An Introduction to Yaoi and Yuri for New Readers

There's a funny thing about many Yaoi (guy/guy romances) and Yuri (girl/girl romances) titles. At a first glance, these comics centering around same-sex relationships would appear to be LGBT friendly, but by now it's such a cliche that LGBT readers are initially attracted to these genres, only to leave disappointed as they discover that Yaoi are written for a primarily female audience of mostly young girls, and not gay guys. And likewise, Yuri is written for a primarily male audience of mostly young guys, and not lesbians.

What this means is that for example, most Yaoi titles can often be divided into one guy who plays the male role in the relationship- being the dominant relationship driver and initiator of sex- and an often literally blushing female role of a guy character being wooed and won over. These stories are literally young women's fantasies. As well, there is an element of self loathing in these comics- in particularly conservative Japan, young women are not supposed to have sex drives. As a result these desires are literally projected on fictional comic guys, who are allowed to be sexual.

The dominant trope in Yaoi titles is often forbidden romance, and often mangaka will stack the forbidden romance as much as they can- for example, student and teacher romances are common, as are age gap romances, boss and employee etc. There are even some that go for the extra forbidden domain of rape, to add extra shame to their forbidden encounters. There are even a minority that will go extremely far with the forbidden romance- into territories like incest and pedophilia. But please don't think that all Yaoi is like this, a majority of it is on the milder socially acceptable end, and a lot of the more extreme titles are not published in the west anyway.

Similarly Yuri has it's own similar tropes. It's not uncommon to have one girl who is basically a guy in a girl's body, who is the target for the male readers to identify with. Some series are even very blatant about this, and will literally have a plot where a guy is somehow turned into a girl but still wants to date his original girl crush. But even more common is tropes involving two very pure maidens. Again there is this element of sexual self loathing in it, as many Japanese young men feel like all sexual thoughts are dirty, unclean and corrupted. As a result you get these odd fantasy romances involving two very feminine maidens that are so pure and innocent that you start to wonder if they even sweat or shit.

That being said, even though these tropes are very dominant, there are some comics that are more LGBT friendly than others. As such I will rank the LGBT friendliness of each one on a scale from 1-10 (with 10 being the most friendly). There are also still a small number of comics written by or aimed at an actually LGBT audience, and these titles will be tagged LGBT and placed in their own category.