Archive for the LGBTQ Category


I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 2

January 8th, 2021

Remember how amazed we were in Volume 1, when the characters of Claire, Misha and Rae had a frank discussion of sexuality? Well, I’m In Love With The Villainesss, Volume 2 has looked at Volume 1 and said, “Hold my mead”….

Rae Taylor is an extraordinary young woman, because in fact, she is not a young woman. She is a corporate drone from our world who has found herself in the world of her favorite otome game as the player character. Instead of romancing the princes, however, Rae has opted for a new route; one in which she is romancing the villainess, the aristocratic and strong-willed Claire François. Here in Volume 2, the holodeck controls are off and Rae and Claire run full speed towards a resolution that even Rae with her knowledge of the game can not predict.

As a reader and as a writer, I ascribe to what we called at the Fanfic Revolution called the “one-handwave” theory. This theory allows every world is allowed one massive, ridiculous, inexplicable thing that must be accepted at face value and cannot be questioned. This volume of I’m in Love With the Villainess, *immediately* blew that theory to hell in the most hilarious way I have ever seen. And then it did it again. And again. The rules? They are for some other story. This story could not have cared less what rules say. Massively important plot points were handled with literal magical handwaves, while actual time and attention were given to discussions of same-sex attraction, gender dysphoria, and, of course, the social impact of income inequality and political upheaval. It was compelling to say the least. It was a little too on the nose for this week, in particular.

This volume is significantly larger than volume 1. Given the resolution there’s only one thing the author left undealt with so Volume 3, when we get it, ought to address that.

In the meantime, this was an amazing read. Whatever benchmark might have been set by Volume 1, was shattered with sound-of speed waves as this volume goes blasting by it. It got exponentially queerer as the story went on. Final tally – 6 queer characters among the main cast, and a happy ending for our principles. And an epilogue that made me ugly cry at 2AM.

I give it my strongest recommendation. If you have not read this series, I hope you will. I know isekai isn’t everyone’s thing, but this is a shining example of exactly what I was talking about in my essay about queer representation Author Inori doesn’t consider that the limits of the worlds that previously existed are the limits of what the worlds could be. They’ve taken an already played-out plot driver and used it to explore very real-world situations in fantasy cosplay and come up with a different resolution. Rather than just assuming what was is what has to be, this series models a new ideal.  I feel even more confident that this was the right choice for my Top Yuri of the year for 2020, and it is going to be very, very hard to beat for 2021. But you know….I really hope something does beat it, because that would be something. ^_^

 

Ratings:

Art – 7 Okay. I’m still angry we didn’t get a picture of Claire in the tux in V1.
Story – 10 Perfection
Characters – 10
Service – 3 Yes, but…somehow this time didn’t bother me at all.
Yuri – 10
Queer – 10

Overall – 10

“Miss Claire, watch over me now.” I am slayed.





“Own Voices – Are There Queer Creators Creating Yuri?” on Yuri Studio

December 14th, 2020

We’ve posted our final video of the first “season” of Yuri Studio and it’s a doozy. This time I take on one of the most complicated questions I get during Yuri panels and lectures. Own Voices – Are There Queer Creators Creating Yuri?

Amazingly, while I was working on this video several creators came out and/or were licensed! I started writing the script with a much smaller group of names than I ended up talking about, so that was pretty amazing. ^_^

I hope you’ll give this video a like and subscribe to my channel for more videos on Yuri.

Thanks very much to all the Okazu Patrons who made this possible. Become an Okazu Patron to have your question answered on the next season of Yuri Studio!





GUNJO, by Nakamura Ching Getting a Movie on Netflix!

October 27th, 2020

Thanks to YNN Correspondent Mercedes for bring this to my attention early today. Nakamura Ching’s GUNJO is being made into a movie by Netflix. This true-crime style story follows the aftermath of a murder. A desperate woman has the woman who has loved her for years kill her abusive husband. The story happens as they run from the police. The Netflix movie will star Kiku Mizukara and Honami Sato.

Komatsu-san at Crunchyroll News has the details.

Volume 1 of GUNJO is available in English at Nakamura-sensei’s site, on a per-chapter basis. I was able to edit is, with Erin Subramanian doing a fantastic job on translation. I hope you’ll read it! With luck, we’ll get a collected e-book volume soon.





Wild Nights With Emily

October 25th, 2020

Wild Nights with Emily, streaming now on Amazon Prime, directed by Madeline Olnek, starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson, was exceptionally silly. That is not a criticism.

Most of us encounter Emily Dickinson in High School, where we are taught her poetry in the way least likely to allow us to actually enjoy any of it. Using it as an example of meter and rhyme, we all end up singing “Because I could Not Stop For Death He Kindly Stopped For Me,” to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas, without really touching upon the commonalities of 19th century hymnal music that would give context to that fact.  I had an exceptionally terrible 10th grade American lit teacher, who we called Fifi, who managed to parrot the party line about Dickinson being a “recluse” and I was still able to guess that she was actually a dedicated writer who had no interest in taking care of someone’s household. What I did not know at the time was that she was gay af.

