Archive for the Yuri Manga Category


Shoujo Magazine Yuri Watch: Blue Friend (ブルーフレンド) 2nd Season

June 17th, 2011

Beginning in the July issue of Ribon magazine is the newest addition to the Shoujo Magazine Yuri manga scene, Blue Friend, 2nd Season (ブルーフレンド 2nd Season). You can read the synopses of the “first season” in my reviews of Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the manga.

The second season begins, as so many series do, with the excitement of the first day of high school life. “Today my high school life begins,” says Shimizu Kanako. Kanako is thrilled to be attending a girls’ high school, making new friends, etc. She quite accidentally slams into another girl who reacts, despite her cute appearance, with unusual aggressiveness. Kamei-san is small and cute, but her personality, Kanako learns, is blunt to the point of rudeness.

Kanako quickly makes friends in class, but is startled to find an underlying selfishness in her new friends. They ask her to give them things she bought for herself, and copy her homework. Kamei-san is, in the meantime, quite rude to Kanako’s friends. At first Kanako is angry and frustrated with Kamei-san’s attitude. When Kamei-san speaks the brutal truth about one of the girl’s new boyfriend (“He looks like a llama.”) Kanako wisks her away to dress her down. Instead, she finds her self admitting that she wants to be able to speak plainly, as Kamei-san does.

Her friends desert her and, in retaliation for her new relationship, nominate Kanako as class representative. Kamei-san volunteers to join her. They start becoming closer – Kanako goes so far as to elicit a smile from taciturn Kamei-san when she admits to feeling happy when Kamei-san stood up to be the other class rep.

Kanako decides that she will be more like Kamei-san, and speak plainly what she feels, rather than playing the other girl’s mind games. When two of her former group try to bring her back into the fold, Kanako rejects their overtures, politely, but clearly, explaining that she did not take kindly to the way they treated her.

The chapter ends with Kanako looking at her future as class rep with Kamei-san and thinking, “Today my high school life begins.”

Of interest to folks who care about such things, this series premiered at the front of the magazine. That’s a sign that the previous series did pretty well. Good news, I think.

I admit it – I’m waiting for the boot to drop. There is no way this story is going to be this positive, this empowering, is there? Can it be that the heroine will manage to learn to speak up for herself and be rewarded with getting the girl, too? Nah….

Time will tell what horrible, tragic backstory and what icky-making trauma will fill in the lines here, but I have no doubt that Ebon Fumi is cooking something up.

Tune in to the same bat magazine next month to find out!





Yuri Manga: Saigo no Seifuku New Edition, (新装版　最後の制服) Volume 1

June 13th, 2011

 Reading Saigo no Seifuku, New Edition, Volume 1 (新装版　最後の制服) was an exercise of a sort for me. When I first read The Last Uniform in 2006, the art absolutely repulsed me. So much so that I struggled for years to give Hakamada Mera any respect. Her stories were always cute, slightly bland, but the oversize heads drove me batty. As time went on, the heads got a little smaller, moe became more common and far worse giant heads on little bodies were thrown at me and now, years later, I find I barely noticed the giant heads anymore. I think, honestly, some re-drawing was done here, because the heads weren’t nearly as huge I remember them being. In fact, there were one or two pages where I found myself staring at a weirdly drawn jaw, the way I used to, but only a few.

So, here we are, many years after Saigo no Seifuku originally detailed the love triangles at Tsubakigaoka Gakuin. But before we get into the original stories, we’re given a few new ones, establishing both Ai and Tsumugi as completely, goofily besotted with their respective objects of affection.

The first couple we “meet” are Ai and her roommate, Fuuko. Fu-chan is that kind of cheerful, apparently doofy girl that we’re never really sure means “like” the same way Ai does. Well, the new edition clears that up. And Beniko and Tsumugi are as close (and as far) as ever to some kind of an actual relationship.

The original tales are retold – how Anzu arrives at school and is assigned to Ai-chan and Fu-chan’s room, thus throwing Ai-chan into a tizzy. And how Tsumugi admires Beniko from afar (well, as afar as the next bed over) until Asagi tries to mack on her girl. Meanwhile Anzu has a crush on Tsumugi that she really doesn’t communicate properly to the upperclassman.

Without a doubt, my favorite part of the book is Asagi’s friend, who wears braids, so is referred to as “braids,” who writes slash fanfic about the dorm residents.  Asagi asks her to pair characters up for a little thrill. Included in this new edition are a few of those fanfics.

Ratings:

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

Overall – 7

Add character pages with uniform and character discussion and you have a shiny new deluxe edition of an “old standard.”





Yuri Manga: Pure Yuri Anthology Hirari (ピュア百合アンソロジー ひらり) Volume 4

May 5th, 2011

You know all the stuff I keep saying about Rakuen Le Paradis? That the stories are written for an adult audience who wants to be treated like adults, and it takes couples beyond happily ever after? Well…none of that applies to Pure Yuri Anthology, Hirari, Volume 4 (ピュア百合アンソロジー ひらり).

