I’m out of town for a few days on some family business. No updates ’til I get back. Enjoy re-reading a few of the past updates while I’m gone!

Ta~

Watching Queen’s Blade is like trying to have a conversation with someone who won’t stop staring at your tits. Or like trying to converse with a really nice girl, who seems to be pretty interesting, but we keep staring at her tits instead of listening to her.

I would really, really like to notch the service back three steps on this anime. As it stands, I roll my eyes so much I keep losing track of what’s happening. What’s happening is a quest series that stars a bunch of strong women who have been rendered down to the bare minimum of personality and near-identical bodies, all of which have the same nipples.

Oh, yes. Women’s nipples do *not* all look the same. This may come as a shock to a large portion of the Queen’s Blade viewing audience. If this surprised you, I think you need to read more Hustler.

The plot, such as it is, is about a quest by a number of women for the Queen’s Blade – the awarding of which will give them the power and rank they need to do whatever it is that drives them to seek it. Each story is completely worthy, so we are likely supposed to feel remorse that not all of them can fulfill their quests. Since we so fixedly stare at their secondary sexual characteristics, I barely notice they exist as characters. “Blah blah blah,” they say, and I’m sure it means something, but we’re staring in between their legs obsessively and I’m finding it hard to care, because all I can think is, “Metal underwear and no leggings. I bet that chafes something fierce. I wonder if they carry talcum powder in their packs.”

When the characters are attacked by creatures that are stand-ins for tentacles, like snakes and giant frogs’ tongues, I also find myself wandering off thinking that this series is like the Caligula of Six Degrees of Yuri voice actresses. The voice cast is instantly recognizable. Some of them I feel a little bad for, but mostly I assume that they thought, “Hey, it’s a paycheck. As long as there are no live events, I can do this.”

I am not the audience for Queen’s Blade. I would LOVE to see a version of this without all the service. It would be a cool series. But instead, I watch this and wonder if I’ll ever get to watch something this spring that doesn’t have us staring unblinkingly at women’s thighs and breasts.

Yuri in this series is implict – lots of f/f pairs that fanboys will immediately slash because service is the same thing as affection for most. And then there’s the explicit siscon relationship that Reina’s sister has for her. I can’t help but assume that Reina and Listy are already paired in half a dozen doujinshi, as well.

In *my* fan delusion, Queen’s Blade is a classic quest story starring pairs of strong women who bond together as friends and who compete for the Queen’s Blade. In reality, it’s an exhaustingly bad series of nothing but service, held together with a plot thinner than the g-strings they all wear.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 4
Characters – 6
Yuri – 5
Service – 9

Overall – 5

If you watched Xena: Warrior Princess staring fixedly at Callisto’s crotch, you will probably enjoy Queen’s Blade.

Saki is not at all what I expected. After watching some of the dreck that has preceeded it this spring season, I was all ready to really hate yet another moe fakey Yuri thing.

Well, okay, Saki is fakey-Yuri, but it’s pretty easy on the brain and not vexatious to the soul like Queen’s Blade. And we can rest assured that while it make be fake Yuri, it will not at least, be Flesbian.

We begin the anime series with two distinctions, Ueda Kana is Saki’s voice and Saki’s gaze is more typical of the male audience, rather than the female. She notices Nodoka, an attractive girl who is wearing the same school uniform as she. Having noticed her, it would be unreasonable to think that the girl is “just” a passerby. Indeed Nodoka turns out to be a champion junior Mahjong player and a member of the school’s Mahjong club.

Saki’s friend invites her to join them for a game, but she says she does not like Mahjong very much. In reality, there is something else entirely going on.

Saki is a fairly typical sports/hobby idiot-savant type character. Having grown up in a ridiculously competitive Mahjong playing household, Saki has learned to play with the utmost skill and discretion. In fact, regardless of the conditions, she plays to a plus-minus zero every hand. She’s so good at this, that she approaches the level of genius.

Nodoka is the first one to recognize Saki’s genius, and her interest in Saki becomes palpable. Light skinship apparently catapults this series into “Yuri” territory for some fans.

I don’t know if Nodoka and Saki’s friendship/rivalry will make it into my personal definition of “Yuri” but my brain didn’t hurt at all after watching the first episode of this series. So…despite the fact that I know nothing about Mahjong, except that my mother has played it every Wednesday since I was a small child and I can still remember the sounds of the tiles and her friend’s voices, I’ll probably watch this because it’s entertaining and not taxing.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 6
Characters: 7
Yuri – 2
Service – 2

Overall – 7

Unless it does something very unpredictable, this series is like every other series of its kind. Watch one, you’ve watched them all.

