Drama CD: Grand Stage Special Performance (グラン・ステージ 特別公演)

September 14th, 2017

The Drama CD Grand Stage Special Performance (グラン・ステージ 特別公演) is technically the end of the first season of the series, but I had listened to the second group CD, Grand Stage Daiundokai , first, so I ended up listening to this one last of all the Grand Stage Drama CDs. And I have to tell you, it worked really well as a final CD for the series, so I don’t feel bad at all about it.

In the opening tracks, the established otokayaku of the Sora-gumi troupe, Suoh Yui, Hiou Akito, Subaru Ryoya and Kazmiya Eru meet the newest of their group – Minami Kohaku. Kohaku’s sister Kurea, is well known to all of them, so Kohaku, it turns out, has a reputation to live up to.

The bulk of the CD follows the otoyaku as a group. The leader of the Sora-gumi is planning a special performance and the otokoyaku are being asked to do a play – “Passive-Aggressive Red Riding Hood.” Frankly, I think Ryoya is a natural fit and I’m not the only one, but there’s a problem. The otokoyaku are not well-suited to play the female role. Hiou and Yui try to play the part together, but they both end up sounding like otokoyaku. Eru has a small crisis at the very idea of even attempting to play a female role, something that had this been in any way an LGBTQ series they could have made a plot point. But instead, they just circle around Eru’s insistence on being a cool guy on stage. They do the same for Ryoya’s inability to be in Kabuki. Lost opportunities to speak about gender roles and Japanese culture, but oh well. In the end, they play it for a comedy with Hiou in the role and then look forward to their musumeyaku doing their performance.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

It was a a fun end to what was a more amazing than I could have ever have expected series of Drama CDs. I’m gonna have to listen to them once more from the top. ^_^

Posted in Drama CDs & Audiobooks, Grand Stage | 2 Comments »


LGBTQ Webcomic: Always Human

September 12th, 2017

Webcomics are one of the most fascinating niches in the comics market and it’s long past time that we talk about them once again..

Webcomics became a “thing” in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s, it was already possible to find LGBTQ content on any number of platforms. By 2003, I was keeping bookmarks of aggregate lists of lesbian and “Yuri” webcomics from half a dozen sites. Finding webcomics wasn’t hard, but finding really good ones, well that’s always been the challenge.   ^_^ As time has passed, webcomics have gone from being a junior league for upcoming artists to being a marketplace in their own right. Webcomics can successfully raise money from backers for print books, publishers are looking at Pixiv and deviantart for talent, and with Patreon and Webtoons, comic artists can get get paid for the work, as well as for the finished project. This particular niche in the comics ecosystem has only just developed those bridges to the larger comics landscape, and I don’t think we’ve more than just barely begun to see their potential. 

Which brings me to one of the best webcomics I have read. Ever. Today we’re talking about Always Human, by Ari North.  Ari sent me a message in 2016, asking me to mention her comic to you as part of a YNN report and I was glad to. I’ve been reading Always Human on Webtoons ever since. This week I finally had a chance to catch up and complete it and all I can say is that this is one of the best uses of the Internet for comics that I’ve seen. 

Ari’s art is colorful watercolor-like washes, with a vertical scroll and a lot of white space. It could, of course, be  reformatted for print, as Pulse was, but the larger, more open format of the online page, means that you can enjoy the details that fill up your screen, and not lose any of it. Often chapters comes with an original soundtrack, which you can listen to for free on Soundcloud. This really added to the atmosphere of every chapter. 

The story is sweet, honest and realistic. It’s also a lot of fun. Set in a future Earth, where virtual reality allows for body modification, gaming, communication – humans are working in deep seas and space- the people who populate Always Human are indeed quite human. Designer Sunati meets college student Austen, and they fall in love.  

