The Summer 2025 anime season continues to impress, offering something for every kind of fan. If you’re into dramatic stories about the drama that’s created when girls violate society’s traditional rules and fall in love with other girls, you should check out Watanare: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… It’s the best yuri anime in years!
Happy New Year from your Friend in Japan, J-List! We hope 2026 is a year of happiness and peace for you. To get things off right, we’re having a huge site-wide New Year’s Sale through Jan. 6, giving you 15$ off all in-stock products. Start browsing now!
The Story of Watanare
Watanare: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… follows Renako, a shy, plain high school girl who wants to have friends after having a bad experience in junior high school. She gets accepted into a group of popular girls, which includes beautiful teen model Mai Oduka, Mai’s rival Satsuki Koto, the elegant Ajisai Sena and the energetic Kaho Koyanagi. Imagine Renako’s surprise when Mai confesses to her, asking to become her girlfriend. Renako just wants to have friends, and there’s “no freaking way” she’ll become Mai’s lover. Unless…?
Renako and Mai agree to a “best friends or lovers” compromise. On one day, they’ll be friends, giving Renako a chance to show Mai the importance of having a close friend to rely on. But they’ll try being lovers the next day, and Mai will do everything she can to get Renako to fall in love with her. Things start to get spicy when Renako’s younger sister spies her and Mai in a physical embrace. Things get even more interesting when the other girls become romantically involved with Renako. Suddenly, she has a harem of cute girls who all want to date her!
The anime is based on a popular light novel series by Teren Mikami. There’s also a manga, if you prefer that format, and both novels and manga are being released in English. The anime is being handled by studio MOTHER, a newer animation studio that brought us More than a Married Couple, but Not Lovers.
What Makes a Good Yuri Anime?
As with any story, how we connect with the characters is a big part of whether we’ll stick around to see where the characters end up. In the case of Watanare, Renako’s strong desire to put the social awkwardness she experienced in junior high behind her and make friends with the popular girls in her class seems very relatable. The confusion she feels when Mai confesses to her, and how she tries to balance wanting to stay friends and realizing that Mai is the coolest girl in the school, is great to see.
There’s one potential problem: Mai is rather aggressive in her pursuit of Renako and comes on pretty strong. When fans encountered this kind of plot device in the Citrus anime, there was a huge backlash from casual fans, who seemed to believe the only romantic stories allowed had to portray idealized relationships where consent was always given. If you avoid some anime because some people on the Internet call them “problematic,” you might not enjoy Watanare.
The Four Types of Yuri Anime
Since I love the girls’ love genre of anime, I thought I’d separate the most famous into various categories so we can understand them better.
Girls Doing Cute Yuri Things
First, we have slice-of-life anime that are built around the real or implied yuri relationships of the characters, or which use them to drive the story forward. Two examples are Yuru Yuri or Slow Start, the latter being a normal CGDCT show with a pretty awesome lesbian relationship blossoming between a teacher and her student.
Fanservice Yuri for Guys
There’s a genre of anime that’s loaded with visual fanservice, to the point that it’s aimed at male viewers. Sakura Trick, Valkyrie Drive Mermaid, Kandagawa Jet Girls, Cross Ange, and Citrus fall into this group. They’re more concerned with showing sexy eye candy to the boys than exploring girls going on a unique romantic journey.
Romantic Yuri Let Fans Sit Back and Enjoy the Show
A lot of girls’ love anime focuses on the romance aspect, and lets us sit back and enjoy watching it blossom from afar, without a lot of drama. Good examples are Watanare: There’s Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover!, Bloom Into You, Adachi to Shimamura, and Whisper Me a Love Song.
Yuri Anime That Focus on the Drama
Then there’s my favorite genre of yuri anime, which focuses on the drama that’s created when girls fall in love with other girls. They explore the complex feelings that can come from a girl developing feelings for her best friend, or how others in society would react to learning of their lesbian relationship. Some good ones are Aoi Hana, Yuri is my Job, and (depending on how you rank the drama over sexy visual fanservice) Citrus. Yes, I know I ranked that last one twice; it kind of fits in both places. Plus I love the anime a lot.
Thanks for reading this blog post about the excellent Watanare: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… yuri anime. What are your top three yuri anime picks that other fans should watch? Tell us in the comments below!
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Happy New Year from your Friend in Japan, J-List! We hope 2026 is a year of happiness and peace for you. To get things off right, we’re having a huge site-wide New Year’s Sale through Jan. 6, giving you 15$ off all in-stock products. Start browsing now!
