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Meipouchou contains yuri elements, but when I first started writing, I had little understanding or appreciation of yuri works. Before I started writing, I read a lot of Yuri novels and manga to familiarize myself with what I expected to be a single genre.

It quickly became clear that different publications targeting different audiences. Many works can be described as by the male gaze, for the male gaze. Some were explicit, with copious nudity, while others focused more on sexual comedy.

What they had in common though, was that the protagonists always found women attractive for the same reasons that men do, or for reasons men stereotypically assume queer women do. Not being a lesbian myself, I'm in no position to say that some women don't feel this way, but I would be surprised if all lesbians did, especially since other yuri works focus on different kinds of attraction and relationships.

Ultimately, I tried not to use these kinds of works for inspiration in Meipouchou, but I read enough of them to get a handle on their more common tropes. They stayed filed in the back of my mind until one night, after watching the first few episode's of the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius, I had a dream that mixed the sexual comedy plots of these works together with the sexual politics depicted in I, Claudius.

Although I did not find the dream very entertaining, I couldn't get it out of my head over the next few days, so in order to work it out of my system, I wrote it up as a short story, modifying it into what I hope is a coherent story. It's far from my best work, but if you enjoy that kind of yuri, I hope you will at least find this story entertaining.