Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – April 25, 2020

April 25th, 2020

There’s a lot of Yuri news this week, which is good – and amazing, given our present circumstances. Japan is suspending shipping by air to the USA, among other countries, as flights have been stopped. Shipping by sea is still happening, and Amazon JP appears to be, for the moment, still shipping…presumably because they have their own planes. But do be aware that if you buy anything from Japan right now, there may be significantly delays. I will continue to write reviews here as long as I have material to review. And, given the number of manga in the report this week, that doesn’t seem like it’ll be a problem. ^_^

Seven Seas dominates the news this week with a pile of new licenses.

 

Yuri Novels

Seven Seas released the second Sayaka novel this week digitally, you can get Bloom Into You Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 2 on Kindle or Bookwalker Global (you’ll be seeing more of Bookwalker, just because the system makes it easy to get both English and Japanese materials in one digital library.)

Pixiv announced the winners of the 2nd Yuri Literary Novel Contest! You can read the entries in Japanese on Pixiv, including winner Taiyou no Yoakeato. (太陽の焼け跡) by Kotobuki Shika. As you can imagine, the idea of a Yuri novel contest makes me happy. I will aspire to become a judge. ^_^

Seven Seas announced an interesting new license with I’m in Love With the Villainess, a GL Bunko light novel. by Inori, with art by Hanagata.  You may remember I reviewed Girls Kindgom 1&2 from GL Bunko and found the story to be silly and the translation adequate, but not good. GL Bunko teaming up with Seven Seas for translation and distribution means you might get to read these goofball Vampire x Samurai novels I’m reading now. ^_^ In any case, this is a good choice for GL Bunko.

 

Yuri Manga

Seven Seas already licensed the Light Novel, and now they have acquired the manga for ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword! You may recognize the artist, Munakata Sunao as having done the art for the Riddle Story of a Devil manga.

Kodama Naoko’s Uminekosou days has been licensed as Days of Love at Seagull Villa. This story has, so far been entirely on-brand for Kodama-sensei with solid characters and fetistry that makes me feel wholly creeped out. ^_^; Link above leads to my review of Volume 1, and Volume 2 is sitting here waiting for me to get to around to it.

Not Yuri, but I am ecstatic about it being licensed, Seven Seas has picked up Kageki Shoujo! The Curtain Rises!, a story about a young woman who enters a school for an all-woman musical theater troupe. I really enjoyed the first volume of this.

Also not “Yuri” per se, but a manga from one of our own, My Alcoholic Escape From Reality, is Kabi Nagata’s most recent autobiographical volume licensed by Seven Seas. I reviewed the Japanese edition, Genjitsu Touhishitetara Boroboro ni Natta Hanashi, this past winter. I also would like to take a moment to shout out the title translation on her work, which now presents a consistent body with “My Lesbian Experience…,” “My Solo Exchange Diary, ” and now “My Alcoholic Escape…”. This is really quite exceptionally well done. For an overview of everything Nagata-sensei has done so far, and why I think it is important I wrote an essay about her work, Kabi Nagata: Opening Doors at an Intersection.

From Rafael Antonio Pineda on ANN, we have the news that Love to Lie Angle manga is wrapping up in Comic Yuri Hime magazine.

 

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Yuri Visual Novel

YuriNavi has news of Yoru, Tomosu (夜、灯す) a “horror Yuri” VN headed for Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch this summer.The link has screencaps and character designs.

 

Sailor Moon News

In the countdown to the new Sailor Moon movie, Sailor Moon Eternal, the Sailor Moon Official site reports that for the next several months, the first three seasons of the original anime will be available on Youtube in Japan. All 5 seasons are available in English on Viz Media’s website. Sailor Moon Crystal, for which Eternal is the 4th season, is available on Crunchyroll.

And, at last, we have a trailer and a date for Sailor Moon Eternal the first movie that will comprise the “SuperS” season. On the positive side, the animation is genuinely good. Check out this comparison of a similar frame from the original anime, Crystal and Eternal from CC Takato on Twitter. Look at Ami’s face and you can really see the difference.

 

Other News

In “feminist scholars you should be following, Grace Ting,” who writes about queer theory and feminism in Japanese and Asian pop culture, is writing a series of intros to Japanese feminist writers on Twitter. I’m super excited about this, frankly.

