Archive for 2017


Yuri Drama CD: Grand Stage Romance Review, Volume 3 (Kazamiya Eru) ( グラン・ステージ ロマンスレビュー 第3幕「風宮絵琉」)

February 2nd, 2017

Squee! Seriously, could  Inoue Marina get any cuter?  ^_^

In Grand Stage Romance Review, Volume 3 (Kazamiya Eru) ( グラン・ステージ ロマンスレビュー 第3幕「風宮絵琉」) the youngest of the Sora-gumi otokoyaku faces a crisis. It’s a good crisis, but…

The song “Hisshou  ~WE CAN FLY~” (飛翔～WE CAN FLY～), sung by all five principals opens the CD. It’s cute and sticky and you can easily imagine them singing it in boy-band style.  I wondered briefly if the lyrics were online, until I literally slapped myself upside the head and pulled out the little booklet with, DUH, the lyrics. I want to share two things about this song with you, both reliant on the quirks of translation and language, but please be assured I say this all with the utmost love and respect. On the CD track, the song was most unfortunately subject to the vagaries of the R/L issue in Japanese-English translation, with the resulting title “飛翔～WE CAN FRY～”. I chuckled, but I swear, not unkindly. The final line  of the lyrics has an interesting reverse quirk. “Hisshou, We Can Fly” and ” Hit Show, We Can Fight” sounded so similar as sung that had I not looked at the lyrics, I would not have known that was that the lyrics included both those lines.  ^_^ 

Eru, you may remember from the first series, is the Sora-gumi’s Peter Pan, youthful and prone to being adorably hyper. When she’s told by Ryoya that the head of the group has called for her to come to the office, she’s a little too green to realize that Ryoya’s teasing. Worried that she’s been cut from the team, she learns that instead, her greatest dream may have come true.

Having been scouted in New York, it has always been Eru’s dream to perform on Broadway and now, an offer to do that very thing has come up! She rushes to reassure us, her partner, that she won’t leave though, until we respond (with implied forcefulness) that she should go after her dream and not worry about us, we’ll be fine. Of course, we’d be more convincing if we weren’t crying when we said that. Eru reluctantly agrees.

We tearfully part. Eru’s crying voice was heartbreaking and you just know that we’re balls of sniffly mush as she heads off to New York to reach for her dream.

As the new track begins, we find Eru has returned. (Is anyone surprised?) But her reason for returning was uniquely Eru-esque. She’s become accustomed to and enjoys performing male roles. In fact, her goal is to achieve a “cool” guy reputation. But once she arrived in New York, she realized that she’d be performing as a woman. (And so the slightly strange cover image is explained at last.) Not that she objected; it just, she realized, wasn’t her. And so she’s back. AND she promises not to leave us again. In execrable English she tells us that she loves our teary face. Squee!

The final spoken track finds both us and Eru in New York (you can tell, because the BGM is saxophones…duh..) and Eru semi-accurately walks us through Times Square and Broadway. (I know for a fact that Ogata Megumi has been to NYC, because that’s where I met her, so she would have been able to regale the writers with stories of what it looked like 15 years ago. It’s changed a lot since.) And we promise to stay together forever.

I think Sakura speaks for us all here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the CD finishes with “2 be there” a new image song.

Ratings: 

Overall – 9

So, another squeezable Drama CD from the geniuses at  étriere, who clearly just want me to be happy. ^_^

Here is Inoue Marina as Kazamiya Eru singing “2 be there.” I thought it suited her.

 





Sound Euphonium, Season 2 Anime (English) Guest Review by Michelle Denise N

February 1st, 2017

Woo hoo! It’s Guest Review Wednesday and we have a Guest Review! I love that so much. ^_^ Today, I hope you will welcome new Guest Reviewer Michelle Denise N of Lonelypond,and make her feel as welcome as possible.  The floor is yours, Michelle!