While the story is primarily romance, it’s a romance that doesn’t isolate Austen or Sunati. Theirs is a world with colleagues and friends and family, which is so important to me as a reader. Unlike mainstream media, which seems to want to wallow in alternative worst scenarios, without  allowing us to work through our uncomfortable realities first, Always Human provides a more progressive world for us to spend time in. Austen has two fathers and Sunati’s parents have a boyfriend, and none of that is a “thing” that must be dealt with, beyond the stress of meeting one’s lover’s parents, which is – as we all know – stressful enough in itself.

Sunati and Austen are adults living adult lives, but they are still young adults, so they are neck deep in the process of creating the lives they hope to live. They aren’t perfect, they make mistakes and deal with the consequences, as we might expect. Even when they annoyed me – and they did – I was rooting for them As Ari says about her comic,”This is a story about nanobots, genetic engineering, and two girls falling in love. No matter how technology changes us, we’ll always be human.” And so they are.

Ratings:

Art – 10
Characters – 10
Story – 10
LGBTQ – 10
Service -1 on principle

Overall – 10

If you’re looking for a really good webcomic to read, I recommend Always Human. Luckily for us, Ari’s working on another comic for Webtoons. I’m waiting with bated breath for more from this talented artist.

Posted in LGBTQ, Yuri Webcomics | 3 Comments »


LGBTQ Manga: Shimanami Tasogare, Volume 2 (しまなみ誰そ彼 2)

September 11th, 2017

Last month, I reported on a fascinating series called Shimanami Tasogare. In Volume 1, we met Tasuku, a young man who hadn’t, as of yet, come to terms with his homosexuality. When he meets a bunch of older gay folks working on a cat shelter, he finds a cause to volunteer his time for, and a place to open his heart.

In Shimanami Tasogare, Volume 2, (しまなみ誰そ彼) Tasuku gets to see what self-loathing looks like from the outside. One of the people who visits the consulting room is a young kid still in elementary school. Misora visits to change into female clothes and life. But Misora never seems particularly happy and is clearly struggling with what puberty is doing to her.  And, she has an ugly tendency to lash out whenever she feels that Tasuku gets too close.

Tasuku is starting think about his own feelings more honestly, and has now realized that he has a crush on an attractive classmate, Kiku-kun. Misora is not at all kind about the bits of information Tasuku shares. And every time Tasuku feels as if he’s gotten a little closer to Misora, she attacks him with a vitriol with which  – we can see  – she means to scar herself. The volume ends on a particularly harsh note, with Misora attacking Tasuku in public in front of the guy he likes at a festival. 

Tasuku retreats to to the unfinished shelter, to lay the shards of his emotions next to the broken beams of the building. The strong visual imaging this series gives to Tasuku’s emotions are just stellar.

Meanwhile, we are led to believe that Tasuku’s secret is out to a classmate we don’t know whether we can trust or not.

It’s an uncomfortable ending to an uncomfortable volume filled with the damage self-loathing does to one’s self and others, without a moral of the story to pretty it up. I’m compelled to read it nonetheless and am very interested to see where it leads.

Ratings: 

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters- 8 
LGBTQ – 10
Service – 0

Overall – 9

The mysterious Dareka-san functions as a kind of guardian angel but, as a result, I really don’t want to know anything about her. I feel as if we’re going to learn it anyway. ^_^

Posted in LGBTQ | 6 Comments »


Summer Reading: The Causal Angel (English)

September 10th, 2017

In May, I reviewed Hannu Rajienmi’s novel The Quantum Thief as a prelude to the rest of my summer reading. We meet and become involved with gentleman thief Jean Le Flambeur, whose escape from prison was a set-up by the woman who sent him there in the first place, his former lover and goddess, Founder Josephine Pellegrini. Set in a Solar System after the Earth has been destroyed, in which virtual and “real” existence are equivalent, wealth is measured in time, and the political forces arrayed against one another are complicated and multi-layered, this book was an absolutely fantastic read.

The second book of the series, The Fractal Prince, shifted the background to the foreground, as Jean becomes less of a focus and his partner-in-need, Mieli’s story starts to step up. Mieli, it turns out was working for The Pelligrini, and has been a double agent in Jeans’ camp since the moment she broke him out of jail. 

