How common is it to use the lily flower/yuri 百合 to represent girls' love in Japanese anime?


So I've seen some say that using lilies is very common for an author to show
that a girl is lesbian for example.

However, I've heard that the whole lilies = lesbian thing is not mainstream.
So I was wondering, how common is this trope used really outside of the yuri
genre?




百合 is a very common term, and virtually every anime/manga fan knows its
association with female-female relationships. It's hard to imagine an otaku
who does not understand the meaning of
[YuruYuri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YuruYuri), for example.

However, you have to understand the following points (I
[explained](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/104949/discussion-between-
zain-alleck-and-naruto) some of them to you before):

  * Outside the otaku culture, indeed it's not mainstream at all. Today, 百合 mainly refers to female-female romance **in fiction**. Wikipedia defines this as follows.

> Yuri (百合, "lily"), (snip) is a Japanese jargon term for content and a genre
> involving lesbian relationships or female homoeroticism **in light novels,
> manga, anime, video games and related Japanese media**.

If you want to know words for lesbian used outside otaku contexts, see [this
question](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/41714/5010).

  * 百合 is the name of a very common flower, too. Even in the otaku culture, it can simply refer to a flower with absolutely no sexual implication. As I explained before, "banana" has a sexual connotation even in English, but that does not mean it is used in a sexual sense whenever you see it in a novel.

  * As an aside, if you know the term [_yaoi_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi), this word fell out of use long ago in Japanese. Young Japanese otaku may not even know this word. (Today, 腐 (ふ; slangy) and BL (sounds relatively "formal") are the common terms.)

