I would take "I do not define it as yuri" as saying "I don't like pigeonholing things".

The way the crowd here is basically screaming blasphemy is more than a little amusing.

Well, it's all about promises not kept. In manga an anime all too often an attraction gets established between two female characters, only for the writers to then go "Fooled ya! They don't have teh ghey. What, you think we're perverts or something?" And to drive the point home the girls either get a boyfriend, get separated forever by whatever means, or have a falling out over nothing.

And no, I absolutely don't care one iota what a writer says on Twitter or in an interview. This about what is happening within the story, and within this particular one the writer establishes a truckload of subtext between Koyuki and Konatsu, only to bail out later on. Koyuki's worries about her future would have a lot more weight in the context of her relationship with Konatsu, but the writer practically ejects Konatsu from the the story and then replaces her with some random other character. Why? It could all be down to incompetence, but stuff like this happens so often in manga and anime that I have become quite cynical.

Like I said, it is getting a bit better, but for every series that is serious about attraction between girls we get a hundred that are like this one.

I like how you're effectively declaring the series ruined FOREVER on the basis of one Twitter post of ambiguous meaning, and please don't try to claim that isn't related to the outburst quoted. Show us on this doll where the bad author touched you...?

last edited at Mar 29, 2019 3:58PM

Translation of Makoto Hagino's tweets (linked above) for the people who don't trust machine translation~~

"I have a certain way of how I want to tell my story, but that doesn't apply to the reader. People should have freedom of expression which applies to both the creator and consumer. I don't intend to define my work as yuri, but the reader is free to approach the work how they want. Rather than denying the reader's interpretation, I want to keep drawing what I want to draw, believing someday my opinions/ideas and worldview will be accepted".

https://mobile.twitter.com/93choco

last edited at Mar 29, 2019 4:20PM

Looooooooooooooong time skulker, first time commenter.

Uh, so, yeah. That's unfortunate I guess that the author would say 'not necessarily Yuri', but I don't see this as a classical Yuri structure either.

The girls don't even realize they like each other, you're just supposed to like that slow burn friendship.

But how much more gay does it get than, "She's so dense...geez!"

Why are they dense, why is everybody but you so "dense"? 'Because they don't realize that I'm lonely!' Why didn't you tell them? 'Because I just can't, gosh!'

lol.

Classic teenager. I don't think Koyuki Honami-sempai realizes she needs or even likes or might like Konatsu. She needs friends because she's lonely, she's too young for love in that sense simply because she's far from understanding that level of companionship. She needs to 'not be alone' more than she needs her 'body satisfied'. It's clearly a Yuriship, soft Yuri(friend)ship.

Because of Koyuki's ignorance, the furthest this could go is her proclaiming to Konatsu, 'Tokyo will make me so lonely, be my friend in Tokyo! Ah, I'm so embarrassed!'. So they will be Tokyo friends, very good friends, they will support each other. There could be a time skip where Konatsu promises she will go to school in Tokyo too and they will reconnect there. Maybe they'll even move in together in Tokyo, but they will be friends. Koyuki just can't admit she needs people and that she needs people to accept her because she's grown up alone and apart from everyone over time (besides of course her father and family, but even they don't really understand her, do they?).

Clearly, her loneliness is a huge mental block for Koyuki. It's beyond even expressing herself, she clearly knows what she wants to do, what she likes to do, but she's realized she can't do everything alone, which is a huge step.

If anything, it's like proto-Yuri, it's the Yuri that comes before the proper Yuri and lays the foundation for a Yuri. Pretty brilliant idea actually. Or she could be het, we don't know. But Koyuki hasn't had a serious girlship with someone her age before, that's why Konatsu-chan is such a big deal.

Even she doesn't know if she wants more than basic girlship or the reasons or motivations for more. Her life is too hard and complicated already right now. She's so lonely!

(Enjoy reading ya'll's posts by the way, they always make me laugh!)

last edited at Mar 29, 2019 4:59PM

I still ship Koyuki and Konatsu.

I'm dissapointed in Konatsu for setting a Snapchat dog filter selfie as a profile pic.

Thank you skulll! I'm okay with that... Just saying, as long as is not het of course!! And that doesn't seem to be the case at all unlike euphonium and that other that we can't speak about

"The only one I can rely on is..." I knew it would be Hirose, lmao! Best grill! Bless this chapter! Keep the friendship rolling~

Heavensrun posted:

Eh, that's because Shoujo Ai -isn't- really a term made up by westerners. It's a term used in japan, but it just refers to the girl's love genre in general, as does Yuri.

I recommend reading my original post and then deleting yours.

Wasn’t there a similar discussion over Nakatani Nio disagreeing with yuri as a label? IIRC she said she wanted to draw relationships between women (romantic or otherwise) regardless of how the readers classified them.

Wasn’t there a similar discussion over Nakatani Nio disagreeing with yuri as a label? IIRC she said she wanted to draw relationships between women (romantic or otherwise) regardless of how the readers classified them.

Not really. Nakatani said she didn't consider her Touhou doujins as yuri, because the nature of most of them wasn't explicit romantic relationships between women (some were, and she called those yuri, but those were a minority among all her stories back then). She saw her doujins as depicting different relationships between individuals that happened to be girls.
She has always called Yagakimi yuri and romance, this is not "up to the reader's interpretation" which is the point of Hagino's comments. So Nakatani doesn't disagree with the yuri label and actually embraces it with Yagakimi. Her editor even got mad some months ago at people who said Nakatani doesn't see her work is yuri.

Related: https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/bloom_into_you_volume_1_extras#2

last edited at Mar 29, 2019 11:32PM

i mean im not mad and surely im not gonna drop the manga because like people already post this is one of the best slice of life mangas that i´ve ever read (well maybe if a male love interest appears i´ll drop it but probably that wont´t happen)

but men first euphonium then amanchu and now hanigare
quoting the user runrin on the tae.chan and jimiko.san thread

runrin posted:

i honestly don't expect this from 99% of yuri.

