If he looks like an uke, but is a top, he's seme, that's just what the words mean. If you call a character uke, he must be the bottom. Remember: the terms seme and uke regard strictly what would happen in bed if something ever happened in bed. It has little basis on reality, it's pure perverted fantasy.Įxtrapolating that, it's become common for people to erroneously call characters seme and uke based on just their looks. This means that fans of BL, specially fujoshi 腐女子, will take two heterosexual male characters from a manga or anime, form a gay couple of them, and fantasize which one is seme and and which one is uke based on what the character looks or behaves like. They are often used in shipping of characters who are not even canonically gay to begin with, so they can't be canonically top or bottom.
However, the terms seme and uke are rarely used to talk about gay sex that happens. If a fanfic or doujinshi 同人誌 is sexually explicit, pornographic, hentai 変態, and it features gay sex, then anyone with a pair of working eyes can tell who's "top" and who's "bottom" in it.
When fans of yaoi やおい, shounen-ai 少年愛, BL, and other gay fiction say seme and uke, they most likely mean "top" and "bottom," nothing more, except things are a bit more complicated than that. This is the most basic, most widely accepted definition. To begin with, seme and uke are, nothing more, nothing less, than words for "top" and "bottom" in gay fanfics, that is, the guy who penetrates and the one who's penetrated. But what does seme and uke mean? What's the difference between a seme and an uke? And what does seme and uke mean in Japanese? You may have heard words seme and uke before, they're two related terms used to describe the roles of characters in gay fiction, mostly gay fanfics, with their gay ships.