This Week in Anime

Are These Yuri Anime Poisonous?

Sylvia
Alas, it is time to pay one very gay and very bloody piper. I suppose, for the time being, I can do my best to put myself in the shoes of someone who might enjoy woeful tales of cosmic codependence spun between two women. I think I can manage that if I really put my mind to it. If I really sink my teeth into it. Really dig my claws. And other such hypothetical activities.

In other words, it's time to answer the age-old question: what's the deal with toxic yuri?

I suppose the thing to acknowledge right off the bat is that toxic yuri lies largely in the eyes of the beholder. Heck, even plain old yuri can be contentious as a descriptor. We don't have to look far, either. Goodbye, Lara from this season, for example, is certainly a title I'd mention in our Summer of GL conversation, yet just the other week we did a whole column on whether one might count it as "true" yuri, a nefarious imposter, or something in between.

Appending that word "toxic" to this genre, however, evokes a general set of traits we might begin with. These relationships probably won't be entirely healthy. The plot's subject matter will likely delve into salacious or mature material. Maybe the series itself skews more adult or more melodramatic. At the very least, when I consider the prospect of toxicity in romantic storytelling, I'm looking for emotional and psychological messiness. And in Dying Day, that messiness is quite literal and visceral.

"Seeping" is a good word for it. I feel like, so far, the vast majority of the toxicity is extrinsic to Sheena and Mimi, although encroaching incessantly closer to them. Students are child cannon fodder for a nebulous war. Mimi is an undead abomination—a byproduct of long-taboo magic. Sheena remains haunted by the specter of classmates she could not protect. Yet the bond between our main characters remains untouched and unsullied, for the most part.

Full disclosure: Lynzee suggested we do a compare and contrast of these first six episodes of Dying Day with the beginning of the shojo classic and toxic yuri tentpole Dear Brother. And I agree, mostly because it means I get to talk about Dear Brother again.

That is my Dear Brother face.

Both series have their parallels, focusing mostly on female students at a private academy, with all the hidden depths and drama both institutions wring out of their respective populations. But yes, on an interpersonal level. Dying Day feels like a breezy walk in the park while Dear Brother pelts you like a torrential downpour without an umbrella to protect you.

Which, incidentally, is a fate inflicted by Fukiko onto Rei in the very first episode. When you see an umbrella get thrown like that, you immediately know that there is some kind of hellish backstory to it. And Dear Brother delights in teasing out every aching morsel of that truth throughout its runtime.

I guess we should also acknowledge that however nice Dying Day looks as an adaptation (and it is quite nice!), forcing it to go one-on-one against an Osamu Dezaki production seems crueler to me than the whole undead child soldier thing. Like how do you compete with this?

Right, Dying Day opens on a scene dripping with blood, yet each episode sees Sheena and Mimi carving out a slice of quotidian respite, whether that's helping everyone clean up, frolicking through some daisies, or exchanging mana the old-fashioned way.

By contrast, Dear Brother is largely a bloodless affair except when it isn't. And as a result, those flashes of violence hit all the harder. BTW, please forgive the DVD quality on some of these. I still haven't upgraded all of my Dear Brother screencaps to glorious HD.

I'm so happy you and I both had our yuri goggles immediately zero in on these two. They've got secrets, and I must know them. Feed me the jaded post-situationship lesbian angst. That is literally what I'm here for. And yes, the upperclassmen trio at Seiran serves the same function in Dear Brother, although their closer proximity to Nanako in age and cohort means she gets more easily tangled up in their affairs and power struggles, i.e., more delicious poison to enjoy. Although if we're talking about concentrated toxic yuri vibes, Mariko's arc is the highlight of Dear Brother's opening act.

It has truly never been more normal for girls.

I love Mariko with all my heart. She is my blorbo. Plus, she's a fun embodiment of one of my personal tenets of yuri toxicity, which is that the relationship needs to be some degree of unhealthy. In Mariko's case, it's her one-sided crush on Nanako that she just cannot let go of at first. She refuses to take a hint, and meanwhile, Nanako is too timid at school to put her own foot down, which allows their bond to fester and grow more fetid with each passing episode. Until it finally erupts during the worst birthday party ever. It is wonderful.

I don't want to spoil everything, but I do want to say that Mariko gets mellower and more based as the series progresses.

