Yuri Fans Harass Sayonara Lara Writer After Male Character Is Introduced

Kawahara Anna, the writer responsible for the script of the anime Sayonara Lara, had to disable replies on two of her tweets after Yuri fans became furious and began harassing her following the broadcast of episode 7.

Until episode 6: the story was centered around two girls (one is a girl who practices boxing, while the other is a former mermaid who had been asleep for hundreds of years and is searching for her “true love”).

Starting with episode 7: a boy who looks very similar to the prince the mermaid knew in the past appears, and the story eventually reaches the point where the two of them go on a date.

Yuri fans became furious and began flooding the profile of Kawahara Anna, the anime’s writer, with insults, eventually causing her to disable replies.

When the episode aired, I went looking for reactions and found people who apparently believed Sayonara Lara would be a Yuri anime. They were extremely angry because Lara went on a date with Luca, a man.

However, what made Yuri fans even angrier was Kawahara Anna’s statement that Lara and Mari watching the fireworks together was an “What If” scenario, while the canon story was Lara and Luca.

The anime Sayonara Lara had an official collaboration with the Lake Biwa Fireworks Festival, held on August 6, 2026. It is a huge fireworks festival held at Lake Biwa in Shiga. The 2026 edition featured 12,000 fireworks and also included a drone show.

The most interesting part is that Lara and Mari, the anime’s characters, were responsible for some of the announcements during the event. In other words, the characters’ voices were used to welcome and guide the audience throughout the festival.

There is even a video showing two Mari and Lara plushies “watching the fireworks together,” which led people to believe that the anime would also have the two characters watching the fireworks together.

This made sense because Sayonara Lara takes place in the same city as the festival. Then episode 7 arrived, bringing the festival into the anime. Mari even invited Lara to watch the fireworks with her and her family, but Lara accepted Luca’s invitation instead, and the two watched the fireworks together:

And then the anime’s writer, Kawahara Anna, posted a tweet explaining that Mari and Lara watching the fireworks together, as they did at the real-life event, was an “What If” story, since Lara watched them with Luca in the anime.

This ENRAGED Yuri fans, most of whom appeared to be Chinese, who began leaving unpleasant comments toward her, eventually causing her to disable replies.

I won’t post the negative comments here, but you can check this and this tweet to see both the replies and reposts. But let’s take a look at how Japanese users reacted to the anger from Yuri fans:

• There are already plenty of works that are marketed as Yuri from the beginning. Just watch those.
• From the beginning, they said they were looking for the prince. So why did they think it was Yuri?
• Wasn’t there already an anime that caused a huge controversy for “tricking” its audience and marketing itself as Yuri? I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was about 10 years ago. It became a huge controversy.
• I like straight romance anime, I like Yuri anime, and I like BL depending on the work. Let’s just enjoy everything.
• If you watch it normally, doesn’t it seem like the story could eventually reach something like “love for humanity”? I wouldn’t mind if they went through a romance along the way, but there has already been a romance with the prince since episode 1, so I don’t see why Luca would be such a huge surprise…
• I’m a Yuri fan, but honestly, I don’t understand where everyone is seeing Yuri in Sayonara Lara. It seems like they’re just consuming the “this feels like Yuri” atmosphere without paying any attention to the relationship between the two characters that the anime actually shows.
• From the beginning, every episode has had completely different direction. You can’t even tell what this anime is trying to do.
• They’re angry because a Yuri work became a story about a man and a woman halfway through. If it had been a story about a man and a woman from the beginning, it wouldn’t have caused this outrage. It’s like a pure romance manga suddenly becoming an NTR story in its sequel.
• They simply fear the existence of men and can’t even stand seeing a man in an anime. Deep down, it’s not that they actually like Yuri.
• Yuri fans, please stop.
• But Luca was a pretty cool character, wasn’t he?
• Thinking about it, they probably kept shouting that it was Yuri from the beginning just so they could complain and play the victim when things didn’t go the way they wanted. It’s really disgusting.
• There have been countless works that started with only girls and later introduced men. Anyone familiar with the genre wouldn’t simply assume it was Yuri. But apparently a lot of newcomers keep getting into these kinds of works. If it’s an original anime, people become even more suspicious. The same thing happens with manga, which is why Yuri works often don’t sell or become popular until they are completed.
• Most Yuri fans don’t actually like Yuri; they just hate men.
• Lala’s feelings toward Mari are clearly affectionate friendship.
• I thought this was going to be an anime where the mermaid started practicing boxing…
• Yes. It had already been announced from the beginning that there was a character who looked very similar to the prince. Even so, for some reason, they kept saying, “This is a Yuri anime!”

The source for all the comments above is this one. There are even more comments there that I didn’t include here, including discussions about rankings in the West.

It’s also worth remembering that Yuri fans previously harassed the staff of Lycoris Recoil because the anime did not feature a romance between its two female protagonists.