Archive for the Christian LeBlanc Category


Momentary Lily Okazu Staff Review

January 15th, 2025

Colorful image of tables in a restaurant, with six girls colorfully dressed, eating and drinking, and smiling with banality.It appears that Okazu Staff huddle together when they encounter a trashfire in media, so once again, we are here to debrief and detox.

Today we are gathered together to memorialize our sanity, lost via Momentary Lily, streaming on Crunchyroll.

 

 

 

Christian LeBlanc

My first impression of the new GoHands joint was that it felt like being grabbed by the shoulders and shaken violently by someone vomiting glitter everywhere. And this is coming from someone who generally enjoys GoHands’ output, in defiance of people who point out the flaws in their animation.
 
Admittedly, I’m not particularly literate in cinema, and so online discussions will often illustrate to me why a scene in a movie works as well as it does. Likewise, people online can point out how GoHands is using an ambitious camera angle or perspective in the wrong place, but I may not always notice something’s off, and simply enjoy seeing the camerawork go absolutely ham for someone walking up a flight of stairs. And why not? Anime is generally exaggerated anyway, right?
 
Well, let me explain in terms of music. Momentary Lily is like a slow ballad where someone starts shredding on their axe like crazy halfway through the first verse. Yes, it’s an impressively face-melting, blisteringly-fast guitar solo, but what is it doing after a line and a half of lyrics? Some people will be open-minded enough to simply enjoy the guitar solo, and won’t be bothered by how out of place it is. Conversely, some listeners won’t understand why the gentle singing was interrupted by a piece of music from a seemingly different tune, and will be taken out of the song because it’s so jarring and distracting.
 
My colleagues will expand on how all the different elements of this show make it less than the sum of its parts, but let me pass the baton with this: one character’s death lacks gravitas because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough over two episodes, while another girl’s breasts defy gravitas even as she’s sobbing over her impending doom. Please learn to read the room, Erika Koudaji’s breasts.
 

Eleanor Walker

I watched this while nursing a tremendous hangover and I’m genuinely not sure if it improved the experience or not. The main thing going through my mind was “she breasted boobily” every time a certain character was on the screen. I still don’t know why these collection of walking stereotypes, sorry, characters are doing what they’re doing, what the “Wild Hunt” is and where they’re getting the ingredients for the random cooking segments. It’s like one staffer wanted to make a cute girls doing cute things cooking show and another wanted to make a monster fighting explosion show and the studio just shrugged and said “eh, whatever, we can only afford to animate one pair of breasts so work together”. The voices are particularly grating, I’m not generally one who notices particularly bad voice acting, especially in Japanese (I didn’t notice Hideaki Anno in The Wind Rises, for example, which was widely complained about online) but dearie me the voices in this one make me want to gouge my eardrums out with a melon baller.

 

Erica Friedman

This project is infamously animated by GoHands, a group that takes their work as animators VERY seriously, as everything in this anime moves, constantly. Even things that do not actually ever move.

In a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been hunted by “The Wild Hunt” – over-animated kaijuu – a girl with a mysterious ability to call up a magical, science fiction-y, mega weapon finds a small group of other teenage girls with similar abilities.  Whether you consider these girls to be special forces, or refugees or just plain child soldiers, don’t worry about the details…their misery and trauma will be mined for laughs and pathos and boob jiggles. And cooking lessons, so even at the end of the world, we can make a nice meal of rice and canned mackerel. We got to get our priorities straight.

As for the service – to quote the great Pamela Poovey, “Inappropes.”

Grab a Dramamine and watch Momentary Lily, with a cast of girls with verbal tics that stand in for a personality.

 

Frank Hecker

Fans of the anime Shirobako may recall a scene in which two animators are discussing a new technique for making reflections off eyeglasses look more realistic, followed by a shot of one person’s glasses illustrating that very technique. Watching Momentary Lily is like watching that scene on infinite repeat, but without the self-reflexive humor. After viewing the first couple of minutes of episode 1 in the conventional way, I turned the sound and subtitles off so I could appreciate Momentary Lily for what it really is, a SIGGRAPH demo with fighting girls. (I originally wrote “magical girls,” but they don’t have transformation sequences—more’s the pity.)

