Archive for the Yuri Anime Category


Yuri Anime: ROD The TV, Volume 7

July 26th, 2005

In between redoecorating a bathroom in my house, worrking on Onna! and getting ready for a talk last night at Gay Activist Alliance of Morris County, I managed to find just enough time to watch this DVD.

I’m really glad I did, too, because I had either missed or forgotten *so* much of what happens in these final episodes that I had to really pay attention to what was going on – and frequently rewind to catch something I had missed.

In other words – it was excellent.

Most of what I had missed had to do with Wendy, whose motivation makes much more sense to me now. But there had still been a bazillion details I didn’t catch – like the pile of books in the very last scene. They only translate one of them, but if you’ve been paying attention to the show at all, you’ll recognize them all. (And if you’ve read the Read or Dream manga, you’ll have a separate set of symbolism for them. Or the line Yomiko spouts at the end, which is translated as “Paper is in heaven and all’s right with the world.” Which made me laugh and walk into the dining room to tell my wife. Who looked up from her computer and told me that the original phrase “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world” was first in print in Don Quixote by Cervantes, not in a Keats ode, as I had thought.

There’s two key things here: 1) Yes, we really do have conversations like this in my house and; 2) The Paper/God thing was a pun. Yomiko made a joke. All’s right with the world, indeed.

Did I mention that this volume was excellent?

There were still many things I wanted answered at the end, but none of them were “Why on earth did so-and-so do such-and-such?” More of them were like, “Hmmm, what will happen when Nancy comes back?”

There are simply so many things I want to discuss with people about this series, and 99% of all of it is spoilers, so you all have to run out and get this volume, watch it and come to the Yuricon Mailing List, so we can gab about it until we’re blue! :-)

The *only* things that were not good were the low episode count and the retouched artwork (which in and of itself is fine, it just means that the artwork was crappy the first time around.)

Oh..and the pencil board was actually pretty good! It’s Yomiko looking all submissive and sexy. Unlike Nenene, Yomiko is pretty much a “good girl” so it fits and nothing in the picture squicks. Of the entire batch, this one is probably the best.

Ratings:

10, all the way around.

Everybody has a happy ending – even the bad guys – the cleverness factor would make Terry Pratchett jealous and the writers win, hands down, for being golden in my book.

No pun intended. :-D





Yuri Anime: Kore ha Watashi no Goshujin-sama – This Is My Master

July 14th, 2005


I’m not feeling very vitriolic today, but I guess I’ll review this anime anyway.

Kore ha watashi no goshujin-sama, aka This is My Master or He is My Master, is…. Honestly? It’s a miserable piece of filth.

I have been told by several guys that the manga is *much* cuter and funnier. However, when I glanced at the manga, I saw very little that I personally find anything like funny. I will freely admit that I loathe and despise broad physical comedy that relies primarily on sexual harrassment and peeping as vehicles for humor. And little girl faces on absurdly developed bodies is repugnant.

Two sisters find themselves dependent on a rich kid for a job. Rich kid is a clothing fetishist and makes them wear “sexy” outfits. Wackiness and tons and tons and TONS of general pervy peeping ensues.

The title is pretty accurate though, when read with sarcasm, “*This* is my master”? And I genuinely believe that that is what the mangaka was going for.

Yes, there is yuri. It is one-sided and will go nowhere and is essentially no more than a girl doing the same exact kind of pervy drooling and peeping that the boy is doing, except of course she can get closer during in the bath. She becomes a maid in the household to be close to the object of her affection. If this is the kind of thing you want to see, she is blatantly, obviously openly desirous of the main character whose name I’m not even willing to look up. That’s how good this story is. Izumi, maybe?

Let me slip out of my exhausted and bored distaste into a brief moment of extreme vitriolic hatred. The alligator sexually harrassing the main character is quite possibly the single most disgusting plot complication I have ever encountered anywhere – surpassing even the entire grotesquery of Shusaku Reply, which was a sewer of an anime. I feel a special violence towards anyone who might conceivably find the whole thing amusing or, heaven forfend, sexy.

