Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – September 10, 2022

September 10th, 2022

Yuri Events

My autumn schedule is filling up. I’m very excited to be part of so many great events in the next few months. These are all NYC-based. If you’d like me at your local event, school or organization, tell them to invite me. ^_^ I can be reached through the Yuricon Contact Form.

October 6-9 – New York Comic Con. I’ll be part of the Defending Manga in Libraries panel. 

October 24 – Hunter College, NYC. I’ll be talking about Yuri and the manga industry.

October 29  – Women in Comics Con, Bronx Library Center, NYC. This event is open to the public with a focus on teens and younger readers of comics. Details TBA.

AnimeNYC, Nov 18-20, NYC. I’m on two panels, Defending Manga in Libraries and Writing About Japan and will be signing books! Details TBA. I’ll be at this event all weekend, so check back for my full schedule.

The next Girls Love Fest will be held on November 11, 2022, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center in Asakusa. I liked that location, it’s right near the Senso-ji. ^_^

Comitia 142 will be held on November 27, 2022 at Big Sight in Tokyo. I’m really hoping to get there for next year’s November Comitia. 

 

Yuri Manga

Seven Seas has licensed an 18+ title from Comic Yuri Hime, Does It Count If You Lose Your Virginity To An Android? By Yakinikuteishoku, this manga is about a woman and her android housekeeper having sex. I am going to be a little salty here about equating “android” with “robot,” in their description, because Seven Seas does that with Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as well and I find it an odd choice.

Via YNN Correspondent Scarlet Queen, Mahô Éditions has announced the French-language Roll Over and Die manga on their Twitter feed. Check out the announcement for a fantastic trailer for the series.

 

 

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This week on the  Yuricon Store!

I cannot WAIT for you to be able to read Sal Jiang’s Black & White: Tough Love at the Office. This shakaijin Yuri is as explosive and violent as dynamite, with two women who are rivals in everything.

We’ve also added Shimekiri Mae ni ha Yuri ga Hakadoru ( 〆切前には百合が捗る) This is a story about a young runaway, who gets taken in by a manga artist.

Yuri Anime

As reported last week on YNN, the Rose of Versailles series is getting a new anime for its 50th anniversary! Woo~~~ Egan Loo has all the details over at ANN. Check out the trailer on Youtube!

ANN’s Kim Morrisy has the scoop on My Master Has No Tail and a look at the key visual for this upcoming rakugo comedy. I’ve reviewed the first two volumes of the manga in Japanese, here on Okazu.

 

Yuri Studio

We have a new video on Yuri Studio! I have been watching the Yuri genre change and grow for 20 years now. Check out the Top 10 Changes In Yuri From 20 Years of Okazu! Your kind comments and, likes help a lot, as does you subscribing and clicking the notification bell, so thank you!

 

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Yuri Novel

Komatsu-san on Crunchyroll reports that the Lycoris Recoil spin-off novel passed 100,000 sales, before it was released yesterday in Japan. According to Komatsu-san, the novel includes scenes that weren’t in the anime. Check his article for images and more information!

 

Yuri Live-Action

Komatsu-san also has the scoop on the cast and key visual for the live-action Oshi ga Budokan Ittekuretara Shinu (If My Favorite Idol Made It To The Budokan I would Die.) The casting looks great.

 

Yuri Doujinshi

Yuni, creator of I Love You So Much, I Hate You, (which is available from Yen Press) has a new doujinshi from this month’s Comitia. Because Comitia is for original work, it gets a lot of good original doujinshi…which I why I always include it under Yuri events!) You can buy FAKE IT, and tons of other doujinshi on Melonbooks, through a buying service like Tenso.

 

Other News

Ogata Megumi, voice of Tenoh Haruka/Sailor Uranus, has a role as the voice of an AI named Solon, in the live-action drama Teen Regime, now on NHK. You can watch Episode 1 in dub or sub on NHK’s site for the series. It’s pretty intriguing and M, is spot on for Solon’s voice, as her range allows her to be a lot of things.

Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth is hitting shelves soon, so, Meet the Real-World Rude Lesbian Swordfighter Behind Gideon the Ninth.

Via ramonzinger on Twitter, check out these concepts images by Anno Moyoco for the Cutie Honey movies!

 

Thanks to our Okazu Patrons who make the YNN weekly report possible! Support us on Patreon or Ko-fi to help us give Guest Reviewers a raise and to help us support Yuri creators!

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Secret Love (シークレット・ラブ)

September 8th, 2022

Are you are the kind of person, like myself, who reads everything in a book? I begin with the beginning reading the introduction, any foreword and, if I’m diggin’ the book, read right through notes, glossaries and even acknowledgments.  Well if you, like me, love to be nosy and see who the author thanks and what secret messages are in there, and you have picked up a copy of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga, you will see among the people I thanked, Rachel Thorn, scholar, translator, and gentlewoman.

