Once more, my sincere thanks to a guest reviewer, this time a guy I only know as Bob. (Sounds like I buy reviews on the street, doesn’t it? “Hey, ya wanna buy a review, I got some in the trunk, right here…” lol) Bob is filling in for an Erica who is halfway out the door to go teach martial arts again for the first time in eight years. Can’t wait. Take it away, Bob!

(I would like to preface this by saying that this would normally be a loser fanboy review, but I’m not a fan of the material covered and so it’s just a loser boy review.)

Sex and violence, as the old saying has it, are reliable sellers. Without that expression, the lasting popularity of Strike Witches would be one of life’s great mysteries, up there with Fermat’s last theorem, Fermi’s paradox and why people can’t believe it’s not butter. I don’t clearly remember why I picked this series up, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time – maybe I was just desperate for something that seemed likely to be high-yuri in content and wasn’t another season of Ikki Tousen.

The year is 1944 and Strike Witches is all about an international crew of magical mecha-shoujo moe cat-lolis with guns fighting Borg-Angels week after week in a world where Manchukuo, Katyn and Auschwitz-Birkenau never happened. You see, in the world of Strike Witches – hereafter shortened to SW – 1939 saw, not the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II, but an invasion of the entire planet by mysterious beings called Neuroi, whose way of life is to hit things with death rays and make more Neuroi out of the charred remains. Having discovered that fighter aircraft et cetera are useless, humanity falls back on Plan B: the magical girl.

Enter our young hero Yoshika Miyafuji, yanked out of her happy pants-free school life by a woman with a disturbing laugh and a patch-covered demonic eye who wants her to join an elite squad of underage witches on the frontline of the war against the Neuroi. Witches, that is, who confront the enemy not with wands and broomsticks but with machine guns and Striker Units – the latter being a miraculous invention of Yoshika’s MIA father, whose stroke of brilliance was to combine the essentials of a piston-engine monoplane with a magical boot. Yoshika, who of course wants to find said father, is badgered into accepting. When the baddies attack en route to England, still holding out against Neuroi-occupied mainland Europe, she establishes herself as the heroine of the series by hijacking a spare set of Strikers and growing furry ears and a tail before taking to the sky. Once in the UK proper, she finds herself inducted into the 501st Joint Fighter Wing, which suffers from a chronic shortage of actual fighters and whose other members hail from thinly-veiled analogues of Japan, Canada, France, Russia, Finland, Italy, Germany and the United States. The rest of this mercifully short series follows a generic monster-of-the-week format with comic interludes as Yoshika uses the power of naïve affection to win over her comrades one by one.

Some, if not all, of the above will sound familiar to those who have consumed a fair volume of entertainment material, because there isn’t a shred of originality in SW from start to end. Yoshika is textbook love-and-peace magical girl material. The other characters are equally stock – which is particularly disappointing because I’d heard over and over that they were based on actual historical figures – though not so much that they can’t be endearing now and then. And of the plot itself? If you’ve seen Star Trek‘s Borg episodes and the first half of Evangelion, you’ll know what the Neuroi are. If you’ve seen the last few episodes of Blue Drop or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, you’ll see the backstabbing conspiracy coming from kilometers away. If you’ve seen Sakura Taisen: The Movie, you’ll not only know how SW ends but even what the final boss looks like. Like Evangelion, the series implies that the Neuroi are more than relentless, mysterious foes, but runs out of episodes before actually making anything of this development. I have no doubt that a second season is in the works somewhere out there.

To its credit, SW doesn’t waste much time pretending to be anything other than what it is: a light fanservice show that crams in enough tropes to make Kaishaku jealous, albeit in a more coherent fashion. Its particular forte, like Agent Aika and Najica Blitz Tactics, is panties. The viewer who makes it through all twelve episodes will be well and truly inundated with them, because the League of Nations apparently banned women’s pants in order to divert cloth supplies to frontline hospitals. There’s also fanservice of the swimsuit and breast-groping varieties, along with an episode of panty-swapping.

