Yuri Manga: Yuri Hime, Volume 18 (Part 2)

November 16th, 2009

The second half of Volume 18 of Comic Yuri Hime is what you’ve all been waiting for – Sarasa and Seriho’s first official date, in this chapter of “Ame-iro Kouchakan Kanadan!” Fujieda does what he he does best – he shows them wandering around, shopping, eating and generally doing the kind of stuff my wife and I call “Playing House.” You know – the stuff you almost never see female couples doing in Yuri series. Sarasa is wholly unaware that Seriho has an agenda, trying to suss out Sarasa’s feelings for her. So used to hiding what she feels, Sarasa has no idea that Seriho thinks that she, Sarasa is, “normal” and the only one in love is Seriho.

Ayumi likes Miki in “Yuri Yuri,” but Miki tells her it’s gross. They play passive-agressive for a while, until Miki’s homophobia turns out to really be sublimated love for Ayumi. Bwah-bwah-bwahhhh.

In “Apple Day Dream” Yuma is marginally less passive-aggressive to Kaoru than usual. And I swear her name has been Mayu this whole time, until now, so either I’ve been dyslexic this whole time, or it suddenly switched for some reason. Either explanation is probable. :-)

In this chapter of the Nekodome Mansion saga, a younger girl finally gains the courage to tell the older girl she’s loved since she was a child know how she feels – just in time to see her married off by her father. But don’t worry, they can have their little something on the side, after all, it’s a marriage of convenience and they really love each other. Stories like this make me wonder about that age-old double standard for men who are, in most cultures, encouraged to have women on the side, but women aren’t supposed to ever cheat. Once again, I really don’t get you straight women, putting up with that crap.

Kagura makes cookies and Sukune-‘neesan eats them, but still has no idea who Kagura is in “Soulphage,” which is failing to appeal to me on any level.

Creo’s breasts are suddenly three times larger than ever before in “Creo the Crimson Crises” and frankly, I was so distracted by and distressed by this I have no idea at all what happened. It involved Suoh crying a lot.

There’s a little series of reviews about Yuri series that make you cry. I can honestly say that none of the series I’d read in the section made me even a little weepy. :-)

In a surprising turn of events, Hakamada Mera’s “Sore ga Kimi ni Naru” pairs unlikely couple Kyou and Amane, the older woman who burst into tears ar seeing Kyou last chapter, over a meal. Kyou is smart enough to see that *something* is up, but Amane really surprises her by coming right out and saying that she was once in love with a girl who looks just like Kyou.

Tae is having an even harder time than before finding her place in Yui’s life, now that they’ve returned to Tokyo in “Mizu-iro Cinema.” Yui’s busy on shoots and Tae’s flailing a bit trying to figure out where to be and what to do. When rooting aimlessly around Yui’s apartment, Tae finds a discarded photo of Yui and another girl. She keeps it in order to have a photo of Yui, but perhaps missing the larger implication. Coming home from a day out together, they are both – for different reasons – surprised to find the girl in the photo standing at the door of Yui’s apartment building. Here’s my new rule for series like this – it can do anything it wants right now, but it *may not* make Tae cry. Or I will be very unhappy with it.

“Himekoi” has a lot of screaming and pages of breast obsession. I note that “Nanako to Misuzu” has left the building. I guess it found a better reception over at Yuri Hime S. “Himekoi” seems to be the replacement “crrrraaazzzyyyy, wacky things and lots of screaming” series.

Adrienne is a cameraman on a shoot for an ero-photo book and finds herself improbably involved with one of the models in “Aka-me Adrienne.”

Definitely more good than bad and some interesting things going on in the pages of Yuri Hime these days!

Overall – 9

6 Responses

  1. Katherine says:

    “There’s a little series of reviews about Yuri series that make you cry.”

    When I first read that (before reading the following sentence), I thought you meant “series so horrific, they make you cry” instead of genuine tearjerkers. But now I’m really curious about which series are listed (just have to wait and see).

  2. Cryssoberyl says:

    So wait…Creo runs in Yuri Hime? Not Yuri Hime S?

    That’s…blowing my mind… o_o;;

  3. darkchibi07 says:

    @ Cryssoberyl

    Well, Creo does have this whole look in its character designs and plot lines if you make this a shoujo fantasy series that’s hetero or yaoi.

  4. Donald says:

    Creo’s breasts are suddenly three times larger than ever before in “Creo the Crimson Crises”

    WTF? They’re ALREADY individually as large as Suoh’s head! They must be bigger than Suoh is now.

  5. Anonymous says:

    “…Stories like this make me wonder about that age-old double standard for men who are, in most cultures, encouraged to have women on the side, but women aren’t supposed to ever cheat. Once again, I really don’t get you straight women, putting up with that crap…”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of lesbian and bisexual women out there put up with that crap for *exactly the same reasons* a lot of straight women out there put up with that crap:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34022-2004Dec3.html

    “…Transactional sex. Consensual, but not really. Based on disenfranchisement rather than choice.

    “In the hospital where I worked, desperate women brought their malaria-ridden children to the pediatric ward. After paying the fee for a consultation, they had no money left for food. The quinine intravenous drip might attack the malarial parasites, but the children still would slowly starve to death.

    “‘Buy food for the child!’ one pediatrician, a Congolese woman, ordered a mother.

    “‘There is no money,’ she replied.

    “‘Find a new man,’ was the doctor’s advice.

    “The woman’s ability to provide for her children depended on her ability to attract a man to trade sex for child support.

    “Would the sex be safe? When members of the mobile Program for Mother Infant Health taught village women to use condoms to avoid getting HIV, Gabonese village men, standing at the edge of the circle of mothers and babies, heckled us: ‘Sex with a condom is like eating a banana with the peel still on!’…

    “…More is needed from the United States than its financial commitment to funding HIV prevention and treatment. The U.S. government should apply political leverage to ensure that the governments of developing countries address property rights, basic education and employment opportunities for women and girls. It should help women become financially independent, so they no longer have to trade sex for support and can grow, if they choose, to be the healthy mothers of a stable society.”

    I doubt that these patriarchs who raise their daughters to learn no livelihood except housewife-of-a-man (I specify -of-a-man because you can’t earn a living being a woman’s housewife when *she* wasn’t allowed to learn some other job either) make any exception for their lesbian, bisexual, and asexual daughters…

  6. Anonymous says:

    The proper English title of the Sukune/Kagura manga is extremely unlikely to be “Soulphage”. It’s almost certainly “solfège” or “solfege”.

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