Watching the show this way helps make sense of some of the shot and plot choices. Why does one of the girls show off her moisturizing regimen in the first scene? So that we can see how well GoHands can model shiny skin (presumably using Phong shading or some more recent technique). Why do the girls take a break from fighting monsters to have a meal? So that the animators can take a break from animating kaijū and relax themselves, modeling various foods, plastic packages, tin cans, utensils, and so on. (They even show a cousin of the famous Utah teapot.) And most notably: why does the girls’ hair fly around so much? It’s simultaneously a plea to the production committee and a boast to the viewer: “If we had a bigger budget, we could animate every hair.”

I guess there’s a story here somewhere and presumably some attempts at characterization, but really the girls are to GoHands what the Madonna and child and other Biblical scenes were to Renaissance painters, a conventional set of stock images used to demonstrate mastery of their craft. (My using the word “craft” and not “art” is deliberate; there is little art here.) Watching Momentary Lily like I did highlights those demonstrations: the omnipresent lens flare that shifts position depending on which way the light is coming from, the focus pulling and bokeh, the way the clouds constantly moving across the sky are reflected in the windows of the buildings in the background. For me, the emotional climax of episode 2 was not the foreground scene of a girl in extremis, but rather the background shot of a tree with all its leaves rippling in the wind.

I especially loved the shots of buildings shown in dramatic perspective, whether during the day or at night, viewed clearly or enshrouded in fog. Which brings me to my recommendation to GoHands: forget plot, character, and dialogue. Ditch the monsters, include more scenes with buildings and benches, erase the girls from every shot, and create what the world has been waiting for: a true masterpiece of “yuri of absence.”

 

Luce

Well that sure was an eye workout. Ow.

Setting aside the camera for now, this is distinctly mediocre. Sci-fi and post-apocalypse isn’t my thing, but this wouldn’t sell me. The five characters we see initially are unmemorable, apart from ‘onee-chan’ with the big bouncing boobs that are totally unnecessary and look like they’re about to float her off to space. (One character says ‘too much jiggle’. Don’t call it out and flaunt it at the same time.) Renge, the ‘main’ character, is screechy, then apologising for the weirdest things, like ‘imposing’ on the group with a awkwardly cut cooking ‘segment’, as they refer to it. Wow, she’s amnesiac, has a cool weapon and can one shot the big robots. Great, sure sounds like a plot thread right there. Too bad I’m not interested.

Sadly, even if I was interested, watching this feels like an attack on the optic nerve. Aside from over-animated hair and one set of boobs, the animation is middling, but not awful. But it’s like someone heard ‘dynamic camera angles’ and decided this meant ‘camera must move every two seconds’. It’s at odd angles, or moving, but in really jarring ways that almost follow characters but not quite. There’s more lens flares than Star Trek. And what is with the split screens?!

If you have a tendency to migraines, or any visually triggered illnesses, avoid this. I promise it’s not worth it. I’m off to have a lie down.

 

Matt Marcus

When my friend and cohost Sibyl sent me the trailer for Momentary Lily, my first thought was “someone must really like RWBY.” As the announcement began circulating in my online spaces, I had only seen dismissive, but not illuminating, comments about the studio that made it. It wasn’t on my radar, but between my friend’s excitement and the reactions from the folks in the Discord after episode 1 dropped, I figured I would give it a shot.

Y’all, I was not prepared.

I could go on about the visually chaotic and cacophonous opening, but that’s just where it begins. From opening to ending, watching Momentary Lily is like reading one of those giant posts of text with three emojis after every sentence, but also the font is Wingdings.

The script feels like it was written by ChatGPT trained using the dialogue of every lady-led shonen show, but dumber. There’s the gamer girl who chugs energy drinks and calls them her “buffs” in every sentence she speaks. There’s the chipper leader with a verbal tic. There’s the serious dark-haired girl with glasses with a verbal tic. There’s the “big sister” archetype with absurd breast physics. There’s the gyaru girl. And, of course, we have the overpowered amnesiac lead who is so obscenely shy that half her dialogue is in pantomime. The characterization is so thin I’m surprised that their models are not literally transparent.

But we’re not here for deep ruminations on the human soul, are we? No, we’re here to see some overly-stylized teenagers do some high-flying ass-kicking! So that part must be good right? I got bad news for you: the action is messy, hard to follow, and extremely headache inducing. The characters don’t match the garish, hyper-saturated 3D backgrounds in both visual style and, worse, in framerate. Even in shots where the background isn’t moving as if the camera is being controlled by a drunk crane operator, the point of view zooms in and out and bounces around like a nap-skipping toddler on caffeine. It’s as if GoHands was afraid that if they didn’t jangle every key in front of our face for the entire scene, we’d lose interest mid-sword swing.