Where’s the Yuri, you ask? Also under the purview of the fanservice bureau, for the most part: the French teamster is blatantly intent on keeping the demon-eyed officer to herself, the Finn and Russian regularly sleep together – in an innocent fashion, of course – and Yoshika herself is heavily implied to have erotic dreams about her well-endowed Canadian partner. It rarely gets further than heavy subtext, but it’s more than some ‘Yuri’ series have offered.

On the technical side of things, the animation quality is decent: while there are occasional bouts of very obvious CGI and some pretty blatant corner-cuts, it didn’t make my eyes bleed. The sound likewise is generally unremarkable and unoffensive.

I started SW with rock-bottom expectations, which is good because it didn’t surpass them by any great measure. If you, unlike me, have a taste for magical girls, moe lolis, gratuitous panties or any of the other items mentioned above, there’s no harm in checking out this series. If you can tolerate said fetishes and are merely looking to watch something inconsequential and get a few laughs, there are probably worse choices – ditto if you just want the Yuri. Don’t watch it for the faux-WWII setting, which is pure gimmick, and fans of girls-with-guns can find far better material elsewhere. If Gonzo et al intend to add to this franchise without it becoming more stale than the bread I ate today, my hearty recommendation is to swap the airscrews for sea screws, bump the timeline forward to 1962 or thereabouts and give us a series called Strike Fishes.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 2
Characters – 7
Yuri – 8 if you have a good imagination, 6 if you don’t
Service – 12

Overall – 7

Thanks Bob! No one told me there was a woman with an eyepatch. Now I guess I’ll *have* to watch it. Bleah.

Yuricon’s hunky mascot, Yuriko’s birthday is coming and she wants a picture to celebrate! Draw a picture of her celebrating her brithday with her lover, famous novelist Midori for the 2009 Yuriko Fan Art Contest!

Submissions will be accepted until February 22, 2009

Please send all submissions – and questions – to [email protected] with the subject line “2009 Art Contest”

Include your name, contact information that you actually read and will respond to and your age (so we can make sure the prizes age-appropriate.)

Your picture can be sexy, but please refrain from sending anything with explicit sex. Thanks.

Please send the picture at no less than 72 dpi and no more than 150dpi, but you might want to have a 300dpi version on hand, in case we want to use it for something cool and promotion-y!

As always, *all* submissions will be included in the Yuriko Art Gallery on Yuricon!

Yuricon – “For real women who like their woman…animated”

Let’s get this out of the way first, so you can decide if you want to keep reading – I don’t consider Ga Rei Zero (喰霊-零-) to be a “Yuri” anime. Yes, I saw what you saw. Yes, Yomi and Kagura love each other deeply. But Yuri goggles aside, they really aren’t “in love” with one another – IMHO. Your opinion is yours and if it is that they are absolutely positively in love and if only they had been allowed to be together…and, needless to say, that I am a complete moron for not seeing it…well that’s fine too. ^_^

Yes. I see what you see. No, I do not think it’s Yuri. *I* think it’s a very close sisterly relationship – one I could wish I had with my sister, but don’t. I also think Yomi was “in love with” Nori-chan and I quite liked them as a couple.

Okay, that having been said, now those of you who either agree with me or don’t care can move on to what the heck Ga Rei Zero is, if not Yuri. And my apologies for not catching up on this series last season when it aired. It just kept slipping down the list.

What Ga Rei Zero is, is a entertainingly predictable supernatural/action anime that combines big demony monsters, schoolage girls with magical swords that come with a *destiny*, and a fight to protect humanity against the evil that, etc, etc.

We are introduced to the story at the end, which I’m told is part of the actual series, Ga Rei, of which this is a prequel. Eventually we are taken back to the beginning of the story in which Kagura, the daughter of the chief of the exorcists is taken in by another exorcist who has an adopted daughter a little older than she, Yomi. Kagura and Yomi become very close, so when the obvious crisis rears its ugly head and Yomi is forced into the position of bad guy, we can watch helplessly as they battle it out for supremacy. The whole story would have been fine except for one teeny little thing that annoyed me so very much that I nearly stopped watching.

