Yuri Anime
Top story this week is the news that Takeshima Eku’s Whisper Me a Love Song is getting an anime! Crystalyn Hodgkins has the details on ANN.
I am beside myself with glee about this. I just love this manga. It’s adorable and utterly, genuinely, innocent. You can happily give it to a pre-teen or adult of your choice. It’s unabashedly a Yuri school romance, without the skirt-staring of Sakura Trick.
I hope/believe this will be the very first anime we can really point to as a shoujo Yuri anime. The manga doesn’t run in a girl’s magazine, of course, so the category is plenty arguable (and I have, in the past, argued that) but with a majority female readership Comic Yuri Hime has always been – very much despite it’s editor’s opinion, at times – a women’s magazine. If the animators keep the feel and look of the original manga, we should get something that would still be appropriate for tweens. My digits are all crossed for that! I can teel you with certainty, that I am not the only person out there, rejoicing for this anime.
Black Rock Shooter: Dawn Fall has premiered on Disney+. ANN has a review by MrAJCosplay, which say it looks pretty good, but doesn’t really give us a synopsis of the story, so I don’t know if it is related to either the OVA or the television series, or if any of the Yuriishness from those, appears here. If you have Disney+ and want to write a review for us, contact me!
Yuri Events
Yuricon 2023 is moving forward! We currently have more than a dozen panels/presentations/discussions in process. So far all of these are going to be recorded and put onto Yuri Studio to be watched at your convenience, but once we get past Q2, I’m hoping to do at least one live event, as well. Is there a topic you really love to talk about? Apply to run a panel or do a presentation for Yuricon 2023. We are completely open to ideas and the stuff folks are working on now are fantastic, I think you’ll really enjoy them. ^_^ We’re working on a logo now and I’ll be doing an opening ceremonies video once that’s done.
Girls Love Fest is running their next event in the Tokyo area on March 19, 2023. Girls Love Fest 37, will include special “only” sections for Bloom Into You, Assault Lily, Lycoris Recoil and other popular franchises. Let me know if you’re attending, I’d love a report!
Yuri Manga
Creator Mieri Hiranashi has announced that her upcoming book, The Girl That Can’t Get A Girlfriend is number 1 in the nonfiction manga category on Amazon. This eagerly-awaited book will be hitting shelves next month. I’ve pre-ordered my copy. ^_^
She Loves To Cook, She Loves to Eat, Volume 2 will fill your heart with food and squee in English this March from Yen Press!
Yuri Visual Novels & Games
Via Sr. YNN Correspondent Ashley, gamedev Christine Love wants you to learn a bit more about Emily Harmless and her quest in Get In the Car Loser! Fate of Another World.
Via YNN Correspondent Cryssoberyl, we have the news that Bushiroad is launching a new Revue Starlight visual novel for Switch and on Steam. Alex Mateo has details on ANN.
Yuri Light Novels
I’m In Love With The Villainess: She’s So Cheeky For A Commoner, Volume 1 has hit digital shelves. I implore you to give this series a read. There’s some repeated footage, but trust me…this is not just a rehash of the same scenes. This series *will* have you in tears. inori-sensei’s writing has leveled up in these last few years.
Buy us a Sailor Uranus or Neptune sparkling water
Support Yuri journalism on Ko-fi!
Other News
A new Yuri literary magazine is launching next month in Japan. Zerogo: Yuri Literary Magazine (零合 : 百合総合文芸誌) features a cover image by Shimura Takako, and a comment by Mikami Teren, but the other names are less familiar to me. I’m looking forward to seeing what this offers!
I’ve been watching the news on this, but Ashley convinced me that you’d be interested too. Ogata Megumi, voice actor of Sailor Uranus in the 2000s Sailor Moon anime and Shinji in Evangelion is doing a series of voice-recordings they are calling a Solo Reading Project. Episode 1 is titled HALF MOON. Tickets are available on Peatix. The event will run from Jan. 14 – 21.
Exciting news for queer comics fans, the No Straight Lines documentary will premiere on American PBS’ Independent Lens on Jan 23! Check local listings for broadcast times or stream at pbs.org/nostraightlinesfilm or PBS Video app! This is a must-see documentary. I reviewed it in 2021 here on Okazu. It was brilliant.