But beyond all that, the biggest sin is the pacing. Characters only have space to do schtick between the barest of exposition. Tone shifts rapidly from “badass” action to cutesy cooking segments where Amnesia Girl shows her new pals how to make otaku struggle meals. (Each episode is named for the dish said girl makes, so I guess this was The Thing GoHands decided the show should be About.) Scenes are smashed together with no sense of time passing. A character is killed in episode 2, and the previews of the next episode suggest that the show is going to tell us why we should’ve cared about this girl in the first place. It’s jarring and exhausting and boring at the same time.

And don’t get me started on the worldbuilding. Almost every human on earth has been vaporized yet social media still functions! Can’t wait for the plot to hinge on the crew posting their 7-Eleven survivalist stews on the ‘Gram. GOD this sucks.

The thing that strikes me the most about the show is that there is clearly effort and skill on display, and yet it is applied in the most artless way I have ever seen. It’s fascinating in that way: a show ostensibly about cooking that lacks taste. For all the “flavor” tossed in, this is very thin gruel.

Ratings:

Story – eh
Characters – verbal tics and trauma
Animation – LOL
Service – too much jiggle
Yuri – no thank you

Overall – canned fish





Kiss the Scars of the Girls, Volume 2

July 18th, 2024

A cute, short-haired blonde girl and a taller long haired girl with black hair, in dark blue old-fashioned Japan school uniforms hold hands as they smile gently at one another.by Christian Le Blanc, Staff Writer

Feet are not something to lance,
And the soft palate’s no place for hands.
Though we’ve been through school combat,
We should leave it at comrade;
You and me could write a stab romance.

As a quick refresher: Kiss the Scars of the Girls is a futuristic vampire Yuri manga from Aya Haruhana and Yen Press where vampires hardly have any powers or protections, and Class S dominates how vampire girls are educated at their vampire boarding schools which are located next to medieval-looking cities full of prey (and vampire hunters). Emille Florence is our bright, cheerful blonde, while Eve, with her long black hair and unapproachable manner, is her older ‘sister’ designated to show her the ropes and watch out for her.   

When I reviewed Volume 1, I felt a bit let down by how dull everything felt, and lamented the absence of vampiral shenanigans, including violence. Reader, you can well imagine my surprise and delight when Kiss the Scars of the Girls, Volume 2 treated me to a flashback of a primary school knife fight where plucky and sunny-dispositioned Emille gets Stabbitha Christie’d by the awkward girl who likes her, Yucca Lotus. 

I will admit, where this story features Class S prim and proper vampire ladies, I was rather surprised at how nonchalantly the narrator of the flashback says this all went down “on an otherwise unremarkable day” where they “were doing mock close-quarters combat training.” 

What surprised me even more was how OMG WTF shocked her classmates are, and how their teacher is furious at Yucca for going all Stabbicus Finch on someone, but, really, when you arm schoolchildren with knives and tell them to fight each other, I don’t know how you can expect anything other than a Black Stabbath concert to break out. 

As it turns out, vampires heal quickly and easily and Emille just waves it off and asks everyone to forgive her assailant, who then sticks with Emille from that point on to avoid getting bullied…I’d say the other students’ fear of ending up as a letter to Dear Stabby is really what keeps them from picking on her, but it’s hard to say with these vampire kids. 

Yucca ends up having one of those friendships with Emille that you only read about in the occasional Yuri compilation of short stories, where that one short makes you feel all squicky because the creepy character loves seeing her girlfriend upset, so she keeps tormenting her in little ways. It’s off-putting, and Emille’s big sister Eve eventually has to step in and resolve things. Yucca leaves a letter saying she has to go now, her planet needs her, and a big part of me hopes that Eve herself wrote it to cover up any extracurricular “murdering Yucca” activities she felt she needed to do as Emille’s senpai. 

Moving on, we start getting into the reason why the vampires in this book seem so human and normal, with the introduction of Colette, a clumsy human girl who Emille befriends in town. Can Emille and Colette forge a friendship, in spite of the fact that all vampires hate humans and all humans hate vampires? Lucce, Emille’s friend who works at the school library, seems to think so. When we learn that Lucce’s parents are a vampire and a human, and combine that with Lucce’s darker skin tones, we are definitely meant to realize that the vampires in this book are a metaphor for discussing prejudice and race, in much the same way that Yurikuma Arashi used bears as a metaphor for discussing prejudice and homophobia (just without any wild Ikuhara symbolism in Scars, unfortunately). 