In 1998, it was discovered that mentions of Emily’s sister-in-law, Susan, had been physically erased from many of her letters and poems. The collection of her letters at Amherst have managed to put together some of their story, which you can find online at the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

Wild Nights With Emily begins from the perspective that given how passionate Emily and Susan’s relationship was…how did we get from there to the “aloof recluse” we were taught about in school? The agent of that new, less passionate, Emily is one Mabel Todd, the woman who published Dickinson’s poetry posthumously. The movie follows the life and loves of the Dickinsons, Emily and her brother Austin, sister Lavinia and their various entwinements with Mabel Todd.  Emily is portrayed as an amusingly snarky and intense person, Susan as the voice of reason who is wholly supportive of Emily. Pretty much everyone else comes across as ridiculous. Austin’s affair with Mabel Todd is tawdry, the men who nitpick Emily’s work are self-involved and mendacious. Todd herself take the brunt of seeming ridiculous, and the sound of her erasing Susan from Emily’s letters accompanies the final credits. We found ourselves barking with laughter, rather more often than we imagined we might.

The one genuine weak point was the acting. The first half of the movie felt like everyone was reading their lines, rather than performing them. It did settle down a little by the end, although Todd’s lines are excruciating throughout…on purpose, I presume, to make her look more foolish. The pace of the movie is frantic and non-linear, which worked fine to keep the story on point.

In the end, we found the movie to be a goofy, yet, effective way to address the enormity of the erasure of Emily’s passionate nature, and the devolution of a brilliant woman into a distant recluse whose poetry had to be shoehorned into more “acceptable” form to be received with any critical acclaim.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 6
Acting – 4
Story – 8
Characters – 8
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 7

This is not a masterpiece of movie-making. But it is a sharp-tongued commentary on Dickinson’s passionate love for her sister-in-law having been largely bowdlerized from her writings and biography.





Olivia, Directed by Jacqueline Audry

October 18th, 2020

Seventeen years before Radley Metzger directed the French school girl lesbian romance movie Therese and Isabelle, in 1951 Jacqueline Audry directed a wholly different movie about a lesbian affair in a girls’ school. Set in France, Olivia, which has been beautifully restored and is streaming on The Criterion Channel  or is available as  a BD with English subtitles.

IMDb sums up the story as “Olivia, an English teenager, arrives at a finishing school in France. The majority of the pupils in the school are divided into two camps: those that are devoted to the headmistress, Mlle Julie and those who follow Mlle Cara, an emotionally manipulative invalid who is obsessed with Mlle Julie.”

The drama is understated and subtle, but the emotions are apparent…to almost everyone in the school. Criterion themselves synopsize it this way, “Neglected for nearly seventy years, a singular landmark of lesbian cinema by one of France’s trailblazing women directors reemerges. Plunging the viewer—and the main character—into a lion’s den, Jacqueline Audry depicts a nineteenth-century boarding school for young girls, a house divided between its rival mistresses, Miss Julie (Edwige Feuillère) and Miss Cara (Simone Simon). As the two women compete for the affections of their students, they rouse passion, hatred, and unexpected reversals of fortune. Awash in spellbinding gothic atmosphere and a hothouse air of unspoken desire, OLIVIA is a daring feminist statement decades ahead of its time.”

I can’t really do better than that to set the scene, although I don’t think it’s gothic so much as wholly Belle Époque, fully idealized romanticism and richly festooned with superficial beauty and underlying decay; a movie version of a Renoir painting.

We learn almost nothing about Olivia’s circumstances, except that English schools are dire compared to French schools, but she is immediately liked by all the girls. It is the cook, Victoire who acts as Greek chorus for us, pointing out the factions of affection at the school.

The melodramatically unwell Mlle Cara welcomes Olivia, but the new girl is absolutely captivated by the cosmopolitan and elegant Mlle Julie. Mlle Cara sees this as a betrayal, and when Mlle Julie’s former favorite, Laura returns to the school it drives Cara into a hysterical fit.

Olivia has a single joyous day with the subject of her desire in Paris.  On the night of the holiday fête, Olivia lays in her room waiting for Mlle Julie to come to her as she said she would, but the headmistress is late and leaves almost immediately. A scream resounds and Mlle Julie finds Mlle Cara dead in her room. Whether her death is suicide or murder is never truly determined. Mlle Julie has lost everything, the woman she loves, all her money, her position and the love of the students and now, she must leave the school, as well.

Okay, so it’s not a happy ending, but wow what a lovely movie! It never once feels low-budget and sparse as There and Isabelle does. The girls’ school always is warm and welcoming, full of beauty and life. No echoing stone halls here, no miserly rations. Victoire serves up delicious food and prime commentary. The acting isn’t awkward at all. Everyone is very convincing and our feelings for the manipulative Cara are probably about the same as Mlle Julie’s, swinging rapidly from pity to exhaustion.

There are no sex scenes, but the few kisses and embraces are intimate and intense. Desire is not at all unspoken. It’s easy for us to understand the girls’ feelings and equally as difficult to sympathize with the adults. Mlle Julie for being inconstant to the only women, she says, she loved, Mlle Cara for being hysterical, Mlle Dubois for being clueless. Only Victoire and Frau Riesener, rise above this and it is Frau Riesener who inherits Cara’s estate and, presumably, Julie’s position.

I had no real expectation before watchingthis movie and I’m very glad I saw it after Therese and IsabelleOlivia was made ten years before The Children’s Hour and deserves at least as much a place in our history of lesbian media, as it has the double honor of being one of the first French films to show lesbian love, directed by an acclaimed female director. The end result is a take in which desire is made rawly visible without ever being made tawdry.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 8 
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Service – 3
Lesbian – 5

Overall- 8

Olivia is movie about the consequence of desire and its effect on the community, rather than one girl’s experience. It was worth a watch.