Archive for December, 2004


Yuri Manga: Pure Marionation, Volume 1

December 6th, 2004

A story about a lesbian android – isn’t *that* original?

Pure Marionation is an exceptionally cute story brought to us by our friends at Dengeki Comics and Mediaworks, your source for irritatingly cute and lolified yuri. Dengeki didn’t used to be so grossly cute – they did Battle Atheletes once upon a time when, apparently, men wanted to look at women, not children, kissing. Gah.

In any case, Pure Marionation is an older manga about Anon, an android, who is sent to school to “test” her AI. She is charged with making friends, and fitting in. As usual, her creators have given her everything she needs to survive, except all the basic information that a fifteen-year old girl might potentially have. So, when asked for her birthday, or blood type, Anon is completely unable to answer. Well, duh.

Anon promptly begins making friends by being adorable, lovable, sweet, kind, generous and affectionate, which just goes to prove that this is a fiction. If a kid like her showed up at *my* high school, she would have been dead meat in mere days. Her first friend, and most likely eventual love interest, is Miamo, a “cool” girl, insofar as this series has them. By the end of volume 1, Miamo learns about Anon’s special circumstances and vows to cover for her, making the promise to the only adult woman in the entire series, Anon’s creator, Madoka. Madoka is quite enamored of her creation, but I’m not really sure what this “test” would prove about Anon. Am I just being a hard ass? Probably.

There doesn’t seem to be any plot complication in this series, and the only antagonist thaws when Anon’s computer brain helps the two of them win a contest together. (There’s a teeny-weeny little jealousy between rival girl and Anon, but only because rival girl thinks that Anon is trying to steal her onee-sama. Quite unreasonably…I’m sure that, in her innocence, Anon doesn’t even know what stealing someone’s affections *is.*)

Each chapter has mild conflict like, erm, Anon overloads in the tub, and what *is* her birthday…? But don’t expect anything angsty here, this is fluffy cuteness in its purest form, with lots of bathing for ballast.

Will Anon and Miamo get together? I am sure that they do, but I imagine that it’s in a Shinobuden happy hugs all around way, rather than a passionate grand-scale Stellvia kind of way. Did I like it? No older woman, no eyepatches, no weapons,…it was okay. ;-)

Ratings:
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Art – 6
Service – 9
Yuri – 4

Overall – 6

Did I mention that this series is by the artist of Kokoro Library? Obviously, another guy obsessed with cute, happy girls who bathe alot. I always wonder if any of these guys ever get laid by real women…

 





I Know You’re Jealous…

December 3rd, 2004

No review today, just some random yuri-ish comments and gloating. :-)

Firstly, loyal yuri fan Clarissa sent the Yuricon Mailing List this link to an interview of a Japanese fan of Maria-sama ga Miteru, in English. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, it has interesting links to many Marimite objet d’fandom.

The above interview also refers to a “realistic” manga series about student life at an all-girl school called Joshi Kousei, which, oddly, I just found last week at Book Off. I expect to be reviewing it some day soon. It looks, upon first glance to be terrifying and wacky. I’ve seen Joshi Kousei listed on more than a few Japanese site yuri manga lists, so it’ll be interesting to read, even thought the actual yuri content is low.

Also, when I get home, there are a few new items awaiting for me today, so look forward to some reviews in the future of:

Pure Marionation – a girl-meets-robot girl love story.

Sokyu no Megami – It looks space opera-y, y’know girls with weapons and/or mecha. It’ll probably be awful. :-)

Himitsu Anjerisu – I don’t even *know* what this was about, but it looked interesting and Yuri Kokoro gave it a reasonable rating, so…

Yuri Shimai 5 – Whee! More Strawberry Shake!

Carmilla – When Japanese lesbian magazine Anise stopped publishing, Carmilla filled the gap. I have one issue and its, erm…interesting. I thought that, since it’s been a few volumes, I’d see how it is now.

