Archive for the Miscellaneous Category


BL Metamorphosis, Volumes 1 and 2

August 30th, 2020

It’s Sunday, a day that we like to stretch out a little and look at things beyond the Yuri landscape on Okazu, from time to time. Today I wanted to take a look at a series that is wholesome, but isn’t really queer or even queer adjacent. Let’s call it queer tangential. BL Metamorphosis by Kaori Tsurutani, out from Seven Seas isn’t really about Boy’s Love so much as about fandom and the enjoyment of having connection with people through that fandom.

In BL Metamorphosis, Volume 1 we meet Urara, a high school girl who embraces her separateness and self-identifies as “strange” for her enjoyment of BL. She ends up introducing Ichinoi, an elderly neighborhood calligraphy teacher, into the world of BL. Almost reluctantly, Urara gains a comrade and a friend…

In BL Metamorphosis, Volume 2, Ichinoi embraces BL with a gusto that embarrasses Urara as much as it thrills her. Despite Urara’s desire to cling to being a weirdo, Ichinoi becomes a role model for Urara, as she simply refuses to be at all ashamed or secretive about her new hobby.  In this volume, there is a scene which is 100% on point for the two characters: At a comic market event, they are separated and half out of concern and half out of fear, Urara just stays put, while Ichinoi throws herself into the noise and confusion of the event happily, exploring different groups’ work without the shame Urara feels.

This, to me is a critical lesson. So many people seem to desperately cling to some wrongness they feel in themselves, and never think to just reinvent themselves at all, like Urara. And here’s Ichinoi happily opening up a new chapter in her life with no baggage at all. To some extent, we’re supposed to see this as a feature of Ichinoi’s age and maturity – she has nothing to lose by doing this, but…neither does Urara.

Almost reluctantly, Urara takes the advice of her new friend and picks up a pen to start work on her own BL story and it becomes clear to us that this was never a tale of Ichinoi’s metamorphosis at all, that Urara is the one that is stuck in her cocoon. It is Ichinoi who can fly already and Urara who has yet to grow wings. Hopefully, she’s about to start creating the Urara she wants to become.

It is very lovely to see a manga star an older woman as a lead, generally. This manga features what is being sold as an “unusual” friendship, because it spans generations, but I can attest to the fact that anime and manga fandom pretty much does away with the idea of chronological generations and instead has it’s own generations, as determined by which series was your first obsession. American anime fans are Ranma generation or Naruto generation or  My Hero Academia generation, Yuri fans can be Sailor Moon, or Utena or Strawberry Panic! or Bloom Into You, etc… generations. Ichinoi and Urara are years apart…but they are the same BL generation. ^_^

Tsurutani’s art has a  gentle quality to it.. As you know, I’m not a BL reader myself, but the art didn’t not feel at all to me to be BL-ish – which is a wholly ridiculous statement, I’m well aware. BL is of course not one style. But this feels more like an artist’s diary sketchbook, than a dramatic narrative. One expects random drawings of flower gardens and landscapes, if you know what I mean. It lacks tension, in a good way.

On a wholly personal note, setting the comic event in Sunshine City set all my “I miss Ikebukuro” bells and whistles off, so that was a joy. I remember that people mover and know exactly where those pillars are and that bench(!! That bench has seen some things) and …and…. ^_^ I can hear the noise of the comic market, as I presume, can the bulk of the Japanese audience.

This is another lovely bit of work by the team at Seven Seas. I want to especially bring your attention to the series logo, designed by Ki-oon. That is pretty fab work, vastly different from the Japanese logo, but is speaking differently to a different audience, as a different symbolic construct for a different title. The Japanese title is メタモルフォーゼの縁側, Metamorphose no Engawa, Margins of Metaphorphosis, which I think focuses on the liminal spaces of change, while the English title and logo are more about community and finding one’s self.) I give it top marks for translation and design.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 8
Characters – 9, certainly Ichinose is.
Service – 0.5 The story itself has none, but it circles the discussion of BL service sometimes.

