It is weird, yeah. It’s like they really want to write explicit yuri but someone powerful has inscribed a list of words they can’t use, like “girlfriend” and “love” (the Japanese equivalents of those of course), in stone.

I don’t fault anyone who isn’t satisfied with AL for that reason, especially with things like the openly lesbian characters in the new D4DJ unit having happened since. It would be ironic if it were Bushiroad who made the list. I doubt it though because Bushi pulled out of the franchise a year ago, and stuff has only loosened up a little since.

Charitably it’s leaning into the wink-wink nudge-nudge thing for fun at this point, since we are getting stuff like Kanaho and Takane exchanging actual wedding vows, and kissing each other in the stage plays. But it would be better if they didn’t do that.

Sorry, I tried to set a timestamp on the video but Lemmy deleted it. Skip forward to about 1:20 in the video for the yuri part.