And the beginning of the next Marimite manga arc, the fourth novel, Rosa Canina. Let’s see how Shizuka fares in manga form, shall we?

So, that’ll keep me busy for a while, I guess. I’ll let you know how it goes! :-)





Yuri Anime: ROD The TV, DVD Volume 3

December 2nd, 2004

ROD The TV continues to amaze and thrill. If you haven’t yet seen this series, you *really* should.

First, the whining:

Note the fanservice-a-riffic picture above. How embarrassing is it that there are people who will find this to be sexy? Worse yet, the special pencil board in this volume has the least sexy picture that I have ever seen of Nenene. I swear, a picture of her snorting potato chips and picking her nose would have been sexier. Like the cover picture, the thought that there are people out there who find this pencil board a turn-on just makes me cringe. Nenene is so cool, could we have not found a less uncomfortable pose for her?

Also, in this volume, the formerly excellent translation appears to go away to be replaced by somewhat more slapdash work. I have this bizarre belief that it *is* possible to translate what was said, and how it was said, in some reasonable facsimile, rather than just glossing over everything to get the general meaning. I DO expect more from professional translators than I do from fans. This volume was lame, Geneon. Really. (Thanks J, for catching that is was Geneon, not ADV, who deserves the blame this time.)

Lastly, I found it to be the height of tacky that Geneon ended this volume at episode 12. For one thing, the season ended on a *brilliant* cliffhanger at episode 13. (In fact, it was at this point that I regularly began to scream while watching this series. Seriously. I’d be sitting on the sofa and then I’d be running around the house screaming. “Oh my god! Aaaahhh!” and the wife would know I was watching ROD.) They certainly could have put *one* more episode on this DVD. Episode 12 makes a decent enough cliffhanger, but 13 would have been so much better! And, more importantly, this means that the last 2 DVDs in this series will probabaly have 3 episodes each, which I think is just crap.

Let me digress for a second, to indulge in this week’s rant. It has come to my attention that DVDs in Japan will, on occasion only have 2 episodes per volume, and cost about the same as we’re paying, so in that way, we’re getting a better deal. In fact this is the case for Maria-sama ga Miteru,but…it still makes me cranky to know that this series is being released on 7 DVDs, when 6 would have simply worked better. (4 volumes of 4 each and 2 volumes of 5.) Then the last volume of each season would have had five episodes, and Vol.3 would have ended on episode 13…the actual *end* of that season. Duh, hello? Am I the only one thinking this way? I swear to you all that, should *ever* begin distroing DVDs, I will use common sense in designing them. I promise.

Okay…that’s it for the whining. Now, the praise:

On the other side of the equation, this volume has some of the best episodes in the first season. The writers’ skills really shine in these four episodes, as we continue the pattern of shoujo/shounen/ alternating stories. I never once felt manipulated, even when I was getting all misty during the obligatory Christmas episode. I mean really – could there be anything more saccharine? And yet, I found myself sniffing happily…much like Nenene herself. ^_^

In terms of Yuri, the series pretty much peaks in Episode 11 when Anita and Hisami have a tearful and emotionally wrought parting. It’s incredibly well done and you can easily make a case for this being something that they will both look back on as their first love, even if they aren’t quite old enough to see it themselves. Certainly they do love each other, but you could just as easily say that it isn’t, you know, *that* kind of love. But I’m a Yuri fan, so screw that. It’s love. ^_^ Clearly the writers thought so too – the body language in this episode is very evocative.

Ratings:
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Art – 7 (still inconsistent)
Music – 9
Yuri – 8

Overall – 9

I would never recommend ROD The TV as a gateway anime – there’s too much going on for the average newbie to follow, but for older fans, and veterans of many, many crappy series, this is a refreshingly well-crafted story.





Yuri Anime: Uta-Kata Revisited

December 1st, 2004

All of a sudden this anime developed both a personality and a yuri storyline, practically overnight. How interesting is that?

