It’s pretty evident that I’m not the average Yuri fan. I don’t read Yuri looking for titillation, I don’t particularly care if a story has sex in it or not. What I’m looking for is a good story.

Short stories are harder than long ones. You have less time to make a reader care about the characters, and less time to develop the situation. A lot of short stories that include sex scenes read like “Plot, What Plot?” stories – even if they aspire to be more than that.

Yuri Hime Wildrose, Volume 4 (百合姫 Wildrose) is a collection of PWP stories and frankly, it doesn’t aspire to much more. This is a collection for the Lowest Common Denominator who want sex in their Yuri and don’t really care much about story, character or plot.

The only stories that stood out to me were Nanzaki Iku’s attempt to *not* do another ShizNat-style story, Morishima Akiko’s story for being something I actually disliked from beginning to end and Takahashi Yostsu’s gang parody.

Nanzaki’s story shows us the relationship between a woman who works at a pet store and one of her customers. It’s sweet, a little dopey and has obligatory sex. It was a refreshing change from his usual. In balance I find myself starting to recognize patterns in the sex scenes he draws and that disturbs me a bit.

Morishima Akiko’s story is set in France, a girl who has to leave takes advantage of the girl she loves in a story that really put me off. It’s classic Cream Lemon, with a super whiny, yet willing to rape to get her way, protagonist. And it’s fake rape, you know, because the other girl wanted it, really. UGH

Takahashi Yotsu’s story was silly. Arisa is the leader of the Wildrose gang, but she falls in love with Serika, they hypercompetent employee at Ichinjinsha bookstore. When Arisa decides to leave gang life for Serika, she finds that her love is actually the Yuri Hime gang leader. Bwah wah wah~~

Other that these, the stories are a mix of unpopular/popular girls, and other blandly typical stories, with sex.

Ratings:

Art – Variable, but I don’t think it got better than a 7.
Stories – 4-6
Characters – 4-6
Yuri – 9
Service – 10

Overall – 5 for me, but more if you think Yuri equals girls having sex.

If having sex is your number one criteria for a Yuri anthology, then this is probably a book you will like. If you’re looking for something with a little character in the characters and oomph in the plot, give this one a miss. I was going to stop getting this series with this book, but Volume 5 is already looking intriguing, so I’ll give it one more try.

Let’s get the most damning thing about Yuri Hime Wildrose, Volume 3 (百合姫Wildrose) out of the way right up front. When I picked it up today to review it, I couldn’t remember a single story in it, although I had only re(!)read it a week ago. After I picked it up and flipped through the volume I remembered a few of the stories, but having set it down again more than ten minutes ago, they are already slipping from my mind. This is not a good thing. But that aside, it’s a fine addition the the Wildrose series.

Mistukuni Hachime, of Gokujou Drops fame, brings it on with “Netemo Sametemo,” which seems just about the most straight-on schoolgirl item in the book.

“Closet Daisakusen’ started off with action and I thought, “woo-hoo, we’re gonna get us some girls with guns,” but no, it was a peeping tom/sex in the closet story.

Nanzaki Iku, aka Doropanda Tours, brings in entirely new, yet completely identical ShizNat stand-ins for more semi-public sex and a mild plot complication.

Amano Shuninta’s “Sweet Exercise” was quite…sweet. A curvaceous woman, Umi, worries that she’s too heavy and tries to diet herself thin only to learn that her curves are what her girlfriend Morii likes.

There were a number of other stories, of course, but none that really stepped up to be more than the sum of its parts.

The impression left behind by the overall volume is one of what the Japanese and many western fans refer to as “ecchi”-ness. It’s titillation of the “sorority sisters’ lingerie party” sort. There’s peeping and cosplay and teasing and bonbons and teacher/student and a bunch of other sorts of tee-hee kind of stuff. Much like Volume 1 and Volume 2. This is what Yuri Hime Wildrose is. It’s a collection of twitter, twitter “ecchi” stories. As Monty Python so brilliantly put it, “wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.”

Ratings:

Art – Variable, as good as 8 at times. Which times are entirely up to personal taste. ^_^
Stories – 6-7
Characters – 6-7
Yuri – 9
Service – 10

Overall – 7 for me, probably 8 or 9 for others.

Before you ask – the reason it gets a 9 for Yuri and not a 10 is because the sex seems more for intended for the reader than for the characters. The cover art says it all – they are looking at us, not each other. And that, in a nutshell, is why I like but do not love the Wildrose anthologies.

Yuri Hime Wildrose, Volume 2, (百合姫 Wildrose) is the second collection of slightly more explicit short stories by authors from Yuri Hime and Yuri Hime S. Most of the stories are one-shots, but there is at least one continuation from the previous volume.

In most cases, the stories are set at schools or involve schoolgirls, although there is an ocassional adult to break up the monotony and add a little illegality to the proceedings. lol Mostly the stories are sex as affirmation of yes, we really love each other, which is a nice step forward from sex as experiment into what do girls do together? (I am always honestly boggled at this question. I’ve gotten it – quite earnestly – from both men and woman from a number of nations, and I still don’t have a good answer, because it seems so obvious to me. I guess not though, if one’s idea of sex is limited to one action only. But I digress.)

Since incest, or something close to it, is all the rage right now, there are a number of sisters/onee-sama-imouto/cousins-who-are-close-like-sisters to chose from. (This trend continues into both Yuri Hime and Yuri Hime S, btw. So once again, the LCD wins and I wait through yet another cycle of fetishes that aren’t my thing, until the tide turns and possibly my thing will become more popular. Although…probably not. lol) Chi-Ran’s story refreshingly remains about sex between two people who know nothing whatsoever about one another. Not even each other’s names. ^_^

And Natsuki x Shizuru fans will appreciate that the blatant parody this time is not Marimite, but a faux Shiznat thing that was actually quite nice. If you can imagine Natsuki as the older student, closing in on graduation and Shizuru as her lover/kouhai and add sex, you’ll have a close enough idea about the goings on.

Of course I did not like each story equally, but overall I think I liked this volume more than the previous one. I can’t think of any story that was standout wow, but nothing that made me cry, either. ^_^

Ratings (variable, so everything is averaged):

Art – 6
Stories – 7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 9
Service – 7

Overall – 7

This book is sort of the middle step between soft Yuri and porn, so if you’ve bemoaned the fact that there’s little in that middle space before it becomes full-blown fluid-spewing hentai, then you’ll probably like this book a lot.