Sometimes figuring who’s on top and who’s on bottom isn’t easy.

I may not know much about the popular “boy’s love” genre of manga and anime where beautiful men love other beautiful men, but I can’t resist a good internet quiz. So when the opportunity came up to see if I could identify the dominant boy in some man-on-man relationships, you can bet I clicked!

Even if you don’t know a thing about boy’s love, it’s still a fun quiz to take because it doesn’t test whether or not you’ve read the manga before. Instead it tests if you can pick out who the seme in each relationship is.

Seme is a Japanese word that comes from semeru (“to attack”) and it identifies the dominant one (“the top”) in the relationship. Its opposite is the uke (from ukeru meaning “to receive”) which identifies the submissive one (“the bottom”) in the relationship.

If you want to try the quiz for yourself, then go ahead and check it out here. Each of the 20 questions asks “who is the seme?” and you just need to click the pink box under the picture you think is the correct answer.

Here’s some examples:

▼ The first question from the test is an easy one. Who’s the seme here?
(Hint: Quite often, sparkly = uke and angsty = seme.)

▼ Then we get, uh, a dog? And a little… cat boy?
(Hint: Just look at that cat. Classic confused, unsure uke.)

▼ The questions get harder as they go, as shown by the color in the upper-right.
(Hint: Both look uke-ish, but the eyes on the left one give his seme-ness away.)

▼ They get really hard toward the end. (Hint: The right one gets no head because
in Japan the seme is usually the one to give… well, we’ll let you figure it out.)

So how did you do? Even with my complete lack of boy’s love knowledge, I managed to scrape by with a 59, slightly better than guessing. Maybe I would’ve done better if I’d taken a university class on uke vs. seme beforehand?

Source/images: Renta!
[ Read in Japanese ]