Yuri, which means Girl's Love in Japanese, is a genre of Japanese media focusing on intimate relationships between female characters who can be lesbians or female bisexuals. While lesbianism is a commonly associated theme, the genre is also inclusive of works depicting emotional and spiritual relationships between women that are not necessarily romantic or sexual in nature. Yuri is most commonly associated with anime and manga, though the term has also been used to describe video games, light novels, and literature.
History[]
Themes associated with yuri originate from Japanese lesbian fiction of the early twentieth century, notably the writings of Nobuko Yoshiya and literature in the Class S genre. Manga depicting female homoeroticism began to appear in the 1970 in the works of artists associated with the Year 24 Group, notably Ryoko Yamagishi and Riyoko Ikeda. The genre gained wider popularity beginning in the 1990s; the founding of Yuri Shimai in 2003 as the first manga magazine devoted exclusively to yuri.
As a genre, yuri does not inherently target a single gender demographic, unlike its male homoerotic counterparts yaoi (marketed towards a female audience) and gay manga (marketed towards a gay male audience). Although yuri originated as a genre targeted towards a female audience, yuri works have been produced that target a male audience.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The de facto symbol of the yuri genre is a white lily.
- As seen in Chapter 60, Lamias also engage in bisexual behavior during their mass orgies, as they engage in sexual activity not only with men, but also with each other or with women of other Liminal species. However, it is not conclusively clarified whether Lamias are bisexual by nature or simply the sexual arousal of the orgy in which there are not enough men drives them to do so. Chapter 63 seems to point more to the latter, since there were few same-sex lamia couples in a mass orgy with many men. However, there are also some Lamias like Maru who are not averse to having same-sex relationships, even if they prefer men.