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originally created 9 january 2024.

explanations:

before i begin, i want to elaborate a little on the thematic bit here. the chart describes "yuri themes" as to mere yearning; however, this is a bit of an oversimplification made for the sake of space.

instead, a more accurate description of "yuri themes" would be a focus on the uncrossable distances btwn yourself and another [person or ideal] near enough to touch in some way, and while both want for that sense of distance to be closed, due to a sense of propriety or fear of crossing boundaries, choose not to do anything about that desire growing in that gap left between them.

i'll link to my more in-depth thoughts on the subject when i publish them on this site someday, but for now that's a good enough working definition.

(these will go from left → right, top → bottom.)

1. flip flappers

   flip flappers is a show about a girl realizing she's gay, and if i were to analyze the whole thing, we'd be here all day.

   anyway, being an anime about two girls falling in love, it obviously passes the gender purist test. as for being thematically pure— the show draws attention time and time again to the protagonist's rigid conformity to others' desires n expectations, both on a social level (what's expected of her as a proper young girl, as a student) and a personal one (what other people think she's like, or what they want her to be), even when there aren't any other people around her to enforce these rules and expectations.

   despite this, she has desires of her own, and she spends much of the show grappling with this (frequently mortifying!) fact before finally accepting that she loves her love interest and wants to live having adventures together with her.

   the show is very much about the protagonist grappling with the gap between herself and her identity, and the desires that grow within her as a result; thereby making it thematically pure yuri.

   anyway, if any of you have seen flip flappers before please hit me up ;-;

2. princess tutu

   okay so magical girl anime #2 on this chart, princess tutu, has four main characters whose relationships are a mess of yaoi and yuri all at once, i'm currently realizing. anyway the yuri that comes to mind here is between this fairy tale prince guy named mytho and the protagonist ahiru , who is also the titular princess tutu. so, right off the bat, you can tell it fails to meet the criteria for gender purity lol.

   so for fairy tale reasons, ahiru is a duck-turned-girl because she wishes to save prince mytho by restoring his shattered heart, but she can never confess her love for him or else she'll be turned into a speck of light.

   you might argue that the narrative keeping ahiru from confessing to mytho counts as an external force, thereby negating the part of yuri theming where it is ultimately one's own self keeping you from acting on your desires, but i think the fact that ahiru (whose name means "duck" in jp) frequently hesitates to act, thinking, "but i'm just a duck" counts towards the self-restraint aspect of it. she wants to save prince mytho and restore his heart, but struggles to believe in herself, which holds her back, esp outside of her persona as princess tutu.

   "what's mytho's side of the yuri?" well you see he doesn't really have any desires of his own in the first half of the show due to having his heart shattered, but he does want to know princess tutu's identity (bc in fairy tales, the prince always falls in love with the princess, right?), and although technically nothing is stopping ahiru from telling him her identity, she chooses to keep it from him anyway.

3. two magnets

   okay this one should be obvious, right? like two magnets of the same polarity will naturally repel one another, but by pushing them together, one is expressing a desire to overcome that gap— yet, even if you can get them to touch, the very nature of the magnets is what ultimately keeps them apart. hence: thematically pure.

   magnets aren't gendered, and the gender of the person or thing pushing them together is irrelevant to the situation, hence why it's gender radical yuri.

4. puella magi madoka magica

   okay full disclosure: i haven't actually watched madoka in full at the time of this writing. however i've seen A Chunk of it n watched this shot-by-shot analysis of puella magi madoka magica that takes somewhere from like 16 to 22 hours to watch in full so we're going to pretend that gives me credential enough to talk abt it here.

   anyway, being (yet another!) a magical girl show, with most of the rlshps being btwn the magical girls themselves, it falls under gender pure.

   it's thematically neutral, however, because as extensively elaborated on in the youtube playlist i linked earlier, the main theme and thesis in pmmm (and the magical girl genre as a whole by extension of pmmm being a deconstruction of said genre) is about hope.

   and, like, you could say that hope is an extension of desire, because hope itself is a desire for a particular outcome, but you could say that a lot of feelings are extensions of desire like that— feel free to argue with me in the askbox, but i've put a lot of philosophical thought towards categorizing emotions and their origins, so for now, we'll just say that specializing its theme into hope isn't quite enough to make madoka count as necessarily thematically pure here, okay? though if it makes you feel better, i originally had it and flip flappers switched on the chart.

   anyway, the show's still thematically neutral, with strong roots and allusions to yearning and desire. like the girls trade their very wishes for the opportunity to be a magical girl.

   madoka spoilers i guess

   like, homura's entire reason for becoming a magical girl is to save madoka; she wants very dearly to keep madoka safe n by her side, alive. meanwhile, madoka wishes to save all magical girls through all time from suffering, and thus becomes madokami.

   there's obvious, like, potential to dig into deeply yuri themes w/this show, what with the wishes n the girls' desires to protect one another n the normal lives they've cultivated for themselves, but bc it's more strongly abt hope, i've classed it under neutral.