Ratings:

Characters – 5 (a slight bump up from last volume thanks to Lucce)
Story – 6 (no huge stakes, but I’m mildly curious to see what’s next)
Service – 1 (5 if you’re into seeing tonsils get fingered)
Yuri – 5

Overall – 6

When I read the first volume, I was puzzled over how similar humans and vampires seemed, and I now understand that this is being used to tackle racial prejudice (and for the shock humour value when we see things like combat training). This has made me enjoy this series a little more, and I’m curious as to whether Aya Haruhana will do anything more with the conceit, or if this is simply the current storyline before it gets abandoned for the inevitable return of Stabby McStabface. 

Erica here: Volume 3, The Stabbening, is out at the end the month from Yen Press.





Vampeerz – “My Peer Vampires,” Volume 3

May 27th, 2024

On a plain yellow background surrounded by a bright red frame, are two girls in white school sailor-style blouses and black school uniform skirts. One girl with long, dark hair, kisses the blonde girl on the upper cheek from behind.by Christian LeBlanc, Staff Writer

I found the last book somewhat vile,
But this volume did make me smile.
Basketball, talking crow, 
The return of Jiro, 
And artwork made this all worthwhile. 

If you’re a human (as opposed to a vampire) and you live to be a certain age, you may find your doctor warning you about your blood pressure, and you may then find yourself looking at ways to lower said blood pressure. Proper sleep. A little exercise. Consuming less salt. 

Less salt, as it turns out, is a sub-optimal way of dining if you prefer eating food that is delicious. You can disguise the tastelessness, however, by adding other things to your meal: garlic, ginger, pepper, vinegar, lemon juice, etc. You may even find some recipes improved when you use these other seasonings. 

So, too, has Vampeerz, Volume 3 (by Akili, published by Denpa) improved, by making better use of its extended cast. We still have the tastelessness I complained about in my review of Volume 2 (14-year-old human girl Ichika is horny for vampire girl Aria, who claims that she has no interest in romance because she looks and thinks like a child). The hustle and bustle of activity in Volume 3 shifts the focus away from this, however, in favor of vampire power intrigues (Aria turns out to be an important vampire figure, and there are allusions to other vampire factions wanting to do something about that) and, of course, school hijinx. 

So, yes, we still get the odd panty shot or bath scene of self-described-as-child-like-Aria, but this is lessened by how she takes the initiative in her relationship with Ichika. And yes, while we may see someone popping a squat in the bathroom, we then also get hilarious moments like Khara in attack mode running full-tilt while wearing one of those whacky rubber horse masks.

Speaking of Khara (introduced last volume, along with her talking, size-changing crow, Jayanti) – Ichika initially (and hilariously) despises her as a rival for Aria’s affections, but soon friendlies up when they both realize that having someone to discuss Aria with is a lot more fun than staying hostile. Khara also joins the vampire intrigue with Jiro (Aria’s servant) and Sakuya (also Aria’s servant, whose cover is acting as school nurse, a position whose authority she abuses from go). It’s nice to see a larger cast interacting and bouncing off each other, and helps to make the book feel more ‘lived in.’  

In addition to some vampire faction business, Ichika’s and Aria’s relationship is moved along when Aria accidentally gets a girlfriend while she’s washing her hands in the bathroom, causing some hurt and jealousy with Ichika. It might be a thin excuse for drama (or even satirizing how these misunderstandings occur in romance manga), but it’s good to see some progression between the two.

Regarding the art, this volume has one of my favourite layouts in any comic, a two-page spread that initially got me interested in this series when I saw it shared on Twitter some time ago: Aria sinks a 3-point shot while the arc of the basketball forms the gutters separating some panels, with a close-up of her lining up her shot in the foreground with thicker linework. It’s a gorgeous setup that can only be done in comics, and adds a great deal of visual depth and immersion. 

Molly Rabbitt’s translation is mostly stellar, but could have used a second pass in a couple of places, as when a teacher refers to Paul McCartney’s song “Blackbird” as a poem that helped inspire the American civil rights movement, rather than having lyrics that were inspired by it. Clarity aside, the translation generally feels very fresh and authentic, particularly whenever the mood turns goofy.

