My primary yuri hot take is that Bloom Into You's relative popularity has led people, especially those new to the genre, to approach it solely through the lens of "good representation", which is kinda the worst way to think about it. Like, if you're reading this ardent, earnest story about two repressed teenagers drowning in a sea of fractured identities internalized and imposed over the course of short lives expected desperately to become something very soon, and your main reaction is to gasp every time they do something impulsive or foolish and declare, "Whoa, the Ideal Lesbian, Duchess of Respectability, Sapphic to the power of Plato, would never do that!", I feel like you've fundamentally misunderstood something about queerness.

On the other hand, I've also seen so many people recommending Bloom Into You as "not like the other yuri" and framing it as the only text in the genre that rises above some imagined juvenility or degeneracy or cowardice that other yuri works supposedly have, and like, nope. I haven't even read all of Nakatani Nio's work, and from what little I have, you can still tell she's deeply invested in the genre. She's written everything from burning toxic yuri to self-insert doujin yuri, and some of YagaKimi's best segments are the ones where fermenting desires and old shadows spring forth wild enough to submerge everything else and transform bodies in the shape of a yearning or memory. We need to rescue Nakatani and YagaKimi from the Yuri Oscars podium and return them to the wildlands of the losers and freaks where they were meant to freely roam.

Otona Precure is making me realize more deeply than ever how "adult magical girls" is not only a subgenre sorely in need of more representation ASAP, but also genuinely the Most Fitting way to do magical girls in general. Like, a transformation sequence that lets you morph into your prettiest dress and your most confident persona in a matter of minutes that also tends to take like one second in Real Time is pretty neat for a 13 year old, but an adult woman desperately trying and failing to navigate late-stage capitalism would rip gaping holes in spacetime and kill 5000 depression monsters in a heartbeat for that shit. Give the ladies their gear, you timeless fairy bastards. They'll do anything.

"Elaborate five minute magical girl transformation sequence that takes three milliseconds in real time" is overdone, tbh. We need to move the other way and make magical girl transformation sequences radically slower. You can't even claim that it'd be unrealistic because we do have magical warriors in real life who go through complex metamorphoses for years on end and still consistently manage to make the world a better place. It's called being transgender. Look it up.

Girl whose only encounter with the techniques of bending of genre and medium to express intense emotional states has been through the anime adaptation of Bocchi the Rock watching an European art film for the first time: Waow... these old white dudes sure got some serious Seishun Complex going on... put these geezers in a band with the other autistic homosexuals in the area, stat!

The thing about the tendency of a fandom to woobify and cutiefy a rather grim and challenging piece of art is that it is mildly irksome when the original work is genuinely misunderstood and mined beyond recognition for vapid crossovers or barista AUs or whatever, but when it's done to a project that's unmistakably and definitively fucked up? A work so grim that it'll straight-up jumpscare you if you go in expecting a pleasant ride with the moeblobs and transform the act of whipping up happy what-ifs into an honest-to-God process of healing and engagement afterward? It's the best thing in the world. It is consciously ironic and yet achingly earnest. It is a celebration of hope in the presence of despair. It is the weaving of dreams from the deep dark night and the touching of wounds in a mutual blood-warming. It is an initiation into the awareness of misery and a reassurance of survival afterward. It is life in all its beauty, the candle lent glory by the void. Nothing can be more genuine.

(This is an elaborate plea for you to play Signalis and create yuri)

The closest we can get to achieving a modern version of the "one in twelve people in Asia is descended from Genghis Khan" theory is in the field of yuri and Touhou. A staggering percentage of yuri fiction demonstrates either direct lines of descent from the project (the authors were fans and made Touhou doujins before publishing original work) or indirect ones based on environmental and cultural factors (every popular trope and most niche ones in yuri today were done by ZUN about ten years before it was cool).

Much speculation abounds as to the causes of this captivating phenomenon, but the theory I most support states simply that Gensokyo exists and there's a bunch of yuri youkai puppeteering the scene. The second-most plausible theory is that ZUN hit upon the themes, aesthetics and issues that would most interest a culture of queer authors in the 21st century quite early on and helped directly and indirectly proliferate them via the enormous popularity of his project (this theory has no lesbian Illuminati in it, so I have to dock points).

