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What's So Gay About Yuri!!! on Ice?

I also appreciate it when lesbian couples are allowed to be overtly sexual. Not for titillation's sake, mind you, but there's this mindset that yuri couples are all pure and innocent compared to 'vulgar' men dominated relationships. But shows like Kanamemo and Cross Ange allow the girls to have physical needs as if it were something perfectly normal (which it is).

Some problems I saw on Yuri On Ice aren't present there, like the fact that those guys talk more than should about women and girlfriends.

B-b-but I'm lesbian and I love sakura trick. I feel like you're painting LGBT people with a pretty broad brush in this article.

Also, nearly all anime romance is infantile and based on misconceptions of what romance is. In fact, real life romance is the same. That's why it's so relatable, and these infantile concepts of romance are ones that we desire to attach ourselves to because they're not stressful, they're fun, and they're easy.

When people want to see something realistic in a romance anime, that romance is going to be a drama. It's going to involve heartache. It's going to involve tears. Sure, it'd be nice to have a yuri drama anime, but it would suck to miss out on fun silly ones like sakura trick just because it's "not realistic".

That said, need I remind you, the author, anime is fiction. Much of it is idealistic, and thus won't conform to reality.

Not trying to be rude but have you ever been in a relationship? I've never had to ask permission or get a girl to sign some kind of permission slip before I touch her or something. Most girls I know would get pretty annoyed if a guy kept asking before he did anything. Either way, fiction doesn't have to adhere to reality.

This is a well-reasoned article, and I'm 100% behind the celebration of gayness in anime... and yet, I think essays like this foster an unproductive, and perhaps unintentionally racist, mindset through which to view anime....

Don't tell me those stupid yaoi fangirls are ruining this show too? I HATE how they see gay everywhere. We can't have nice male (or female) friendships anymore, because all they see is gay...

If you want to read yaoi, fine, go and read some yaoi. I don't have a problem with gay pairings if the author makes it clear that the characters are supposed to be gay. But stop ruining sports manga/anime with your delusions.

Hopefully it should be obvious by now how I'm planning to apply these lessons to most fandom reactions to series with LGBT elements. The Japanese conception of homosexuality and gender issues is totally, wildly, ridiculously different from the Western one, lacking the shared metanarrative of oppression, struggle, and recognition that defines our conception of the topic. Japan largely lacks the "moral disgust" reaction ingrained into many other societies, but also places such a premium on gender-coded social interactions that its people are often straight-out befuddled by questions of how to incorporate non-binary self-identifications into society, assuming that such "personal preferences" are one of the many things you don't publicize in your standard social interactions—just as in many situations you wouldn't tell a host you didn't like coffee if offered; you would simply drink it to be polite. The situation is simultaneously "better" and "worse" than it is in the West, because, and I can't say this enough, everything about it is fundamentally different. I truly think it's actively wrong (and, again, possibly racist) to apply one's own conception of the LGBT struggle and of the importance of depictions of LGBT characters to Japanese media, just as it is wrong for me to apply a Christian conception of religion to Japanese society.

Therefore, it is wrong and myopic to project those prejudices onto a culture that does not share them.

I watch this week´s Supergirl S02 by CW (it got notably better). It´s a PG rated young adult show for primarily women. A new supporting cop character is a lesbian and she kissed another woman on camera with zero narrative focus on it. The media didn´t pick up on it either. That´s how you win the "representation" race in my eyes. In a matter of fact way with noone bothering to notice, on a goofy kids show. Slow clap!

Well they didn't tell us anything we didn't already know, but it was nice to have it clearly stated like that. "Yuri loves Victor but he still does not know in what kind of form".

The point of the show is not so much to see if Yuri is going to win some medals, as it is to see him trying to find himself and sorting his feelings for Victor out. What the majority of the commentators here does not realize, is that it does not matter what will happen in the end as long as it is well written and believable in the eyes of the audience.

I've been wondering something for awhile about the whole "I'm not gay, but for you..." thing. In the real world, this can totally happen. People can fall in love with a specific person, without being in love with anyone else of that gender and in fact having a history of generally preferring the opposite gender. But, as the article addresses, most anime show these relationships in a completely non-nuanced way. Anyone know an example of an anime that does this well? Where a character loves someone, not some gender. I feel like YOI might be close to this depending on how the series continues.