Ratings:

Art – 9 I really enjoy Akili’s art style, and the kill-faces Ichika makes at Khara as she’s seized by jealousy made me laugh. 
Story – 6 I feel like we’re still just setting up the pieces, but I’m enjoying seeing things get set up at least. There’s really not much plot to speak of, yet.
Characters – 7 I don’t feel super attached to anyone, but they’re fine to pass the time with.
Service – 7 I might not mind the service if the characters were all coded as older than fourteen, so as it is, it just feels off-putting. 
Yuri – 8 Rivals for love! Bloody kisses! 

Overall – 7 A much more enjoyable entry than last volume’s creepiness. 

I’m hesitantly looking forward to Volume 4, which should already be out by the time you read this. I doubt that what I find unpleasant in this series is going away any time soon, but the artwork, humor and growing cast are the seasonings I need to keep me going.

But take that with a grain of salt, of course. 





Okazu Staff takes on Yuri Is My Job, Volume 12

May 13th, 2024

Two girls in green, old-fashioned Japanese school uniforms embrace. A girl with blond hair and glasses tenderly holds a girl with blue hair, who holds on tentatively.Yuri Is My Job, Volume 12 came out in English from the fantastic team at Kodansha and it was…a lot. I had reviewed it in Japanese almost a year ago, and it was a lot then, too. After discussion with Okazu Staff Writers, I decided that it was big enough and complicated enough that no one person ought to have to shoulder it. So, welcome to the very first Okazu Staff Writers Group Review. Here you will find 5 perspectives on this volume, each from people whose opinions you trust, but who are all quite different people.

CW for this volume and these reviews: sexual assault, emotional manipulation, trauma.

 

Reviews by:

Luce | Christian LeBlanc | Eleanor Walker | Matt Marcus | Erica Friedman

 


Luce

Goeido had always been a divisive character, I imagine. Since she was introduced back in volume four, she was shown to be manipulative and callous, something only expounded upon every time she showed up. Last volume, her and Kanoko went to a hotel together – just to ‘talk’. This volume, we get the culmination of that interaction, and boy howdy is it uncomfortable. Not happy getting Sumika and Nene to think that her and Kanoko are in a relationship, she essentially comes on to Kanoko, to prove to her that kissing and sex are important in a relationship. Kanoko is stuck, because admitting that kissing might be important means that Yano kissing Hime meant something, but if it was important, that implies that Hime didn’t mind this from Yano, something Kanoko cannot bear.

The sexual violence warned about on the contents page, I think, (although I’m concerned it’s a bit too easily missed, though I’m happy it’s there) refers to two separate incidents in this volume. The first with Goeido and Kanoko – where Kanoko unwillingly has her skirt and top taken off, and as far as the reader can tell, that’s as far as it goes (however, Goeido is at least twenty, but probably a little older, and Kanoko is 15/16). Equally uncomfortable was the second incident, where Kanoko, on the same day, forces a kiss onto Sumika, and feels up her breasts, without asking for any consent. Sumika pushes her away, and ultimately it shows up Kanoko’s extremely warped thinking, which honestly I have some trouble following. But they talk about it, which is good.

Goeido’s actions are reprehensible, definitely, and as an asexual person, extremely uncomfortable, but not for the reason you might think. I am fine with sex scenes in manga. It’s her implication that love cannot exist without sex, which I would like to vehemently oppose. I feel like this is meant to represent Goeido’s views rather than necessarily the mangaka’s, but it still sticks out as uncomfortable to me. For her, love and sex are completely linked in a way that no one else in the manga thinks about – and I can’t help but wonder if she might be aromantic allosexual, albeit terrible representation for an extremely underrepresented and demonised orientation. But to me, in many ways, it makes sense – her insistence that love is impossible without kissing and sex. Her ability to walk away from Nene when her job requirements changed. Nene states that every time they met up, they ended up in a hotel, having sex.

Honestly, I don’t even really like this interpretation, but it equally makes sense to me. I don’t like it because alloaros, as they are coined, are forgotten, or the characters that might most likely be alloaro are the ‘players’, the assholes who use people for sex then leave without a second thought, which is definitely not defining for the entire group, the same way other stereotypes are not indictive of entire other orientations. But in a manga where romantic love has been shown to tear people up, make them blush and just react in general, Goeido has always felt calculating and calm. Maybe she’s just in control of her emotions, apart from a few surprised expressions. But even with Nene, she’s always shown to be in control of the situation, never reacts much outside of a general pleasantness that she shows to almost everyone bar Sumika.