This is not a crisis, nor should we run screaming, but I think it is important enough that every reader, writer, publisher, editor and all champions of freedom of expression should take note. Amazon has changed its policy and has de-ranked books that it deems “adult” in nature. This includes anything they count as erotica and many non-adult LGBT books, as well. De-ranking means that they have been pulled from the sales ranks and are also not coming up in the search engine.

I do not advocate being outraged. Outrage accomplishes nothing. I *do* advocate a polite, but firm letter campaign asking that Amazon allow sales to indicate sales rank and nothing else. I distrust their definition of “adult” if it does not include Twilight, or Playboy, but does include Annie on My Mind.

Please make a firm request that all books be ranked and that they do not involve behavior that can be seen as censorship or “protection.” Please feel free to Digg this or forward it to MLs, forums, sites, etc. The more people who protest politely, the more of an impact we can make.

You can contact the Amazon Executive customer service email at [email protected], call the customer service phone number: 1-800-201-7575 or login to your Amazon account and visit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?ie=UTF8&browse_node_id=468496

You can also sign this petition against the policy:http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy

As a publisher of LGBT comics, as a reader of whatever I bloody well want to read, as a member of the community of humans that prefers to think for myself, I ask for your support against this misguided policy.

***

Update – This is not a “glitch”. Emails were sent out to the first victims of this new policy more than 2 months ago that stated that it was a policy change. They were all LGBT authors – many of whom had no, or ridiculously little, “adult” content in their books.

It’s understandable that Amazon wants to call it a glitch, but don’t let them get away with it.

Also – do not ask *me* if your local Amazon is affected. Go search for J.D. Glass, Radclyffe Hall or any other LGBT book you can think of and see for yourself. *Do* for yourself, and *think* for yourself. Don’t be sheep and follow me or anyone.

Lastly – this has nothing to do with the game Rapeplay, don’t be delusional. The 14 of you who want that dreck have had no affect of the hundreds of authors de-ranked and delisted from Amazon right now. Crichey.

***

Update 2 – Amazon has apologized, and is sending out emails calling this a ham-fisted and embarassing error. To say the least….

I should let you know that it *did* affect some of the other catalogs. Amazon.co.uk was affected. And yes, some Yuri and Yaoi manga titles were caught in the net.

Weev’s claim that he hacked the system is…unlikely. A number of people are saying that that is a hoax.

Here’s what I think actually happened:

Some manager proposed an idea for moving adult books off the ranking, like in Amazon JP. Another one got the order, handed it to a tech and said, “do this.”

The tech had no interest or clue and did a thing that checked ontology or whatever. They don’t report to the manager who told them to do it, so they handed it to their manager who had no idea about it who, when asked about the gay thing said, “it’s all porn, whatever.”

So customer service gets emails and asks a completely different manager, who asks up the chain and finally gets, “it’s a policy thing about adult stuff.”

I’ve worked in large companies for my entire life and basically, this is how things always work. No one knows what the person next to him did and none of the managers have a clue.

As of this moment, I have no intention of moving the Yuricon Shop or the links here and we’ll see what happens.

Final Update: Everything has been restored.

So, I really should review something today, but I’m not going to. Instead, here is my non-Yuri news report:

I am pleased, proud and amused to announce that I was able to write a Guest Review for Ain’t It Cool News for the beautiful graphic novel, My Mommy is in America (and she met Buffalo Bill). I hope you will take a moment and read the review. Also, do take a moment to read the comments. They are so incoherently hilarious that I have come to a new appreciation of the haters here, for at least being *on topic* in their rants. :-) My sincere thanks to AICN for giving me to the opportunity to confuse a whole new audience with literary references in my comic review.

Secondly, tonight I am doing my second and final talk on Graphic Novels at the Morris County Free Library. The talk on Saturday was honestly a lot of fun. I hope tonight’s talk will be equally as interesting. The talk will start at 7PM, and I’d love to see you there!

I might as well add in item three. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook these days so, if you are on either, do consider following me on Twitter and/or becoming a fan of Yuricon & ALC on Facebook! You’re just about guaranteed to get the Yuri news hot and fresh that way! Or check the right hand sidebar for other social media site links, like Yuricon on Livejournal, My Space, etc. It’s all about number creating a artificially inflated sense of importance, you know. (That was a joke, in case my sarcasm didn’t carry over text.)

That’s it for today. I’ll probably not get anything out tomorrow, either, but I’ll be back asap with more Yuri anime and manga reviews!