Sound Euphonium, the animated series, follows the haphazard learning process of euphonium (or baritone) player Oumae Kumiko, a somewhat reluctant first year member of the Kitauji High School Concert Band. Kitauji suffered a schism the year before, when the more serious first (now second) years quit over their lazy seniors’ lack of effort.  A new instructor, Taki Noburo, has taken over leadership, which attracted Kumiko’s fellow first year, trumpet virtuoso Kousaka Reina to the school. Kumiko had been trying to escape both band and Reina, after a ‘dud gold’ placement in middle school. SE’s first season built up a certain amount of dramatic tension between the two girls, which the second season glances at in the first episode, but then takes Kumiko and the rest of the episodes in an entirely unexpected ramble through the other relationships in the band.

If you love the trumpet, Sound Euphonium Season 2 is worth watching; the trumpet solos are sublime. If you watch anime not for music, but plotting and story pacing, SE2 would have trouble rating a dud bronze.

Kumiko is a mild, friendly, pleasant enough character. Through the first season, she spent most of her time with Reina. In the second season, they tossed Reina to the side, leaving her to pine over sensei while Kumiko wandered wide-eyed through relationships she didn’t really understand. There is also some attention paid to Kumiko’s relationship with her sister and Kumiko’s need to play music with someone she has an emotional connection to. The resolution to that plot point was shoehorned uncomfortably into the end of the season in a way that didn’t strike true for me with any of the characters involved. However, the smaller stories about other band members were short arcs that did actually catch my interest and my heart, unlike any of Kumiko’s antics. I mostly just felt like she was wildly out of her league emotionally, very naive.

Yuri: Let’s get the KumiRei question out of the way first off; it’s never really caught my interest as a combination, both girls seemed to be playacting. The first season of Sound Euphonium, Reina’s crazy boldness and how much I disliked her caused me to start yelling ‘devil trumpet player’ at the screen during her antics. The wonder and puzzlement of Sound Euphonium Season 2, is that just as I started to sympathize with her, she disappeared from the story.

If you look at Sound Euphonium Season 2, with no expectations it becomes the story of a young euphonium player’s innocent trampling through relationships more adult than she is capable of understanding, while searching for an emotional connection. Meanwhile, her weirdly intense best buddy from Season 1, the piercingly talented trumpet player with a crush on teacher, slips from story center to a near silent sideline participant, though still an epic trumpet player.

Non existent KumiRei chemistry gets eclipsed by the fragilely emo oboe player, Yoroizuka Mizore and the slightly swaggersome former flute, Kasaki Nozomi, suffering from one of those mutual misunderstandings that seem to plague fictional young girls who might have mad crushes on each other but never seem to talk about ANYTHING. This phenomenon always puzzles me when sighted in the wild. But this time, we get to an understanding, and a bonus nice moment that might lead the audience to think flautist and oboeist had kissed and made up at some point, but were refraining due to public location. And then Reina and Kumiko make fun of them, acing their callow youth best. There are also some exchanges that could be mistaken for flirting between several of the other band members, as well as the continued pining of trombone player, Tsukamoto Shuuichi, male, after Kumiko.

And we also have a pool episode, complete with bikinis.
 
RATINGS
Art 7 — some nice lighting, lots of outdoors moments, makes playing in band not visually boring
Story 5 — too unfocused
Characters 7 — many of them interesting, but leads let down by plot/pacing issues
Yuri — 3 (is that the right level for make it up and/or close your eyes and imagine)
Service 2
Overall 6 (watch it for the music and the flute player so get at least halfway through)

Erica here: Sound Euphonium, Season 1 and 2 are available streaming over at Crunchyroll. 

Thank you! I appreciate both the balanced perspective and the appreciation for music, although I’ll always be biased for woodwinds over brass. ^_^

The phenomenon you speak ofwhen characters just do not *talk to one another,  I refer to as “Jondalar syndrome” after the male protagonist of The Mammoth Hunters, who desperately wants to have sex with female protagonist Ayla, but just never tells her, for 400 pages. It was excruciating. Irritated the pants off me. ^_^





Yuri Manga: Season Theater Theatrical, Volume 1 (シーズンシアターシアトリカル )

January 31st, 2017

In Season Theater Theatrical, Volume 1 (シーズンシアターシアトリカル ), Manabi is a director and Taiyo is an actress and together they create Yuri-themed musical performances for online streaming site Play Play Douga. But Manabi has bigger dreams. She envisions an all-Yuri musical performance revue! 

