Hello and welcome to the 2019 Edition of the end-of-year lists here on Okazu! <pausing for applause> As usual, I will be splitting the lists of things I consider notable, interesting, worth mentioning into three. We begin, as we always begin with anime of the year that I consider worth noting. Also as usual, I will be bending the laws of relativity around words like “anime” “year” and “worth.” ^_^ I’ll do my best to note where and/or how you can watch this series on the list. Because it is possible this year, every single series on the list is available legitimately streaming and/or with an English-language release on DVD or Blu-ray.

These are all inherently my opinion and may therefore necessarily not reflect yours. ^_^ I invite you to write your top lists in the comments! I’d love to see what you consider best of the year.

Honorable Mention: Devilman Crybaby

This was explicitly a 2018 series, but I did not watch it until 2019, so could not include it last year, which was a huge failure on my part. Oh well. ^_^

Devilman Crybaby is also not “Yuri” per se, but it is queer as fuck and arguably the best anime I watched all year.

So here we are, starting off with this collaboration for Go Nagai and Masaaki Yuasa in one of the finest anime I have ever seen. Devilman Crybaby is a masterwork and deserves recognition for its mastery.

Streaming on Netflix.

Revue Starlight

It’s not as Yuri as I’d hoped, but there’s plenty of Yuri drama in between what is largely incoherent plot points. But who needs coherence when you have songs! and fights! and a giraffe!

For Futaba and anyone not Kaoruko, for Banana and Junna and above all, for Maya and Claudine, this series definitely deserves a place here.

Streaming on HIDIVE, coming out in 2020 on “home video” as they say, from Sentai Filmworks.

Steven Universe

I know and you know that this is not anime. It is, however so *deeply* inspired by anime that I hope I don’t even need to mention that it’s a child of Revolutionary Girl Utena, it’s just that obvious.

It tells us deeply difficult stories in a way that actually address all of the problematic bits, and it give us multiple queer characters seen from multiple angles. Both allies and enemies are sympathetic and unsympathetic in turn.  And it gave us so much music that gets stuck in my head. The series climax was brilliant, the movie finale was a Takarazuka tribute and “Future” gave us time to consider where we go from here. As long as there’s a Steven Universe. It’ll quite likely end up here on my Top list eventually. ^_^

Broadcast on Cartoon Network, streaming on Amazon Prime, available on DVD.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Yep, also not an anime. But super duper gay, so yeah, it’s on here. It’s a little darker, a lot more complex than kid’s cartoons were in my youth, but the gay characters’ relationships are noted as such. There’ll be no segment of fandom trying to rewrite what they are told here – Netossa and Spinarella are a couple and so are Bow’s parents and that is that. I genuinely love how I am not the target audience for this series and how very obviously little kids are, without the tiresome blatant marketing + faux morality that was foisted upon cartoons I grew up with.

She-Ra and the Princess of Power is a damn fine animated series and you should at least give it a try.

Streaming on Netflix, available on DVD.

Sailor Moon Super S

Upon watching the Sailor Moon SuperS Special, one might find oneself inclined to become very gay indeed. (Also one might wonder about the ferociousness of Michiru without Haruka to keep her tempered.) For such a short special, it packs a really gay punch. And this is the first time its ever had an official English-language release!

SuperS starts off with a surprising amount of queerness, but it all gets set aside for the second of Chibi-Usa’s questionable love choices. Nonetheless, the SuperS Special makes this whole season worth existing and is the sole reason that it is on this list.

Streaming on Viz.com, available on Blu-ray from Viz Media.

Sailor Moon Stars

Where SuperS starts off queer, but ends back in boring old straightsville, Sailor Moon Stars starts queer and just keeps on going for a long, long while. It has the largest collection of non-cis and not-straight characters of all the seasons and Haruka and Michiru get some pretty intimate lines between them. When you remember that this is a 25 year old series for children, and you reevaluate some of their scenes, you might feel at least a little bad for those folks positive in their conviction that they were not women and not in love. Because they are so obviously, definitely two women in love any argument to the contrary seems utterly ridiculous.

For at long last, giving us the best possible version of Stars, Viz gets two thumbs up and a place in this year’s top three.

Streaming on Viz.com, available on DVD and Blu-ray Viz Media.

Kase-san and Morning Glories

It was sweet, it was charming, it was beautifully, lovingly animated. And now that it is available in English as a sub and a dub, it’s one of the best buys of the year! Yamada, who loves plants and struggles quietly with her sense of self-worth, and Kase-san, a beloved star athlete of the school, fall in love and it’s all…delightful. They have things to work through, and things they need to say out loud and things that they need to do for themselves, but they are there for each other, moving forward in life and love, together.

Their story is ongoing, but this anime can be watched as is without any explanation as a slice of two lives that are coming together as one.

Available on Blu-ray from Sentai Filmworks.

The Kase-san OVA has been my #1 of the year before, and I honestly expected it to be again this year, but then some things happened. First, something old and wonderful came back to us after years of being obscure.

Go Nagai’s The Devil Lady

A bit of a late entry, because I had no idea it had come back into circulation, but Go Nagai’s The Devil Lady, the early 2000’s ADV (now Section 23) release of Devilman Lady is….fantastically gay and deeply Yuri. It’s violent, and trashy, as all Nagai works are, and it’s full of mutating people and death and misery and sexual desire and even love.

In a year when queer horror is having the renaissance it deserves, and in Go Nagai’s 55th anniversary of his debut year, I can’t think of anything that makes me happier than to see one of my absolute favorites come back into the limelight. Fingers crossed for a license of the remastered Devilman Lady which ought to be out next year for a 20th anniversary. (And I’ve already asked Seven Seas to consider the manga which was deeply fucked up. ^_^)

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

When it comes to “something happened,” my number one pick of the year doubled down.

Bloom Into You

The first thing that happened was that – very unusually – the anime really added layers of depth to the manga and ended up being better than the source material.

With insightful voice acting in both English and Japanese, the anime took a few early volumes of the manga and made them seem far more compelling than the comic had. That’s rare in and of itself.

But what really catapulted this series into the top spot was that the home release actually fixed the problems with the broadcast/streaming animation, and added in a pile of physical extras on top of that. For once, it was really worth getting a Premium box set.

Considering that the story is chock-a-block full of typical Yuri tropes, the fact that the Bloom Into You Premium box set from Sentai Filmworks/Section 23 is so incredibly good, it is my number one Yuri anime pick of the year.

Streaming on HIDIVE, available on Blu-ray.

We didn’t have a lot of Yuri anime this year, but what we had was pretty amazing! Next up, the unbelievably difficult Yuri Manga list. (Holy cow there was a lot of good Yuri manga this year.)