Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – November 22, 2025

November 22nd, 2025

A blue silhouette of a girl with a white flower in her hair, embracing the earth. Blue block letters read YNN Yuri Network News. Art by Lissa P. For Okazu. So much is happening this week in Yuri news!

Yuri Manga

Tokyopop’s LoveLove imprint has announced three titles of interest for us! Via multiple YNN Correspondents, we have news of How My Cute Girlfriend and I Started a Love Story by Nomiya Rion, There, Beneath the Water by Fuyumushi Kaiko and Knight-Type Girlfriend by Suzumiya Kiriha.

YNN Correspondent gqll also notes that The Comics Beat’s Ollie Kaplan has an Interview with Lena Atanassova on LoveLove’s inclusive vision and bringing UNNIE, I LIKE YOU! to print.

Seven Seas has licensed The Death Defying Princess Creates a Yuri Harem to Survive by Akashiro Aoi, Kouji Moromi, Murata Shinya, and Yanai Nobuhiko. I’m gonna have to read that.

Yen Press has an interview with Unni, creator of I Love Amy. I reviewed that for ANN’s upcomingwinter manga guide, but really, cannot recommend it here. CW for manipulation, torture, kidnapping and general horribleness. But if you like very toxic Yuri, have at it.

Via YNN Correspondent Manga’Albine, Natsuo Mutsumi’s Yuzuki doesn’t think! which won a Shueisha Newcomer Manga Encouragement Award in 2021, is available for free on their Tomboys site.  This is a story about a butch and tomboy working in a men’s clothing cafe. ^_^

Galette No. 36 is hitting inboxes shortly for members of the Galette Fanclub. Galette Special English Edition. No. 4 backers have been contacted with the price of shipping and tariffs. For my backing level, I’m paying +60% on the cost of the item. In no way do I blame Galette. Contacting our Congress members  and letting them know this is not okay is something we can do.

Love Bullet is out digitally and headed for shelves in print in a few weeks. inee’s remarkable manga is getting a special Kinokuniya pre-order variant cover, for folks who like that kind of thing!

New chapter of Hitorimi desu. by Morishima Akiko, is up on Kadokawa’s highly lesbian CandleA imprint on Comic Walker. ^_^ We meet Sachi’s ex-lover and her cat. 

 

Support the people who bring you Yuri Journalism 
Become an Okazu Patron today!

Baihe

Seven Seas’ first Baihe release, The Beauty’s Blade: Mei Ren Jian is out now! This has a standard cover and a Crunchyroll variant cover, as well.

Sr. YNN Correspondent Frank says “The Baiheverse folks are on a roll: They just announced a license for the baihe manhua I Got Blackmailed by the Fake Bitch in Class, another entry in the “opposites attract” schoolgirl yuri genre. (It’s not yet up on their site yet though.)”

 

Events

If you are in the NYC area, don’t miss Rica Takashima’s exhibit at hetLabo in Brooklyn to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the First Yuri manga ever published in English, Rica ‘tte Kanji!?

While I was in Paris for the wonderful Y/CON 11, I also had a chance to visit Musée national des arts asiatiques-Guimet for the Manga. Tout un Art! exhibition. Highly recommended and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. ^_^

The Kase-san series is 15 years old! To celebrate, creator Takashima Hiromi is doing a web sign event with Shosen book stores. According to their post on X, if you apply to the online event, you’ll get a bonus.

Animate is selling tickets to a Comic Yuri Hime 20th anniversary event/shop. If anyone is going, please let me know and take lots of pictures, because Hayashiya Shizuru-sensei says that there will be Strawberry Shake Sweet illustrations and…I wannnttttt to seeee them!

 

Support Yuri News and Reviews on Ko-fi!

Yuri Light Novel

Fantasia GL has a three- part Japanese audio rendering of scenes from the LN Eh? Watashi Socchi Nanno!? (「え、私がそっちなの!?)   Confession, Lap Pillow, and Recall voiced by Tomoha Takayanagi and Akari Kito.

 

Other News

Sr. YNN Correspondent Sean Gaffney suggests ANN’s This Week in Anime in which Coop Bicknell & Steve Jones say Bring Out the Big (Girls with) Guns! Many of our favorites are included.

Also on ANN, I take a look at vaguelishly Yuri, two kinda girls travelogue-esque tale of post-destruction Japan in Touring After The Apocalypse, Volumes 2-3.

Anime Herald Magazine is available now in print and digital, or as a print/digital bundle. This is the perfect gift for your otaku friends and family, with in-depth looks at people, series and historical trends by writers like ANN’s Lynzee Loveridge, Red Bard and others, Anime World Order’s Daryl Surat, myself, Anime Herald’s Samantha Ferreira, Yatta-Tachi’s Katy Castillo and many more!  It’s an amazing magazine and you don’t want to miss it! If you’re one of us olds, who miss the days of print anime magazines, then this is a perfect gift for yourself. We’re all hoping that it does well enough to get a second issue for next year.

