Post 1- From Class-S to I'm in Love With the Villainess: Is it gay to be gay?
In the beginning, there was no yuri (what a sad world to live in!), but in the early years of the 20th century, Class-S was born.
Class-S is a term used to coin a genre really prominent in Japanese fiction in the early 20th century. To sum it up, the S stands for concepts like sex, sentimentalism, shoujo, sisterhood, and more. These stories took place in all-girls schools, where they would experience romantic and/or platonic feelings towards each other, and they would even get to experience sexual attraction sometimes.
I will love to touch more on Class-S, how it came to be yuri and the Year 24 group and their works in future posts, but for now, I just wanted to clarify that, looking at Class-S as yuri’s predecessor, it had little to nothing to do with queerness, as these stories between young girls were considered just a phase. They would graduate school and marry men. Everything would go back to normal in the end.
We travel in time now to October 2023, when the I’m in Love With the Villainess anime based on Inori’s light novels and manga with the same title was released. This story is an isekai who follows Rei Oohashi, or Rae Taylor, as she is called in the world of her favourite otome videogame, to which she was spontaneously transported. The former burned-out office worker now lives in her favorite game, which takes place in some kind of Medieval-like time period, and where she is in love with the villainess rather than the male love interests. I was personally already obsessed with the novels so I really loved that they were doing an anime adaptation.
The anime had a good reception overall, with a bit of a viral moment originating from a conversation that happened on episode 3 (and part of the reason I thought of creating this blog).
The following does not contain spoilers per se:
Misha, Rae, Lene and Claire are having tea together and Misha confronted Rae with the following question:
“Are you what they call gay?”
And it says so in Japanese as well, using “doseai-sha”, which directly translates to “homosexual”. Lene scolds Misha, as she deems that question inappropriate, to which Rae clarifies that she is okay talking about it. Claire expresses that she is uncomfortable with that conversation and that she feels herself in danger around Rae, to which Misha points out that those are prejudices and it is not okay to have them. After Claire has been scolded, Lene verbalizes what she just thinks she understood: For Rae, gender doesn’t matter when it comes to love. But turns out, it does. Rae clarifies that, for her, gender matters as she only likes girls, not boys.
I loved this conversation from the bottom of my heart. Also, in the novels, topics like being transgender and gender non-conformity are also mentioned very thoroughly from Rae’s thoughts and memories from her previous life and some other events that take place in the story.
This marks a very big checkbox for me about queerness in manga and anime: It is queer out loud. So I guess this raises a question: Does a manga or anime need to be queer this out loud in order to be classified as “properly queer”? My answer is, although I loved this and wish to see it more in this kind of works, it probably shouldn’t be a necessary criteria to be met. At the end of the day, I am seeing everything through Western lenses and, though I think it is a worldwide wish to be able to speak about queerness more openly in fiction, every country has their own reality, as every author and artist does. All in all, not talking about something does not make it any less true.
But, after episode 3 was released, it caused some negative reactions online.
These screenshots were uploaded by Twitter user ShoujoCent:
Although not talking about something doesn’t make it any less true, it seems like some yuri fans don’t consider the yuri genre to be queer in on itself. They don’t consider the sexual and romantic attraction between two women to be necessarily sapphic.
This reminded me of the Class-S conception: These girls love each other romantically, they are attracted to each other sexually, but it is just a thing girls do sometimes, isn’t it?
It is pure entertainment, it is simply fun, or beautiful to watch. The stereotypical girl who chases another girl and is not afraid to say out loud that she wants her as it is not a serious thing is simply a loved trope, it doesn’t mean anything.
One thing that the World Wide Web has given us is that people speak up their minds more often and louder than before. Someone could read yuri in the 80’s just because they liked the appeal of it and then be a homophobe, but no one would know about the hypocrisy of those two acts coexisting together. Probably, many more wouldn't think that is a hypocritial thing to do. Sadly, this thought never died, and queer people are still regarded by many as just a theoretical concept made to entertain them, to have opinions about us and to consume us as simple content.
This is not to say that Class-S was untouched by queer people, as one of the most notable authors, Nobuko Yoshiya, was a lesbian. Also, Class-S authors were not to blame for the way queer themes were used devoid of queerness for (mostly) straight readers to consume. But the message that those works expressed 100 years ago should have already disappeared, as in most of the world’s societies we know about the existence of queer people as real, tangible beings.
For me, queerness in fiction doesn’t have to be about saying it out loud, but it sure has to do with not separating queer people and queer themes from queerness.
All in all, I’m in Love With the Villainess is a very queer work by a very queer author, since Inori also happens to be a trans woman and her themes really do have a contrast with the Class-S narrative.
What do you think? Do we share the same concept of queerness?
Thank you for reading my first post!
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