I think she’s a bit similar to Hime, actually.

Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin – Hime as the ‘good’ side, and Goeido as the ‘bad’ side. They both have a facade of innocent pleasantness, whereas their true selves are far more manipulative and callous. The difference is that Goeido seems to want to stir chaos and hurt people (especially Sumika), whereas Hime, when push comes to shove, wants to help and keep people together. Hime, though, has been forced to grow and change over the series, pushed by the immovable rock of Yano, refusing to back down and let her get away with her manipulations. Goeido hasn’t changed a single bit. She’s stuck on getting back at Sumika – and I’m pretty sure that’s why she came back to Cafe Liebe in the first place. Either to bait Sumika, or to get an in to get someone else to.

Perhaps Nene was onto something – maybe she was attracted to Sumika. As a beautiful lady, perhaps someone not being attracted to her heated so much she wanted to take revenge against everything that meant something to Sumika. Maybe she was just mad that Sumika saw through her facade. Who knows – part of me thinks this won’t be the last we see of Goeido, not that I especially want to see her again. I think I’ll be glad when the air starts to clear, as it might do next volume between Kanoko and Sumika, and we return back to Mitsuki and Hime.

 


Chris LeBlanc

I will admit, reading Volume 12 a second time to gather my thoughts felt even more uncomfortable than reading it the first time.

I have this idea that most online arguments could be resolved if people would just understand that different things work for different people. Goeido would disagree with this theory, however – I get the feeling she believes everyone else on the planet feels the same way she does about sex and romance, and anyone who claims to have different ideas about these things is being delusional. It feels like everyone in Yuri Is My Job! are on different pages when it comes to this, though, and while that usually makes for enjoyable dramatic conflict, let’s just say that Goeido crosses a lot of lines in this volume.

There’s a part later in the book where Kanoko claims to have been unharmed by Goeido, but this is clearly not the case, underscored by the black gutters and panel borders in this section (a technique normally reserved for flashbacks in manga). Happily, the visual tones eventually turn much brighter as Sumika tries to help Kanoko through this chapter, even leading to a cute bit where she tries slipping into Schwester-speak for a moment before dismissing it.

 

 

Eleanor Walker

There are many different kinds of love, and Goeido, one of our central characters for this volume believes that sex and love (and possibly violence, I would argue) are intrinsically linked, and one is not possible without the others. Moreover, anyone who disagrees with her is automatically wrong and must be shown the error of her ways. I am not generally a fan of sexual assault used as a plot device, but this volume handles it pretty well, and it works within the context of the story. However, the full colour spread of Goeido posing in lingerie to open the volume left me viscerally uncomfortable, especially in a series which hasn’t been terribly focused on fanservice. But my favourite moment was when Saionji shows up and reminds Goeido that not everyone thinks like she does.
 
 
Kanoko pretends that’s she’s alright after the event, but she definitely seems off to me, and I hope the next volumes have her getting help to deal with such a traumatic experience.
 
 

Matt Marcus

I struggled a lot with this volume. On the one hand, I understand exactly what Miman chose to do: they decided that Kanoko needed an extreme push to break her calcified conception of Hime and her relationships in order to drive her character arc forward. Narratively, it’s a sound maneuver, and it is effective insofar as it demonstrates how some people will desperately hold onto a belief despite knowing it will do them tangible harm, and how in turn they can reflect that harm onto others. On the other hand, I think what Miman chose to do was in poor taste and has negative implications to the themes of the series.

Goiedo was an interesting character to me. Sure, she was a bad person, but she was for the most part honest in her intentions. She was very clear with Nene that they were fooling around to make Sumika jealous and to have a bit of fun: nothing more, nothing less. It’s not really her fault that Nene’s feelings developed into romance…OK it kind of is, but she could have continued to exploit Nene’s feelings for her, but that wasn’t the contract they made. Yes, the relationship ended once it was no longer convenient for her which is a shitty thing to do, but nevertheless I found it compelling that she was a villain who meant what she said and held herself—and Nene—accountable.

