Still, there's my proposed compromise. We can still split Girls' Love and have a Lesbian Romance page for non-Japanese works and have Girls' Love relate to Japanese Lesbian Romance, since it's a well-defined sub-genre by itself.
Wow, this thread was a pain in the ass to get through...I really don't see the problem with the Girls' Love article, but if it's going to require splitting GL into Lesbian Romance and Japan-only Girls' Love to get this resolved, then I guess that will work.
Lesbian romance wouldn't be a good trope by itself as outside Japan, it's not treated all that differently from gay male romance so you might as well just use Queer Romance for that.
Still a lot of fans do use Yuri or Girls' Love to describe non-Japanese works and it's not inconsistent with what "yuri" or "girls love" means.
At any rate, my opinion is that non-Japanese lesbian romances should either be left to Queer Romance or just piggybacked off the Japanese genre/trope.
edited 27th Jun '11 5:46:54 PM by CBanana
and that's how Equestria was made!We also need to decide if this should only apply to works where the romance is a main part, or use it how fandom uses it, where more subtexty works fit in as well.
What we're looking at is things that are more than Les Yay, and less than full blown lesbian romance.
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Yes, yes it is. It's treated very differently than gay male romance in western works. In fact, the ONLY different between Eastern and Western seems to be the bubbles and that's just common to Japanese romance in general.
I'm still trying to figure out the difference in audience between Girls' Love and Queer Romance. There is a very clear cut delineation about the audience for Bara and Boys' Love. Girls' Love, not so clear.
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I don't think Western lesbian romance and Japanese Girls' Love are the same at all. Western lesbian romance is, by and large, aimed at lesbians (because of the whole women-like-romance-men-like-sex thing — we get all the romance novels, they get all the porn). YA lesbian novels tend to have a very "I'm-okay-you're-okay" feeling, and are almost always about teenagers Coming to Terms with Their Sexuality. Adult lesbian novels... okay, I haven't read many that aren't by Sarah Waters, but I would say at least that they tend to have adult protagonists and are rarely "cute" in the way that anime/manga tend to be cute. Both types are often fairly politically charged, or at least have a point to make about it being OK To Be Who You Are.
Japanese Girls' Love is aimed at either (a) young men or (b) teenaged girls who aren't lesbians. Characters in both categories are overwhelmingly schoolgirls, or at least teenagers. Even if they're not, they're probably supposed to be cute and moe. Stories may be either very melodramatic or cute slice-of-life, but Gayngst is rarely a main focus. If it is, it's usually used to heighten the "forbidden love!" drama rather than to make a point about societal acceptance or reassure girls who are going through the same thing. Actual societal attitudes and issues are usually ignored beyond a vague "no one must ever know!" sentiment — and that's assuming it doesn't take place in Magical Yuriland where Everyone Is Gay and no one cares. The term "lesbian" itself is rarely used, and if it's aimed at teenaged girls, the relationship is probably very chaste and the characters frequently avoid explicitly defining their relationship as "dating" or being "girlfriends" even if that's clearly what they are.
There are Japanese works that feel more like the Western style of lesbian romance; Yamaji Ebine's works come to mind. And I'm sure there are some Western works, particularly webcomics, that feel more like Japanese Girls' Love. But to say they're the same thing except for the bubbles strikes me as a little silly.
I do agree that Western lesbian romances and gay male romances aren't exactly the same, but I'm not sure whether that merits splitting Queer Romance and/or Queer Media.
edited 27th Jun '11 7:27:42 PM by bluepenguin
You realise that when you were trying to describe Girls' Love there, you just described The L Word almost perfectly. I've read very little Western Queer Romance that sounds how you're making out to be, and I read a lot of it. I read a lot of Japanese works as well. That's where I'm getting the fact that the only difference is bubbles.
I confess that I haven't seen The L Word at all, and like I said I haven't read a lot of lesbian novels aimed at adults, so what I was describing was mostly YA lesbian novels, which I read a ton of as a teenager. Those, at least, feel very different from Girls' Love.
edited 27th Jun '11 7:31:53 PM by bluepenguin
bluepenguin more or less has it. There is, generally speaking, a difference between lesbian romances aimed at the GLBT and/or arthouse audience and those aimed at straight men/women. Of course there are exceptions/overlap and The L Word may be a good example of that (haven't seen it so I don't know for sure) but that's the point of tweaking these articles until the examples reflect the content of the page they are on. A lot of the movies on Girls' Love that I've seen do not follow the tropes common to the Girls' Love genre. For example Fire is a social commentary as much as a love story and is the first of a series of films tackling sensitive social (and often feminist) issues in Indian culture. Cute, melodramatic school-girl romance it is not.
In a sentence: There can be Japanese Queer Romance works and there can be Western Girls' Love works, we just need to sort out which is which.
edited 27th Jun '11 7:56:15 PM by whereismytea
So Girls' Love may target young men or young girls as the intended audience. The characters must be adolescent and cute and the story must be driven by the romance between the principal characters. There probably isn't a political agenda behind Girls' Love stories and the relationship may never be public.
Is this accurate so far?
Would the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre fit in this category?
And I return to Eugenie in The Count Of Monte Cristo and her elopement with the young woman who's name escapes me. That doesn't fit in the genre because their love story is a very minor plot point.
