Written by Laura Christian

It is one of the most unescapable aspects of anime. All you would have to do is read your share of fanfiction by the eclectic mix found in any mailing list at Onelist or E-Groups and you would find it. You might be shocked, depending on how long you have been on the Web, how long you've been reading fanfiction and so on. But the shock factor in the first time you read a yaoi or yuri fic, or even the tame shounen or shoujo ai, is the largest. Using a psychologist's term, a paradigm shift occurs. The anime world may seem larger, stranger, more full of twists and possibly scarier.

An Introduction: So what are Yaoi and Yuri anyway? Yaoi is an acronym that stands for "yama nashi, oshi nashi, imi nashi" which means no climax, no point, no meaning. It was originally used to describe a manga or doushinji story which had no plot other than to get two male characters in bed with each other. In the transition to the West, it came to be used for text stories as well. Yaoi in itself is a mainly doushinji innovation for such popular manga as Yu*Yu*Hakusho (YYH) and Gundam Wing (GW), a doushinji being a comic based on a particular manga drawn by fans. For original yaoi manga, the term june is more appropriately used. For Western fans, they may be more familiar with the term "slash" which is similar, but not the same as yaoi. The term yuri means basically the same thing, but refers to female - female stories instead. A very good explanation and dictionary list can be found at Aestheticism.com in their Visitor's Section. To clarify a bit further, manga is the original comic (and I use this term for the lack of any other better word) drawn by the creator of the series. Doushinji are drawn by fans for fans, and are spin-offs or based on the original, and as they have artistic license to do so, they can make up yaoi pairings if they want to although there's no such thing in the original. Shounen ai and shoujo ai are literally "boy love" and "girl love". Whereas yaoi and yuri is about sex, if not outright rape, shoujo/shounen ai is about love, emotions, and relationships. Shotakon is a relationship in which one is underage, usually 9 to about 12 years old. A prime example are the CLAMP mangaka (circle of artists) who made their start in doushinjis. They are now responsible for wildly popular series such as X (X/1999 in America), Card Captor Sakura (CCD) and Tokyo Babylon (TB). I chose to use the CLAMP mangaka also for the reason that they do include hints of both shoujo ai, shounen ai and yaoi in their works. The scenes in X with Monou Saya, Fuuma's mother, and Shirou Toru, Kamui's mother, are highly suggestive of shoujo ai, not yuri, because they seem to be in love. In Tokyo Babylon, the relationship between Sumeragi Subaru and Sakurazuka Seishirou is shounen ai, and always referred to in a playful manner, not outright hugs and kisses, but in banter and teasing between Hokuto, Subaru's sister, and Seishirou. (CLAMP never outright admits that it is shounen ai but that is the tone of the manga.) As for CLAMP yaoi, the best example would be the apparent lust that Dark Fuuma feels for Kamui since there is no emotion attached to it, but an admiration or a need to possess Kamui's beauty (and one which I'm sure many a fangirl can understand). Another example would be the attraction between the X's Sakurazuka Seishirou and Sumeragi Subaru, both older and Subaru considerably more bitter. The circumstances are too difficult to explain, but try referring to Ueno Park or X/1999 for more information on CLAMP's most tragic couple. Finally, we come to the seme and uke question. A seme is the person who takes charge in the relationship, and the uke is the person who passively goes along. To put it more bluntly, the seme is on top, and the uke is on the bottom. The words are shortened forms of semeru and ukeru which mean to attack and to receive respectively. They are pronounced with two syllables, as are shoujo and shounen and yuri. A character can be either a seme or an uke in a relationship... rarely do they interchange. As noted in Aestheticism's article, it is more likely for the taller in the couple to be put as the seme. For example, how many fics have you read in which Hiei rapes Kurama and not the other way round? I can count them on one hand... On a side note for those who don't know, bishounen literally means "Beautiful boy". It's like Pretty Soldier Sailormoon is "Bishoujo Senshi Seeramuun" where shoujo is "girl". A beautiful man is a biseinen. And in fanfiction...? Fanfic classifications