yuri as a genre

alluded to in my last post, i've been thinking a lot about this lately. i understand the origins of the terms of yuri and yaoi as being very helpful in that girls & boys love are both things that stray from the heterosexual norm and as such will have different aspects by virtue of not sharing aspects of i guess straight culture. i still do think that such terms are more obsolete; the true value of those tags has really faded and does stories that get categorized as yuri or as yaoi a disservice. i feel like this is probably going to have some certain pushback just because that sort of overrides their status as like, pushing against societal norms, but i do feel like it's not ideally meant to be a genre. the relationship type tells you (mostly) nothing specifically. the most i can think of only really applies to yuri and would then involve the interplay between homophobia and misogyny (which i can also fathom an argument for even for m/m couples, but which is more clearly prevalent if they're both girls), but that's never a common subject matter for things in my experience. i think just grouping something as yuri or yaoi as opposed to actual genre tags like scifi and whatnot can be so limiting for legitimately good stories. this might be limited just to myself, but when i personally come across a recommendation post for something and the key point is that it's about two girls or two guys, i get slightly uninterested. tell me more about what the actual premise of the story is, for god's sake. this is seeping into a trope talk post more than anything, and i feel the same about the yuri/yaoi tags as i do about monikers like enemies to lovers and the one bed trope and whatever else, which is to really say that the tropes themselves can work and i don't hate them by themselves, but that more elaboration really has to be done aside from just the label. i don't think that everything needs to have some grand theme and message that must reach everyone in the audience, but i do think that if it's a story that's trying to take itself seriously (and it's totally fine not to, i think; it just shouldn't be everything that's out there in the literary sphere) that it should actually try to do something fresh with the tropes. anyway, pardon the discursive post (though most of my posts tend to end up this way). hope you've all been doing well!!

enemies to lovers

i love thinking about trope talk so much. there's a lot of things i could say about tropes commonly utilized in public fiction (especially in the ya sphere with That Genre of advertisement. the one with the arrows and the tropes pointed at the characters in the cartoonish art styles; you know the one), but i love thinking about it in fic more because there's such a playground there (and because the universality of the tropes permits me to be really general as opposed to working within the confines of things of just the popular ya books, etc.)

for me, the two biggest things i like thinking about are enemies to lovers and aus. aus deserve a whole post for themselves, so i'm going to be reserving that for some other time, when i feel good enough to go on my rambles about them. enemies to lovers is a trope that i used to dislike all of the time, but i've warmed up to it nowadays, and i think that's because i can identify why i used to dislike it.

i think enemies to lovers fundamentally requires just one thing, that thing being a genuine personal dislike. which doesn't sound hard to pull off, but in combination with the common societal values that naturally pervade what you write and what you perceive as "acceptable", it becomes a lot harder to pull off. by this, i mean to say that much of the time, there are two paths pursued: the hatred being founded on a misunderstanding (mutual or otherwise), being really old and dating back to childhood (interplay with the childhood friends trope, and also likely connected to the misunderstanding point), or if the setting permits, perceived ideological differences derived from being on opposing sides.

the misunderstanding point i understand as being drawn from convenience. enemies to lovers is a genuinely hard thing to pull off; given that its fundamental requirement is hatred, it seems really hard to have them in a position where they can reconcile. i understand, but it gets frustrating as a reader to see people fumble around and being unable to communicate, which is why i previously disliked that. i also find that if it's a misunderstanding, it's not genuine enough hatred (don't get me wrong; it can be genuine hatred even if founded based off of a misunderstanding, but things come back to convenience: if the misunderstanding is just drawn-out and nothing serious, you can get a facsimile of hatred that can justify slapping the trope tag on, and that's what i tend to see as the most common route pursued). given that this is a post specifically about fanfiction and that fanfiction is naturally self indulgent wish fulfillment (i am a fic writer myself. this is in lighthearted fun), i can't hate this so much, but i don't tend to read enemies to lovers thanks to this

the more interesting route for me personally is the (usually dystopian) positioning of the two love interests as being on opposing sides. the hatred here is oftentimes drawn from them being on opposite sides, and since it's a dystopia, it's going to be clear that one of the sides is going to be something along the lines of ontologically evil, which plays into the trope, right? i think that on the contrary, the common want for your love interests to be moral angels sabotages the setting. more times than not, i find that the love interest on the "evil" side will have been forced to play the role or some other thing that denotes unwillingness and a shared sympathy with the protagonist. i don't hate this either, to be clear, but i feel that if the ideological difference ceases to be a motivation for them to hate each other, that the enemies part collapses; they were never Personal enemies if it was a perceived ideological difference, to me. this is akin to the one-sided misunderstanding, as the person who's unwilling to work understands that they're on the same side. the more interesting route to me personally is the route less chosen, where the love interest is actually on the evil side willingly, because that's the only time an ideological difference would be sustained, and then that also permits interesting commentary on brainwashing and things of that sort.

the summary of all of this is of course to like what you like. i just can't really like enemies to lovers unless it's from a vetted friend of mine who sees what i see in it, and well, that's fine. it's fandom, at the end of the day. like what you like