Because I don't have a huge to-do list today of course I'm reading about the origins of yaoi and yuri (more or less #WLW and #MLM in #anime, I think?). After not-very-much reading, I'm having this speculative thought:

It seems like, at least in anime, many of the earliest publicly-available MLM and WLW stories were marketed as lurid pulp, maybe analogous to England's "penny dreadfuls". This seems like it might have been because queer narratives were not welcome in mainstream media, so the only ones that got through to broad audiences were the queer stories published in horror or kink outlets, where relationships were depicted as abusive, ending in tragedy, or bundled with socially unacceptable behavior (e.g., lesbian couple who are mob hitwomen).

If the above was a thing (and that's a big If; I'm not deeply knowledgeable about this), then perhaps an entire generation or two of queer kids (and adults) found their sexuality mostly represented in very fucked-up contexts and with deeply fucked-up relationship dynamics. This would probably have an impact on relationship patterns in queer communities for quite a while.

As an attempted analogy: I'm imagining straight people in the USA never being taught about sex or attraction--the messages were only about shame and sin and straight people were shamed for expressing any romantic or sexual feelings. Then, from the 1950s to the 1970s, stories featuring romance and sex appeared in magazines that a person could actually buy. Of course all the sex- and relationship- and norms-starved straight people ate those stories up, but the only stories involving straight sex or romance available for 20-30 years were written by David Lynch and Anne Rice.

I wonder what my thoughts, feelings, prototypes, and expectations about #relationships and #sex would look like if all my formative sexual and romantic #media exposure (in a near absence of any other kind) was from Eraserhead and Queen of the Damned? What would my romantic/sexual self look like?

#random #yaoi #yuri #SpoutingOff #ProbablyWrong #speculation