In Lily’s story, there is almost no LGBT.  Even though Lily does mention the possibility in passing, and there are strong hints (confirmed at the end) that Crystal is for a time at the least bi, there was very little LGBT in this story.  There is a large cast of… at least twenty girls, and only one of them is even bi.  The rest are interested in boys – at least as far as we know (there are some I didn’t flesh out very much, but since we don’t know, it doesn’t matter.  Do I know?  Not really.  I didn’t really care what, say, Britni did in her private life where Lily wasn’t concerned.)

And even Crystal was bi because of trauma.  She’s the one who, well, let’s be frank, got raped by one man, and was in an inappropriate relationship with another, so her experience with men was very bad.  It made sense in the story that Crystal would be, at the very least, a little confused.  Trauma does tend to go hand in hand with that kind of thing, it seems.  (Not one hundred percent of the time, but often).

So there were multiple reasons for that.

The first reason is, this is a story told from Lily’s perspective.  Every day Lily wrote a post in her diary, and apart from the occasional “guest post”, the story was only ever told through Lily’s eyes.  And that kind of thing… just didn’t occur to her.  Britni or Yu or Rebecca may have been interested in girls, but I don’t think Lily would have ever picked up on that.  So, maybe there was some stuff going on out of story.  Lily never picked up on it, so it never got talked about.

The second reason is, it’s really not a common thing.  As much as the media wants to make us believe it is, in truth, it’s a very small percentage of the population that is of that persuasion.  Many yuri anime likes to pretend that it’s really common and when you get a pile of girls together they’ll start being interested in each other.  For the most part, that’s just not true.  So I deliberately wanted to go against the yuri trope, and have a story where there were no yuri shenanigans.  So it was partly a rebellion against the other stories that did have an agenda, for whatever reason.  (I maintain that a lot of the yuri anime out there are not yuri because of representation, but more because male otaku like to think about two girls rubbing things together that many girls commonly wouldn’t rub together.  Japan really tends to treat that kind of cultural thing much more matter-of-fact.)

The third reason is, that it would have ruined the story.  Frankly Jack came close enough to ruining the story, and it was a straight relationship.  If I’d let the complicated feelings of romance pollute the pure love of Lily and her sisters, it would have become a problem very quickly.  The whole point of the story was to explore the relationship of a bunch of girls who loved each other in a very pure way.  Adding an “impure” motive on top of that would have just ruined everything.

And the last reason is, I just didn’t want to.  It’s my story and no one is entitled to “representation” in it.  When I write stories or other similar products, my attitude is very simple:  It’s my story, my plot, my characters, my everything (unless it’s fanfiction, though some parts of that are still mine).  You can tell me how bad my story is structurally, point out errors (and there are errors), all that sort of thing.  But the plot is mine.  You don’t get to criticize that.  I just didn’t see any point in adding that to my story, so I didn’t.  If you do want to read a story with that kind of thing, then…  write your own, or read something else.  There’s lots out there to choose from.

I was pretty cagey, in one of the bonus entries, as to why Crystal left her girlfriend.  Crystal didn’t want to tell her, and Lily didn’t pry.  So Lily doesn’t know, at least right now.  But I’ll tell you.  Crystal left her girlfriend because as much as she loved her, she didn’t like having sex with girls.  She thought she did, she did feel an attraction and a love for her girlfriend, but when push came to shove, it just wasn’t her cup of tea.  She had a long talk with her girlfriend, and explained that, and her girlfriend basically said “You don’t have to be lesbian, you know.  I know it’s not me.  Go find yourself a guy and have a happy life, we’ll still be close friends.”  And they hugged.

And they broke up.  They’re still really close, like Lily said, and Crystal hangs out with Dakota and her girlfriend sometimes.  Even Dakota’s new girlfriend likes her, and they’re getting pretty close.  But Crystal just wants something…  different.

Dakota’s not really a part of the sister group, but they all know each other, and Lily did meet her.

I just thought of the fact that cat-girl seemed to love being with women.  She was… ummm…  an interesting case.  I didn’t really write her as lesbian or even bi.  I wrote her as… well… she’d do anything with anyone.  So it’s not so much that they were girls or boys, it’s just that they were there.  She’s quite the character, but at the end of the day…  her goal was always to find a man and settle down.  It’s just that it seemed so out of reach that she gave up and fully embraced hedonism.

The long and short is, these things are complicated, with complicated psychological reasoning, and squishing the whole thing down to a label is its own kind of dehumanization.

So, that’s what I was thinking.  No LGBT in Lily, and now you know why.