It's kind of a slow-burn horror!

It's one of the fundamental ingredients of drama, period. You need conflict, and in fiction, as in real life, these conflicts often arise from the inevitable disconnects and mismatches that occur between different people. Even the most compatible couples have areas of discontent. And toxic yuri, to me, is about probing, prodding, and precipitating those areas until they are swollen and tender. And I wish Dying Day were more focused on that. It has its moments, of course, but it also feels more toothless than I'd like.

For a recent point of contrast, This Monster Wants to Eat Me surprised me with how it developed its central unhealthy relationship into something both more honest and more abject by the time its first season wrapped up.

As a gay mermaid enjoyer, I hope we continue to be so blessed.

Another recent font of yurified toxicity—one that we're both familiar with at this point—has been the BanG Dream! franchise. Suffice it to say that this scene in particular changed my life. For the worse, and for the better.

It's all so good. We've sung Yuniko Ayana's praises before, but her work on MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica is a tour-de-force of authentically messy teen girl feelings, even when those feelings are filtered through larger-than-life band drama. Which speaks to another important tenet of good toxic yuri: multifaceted characters. Obviously, that's a desirable quality to have in any kind of dramatic composition, but complicated people make for complicated relationships, and that is the source of the spice.

Fellow day-one Rebellion defender here, and yes, MadoHomu are enough of a toxic yuri tentpole to foster an entire other movie now, 13 years in the making. I mean, who knows what Walpurgisnacht: Rising is going to be about, but I am reasonably sure it will be a good bad time.

Looking further back, Revolutionary Girl Utena's web of relationships is not exclusively yuri in nature, but almost all of them exemplify a wrongness, a yearning, or an abusive quality that was instructive for how I perceived every subsequent anime I've ever watched. It is the rancid ruler by which I measure most things.

It's also probably why I tend to appreciate a dash of incest in my blend of venom.

To this day, Citrus still makes some people upset when you mention it, and that's how I know it's good.

Sometimes it is enough for toxic yuri to simply be a hot mess wrapped up in a salacious conceit.

I also want to mention that the most toxic of toxic yuri are probably not going to be found in anime form. That's not to say you can't find good stuff, as we've already discussed several of those series in length, but the adaptation process is a filter that's going to sift out the truly weird and off-putting material. One example is the manga Kitanai Kimi ga Ichiban Kawaii, which opens with a chapter about a girl forcing another girl to puke because she's turned on by it. Unsurprisingly, it has not been officially localized yet or adapted into anime.

By the same token, novels (light, visual, or otherwise) have a better chance of plumbing the deepest depths of the yuri miasma, because they can be made by smaller teams for more niche audiences. If OELVNs are your thing in particular, there are currently two game jams worth of toxic yuri visual novels to sink your teeth into. That should be enough to sate all but the most voracious of yuri consumers.

It's a bigger topic than we have space for in this column, but the explosion of messy yuri stories in the English VN scene is a very recent and very fascinating development in queer storytelling. I've even toyed with the idea of writing my own! This is an exciting time to love games about women who are maybe evil.

Speaking of, to pull this column back into the anime realm: Chris, can you enlighten me (and our readers) about what the hell is going on with Viola and Miyako in Yume Mita? I'm not caught up yet, but I've been rubbernecking the events as they've been popping up on my Bluesky feed, and it seems like A Lot.

Okay yeah, that is insane, that is delightful, and I definitely need to prioritize catching up. But I am glad I correctly identified Viola's as a face I could trust in the series premiere—a face I could trust to make everything much, much worse.

On a slightly more serious note, though, I'd like to go back to our original question: what is the deal with toxic yuri? While I believe there is an unavoidably exploitative aspect of it—an appeal to the trashy romance lover within us all—I also believe it goes deeper than that. Fact is, it is pretty difficult to exist in this world as a lesbian. It is even more difficult to exist as certain kinds of lesbian. There are predatory narratives that haunt us, laws and rhetoric that seek to oppress us, and other manifestations of bigotry and misogyny that surround us. Toxic yuri, therefore, provides an avenue to sublimate and explore some of those anxieties. It's a release valve. A place to kick back in the playground of fiction, and a vehicle for safely banishing some more pernicious demons. That's why I don't think yuri will or should be getting more wholesome anytime soon. After all, the correct dose of poison can become a cure.