The bullet hell mechanics in Touhou games are very amusing to me because 90% of the time I parse them through the language of genres wherein a curtain of colorful projectiles fired at your little hitbox is just A Certain Type of Game Scenario. Once in a while, though, it strikes me that I am embodying a girl whom numerous beautiful women are trying to murder in a million imaginative ways and realise that paradise was before me all along. Then I am blasted out of the sky by a cherry pink missile and plummet to the ground, already dreaming of the day when I am brave and strong and worthy enough to receive milady's ultimate sign of affection, the Cherry Pink Missile 2. What could be more yuri?

Watching the first episode of Girls Band Cry and concocting the theory that the measure of whether a music anime with an ensemble cast of women is going to be great or not (by my standards) is if it addresses the economy. I need my bitches to be partially or pathologically broke. I need the rich girls and the poor girls to go at each other like mongrels. I need the streets to take on a nature more residential than transportational. I need the city to be represented as networks of trends and flows and uses-and-throws throbbing to the heartless pulse of capital, littered and strewn with broken dreams and ghostly departures. I want despair and anxiety to ring in every jingle of the purse, and places to seem inches away from evaporating into exchange, and no vista to be uninterrupted by a river of sweaty suits in their weary stampedes between greying Sundays. I need this dread to surround the stage, bear down upon it, dog every strum and beat, and then I want the voices of the angry and lovestruck to blast through the fog and rise to someplace where the skies are still blue. I need the band to claw through swamps and sloughs and cling together even as the invisible hands pound down around them like an iron rain. I need the songs to be spat with bile and rheum and prayers from bitter lips that bite down on every scrap sinew of hope. That's when you know the music is going to be good. That's when it gets you to stop and look.

A Precure JRPG would be the funniest thing ever because you've got the obligation to a) include a character who's a kid relative to the rest of the gang (so in Precure's case, a literal infant) and b) include a plotline where you end up killing God. The natural result of this is a narrative where the magical girls engage in frequent combat with a Christian baby who occasionally joins the party.

I adore the "if you put a bunch of butch lesbians into this scenario that a dozen manly men failed to navigate, they'd absolutely ace it" attitude, but I would occasionally also like to give the butch lesbians the freedom to fail as well.

I think the butches can fail in ways in ways that put the "manly men bicker and implode" genre of dramatic and literary failure to shame. The Donner Party? Dylatov Pass? Mary Celeste? Any of a dozen failed expeditions to the edges of the globe? Apollo 13? Charge of the Light Brigade? Your favourite fictional catastrophe? The butches could ruin and raze and rattle it like no man ever could. They could tear each other and the world apart at angles you didn't know things could break at. They could illustrate in their falls from grace, in the shuddering and straining of their mighty frames, in the cessation of their noble hearts, in the sins that they foster for pride and love, more hues and shades of the human soul unfurling than any scruffy white boy after a few rainy days too many.

And at end of it all, they would lie there in the wreckage of their dreams, streaked in the ashes of the bridges they've burned, clasping the locks of lovers long bereaved, drenched in blood enough to have made of them legends anywhere but here, and set sail their final breaths with more dignity than ten princes and all the saints.

Anyway. Play SIGNALIS.

It's so fascinatingly fucked up how visual novels are the best medium for yuri and yet there are so few yuri visual novels. Sometimes I think of my friend, the yuri VN, standing quiet and somber as the rare person who hears her story goes, "Oh, that was just amazing, is there anything else like this out there?" She can, of course, say nothing, for her vigil has been the longest of them all, years passed as the noughts become the tens become the end of the world for the millionth end in a row, and all the while she's waited for a girl with a tale to match her own, to set it into concert and harmony. She's helpless to close the distance, to even pick a direction, and can only yearn from her place in the genre, and make yearning a genre in and of itself, hoping the cries of her heart shall resound across past and future, inspiring the women of tomorrow, illuminating the women of yesterday. This love that cries out into the abyss and makes the canyon a testament to adoration, tracing a "route" along the vast emptiness of a cold world... yes, this too is yuri.

