Forum - View topicREVIEW: By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga
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wolf10
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Had a longer post drafted, but deleted it because I'm starting to feel sorry for yuri. I'll keep this brief.
Yuri and Yaoi (pardon my cringe) both have pages on English WIkipedia that refer to them as genres, while also acknowledging the wide variety of content they contain. (phpBB chokes on the hyperlinks, but it's easy enough to verify with a search.) Basically, it's a genre if enough people can agree it is, and it seems like they do. People insisting their work isn't the genre it is is nothing new. For example, JRR Tolkien hated having his work compared to that hack CS Lewis. spoiler[(English Lit joke!)] As it happens, "genre" when used in Japanese as a loanword carries a meaning closer to the English word "trope." (You even acknowledged this after an edit.) I suspect you may be running into a similar translation gap from your native tongue. Anyway, hope that helps put the issue to bed. |
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SHD
Posts: 1752 |
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On-topic: to be honest I'm not entirely inclined to place a whole lot of trust in Wikipedia on yaoi and yuri - it already has so many things wrong re: this particular topic. (Also: "yaoi", I mean.
 ) But anyway, I'm just hung up on this, because in my experience calling these labels "genres" always comes with the implication that "all of these works share certain traits" (that being the implication of "genre"), those certain traits usually being broad stereotypes, which is just not true, not on this level. Anyway, yeah, it's not a hill I want to die on, I'm just really against stereotyping things.
Off-topic linguistic head-scratching: I admit I'm getting confused because to my best knowledge the word "genre" means a sort of stylistic/thematic category, as I said, like "action" or "comedy" or like, "heavy metal" or "hip-hop" or "realism" or "still-life". Basically a way to refer to stuff that share certain similarities. Considering that BL/GL(/shoujo/shounen/whatever) works can be wildly different and individual works may have little to nothing in common at all, I'm kind of struggling to see how these categories can be called genres. As an aside, my first language has no word deriving from the same source as "genre" in English that has the same general meaning (what we have is a loanword from French that we do use in a very different way, usually to mean "type" like "that girl is totally my type"). However, the word we have that corresponds to the English "genre", is used in the same way, and translates to "genre" does in fact refer to categories like "action" "comedy" "hip-hop" and so on.
Hm, I wouldn't say that it's closer to "trope", at least I've never seen it used in that way. It's really more like "category" (eg. see BookWalker's genre list). In fannish usage though it may even be used in a way that corresponds to English "fandom", referring to certain works. I don't think I've ever used the word "genre" so many times in my life.
(Edit: added BookWalker screenshot) |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2624 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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I've been thinking about how to answer your question, because it's something that actually does come up a fair amount in one of the subjects I teach, creative writing. I think the best way to frame it in terms of literature is to look at genres as a broad set of guidelines and subgenres as the more specialized terms within those categories. So for example, romance would be the genre, and all works filed under that heading would be "narratives with the formation of a romantic relationship as the main point." But then that's further broken down into subgenres, which are specific to a time period or style of writing; if we stick to the example of romance, subgenres would be Regency, paranormal, queer, erotic, fantasy, Victorian, etc. Someone who's into Regency romance (set in the first two decades of the 19th century) may only like that specific subgenre because of the tropes it features, and paranormal romances with vampires and whatnot leave them cold. (Naturally there are cross-subgenre blends, but that's getting in too deep for our purposes here!) So in that context, yuri/GL would be a genre meaning "works focusing on a romantic relationship between two women," while subgenres would be specifics like Class S, office romance, fantasy etc. I don't know if that clears it up or just makes things even more confusing, but I thought I'd try! 
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SHD
Posts: 1752 |
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Thank you for explaining! I see, this does clear up where you're coming from, I think it's simply approaching the concept of "genre" from different directions and applying different understanding, which might just be a cultural thing. In the end of the day, as far as I'm concerned the point is that, whatever we call GL/BL/etc we still can't claim that by nature these works all share similar stylistic traits and tropes - that "GL" implies soft girl/girl romance and Class S pining, etc.; or that "BL" implies rape and rigid seme/uke roles and whatever. (Or that "shoujo" implies bubbly romance or "shounen" mindless action, and so on and so forth. I guess I'm just chafing against the word "genre" because I keep coming across these attitudes. )
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2624 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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You're welcome! And you're right, it may just be cultural, but even if it isn't, I feel like there's some confusion between genre and demographic. I'd call "shoujo" a demographic designation, i. e. a statement of who the intended audience is. Ah well, we've probably spent too long on this, but I do find it an interesting topic.
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