In fact, very few of the stories even read “Yuri” to me at all. If they called it “Pure Friendship Anthology Hirari,” I would say it was more accurate that calling it Yuri. In fact, if anything, calling it Yuri stretches the definition of Yuri even past what I’m willing to admit Yuri is. Hirari is, mostly, stories of girls developing emotional closeness with other girls. Call it best friends or, maybe, in some cases, more…but not really. Almost every story in this collection is so removed from love or desire that I find it honestly ridiculous to call it that. Maybe a few stories have some light crushiness, but most of them sound like this:

In Hakamada Mera’s “Black and White,” creepy-looking, magic-user Kurosawa enters a new school and resigns herself to being alone as she always has been. Until another girl becomes her friend. But, when Kurosawa gets good grades on a test, she is accused of using magic and is ostracized. Until her friend comes and rescues her from class-imposed solitary life and forces the other kids to apologize. And…that’s it. It’s a great story of a nice friendship. Perhaps, maybe, it will develop into more, but after several chapters, referring to it as Yuri is just stretching the truth.

Ratings:

Overall – 6





Yuri Manga: Tsubomi (つぼみ), Volume 10

April 14th, 2011

Earlier this month, I wrote a review of “Story A” for Hooded Utilitarian. In many ways, Story A is like a music hall song. You know music hall songs – these are songs that you know – at least the chorus. When music hall was a common entertainment, popular songs were sing-a-longs, with songs like “A Bicycle Built for Two.” (By Blur. Because music hall music is timeless.) Don’t know the lyrics?   Performers would display the lyrics as they were sung, so *everyone* could join in.  My wife’s favorite music hall song is “Let’s All Go Down The Strand” (also by by Blur, because why not)  which is a very singable song. Try it, go ahead, you’ll have fun. Here’s the lyrics, so you can follow along. The Strand is a large street in London, like 5th Avenue in New York City, with a lot of stores and museums and Trafalgar Square. Popular place to go and “be seen.”

The point is – when you know what to expect, sometimes it’s more fun, because you can just relax.

In Tsubomi (つぼみ), Volume 10, we can just relax and sing the chorus, because we already know the story: There is a girl, she likes another girl, the girl likes her, the end. Like a good music hall song, there’s nothing unpleasant about repeating this refrain over and over because we enjoy it.

Sometimes, there’s even a new verse or two.

Ratings:

Overall – 9





Yuri Manga: GUNJO, Volume 2

April 11th, 2011

There will be massive spoilers in this review. I cannot discuss how powerful the story is or the reactions I had without them. If you object, skip to the ratings.

Today, we speak of desperation.

In my interview with Nakamura-sensei, she called GUNJO (羣青 ) a story about the “profound loneliness of a lonely person.”

In Volume 1 (上), we learned why the brunette would be driven to desperate acts, as a way to escape a life of despair and pain. She had nothing to lose. And we can understand that, we can forgive that. Abused women fighting back makes sense to us.

In Volume 2 (中), we are forced to deal with the other half of that act…executed by a woman who had everything to lose.

The beginning of Volume 2 starts with the chapter that made it impossible for me to continue to write chapter-by-chapter reviews of this story. This is when I began thinking of reading GUNJO in terms of “eating the most delicious razor blades you’ve ever had.” Each chapter hurts so magnificently, it has become my equivalent of cutting. I read a chapter to see how low into despair I can sink, how intensely I can feel their loneliness, how miserable they can make me feel. I read this every month to see if I can still summon hope.

In Volume 2, we do the most absolutely emotionally draining thing possible, we stop watching the main couple, with their dysfunctional relationship and dangerous dynamic, and take a step aside to really understand everything the blonde has thrown away. I don’t believe I’ve ever shed so many tears over a book as I did in these chapters. Watching the blonde’s ex re-create her life, find out how close they were to making it permanent (or, as permanent as possible for two gay women in Japan in the present), watching as the loss of her lover forces the ex to come out to her parents, and express how she *would* have spent the rest of her life with that woman. And then, when it all seems like she’s put it behind her and is ready to move on, we watch her give up completely…and kill herself. The blonde, who has everything to lose, has lost everything.

Then, when we think that we can put that behind us and we can move on, the ring her lover had bought her….the ring with which she was intending to propose…is given to the blonde, along with the story of her lover’s death. Now she has to deal with new loss on top of old.

But the book doesn’t end there. Profound loneliness has no cure. It wants no cure. The brunette, a woman who has run until she has been cornered by life, has new ammunition to make the one person who cares about her hurt. So she does. She batters the blonde with emotional torment until the blonde throws away the very last relics she has of her former life, 550 yen….and the wedding ring.

Ratings:

Art – 10
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Lesbian – 10
Sevice – 1

Overall – 10

There is no respite here. There is no moment when we can breathe a sigh of relief.

All we can do is feel the desperation and the loneliness of despair. And wait. For Volume 3.