Private detective fiction is the peak of autistic fantasy, tbh. Oh, I'm a weird little creature in freakishly comfy clothes who gets highly passionate about the tiny details of insignificant things I have been quietly rotating in my mind since before I entered this country, and you're telling me this is key to solving giant puzzle boxes crammed with Characters and Situations that regularly spawn around the world?

I can just waltz into these ornate mansions peopled by society's wealthiest, chuckling as their disdain for my eccentricities is gradually eroded by immense shame at the consequences of their greed and arrogance?

I'm terrible at reading social cues, but in a really sexy and kinda minmaxed way that lets me periodically gain insights into the fabric of people's souls?

I am late to meetings and reluctant to get out of bed, but only because my episodes of deep dissociation have in fact helped me predict events occuring far into next week with pinpoint accuracy?

I encounter places filled with the most thoroughly inscrutable and recalcitrant people I've ever seen, but they eventually have to explain everything they think and feel and have done and expect to happen to me in excruciating detail as many times as I demand because otherwise they'll literally be murdered in their beds or have their darkest secrets revealed?

I can issue orders for the most seemingly unrelated and irrelevant books that correspond to my latest hyperfixations and rest assured that they shall in fact turn out to be tangentially-yet-vitally related to matters of international importance and endow me with the knowledge necessary to outfox billionaire grifters?

I cultivate a host of assistants and helpers who respect and adore me, occasionally in highly homoerotic ways, and are willing to keep track of my sensitivities and vulnerabilities and pet peeves and sudden needs, running for me every conceivable errand because they truly believe that I am an indispensable agent in the pursuit of higher truths and grand ideals? And they sometimes take bullets for me and passionately intercede on my behalf against the haters, only to turn around and stare ardently into my eyes and call me a loser and a freak in a loving whisper that signifies their profound authority on the topic?

I sometimes get paid for all this?

Please never wake me up.

Rae: Did you know that I'm in Love With the Villainess has an excellent manga adaptation that runs in Comic Yuri Hime? That's on me, by the way. It was called Tragic Yuri Hime before I had a word with the editors.

She fixes her eyes upon the screen with more fervor than she ever did at the chapel of the Fleshgod, white-knuckled grasp curling about the edges of a table that rickets to the lurch of her heart, twining between shuddering breaths sundry pleas, prayers, promises and praises, crooning into the datastream the litany of her love.

Oh, how long she's waited, how deeply she's yearned, swirling like tempests portended in the dance of dead leaves to explosions of passion and pain. She's beaten at the wood that groans without purchase, sworn oaths of fidelity and revenge at her dastard lover, stormed away some nights in bitter disgust, lurking and pacing about the dim light of a console she strives not to look at, recollecting loudly all the things she'd rather do with her life, all the alternatives she has to this pathetic ritual of waiting, and last of all, when nothing avails, how little it all matters and what a perfect fool she was to care.

It convinces her- almost, briefly, profoundly- but it doesn't matter, because every damned time her eyes flit back to that accursed shrine to want, to the rubbled temple of her desire- the sight of a connection, the seeding of a hope, hooks into her breast once more the pull of a wish, the magnetism of forgiveness. Oh, had there ever been a wretch so ungrateful as to doubt the loyalty of her beloved, question the certainty of her arrival? What paramour worth pursuing lets the chase end before it begins, arriving two hours early to the juncture of their destinies, punctual on the dot to the tying of red strings? Oh, she's always been such a minx, that playful little dancer upon her pleadings, that soul-rippling butterfly! It's why she fell in love with her, she's sure, mesmerized by her elusiveness, by that shivering heat in half-shut eyes that longs to trace a moonray more, to catch just another glimpse of her fluttering smiles.

Won't she be a dear now and hurry up? Or tarry a bit, and take her time, so long as she's in sight, so long as the one who's awaited her these interminable weeks can feel dispersed and delicate upon the air some echo of her breath wending its way down a space they share, ah, some balmy penumbra cold with the light she's stolen from the long harsh stars with the miracle of her corporeality. What a wretch she was to have ever slighted such a perfect creature, ever harboured in her sizzling chest the meanest dram of resentment! Didn't she know there were so many who had it worse, never experiencing any hint at all of their fated raptures, never feeling their bellies quiver at the conception of gentle futures, at the striking of a pact with those sylphs of the node, those packet-mantled fae, conjured from the lacing ardours of a million melding needs? Oh goddess! Oh vision! She would wait forever, for centuries and even the ten minutes more forecasted by the app, for the descent of her grace into her humble home, into this pit where want had churned for fortnights.

