Spring is fetish season FINAL #12 – Yuri – The lily spectrum

Posted on | February 9, 2009 | 7 Comments |

So last time I discussed the main reasons why I believe that girl-girl material is popular. This time, I will be exploring the Spectrum of Yuri from non-ero tease stories all the way to high impact bondage and evilyuri rapetastic goodness.

So you’ve got some lesbians…how would you go about classifying that material? Well, logically, you could first classify it in terms of content – read: how far they get with each other. Included in this is the existance (or not) of a coherent storyline and therefore the amount of focus that is given to the cunnilingual content.

So we could address them in terms of soft fruits as:

Non-ero or STRAWBERRY – Material containing no sex or even naughty touching, though there is (eventually) kissing. Good example being a lot of Morinaga Milk’s recent stuff,such as Girlfriends and Nana & Hitomi. Warning – may contain emo!
Plain ero or RASPBERRY- A bit more tart than strawberry type material (groan) – This is where there is a relationship and a storyline, but instead of unrealistically stopping at the kissing stage, they go all the way. But in a vanilla like fashion without our good old rubber-moulded or battery operated friends.
Explicit ero or POMEGRANATE – Not always to everyone’s tastes – This takes plain eromanga and introduces other elements that whack up the perversity o meter – for example, vibrators, double dildos, bondage, but still has a coherent storyline, so it’s different to…
Porn without plot or BANANA – Lewd, but unanimously popular – This pretty much describes the vista of Western lesbian pornography with girls getting it on at the drop of various headgear without so much as a howdy-do. it does exist in eromanga, most especially with doujinshi where the relationship background is already covered by the anime that is being parodied.

Within this spectrum, there are the different Sexual Elements, which are of course, different in Yuri (due to the lack of parts and so forth). These relate closely to the area of the spectrum that you are in – since for example, you wouldn’t find girls enjoying themselves with a double dildo in a Strawberry doujinshi, by definition. Therefore, by looking at the sexual elements found in a doujinshi, one can determine which category one is perusing.Â In order, they are:

Deep kissing
Hands (over panties)
Hands (inside panties)
Cunnilingus
69
Tribadism
Dildos/vibrators
Double dildos
Strap ons (These are further down because of the Dom/sub implications)
BDSM
Harder fetishes (e.g. fisting, watersports etc.)

Other important elements that put an eromanga further up or down the scale include:

Number of non-ero pages – rated as a percentage of total content – 1. 100% (virtuous), 2. >50% (making an effort), 3. >30% (just scene setting is enough), 4. <30% (Well, there's some gags in there) 5. 0% (not even bothering)
Juiciness coefficient – rated as 1. Absent, 2. Glistening, 3. Oozing, 4. Flooding, 5. Squirting (6. WTF)
Dom/sub relationship – rated as 1. Both innocent, 2. Mild Dom/sub (pinning, mild non-consensual), 3. Strong Dom/sub (bondage, S&M, evilyuriraep etc.)
Breast size – rated as 1. Both modest, 2. Breast envy, 3. Both large, 4. Symmetrical docking, 5. Either girl licks her own nipples.

And so we can draw a spectrum diagram of yuri material like so.

The significance of this spectrum is that most people would occupy a continuous area of the spectrum, for example, that they liked non ero and mild ero with storylines, and therefore only material with kissing and light petting. Rarely, one would occupy different portions of the spectrum at the same time, or even just the extremes. If you’re interested, I occupy the whole thing (and then some). Thought you might have guessed.

The other parallel I wanted to draw was to Western material. This occupys the edges of the spectrum, with TV shows with lesbian themes (UK e.g. Tipping the Velvet, At Home with the Braithwaites) at the far end of Non-ero and pornography at the other end depending on the exact nature of the material. I’ve made the point before that Japanese people are very serious about their pornography, so possibly felt that it was time someone filled in the gap between mainstream token lesbianism and full on lesbian porn. And right they were…

The other way in which you might classify yuri is in terms of the couples involved. Since yuri, like all other genres of anime is extremely stereotyped in the storylines that can exist, there are accordingly few couple types that regularly make an appearance. I’ll list the one I’ve come across below:

“Normal” – Falling in love the old fashioned way – you know, when a girl meets another girl, and she feels something and then they become friends and holding hands leads to kissing in the back row of a cinema, which leads to heated fondling in the disabled toilets, embarassed trips to the local sex shop and whispered promises of love as moulded rubber tears away innocence.Â That kind of falling in love. e.g. Shinobu/Momoko – Shoujo sect (amongst others)
“Unrequited” – The stuff of subtext – Oh so common when I started out in this field was the mainstream anime with the best friend who finally one night had a visit from the goddess of yuri, who whcked them on the head and shouted at them – “Those feelings you get at night, when you think of your best friend and touch yourself in naughty places – that’s NOT FRIENDSHIP YOU IDIOT”. Unfortuantely, it is revealed that the best friend in question is as dense as a brick when it comes to relationships and ends up falling for someone with a penis. Outcome? Supporting her best friend with Emo Inside (TM), or confession with dire consequences. Damn you anime gods. e.g. Sakura/Tomoyo – Card Captor Sakura
“Discovering sexuality” – That old chestnut – you know, when a girl meets another girl, they become best friends, and then one of them has this feeling that actually, she’d rather be engaging in sweaty fumbling than trying on clothes and doing each other’s makeup. Then when she confesses, instead of running away screaming, the other girl warms to the idea and soon they strike a compromise and have hawt secks in the changing room of H&M. e.g. Nana/Hitomi – Morinaga Milk (Various)

