#renaissance Yaoi

[drsunshines]

Guys. You didn’t see this.

[puppyeared]

these two are so interesting to me

characters belong to @canisalbus

[soullessjack]

can Jesus and Judas be considered doomed yaoi

[blanktriptych]

.

[dread-pirate-mumbles]

2024: Year of the Old Man Yaoi

[steppesliver]

every single day that passes where i can't find a link of the new master & margarita movie with english subtitles is another day lost to agony and a new found motivation to keep learning russian

[nilovalentine]

you guys ever think about how many of the 'straight women fetishizing gay men' from 5 years ago are now gay trans men. Isn't that kinda funny

[alexanderpearce]

many are saying this

this is my a tale of two labo(u)r governments manifesto concerning the respective governments of bob hawke and paul keating in australia and tony blair and gordon brown in the uk. i promise im still a communist im just obsessed with the psychodrama of the westminster system. the cycles.

both paul keating and gordon brown had been living labo(u)r politics since they were in their early/mid teens, where bob hawke and tony blair swept in and managed, a lot because of their sense of populism, to win a labo(u)r victory after years and years of liberal/tory rule. one of the insane things with hawke and keating is that at the point hawke entered politics, keating had been there for 13 years or so, and at this point keating was 36 and hawke was 50. keating was of course pissed off to have the premiership stolen by some 50 year old relative novice.

anyway in 1983 hawke becomes prime minister with keating as his treasurer in a landslide victory after years of liberal rule, and in 1997 blair becomes prime minister with brown as his chancellor in a landslide victory after years of tory rule (chancellor and treasurer are basically equivalent roles in their respective governments). both are pretty powerful treasurers/chancellors and see themselves as running the country more than the PM, though brown was way more proactive in uh. using his power to block money and fuck with the PM.

my understanding is that both labo(u)r parties got in and stayed in on ‘modernising’ the labo(u)r party, which essentially meant becoming less labo(u)r-y. this was especially true for the hawke-keating government, which adopted policies and actions people saw as much more liberal, giving the government less power of some parts of money. who is up floating the australian dollar. who is up giving the bank of england operational independence. idk i wont compare economic or other policies between the two governments too much because i dont really feel like i know enough to do so. there were obviously at least as many differences as similarities between the two.

both sets of men had a deal that the prime minister would step down and let his treasurer/chancellor take his place after a few terms – the kirribilli agreement (confirmed, done before witnesses, solid) for hawke and keating, made at kirribilli house (after some informal agreements years before) and the granita pact (alleged, nebulous) for blair and brown, made at the granita restaurant (after some informal arguments and threats and agreements over years). i think the main difference between the two is that hawke and keating seemed more explicit and solid in all their dealings together, with a deal in front of witnesses, hawke explicitly reneging on the deal, and keating stabbing him in the back (or the front) openly with a vicious off-the-record speech and multiple spill attempts, where blair and brown's dealings seemed to me a lot more indefinite. this may have been purposeful on blair's part.

also blair and brown also LITERALLY WENT TO KIRRIBILLI HOUSE TOGETHER IN THE EARLY 1990S AND MET HAWKE AND KEATING THERE to talk to a successful labo(u)r government about getting into power. like what kind of Premiership Succession Deal Cinematic Universe is this. hawke and keating should've had dinner at granita together too.

another difference is that keating won himself a second term after his half one, making his premiership last from 1991 until 1996, while brown never served a full term, lasting from 2007 until 2010. imagine the sting. everyone was just sick of labo(u)r. i do also think (and this will be influenced by the end of the party being one of my main sources, so i say it with a pinch of salt) that keating was a better prime minister than brown was. he truly had a vision for australia, and worked to try and implement it, where the people around brown often said that he didn't seem to have an overarching plan once he got into power.

both couplets of men were successful precisely because of their partnership, with a populist, smiling frontman in hawke and blair, and an economic thinker propping them up on policy and desperate for power in keating and brown. keating and brown, when they finally got power, were tired already and felt they had gotten it too late. both pairs of men were described as brotherly, but the grip of their respective deals broke down their relationships into deep bitterness and antipathy. i will say that (despite keating acting like the lodge was haunted by hawke after he left and saying all that shit about how he should have been on his hands and knees about keating even being around him) hawke and keating’s relationship never seemed to reach the same heights (or depths) of homoeroticism and hatred that blair and brown’s did. i think this maybe also allowed hawke and keating to be more direct with each other than perhaps blair and brown were.