Now, as the summer comes to an end, I take a look at the the third book of the series, The Causal Angel. In this volume, all the various Zoku (temporary and permanent groups bonded by need or desire in the virtual realms) find themselves embroiled by Jean and Mieli (working together, but separately,) in a war amongst the technology-based Sobornost and the Founders, for the ability to shape reality itself. The book primarily follows Mieli, as she works her half of the plot developed by Jean to bring down the Founders themselves using the power of the Kaminari Jewel. Mieli navigates multiple virtual realms to gain the jewel but, in the end, won’t turn it over to Jean. When reality is remade, the wish that makes it is pure and unassailable and…most importantly…uncorruptable. Reality will always be corruptable, but that doesn’t mean it has to start that way.

This series was extremely well-written, if what you like is a barrage of new information cannoned at you faster than you can grok it. As it happens, that is exactly what I like. ^_^ Catching up with the story only meant that the story was about to wrap up, not that I was particularly fast on the uptake.

When I reviewed The Fractal Prince, I commented casually that Mieli needed a new girlfriend. Thumbs up, Hannu. Thumbs up.

Ratings:

Story – 10
Characters – 9 all the way around
Lesbian – 10

Overall – 10

If you’re looking for sci-fi that is not at all the usual stuff, with fully-developed characters – both male and female – vast and deep world-building that moves quickly and is compelling, I got your series right here. 

This was a great read and a stellar summer reading series. It would be hard to beat, so my next book is going to have to be something completely different. ^_^

Posted in Novel, Queer Fiction | 2 Comments »


Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – September 9, 2017

September 9th, 2017

Yuri Anime

YNN Correspondent, Beatriz M. wants you to know that she recently hosted a Revolutionary Girl Utena podcast about which she says, “We get deep, we get gay, and we continue to ask, “What does this mean, Ikuhara?”

 ANN Reports that the Aria dub kickstarter has reached it’s all-series dub stretch goal.
 
Kimono-wearing fox-eared girls populate Amano Sakuya’s Konohana Kitan manga, running in Comic Yuri Hime which will soon have an anime of it’s own. (Continuing Ichijinsha’s trend of picking the stories I like least to make into anime. At least this one is genuinely Yuri, I just don’t much like animal-eared characters.)  ANN has the report.
 
Rose of Versailles is getting a game and an animation based in a high-school setting from Otomate, a romance game company. We totally needed that.  (Now I think about it, I may have a Berubara Gakuen doujinshi somewhere. ^_^.)
 
ANN also has a report for an anthology dealing with Gender Identity Disorder being published in Japan called My Husband is Too Attractive! I Entered the Family Register of a Hot Guy that Used to be a Woman.
 

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Yuri Manga

We’ve added  Hitoto’s Shuumatsu Nani Shi ni Ikou? (週末なにしにいこう?) to the Yuricon Store.
Also added is Momono Moto’s collection Yuunagi Mabrette Perfect Volume (夕凪マーブレット完全版), which is especially interesting as it is the first collected volume from Galette Works, the publishing team that is putting together the Galette Anthology of which Volume 3 is also up on the Store.
 
 
Other News
 
Brigid Alverson has a great article on how LGBTQ comics are becoming de rigeur for school and public libraries in Just Another Day in an LGBTQ Comics for School Library Journal.
 
From Smithsonian Magazine, the National Museum of African American History and Culture explores the long legacy of women who shaped the feminist theory in #APeoplesJourney: African American Women and the Struggle for Equality.
 
The James Tiptree Foundation has opened submission for their 2017 Fellowships for folks researching or creating  work exploring gender and sexuality.
 
The folks at Anime Feminist are putting together a list of feminist resources in regards to anime and manga. Bookmark their page and let them know if you have any suggestions!
 
Toyoake City in Aichi prefecture has declared support for LGBT people. Not so far a step as marriage, but a step nonetheless.
 
 

Know some cool Yuri News you want people to know about? Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find.Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

 
 
Posted in Yuri Network News | No Comments »