Lately I watched the "special episodes" 1 and 2 of Soulmate Adventure season 2. Well-- maybe. Maybe of Soulmate Adventure season 2. I don't know how BilliBilli pictures in all their wisdom categorize these episodes in their "seasons" format. They might not have labeled them under season 2 or put them in a season 2 playlist because they are "special episodes" even though they continue, complete, and are crucial to understanding season 2. They are just the end of season 2, if I can be presumptuous enough to categorize these episodes in any given way. If I can make a prediction in all of the hubris of people who try to figure out what the writers of Soulmate Adventure are ever thinking and doing-- probably you won't understand season 3 of Soulmate Adventure if you did not watch these "special episodes." But maybe I'll be wrong because I'm wrong often about Soulmate Adventure.
Anyway. I am right about one thing-- it's good. It's *really* good. You should watch Soulmate Adventure.
Soulmate Adventure is the official english title of a Chinese animation series that I first knew as "Feng Ling Yu Xiu" which is just the names of the characters. This is fitting because the characters themselves use contractions of their own names together in the story itself, as if they understood, that we would do this to them when we ship them, and also, that when I first watched the pilot episode of the show on a random anime streaming site with my wife, I knew it as Feng Ling Yu Xiu. Before BilliBilli acquired it and put it all in a 9 hours and 32 minutes video that you can watch right now, for free. All 9 hours and 32 minutes are very worth watching. You should watch, whatever the fuck this show is called, and you should watch all of it.
Hey is Soulmate Adventure "yuri"?
I fucking got you, you little shit-- that's the fucking thesis of the post now you can't escape--
I don't ask this question because I am invested in the categorization of the show. I'm not interested in being able to put it under yuri in my backloggd or whatever-- forgive me if this is not how backloggd works, I don't use these things. I don't use websites. I write these posts on vellum and hand them to a bird and you see them somehow later. Anyway. I don't care about what it means for the show to be categorized as "yuri" but I've been thinking more about what these categorizations mean for the people who experience, discuss, and promote works of culture. Soulmate Adventure is infrequently classified as a "yuri show" because the japanese lexicon for these kind of animations suggestive of female homosociality/homoeroticism, is more popular than the chinese lexicon. People more attuned with the latter might call it a "Baihe" instead. Baihe is gaining a lot of purchase online among people I see my friends repost on social media, that I myself don't interact with, because, I don't interact with anybody. Because the bird does that for me, somehow. And the bird doesn't speak human--
I feel like I have to go on a tangent here. I write a lot like how I think. Obviously not like literally. Not like this is exactly what I'm thinking right now. But in translating what I think into writing I just-- I do weird shit like that paragraph I just wrote that made me write this paragraph. I feel like you will think it's less pretentious if I tell you I find this as much of a curse as you might. Or maybe you love it. I don't know! I don't interact with people or use websites. The bird. I'm going to return to the meat now--
--with the more widespread popularity of chinese web novels in my circles I see "baihe" used as much as, if not more than, "yuri." But there is also an instinctive distinctiveness with which these are approached. Bang Dream Girl's Band Party It's MyGo Presents Ave Mujica (unlike with BilliBilli's sage work of culture, I don't care whether this title is right, and I won't furnish any explanations) is seldom, perhaps never, called a "baihe", at least not, where I can fucking see it. Because that would be "cringeissimo." But also because "Baihe" has certain distinctive characteristics. Soulmate Adventure, for example, is steeped in the specific language of chinese martial arts fiction. The girls operate in "Jianghu", the parallel culture of martial arts that is ruled by "sects" who control martial arts and their practitioners. They quest to uncover the truth of a demonic martial arts that created the "Red Yang Blood Essence" that grants massive internal power at the sacrifice of the person's health and even their sanity. These qualities are deeply associated with chinese action fantasy-- could this be said to be distinctly baihe?
Lately I've been wondering about myself, and about my work, as I often do-- because I'm a narcissist, and therefore, my only real source of misery. The work that I do features and focuses on homosociality and homoeroticism between women. People have called it "yuri"-- I have called it "yuri" because, despite some reservations about whether this is "cancellable" behavior, it's just the language I'm used to. There's no pithy English word that I know of and want to use for this kind of fiction. So I call it "yuri". It feels more cancellable-- even more of a pretension-- to call my work "baihe" though some people have. "Yuri" is in the lexicon of english-speaking lesbians because we read a lot of japanese manga. Baihe has less of this cultural cachet. It's not that "yuri" is any more precise or suitable than "baihe"-- to me they are equally imprecise because I'm neither japanese nor chinese. It feels like I'm stealing valor when I use it. Real meimeis and kouhais have yearned for their jiejies and senpais and put it on the page. I just had my childhood stolen by my parents, and survived being shot at with a gun in school.
However, "yuri" is like "the"-- most of my audience just won't think about it if they see it.