The relationship between the characters in The Gymnast doesn't fit because the women are too old, ditto Out At The Wedding and Daphne.
Are these accurate statements?
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That sounds like a good summary of what I was babbling on about, yes.
About Jane Eyre, while Jane and Helen's relationship has some resonance with Girls' Love tropes ("while at boarding school, girl has "Romantic" Two-Girl Friendship with an older girl she idolizes, then grows up and has an adult relationship with a man" is a storyline you find in a lot of older Girls' Love, like Oniisama E), the novel as a whole is certainly not Girls' Love, by virtue of focusing on Jane and Rochester's relationship much more than Jane and Helen's.
edited 27th Jun '11 9:40:42 PM by bluepenguin
God Jane Eyre it's been so long since I read that... I really can't remember.
Age is one of the iffy things there are older Girls' Love works (20-25) but those are usually fresh out of college still youthful feel or Office Lady still with the Tall, Dark and Bishōjo Sempai and shorter Girly Girl Kohai dynamic. Was going to link an example but for the life of me I can't remember the name...
If you have seen Hidamari Sketch Hiro and Sae's relationship is pretty much the former (they still go to High school though the tone of the series is living on your own for the first time and making it Squee.) Sae has a writing job and very much plays the Tall, Dark and Bishōjo role with Hiro trying to prevent Sae from committing Karoshi (death by overwork.) from said writing job...
I actually have never seen anything in Christmas Cake territory but social stigma over that trope would change the demographics and draw it out of Girls' Love.
edited 27th Jun '11 11:12:43 PM by Raso
Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!Maka Maka, that's the name I was looking for. (Edit: The page paints a very different picture than what I got out of it...)
edited 27th Jun '11 11:04:48 PM by Raso
Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!OK, so the characters in a Girls' Love work can also be post-adolescent and while there isn't an age line drawn, stories about older characters just don't seem to happen.
Key question: is there always a "first time" experience for one of the characters?
There is sometimes a first time experience, sometimes not if they come in as a couple. They don't have to be hidden, they can be open. Sometimes people make a big deal about it if they want to make someone sympathetic. Sometimes they don't. There's very little consistent in the genre. Save the bubbles and they aren't always there.
The lack of consistency that you mention makes it hard to identify it as a genre. Some of the other posters have said there is a feel about Girls' Love but I need more information than that. I'm getting the impression that there is an implied innocence in the stories even if there is explicit sexuality.
I do think that WAFF (Warm And Fuzzy Feeling) feel of the work is pretty important. (Said moments are usually covered Love Flowers.)
But the demographics are the most important part. Girls' Love is always marketed to Seinen (Periphery Demographic for of some Girls) many times playing off Moe and other tropes.
In a What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls? kinda way, (read that page its helpful), very close to K On and Lucky Star and so on which have large elements of Girls' Love but not the main focus of the series.
Boys' Love is very similar in that its marketed stictly for Shōjo and Josei crowd with Bara being the Gay men works aimed at gay men.
edited 28th Jun '11 7:58:10 AM by Raso
Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!Eh, the warm fuzzy thing is kind of a more modern thing just like it is in Western works. They used to all end in horribly sad ways with either death or I Want My Beloved to Be Happy or the girls breaking up...
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick![]()
Yuri Hime at one time had 70% female readership and was technically jousei (which covers a slew of titles). Other jousei yuri includes such titles as Love My Life and Pieta.
By the way, any constructive objections to me putting up this article
for now? I'll be removing Bara from the second paragraph and hiding Sempai/Kouhai under something like Older Student Younger Student to deal with Fast Eddie's main objections. The article is probably not going to satisfy everyone but it will push the article to be better flowing, more accurate and clarify trends/definitions better than the current one. I'm not going to say this should close down discussion but it would be nice to see the article take a positive step forward.
edited 28th Jun '11 10:37:29 AM by CBanana
and that's how Equestria was made!![]()
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Bara doesn't have an English equivalent that would make any kind of sense, so I don't see any reason to remove it. Maybe move the second paragraph to the bottom, since it's a compare and contrast kind of thing. And add a line saying it's a subtrope of Queer Romance.
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Can we hold off the title debate? We were just getting somewhere with the definition.
edited 28th Jun '11 11:18:24 AM by Killomatic
Regulated fun - the best kind! I don't make the rules, just enforce them with an iron fist.

I know, that's ironic, I previously argued in another thread that Harem Genre can be a subgenre, but romance is different. "Romantic relationships", on it's own, would be an Omnipresent Trope. Every work has romance in it, sometimes it's gay, and usually, it is pretty important to the plot. That's why we don't list Avatar, Smallville, or Back To The Future as a "Romance", even though technically the romantic subplots often drive the main plots there. There is an expectation, that "Romance" is only a work where romance is the point of the whole thing, otherwise, it's just one of the many other Love Tropes.
And I don't just mean as in Madoka Magica, that if there would be no romance, the plot couldn't happen that way, but just as in "the plot would be meaningless, because romance was the only story to tell here". In Madoka, this subplot isn't even revealed until the end of the story. It isn't a defining characteristic of the storytelling as a whole.
edited 27th Jun '11 3:02:33 PM by EternalSeptember