In discussing her approach to the yuri genre, Nakatani expressed that while she liked romance stories, she was disappointed with narratives that paint a relationship as necessary to complete oneself emotionally, as it made her feel as if "something was wrong with me." Nakatani felt that same-sex romances often avoided this dichotomy, and that as she struggled to write a convincing heterosexual romance, she was more drawn towards creating manga about same-sex couples. While Nakatani had also drawn boys' love manga previously, she ultimately said that yuri was more interesting to her, as she wanted to draw cute girls. In one interview, she said that yuri was difficult to define, but that "once the reader thinks it is yuri, then at that moment it becomes yuri." In a conversation with Riddle Story of Devil creators Yun Kōga and Sunao Minakata, she concurred with Kōga's statement that yuri is about "girls getting involved with other girls," adding the qualification that it is "feelings between girls." She also cited the anime adaptation of Sound! Euphonium as an influence, saying it showed "everything I want to do in yuri."