(all of this has happened before, and it will happen again)

[frmulcahy]

College lecture video on yaoi 👍

[peasantexchangeprogram]

and today in 'christians (or extians) on the internet that need the catholic church explained to them by a jewish homosexual'....

[storkmuffin]

[theophagie-remade]

Ppl who say Yuri/yaoi/shoujo ai/shonen ai isnt gay/queer media are wild

Like sir... The girls and boys are falling in love and kissing. That's literally the girls and boys falling in love and kissing genre WTF are you on abt.

Do ppl just think that japanese queer ppl and authors that just decided to write a cute love story with characters of the same gender don't exist????????? Do they???????????

I'm not sure what brought this on exactly but yeah lol. Lots of people excuse this shitty attitude by insisting that most manga doesn't count as real queer media because their authors are ~mainly cishet women~ ("Source?" "It was revealed to me in a dream") and it's. Soooo annoying andjkgg. Luckily this hasn't happened to any mangaka as far as I know, but it's especially crazy to me because in general this way of thinking leads to pressuring authors into forcefully coming out so that their art can have a "legitimate" reason to exist, which... what the hell are you doing!!!! And it's truly stupid to attack akchually cishet authors as well, dare I say especially when they're women. There's no point in making monsters and enemies out of people who are for the most part allies and whose art is a way for them to reclaim their own sexuality, like there's no point in going after them because their works can be problematic™ or whatever else (boy is there Stuff out there made by queer people themselves!!!). Nevermind that more often than not hating on "fujoshi" is also an excuse to be super transphobic...

As a side note, I don't want to be That Person, but while yuri is used alongside GL (girls' love), both shounen/shoujo ai and yaoi are used super improperly in the west- depending on the market you're referring to, BL (boys' love) and geikomi/gei comi (gay comics) are your go-to (geikomi also being known as bara in the west, although the latter isn't commonly used in Japan either). You can read a bit about it here if you're interested x x x x x x x !

[scary-ivy]

The lack of femslash in fandom spaces still being ongoing til this day....either fandoms are a lot less "dominated by women" than some like to claim, or a silent majority of fujoshis still haunt the internet

[stalactites]

there are sponsored teen wolf posts with art that was done by someone other than me... why the FUCK wasn't i approached for this

[sapphixxx]

there's a lot of reasons more people aren't into yuri that are troubling to consider, but equally, I genuinely think it cannot be understated how much of it comes down to most yuri being boring as hell. Like truly. I've been reading the front page of Dynasty Scans like it was the newspaper for 15 years I am not exaggerating I can show you the download file data 15 years.

You know what the complaint about yuri by yuri readers was back in 2009?

"wow that really was just 5 volumes of them blushing at each other and then they don't even kiss"

You know what the complaint about yuri by yuri readers is today in 2023?

"wow that really was just 5 volumes of them blushing at each other and then they don't even kiss"

Don't get me wrong, Yuri has grown a LOT in that time, to the point that most people today wouldn't even understand a Maria-sama reference if it were dropped in front of them (thank God). It's expanded and evolved to encompass more stories about adult women, wider varieties of scenarios, a greater acknowledgement of real life lesbianism, and is more comfortable showing girls kissing with tongue and having sex.

Yuri Manga is maybe the best is it's ever been, and it's also getting the widest readership it's ever had in the English speaking world. The titles we carry at work are always on back order with long queues, and, when I've asked them, most weebs of all gender or sexualities report keeping up with at least a few Yuri series.

At large though? Most of it is still really boring. That's not a bad thing necessarily. I like it because it goes down easy. For the most part any series you pick is gonna be pretty chill. Even shit from Sal Jiang which is PRETTY EDGY for yuri is a pretty breezy read. More serious ones like How Do We Relationship? cover some pretty real subjects about how intimacy is actually quite difficult even when both of you love each other, but it's not like... Exciting. Yuri isn't where you go to pump your fist or get perched on the edge of your seat.

So when the comparison is made to yaoi, well, I mean, have you READ any yaoi? Even in some of the more restrained titles those boys are likely to be sucking and fucking balls and all within the first volume or two. There's gonna be drama, intrigue, shit is gonna get messy, passions are gonna get heated, clothes are gonna be ripped off, people are gonna get sold to One Direction, it's stuff you can sit down with a bowl of popcorn with you know? Stuff you can message your friend and gush Hey Can You BELIEVE? A lot of it is pretty trashy, but that's the appeal. The generic state of yaoi is torrid and exciting and sexy. Ultimately, as a species many of us like to see pretty people fuck. In yaoi you'll get that. In yuri you won't. Nothing wrong with that, but it is gonna be a major contributing factor to their relative popularity.

