This study employs “sexual consent (four levels)” and “subjectivity (binary)” as parallel axes of ethical assessment to conduct a comparative content analysis between the Yuri section and the general-audience (platform-labeled) popular ranking on a specific website. Results show clear differences between the two samples in both consent representation and subjectivity. In the Yuri sample (n = 60), works coded as “explicit consent” and “ambiguous, consent-leaning” account for 78.3%, works with subjectivity present account for 68.3%, and 41.7% of works meet both conditions (“consent + subjectivity”) and are therefore labeled “consent with mutual subjectivity.” By contrast, in the general-audience sample (n = 31), works coded as “ambiguous, resistance-leaning” and “explicit resistance” account for 41.9%, the absence of subjectivity reaches 83.9%, and the “consent with mutual subjectivity” type accounts for only 9.7% of the sample. Although the sampling frames differ, this comparison suggests that within the platform’s mainstream visibility pathway, general-audience works are more often framed through sexualized, coercive, or de-subjectifying scripts, whereas Yuri works are more likely to place emotional relationships, reciprocity, and boundaries at the center of sexual narratives. Further cross-tabulation indicates that “subjectivity” is not independent of “sexual consent.” In the Yuri sample, the absence of subjectivity rarely occurs in works with explicit consent; instead, it is mainly concentrated in samples coded as ambiguous, consent-leaning and ambiguous resistance-leaning/explicit resistance: the lower the consent level, the more concentrated the negative judgments on subjectivity become. This pattern is even more pronounced in the general-audience popular ranking, where—even among works identified as “consent/consent-leaning”—the absence of subjectivity remains high, suggesting that such “consent” may more often serve low-context objectifying portrayals rather than stemming from reciprocal emotional negotiation. The study also cautions that, although depictions of ambiguous, consent-leaning scenarios are common within East Asian cultural contexts, they are not entirely without ethical risk. There may be implicit narratives that romanticize coercion and render it less explicit; from the perspective of consent representation, this remains a gray area.
Jiajun Zhu (Wed,) studied this question.