Also written: shoujo-ai
A genre depicting romantic relationships between women, spanning subtle emotional intimacy through to explicit romance. Read from the opening, as a 1.
1One — initiative. That is the reduction of this term, and the shelf it is read from.
Yuri covers manga centred on romantic or intensely emotional relationships between women. Its range is unusually wide — from work where the relationship is largely unspoken to explicitly romantic and sexual material.
Yuri developed from more than one source, which is why the category feels less unified than Boys Love.
One strand descends from shojo magazine traditions of intense female friendship, where emotional closeness is the subject and romance may be implied rather than stated. Another is explicitly romantic and has its own dedicated magazines and readership.
Yuri's audience is more mixed than BL's. It is read substantially by women, including queer women writing and reading about their own experience, and also by a male readership — a split that produces recurring disagreement within the genre about who it is for and what it should be doing.
Yuri has grown considerably in the past decade, with more dedicated magazines, more licensed titles in English, and a noticeable shift toward adult protagonists and workplace settings rather than exclusively school ones.
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 28, which folds down to 1.
One is leader & pioneer — beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone. The reference files it as a first move. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 1's appetite for a clean, decisive beginning.
The vowels alone reduce to 3, the consonants to 7. Expression underneath, inquiry on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The 1 mistakes being first for being right. Several of these texts describe launches that mattered enormously for a year and then mattered to nobody. What the 1 still asks is that you notice what had to not exist for this to be possible. The other entries that reduce to 1 are collected on The Opening.