Nerd Lolz: I made a joke this week about Evangelion 3.0 being a Tales of Hoffman for anime and Loryn Stone came back with this brilliant summation on Twitter. The comment by Empty Movement is also spot on.

ANN’s Crystalyn Hodgkins let us know that Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 has already been greenlit for a second season.

And, to wrap up this week, Anthony Gramuglia offers up Girl’s Love: Where to Start With Yuri Manga on CBR.

 

Become a YNN Correspondent by reporting any Yuri-related news with your name and an email I can reply to – thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network! Special thanks to Okazu Patrons for being an essential part of the team!

Posted in Yuri Network News | 10 Comments »


Bloom Into You, Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 2 Digital Release

April 24th, 2020

Seven Seas has released Bloom Into You, Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 2 on Kindle this week! Follow young lesbian Saeki Sayaka as she navigates love and jealousy in high school.

Volume 2 covers the events of the Bloom Into You anime from Sayaka’s perspective and, as with Volume 1, we get a great sense of her internal monologue, her motivations and her own perspective of her  strengths and weaknesses. I enjoyed this book immensely when I read the Japanese edition, about which I said, “Once again, I am pleasantly surprised to have fully enjoyed a novel by Iruma Hitoma, in which the tone and feel of the character as we know her is captured well. And I look forward to the sequel as it takes us into new territory.”

Ratings:

Art – 10 Art by the series creator
Story – 8 A stronger sense of Sayaka’s feelings for and about Touko
Character – 10
Service – 1 Not really this time
Yuri – 7 This book is chock-full of Sayaka’s thoughts about being attracted to Touko for all the reasons.

Overall – 9

I was so pleased to see this appear in my Kindle library this week and I am extra excited for you all to read Volume 3 next autumn!

 

 

Posted in Light Novel | 4 Comments »


Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on Netflix

April 23rd, 2020

Over the past few weeks, I sat down to watch all of the visual media half of the Ghost in the Shell franchise, in part, to get myself ready for the new Netflix release of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Would we be getting a reboot of something familiar, or a bolder approach into a new story? I hoped for the latter, as Kamiyama Kenji was one of the directing forces. So far from the opening episode, I have not been disappointed.

This story begins in 2045, two years into the “sustainable war” begun by the American Empire. Section 9 has been disbanded, but Kusanagi, Batou, Saito and Ishikawa are still working together when the story begins.  And they appear to have both Tachikoma and Logikoma with them.

The animation is wholly CGI, but as used as we are to CGI games now, this is no longer the affront to the sensibilities it was in 2008. In fact, my first thought on seeing the animation during the opening action scene was “good gaming mechanics.”

Obviously, with a set-up that is set in both our future and a future within the story, this isn’t attempting to be part of a continuity in any meaningful way. The Prime Minister from SAC: 2nd Gig makes a cameo in a photo. But the story feels very much like a manga story, as opposed to an anime and, again, my  first thought was that with the current setup and the opening scene, this series felt very much like it “belongs to” the Global Neural Network manga anthology published by Kodansha in 2018…an anthology I really liked and which, having been done under Shirow’s watch is considered by him to be canon. In that sense, we can think of 2045 as an additional entry in that anthology. ^_^

I expected the opening to be the “building a cyborg body” segment – I was not disappointed. But I quite enjoyed that the body is now 3-D printed. The rest of the segment is, as it always has been, low-key prurience. The music was a pretty clear indication that we were getting something a little less “Japan of the future,” and indeed, we open the story in an American Pacific which looks like it has been overtaken by the desert it more properly belongs to, if the golf courses were left to die.  As another bridge to an American audience, Section 9 has a new recruit, Stan, subtly nicknamed Clown so you know exactly the level of respect America has in this series right from the get-go. ^_^

Since her sexuality is something we’ve talked about in the past, I want to nod to the scene where the hookers are checking Kusangi out.  I’m okay with this.

 

Ratings will be held until after I’ve watched the whole thing, but…

Overall so far – 8

What I now look forward to is this iteration’s balance of dive into the meaning of personhood/self and action series…and I hope it gives us the multiple-identitied Major that I’d really like to see explored.

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »


Black Lightning on CW

April 22nd, 2020

DC’s very first African-American lead superhero, Black Lightning only got 11 issues from 1977 -1978 before DC cut many new titles. Black Lightning got another reboot in the 2000s and has been and out of several continuities since. In 2018, as part of it’s television franchise on the CW network, Black Lightning once again received a new starring role. And, frankly, I think this is a truly excellent television series.