Ratings:
Art – 6
Story – 2
Characters – 3
Yuri – 8

Overall – 3

To be blunt – if you find this anime “cute” or “funny”, you are probably a “loser.”





Yuri Anime: Gokujou Seitokai

July 12th, 2005

The early summer season of anime has been lame in general, with only a few exceptions, and absolutely *abysmal* as far as Yuri goes.

As I see it, there are exactly two anime with anything approaching real Yuri, and of those I find one so repulsive I simply cannot bring myself to discuss it with any semblance of objectivity. (I will leave it for a later vitriolic rant.) Which leaves us with Gokujou Seitokai.

Thankfully, Gokujou Seitokai is a lot of fun, as well as having at least a little meat for the yuri fan to chew on.

The plot, to quote several wise people, is “about girls at a girls school with girls.” I think that sums it up nicely, myself. ^_^

Miyagami Gakuen is yet another exclusive all-girl elevator school – only there is nothing like 1920’s comportment here! Instead we have a special super highest power student council that runs the school, with a covert operations squad complete with ninja, an assault squad complete with serious heavy-duty nuclear weaponry…and of course, pretty girls.

In the beginning we meet space cadet Randou Rino, a young lady with a deficient frontal lobe and a bizarre, trash-talking puppet attached to her hand. Randou has been sent to this school by the mysterious Mr. Poppet, a penpal of some kind. Of course she ends up joining the Gokujou Seitokai, which is run by the head of the school, the lovely and gentle and a little cracked, Jinguuji Kanade. Kanade is the idol of the school, so there’s a lot of jealousy when she begins to favor Rino. (We eventually learn that there is some connection between Rinou and Kanade, but by episode 14, we have not learned the exact nature of this connection. All we know is that Kanade is definitely, consciously acting as surrogate mother/big sister for orphaned Rino.)

We also learn that the puppet, Pu-chan, is not at ALL what he seems. The obvious gag about Pu-chan being Rino’s alter ego is just…wrong. Let’s put it this way – in the big curry battle episode, we learn that in the past, Pu-chan had an affair with an Indian woman. Not your average puppet, trust me.

So…Yuri?

In the beginning there is a really funny episode about rumors of Rino and Kanade having some kind of affair. “Paya-paya” was not in any of the the slang onomotopeia books or lists that I could find before this episode, but I bet it’s in them now. ^_^

Look! I just found this on the Urban Dictionary:
payapaya
Japanese slang for some kind of interpersonal contact, possibly sex. Popularized (to north american anime fans) in Gokujou Seitokai episode 3.
“The president was seen in Rino’s room, they were doing payapaya!”

See?

For me the least likely, yet most interesting, Yuri couple would have to be the two Vice Presidents of the Gokujou Seitokai, Nanaho (Assault) and Kuon (Covert.) Really, there’s NO sign of anything between them. I’m making it up, pretty much. But they’d make a great couple and I have Kato/Inspector Clouseau-like scenes of bedroom assault in my head between the two of them that I simply cannot rid myself of. ^_^

We are introduced to an exceptionally strong shinyuu/intense friendship between Rein and Sayuri, which is easy enough to see as something more. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call them a couple.

And plenty of folks have interpreted Nanaho’s feverish devotion to Kanade as love, which it certainly is. I’m not sure it’s desire, but I’ll leave that question to the philosophers.

The one genuine full-blown babydyke character is Izumi Kaori. In the beginning we are led to believe that she is the typical obnoxious overachieving ojou-sama, but pretty quickly we learn that she’s nothing of the sort. In fact, she’s probably the most well-developed character so far and has turned out to be quite intelligent and admirable. Her overt crush on Kanade apparently stems from Kanade’s kindness and generosity in Kaori’s past, but when we get scenes of Kaori imagining herself and Kanade “doing things that she doesn’t know about because she’s a pure maiden” it kind of blows the purity bit right off. ;-) So she’s probably the only “real” lesbian in the bunch.