What Goeido does to Kanoko, however, is simply beyond the pale. It’s one thing to play around with the heart of a sensitive girl, but it’s another to enact targeted psychological violence at the threat of serious intimate violence. To me, at that point she stopped being a believable plot device and turned into a plot contrivance. She is instrumentalized as a mouthpiece of a certain viewpoint on romance without any explanation as for why she believes it. There was an opportunity for this, as she is very familiar with A Maiden’s Heart and no doubt should have opinions on how it depicts relationships between girls and what it represents. As we see on the page, she has feelings on how the characters acted within the confines of the story, but does not take a viewpoint of how the story itself relates to the real world—in a series that is all about meta-narrative.

What tweaks me more, is that Miman wants us to believe that the assault happened…until Kanoko reveals later that it didn’t. And then Kanoko assaults Sumika. It all feels very emotionally manipulative, playing with very triggering subject matter. I think the same narrative turns could have been accomplished without it. Goeido can still be the villain; Kanoko can still panic and flail; Sumika can still be angry and hurt. It just didn’t need to be this.

This narrative turn also unintentionally creates problems for the meta-narrative structure of the series as well. There was always an ongoing tension between the sanitized, pseudo-romantic Class S performances in the cafe and the messier real relationships that were occurring simultaneously. So far, Goeido is the only character who transgressed the Class S “purity” by introducing sex into the story. Given how she’s also now unequivocally a predator, coupled with Sumika’s statement that she has no interest in a physical relationship with Kanoko, frames sexual desire as only a corruptive weapon. It aligns the “real” world with the fictional world of Liebe in that the relationship between girls is only good when it is the pure bond of the Schwesterns. It’s a turn that feels regressive, reminding me specifically of the muddled messages from the Yuri Kuma Arashi anime.

Hell, when you look at the whole of WataYuri, every kiss we’ve seen was given without consent—Yano on Hime, Goeido on Nene, and now Kanoko on Sumika. Physical romantic intimacy is thus represented as always a case of someone imposing their desires on another, starting at its origin (it’s worth noting that five of the six characters mentioned were experiencing their first kiss in this context). When Kanoko offers herself to Sumika, she says, “you have to hurt me as much as I hurt you,” clearly framing sexual intimacy as harmful. Obviously, one can have romance without sex—and that’s a great thing—but Miman seems to be saying that romance, at least between women, should only be without it.

We have had some great discussions about WataYuri in the Okazu discord, and one of the viewpoints raised by Erica and others is that one can read this series as celebrating the potential power of the bonds of sisterhood from Class S stories rather than rejecting it, which is an argument I can support; however, if the series also drags along the negative aspects of those tropes with it into the modern day, I’d rather such stories be left in the past.

Also the hotel should’ve been called Best Schwestern. I mean, c’mon.

 

Erica Friedman

I have now read these chapters three times. The first in the pages of Comic Yuri Hime magazine, where they were a genuine shock, again in the collected volume where I could take time to be truly angry at Yoko. As an adult, her actions are morally repugnant and criminal. I sat with my feelings about no one in the Cafe being able to see what kind of person Yoko was and, I’ll admit, considered dropping the story. I was that angry.

Now I have read the chapters for third time, this time in my native language and it allowed me a chance to delve into all the nuanced ways this arc has made me uncomfortable. Primarily – I do not like Kanako. I have never liked her as a character. Her obsession with Hime blinds her to everything and everyone else. When she hurt no one but herself, she was tolerable. When Sumika became involved, it was not. I am not a fan of “obsession” in literature, as it has been co-opted by serial killer/stalk “”thrillers.” I have been trained to keep waiting for Kanako to snap.

Sumika’s own delusion is pretty high – she imagines that she is above romantic love and attraction and when intimacy with Kanako forces her to rethink that, she does not handle it maturely. Because she, too, is a child. We look at Kanako and see an innocent, naive girl, but forget that Sumika is only a teenager, as well. Kanoko’s inability to “see” other people and understand their motivations is a complicated matter. Yes, Kanako absolutely pings neurodivergent (as does Mitsuki,) but I, personally, have a belief that if you read that much, surely you begin to understand something about people. I did not understand people my own age, but I understood human nature as a whole at Kanako’s age, purely from reading books by and for adults.

So as we watch Kanako walk into Yoko’s hotel room, of course we are screaming at the pages of the book…but also I am screaming at Kanoko. How have she read so much and is unable to see that Yoko is not okay?

