Cross-Cultural Reception in the Western Yuri Fandom; Assimilationist and Transcultural Readings

This thesis analyses the response to the yuri genre within Anglophone online fan communities. The Yuri genre, dealing with same-sex intimacy between women across a range of media such as manga, anime and games, has been experiencing major growth throughout the past decades, and as with other Japanese media has acquired a fan community in Anglophone spaces, who both produce interpretations of yuri in fan spaces such as forums and new works identified as ‘yuri’ by the creators and community. In this thesis I will analyse how these communities and creators have received the genre and their cross-cultural response to it. I analyse this reception from two angles: firstly focusing on the readings of Japanese yuri in the online fan community itself, represented primarily by the site Dynasty Scans, and secondly on the aforementioned yuri Western texts, in particular several major releases in the visual novel medium, Heart of the Woods, A Summer’s End, and Love Ribbon.