Yuri Surveys
Thank you to everyone who filled out the Yuri Fandom Survey. We had responses from more than 1600 Yuri fans world-wide! I’m working on the preliminary results now.I’m really fascinated by all of your answers (not in a creepy way, it’s just really cool!) and will get those results up soon.
The timing was off for posting here on YNN, but this past week Comic Yuri Hime was also running a survey – their first-ever look at what overseas fans want. I hope some of you caught my posts about it online and filled it out. I conjecture that this is a direct result of the popularity of I’m in Love With The Villainess being grown overseas first, then in Japan.
Seven Seas is also doing their monthly reader survey – this one offers a 30% off coupon for all of their imprints on Bookwalker! Since She’s So Cheeky For A Commoner launched digitally this week, I made a point of filling it out. ^_^
In a related topic, Mainichi Japan reports that Japan survey on asexual, aromantic people reveals the terms are not black and white. People have very individual ways of thinking about themselves. How do we really encapsulate gender and sexuality when ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is an answer that people actually use? ^_^
If you’d like to support Yuri journalism and research, Patreon and Ko-Fi are where we currently accept subscriptions and tips. Your support goes straight to paying for Guest Reviews, folks helping with videos, site maintenance, managing the Yuricon Store and directly supporting other Yuri creators. Just $5/month makes a huge impact! Become part of the Okazu family!
Thanks to our Okazu Patrons and Supporters who make the YNN weekly report possible!
Become a YNN Correspondent: Contact Us with any Yuri-related news you want to share and be part of the Yuri Network. ^_^
I am also extremely excited for the “Whisper Me a Love Song” anime series! The manga is utterly delightful and, as you pointed out, this may be the closest series we’ve gotten to a shoujo yuri romance. I also find it funny that Seto Asami, Yori’s VA, has been popping up in a lot of yuri related projects as the co-lead (Aoi in “Birdie Wing”) or very important secondary character (“Yuri is My Job” & “Gundam: Witch From Mercury”) in recent years. Here’s hoping the anime adaption is solid!
I’m happy to see that Mieri Hiranashi’s manga is shaping up to be a success! Here’s hoping Viz Media continues to give more original manga and graphic novels like it a chance.
It always seems to be a a “six degrees of Yuri” thing with seiyuu. They do one popular series and the next thing you know, they are in a bunch. ^_^
Did you see that Pikachi Ohi put out a Lycoris Recoil doujinshi?
I had not.
There was a 2017 interview with Pine, chief editor of YH at the time, where she said the magazine’s readership was majority male, having flipped over back when the YrYr anime brought in a large influx of new readers.
I don’t think of SasaKoi as shoujo. I don’t ever see series like it from shoujo magazines or on shoujo web platforms, whereas there are several shounen or seinen magazines where it would be right at home.
Kase-san seems like the yuri romance anime with the easiest argument for it being shoujo. For one thing, the series now runs in Wings, which positions itself as a shoujo magazine, albeit for adults.
I think a good thing about a SasaKoi anime is that the main couple start dating early enough that the anime is bound to get that far, which remains a rarity.
I assumed you’d argue this point, but if Kase-san, with it’s very sexual service that also ran in a Yuri magazine with a mostly-male readership is shoujo than I cannot imagine that Sasakoi is not, but we rarely see eye to eye on these things, so we will just disagree. ^_^
Fanservice and erotica are a normal part of shoujo. Kase-san’s approach to nudity and sex is pretty in keeping with shoujo. The absence of fanservice in SasaKoi isn’t something that would make it shoujo.
What feature(s) of SasaKoi is (are) not shoujo in your opinion?
The art style. It’s the sort of style that would fit right in magazines such as Kirara Forward, Dengeki Daioh, Gangan Joker, Flapper or Rex, but would be out of place in a shoujo magazine. Takeshima’s other work has included a few different projects in connection with the bishoujo game industry, since that’s what their style is suited to.
There are other aspects that are easy to find in seinen and just not really seen in shoujo, but they’re not things that would prevent a series drawn to look shoujo from feeling like shoujo.
Since neither Hirari or Comic Yuri Hime are technically shoujo manga magazines,(and neither has a house style in any case,) that’s a valid opinion, but one I cordially disagree with. ^_^ In my opinion, SasaKoi is much more like -let’s call it my ideal shoujo manga. It hardly matters, as these are all merely opinions on both our sides.