Your first yuri manga/anime?

For me it was a manwha, Maison de Maid. That first began my yuri rabbit hole and then I read I married my best friend to shut my parents up and Cirque Arachne. Cirque Arachne is probably still one of my favorites but I haven't read it in a while.

im currently reading my first one right now! its called Handsome Girl and Sheltered Girl :D In im the part where kanda-kun tells her friend-group that ookuma-chan is her girlfriend

When I started watching anime purposefully in like 2017 I always enjoyed the homo-eroticism in Cute Girls Do Cute things type anime, but I never felt like seeking out Yuri.

I'm not quite sure but I think my first Yuri thing was actually a western Visual Novel: Highway Blossoms. I read it without knowing what genre romance it'd be so I was kinda clueless and got (pleasantly) surprised by the queer relationship. I still thought I was a guy back then, so it didn't kick anything off. I replayed it with very difficult and conflicted feelings after the, uhhh, gender questioning and realization happened and both wishing so badly to be Amber while still being somewhat unsure about myself.

There wasn't really a gateway drug Yuri for me. Anime doesn't have much and I mainly watched anime back then. Just one day a while after becoming sure of my gender I asked a friend who had read some Yuri what they'd recommend and I went and read Hanjuku Joshi which I enjoyed, and then proceeded to inhale all (most) of Morishima Akiko's bibliography, read Girl Friends I think (and proceeded not to check out Morinaga Milks's bibliography rightaway cuz I didn't like Girl Friends much), and ended up becoming a religious database consumer and got into manga properly which I now read more regularly than I watch anime.

And over time it released the himejoshi I've deep down always been, I'm hopelessly in love with girls in love <3

@LilyBlueCat oh, Nanzaki Iku. I won't lie, it's hardly the most widespread gateway into yuri, but... that's really cool!

Even though my introduction was entirely different, I can totally relate to what you said. Once you're in the rabbit hole, there's no way out.

@LilyBlueCat My then-girlfriend showed me Simoun, which is an original yuri anime of, I'd say, grandiose complexity that requires serious effort to make your way through it, but that was it for me. I made my way through it and I cried for the last episode for hours.

Then I found out that you have enough fingers on one hand to count good yuri anime and went on to read yuri manga. Never regretted it :D

@LilyBlueCat Well, in fairness, I haven't rewatched it for years, and I may feel unreasonably nostalgic about it... The first episodes are so confusing and make so little sense that it's very easy to drop the entire thing. I recall really wanting to do that, but she dissuaded me, saying it would get better. It did :D But the plot still seemed to be slightly convoluted. Ah, anyway. The final episode was very romantic, so I liked it in the end.

And you're right. While anime seriously lacks good yuri series, you can always find the right thing for you in the world of manga. It's just... Sometimes I think, would it kill you to adapt something gorgeous like KitaKawa or The Summer You Were There instead of making another hyper-predictable isekai adventure of a ridiculously overpowered victim of reincarnation? I guess not in this life :D

@LilyBlueCat huh... I can only guarantee, from what I remember, Simoun is anything but a yuri bait, although there are some caveats that I can't actually reveal unless you want spoilers.

Speaking of The Summer You Were There, I fear that a film would be too short to include everything. Would be such a disappointment if they missed out on all those subtleties there... But KitaKawa is absolutely perfect for anime. It's got the exact right length to be told within one season.

I was once contacted by a guy here on MAL, and he seemed to seriously believe that all yuri was like Adachi to Shimamura (the anime, not the manga or the light novel even). He even convinced himself that it was very realistic. I'm not confident to this day that he wasn't trolling me, but in any case, there are many people who base their impression of yuri on anime, not manga. And that's so unfair and simply sad. I bet those people would be pretty shocked if they see a KitaKawa anime, but—serves them right, if you ask me :D

And yet, as you said, this recent revival of interest in adapting yuri manga into anime is a glimmer of hope in this dark, cursed world.

This Monster Wants to Eat Me is such a divisive thing. I'd suggest that many people who had read it would ask, "yuri wen?" while I think it's been there all along. There is a lot of half-hidden yuri there if you ask me. But my view isn't exactly popular or widely supported, so...

@LilyBlueCat It's lovely that you brought up Shuninta Amano. Her works seem to be often overlooked by newcomers, even though I could easily say that most of them are classics at this point. What I always loved about her style is her relentless desire to tell layered stories that rely on a complex network of references. In "The Feelings We All Must Endure," for example, she does this amazing thing where the characters representing seven deadly sins evolve to become their own antipodes, which is basically in line with Jung's enantiodromia concept. What I mean to say is that you don't often get yuri as nuanced as that (I think the only other author who seriously invests in the intellectual level of their yuri manga is Sal Jiang, although her approach is different). And Shuninta Amano does this sort of thing even in something as silly as Ayame 14, even though it's a lewd coming-of-age comedy.

I completely agree that, to many people, yuri equals fluff. That's why, for example, some people go as far as to say that CGDCT counts as yuri, too (a take I personally find absolutely ridiculous). Yuri is often defined as a genre about close (and not necessarily romantic) relationships between women, and technically, CGDCT falls into this category, but it is clear to me on a purely intuitive level that those are very different things. Something like a convergent evolution, maybe?

Personally, I love any form of yuri as long as it's a good story. It's not always the case, but it would be weird if all works in one genre were only good. What concerns me a little is that, with the abundance of gorgeous contemporary yuri like Amayo no Tsuki or the vice queens of toxic yuri (by them, I mean the triad of Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell, My Girlfriend's not Here Today, and The Face You Shouldn't Show), it may take years for a newcomer to finally get to read something a bit older, like Shuninta Amano, Takemiya Jin, or Ajiichi's classic doujins, such as Dear My Teacher. Hell, even Ohsawa Yayoi's earlier output is like that. It's not like anyone can do a thing about it, but it's still a pity, at least for me.

@LilyBlueCat It's lovely that you brought up Shuninta Amano. Her works seem to be often overlooked by newcomers, even though I could easily say that most of them are classics at this point. What I always loved about her style is her relentless desire to tell layered stories that rely on a complex network of references. In "The Feelings We All Must Endure," for example, she does this amazing thing where the characters representing seven deadly sins evolve to become their own antipodes, which is basically in line with Jung's enantiodromia concept. What I mean to say is that you don't often get yuri as nuanced as that (I think the only other author who seriously invests in the intellectual level of their yuri manga is Sal Jiang, although her approach is different). And Shuninta Amano does this sort of thing even in something as silly as Ayame 14, even though it's a lewd coming-of-age comedy.

I completely agree that, to many people, yuri equals fluff. That's why, for example, some people go as far as to say that CGDCT counts as yuri, too (a take I personally find absolutely ridiculous). Yuri is often defined as a genre about close (and not necessarily romantic) relationships between women, and technically, CGDCT falls into this category, but it is clear to me on a purely intuitive level that those are very different things. Something like a convergent evolution, maybe?

Personally, I love any form of yuri as long as it's a good story. It's not always the case, but it would be weird if all works in one genre were only good. What concerns me a little is that, with the abundance of gorgeous contemporary yuri like Amayo no Tsuki or the vice queens of toxic yuri (by them, I mean the triad of Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell, My Girlfriend's not Here Today, and The Face You Shouldn't Show), it may take years for a newcomer to finally get to read something a bit older, like Shuninta Amano, Takemiya Jin, or Ajiichi's classic doujins, such as Dear My Teacher. Hell, even Ohsawa Yayoi's earlier output is like that. It's not like anyone can do a thing about it, but it's still a pity, at least for me.