Enter Shinomiya Kise, the young, exceedingly cute CEO of the Shinomiya Group. Kise has never really had too many friends, but she loves sitting and watching performances on Play Play Douga. And, of all the performers, she likes Taiyo most. She really likes Taiyo. So, when Kise-chan approached Taiyo and Manabi with an offer they can’t refuse – use of a custom built theater for Yuri-themed plays – they don’t refuse. And, so, the Season Theater (named after Kise) is born.

Taiyo falls almost immediately for Kise’s personality, (which is so shy and scared, she reminded me of a small prey animal. A shrew perhaps, or a vole.) Kise’s maid, Aoba is multi-talented and Manabi integrates her into the staff immediately. 

Now, they just need a cast! Manabi decides to do auditions on Play Play Douga, using popular Yuri couples from the streaming site. She ends up with the two members of  duo “Jewel Box,” Jueru and Hakobe, as the supporting cast. And, when all is said and done, they perform “Yurizukin-chan” a “yurified” version of Little Red Riding Hood 

This manga is drawn by Minamoto Hisanari, creator of Fu~fu, for Comic Cune, which, while it does have Yuri, is more focused on the moe than the Yuri. So, yes, there are Yuri couples and yes, they are all adults, but they all look like they are toddler to 4 years old and everything is extra, super, teeth-grindingly adorable. The plot is amusing, there’s very little drama and it’s a fun read, without being even slightly stressful.

That said, there is one moment when I absolutely wanted to hug this manga. Jueru shows up at the audition with Hakobe all attitude and tsundere. She’s pretty obnoxious, actually. And when she and Hakobe come in second to Taiyou and Kise for the lead roles.  Jueru is all ready with a dramatic exit. “And so, the losers will take their leave!” she says and begins to sweep her way out of the theater. Manabi reminds them that they need other actresses, too, so they are kept on to play the little sister (rather than the grandmother) and the wolf. But the meme Jueru inspired,  “The losers will take their leave!” is granted eternal life on Play Play Douga. Aoba is right on it, and starts to mock Jueru, before the end of the scene. This shows some insight on online cultural dragging and I really appreciated it. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – erm….moe. REALLY moe
Story – Goofy, lovable
Characters – Also goofy, lovable
Yuri – Yep
Service – Nope

Overall – YMMV but I’m feeling generous, so let’s say 8

The story is ongoing and I can’t say I’m hooked, but it’s certainly worth following for some light reading. “Our Theater” the cover reads. How I wish it was….

I particularly like how, according to the author’s note, Minamoto-sensei became hooked on all-female musical review troupes as he did research for this series. “I’m off to Osaka!”” he says to Fujieda Miyabi-sensei, “Wanna come?” “Um..no, that’s okay.” ^_^

 





LGBTQ: Oath, An Anthology of New (Queer) Heroes

January 29th, 2017

I’m horribly backlogged on the books I backed on Kickstarter in 2016. Today I’m going to take a look at Oath, An Anthology of New (Queer) Heroes. 

Created by a lineup of talented creators, this book is a fully diverse anthology that takes a look at the stories of people who are or have become, heroes and whose gender, sexuality, race and body size do not in any way negatively affect their ability to function as heroes.

My two favorite stories were Theo Nicol Lorenz’ story “Lunch Break” in which two people with secrets learn to trust and love one another – a theme that repeated throughout the book and Lee and Ty Blauersouth’s “Safe House” which broke age barriers as well and had a truly joyful ending.

“The Fourth Option” by Adriana Ferguson and K. Van Dam actually made me laugh out loud with it’s quirky “information assimilant” who makes packets with key information, including her name. 

And Jenn St-Onge’s No Sugar was a tale that would be familiar to any manga fan of magical girl stories.

As one might expect (and for me, desire) in an anthology, the art styles are varied, but I’m going to  say that the story telling as tighter then usual for an anthology. Especially one that has such a broad overarching topic as “Heroes.” I don’t think any of the stories left me feeling as if anything wwas missing and almost all of them felt scripted exactly as they needed to be – enough to tell the story, not too much to preach, not too little to leave us wondering what as going on.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

As Kickstarter anthologies go, Oath was one of the best I have read. Oath is available digitally on the Oath shop or softcover in print.