No Straight Lines, Vivian Kleiman’s documentary about queer comics and comic artists will screen free during the month of December on Pbs.org. If you haven’t watched this, don’t miss it. It’s a very moving discussion of the beginning of modern queer American comics. We’ve lost a number of the featured artists already, so this was so critical a work. I reviewed this movie in 2021, and the comic anthology that spawned it and the Queer and Comics events, in 2013.

 

Your support for Yuri journalism and research has never been more important. Patreon and Ko-Fi are where we currently accept subscriptions and tips.  Our goal now, into 2025, is to raise our guest writers’ wages to above industry standard, which are too low!

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!

Become a part of the Yuri Network, by being a YNN Correspondent: Contact Us with any Yuri-related news you want to share with us.

Posted in Yuri Network News | No Comments »


The Secret of Girls

November 19th, 2025

Promotional poster for the Chinese baihe drama The Secret of Girls, showing the four main characters.Baihe (Chinese yuri) is having a mini-moment. Seven Seas Entertainment just released its first baihe novel, the Baiheverse site is making steady progress on its project of licensing baihe manhua, novels, and other works (including the short film When We Met), and enough other works are being teased for licensing that what has been a mere trickle of official English translations promises to become a growing stream (albeit nowhere near a flood).

Unlike baihe novels, which (like their danmei/BL cousins) mostly seem to traffic in historical fantasy, The Secret of Girls (original title 如果有秘密) is a realistic contemporary baihe drama, now available on the GagaOoLala premium service. As it begins, young Xu Jingxi (He Lei) is laid off from her job, decides to go traveling (for a reason that the GagaOoLala synopsis spoils, but I will not), loses her wallet, ID, and phone while helping another woman, and ends up prevailing on older hotel employee Wen Shan (Sun Cailun) to let her have a room in exchange for working at the hotel.

At first glance the setup is reminiscent of many other yuri works: a free-spirited extrovert who’ll end up softening the frosty exterior of an introverted tsundere. However, Xu Jingxi’s outgoing persona is a cover for her suffering, the nature of which is slowly revealed as her romance with Wen Shan progresses. But the series is about more than the ills of one woman: the back stories of both Xu Jingxi and Wen Shan, and their relationships to their mothers in particular, form a sharp critique of a patriarchal society that demands that daughters show filial piety but offers them little or nothing in return.

Suffice to say, The Secret of Girls is not a series with a “happily ever after” ending, but it’s far from being “tragedy porn.” This is in large part due to the performance of He Lei, who takes what could have been a simplistic character and makes her richer and more complex. (As it happens, He Lei also starred in When We Met, another tale of a younger woman winning the heart of an older one.) Sun Cailun is a worthy companion to her, portraying Wen Shan’s slow and subtle opening up to friendship and then love. I should also mention Li Keyi and Wang Miao, who play hotel owner Ling Yung and bar manager Qin Bei respectively. Their characters support Xu Jingxi and Wen Shan in their evolving relationship and contribute a more light-hearted tone and a very sapphic vibe: The two women live together and are clearly in a relationship of their own, and Qiu Bei’s bar “Her” is advertised as being “Where Ladies Meet.”

My main complaint with The Secret of Girls is with its packaging: It was originally released as 24 five-minute episodes on the WeChat app, and the amount of actual content is such that it could have been (and I think should have been) released as a feature film. However, GagaOoLala is presenting it as 16 episodes, with multiple minutes in each episode taken up by a lengthy OP (which spoils many of the scenes in the series and is untranslated to boot) and even more time taken up in several episodes by an equally lengthy credits sequence. Regarding other aspects, the GagaOoLala version has at least one scene that was almost certainly excised for the Chinese domestic audience; it makes explicit what was already very much implicit in the portrayal of Xu Jingxi and Wen Shan’s feelings for each other.

Rating:

Story – 7 (a potentially clichéd and maudlin plot redeemed by the writing and acting)
Characters – 9
Production – 6 (points deducted for chopping up the material)
Service – 3
Yuri – 10
LGBTQ — 5 (not explicit but very queer-coded)
Overall – 8

The Secret of Girls is not an easy watch at spots, but it’s definitely recommended for viewers who are tired of relatively superficial or melodramatic yuri series (looking at you, Thailand) and want to see a more realistically emotional human drama. It also marks a welcome second outing for He Lei, whom I hope to see more of in future baihe series.

Posted in Baihe, Frank Hecker, Live Action, Staff Writer | 2 Comments »


Thank you Y/CON!

November 17th, 2025

From the left Lou, Erica Julie on Saturday at Y/CONWow, Y/CON was so much fun! I highly recommend it to anyone who can get to Paris for the event. First of all, everyone was so charming and enthusiastic, from Y/CON staff to every one who listened to our panels or came to get a book and chatted with me.