Overall – 9

BL Metamorphosis is a sweet story about finding friendship in BL fandom, but it’s also about pushing yourself out of the limitations you create for yourself. And for that, I think it’s absolutely worth reading.  What is life for, if we’re going to stay the person we were as a child all our lives?

Volume 3 in English is slated for a winter release, with a fourth volume in Japan released this past March. This June, creator Tsurutani-sensei said there is a little bit remaining of the series, as reported by Jennifer Sherman on ANN.

Thanks to Seven Seas for the review copies!





The Future is Always Obsolete: Ghost In the Shell Manga Franchise

August 28th, 2020

Some months ago, I took a great number of hours and watched all the visual media (except for the recent VR Noh-inspired play, which I desperately want to see…) from the Ghost in the Shell franchise. It was a learning experience and I very sincerely intended to do the same thing with the manga. 

I made my way through  Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 1.5 Human Error Processor, Ghost in the Shell 2 Man-Machine Interface, Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex and Ghost in the Shell Global Neural Network (but not yet Ghost in the Shell The Human Algorithm) and find…that I cannot do the same for the manga. These links lead to Global Bookwalker for the purposes of today’s musings – it can’t really be considered a review of any of these books, it’s more like an overview of all of them.

I was going to do a deep dive, as I said, but almost immediately, it was obviously impossible. Despite the pretension to profundity, there is very little depth to any of the manga, as both plot and protagonist are forced to do spins and turns so we can see the sexy parts, without the qualities of a person – or narrative – that might make those parts sexy.

Shirow’s manga is not truly a narrative…or, if there is narrative, it’s only by accident. Technological innovation to some extent has rendered his notes ridiculous, but even by 1997, “external memory” was not a complicated idea and his notes serve to distract, rather than reinforce. They explain in excruciating detail things not shown, irrelevant to the story, or merely random off-shoots of his thought processes.

 
 

Overall, Shirow’s manga is a technical manual of Shirow’s internal world-building told while flashing us with a constant ass-crotch-tits sequence. It’s like trying to learn the quadratic equation with someone waving a porn magazine in your face. You can’t concentrate on either properly. The audience for all this was, clearly, people who were enamored with Shirow’s world-building and had little to no chance for sex and were therefore satisfied by the constant disruption of “Network” world-building to enable multiple angle panty shots.

 
 

Tezuka sometimes popped little SD characters up of himself to make comments in his manga – it worked for him, not so much for Shirow who, we are frequently told is a great artist, who should not do manga. I posit that he is neither a great artist (although he is a competent draftsman) nor a good story teller, but is instead merely an “idea guy” so enamored of his ideas, that he can’t stop getting in the way of the story to tell you about them.

After the initial volume of Ghost in the Shell manga Kusanagi is, like the lesbian sex scene in that original manga, entirely performative. She never exists, except as our impressions of her existence. These impressions are reinforced by the strictly story-telling aspects of Gits 1.5 Human Error Processor, reinforced by our memories of those specific episodes from the animation. 

 

In GitS 2 Man-Machine Interface we can see that she is almost literally the only woman in the story, by virtue of being almost all the women in the story. In Standalone Complex, she is the sum of our memories of her, drawn by Kinutani Yu as a comic version of the television series. By the the time we reach Global Neural Network, we are seeing the memories of those impressions as their own stories…and, frankly, better for that than some of what passes for narrative in GitS 2.

 

 

The future in Ghost in the Shell is already obsolete. Cyborg body parts exist, and they get decked out with paint and stickers, our rainy neon-lit city streets are dystopian in multiple ways and also horrifically banal. We put on masks to block out a pandemic and facial recognition as we head out to get our fast food takeout and we’re bluetoothed into our podcasts, not wired through ports in our necks. Shirow’s network teeters precariously between being a religious philosophy and a technological phenomenon.  The only thing he got right is the proliferation of dangerously absurd conspiracy theories.

 
 
The takeaway from the Ghost in the Shell manga is that we’re not going to get flying cars or peaceful utopian societies, but maybe we might at least hope for cuter tanks.

