#manga musing

It's Yuri Day so here are a couple of neat videos on yuri you can check out in-between all the reading and watching of actual yuri you will obviously be doing today.

citrus and the rise of yuri anime and manga (3h)

Citrus' place in yuri history is indeed "complicated" and while it's not a fav series of mine this 3 hour look at that history and the criticism Citrus has faced, both fair and otherwise, was really interesting and informative, so I highly recommend i!

The Queer Subtext of Shoujo Manga (30m)

Colleen is my go to on anything shoujo and josei and in the past year I've noticed they've been including more about how yuri and BL fits in with those demographics. This video is the perfect example of this, it touches on a lot of early proto-yuri that setup many of the staples we'd see in future works. Aside from this, all of Colleen's videos are great so check out their backlog.

The Fruitiest Anime You've Never Heard Of: A Simoun Retrospective (1h5m)

Simoun has always been an interesting oddity in the yuri sphere, originally airing on the very same day as Strawberry Panic it never reached the same level of popularity. It certainly tried to do some interesting things with gender and war and this video is a great look into some of those elements. You can watch it without having seen Simoun as it tried to avoid spoilers so more people can go watch it themselves.

Kunihiko Ikuhara: A Revolutionary Director of Anime (2h20m)

ah Zeria, an og in the animanga video essay field who did a lot of great videos on yuri, they've since bowed out of video creation and delisted a lot of their backlog but some bangers still remain, including this look at Ikuhara's work from Utena to Yuri Bear Storm.

Why the manga LOVE BULLET was supported on a global scale (16m)

Love Bullet!! This is a good overview on how Love Bullet had its comeback, showing the how and why the yuri fandom ended up rallying behind it.

The Ultimate Lesbian Horror Anime! (27m)

I did a break down of how many yuri titles got picked up for English print releases last year and since then I've just been keeping track of how 2025 has been going. Good news, this has been a really good year for yuri!

We got 27 new titles this year, which not only beat out the the previous all time high set in 2021 but also marked the first manhwa and manhua print pick-ups with Sora & Haena, I Love Amy, She Is Still Cute Today, Unnie, I Like You! and See You There, Beyond the Ocean.

One of the most interesting things to me this year was Tokyopop finally fleshing out their LoveLove line, which technically covers all their romance titles but was pretty lacking in F/F stories till now. Glad to see it! Their picks have been a mix of manga, manhwa, and manhua that vary between syndicated and self-published works, so they're definitely bringing some new blood to the field. Their editor-in-chief Lena Atanassova did an interview about the line recently which gave some interesting insight, worth a read!

Other things of note is that Seven Sea's has bounced back after being pretty absent last year, but thankfully other publishers continuing to pick up new yuri has made it so we don't have to live and die by Seven Seas' catalogue either. There's also been a few things happening on digital only side with Fatale Game and Gal x Gal Yuri Manga both getting English simulpubs by Kodansha and Viz. Unclear if they'll also get printed volumes in the future so that why they're not on the charts for now.

My only prediction for 2026 is that we'll probably see more manhwa and manhua now that the ball has started rolling (someone HAS to get Her Tale of Shim Chong, right??). I could also see more webtoon originals getting printed volumes like we've seen with Not So Shoujo Love Story and Mage & Demon Queen. Other than that, we'll just have to wait and see! This year had some great stuff come out, including some personal favs of mine!

Here's to 2026 being another great year for yuri!

(Also you can look over all the 2025 licenses under the cut)

This one's a little heavy since its laying out why so much early Class S/yuri works were tragedies, a various issues sapphic women were facing in the early 1900s, but its covered really well so definitely worth a watch.

Kashimashi and Strawberry Panic both got visual novels, and that's pretty standard as far as anime licenced games goes, it's still a lot of work to make but manageable under a certain time-frame and budget.

But Simoun? Simoun got a strategy RPG! which makes sense for the content of the show itself, it's a war story (with a lot of trauma, gender, and girl kissing thrown together) but how you know people were getting stupid with money is that Simoun... Was Not Even That Popular??? Like, even in yuri circles, which are niche themselves, it's not super well known!! you're way more likely to have heard of, and possibly watched, Strawberry Panic than you have Simoun. And listen, I say this as a Simoun apologist who has a soft spot for the series but it's truly wild that it 1. got a game at all 2. was not just a visual novel.

Also I planted some lilies on my balcony this year and they just recently started to bloom :)

Love Bullet

Koharu and Minato: My Partner is a Girl

The Helpless Saint and the Powerless Princess

Destroy It All and Love Me In Hell

There is No Love Wishing Upon a Star

You can vote for 3 titles in the print category and 3 in the web so go vote for some yuri so we keep getting animes in the future! (link for voting!)

While it's not guaranteed that winning or placing high will get a series an anime adaptation, it does go some way to making that possible as it shows audience interest. (The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy At All, The Moon on a Rainy Night, I’m in Love with the Villainess all either won or placed well and went on to get animes)

Sancho Step made a handy voting guide you can follow! (they're the group scanlating Love Bullet so it's used as an example but you can vote for whichever you like.)

Recently I've been thinking about the success of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All and how it feels like seeing where Tamen de Gushi could have ended up, had its publishing issues not lead too various hiatuses during its peak.

To give a quick summary of events; Tamen de Gushi (aka Their Story/SQ Begin W/Your Name!) is a manhua created and posted online by Tan Jiu. It was incredibly popular around 2015 to 2018, during which time it had big ad campaigns, cute merch, animated promos and a print volume of the manhua itself. Just the one though. Sadly a the start of 2018 Tan Jiu announced that volume 2 would be indefinitely postponed as their publisher had requested several scenes be removed, which they refused to do. People speculated the scenes were the romantic ones between the leads, particularly the Big Kiss that would have been in that volume, but it was never specified. Regardless, this had a pretty disastrous effect on the manhua, as without the revenue from volume 2 Tan Jiu understandably began working on other projects and updates basically stopped altogether outside of occasional illustrations and short comics detached from the main storyline.

Meanwhile The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All (lets go with the insane shorthand tgswiiwagaa from here on) is a manga created and posted online by Sumiko Arai. First starting in 2021 it has become incredibly popular, which has lead to big ad campaigns, popup shops and cafes, a drama CD and print volumes of the manga itself.

So there is some surface levels similarities between the two: both are released via the author's social media account, both feature a high school slice of life stories, both gained a huge followings outside of their original language due to scanlation efforts, and both were/are the the face of digitally published yuri.

I don't think we'd get tgswiiwagaa without Tamen de Gushi, or at least I don't think it would be as big as it is without the groundwork Tamen de Gushi lay within online spaces. I can't speak too much on Tamen de Gushi's domestic fandom, or even its Japanese one, (though it was clearly popular in both) but at least in English-speaking yuri circles it was the breakout hit that brought in a lot of new readers to the genre. (Which is crazy to think about since it was before Mangadex became the dominant host of scanlated works, so it was primarily released on Tumblr! with only some chapters showing up on Dynasty Reader later.)

And I don't wanna say it was the only game in town back then, as around 2015 was a real golden age of manhwa and manhua popping off with the likes of Her Tale of Shim Chong, What Does the Fox Say? and PULSE. They're all still popular recommendations when people ask for top yuri picks, deservedly so. But as I said, there's something about tgswiiwagaa that reminds me of Tamen de Gushi in particular.

That popularity which lead to fanart, edits and fancams in the English side of the fandom feels kind of important to tgswiiwagaa's future international success. Like it widen the net so when tgswiiwagaa came along with a story that had even more western pop culture touchstones than a manga reader might normally get it was able to scoop up way more fans than ever before.