It's also worth making the comparison to hetero romance manga, which has undergone a renaissance of it's own in recent years. There's now a whole meta around crafting a handful of mean shitty grouchy dysfunctional bully women and flinging them at the protagonist of the day who, unlike in years past, may actually have a face and personality. Most of these are also very trashy and truly scrape the bottom of the bucket in terms of writing.

AND YET?

I would bet money on the fact that you'll have heard of these women and probably even have a good idea what they're like without ever having touched a page of their manga.

I'm sorry but the straights are whipping donuts around the yuri girls in terms of delivering a wide variety of weird compelling fucked up women. How many yuri leading ladies by comparison can you point to as standout recognizable characters even divorced from their story? There's definitely a few, but not many. I'm not talking quality or depth of writing, I'm talking straight up pure recognizability. There are many beautifully written women in yuri, now more than ever. I can't think of many who'd like, get a figure made or have their face splashed on merch, though.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I love Yuri a lot, but at the end of the day this is just kinda the state of things right now.

[victimsofyaoipoll]

Round 2

Propaganda Under Cut

Elizabeth Midford

She started as just a cutie fiancée trying her best, turns out she's also a swordfighting genius, very under pressure to perform feminity in the Victorian Rose type of way. Fandom crucifies her bc she's Ciel's fiancée and they want him to be with his butler, Sebastian, the demon he sold his soul to for revenge

anime was a shitty canon divergent adaptation that butchered her character down to her "cutesy silly girly" persona, which obviously made the 2008 anime fans hate her with a passion (nothing wrong w being girly I'm just saying the adaptation made her super one dimensional) anyways fujoshis used to treat her as a villain because she's the fiance of Ciel,, who as u might know already was HEAVILY shipped with his butler, Sebastian back then (now it's kinda looked badly upon, nice tbh that ship sucks ass xD) She's a bit similar to Misa Amane from death note in the way she was treated. (Like an obstacle the yaoi ship must overcome rather than a person)

she's my silly little rabbit! i could gush about her character but i'll keep it short and just say that she's really well written and one of the best characters in the series. anyways she's ciel's fiance and she's like, rightfully annoying as any other 13 yr old girl would be but the fanbase fucking crucified her for even existing. she gets demonized for being 'annoying', but then ciel gets yaoishipped with an even more annoying guy. there is 100% an argument that lizzie/ciel is weird bc they're cousins (i personally don't ship it) but that falls flat when her detractors then ship the 13 yr old ciel with an eons old demon who Canonically looks like his father. the anime also never reached her main character development until years after its peak and that was only in a movie, so she really got the bad end of the stick here. not me though i had a giant crush on her when i was 12

Katara

Katara is constantly mistreated by the fans in favor of the Zukka ship (Zuko × Sokka.) They make her out to be mean, homophobic, and completely out of character just to add drama to the Zukka ship. In reality, Katara is very compassionate, and would never act that way toward anyone. 

Zutara was a popular ship but when zukka got popular over covid during the atla renaissance there were a million posts about how zutara was problematic while zukka was perfect usually for racist reasons. Meanwhile katara and sokka are siblings so it didn't even make sense. They did not have to be so illogically rude to her to ship zukka and it was weird

Katara is FANTASTIC I fucking love her to pieces she is so cool and yet the entirety of the ATLA fandom treats her like garbage because she “talks about her mom dying too much” (even though she BARELY does & also was parentified from a young age due to her mother’s death) and, of course, because she’s a more feminine women when compared to her counterparts. Even in the show itself she’s mistreated: she’s ALWAYS shown cooking for the rest of the gaang, doing their laundry, any ‘womanly’ task. She ends up with the guy who kissed her twice without her consent & who she never showed any real attraction to and apparently (despite being a badass warrior-doctor!!!) after the show ended she just… settled down in the South Pole and had a bunch of kids and never did anything else. She didn’t even get a statue :( Anyways during the ATLA renaissance, despite Zutara actually not being canon, people felt that Katara threatened the sanctity of the new almost entirely baseless yaoi ship, Zukka. Unfortunately for them, due to the fact that Katara and Sokka are siblings, the usual anti-Zutara arguments didn’t work as well. So they resorted to just… slaughtering her character. If she was lucky, they’d just make Katara a background character, wingwoman, &or throw her together with her canon love interest. If she was unlucky they’d do anything from make her homophobic (??) to killing her off! Fuck’s sake, she never even got a token spare-the-pairs wlw ship! Sorry for getting so heated, that whole debacle made me FUMING MAD.