Girls’ Love: The Development History of Lily Fan Culture in Taiwan’s ACG Industry 2023 Revised Edition (少女之愛：台灣ACG界百合迷文化發展史 2023增修版) is, as far as I know, only the second book on Yuri fan culture that exists in the world, so of course, I wanted to read it. Thanks to James Welker, who was in Taiwan and picked up a copy for me, I am able to tell you all about it today.

This book is by the popular pseudononymous Baihe novelist 楊雙子 Yáng Shuāngzǐ (a name that means “The  Yáng twins”). This is the nom de plume of author 楊若慈 Yáng Ruòcuī and her late twin sister, fan studies scholar and historian,  楊若暉離 Yáng Ruòhuī. Yáng Ruòcuī, using the shared pseudonym, has written several popular Baihe books and, in 2022, ran a successful crowdfunding campaign for Kitanhana Monogatari (綺譚花物語) a Taiwanese historical, supernatural Yuri manga to be translated into Japanese. I’m reading that now, and will review when I am done, of course, but I had set it aside to read this book first.

Before I begin, I have a few notes: For the purposes of this review I will be referring to fan culture as “Lily culture” as opposed to Baihe or Yuri, so I don’t keep bouncing back and forth between terms, as my translation tool did. ^_^ I do not read Chinese, and know very little of fan culture in Taiwan, only what I understand from this book, so If I make any substantive mistakes, I apologize up front.

This book is the fourth iteration of itself, and includes the initial article on Taiwanese Lily Culture and the revised version as appendices. The graduate thesis Yáng Ruòhuī wrote is not included, but I imagine it is available in Chinese-language thesis sources, as we have English-language ones. This, then is the fourth iteration of that work, with new research completed after Yáng Ruòhuī’s death in 2015 from cancer.

Where my book, By Your Side: The First 100 Year of Yuri Anime and Manga (which gets one line of a mention here, as Yáng notes that there is one Lily history book, in English) aims to tell the story of Yuri history in Japan and how it spread globally, Yáng’s book is very focused on Taiwanese Lily culture. So for the purposes of this book, Lily culture began in Taiwan in late 2003, into 2004. Although there was lesbian literature before that, when Maria-sama ga Miteru fandom began to form a Lily Forum online, was the functional beginning of Taiwanese Lily Culture. Much of this book is analysis of the Lily Forum’s activities in translation and dissemination, discussion of nomenclature  – which continues to be a thriving topic of conversation among Lily fans everywhere!

Because Yáng says she has little experience with Japanese Lily culture directly, the focus of the work is, instead on the activities of Lily fans in Taiwan (translation, doujinshi events, forum discussion) and the influences into Lily culture from China, from ACG (Anime, Comics, Game) culture and industry at large and from the consumed media. There is an essay about why Magical Girl anime is so synonymous with Lily, to the point that non-Lily magical girl anime, like many of the obviously heterosexual PreCure are still so popular with Lily fans.  There were a few points in that essay I’d like to revisit and maybe expand upon one day.

One of my favorite takeaways is  a discussion of what Yáng calls “Lily-reading.” Of course our fandom is hypersensitive to subtext – arguably, seeing where it is not, but Yáng talks about this as an active trait of fans, the lilyfying, if you will, of non-subtextual text. By engaging in Lily reading, Lily culture fans take characters who may even be overtly in a non-same-sex relationship in the text, and turn that character and another female character into a couple. To use Sailor Moon as an example, Usagi is explicitly paired with a male counterpart and yet, fan artists and writers have no qualms about pairing her romantically or sexually with her Senshi in story or art. This is what Yáng refers to as “Lily reading.” I like that and will use it going forward.

A large part of all the essays is a discussion of the assumption that “Lily is for men,” an assumption that historically underpins fandom discourse. From the very first essay, Yáng sees that this has never been true in Chinese fandom, any more than it is in any other fandom. Our Okazu Global Yuri Fandom Survey turned up slightly less than a quarter of Yuri fandom identifies as men. Yáng found approximately a 1:6 ratio of men to women in Taiwanese fandom.

Another interesting learning was the source of the relatively recent argument that GL means “real women in relationships,” where “Yuri” is a term about fantasy lesbianism.  When it popped up a few years ago, I had no idea where it had come from. And the fandom proposing it was so angry for some reason that they twisted the history of GL and Yuri up, so they were claiming Yuri was a publisher term and GL the fan term – which is the opposite of the truth. To respond I wrote Why We Call It “Yuri” for Anime Feminist. It was odd, because that interpretation had popped up so suddenly and with such virulence that I could not understand where it came from. (TBH, I kind of just mentally assumed Tumblr, because fandom there is weirdly angry and judgy ALL THE TIME.)

It turns out that source of that naming may well be Chinese fandom. Yáng talks about the shifting interpretations of GL, lesbian and Lily and how the arguments about what they *mean* became heated, as humans are always looking for definitive and fixed meanings for words that, by their very nature, have none. In part, Yáng attributes this to both social and legal taboo of discussing homosexuality when the Lily Club Forum began. Any discussion of lesbianism as such was shut down, for fear of censorship. That may well have lingered long past the need, as fandom everywhere tends to be conservative by nature.

In the conclusion, Yáng proposes these three simplified “definitions,” for the terms “lesbian,” “GL” and “Baihe/Yuri/Lily” works of popular culture.

“Lesbian” would refer to stories of real life people and their real-life issues. This might be same-sex marriage (which Taiwan became the first East Asian country to make legal in 2019, thus removing that from the list of “issues.”)

“GL” is pop culture (ACG)-related materials that focus on romance, for entertainment. I.e, there might be overlap with lesbian media, but that is not the main goal.

“Baihe/Yuri/Lily” works are any  works (even overlapping with the above two categories) that does not include awareness or mention of lesbian identity. In, other words, Yáng is saying what I have always said here, “lesbian content without lesbian identity.” ^_^

Yáng ends the book with a repeated appeal that Taiwan has, up through the publication of this book, not had a strong native Lily creative industry. Most of the work is translated from Japanese or imported from Japan, China, Korea. With the relaxing of that taboo, Yáng hopes to see more native Lily flourish. And, of course, so do I.

Ratings:

Overall – 10

Anyone researching Yuri will want to get a copy of this book for sure. It was a fantastic look at a part of fandom I had not really looked at before.