(referring to deep character motivations and logic)

it's not exactly a genre full of woke authors writing about healthy relationships. i just overlook what i can, and enjoy the nice parts. i'll put up with incest, weird power dynamics, etc, etc, if its cute enough. it's just so common for yuri to have at least one thing that bothers me, that i've gotten to the point where i just try to get what i can out of it.

so it´s really sad (and kind of frustrating) when stuff like euphonium and hanigare that in my opinion are actually good and well written (maybe also amanchu before the kokoro BS) are like "nop just gals being pals nothing to see here"

last edited at Mar 30, 2019 1:59AM

Shoujo ai is made up term by westerners, because they needed a way to market SFW and NSFW yuri and needed a clear distinction.

And yet despite this supposed distinction, most yuri manga are either tagged both, or just yuri even when it's SFW. Talk about useless

Eh, that's because Shoujo Ai -isn't- really a term made up by westerners. It's a term used in japan, but it just refers to the girl's love genre in general, as does Yuri. They're just synonyms. There is no real distinction in how the japanese industry uses the terms, from what I've seen.

I would actually like to see you produce these instances that you supposedly saw, of the Japanese manga and anime industry using the term shoujo ai.

Shoujo ai has been used by Japanese anime and manga figures, as an exclamation.
Look at a little girl and shout "Shoujo ai!"

Maybe I am just trying to not face the reallity but is this really the same as what happen in euphonium and amanchu?
I mean what happened in those seems way worse

Zexalfan posted:

Maybe I am just trying to not face the reallity but is this really the same as what happen in euphonium and amanchu?
I mean what happened in those seems way worse

Not at all, not even close

Zexalfan posted:

Maybe I am just trying to not face the reallity but is this really the same as what happen in euphonium and amanchu?
I mean what happened in those seems way worse

Not at all, not even close

OH THANK GOD.
Don't mind the over reaction. Thanks for the reasurance about it, I haven't seen either euphonium or amanchu so I couldn't really confirm how alike the situations were.

Did the authors of Euphonium and Amanchu have any yuri background like Hagino does?

last edited at Mar 31, 2019 8:29AM

Zexalfan posted:

Maybe I am just trying to not face the reallity but is this really the same as what happen in euphonium and amanchu?
I mean what happened in those seems way worse

Not at all, not even close

Did the authors of Euphonium and Amanchu have any yuri background like Hagino does?

IKR! it hurts way more pulling a "friendship/skinship between girls" from a yuri author. Makoto Hagino is clearly a yuri fan and she's not fooling anyone. she flooded her story with yuri interactions that cannot be called subtext anymore. heck even her covers are so gay if any normie saw it they will say it's a lesbian romance story. if she really didn't plan to write a yuri romance story from the beginning, why did she put all those yuri elements into her story? beats me.

welp, guess I'll stop following this manga and maybe I'll read it when it's finished to see how their "friendship" settles. I'm actually not one of those "no gay no deal" people, but she clearly wasted a great romance story potential with fantastic and well developed characters. the two main girls' chemistry is what kept me commited to reading this story every chapter release.

last edited at Mar 31, 2019 10:20AM

Zexalfan posted:

Maybe I am just trying to not face the reallity but is this really the same as what happen in euphonium and amanchu?
I mean what happened in those seems way worse

Not at all, not even close

Did the authors of Euphonium and Amanchu have any yuri background like Hagino does?

IKR! it hurts way more pulling a "friendship/skinship between girls" from a yuri author.

That's exactly the opposite of what I'm thinking. It's reassuring if anything - I can't imagine a known yuri author voluntarily going Amanchu.

Zexalfan posted:

Maybe I am just trying to not face the reallity but is this really the same as what happen in euphonium and amanchu?
I mean what happened in those seems way worse

Not at all, not even close

Did the authors of Euphonium and Amanchu have any yuri background like Hagino does?

IKR! it hurts way more pulling a "friendship/skinship between girls" from a yuri author.

That's exactly the opposite of what I'm thinking. It's reassuring if anything - I can't imagine a known yuri author voluntarily going Amanchu.

​I understand that what Amanchu author pulled is waaaay worse than this. that said, what Makoto Hagino did is still as bad as Hibike. "just gals being pals"..and it still hurts way more than Hibike considering that Makoto is a yuri author herself. I mean, we totally had faith in you goddamnit ;-;

I'm pretty sure I'm seeing some major jumping to conclusions in this thread right now.

I'm pretty sure I'm seeing some major jumping to conclusions in this thread right now.

I was thinking the same thing this very moment. How many creators across various media have we heard say the equivalent of, "I don't think of this as [familiar genre]--to me it's [airy-fairy restatement of gist of familiar genre]"?

Then the work turns out to be pretty much [familiar genre] with, at best, a bit of a twist.

I think it's a way they keep themselves from just wallowing in genre tropes or getting swamped by audience expectations.

last edited at Mar 31, 2019 4:19PM

I think it's a way they keep themselves from just wallowing in genre tropes or getting swamped by audience expectations.

Sounds about right. And some authors just dislike labels on principle.

Judge stories by what happens in the stories, IMO

Amanchu and Eupho aren't trash because their authors went in interviews and said "no homo" at one point somewhere maybe, they're trash because the actual stories themselves undermined their core character dynamics in shitty and nonsensical ways. If the actual text of Nettaigyo stays good then I don't really care if the author says "and then 10 years later they were all abducted by aliens" or whatever, and by the same token if the story does something stupid and that doesn't work as we're reading it then I don't really care about how Hagino explains it beyond maybe as a curiosity.