doing horrible shit with the media in question. It's so disgusting and tiring, another 20+ reports submitted. I still love K-On and I'll continue loving Umamusume, but it sucks to think about such hateful losers wiping their slimey hands all over them.

... So what are the usual terms in Japan then, if not "yuri"? Is it just "GL"? That feels so boring...

(And also doesn't come prepackaged with pretty flower imagery!)

I see mangaka use Yuri all the time on their social media, so I think it's a personal preference and mileage will vary thing

^I worry I might come off the wrong way or at least badly, especially as there's nuances and thoughts that get missed or are difficult to articulate, here goes though. Part of why the situation is so weird to me is that there's games and anime/manga where I don't mind attractive characters, fan service elements, and so fourth. With anime/manga the loli/shota thing to me is something where I see a cute stylized cartoon character. I don't translate or take things from these types of media into the real world, and I think that's "normal" I guess.

Where I can say oh yeah this ZZZ character is attractive, or this taboo one-shot comic on Dynasty is interesting or sometimes even spicy, and that's about the gist. I don't make it a personality point, I can turn off my computer and entirely separate that from the real world. I'd like to at least believe I have a solid head on my shoulders and ability to separate reality and fiction.

So it's just...weird to me when I look over and see people being creeps about all of this media in a way where it is their personality, and they translate it to irl as well. On top of often being incels that are all around hateful. The kind of people that go out of their way to be cruel to artists like this, and it's a core part of their personality. It sucks.

Wait did I miss something? Is the manga entering its final arc? I was so used to thinking this manga would just keep on going forever...

As far as I'm understanding it just this character arc is concluding for the moment. Though I might be misunderstanding.

^I know Nasu and Kojima have their issues and I won't say they're perfect, but as someone who likes both of them and various things they've done I'm over here thinking, Oi, let's not be rude. Though I think we have a lot of "agree to disagree" views on creatives and media, and that's fine lol

Also I don't know, when I was watching the series Shuji gave me more Kirito energy than Shaggy, but I suppose mileage will vary. Another agree to disagree moment heh

Anyhow, I think if we want to discuss this more someone should make a GCucks discussion thread on the forum, I don't want to keep being disruptive on GWitch art.