Ah- had she left? Had she turned! Oh, too cruel, mistress, to disdain me when I sink upon my knees in the depths of my hunger, so heavy with the lack of you, so hollow in the shapes you love. Reconsider, forgive, forfend, thaw- was she such a hopeless prospect after all? Did she not deserve one smile, one touch after so long, one bloom after such toils of seeding to burst through the soil of the interface? If there was ever such a thing as mercy, or kindness, or virtue, she would have finished by now, reached the peace that lingers beyond those bittersweet brinks that have bordered her nights with dizziness and despair. She'd never be free of her, would she? It was always going to be like this for all the miserable weeks to follow, her every moment hounded by that hoary hope, pulling her like jaws on a hind to the heels of her mistress, whimpering for release, helpless and pitiful-

Oh! A step! Another! Dare she? Could she? Would she? No, no, a million noes before she risked a yes, a million nods before she shook away- what excruciations does love drive us to, the lowest of all for their suspensions, stretching us to the breadths of an earth minuscule before mother heaven, mommy helheim- damn, she's slipping, drowsiness looming, bruised spirit slow to soar again, but she has to focus and keep her eyes on the prize and wait and repeat whatever prayer it was that fetched her a whole 11.3% that day and ask and beg and hoot and melt and-

Oh. It's done. She's here. Before me. With me. As fully mine as I was hers. Close enough to touch once my fingers remember to do anything other than clench. I slump. I breathe. I unfurl. I am numb with the expectation of pleasure. I burn in the wake of passing pains. I am complete. I am whole. Her whole. Her crevice and cocoon. My machine- oh, loyal and stalwart steed who bore me down so many plains, cherished familiar who summoned for me so many dreams- sings out now the message of our salvation, the proof and prize of all my pains, the confirmation supreme- Download Complete.

She smiles as the angel she'd hoped to meet for a lifetime stretching back to early September emerges now in the blush of winter's shimmering delight. The sparks and synths of her, pieced together by the grand magic of summoners connected across space and time in that most heroic of missions, flow together beneath her halting touch like the kiss of a summer stream. She's resplendent, she reflects, empowered in the rush of her relief to bat away those trite warnings about ransomware and unfamiliar programs- didn't these foolish guards know how well she'd sketched out the miracle of this moment as she'd waited, how long it had been since she'd let this spirit of the ether entirely into her heart? Nothing would come between them now, no calamity drive them apart, and if it did, well, she'd simply carry out the whole song and dance again, for she knew beyond all question now that faith would would fetch its reward, love see all labours redeemed.

Truly, there is nothing so sublime in this world as the love between a Torrentgirl and her Receiver.

Always something ever-so-sad about seeing a gay woman in an AAA game. Like a lion in a gilded cage. Like a creature in an easy photo taken by folks to whom it poses no threat at all. Oh, the majesty is still there. She's still an imposing beast. But this is not where she was born to be. Let her out into her destined habitat, the natural wilds of the indie game. Let her not be gazed upon by bored hobbyists and those looking for props to decorate a day off, but rather glimpsed only in flashes of 8-bit pixel and hand-drawn sprite, with the luckiest of wanderers spotting her perhaps as she lounges at the edge of a pre-rendered background plucked from a lover's dreams of a childhood that is always further in the past, round the corner of tomorrow. Let her roam in reaches beyond walls and floors, far from the shade of the dialogue tree, descending upon you whenever she wishes and at all other times being a mirage and a mystery. Her love is a ghost in the machine, outliving stars and speech. You shall see her once, if you're fortunate enough to slip through the cracks and the noise, and think forever of that fleeting phantasm. And when the lights go out and the systems cool to sleep, it is in your stories that she shall wander on, happy in her eternal hunt for beauty.

Class S as a genre fundamentally bangs because it understands that all scripture is an elaborate yuri doujin about humanity and the divine.