Originally posted to the r/anime subreddit [21.11.18]
There are a lot of good shows this season. Too many. During the last few seasons, I only watched three shows. And now I'm watching twelve shows, and planning to start later today on 'Seishun Buta Yarou wa Bunny Girl Senpai no Yume wo Minai'. But even my personal favorite of this season has got to be 'Tonari no Kyuuketski-san' or 'Ms. vampire who lives in my neighborhood'.
Before I start discussing the topic at hand, allow me to praise the show for a bit. The characters, for example, are incredible. All their designs and personalities are not only incredibly wholesome but also really cute. The OP and ED are also dangerously catchy. They would probably be my favorites this season if it wasn't for 'Anima Yell'. But the best thing about this show is the chemistry between the main cast. It is also especially strong between the two main characters, Akane and Sophie. In a way, their relationship reminds me a lot of 'Momokuri', with both Kurihara and Akane having that obsessive personality about their crush, with the crush not openly denying the fact that they dislike their love interests obsessiveness about them, but clearly being a bit uncomfortable with it. Which in turn brings me to my main point: can this show be considered yuri?
I'm not gonna hide the fact that I love yuri. Sure, I may only have seen two yuri shows and read one yuri manga, but those are both really great and from while I may not be able to call myself a connoisseur of yuri the same way I do about moe, but that's not really that important. The point i'm interested in discuss in this section is whether this show can be considered a yuri. If you go on the show's MAL page, you will see it listed as a 'Shoujo Ai', and I'm not really sure whether that is correct or not. I'd have to be legally blind not to agree with the fact that Akane clearly has a crush on Sophie, and that Hinata is obviously in love with Akane, but from what the show has done so far, I see no reason to believe that any of the characters are ever going to enter an actual relationship with each other, which is kinda the point of a romance show, right?
To me, it kind of feels like yuri-bait. I posted a comment like this one of the weekly discussion posts with that question, and I got a response which stated that it's not yuri-bait because the characters are clearly gay, and yuri bait is when the show just makes it *seem* like the characters are gay, but are later revealed to be straight.
And I don't really know how to feel about that. Yes, it's obvious that they're gay, but...
I'm going to be completely honest: I just don't know. I've been discussing this with myself for a while, and I just can not come up with a consistent answer. On one hand, the show has gay characters acting gay, but one the other, none of them are ever going to be in a relationship. It could be argued that it's not explicitly a romance show, but what's the point of having four gay characters in a house who are clearly into one another if you're not going to follow up on it?
Man, discussing whether an animated Japanese cute girl show about gay otaku vampires can be considered lesbian romance or not sure is exhausting.
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