The first handwave – there are demons who pop into this world and we are protected by the exorcists who fight them. Accepted.

The second – these exorcists use weapons created by a mostly naked guy named Michael, who has a somewhat impractical grasp of “useful in battle.” Accepted.

Third handwave – that Kagura and Yomi, with only a few years of life and experience behind them and pretty much no emotional maturity, are the pinnacles of power in the organization. Accepted

Fourth handwave – that not a *single* person in the entire exorcist organization has two brain cells to rub together. Denied.

It was a case of one handwave too many, when the entire organization is unable to see that Mei is the source of all evil, but how fast are they to spot it when it’s Yomi. And also no one in an entire organization that comprises dozens, if not hundreds of people can see that Yomi’s Uncle is a grasping bastard. If everyone had accepted it outwardly, but in private bitched that it was an extremely suspicious thing that a will suddenly appeared that contradicted Yomi’s father’s well-known wishes, well, maybe I could have bought it. But not a single person even blinked at it.

I could deal with the battle iron, filled with holy water and the battle suitcase which shot projectiles. I simply refuse to believe that there wasn’t a *single* person in the entire organization that had the vaguest grasp of human nature.

Once we got past that, the end comes fast, because it’s too late to just, oh, stop attacking Yomi. The final battle rushes forward and Kagura is forced to step up as the leader of the organization and take down the one person in the world she loves. No surprises there.

Overall, a perfectly fine series, with one too many handwaves. And Yuri that, if you think about it for half a second, really isn’t.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 6
Characters – 8
Yuri – 3
Service – 2

Overall – 7

I have to tell ya, all handwaves aside, there is no way that a 14-year-old is going to make a good leader. I don’t care if that’s the basic lesson of all anime, it’s a really silly idea. ^_^

If you keep your sights low, you’ll never be disappointed. – anonymous Media Blasters employee.

It was a snowy, blustery day in New Jersey, as I headed out to Secaucus to visit the site of the new warehouse and store for the fine folks at Media Blasters.This unadorned, unmarked and covered over in pages of the Village Voice (“Gay Sequel” and “1-800-Hot-SEXX” ads facing out) door is what greets one, when one arrives at the Outlet mall where the new offices live. (Conveniently placed near my favorite Kasper store, so ladies, after buying Yuri, you can cross the parking lot and pick up nice business suits at discount prices. Seriously.) Oh, and because I always forget to say this and about half of you never notice – you *can* click the pictures for larger versions.

I was greeted cheerfully at the door by Chet who, if you have approached a MB table at nearly any con, you have met. He’s a perfect representative for the company – a cheerful, pleasant, hardcore geek with a very grounded grasp of the kind of crap he sells. ^_^

After a few preliminaries, I was given a tour of the new building. The store is your first stop. It is bigger than expected, and had a very nice selection of not just MB titles, but many other series from the same genres. DVDs are separated into horror/cult/pink/Asian action and general anime, then a separate adult section and finally, their Yaoi and Yuri section.

I was informed that a lot of the random items decorating the store came from the personal collections of the MB employees, which I found both amusing and charming. And also a little freakish, once I started looking around more carefully. ^_^

Speaking of freakish, (Serge, this is for Donna!) The entrance into the store is decorated with props from some of their Tokyo Shock movies, including some extra special items from Machine Girl. And the “sex chair,” creatively festooned with intestines and, I was assured still “working” whatever that means. I really, really don’t want to know.

Next, I was taken back into what I assumed was the warehouse. There were shelves, with piles of anime, more shelves behind them in a bit of the room that went further back and a kid with a dolly pulling big boxes full of boxes of stuff to put on those shelves. You, know, warehouse stuff.