5. xiaoven

   if i were to go into every single little detail regarding the yuriisms of xv we would be here for the next three weeks. without bathroom or meal breaks.

   that said since you're on this website i AM going to assume you're reasonably familiar with genshin lore. like yeah yeah the dihua flute moment where xiao was abt to fall victim to his karmic debts but then he heard the sound of venti playing the flute from afar and it was so beautiful his life was saved and now his dream is to dance in a field of flowers to the tune of that flute, free at last. we all know it. so i shall quote xiao's voiceline abt venti at you all:

   venti? so that's the name he goes by. his tunes are… forget it.

   is that not like the most yearnful thing you've read all year???

   that said, because venti's character is much more strongly defined by freedom, meaning that xiao's strong focus on the struggle with desire is more his own, i'd say it falls more under thematically neutral, carrying themes of desire n yearning, with a lot of good xv explorations really digging into that part of them, but it's not, like, strictly necessary, i guess?

   (you really shouldn't quote me on anything on this page since i made this chart in like ten minutes late at night tbh.)

   anyway, and then they're gender neutral bc neither of them are women, but a lot of people want to steal their genders.

6. my relationship to anonymity

   this one's funny bc i don't get to talk abt it much, esp. here, on my website that i made as a home for my anon works.

   anyway, obviously this one is gender radical bc disregarding my own nonbinary trans­genderism, anonymity itself means to forsake one's entire known identity, which can include gender! so it's in, like, gender limbo. schrödinger's gender: is it there, is it not, is it one identifiable to anyone aside from the one who possesses it???

   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯!!!

   then like thematically neutral is easy! despite having forsaken my named identity in the genshin impact fandom, an act which itself painted an absence in my own form to sit in the space with which i would have otherwise sat to connect with others, i still crave a sense of belonging, of being known by those around me.

   and so you have, like, this gap, right? between myself and the community i want to call my own, and the wish to be known growing in said gap— and yet, despite having the power to remove my works from the anon collection on ao3 at any moment i wish, i don't. because Reasons.

7. all f/f pairings are yuri

   this one's kind of obvious. like, for the gender pure/thematically radical school of thought, yuri doesn't need to have any themes and shit!! yuri is about women and Sapphistry!!!

   as long as it's about gay women, then it's yuri.

8. the yaoi metanarrative

   okay this one more ties in with the full-length version of my yaoizine submission, which originally contained a fragment of contains at least one catboy :D as a transition.

   so, like, the gender neutral aspect of this entry is fairly obvious. the yaoi metanarrative still contains a strong sense of gender to the issues it grapples with, and the focus on yaoi itself, combined with the traditional Shame of being a girl(?) obsessed w/it, thereby fulfills the "gendered aspect" mentioned on the chart.

   the snippet i wrote for the yaoizine was deliberately written such that one could pluck the yuriisms from it in the same way that you can pluck the yuriisms from my rlshp to anonymity. however, i wouldn't really say that's a terribly strong throughline in the hypothetical work, which focuses more on on things like power, identity, agency, etc. you all read the pitch you get it. anyway, hence: thematically radical!

9. we are ALL yuri

   we all know the "this too is yuri" meme, right?

   well, i read the essay that spawned it, and as explanation for this box, you should too: yuri made me human — interview with iori miyazawa.

honorable mention:

revolutionary girl utena

originally categorized under gender neutral/thematically pure, the more i thought about it, the more i felt that rgu is too thematically yaoi due to its focus on identity and cycles of power.

now, in defense of its gender neutral placement despite being about two girls, the series itself focuses heavily on gender roles and, like, the performance of those roles; utena herself strives to play the role of an ideal prince.

i'm gonna stop here tho since i'm not really the person you should be going to for gender analysis of rgu, mostly bc i've only seen it once.

anyway, i had planned on defending rgu's placement in thematically pure by saying smth abt how despite everything, utena fails to embody her ideal prince, but then i realized that because she's always actively seeking to close that gap btwn her real self n ideal princess, not really holding herself back from achieving it, that's not actually very yuri. (it is very yaoi in my opinion, though.)

that said, i think rgu's best placement on this chart would be between gender purist and gender neutral, whilst being thematically radical for its yaoiful nature.

FAQ:

Where does this chart fall on the yuri scale? like it has no apparent gender and also alludes to a desire/yearning to understand.

hmm hmm i was thinking since the chart is more for analytical purposes, it has no desires of its own, thereby making it gender/thematically radical.

however, this betrays the desires of the maker, as you said: the desire to understand [the categorizations of yuri better], so maybe gender radical/thematically neutral?

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