Rachel Thorn is one of the preeminent scholars of shoujo manga. While not all her work is available in English, you can find quite a lot of interesting essays on her blog (which still uses her deadname and is now some years out of date, so don’t be surprised.) Rachel is a professor of manga studies in Japan and is an old friend. SO, when I received an email with some commentary on By Your Side, I stared at the email nervously.  Actually, no, I didn’t, because Rachel is a lovely human and made sure there was kind commentary in the subject line. ^_^ She did have some small changes to suggest and the name of a manga I hadn’t before heard that had a proto-Yuri story from before Shiroi Heya no Futari, the manga I tend to refer to as arguably the first Yuri manga.

Having now read her suggestion, I could recognize some early echoes of Yuri, so today we are talking about Secret Love, by Yashiro Masako. “Secret Love” is a one-short story in a collection of the same name that was published in 1978.

The story begins with a girl telling us that her first love was a beautiful girl. Atsushi-chan, our protagonist, is at school, painting Fuyuko. Atsushi has short dark hair and keeps to herself in the art room. Fuyuko is the star of the school, with many admirers. Because she is close to Fuyuko, the other girls do not care for Atsushi and avoid her. With her introverted nature, Atsushi is fine with that, but does not like the whispers she hears about how strange she is and how she is too close to Fuyuko. She also does not like to hear that Fuyuko may have a boyfriend. She spends a lot of time mooning over the feelings she has for Fuyuko for which she knows no name and has no outlet other than her painting.

One day Atsushi meets a young man on the street who tells her he’s trying to become a great photographer, He asks for her name but Atsushi tells him no and runs off. The next day when she’s painting, the guy comes to visit Fuyuko in the club room. Atsushi is livid that Makio has horned in or her time, but when he starts to snap her photo, she becomes hysterical, even threatening him with her palette knife, and collapses.

When Atsushi regains herself, Fuyuko apologizes, but  it’s Atsushi who feels that she did wrong. She seeks out Makio and apologizes to him and he returns the favor, apologizing that her didn’t ask permission. Honestly…I loved this bit where everyone recognizes where they stepped out of line and hurt someone else, even if it was unintentional.

Fuyuko, clearly in love with Makio, asks Atsushi to take some Valentine’s Day chocolates to the photographer, but when he finds that they are not from Atsushi herself, he rejects them. Fuyuko becomes jealous of Makio’s interest in Atsushi and causes an accident in the chemistry lab that could have hurt Atsushi. Appalled at herself, Fuyuko runs away.

Atsushi and Makio track Fuyuko to the ocean, Makio goes in to save her, but he is too late. In the final panel, Atsushi tells us that, after the incident of Fuyuko’s death, Makio ran away to some other town and she has not spoken to him. But Fuyuko smiles, eternally beautiful, in the portrait Atsushi painted of her.

There are some obvious connectors to early Yuri here, the main one of which was that Atsushi’s feelings as a kind of pathological illness that cause her to react with hysteria and violence to Makio.  Like so many other hysterical Yuri characters, her reaction could be understood as that of an abused child, reacting not just to Makio’s maleness, but to the idea of being photographed – even though we know that the mental instability here was specifically being tied to her feelings for Fuyuko.  This story was also set in a all-girls school and Atsushi was boyish in the sense that she had short hair. More importantly, she also had a “dark” brooding, intensity to her feelings for Fuyuko. Fuyuko is the perfect cheerful lighter-haired partner with ribbons in her hair, thus making them a close fit for what would become the iconic Yuri couple.

The manga artist was best known for her Yoko Series  (according JP wikipedia) which went for many volumes with “detailed depictions of everyday life, fresh eroticism, and a wide range of styles” and she influenced Moto Hagio and other artists.

The story looked and felt more like something from the 1960s, than the 1970s, with tight panels and dialogue and simple art. The whole thing felt very pre-Sexual Revolution/49ers in a way that Shiroi Heya no Futari, with it’s psychedelic backgrounds and hip clothes, does not. 

Ratings:

How do I even rate this? It’s like a heavy dose of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening combined with a school girl drama. Mei from Citrus would feel right at home, though.

