Content warning for discussion of queerphobia and heteronormativity
Minor spoilers for Catch These Hands! and Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon
Historically, the tropes and traditions of yuri have been anchored in the school setting, meaning that the recent uptick in titles starring adult characters has been exciting and worthy of note. There’s an increasingly varied platter of yuri with post-high school protagonists, from college stories like How Do We Relationship? and I Don’t Know Which is Love; to workplace romances like Still Sick and I Love You So Much I Hate You; and even into the realm of genre fiction with titles like Otherside Picnic and SHWD. All these series do the valuable work of demonstrating that while schoolgirl yuri is surely going to remain a beloved mainstay, yuri can also function effectively outside the walls of the school setting and outside the structure of adolescent romance. Series that focus on adult characters also open the door to a storytelling niche that’s still relatively underrepresented despite the rich narrative potential it offers: the post-adolescence queer coming-of-age story. Or, in other words, the gay quarter-life crisis.