Are These Yuri Anime Poisonous? – This Week in Anime

In other words, it’s time to answer the age-old question: what’s the deal with toxic yuri?

Appending that word “toxic” to this genre, however, evokes a general set of traits we might begin with. These relationships probably won’t be entirely healthy. The plot’s subject matter will likely delve into salacious or mature material. Maybe the series itself skews more adult or more melodramatic. At the very least, when I consider the prospect of toxicity in romantic storytelling, I’m looking for emotional and psychological messiness. And in Dying Day, that messiness is quite literal and visceral.

Full disclosure: Lynzee suggested we do a compare and contrast of these first six episodes of Dying Day with the beginning of the shojo classic and toxic yuri tentpole Dear Brother. And I agree, mostly because it means I get to talk about Dear Brother again.

That is my Dear Brother face.

Which, incidentally, is a fate inflicted by Fukiko onto Rei in the very first episode. When you see an umbrella get thrown like that, you immediately know that there is some kind of hellish backstory to it. And Dear Brother delights in teasing out every aching morsel of that truth throughout its runtime.

By contrast, Dear Brother is largely a bloodless affair except when it isn’t. And as a result, those flashes of violence hit all the harder.

BTW, please forgive the DVD quality on some of these. I still haven’t upgraded all of my Dear Brother screencaps to glorious HD.

And yes, the upperclassmen trio at Seiran serves the same function in Dear Brother, although their closer proximity to Nanako in age and cohort means she gets more easily tangled up in their affairs and power struggles, i.e., more delicious poison to enjoy.

Although if we’re talking about concentrated toxic yuri vibes, Mariko’s arc is the highlight of Dear Brother‘s opening act.

It has truly never been more normal for girls.

I don’t want to spoil everything, but I do want to say that Mariko gets mellower and more based as the series progresses.

For a recent point of contrast, This Monster Wants to Eat Me surprised me with how it developed its central unhealthy relationship into something both more honest and more abject by the time its first season wrapped up.

Another recent font of yurified toxicity—one that we’re both familiar with at this point—has been the BanG Dream! franchise. Suffice it to say that this scene in particular changed my life. For the worse, and for the better.

Looking further back, Revolutionary Girl Utena‘s web of relationships is not exclusively yuri in nature, but almost all of them exemplify a wrongness, a yearning, or an abusive quality that was instructive for how I perceived every subsequent anime I’ve ever watched. It is the rancid ruler by which I measure most things.

It’s also probably why I tend to appreciate a dash of incest in my blend of venom.

Sometimes it is enough for toxic yuri to simply be a hot mess wrapped up in a salacious conceit.

By the same token, novels (light, visual, or otherwise) have a better chance of plumbing the deepest depths of the yuri miasma, because they can be made by smaller teams for more niche audiences. If OELVNs are your thing in particular, there are currently two game jams worth of toxic yuri visual novels to sink your teeth into. That should be enough to sate all but the most voracious of yuri consumers.

Speaking of, to pull this column back into the anime realm: Chris, can you enlighten me (and our readers) about what the hell is going on with Viola and Miyako in Yume Mita? I’m not caught up yet, but I’ve been rubbernecking the events as they’ve been popping up on my Bluesky feed, and it seems like A Lot.

On a slightly more serious note, though, I’d like to go back to our original question: what is the deal with toxic yuri? While I believe there is an unavoidably exploitative aspect of it—an appeal to the trashy romance lover within us all—I also believe it goes deeper than that. Fact is, it is pretty difficult to exist in this world as a lesbian. It is even more difficult to exist as certain kinds of lesbian. There are predatory narratives that haunt us, laws and rhetoric that seek to oppress us, and other manifestations of bigotry and misogyny that surround us. Toxic yuri, therefore, provides an avenue to sublimate and explore some of those anxieties. It’s a release valve. A place to kick back in the playground of fiction, and a vehicle for safely banishing some more pernicious demons. That’s why I don’t think yuri will or should be getting more wholesome anytime soon. After all, the correct dose of poison can become a cure.