can be very convoluted, and differ greatly from anime to anime. For starters, a lemon is a story describing sex in detail between two characters and can be boy/girl or yaoi or yuri. A lime on the other hand, is less intense... it involves heavy petting, kissing and hugging, but no actual sex. A PWP stands for "Plot? What plot?" and probably is most true to the meaning of yaoi. The difference between a PWP and a lemon is that a PWP is blatantly without a plotline... the whole story is to get two characters in bed with each other, whereas lemons usually have some sort of plot. Following the fruity theme, there is also lemonade which is exactly what it sounds like... sex with a great deal of sappiness in it. It is also less commonly used. Most conscientious writers will add a tag like [this] in their headings which will tell you what the story contains. It should look something like "[YYH][Yaoi][Lemon][NC-17]The Unpublished by Soandso". If you're on a ML like the YaoiML, it's also courteous to put a tag stating the series the fic comes from... in this case, Yu*Yu*Hakusho by Yoshihiro Togashi. Of all the anime out there, Gundam Wing (GW) and Yu*Yu*Hakusho (YYH) have perhaps the biggest fandom of yaoi on the 'Net... bigger than the yaoi manga such as Earthian and Bronze. As I said before, people also rate pairings differently from anime to anime. For Gundam Wing, the character's names themselves are numbers. Heero Yuy, the protagonist, is 1 (Yuy is one in Japanese), and Duo Maxwell 2, Trowa Barton is 3 (Trois in French), Quatre Raberba Winner 4 and Chang Wufei is number 5 (Wu is 5 in Chinese). While this makes for some interesting filks with Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5 (see Shinigami Project's fanfic section), it also works out into a neat and tidy pairing system. Zechs Marquise is number 6 and Treize Kushrenada number 13. In essence, if you wanted to warn people that your fic was about Heero and Duo, you would put 1x2. Always, but always put the seme in the relationship first, and use "x" not "/". It's good netiquette, and will avoid confusing people. YYH is considerably less befuddling as it is almost always Kurama x Hiei or Hiei x Kurama, KxH and HxK for short. Kuwabara and Yuusuke pairings are rare enough that classifications for these are not available. The YYH universe is extremely developed... "sweet snow", for example has come to be an euphemism for ice cream, one which is not used anywhere in the anime. While we're on the subject of classification systems, I have to mention Slam Dunk (SD). SD is a wonderful, heart-warming and non-yaoi manga by Inoue Takehiko, and certainly its fandom has lessened since it is one of the older manga. However, it has the distinction of possessing the most convoluted system I have ever seen. Fans classify them by using shortened forms of the characters' names such as RuHana (Rukawa x Hanamichi and incidentally my favourite), SenKosh (Sendoh x Koshino) and MitKo (Mitsui x Kogure). That's all well and good except for the fact that this series has a lot of characters, and all of them quite lovable and very pairable. Take SenYou (Sendoh x Youhei) and JinKi (Jin x Kiyota), and Fujima x Hanagata pairings, not to mention Maki and ... There are characters galore from every team that Shohoku High ever played against. It's not a surprise given that one game can take four volumes to finish, with Inoue-sama's penchant for character development. Nonetheless, owning the Chinese version and looking at Japanese names can be very confusing. And the main character's name is Sakuragi Hanamichi (a kind of a joke given the way he looks) and it's shortened to Hana, as is Hanagata of Shoyo's basketball team. Needless to say, after hunting through archives for HanaRu/RuHanas, I was flat out with Kenshin-esque whirlies in my eyes. On a note, both Hiei and Sakuragi call their respective others "baka kitsune", usually in an affectionate way. In just about every other way, however, the couples couldn't be more different. Another fanficker's innovation in this wacked-out world (let's face it... all anime characters are wacked out, that's why we love them) is the "Blanket Scenario", originally started in Rurouni Kenshin (RK). Stick two characters of your choice in a cabin in a blizzard with only one blanket and let 'er rip. On the Crimson Ink ML, a lesser known innovation is a Key fic. If you want to use either of these, please contact their creators first and ask for permission. Ditto for any other original character you might want to use. Never just take.