 

No Ratings

 

If Kusanagi’s cyborg body weighs so much that she’d sink in water or crush a car by landing on it, how does she wear high heels?





Vampeerz, Volume 3 (ヴァンピアーズ)

August 25th, 2020

 

The third volume of the manga Vampeerz (ヴァンピアーズ)
Is chock-full of fetishes and fears.
Vampires in school, but really,
It’s all what you’d expect from Akili,,
Gravitas Twilight has smeared.

That’s it. That’s the review. ^_^





No YNN Report Today

August 22nd, 2020

It’s been 8 months straight for the weekly Yuri Network News report and today, I’m taking a day off. ^_^ We’re working hard on a new video for Yuri Studio right this very moment…stay tuned! If you’ve enjoyed our Yuri News Reports, anime, manga, film, books and VN reviews, and hope to see more, please consider supporting us on the Okazu Patreon.We’re hoping to get 3 new patrons by the end of the month to stay on track for 2020.

Okazu Patrons get recognition on the front page of Okazu, a nifty hand-crafted digital badge, behind-the-scenes access and sneak peaks on new projects, polls to drive the direction of our work. Patrons can ask questions used in our Yuri panels and which we’ll address in upcoming videos! Sometimes, Patrons get access to contests or little gifts of thanks, because we can. ^_^

Every dollar makes a direct impact on what we can pay writers, and technical staff…as well as keeping us in the center of a thriving Yuri ecosystem. $5/month moves us a big step forward. Thank you to our current Okazu patrons, your support is greatly appreciated.

I’ll see you again next week here on the YNN Report!

 





Weekly Magazine WOMAN, Volume 3 Summer (週刊文春WOMAN 夏号)

August 9th, 2020

In September 2019, when I was in Japan for the 100 Years of Yuri Tour, I had an item on my to-buy list that I honestly expected to have difficulty finding. Shunkanbunshun WOMAN, Volume 3 Natsugou (週刊文春WOMAN 夏号). This mook is a several-times a year special edition that is somewhere between a literary and a lifestyle magazine, addressing topics of interest to women or about women. It’s not a fashion/makeup magazine, although the advertising is, clearly, fashion and makeup.  Summer 2019 included tｗo articles of interest to me and I hoped I’d be able to find it. It was a wildcard on my list, and I honestly expected to have to special order it. I was surprised to find it pretty much in every place I shopped. Luck of the draw, undoubtedly.

In any case, it has taken me almost a year to crack it open to read Yamawaki Asou’s article “Ima Yuri Manga ga Omoshiroi!” – presumably riffing on the popular publication, Kono Manga ga Sugoi!. The article is, itself, pretty interesting. It includes feedback from Comic Yuri Hime editor Umezawa Kanako and columnist Fukusawa Maki, and it includes a number of very gratifying quotes by manga scholar Fujimoto Yukari. I say gratifying, because she and I have discussed the series she talks about many times together, so when she calls Shiroi Heya no Futari by Yamagishi Ryouko a “protoype” Yuri, it feels like a win for me. There’s also a discussion of the changing demographics of the fandom and how the content has shifted to accommodate those changes.

It’s a pretty good overview of Yuri, the changes we’ve seen over the decades, and the reasons for them. There’s a little bit about overseas fandom and a nice wrap up of the kind of “shakaijin” Yuri we’re seeing now. The article also mentions the inclusion of LGBTQ characters and issues in recent years The manga included was also a generally good selection of “best of breed” from the last two decades. With one exception – I will never, ever really understand how Yuru Yuri gets on Yuri lists, when there’s so little Yuri as to be negligible. . I think the list was worth reading, though, and reminded me I really need to read Yamashita Tomoko’s Ikoku Nikki (違国日記, which has been on my eventually to get to list for a couple of years, now.

Following this article is an interview with Shimura Takako, creator of Aoi Hana and Otono ni Nattemo, among other titles. It goes pretty well for an interview with a manga creator, although there were no amazing insights.

Ratings

Overall – A very solid 8

I’m pleased I was able to get this magazine and pleased that the summer of our 100 years of Yuri included this review of the genre for a – hopefully – new audience!