Either by trying conquest or using his power to force it. It often boils down to who puts most energy into making the relationship come to fruition, and that's usually the seme. There are cases where the extroverted uke looks naive and the introverted seme looks composed, and there are cases where the introverted uke looks shy, and the extroverted seme looks flirting. Introversion and extroversion have little effect on seme and uke. Although generally the idea is that the uke is the one in dire need of the seme's aid, in some cases it's the seme who needs attention or love, and the uke ends up being the one there to offer it. The seme also usually takes protector roles or mentor roles. That is, the seme is often more powerful than the uke in pretty much every aspect and that translates in the romantic and sexual roles. In many cases ships are made of a childish uke character without resources (poor, abandoned by parents, lives on the streets, has to pay off an huge debt, no, wait, that's Hayate) or knowledge paired with more grown-up seme characters that are either rich or successful in their fields and can teach or financially aid the uke. I'm assuming the seme-est of the two ends up being seme, but who knows? There are also couples which can be reversed. Also, for the same fan, a character may be seme if he's paired with one character, but uke if he's paired with another character. That is to say, for one fan a character may be seme and for another fan the same character may be uke. However, since most characters in manga and anime weren't created to be a textbook BL couple, they often lack some (or most) features to say for sure they're seme or uke, but fujoshi will ship them anyway. Takes the "woman" role in the gay relationship. Takes the "man" role in the gay relationship. Generally speaking, the difference between seme and uke characters is as follows:īrave.
I'll explain in detail later, for now let's focus on gay since it's the most common case. So there are cases seme-uke are decided randomly and without thought, meaning they mean nothing.Īlthough seme and uke are mostly used with gay ships, it can also be used for lesbian ships and even straight ships. That is, seme and uke in BL rarely considers the possibility of a character's sexual preference, and is instead is the logical assumption made by the shipper based on whether the character would be the "guy" or the "girl" of the gay couple.Ĭonversely, cases where the shipper just makes a couple of two characters and, well, one needs to be seme, one needs to be uke, what to do?! Also exist. Since BL puts less emphasis on sex itself and more on the relationship between characters, one could say that which character is depicted as "top" or "bottom" in the sexual act merely reflects the dynamic of the relationship itself. Conversely the most seme-looking guy who's a bottom is by definition an uke. If he looks like an uke, but is a top, he's seme, that's just what the words mean. If you call a character uke, he must be the bottom. Remember: the terms seme and uke regard strictly what would happen in bed if something ever happened in bed. It has little basis on reality, it's pure perverted fantasy.Įxtrapolating that, it's become common for people to erroneously call characters seme and uke based on just their looks. This means that fans of BL, specially fujoshi 腐女子, will take two heterosexual male characters from a manga or anime, form a gay couple of them, and fantasize which one is seme and and which one is uke based on what the character looks or behaves like. They are often used in shipping of characters who are not even canonically gay to begin with, so they can't be canonically top or bottom. However, the terms seme and uke are rarely used to talk about gay sex that happens. If a fanfic or doujinshi 同人誌 is sexually explicit, pornographic, hentai 変態, and it features gay sex, then anyone with a pair of working eyes can tell who's "top" and who's "bottom" in it. When fans of yaoi やおい, shounen-ai 少年愛, BL, and other gay fiction say seme and uke, they most likely mean "top" and "bottom," nothing more, except things are a bit more complicated than that. This is the most basic, most widely accepted definition. To begin with, seme and uke are, nothing more, nothing less, than words for "top" and "bottom" in gay fanfics, that is, the guy who penetrates and the one who's penetrated.
But what does seme and uke mean? What's the difference between a seme and an uke? And what does seme and uke mean in Japanese? You may have heard words seme and uke before, they're two related terms used to describe the roles of characters in gay fiction, mostly gay fanfics, with their gay ships.