by Matt Marcus, Staff Writer

CWs: death, gore, child murder, attempted suicide

If these reviews had bylines, this one’s would be “the perils of world building”.

In SHWD: The Complete Yuri Collection, major cities are plagued by the Dynamis, a bio weapon made during the previous world war. Those exposed become immediately violent and attack all of those near them. Airi Koga, a bulky, muscular 22-year-old woman is the newest recruit at the Special Hazardous Waste Department, a private company that specializes in the neutralization of Dynamis.

Koga gets paired up with the Tokyo division’s ace Shino Sawada, a steely woman who seems purpose-built to fight the Dynamis. Koga is immediately smitten with her new boss, and spends the duration of the story wagging her tail at any scrap of approval from Sawada.

In general, I like the dynamic between the leads but I didn’t find it strong enough to bear the weight of the whole series. The problem ends up being that neither character changes very much over the 16 chapters. Koga pushes through every red flag and warning given to her about Sawada, but she is too ensorcelled to acknowledge them. The emotional climax of their story is simply Koga asserting that her puppy-love for Sawada is real in defiance of a big reveal that should otherwise cast extreme doubt on Sawada’s character. It also doesn’t help that this climax lands in the middle of a messy exposition dump that feels like set up for a longer series that we will never see (more on that later). Nevertheless, if you love Yuri where the leads show their affection through their fists, you’ll likely be plenty pleased with their arc.

There is also a secondary pairing from the Fukuoka branch: Leone “Leo” Cass and Nonaka. The former is a hunky, affectionate operative from the US; the latter a short-tempered ex-yakuza. I felt this pairing had the strongest thematic resonance: Leo lost her 8-year-old daughter and has become viscerally nauseous at the sight of children, while Nonaka lost family members and school friends to an attack that left her body unable to mature, forever stuck in the form of a child.

Leo is by far my favorite character in the series: she adds both levity and pathos, both with her playful-but-caring nature and her vulnerability. Despite appearing in control at all times, she has an emotional weak point that, when exposed, sends her immediately into deep despair. It really highlights how the Dynamis’ mental pollution leaves even the strongest operatives balancing their sanity on a knife’s edge. Nonaka, unfortunately, is as half-baked in her characterization as she is in her physical appearance. Despite her, dare I say, shitty demeanor towards Leo, there is “dere” under that “tsun”, but we are never told whence that affection came which leaves her feeling a bit hollow. That said, the way that Nonaka offers herself as Leo’s safe space to recover from mental pollution feels surprisingly sweet. However, it comes with the obvious caveat that while Nonaka is mentally mature, the optics of her and Leo together has some notable ick factor.

One of the draws of a sci-fi setting is the ability to explore themes with extreme precision. SHWD has a clear setup to explore how people process and react to grief. Every named operative was motivated to join the company because of someone they lost to the effects of the Dynamis—and we are shown enough of those gruesome moments to give bite to the characters’ feelings. The problem is that the story doesn’t follow through with this angle, and instead shoehorns in a conspiracy plot in the final stretch that ends up undermining those motivations. As it turns out, SHWD is secretly the causers of the Dynamis outbreak (due to an unnamed disgruntled evil scientist, natch). Leo drops one line about staying with SHWD simply to minimize harm, but it. It’s the equivalent of someone joining an addiction center run by Perdue Pharma after a loved one died of an opioid overdose.

When she ’bout to tell you the world’s plot.

What also doesn’t help the final narrative twist is the way it is written. The pages where Sawada explains the Dynamis’ true history is, to be frank, very incoherent. The grammar and sentence structure doesn’t flow at all, or at best does if you squint really hard. One section reads:

“As world wars became more frequent, the weapons needed to end them became increasingly more radical.

In other words, soldiers lost their fighting spirit.

A weapon that affects the spirit of enemy soldiers is difficult to reproduce.”

I think the meaning here is supposed to be something along the lines of: “Constant world wars with escalating weaponry began to seriously erode the morale of the military rank-and-file. With their existences on the line, many governments developed methods to combat the emotional tolls of war, but their effects were short-lived.” What’s on the page feels like a very rough-cut translation that took me multiple reads to parse.

I don’t want to make any firm claims, but given that Seven Seas decided to forgo separate volume releases after the first one and instead pivoted to an omnibus format coupled with the fact that this wasn’t a problem anywhere prior to the Volume 3 sections makes me wonder if shortcuts were used for the later chapters. It could also be plausible that it’s just as confusing in the original Japanese. Either way, you can tell that sono.N was wrestling with fitting in “the world’s plot” in the limited space of the back of this series. It’s as if the world-building was too good for the space that was given, leaving me wanting the themes and character motivations to be more consistent and clear than they are.

I would say that I do like sono.N’s art. The Dynamis are formless but very creepy, the character designs are fun (props again to body diversity), and the action is well-conveyed. Occasionally, though, characters do look off model in a way that messes with their scale relative to each other: case in point, Koga looks a lot less beefy on the cover compared to inside the book. It’s a minor gripe, though.

If you are looking for a short Yuri sci-fi story with badass women in it, and you can stomach some bad things happening (mostly to children), this meaty omnibus is an easy book to recommend. I just know that a lot of meat was left on the bone. 

Art – 8 Plenty creepy when needed
Story – 6 A lot of potential that was left unfulfilled and a bit grim at times
Characters – 7 Koga and Leo are plenty loveable, the rest…eh
Service – 4 Mostly if you like muscular women (plus one bath scene)
Yuri – 8 / LGBTQ – 8 The imprint is called “Girls’ Love” for a reason

Overall – 7 A snack that could have been a four course meal

Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.