Art – 8 very of a specific style that speaks of the age just before the Magnificent 49ers
Story – 7 Full of unexplored trauma that in a modern manga would feel overblown
Characters – 7 One hopes that Atsushi was able to find herself and be happy, eventually. She’d be just a little older than me. ^_^
Service – 0
Yuri – 7 Unfulfilled longing and loss, a classic Yuri story

Overall – 7

As this is a one-chapter story and Shiroi Heya no Futari was published as a full volume (again, thank you Rachel,) I’ll stick with that one as my “first,” but… I agree that Secret Love is another important piece of our Yuri past.  ^_^

Posted in Classic Yuri, Yuri Manga | 2 Comments »


Revue Starlight: The Movie

September 6th, 2022

In 2019, Revue Starlight hit the anime scene with a bang. It was shiny, with a setup of a Takarazuka-like school, the intensity of competition and performance and internal struggle embodied in duels referred to as “auditions.” These duels allowed characters to work through personal and relationship issues with their partner/rival, and were accompanied by character image songs that expressed deep emotions – what could not be said, could be sung. I reviewed the anime on Okazu, with a ranking of couples, rather than rating the anime itself. ^_^

Now, HIDIVE is streaming Revue Starlight: The Movie and so, I took an appropriate day off to watch it. It had some truly excellent moments.

For most fans, the immediate visual reference would be the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie, what with musical duels and emotional purging. Clearly, the visuals were meant in many places to call Ikuhara Kunihiko’s work to mind….I’d say there’s as much Mawaru Penguindrum as there is Utena in this movie. But still, as with the TV show, I felt the shadow of Melody of Oblivion hovering in the corner of my mind the entire time. If Birdie Wing‘s mecha golf course came with epic music, it’s much the same feel, when the mechanics and music combine. Visually, this series was epic and surreal. It Ikuhara’ed. And in several cases, it worked.

There were only two things that did not work for me, personally. The first and most critical was the insertion of extended scenes of Hikari’s and Karen’s backstory. I am of the belief that few, if any, people were going to see this movie without having seen the TV series, so not only were these redundant, but they were also rather dull. As I said in my original review, Karen and Hikari were the least interesting pair in the series. Having to spend more time with them and their convoluted non-conflict was a chunk of time that added nothing. I’ll get to the second problem in a moment.

An initial fight scene is quite shocking, but when the pair duels actually arrive – they are excellent. The duel that ought to have been the best was, in fact, the best. The “staging” during that duel was animated like actual staging. Despite the leads being two other characters, it is impossible to take one’s eyes off Claudine and Maya. It was perfect. Junna and Nana’s duel was redemptive in a way that I felt really worked and I really dug everything about Futaba vs Kaoruko.  And then the end comes, and the final duel is HUGE and full of everything.

The second issue with this movie is that, despite this, the emotional stakes are low to non-existent. I didn’t care who won, or why, because I knew perfectly well that everyone was just going to grow up and move on. Yes, absolutely, high school is weird and a performing high school by it’s nature has to be extra weird. A high school of performing arts at which musical existential duels are performed on shapeshifting stages, presided over by a nihilistic giraffe is just too weird for me to ever develop any emotional buy-in. ^_^

Aside from that, it was a good movie if you’d like to see folks who work with the specific kinds of forced surrealism that Ikuhara favors, combined with a musical emotional journey (oh! Here’s another reference…Red Garden for similar musical therapy  sessions and inside voices.) I do enjoy such things and, as a result will quite probably watch this again…this time zapping forward through all the Karen x Hikari stuff. If you have HIDIVE or want an excuse to get a free trial, and also like such things, Revue Starlight: The Movie is definitely worth a watch.

Ratings:

10/10 for Maya v Claudine
9/10 for Nana v Junna
8/10 for Mahiru v <spoiler>
8/10 for Futaba v Kauruko
7/10 for Hikari v Karen

The epilogue in the end credits was quite nice, too. I’m a big fan of epilogues.

Posted in English Anime, Yuri Anime | No Comments »


New Okazu Anniversary Video on Yuri Studio!

September 4th, 2022

Thanks to my Patrons for the idea. As a final celebration of reading, watching, and writing about Yuri here on Okazu, we have a new video up on Yuri Studio: S03 E05 Top 10 Changes In Yuri From 20 Years of Okazu!

In this video I think about all the things I’ve seen change in Yuri and Yuri fandom and celebrate each and every step forward. So join me and let’s talk about some changes we’ve seen in Yuri!

 

Your likes and kind comments on YouTube make a huge difference to the algorithm sharing my videos and are very much appreciated! I hope you’ll subscribe and get notifications, as well, because these are things YouTube judges me on. ^_^

Thank you so much to all my YNN Correspondents, Guest Reviewers, commenters and readers here on Okazu. Happy 20th Anniversary to the Okazu Family!

(Also, note the excellent new t-shirt! It’s up on the Yuricon store. ^_^ When you go to Redbubble, the image shows up blank on the page header because Redbubble won’t let me show the image with background color. Scroll down and check out the items to see the image.)