I did a presentation on the history of Yuri fandom, and had roundtables with author Rutile and Louis-Baptiste Huchez of Taifu Comics, in which we talked about Yuri internationally and with Dr Pralinus, about BL and Yuri and queer joy.  We of course did not have not have time, but our conversations were really interesting. I have so many people to thank I know I won’t remember everyone, so if I miss you, please remind me!

 Thanks to Alex, who was a wonderful driver, Shaby, Shane and Paul in the green room who helped us find the bathroom down the dark corridor of nothing and made us feel so welcome. Olivia, Elisa, Valentine for arranging everything, Lou for being a fantastic moderator and Julie for doing an outstanding job a translating my insistence on being aggressively, joyfully, queer as a form of political resistance. 

This last kept coming up over and over as we are seeing a resurgence of fascism globally. Dr Pralinus and I agreed on many things, but as they spoke of how queer people have always been here and we will always be here, even if we have to hide, I suddenly was hit with an epiphany that hiding is not the way. We have never been safer for hiding. As we see with protestors dancing and singing in costume, joyful resistance makes the oppressors look even MORE ridiculous. My message was that they are the weirdo minority, not us. So enjoy your BL, Yuri, trans manga and be loud about it. 

It was exciting to see Akata Editions, Hana and Taifu at the event, I’m jealous of French Yuri fans that they have schwinn’s Hana Monogatari available to them.

Before I wrap up I want to wave hi to Mang’Albine and Resuri, it was so amazing to meet you both in person and I will see you online!

I hope to return to Y/CON one day soon.

Posted in Events | No Comments »


No YNN This Week

November 15th, 2025

No YNN this week, I’m off on an adventure and will report back asap!

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »


I Wanna Be Your Girl, Volume 2

November 14th, 2025

Cover of I Wanna Be Your Girl, Volume 2, Two young women in sweaters, one red, one pink over Japanese style school uniforms sit in a classroom. Curtains blow from open windows,By Eleanor Walker, Okazu Staff Writer

Volume 2 of I Wanna Be Your Girl picks up right where the end of Volume 1 leaves off, with Akira declaring that she wants to be the soccer club manager. Compared to volume 1, this volume focuses more on the individual characters rather than their relationships with each other, and it’s nice to learn a bit more about both of them and how they ended up where they are now.

Hime meanwhile, confides in another girl called Yukka about her feelings for Akira and the confusion they’re causing her. Yukka, as it turns out, has her own past trauma around queer love and that’s why she’s able to advise Hime so well. This section was actually my favourite bit of the entire volume because it’s pretty much how I felt about my friend back then too. To quote myself from my volume 1 review:

“When I was in high school, I had a crush on someone who I thought was a boy, but she told me she was actually a girl. My reaction at that point was “huh, that’s a bit weird but ok” and still kept kissing her.”

We then return to Akira and her new job as manager of the soccer team, and reality bites hard when some of the other members start misgendering her and someone makes a comment along the lines of “why isn’t she growing her hair out if she’s really a girl?” One person however, Hasegawa-senpai is utterly supportive, has nicknamed Akira “juice girl” and when others on the team misgender her he gently corrects them. And it turns out Akira might just have a bit of a crush on him. Just normal teenage girl things.

The other thing I liked about this volume is that it shows Hime going through her own kind of identity crisis as well. She’s wearing the boys’ uniform to support Akira, but she is ultimately still cis, and she can go back to wearing the girls’ uniform at the drop of a hat. She talks to her parents, who are thankfully supportive, and ultimately decides she will go back to wearing her uniform and shows up the next day in it.

Where would we be without a bit of teenage angst though? Hime and Akira run into Hasegawa-senpai, who at first doesn’t recognise Hime because she’s in the girls’ uniform, but then he calls her cute and that rips through Akira like a knife to the heart. Hime runs away crying to the rooftop stairs, a mysterious boy appears and invites her to the roof. Turns out, he has a secret of his own as well. He works at Hime and her friends’ favourite cafe, but cross dresses as a girl while he does so, also to support someone he cares about.

Ultimately, the volume ends with Akira resolving to talk to Hime and apologise for lashing out at her, thanks to the support of their friends, and I’m sure we’ll see that in the next volume.

Overall, this is a good continuation from volume 1 which dives more into the individual main characters, and they do still feel like realistic teenagers. However, I hope we get the teacher’s backstory at some point as well though which was hinted at in volume 1. With 2 volumes to go, I’m excited to see where Hime, Akira and everyone else ends up.

Story – 7
Art – 6.
Characters – 8
Service – n/a
LGBTQ — 10

Overall – 8 but again, probably a 9 if you’re a confused/closeted queer teenager.

Posted in Eleanor W, English Manga, Takase Umi | 1 Comment »