Ratings:
Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 6

Overall – 7

Lots of fun, good as brain candy, Gokujou Seitokai is a pleasant, but seriously unserious addition to the yuri collection. It has been licensed by ADV and is being released as Best Student Council.





Yuri Anime: Madlax, Volume 2

July 5th, 2005

It has been pointed out to me in the notes below that this review was full of hot air. I stand corrected – the translation in the one case I illustrated was fine. ;-))

I am so irritated about this volume of Madlax, I’m not really even sure where to begin.

So to begin, I’ll touch on the good things. First and foremost, this volume is fun, with a capital “fu”. I mean, how many other places can you watch a gentle maid go totally postal on some entitled wannabe frat boy?  I particularly enjoy it when Elenore snaps the kid’s wrist, because he hurt Margaret’s wrist. And when Vanessa says, “How vicious,” she really doesn’t sound all that disapproving. ^_^

Other good things – the liner notes include highly amusing fan art drawn by some of the staff, complete with in-jokes that have to be explained. I really enjoyed these.

And that about covers it. The plot is dense, the bad guy is a joke, but those haven’t changed from my first viewing of the series. And the rest of the episodes are actually very interesting, as we finally start to draw a connection between Margaret, the book and Madlax.

(Remind me to engage in a light rant about the book next review…^_^)

The really stand-out not-good thing on this volume is the seriously awful translation. The first volume was pretty good, but again, its like they switched midstream and stopped actually listening to what was being said, and instead started guessing at something sort-of close to the meaning.

I can’t remember all the things that annoyed the living daylights out of me, but there were several. COME ON,  anime distributor companies! We are notstupid. We are not children. JUST TRANSLATE WHAT THEY SAY. Not something “close enough” to it. And leave the \expletive deleted\ honorifics alone, already! Stop the dubtitling.

It’s absolutely infuriating to pay money for something that is not done properly. It may be cheaper for you to dubtitle, but it stinks for those of us who want to watch the Japanese. Thanks for treating us like second-class citizens, when we are your fan base.

No ratings, I’m in a bad mood.





Yuri Anime: Air Master, Volume 1

June 30th, 2005

I managed to get a copy of Volume 1 of Air Master at last. This series has become a “comfort” series for me – I stick it on the TV when there’s nothing else on and I don’t want to have to pay *too* much attention. But, then I end up watching it anyway and not doing whatever it was that I was slacking off doing in the first place.

I won’t beat the plot, character of yuri components of this volume to death – I have repeatedly ranted about how wonderful this anime is in several of my previous posts: From the first recommendation back in August 2003 to Feb. 26, 2004, May 21, 2005, and May 23, 2005. And that doesn’t include all the rants about the manga, either.

So, yeah, I like this anime – a lot.

And I’ve already discussed the problems with the DVD release, some of which have been addressed in the second half of the thrid volume.

What did shock me about this first volume was how utterly, horribly *BAD* the translation was. Again, I felt like I was watching a bootlegged copy. Whole sentences were completely, totally, changed from what the characters were saying, as if the translators kept assuming what they “really” meant was….I imagine that this was a dubtitle issue, but even so, there were entire sentences that were just plain *wrong.*

Oddly, the language in the first volume subtitles is much ruder than in the second, and in that way, fits the story better.

But I’ll admit, if I had bought this volume first, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have bought 2 or 3. So I’m a little glad I bought them first.

Story-wise, Volume 1 is not particularly strong, either – again, by going backwards I can see how much more three-dimensional the characters are only a few episodes later.

I think it really sucks that this release was so bad – there are plenty of folks that might enjoy Air Master, but who, if not already turned off by the ugly art, will just give up in frustration with the unbelievably poor quality of this DVD.

What makes even this volume worth watching is, of course, the characters and the fighting.

And Sakiyama Kaori.

Ratings:
Art – 5
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 6
Technical Details – 3

Despite the crappiness of this particular Volume, I recommend the series. If you’re going to buy it from Amazon, look for a used copy or a cheaper copy on the Amazon marketplace. This way you won’t feel quite so ripped. Also – do not be afraid to write the distributor and express your dissatisfaction – if you don’t tell them, they can’t know.