Posted in Okazu News, Yuri Studio | No Comments »


Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – September 3, 2022

September 3rd, 2022

I want to thank everyone who participated in our Okazu 20th Anniversary Treasure Hunt! You are all Yuri Masters!

The next thing we’ll be celebrating this year is a 5000th post on Okazu. Crazy, huh? I’ll be taking suggestions from Okazu Patrons on what I should write about for my 5000th post here.

And I want to apologize, I had a technical error in my newest Yuri Studio video that was beyind my limited technical skills to fix, that meant it will be delayed a week. But hopefully, you will all get to see the video I did to celebrate 20 years of Okazu next week! In the meantime, catch up on Season 3 of Yuri Studio so far!

 

Yuri Manga

I was extremely honored to be able to assist with the English edition of Nekobungi Sumire-sensei’s new manga collection, Tokyo Nekoka Project, “Tokyo Caticization Project.” It’s a fun and interesting collection of scifi, Yuri and cats. I hope you’ll pick up a copy and let Nekobungi-sensei know if you enjoyed it!  I thought it was great and you know how I feel about cats. (-_-)

Ratana Satis’ Pulse, Volume 1 is now available from Seven Seas! I reviewed this back in 2016 and am glad it will reach a wider audience now.

Vampeerz, Volume 2 is out now from Denpa Books. I reviewed this in 2020, and while I read the next couple of volumes I stopped reviewing it in Japanese. Not for any specific reason. If you like vampires and can write limericks, I invite you to consider writing a guest review!

Chapter 29 of Tsukiritai Onna to Tabetai Onna (作りたい女と食べたい女) is up and Kasuga is shopping for Valentine’s Day chocolates for Nomoto! Ahhh!

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Spica wo Tsukamaete, Volume 1 (スピカをつかまえて) is up on the Yuricon Store. This is a heated school triangle about three girls who are rivals for the number one spot in school and more.

Lucky Star manga, which has been on hiatus for 8 years, will restart in Maitana magazine.

On Twitter, Nouchi-sensei announces the start of their school life Yuri series, Yukidoke to Agapanthus (雪解けとアガパンサス) running in Dengeki Daioh! (Which I would have bought, but saw that issue of Geijutsu Shincho with Rose of Versailles on the cover, on the shelf and bought that instead. ^_^)

Also from Twitter, we have Hime ha Atsuku Nigiru (姫はアツく握る) which nanaoku found and announced “It’s Yuri!”

From YNN Corespondent Pan, we have a new girls’ sports series, Tsubame Tip-off (つばめティップオフ！) about basketball, from Comic Meteor. Pan suggests it has Yuri undertones. Even without, I always welcome another sports drama featuring women. ^_^

 

 

Yuri Anime

Alex Mateo on ANN reports that Crunchyroll has Psycho-Pass 3 up for streaming now. If the lesbians are still alive, I’m open to a guest review!

Lycoris Recoil hit Japanese Trending on Twitter this morning with a spoiler from Episode 10. An admittedly not at all surprising spoiler, but spoiler nontheless, should you click.

Lucas DeRuyter has written an interesting perspective piece on Birdie Wing, from the point of view of someone who lives and breathes golf. Whiffs and Aces: Birdie Wing’s Mixed Depiction of Golf is over at ANN. h/t to Sr. YNN Correspondent Sean G for this!

 

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Yuri Doujinshi

25% off everything on Lilyka for the US Labor Day holiday. Check out with code, “Labor.”

 

Other News

No Yuri manga won this year’s NicoNico Next Manga awards, but Bookwalker is offering free previews of all the nominated books, which include several Yuri titles. Take a look! 

The Lily, the Washington Post’s women-focused newsletter, features an amazing comic by Sólveig Eva about how women’s work is devalued and made invisible.

LGBTQ Nation has a discussion of LGBTQ Slang and how it’s changed over time. Check out LGBTQ slang: Exploring Outdated & Modern Queer Slang.

 

If you’d like to support Yuri journalism and research, Patreon and Ko-Fi are the ways we currently have  \active to accept subscriptions and tips. Your support goes straight to paying for Guest Reviews, folks helping with videos, site maintenance, managing the Yuricon Store and directly supporting other Yuri creators. Just $5/month makes a huge impact! Become part of the Okazu family!

Thanks to our Okazu Patrons and Supporters who make the YNN weekly report possible! Support us on Patreon to help us give Guest Reviewers a raise and to help us support Yuri creators!

Become a YNN Correspondent: Contact Us with any Yuri-related news you want to share and be part of the Yuri Network. ^_^

Posted in Yuri Network News | 3 Comments »