Yuri News Report – January 10,2009

January 10th, 2009

Time flies, huh? Already the second report of the year. Oh, apropos to nothing, I posted 340 times last year. That’s *way* too many posts. lol

Yuri Anime

Eric P writes in to say that Shattered Angels, the English release of Kyoushirou to Towa no Sora, was quietly rescued from oblivion by Funimation and has been given a complete box set release date of February 24. Let’s call that a “tentative” release date and not hold our breaths. If you like Chikane and Himeko, give this series a chance – there’s no rape, Kaon and Himiko get together and the extras are full of Yuri love-love. Sure, the story is a stupid hash. Who cares? It’s a cartoon. lol

And Crunchyroll has announced that Kaleido Star is now available for free, legal streaming. I hear a lot of negativity about Crunchyroll and they boil down to two things – they used to let us post unlicensed stuff, and then pulled it and, they are US only. Let me address these. It is a US company and unfortunately, licensing works that way. I’m sorry for non-US people, but instead of whining, why not start figuring out a way to get a license for your own country? The owner of Crunchyroll did and trust me, he didn’t pull money out his ass. Secondly, as for the thing that makes you all so pissy – I sincerely agree that changing business models mid-stream was inconvenient but hardly worth freaking out about. There’s 14 million places online for you to look for, store and share unlicensed material, fan art, videos and the like. The bottom line is – you, Fandumb, *said* you wanted anime, free, immediately, simultaneously released with the Japanese anime and you STILL aren’t happy. My response to you is, stfu, you ungrateful little turds.

Folks – watch Yuri on Crunchyroll. Support a business model that makes *sense* and gets you FREE LEGAL YURI.

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Yuri Live Action

Erin tells us of a movie cleverly titled Girl’s Love about…can you guess? Yes! It’s about two schoolgirls who fall in love! I know, I know, that’s never been done before! And they have the requisite unromantic kiss scene in which their lips press together for a second or two while they both stand completely still, as if paralyzed. If you are still motivated to see the trailer for this movie (no one will blame you, if you’re not) hit up the Avex trailer page which has a bunch of romance movies that look exactly the same. See if you can figure out which one the Yuri one is. lol

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Other Yuri News

Leia Weathington has completed another Bold Riley adventure and I thought you should know about it. This tale of a beautiful Indian princess who is also a dashing adveturer is a nice mix of several things all at once. And an excellent change of pace from most Yuri wecomics, which follow similar formulas of either Romance (TM) or Pithy Wit (TM).

In completely personal news, I received the most awesome New Year’s card from Gunjou‘s Nakamura Ching and I just wanted to thank her. It shows a woman in a cow suit holding a sword (saying “moo”) riding a raging ox. So completely cool… Thank you Nakamura-san!

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Short report this week, although with the rant and beating you heavily with the sarcasm stick, it’ll feel like more. lol See you next week!

11 Responses

  1. deanbcurtis says:

    A New Year’s card from Nakamura-sensei. That’s phenomenally cool.

  2. Motormind says:

    watch Yuri on Crunchyroll

    I’d hardly consider Kaleido Star to be Yuri by any stretch of the imagination.

  3. @Motormind – There a number of Yuri series, and series popular with the Yuri crowd on CR. I’ve been reporting them as they are licensed. Many people see Kaleido Star to be a love story between Sora and Layla. It all depends what you like. :-)

  4. Anonymous says:

    Total agreement re: Crunchyroll. Never got around to watching Kaleido Star, but this seems like a golden opportunity!

    I’ve never commented here before, at least as far as I recall, but this seems like a good time to say thanks for running such a fun, well-written blog (and about Yuri, too!). :) I always look forward to your posts.

  5. @Anonymous – Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoy it.

  6. Now that CR (and ANN) can only service some selected countries, it’s helluva slim chance a television station here in my country to bother about video streaming — these stations are too busy to pay attention and fix their creative mindset, and instead worry about ratings and beating up each other.

  7. @soulassassin547 – Pleas pardon me while I boggle at the cognitive dysfunction.

    1) Because two *online* *anime* portals are doing something, your TV stations will be affected how? No. I’m sorry – there is no relationship between what your TV stations are doing and Crunchyroll. Any more than the Saturday morning cartoons on US TV are.

    2) These are online portals begun by people. Not gods. Not companies. There is *nothing* stopping you from starting a portal in your own country. Or trying to work with Crunchyroll to obtain licenses for your country.

    What I’m saying is – stop waiting for someone else to do things for you. That’s not how things get done.

  8. I know, it’s just that licensing is really hard to deal with.

    The distributors (d-Rights and Sunrise for example), as far as I believe, have control as to which and where their products/titles (anime from the studios) should be broadcasted under license.

    Whenever a TV station acquires a licensed title from the distributor for broadcasting, restrictions and limitations are included in the contract — some can only air that title within the country, and not overseas, unless the broadcaster has enough money to pay for global coverage.

    As “Shinji” (the guy who’s in charge of CR) says about the warning This video is not available in your region:

    For those of you who aren’t in the USA or Canada, sorry it’s still not available to you guys =*( As you may or may not know, licensing is realllly really complicated and it’s a bit difficult to get permission to show certain videos in certain countries. It’s no ones fault, it just takes time to sort out…I’ll try to get more stuff for you, I promise! And I’ll also try to make these availability notes more clear in the future!

    As I haven’t visited CR much, I’ll see if there’s any restrictions for my country (Philippines)…

    Update: He’s right, we Filipinos can’t watch Kaleido Star (which is licensed to the local TV station called QTV 11) for now. D:

  9. Anonymous says:

    Well, it is pretty for you or anybody in US say that licensing can be worked out. You have big market and even if you have not a big amount of many to invest, japanese companies will consider to provide you licence. But it is not that this is a general principle, if you live in a small country it just does not apply. And i know that from first hand experience, for more that one year i tried to get licences on some manga for a small publishing company in my country. With no result.

    So do not think that people are only being lazy and imcompetent and later angry for no reason. In small market you just dont have that many options.

  10. Anonymous says:

    Sigh, Erica, don’t make me *want* to buy the KnTnS anime, too. I already got the manga.

  11. Okay, I got the idea and, honestly, it’ll be futile trying to convince the bigger broadcasting companies to deliver.

    I’d just let go because anyhow money and ratings talks so loud in my country than viewers’ requests.

    Thanks anyway. :)

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