 





Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – January 28, 2017

January 28th, 2017

Sailor Moon News

The fourth season of Sailor Moon Crystal has been announced, according to Rocket24News, as part of the official 25th anniversary of the series.  At this point, we have to just assume that they’ll be completing the series. Then they’ll have to figure out something new for the 30th Anniversary. 

Here’s a piece of amazing news – ANN Reports that the Sailor Moon Musical is coming to Anime Matsuri in Houston Texas! I think that’s spectacular. The cast includes several former Takarisiennes, including Yamato Yuga who plays Tuxedo Mask and Shiotsuki Shuu who plays Sailor Uranus. This is a fantastic chance for American fans to experience a Seraamyu event.

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Yuri Manga

I’m pleased to report that the independent Yuri anthology Galette (ガレット創刊号) is now available for pre-order on Amazon JP and will be shipping mid-February. This book includes illustrations and manga by Takemiya Jin, Hakamada Mera, Amano Shuninta and many others.

Takashima Hiromi’s Kase-san and Morning Glory, a book that made Top Ten here on Okazu is hitting western bookshelves in English at the end of February.

Momono Moto has a new collection called Akane-iro Kiss. (茜色のキスは屋上で)

Yasuda Kousuke is a new name here on Okazu. His book Watashi no Kanojo no Otomari Eiga  (私と彼女のお泊まり映画 1) appears to be about two college students who have a standing “Movie night” date. So half movie review, half Yuri manga.  ^_^

Morinaga Milk’s Hana to Hina no Houkago  (ハナとヒナは放課後) continues into a Volume 3, with a lovely cover. ^_^

Goofy body switch with a heart manga Swap⇔Swap, (すわっぷ⇔すわっぷ) gets a second volume, which is pretty amazing as they clearly ran out of content by the end of Volume 1.

 

LGBTQ Comics

YNN Correspondent Mariko S want to make sure you know about the IDW anthology by some leading lights in the comics industry, Love is Love. It was created to raise money for the families of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting victims and has been so popular that the first printing sold out!

Women’s comic pioneer, Roberta Gregory, has been named as a possible honoree at the Eisner Hall of Fame this year. This is fantastic news for those of us who grew up with her life-changing Bitchy Bitch. ^_^

And while I was looking for a link to Love is Love, I found this absolutely awesome-looking illustrated history of LGBTQ activism called Queer: A Graphic History by Dr. Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele.

I know we’ve mentioned this before, but Marvel has a queer Latina superhero, America Chavez and it’s worth checking her book out.

Thanks to Mr. Mochizuki, who I met out in Michigan, I learned about another LGBTQ comic running in a mainstream comic magazine in Japan, but this one really surprised me. Sorairo Flutter (そらいろフラッター) by Okura and Hashii Koma, is about bisexuality. That in itself is interesting, but it is running in Gangan Joker magazine, which shocked the heck out of me. It is a pretty “otaku-ish” magazine, which spends much more time on violence and treating women shitty than it does, usually on young men’s feelings. Count me surprised, but very pleased with this.

 

Other News

I haven’t read it, but if you want an attendee perspective of my lecture at University of Michigan, Patricia F. Anderson has passed along a Storified version of her live-tweeting “Alt-Manga, Queer Manga”! Thanks Patricia!

James Whitbrook blew my mind with this fantastic article about character detail in Steven Universe.

I keep meaning to pass this along. Anime Feminist, which is a blog you should be following, has an interview with Masaki C. Matsumoto, queer and feminist activist, which you should be reading. ^_^

We’ll wrap up today with  a reading suggestion from YNN Correspondent, Guest Reviewer, Patron and dear friend Bruce, Daughters of the Samurai by Janice P. Nimura. Bruce has this to say about it: “It’s about a small group of provincial girls who were somewhat randomly selected by the Meiji government in 1871 to go to America, get some western schooling, and return to help establish women’s education in Japan. Shipped overseas with no family, no English, and no idea what they were doing (one was only six), three of the original five ended up kicking butt at Vassar and Bryn Mawr, and on return were instrumental in the development of Japanese women’s higher education. The description sounds a little dry, but it’s a fascinating cross-cultural story of some truly extraordinary women. Great book.”

Know some cool Yuri News you want people to know about? Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find. Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!