Let me begin from the beginning. In Episode 1 of Uta-Kata, we are introduced to average girl Ichika, who, in the course of cleaning a spooky mirror, sees a reflection that is not her own. In the mirror is magical girl-creature Manatsu who comes into the world to be Ichika’s companion through a little misinformation and alot of personal charm.

I reviewed Uta-Kata back on October 25, when it first came out and I was mightily unimpressed. And with good reason, I might add. I have, until this week, been watching the series raw. Well it turned out that I really was, despite my disclaimer last month, really missing *alot* of what was going on, at least in part because I was only half paying attention. But two things happened this week that makes it worth going back and re-reviewing this series.

First, the good news. In Episode 9, the slow crawl into grim that this series has been undergoing becomes a headlong dive into dark and creepy. Initially, I was annoyed by the lack of anything – character development, plot, action. The entire series seemed determined to bore me with triviality. But, during this week’s episode I realized that I had been watching the wrong things entirely. With that revelation came a realization that this series had actually become quite interesting. Because while I was waiting for the inevitable magical girl power up/action/crises escalation, I completely missed the slow deterioration of Ichika, and the plot, into one seriously bleak – and interesting – little tale.

Secondly, due to my lack of attention, I had only half-noticed Ichika’s friends, most especially, Satsuki, played sharply by Kawakami Tomoko, the voice actress for Utena. It seemed to me that we beat on her friends and acquaintances a bit, but while I was looking for the usual magical-girl stuff and trying to ignore the fanservice, I missed that the emotional beating they were all taking *was* the plot. So, when (to me) all of a sudden, the story took a yuri turn, I decided to rewatch the first epsiodes, this time subbed, and see what I had missed.

The bad news – the first seven episodes of this series are cleverly designed to suck, so only hard-core or pig-headed fans will remain to see the good stuff. In rewatching the first three episodes, I was reminded that the fanservice was yawn-a-riffic and the plot really WAS boring as hell. I wasn’t wrong about that when I wrote the first review.

Seriously, the first episodes are dire. No wonder I couldn’t see what was going on – the plot was completely cloaked by several layers of awfulness. Episode 2 is, especially incomprehensible – even with subtitles. I still have no bloody idea what the writers were getting at.

And I can’t say that it gets better, because it basically gets worse until Episode 8 or so, when they lose the fanservice and add in a plot. Basically, while I was waiting for marketable items to manifest and Ichika to use her powers to save the world (when in fact, she’s been using them to find lost watches and turn the lights off…) Ichika has really been overloading on these useless powers. As a result, they are making her very sick. It’s different, at least, watching a magical girl barf into a toilet. Not cute at *all*, which is kind of cool.

So, there I am, watching Episode 9, in which Satsuki (who has apparently been abused by her father as a small child) is acting the prince to Keiko, who is suffering from a broken heart (that being this episode’s “plot”,) when it dawns on me that Satsuki is also suffering from a broken heart – over Keiko. Apparently it dawns on Keiko at the same moment, and she stands up and kisses Satsuki. We later see them hand in hand on the ride home – and we fervently hope that this is not a fluke. Don’t we?

As a yuri bonus, Manatsu and Ichika are all touchy-feely this episode, too. It’s not lesbian, but I think we can make a clearer case for a fanon relationship there. Expect mediocre yuri fanfic art to flood the ‘net any day now. :-)

Episode 10 looks like a literal nail in the coffin as it appears to be about death. So there you go. NOT cute magical girl at all, but grim and unpleasant magical girl, and I for one am mightily relieved.

If you plan on watching this in subs, be prepared – the first seven episodes just suck. (At the time I am writing this, only the first three episodes have been subbed at all. Don’t be surprised when they are god-awful.) But if you can stand it, it looks like some interesting things are right on the horizon.

We’ll keep watching and keep our fingers crossed. :)

Revised Ratings:

Story – 7
Character – 7
Art – 6
Music – 6
Yuri – 8

Overall – A hopeful 7 (at least for Epsiode 9.)

If it goes the way it looks like it’s going, Uta-Kata might even be worth watching.