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There's a real pattern there in broad strokes, and with more layers than you'd expect, in no small part because there is a genuine contradiction. The physical rock character's stoic, good at problem-solving, traditionally masculine... and this is simultaneously desirable and absolutely infuriating to most women, since it seems belittling even in its best form where it solves problems easily and correctly. The Other One is emotionally open, in touch with his feminine side, risk-taking, and very understanding any triggers from past relationships/male authority figures... and also doesn't really come across as the sort of person a woman she be chasing, and not just in the stereotypical 'bad boy' way, either. Which, to be fair, can also be a fun taboo violation of its own, but still an awkward matter in a real relationship.
Yaoi fangirls are aware of a dynamic, because the genre formalizes one. Ukes are feminine, emotionally open, perceptive (often to a fault), shorter, and a bottom. Semes are masculine(ish), emotionally steady, inscrutable and less perceptive, taller and tops. In some circles, this can get as formal as hair color or blood type. Obviously, many of these associations are not real -- a lot of traditionally feminine skills in particular end up being pretty top- or switch-coded in practice, and a uke/seme excludes a pretty wide variety of real-world physiotypes -- but my guess from the outside is that they're part of what make yaoi attractive to women.
And in the real world, it doesn't really break down easily into one role or the other all the time, either in gay relationships or in M/M/F ones. In the trivial sense, there's a lot of switches, but more broadly it's extremely rare for people to have the same level of confidence and awareness in all fields, or just daily variation in personality expression. It's hard to actually set up a reciprocal norm when at the raw flirting stage, but it's something that tends to evolve pretty quickly in a real relationship in my experience and in those I've seen second-hand.
I have absolutely no idea on yuri/FF. Not really my thing, and while I'm aware of butch/femme people and how they act, I can't say much as to how well they generalize.
I'm kinda curious which one of spudyjek's guys seems androgynous masc to you. In her adult content, they tend to swap (the gray-furred bat is socially confident but physically vulnerable, the white-furred rabbit is socially vulnerable but physically confident... most of the time, but between furry genre assumptions and knowing about that content, I'm not going to get the same read as an outsider would.
I take the opposite view, where the genre (and its conventions) exist as a natural extension of how people subconsciously act -> it works because it inherently resonates. Categories for the (wo)man, and all that.
And sure, that's complicated by the lowest-effort to express, perhaps like love triangles are for het or yuri romance (such that I believe this is just something the typical man likes and that criticisms that it's "tropey" are more from people who have enough mental capacity to both notice that pattern and get bored of it), but if it works for most people in the target audience, then it's probably a signal about that audience.
Which is why it seems that a solution to that paradox is to spend effort abstracting that tendency into a symbol [of... attraction, acceptance, devotion, I... guess?] and move on (and so places where that abstraction breaks down re: 'mansplaining' are going to feel worse, since that abstraction is broken -> proof/meaningfulness of accepting it happens is not only denied and the person/group for whom that emotional work was done is now the exact thing denying its worth). Reminds me of how certain Christians approach God for what I'm pretty sure are the same reasons. (See also: notice me, senpai!)
If I recall correctly, the second quick pass of the given examples suggested it was the black one. The white one does have some signals of this (most stereotypically the glasses), but he also appears to be quite a bit larger and isn't usually doing the 'girly' thing in the linked example.
This is more trying to compare and contrast how straight men see MFF throuples in opposition to how [straight?] women see MMF throuples (I guess I could just read Ouran High School Host Club for a bunch of other examples that I remember even the show just outright stating, but anything other than MM non-twins aren't currently in scope and that's not really the only dynamic featured in there). Gender isn't a symmetric "object" so it's not just "the same thing but flipped" should you examine it in front of a mirror, so to speak (for instance, men and women both might find opposite-sex-twins-on-self-insert hot, but I don't get the impression that men are attracted to the cascade of background of emotional connection leading up to whatever it is they're doing that women seem to be), or rather, examining "what lines up with what" seems to me to be the wrong tool with which to examine the question.
Yet you still seem to require some background awareness of it, especially when you're trying to flirt with someone who doesn't know that. And then that background awareness colors every other interaction (even when it's not meant that way).
For example,
Yeah, totally a mystery as to how that would be appealing to straight women at all- either of the two modes it's going to go into (which is either 'why yaoi has that name' or focused a lot more on the emotional side, which is something that isn't really found much in yuri made by men even though it's something I would naively expect from both sides of a lesbian relationship [but for different reasons in each participant]). Then again, I'm also aware that lesbians are very unusual, so...
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