I started watching the series on the CW, but life and a wonky DVR left me playing catch up all the time. Now that Black Lightning is on Netflix, I’ve finally had a chance to become current…and it’s still a really excellent series.

The DCU on CW is embedded in the gritty hyperrealism that I’ve never much loved about modern American comics but, in the way that it feels very like the long shadows of Tim Burton and Frank Miller in Batwoman, it works for Black Lightning.

High school Principal Jefferson Pierce has retired as the superhero Black Lightning as the story begins. What starts as a drug war, becomes a war against an oppressive government. Along the way, we’re introduced to enemies and allies, of course. Among the allies are Pierce’s daughters, Anissa and Jennifer, who also develop super powers.  It is Anissa, Thunder, I want to focus on here.

Anissa Pierce is a lesbian when the series begins, She has a girlfriend. She’s out to her family. That’s it. She’s out and as the story goes on, her sexuality is never once a point of contention (except for in on an alternate Earth, but this is DC and they can’t help themselves.) When Anissa is no longer with her girlfriend, she meets other women, sometimes sleeps with one. Eventually she ends up with another woman, Grace. And please understand that to write this paragraph I had to avoid about a dozen spoilers absolutely NONE of which had to do with Anissa’s sexuality. It’s simply a non-issue.

So, what is an issue? Nothing. It’s a great series that touches on all the buttons that make white people uncomfortable that it can possibly touch in a way that I really appreciate. It’s like a pokefest of “did THIS make you uncomfortable? NO? How about THIS?” and it’s fairly constant which is the fucking point of this particular form of addressing issues, isn’t it. The less this series is “for me,” the more I like it. The cast is almost wholly black, with a few folks who are Asian. There is one white ally guy is always in a support role.  The white people who show up are, with that one exception, cringe-making. Good. We can be all the stereotypes, from confederate flag-waving racists, to Parking Lot Peggy calling the cops on a black woman standing near her vehicle.

Cress Williams and Christine Adams do a bang-up job of playing Pierce and his scientist wife, Lynne, but for me the joy of watching is Nafessa Williams as Anissa/Thunder and my hero, China Anne McClain as Jennifer Pierce/ Lightning. It’s kind of a pun to say she’s incandescent, but seriously, she’s breathtaking. The relationship between the sisters is entirely realistic, as well. Overall superlative writing. I found this interview of Nafessa Williams by Cortney Williams for The Grio, about her role, in which she discusses being able to play an out black women in a loving family. It’s worth the read.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 9
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 9

The things that hurt are supposed to hurt. The things that work best are supposed to work just like that. When there’s love, it’s lovely.

I grew up with Marvel and as I’ve admitted openly, DC has never been my boom, but I have to tell ya, with Batwoman, Thunder and Lightning on their television roster (and yes, I know about Supergirl, just haven’t watched any of it ,) I’m almost tempted to say I like the DCU on CW. ^_^; At least I can say, I like Black Lightning.

 

Posted in Live Action | 4 Comments »


MURCIÉLAGO, Volume 15 (ムルシエラゴ)

April 21st, 2020

In MURCIÉLAGO, Volume 15 (ムルシエラゴ), we wrap up the Gold Marie redux arc with a somewhat unexpected reward for Kuroko. Narumi asks for physical contact. Kuroko is glad to oblige.

Kuroko and the gang are then launched into a creepy Elder God-inspired circus, (like circuses need to be any creepier than they already are.) A criminal from the past known as the Comedy Writer is back, and with the cover of the Bugg Shash circus, is manipulating people’s consciousness. It seems like more of the same – almost-supernatural hijinks and murder, except…

…what it actually becomes is kind of a cold case police procedural, in which questioning suspects is more than just a motivation for expository commentary.  What are the nature of the drug Francis and its relationship to Ceasare? Are they how the Comedy Writer manipulates people into deeply creepy or is it something else? Tsuru and Chacha are on the case! And, compared, with some of the previous arcs, this case might actually take their specific skills to crack.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Horrific and freakish more than violent this time
Story – 8 Inexplicably weird
Characters – 8
Service – 4 Other than straight up nakedness, surprisingly not
Yuri – 4 In a different timeline Narumi and Kuroko would make a decent pair

Overall – 8

 

Posted in MURCIÉLAGO | 1 Comment »