Anime genres

Hello and welcome to Anime with Senpai, a blog series where I talk about anime and try to help people understand it more and also try to give them a few things to watch while doing so. This series will be done every Thursday starting today, I never really had a posting schedule so I might not stick with this and might end up making the dates a bit further away, like making them every other Thursday. Any ways, let's get into the blog!

Today's topic we will be talking about the different anime genres. There are many genres and they might confuse some people so I'd like to try and explain a few of them in this blog and some in later blogs. Right now I'll focus on the ones that might confuse people the most, Yuri and Shoujo Ai along with Yaoi and Shounen Ai.

Yuri

The Yuri genre and Shoujo Ai genres tend to get mixed up sometimes so I'd like to clear this before we start. Yuri and Shoujo Ai may be similar but at heart are different. Yuri focuses on the phyiscal relation ship between girls and Shoujo Ai focus on the mental relationship. For instance, in yuri they could love each other but would end up showing it through kissing or other physical things, while in Shoujo Ai they love each other but show it through a different way such as saying it. A good example of Yuri would be Sakura Trick, which is about two friends who end up kissing each other in an empty classroom.

Shoujo Ai

I know I pretty much already covered this in Yuri but I'm gonna go over it one more time. Shoujo Ai is about a relationship that focuses on romance between girls. a good example of this would be Akuma no Ridlle, or Riddle story of Devil, which is about a classroom of assassins who have to asssassinate the only non-assassin in the class, and one girl who protects her instead of killing her.

Yaoi and Shounen Ai are the exact same as their counter parts Yuri and Shoujo Ai so I can't really talk about them much in this part of the blog. So I'm just gonna recommend an anime that I think is a good representation.

Yaoi

I've never actually watched any Yaoi anime due to it not being my cup of tea to I had to look through MyAnimeList and pick one at random so I can't assure you if it'll be that good. Junjou Romantica is about three couples and their loves stories that use Seme and Uke relationships. This sounded like a good example so I chose this one but I'm still not sure if it actually is.

Shounen Ai

Unlike Yaoi I have watched some Shounen Ai so this part is a bit more trust worthy. My choice for Shounen Ai is Yuri!!! on Ice. I've heard most call it Yaoi but I consider it Shounen Ai because the most I've ever seen is two dudes in an inn bath house and a kiss. In anime it's normal to see people of the same sex to use bath houses together and a kiss isn't really that big of a deal. Yuri!! on ice is about Yuuri, a once famous ice skater who ends up going home after a big defeat. While he is having mixed feelings as to if he should retire or keep going all of a sudden Viktor Nikiforov appears and brings him back into the world of ice skating. This Isn't all that bad but I personally didn't like it, but I do think it represents this genre quite nicely.

Now that you know a bit about these genres lets get into a bit of their history. Yuri, also refereed to as Girls Love started in female targeted works such as Josei but today it is now focused on boy targeted works such as Shounen and Seinen and focuses on the sexual part between a relationship with girls. In the 1970's lesbian theme works started appearing by authors such as Ryoko Yamagishi Riyoko Ikeda. In 2003 the first work that completely focused on Yuri, Yuri Shimai, was released and then Comic Yuri Hime got released after the Yuri Shimai was discontinued in 2004. I can't find out how Shoujo Ai started but if I had to guess I'd say it ended up happening with Yuri. Yaoi started in the 1970's when Shoujo magazines that published Shounen Ai, which is a sub genre of Shoujo.

Well, that's about all I have to say on this. There are many other genres to cover but I doubt I could do them in one blog. If I tried it'd be to long, so I will cover other genres in the next blog. And probably not like this, it'll probably cover more but maybe be as big or bigger than this blog.

Any ways, that's all for today. Cya maties!

#Genres #AnimewithSenpai