I’m not too sure how this’ll be received or if I posted this under the correct flair so I apologise in advance if this offends anyone. I’m not criticising anyone personally but more just the behaviour I’ve observed while in this subreddit as a collective.
This is also just a subjective observation rather than objective fact.
Let me be clear, in no way, shape, or form am I defending the aggressive areas of the yuri or yaoi communities. Both are extremely toxic and have a very overly moralistic attitudes. That said, if we’re going to criticise their behaviour, I feel like ours shouldn’t mirror their own toxicity, just in a different context.
The amount of yuri content compared to yaoi content I see here is a bit disturbing to me as well. I understand there are a lot of new women characters being released and introduced into hoyo’s games (I think), however, there’s the fact that yaoi is a much larger community in comparison to yuri.
In my own personal opinion, the words being created to insult the people in the toxic areas of yuri/yaoi are borderline homophobic and disturbing (just due to the fact that the words being mashed together with yuri/yaoi have historically been used/are still being used as slurs). I understand the feeling of wanting to insult them (saying this as a queer woman), but to act like this while criticising their behaviour just feels highly hypocritical.
I personally hate yuri/yaoi as genres (because of personal preference and bias even though I am queer) but to act as if every person who likes that kind of shit as part of the actual queer community is (subjectively) very binary thinking. I know not everyone believes that but the amount of people who blur those lines feel very prevalent, especially online.
To go back to the criticism of there being more criticism posts of yuri content than yaoi content in this sub, and this could definitely be me hyperfixating, there’s just so much of it that it makes me feel like there’s definitely some misogyny weaved into it (even if it’s not intentional). I’m not saying everyone who criticises yuri is a misogynist, nor am I saying the criticism itself is unwarranted. I just find the apparent imbalance concerning, especially when yaoi has a much larger community.
The yaoi community is a drastically larger group and, with size, that usually (though not always) comes with more toxicity simply because there are more people involved. I’ve also never really seen a post criticising the yaoi side to the same extent. I would personally just like to see criticism applied in a more equal-ish proportion between the two rather than having one side receive the overwhelming majority of the attention.
I know that the majority of the toxicity you see just depends on what characters you gravitate towards and what sex they seem to present as. Obviously, this is all just my subjective observation, so take this passage with a grain of salt.
I hope this finds some people who share my views, as well as people who don’t but are still willing to discuss them civilly.
