Yurikuma Arashi PSA
To all the people shrugging off or downright despising Yurikuma Arashi as disgusting male gaze fetish porn or something: I think you’re entirely missing the point. I think it’s time for me to explain you a thing, gaugau!
Yurikuma is one of the works of the brilliant but notorious Ikuhara, known for anime like Utena and production work on bigshot yuri-approved Sailor Moon. He’s said time and time again that he will write lesbian characters and yuri relationships into his stories, mostly for the reason that it usually does not detract from the story at hand, allowing him to build a great story without just romance to it to create substance.
You see, Ikuhara uses his stories to make points, and it’s up to us to try and figure them out. Sure, they’re cryptic, but it’s a fun and a wild ride for us as viewers, and that’s something I refuse to take for granted. With Utena there was a lot about adolescence and some important points about various other things that I’m too tired to think about right now, and with Sailor Moon it was a little more of proof that lesbians could be incorporated into a show for a relatively younger audience in a healthy relationship that didn’t define them wholly as people, amongst other things.
And in Yurikuma, Ikuhara makes perhaps his most poingant point yet. It’s all about you guys. Yep, all of you. Why? Because it’s a cleverly made criticism of both the anime industry, and society as a whole, and their treatment of lesbianism.
Society tries to stay inconspicuous, or invisible. Society follows trends. Those who break the trends pay the price.
From the beginning, the girls who are excluded are those who choose to love as they wish. Metaphors aside, it’s pretty clear that they exclude girls for loving other girls, causing girls like those that Life Sexy spies on to keep their love under lock and key. Many even confuse friendship for love, or at least mask love under the guise of ‘friendship‘, like Yuriika does.
Not only is exclusion a key factor, but the fact that the Yuri Court is under the supreme control of Life Sexy certainly is no coincidence. Yuri as a genre, and lesbianism as a theme or trend in the media, is governed by the laws of eroticism and sex, much more than is the case for gay males or those of another sexuality or gender. From the beginning, we have been both loved and hated by you.
We are loved in the sense that we are seen as objects of lust in the eyes of men, but hated in the fact that we exist and yet are not willing to become objects of their affection and so break the rules of society.
You see it all the time. When a new yuri anime comes along, the first general reaction is either ‘is it some male gaze bullshit‘ or ‘regardless of the content, it’s gotta be male gaze bullshit. ew.‘ Both attitudes factor into this, as yuri is so often portrayed for the eyes of those that cannot have us and refuse to acknowledge our sexuality that we automatically believe that everything yuri is male gaze and nothing is ‘real‘. That’s how far it’s gone. Don’t believe me?
I was sat in front of the TV with my mum once, flicking mindlessly between two music channels out of boredom. One was your standard near-naked twerking sorta deal, the other was a storytelling sort of music video with two girls falling in love. When the two girls kissed, fully clothed and innocently in love, my mum said that the other video, where girls were writhing nearly-naked around a single guy, was more ‘decent’ and less ‘male-gaze-y’. Now doesn’t that tell you something. Not to say that wearing little clothing and twerking isn’t ok, but to say that one video was clearly meant to be sexual whilst the other was clearly not.
The problem that society has with lesbians but not with gay men so much is one that has arisen out of misogyny. Somewhere along the line somebody thought that lesbians were clearly not lesbians, and in fact were ready to pounce onto the ‘right guy’ when the time came, and unsurprisingly it caught on. I went on omegle once (for shits and giggles) and the first thing the guy said to me was ‘so lesbian means you’re just hard to get, right?‘
A guy liked me once. He was pretty sweet and I didn’t know him well so I tried to turn him down as kindly as possible, explaining that I liked another girl and was 100% gay. He must have misheard ‘gay‘ as ‘i wanna take it slow‘, clearly, and decided to spam me with promises that ‘we can be friends first‘ and ‘it’s ok to start off slow‘. I deleted his number when it became too much. I’m far from alone, and many other people have had it worse.
My own family and people I thought I knew have fallen prey to this ‘invisible storm‘ in real life, and the ‘wall of severance‘ that separates us from the rest of society is built around false eroticism and misogynistic sexual colonialism.
It may sound like I’ve gone off on a tangent here, but everything that I have said and experienced is ultimately relevant. Why? Because Ikuhara is criticising the society that we live in in Yurikuma Arashi, and the extents that the invisible storm of society will go to in order to exclude and harm those who do not ‘follow social cues‘. When we get to a point where even lesbian love in its purest form is considered enough to make us all criminal-bears, then where the hell did we go wrong? If we can’t break down the wall, we are forever fated to destroy ourselves from the inside.