Then Chet says, “Let’s go into the warehouse.”

Confused, I follow him through a door, and my head explodes.

There were several rows of these, then the space opens up into…

This is a bad picture, because I am short, so you can’t see the rows and rows of this. I gaped and stuttered a bit and probably uttered an oath or two. Honestly, this room was *huge*. It was like being at an anime Home Depot.

On the left of all this, there were some makeshift desks and workspaces, as well as actual built-in office space. I didn’t take pictures of any of that.

So, Chet and John and I chatted for a while about god knows what, while I rearranged the shelves and went through the general anime section, pulling out titles that could be added to the Yuri section, and generally making myself helpful. (Snort.) Here’s the end result – five columns and nine rows of Yuri. Not so bad. The Yaoi section was about twice the size – which was still not nearly as large as you’d expect.

While we were rearranging the shelves, we took a bunch of box sets that were Yuri- and Yaoi- related, like The L Word and Queer As Folk and laid out the end cap of that Yuri/Yaoi section with them. It looked pretty cool having all that Yuri physically together in one space. And they were definitely appreciative of having my help in filling in the holes.

One of the things they had along the wall across from the Yaoi/Yuri section was a bunch of really old, obscure artbooks and anime comics from a guy who’d been collecting since the dawn of time. They had a collection of anime comics from Cream Lemon, something I had never seen. In a fit of unreasonable and unreturnable generosity, they gave me the Escalation volume. I will treasure it, I can assure you. They also completely rearranged the shelves so I could take this picture. They are honestly too much. ^_^

After lunch, we all just walked around the store, moving stuff around and making fun of the titles because, let’s face it, they sell a lot of crap. ^_^ And John told us all about the schwing deal he made in a trade. In fact, here’s a shot of John and Chet and John’s awesome new – by which I mean, really, really old – get.

The store is slated to be open soon – perhaps by the end of the month, if the stars align correctly. You will certainly find me there from time to time and perhaps we can bolster up that Yuri section a bit, if people actually buy what’s there. :-) When it opens, I’ll be sure to let you know. And we may, possibly, be holding a Yuricon event or two there. (Seems like a really good possibility.)

And that’s about it for this lovely day looking at bodies carved in half and hentai and Asian exploitation flicks and old-school porn. My thanks to my gracious hosts for the tour of the facilities, the fascinating discussions about body parts and functions and anime sales and predictions and, the unique vision that drives Media Blasters.

New anime Mariaholic (まりあ†ほりっく), is meant to be a comedy about a “Yuri obsessed girl” (by which the coyly clever writers mean she’s a lesbian) at a girl’s school, who falls under the control of a sadistic cross-dressing guy.

Let’s start with the good. The art is very good – I genuinely enoyed it. The surreality is also quite good. Like Melody of Oblivion, it provides a slightly pregnant, omninous atmosphere. The VAs are recognizable “6 degrees of Yuri” actresses, which was nice.

But on the downside, the story at its most basic is about the emotional torture of a young lesbian. Which somehow isn’t reading as “funny” to me. If I thought that this story would lighten up, I could deal, but knowing that Kanako’s tortured misery is not just the story, but is meant to be seen as *comedy,* I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to enjoy it, ever.

It feels like another story in which the “comedy” is a thin mask to give the audience a vicarious thrill of harassing a woman. Much like the very thinly veiled aggression in That Is My Master. My gut feeling is that if you like Master and think it’s funny, you’ll probably like Mariaholic and think it’s funny. If you look at the promotional picture up top there, you’ll notice that protagonist isn’t in the forefront of the picture. I kind of think that that’s pretty representative of the whole thing. This is series about the torturer, not about the victim and we are meant to empathize with him, not her. I think of it as an anti-Yuri series.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 2
Characters – 4
Yuri – 0 or 6, depending on your point of view
Series – 8, if your fetish is emotional torture

Overall – 3 or 8, depending on your point of view, interests and sense of humor