Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, a few devoted fans of anime sat hunched over their computer keyboards. The sound of the modem was loud and screechy, but it signaled their journey to Usenet, and groups where they could – for many, for the first time in their lives – talk with folks who had similar interests as they did. Among those fans were a small group of folks who were interested in characters who – it seemed to them –  were, androgynous, or butchy or otherwise queer.

Back in those days, when a new character showed up who definitely, probably had a crush on a character of the same sex or even more rarely a couple who were clearly a couple, this group would rejoice! We are represented! They would celebrate with fanfiction, and music videos and art and cosplay and other rituals.

As years passed, we were given more of this; more couples, more characters who represented the things we looked for in media. But the more we got, it seems, the less we’re satisfied. This is true not just with anime, but with every media. Why is it that attempts by media companies at representation now feel so flat and stale when formerly it was so exciting?

Your Story

Over the new year holiday I was reading articles about media franchises that were/are not for me, and the reactions of those various audiences….and thinking about how much work we, as fans, put into a franchise to make it our own.

Trans and queer kids read Harry Potter and felt the story about a kid who is othered by his family spoke to them, personally. It makes perfect sense that they did, of course, and their love for the series that validated their existence was fierce. Which made the ongoing betrayal of that fandom by the creator just that much worse. Molly Fischer’s Who Did J.K. Rowling Become? seeded an idea in my head.

Following upon that, I read Andrew Tejada’s Representation Without Transformation: Can Hollywood Stop Changing Cartoon Characters of Color?  and I saw the exact *same* questions being asked. As media does a better job of diversifying stories…why are we more unsatisfied than when we had no representation at all? I thought back to those Usenet days, when a character might appear on screen for one episode and still become a Yuri icon.

Because we had less representation, we were more easily satisfied with what we could get.

The gold area in the target was bigger- merely seeing someone like ourselves on screen or on the page…or even someone whose issues we could slot into our own….was enough to be cause for celebration. A gay character in a movie who wasn’t predatory, murderous or mentally unstable was a triumph. Something that showed a non-straight, non-cisgender person in a positive light – even if they were played by a straight actor, or the portrayal wasn’t perfect – was significant. The bullseye was easy to hit, because so few companies bothered even trying to shoot at the target.

Creative studio CLAMP was given endless amount of queer cred, simply because they had same-sex characters who sometimes touched, or had obvious affection for one another, even if it was often unspoken and invisible. They were not queer creators writing about themselves; they were a creative team giving us a glimpse of how they’d like to see us. We accepted it as how they thought we’d like to be seen. This is Your Story, they said, and we accepted gratefully.

Our Story

In 2013, Adachi and Shimamura (安達としまむら) was a light novel series in Japan. The first volume had come out 2012 and by 2013, there were two volumes. I read the first and was unimpressed. Over the years, as the series progressed and picked up fans, my initial review would on occasion receive unsatisfied comments, because I had failed to anticipate how the series would progress over 8 years.  ^_^ In 2013, some Yuri fans in Japan were delighted by this series which contained a reference to the author’s previous work and evolved into a romance.

By 2013, I had already seen Yuri go through a number of shifts and changes. We’d had Aoi Hana / Sweet Blue Flowers, for almost a decade by then. We were in a boom of Yuri, with three manga magazines, a handful of out creators, a lot of queer fans online.  Straight fandom was happy enough with another schoolgirl story, but queer fandom was already asking where were the adults?  Where were the lesbians? Where were the queer people in these queer stories?

We were no longer as satisfied with media crumbs as we had been. When in 2015, Yuri fans got a new gateway Yuri series, Bloom Into You, it had both lesbians AND adults! (This is exactly why I’d like to see more adult role models in teen lit. For a lot of queer teens, seeing one adult who is open, happy and out can make the most extraordinary difference.)

Yuri as a genre had already left girl-meets-girl stories behind, here we were able to see something that looked more like our story. But, even as we got closer, many of us were waiting impatiently for queer Yuri to become more widely available. When folks began to identify with Yuu as aromantic or asexual no one argued that they were wrong. What we said was, “this may be Our story, but it might not be Your story, so don’t be surprised if Yuu ends up not aro or ace.” The odds that the series might miss that mark grew, even as it hit other marks in the gold. Because the targets had become more specific, it became less likely that all of them might be hit.

Because we had more representation, mediocre representation fails to satisfy us.

We wanted more. We wanted what all marginalized groups have wanted – to be represented in our media. If this story is ours, we argue, then we should be involved. Valid criticisms of Disney’s movie Soul argue that they missed opportunities to make the story as authentic as they might have. Intentions aside, some folks felt it was praiseworthy for aiming in the right direction, while many critics saw it as Disney handing out another Your Story. I had a similar reaction to watching Kinky Boots, a story many older straight women had told me they enjoyed. I mostly saw all the old, tired stereotypes. This is “Your Story,” the straight audience was saying. Look, how happy it is!

MY Story

Fans aren’t always looking for specific reflection of their selves. Obviously not, as so much of fandom has been built upon media created by and for and, most especially about, people unlike us. We’ve been happy enough following Frodo and Sam and Luke and Han, and Kirk and Spock. It’s just that after decades of that, some of us want stories that make space for people like us.

The closer media comes to representing us, the higher the emotional stakes are for us.

Now, in 2021, when we see media that purports to represent us, we’re looking at, not just who it is for, but who made it, who is in it – who the cooks and servers are, as well as who is at the table. It’s not that we don’t believe that someone outside whatever we define as “us” can’t possibly tell a story well, it’s that we’d really just like to be included when our story is being told as a bare minimum. Without me in my story…is it really my story?

Even worse, if the so-called representation fails to hit the mark, there’s more emotional risk and, in some places, actual physical risk. If a mainstream media shows say, femme lesbians as good and butch lesbians as predatory, that could have serious real-world repercussions. Which is why you saw gay men angry about gay representation in The Prom. It might be their story…but the guy playing it wasn’t them. Worse, it annoyed the hell out of folks who thought an opportunity for a not-tragic gay story was missed.

When the shot comes close to the gold, but fails to hit it, for some folks, it might as well have missed the target altogether. When I watched the trailer for The Happiest Season, I thought, “Well, this may be Our Story, but it’s not My Story.” It’s a story that spent a lot of time in the unfun stereotypical pain of being closeted and very little time in the joy of being in love. I do not in any way object to other people enjoying it – but it’s not for me. At all.

A Yuri story in which no one is gay or there is no recognition of the couple as a same-sex couple from characters around them; where there is no society, they have no friends who are gay or a community…or media…or a functional Internet… feels obviously inauthentic at this point.

Hitting The Gold

For decades, we’ve accepted corporate entities and straight creators telling us “This is Your Story.”

Now, we are even getting Our Story told in a lot of media. And as we get more, sometimes, I might even get My Story and you get Yours. Certainly, in this day and age of crowdfunding and social platforms, there’s nothing at all stopping any one us from telling our own stories exactly the way we want to. And yet, I am still not quite satisfied. ^_^ Today, as I look into the next decade and the next century of Yuri, I plan on pushing myself and the media I consume towards one goal:

I want media that actively models the world I want to see for people who have not yet imagined it.

This is a real limitation of looking for our reflections in media – we’re looking to see who we were, and who we are. I want media that tells both us and those who are not us, who we can become.

When the media we create and the media we consume represents us in a way that expresses and models how we want to be seen and be treated, then we have queer representation that hits the mark.