“Best friends (with benefits)” OR “Blossoming love” – Subtly different from the above two – When two girls who have been friends forever realise when they come of age that their holding hands and cheek kissing is actually the symptoms of a serious illness…But then the world moves on, homosexuality becomes acceptable and the two have their first experience on a sleepover when their parents are away for the weekend. NB: Note that the development is smooth from friendship to love here, whereas above it’s more of a stepwise occurrence. e.g. Nanoha/Fate – Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha
“Gay/Oblivious” – The comic one – Once upon a time there was a lesbian, who only liked cute girls. Along came such a girl who reeked of innocence and kawaii. The lesbian didn’t want to riun her chances to get her rocks off with this once-in-a-lifetime girl, so she decides to play it slow so she won’t get rejected. Cue multiple incidences of “Actually they’re both into each other but either of them realise it” gags. They really don’t get old…e.g. Julia/Ran – Strawberry Shake Sweet
“Sempai/Kouhai” – Admiration turns to love – For some reason, Japanese schools have this popular belief (of which I’m not sure how widely it applies) that underclassman girls squee uncontrollably at older, cooler girls who are tall, have great breasts and are great at everything they do. This accordingly means that if the oppportunity came for them to be eaten out by said sempai with the ferocity of William Shatner at a salad bar, they;d go all out to make it happen. Silly girls…don’t they know that those upperclassmen are longing after thegirls in the year above…and so on in an infinite Escher-like dimension??? e.g. Sakaki/Kaorin and countless others
“Evilyuri/Stalkee” – Ah, the return of the evilyuri – The natural mode of the evilyuri is stalking, where they follow innocent girls around, turn up when they least expect it and generally creep everyone out. However, since they are by definition older girls with great bodies and awesome respect, no one really thinks anything of it except that they are a bit eccentric. But think of the poor girl who’s getting molested every day in the library, behind the gym, in the girls bathrooms, in the PE storecupboard, in the classroom after school, in the changing rooms after PE, down the alley round the back of the gay bar, in a seedy motel room and in a secret underground chamber, surrounded by hundreds of other masked evilyuri chanting. Don’t you feel jealous? e.g. Shizuru/Natsuki (MaiHiME)

And so we come to the end of our discussion of yuri and indeed the end of fetish season altogether this time. It’s been a marathon of a fetish month this time, and I thank everyone who read and especially those who commented and contributed to the discussion. I hope the things that I brought up were either enlightening or enraging (or both)…maybe there’ll be more fetish posts at some time in the future (or maybe I’ll compile them into a book!)

The site might be down for a short portion of next week as I’ll be porting this blog to update the Wordpress on it to 2.7 (it’s still on 2.0) to stop the millions of spams and hackage. Hopefully I won’t just lose everything, but you never know -_-…

Thank you all for reading!

Regards

Yuribou

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Category: Editorials, Hentai/Ero-games, Shoujo-ai

Comments

7 Responses to “Spring is fetish season FINAL #12 – Yuri – The lily spectrum”

Asuka
February 9th, 2009 @ 3:03 am

Great categorization. I’m the strawberry/raspberry practitioner. Focusing on the emo feelings side of strawberry and learning from the raspberry side of physical touching can be of great use. Guarantees a juiciness coefficient of 3.5. Complementing the partner’s needs. :D
Also the strawberry/raspberry spectrum is more… umm applicable to real life. ;)
chrisl
February 10th, 2009 @ 3:10 am

Sakaki and Kaorin are about the same age and grade, sakaki is only taller and athletic
hirohisa4president
February 10th, 2009 @ 11:01 pm

I’d say ikenie fujin by hirohisa onikubo is banana since it has yuri/straight/gangbang/scat/ and it has all of the fetish things listed plus scat in 2 scenes.

So if your looking for a good bdsm banana manga i recommend ikenie fujin as itll never get licensed in america or britain anytime soon -.-;
but I’m more of a fan of 3 or more ways sometimes and those arent always yuri ^.^;
SK
February 11th, 2009 @ 1:29 pm

I’m into everything, but it depends on my mood and my aim that night. Do I want a story, or do I want sex? Then again, with sex I tend to head towards to futa. Oh well. Amusing labels too. Too much futa tends to have a juiciness coefficient of 6+ ;)
Akakori
February 12th, 2009 @ 3:08 pm

I like them all! I’ll have fruit salad yuri please!
Jaden
February 16th, 2009 @ 2:56 am

I actually skip most of the mid-section of pomegranate and the start of banana, I do kinda blame those weird European bondage comics I read when I was like 13 for the skip though. Also I have issue with watersports being less perverse than fisting. Maybe if it is one of those things where a girl urinates due to loosing control because of pleasure, but not just peeing on someone.

But this brings me to a problem I have, I read for either story or sex. And I just don’t know what to do with Shojou Sect, the manga and the OVA. I had the same problem with Maka Maka, started it for the sex but ended up reading for the story. Oh the yuri fan’s burden. So any help would be a great help.
Chris
February 16th, 2009 @ 3:48 pm

When I watch or read my yuri I prefer it to be of the best friends category (Konota & Kagami) or of the Sempai/Kouhai category (Nobue with any of the younger girls from Strawberry Marshmallo), and I don’t like the action to go above the mid-high raspberry level.

If the more dominate girl starts using strap-ons then I feel that she’s trying to sub-plant my role as a male, I’m the one with the penis.

So, to me, I like my yuri to be a complete male fantasy, watching two girls who are supposed to be sugar & spice and everything nice getting it on. I guess as the viewer I can watch them use their lips & hands and think to myself since I’ve got the tool I could hop in and do a better job. But, if one of the girls is using a strap-on then how can a man compete with a tool that doesn’t give out or reach a limit.