Calling it "yuri", however, leads people to "expect the things that typify yuri." Lately I have seen a lot of people talk about "toxic yuri." Including a friend of mine receiving a befuddled question about "when the toxic yuri" appears in Unjust Depths. To me, judging by the examples I have seen in the wild, it seems that "toxic yuri" is when schoolgirls are demanding or rude to each other, or when the cinematography of an anime with girls in it highlights one girl as "particularly aggressive". In that case, well, I dunno. You figure out when it happens in my story. Interpretative power lies with you. However, there are other expectations-- for example, I would say that most "yuri" works are about one major relationship with maybe few paired off side characters. It's about a dark haired girl and a light haired girl. Let's call them an "adachi" and a "shimamura," even though we won't refer to them in any further examples. Now-- my work is not like that. My work has six galjillion characters in it, and will never be finished. So when people come into my work with the expectation of a "main couple" rather than a like 19th century serialized adventure story where the author "gets bored" and "writes a chapter about some other guy" literally one hundred times in the two years of a weekly serialization-- I feel like we don't adequately convey the facts to the people "expecting yuri." My shit is so much less together than any yuri author's-- I feel like we do people a disservice to give them an impression otherwise.
I don't know, I just think about these things.
I think about someone getting told Unjust Depths is a yuri with "rivals to lovers" under a post where someone is begging for "yuri stories" with a "rivals to lovers theme." I think of Unjust Depths, and many of my works, as a weird, dramatized abstract simulation of a fake history-- history is bigger than any of us and has twenty dyketillion characters in it at any given time. I like doing that-- it's "what I do." It's what I'm interested in. If you tell someone that it has "rivals to lovers" in it-- like yeah probably there are some characters that I can see that with. But they'll also have to develop an enjoyment of communist social organization, national socialist economic pontification, and a little sharky girl who wants to chew on a human femur-- because they will see more of that stuff than raw, focused, "rivals to lovers" content. Someone is on twitter asking "I would like a refreshing natural place to swim in, that doesn't have strange parasites in it" and you can go find a single microgram of the Danube that might qualify as "refreshing" and tests parasite free. Then you tell them to jump in the Danube. Maybe the problem was their question. Maybe they should jump in the Danube like many an honest Magyar has done before them. Maybe it's the Danube's problem for being so fucking full of parasites. I don't know. I am not going to judge any part of this equation and I'm just saying it's low key high key weird to me and I don't have to keep quiet about any of it.
I think about how books get sold now. I think about how I saw a "progression fantasy" book someone was advertising on bluesky, served to me by the execrable Discover page-- which was described as being like "Harry Potter meets The Avengers." This says to me 'this must be the worst work of fiction ever made'. But this is every book. There is a book out there that is advertised "like Venom meets Wuthering Heights." Any possible combination of several existing popular pieces of media is the description of your book, if a publisher gets their grubby hands on it. Unjust Depths is like if-- uh, what's a popular lesbian movie-- it's like "Love Lies Bleeding" meets "Master And Commander." I don't know. I don't know how much that progression fantasy is like "Harry Potter"-- which is to say "transphobic"-- or "The Avengers"-- which is to say "fascist." There could very well be slurs on page one. It might be the most considered piece of fiction I would ever read. It might be better than Mushoku Tensei. It's unlikely to be better than Mushoku Tensei because Mushoku Tensei has Eris in it. I am not going to find out. But it all makes me think-- what typifies "Harry Potter meets the Avengers?" to someone who *wants* that? Who is *looking* for that? What things in those stories, which are then reflected in these stories, make this a useful description to someone?
Is Unjust Depths "yuri"? What do we mean when we say that? Do we *only* mean lesbian homoeroticism or homosociality? Do we mean more?
If you rip off all the planks on a ship and put it back together and one plank is rivals to lovers is that *enough* rivals to lovers for a recommendation?
I used to follow this guy on twitter who would sometimes just breathlessly post a bunch of buzzwords in a single post like it's the last thing his brain is experiencing before death. Vibes, aura, peak, brainrot, rizz, yap, brat, etc etc. Sometimes I think about my work in someone's estimation as a post like that. I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling and my brain devolves into: butch swag, butchfemme, toxic yuri, t4c, t4t, age gap, sizediff, transfemme, slowburn, rivals to lovers, being an adjutant is gay behavior, girldick, eroguro, hung bottom, real robo, authcom, etc. I think about psychically transferring any, or all, of those words from my cognition presently, backwards in time into the brain of my younger self to torment her. I may have done this successfully, leading myself to experience migraines, confusion, gender dysphoria, in the mid 2000s, thus, leading me to be who I am now. I don't know. I honestly wish I had not even considered this notion to begin with because I am rapidly convincing myself that, in the absence of any evidence contrary, I was responsible for making myself gay. And that's cancellable.