Yoko, too, has an obsession. Her only goal is to hurt Sumika. The why is not all that critical to the story, and it will be handwaved into an almost unbelievable act of hurting the thing one loves, as if Yoko is a child in kindergarten aggressively teasing someone they like because they don’t know how to act appropriately. As Matt points out, even though the why is not critical…there should have been an attempt at giving us a why.

This third time, I sat with all the layers of discomfort – not liking Kanako, but also forced to sympathize as she deals with all-too-real trauma.   Not liking Yoko, on multiple levels, including the way she is presented to us as a sexual creature (encapsulated in a very uncomfortable-making two-page spread of Yoko in lingerie ), then her words and actions to Kanako making no real sense, as if she’s a cult member trying to proselytize. And Sumika, whose desire to protect Kanako is bifurcated into competing needs for intimacy and responsibility, with no clear understanding of how to do either. And back to Kanoko, who will deal with this trauma…but maybe not take the right lesson from it?

This is a rough volume, about characters making bad choices sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for appalling reasons. But it is an important volume to move both Sumika and Kanoko out of their childish delusions, into more adult delusions. The question I am left with is…is this what we needed or wanted from Yuri Is My Job!?

For such a silly premise, this story has had more than it’s fair share of me shouting at the characters.





Kiss the Scars of the Girls, Volume 1 Guest Review by Christian LeBlanc

October 25th, 2023

Two girls in dark old-fashioned Japanese school uniforms, look at us. One, with long, dark hair embraces a younger student with light brown hair. This image is an Amazon affiliate link.Vampires crossed with Class S!
And set in the future, no less.
With a setup so fun
You would think volume 1
Should be more fun than paint drying, not less.

For a story that’s set “in the far, distant future,” Aya Haruhana’s Kiss the Scars of the Girls  from Yen Press languishes in Yuri tropes of old. Emille Florence is our bright, cheerful, young and blonde protagonist, who falls for her assigned cool and distant big sister Eve Winter (whose first name rhymes with “Leave,” the very first thing she says to Emille upon meeting her). Maybe it’s the tea parties with cookies and cake, maybe it’s the secret rose garden (“vampires love the scent of roses”) or maybe it’s the school uniforms that the cast of Maria Watches Over Us would think were too old-fashioned, but I’m just not feeling this ‘future’ vibe. (Or this ‘vampire’ vibe, but we’ll get to that.)

Set at an all-girls’ school where students are assigned a “big sister” on their 14th birthday, Emille spends a great deal of time trying to win over Eve, who, as luck would have it, appears to have hidden, secret reasons for not wanting to get close to anyone. Emille’s friend Yucca Lotus seems to have an unspoken crush on Emille, while Violetta Emme (whose name I keep reading as Violent Femmes) also likes Emille, but not as much as she likes bullying her classmates and obligatory big sister.

Since this is a manga where everyone at the school is a vampire, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be a book that portrays vampiric content without vampiric identity. Unseen vampire hunters do factor into things, however, attacking the students with swords and shotguns whenever they visit the local town to hypnotize the local ladies enough to feed on them. Vampires are persecuted for their appetites (with no gore, but much blood), but never in a fun, ultra-violent way (which is a missed opportunity in my opinion).

 The vampires in Scars work a little differently than the vampires you’re probably used to, in fact: when a vampire turns 14, they start requiring human blood to live, losing interest in the food they used to love eating. The implication here is that vampires are living (as opposed to undead) creatures, seemingly born this way. These vampires also have no trouble with sunlight, fall easily to any type of weapon, and lack the immortality (and mystique, if we’re being honest) of your stereotypical bloodsucker.

 Overall, Kiss the Scars of the Girls feels like a missed opportunity. The vampire angle doesn’t do anything to make this Class S story stand apart from other Class S stories, except to give a narrative excuse to have the occasional student die violently. If you’re Ride or Die for Class S stories, then by all means give this book a try, but if you like your Yuri vampires to be comedic, or violent, or even inappropriate, you’ll probably feel like you have no stake in this.

Ratings:

Characters – 4 (Shiki Amakuni, we barely knew ye)
Story – 4 (does very little with either Class S or Vampires)
Service – 1 (scale this a little higher if you’re into shoulders)
Yuri – 5

Overall – 6

Erica here: Thank you Christian for this look at what I found to be a surprising license.

I am reminded by Amazon that I have to tell you that the book is linked to an affiliate link, in case you may have forgotten.