Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – February 3, 2017

February 4th, 2017

Yuri Manga

Very exciting news out of Brazil! YNN Correspondent Pâmela P. wants everyone to know that Newpop publisher has announced that Philosophia by Amano Shuninta and Sunset Orange Lips by Rokuroichi will be released in Brazil (link in Portugese).  She says, “I am very happy because its the first time Yuri-centred manga will come to Brazil” and I have to say, I’m thrilled, as well!  How exciting for Portugese-reading Yuri fans!

Mildred Louis’s delightful magical girl warrior webcomic Agents of the Realm has achieved a first print volume!  If you’re not reading it, you definitely should take a look. Manga-influenced, but not a ripoff at all and a full roster of diverse characters.

Kurata Uso’s online Yuri collection Linkage (リンケージ 完全版) is getting the Perfect Volume treatment from Ichijinsha.

Comic Natalie tells us that Shounen Gahosha’s Ours GH has a new series called  KuroYuri Gakuen Oooku Gakka (クロユリ学園大奥学科) that looks like a wacky Yuri harem comedy set at a exclusive school for girls.

Comic Natalie also has news of a collected doujinshi volume for Tsukiko’s Futari no Beya, series, called Onedarishitemite (おねだりしてみて).

 

Yuri Anime

If you haven’t been watching, YNN Correspondent Michaelangelo H wants to let you know that Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, which is streaming on Crunchyroll, is indeed quite Yuri. The manga is available in English from Seven Seas. And Funimation just announced the dub cast, according to ANN.

Komatsu-san at Crunchyroll highlights the baton passing video from the Mahou Tsukai Precure‘s  Cure Miracle to Kira Kira PreCure ala Mode‘s Cure Whip.

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Yuri Events

The full video from my University of Michigan lecture is up on Youtube. I’m not actually in much of it, as I was walking in front of the room and not at the lectern. ^_^

 

Yuri Drama CD

Innocent Grey, creator of the Flowers Le Sur Printemps VN, has a new Drama CD, Uru no Shoujo Original Drama CD, “Uru no Shoujo” Ten ni  Musubu Yume-“ (「虚ノ少女」オリジナルドラマCD 「虚ノ少女-天に結ぶ夢-」).

 

Kickstarter Watch

UNDERCITIES is a short story anthology that focuses on queer narratives in an urban fantasy setting, featuring queer and POC creators.

 

Other News

The Prism Queer Comics Grant is accepting submissions until March 1, 2017. Get those submissions in!

Teen Vogue has been a leading voice in the Resistance (and you can support them for an unprecedented $5 subscription) and among their voices is the brilliant Lauren Duca. Today I want to share her message to her internet trolls. It’s substantially the same position I have taken for the 15 years I’ve been writing here. Duca’s article is worth reading if you’re a woman with an opinion online or know one. ^_^

YNN Correspondent Jenna M. suggests we all take a look at the Indivisible Guide to  help us resist, as well. I’ve had this downloaded for some time and it’s excellent, if depressing that we need it.

Kara Dennison at Crunchyroll News has the scoop on the new Rose of Versailles Valentine’s Day collaboration at Takashimaya’s Shinjuku store.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this site before, but Manifesto on Moral Mansex is a NSFW Tumblr on BL manga that makes me laugh (along with Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos and McMansion Hell) and I wanted to share it with you.  We could all use a laugh. Enjoy!

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 | 3 Comments »


Queer Manga Lecture at Michigan on Youtube

February 3rd, 2017

With many thanks to the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, the entirely of my lecture Alt Manga, Queer Manga – Telling Our Own Stories is now available on Youtube for your enjoyment. I hope you’ll watch and comment and now I’m gonna have to go and write something new. ^_^;

 

Posted in Events | 5 Comments »


Yuri Drama CD: Grand Stage Romance Review, Volume 3 (Kazamiya Eru) ( グラン・ステージ ロマンスレビュー 第3幕「風宮絵琉」)

February 2nd, 2017

Squee! Seriously, could  Inoue Marina get any cuter?  ^_^

In Grand Stage Romance Review, Volume 3 (Kazamiya Eru) ( グラン・ステージ ロマンスレビュー 第3幕「風宮絵琉」) the youngest of the Sora-gumi otokoyaku faces a crisis. It’s a good crisis, but…

The song “Hisshou  ~WE CAN FLY~” (飛翔～WE CAN FLY～), sung by all five principals opens the CD. It’s cute and sticky and you can easily imagine them singing it in boy-band style.  I wondered briefly if the lyrics were online, until I literally slapped myself upside the head and pulled out the little booklet with, DUH, the lyrics. I want to share two things about this song with you, both reliant on the quirks of translation and language, but please be assured I say this all with the utmost love and respect. On the CD track, the song was most unfortunately subject to the vagaries of the R/L issue in Japanese-English translation, with the resulting title “飛翔～WE CAN FRY～”. I chuckled, but I swear, not unkindly. The final line  of the lyrics has an interesting reverse quirk. “Hisshou, We Can Fly” and ” Hit Show, We Can Fight” sounded so similar as sung that had I not looked at the lyrics, I would not have known that was that the lyrics included both those lines.  ^_^ 

Eru, you may remember from the first series, is the Sora-gumi’s Peter Pan, youthful and prone to being adorably hyper. When she’s told by Ryoya that the head of the group has called for her to come to the office, she’s a little too green to realize that Ryoya’s teasing. Worried that she’s been cut from the team, she learns that instead, her greatest dream may have come true.

Having been scouted in New York, it has always been Eru’s dream to perform on Broadway and now, an offer to do that very thing has come up! She rushes to reassure us, her partner, that she won’t leave though, until we respond (with implied forcefulness) that she should go after her dream and not worry about us, we’ll be fine. Of course, we’d be more convincing if we weren’t crying when we said that. Eru reluctantly agrees.

We tearfully part. Eru’s crying voice was heartbreaking and you just know that we’re balls of sniffly mush as she heads off to New York to reach for her dream.

As the new track begins, we find Eru has returned. (Is anyone surprised?) But her reason for returning was uniquely Eru-esque. She’s become accustomed to and enjoys performing male roles. In fact, her goal is to achieve a “cool” guy reputation. But once she arrived in New York, she realized that she’d be performing as a woman. (And so the slightly strange cover image is explained at last.) Not that she objected; it just, she realized, wasn’t her. And so she’s back. AND she promises not to leave us again. In execrable English she tells us that she loves our teary face. Squee!

The final spoken track finds both us and Eru in New York (you can tell, because the BGM is saxophones…duh..) and Eru semi-accurately walks us through Times Square and Broadway. (I know for a fact that Ogata Megumi has been to NYC, because that’s where I met her, so she would have been able to regale the writers with stories of what it looked like 15 years ago. It’s changed a lot since.) And we promise to stay together forever.

I think Sakura speaks for us all here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the CD finishes with “2 be there” a new image song.

Ratings: 

Overall – 9

So, another squeezable Drama CD from the geniuses at  étriere, who clearly just want me to be happy. ^_^

Here is Inoue Marina as Kazamiya Eru singing “2 be there.” I thought it suited her.

 

Posted in Drama CDs & Audiobooks, Grand Stage | 4 Comments »


Sound Euphonium, Season 2 Anime (English) Guest Review by Michelle Denise N

February 1st, 2017

Woo hoo! It’s Guest Review Wednesday and we have a Guest Review! I love that so much. ^_^ Today, I hope you will welcome new Guest Reviewer Michelle Denise N of Lonelypond,and make her feel as welcome as possible.  The floor is yours, Michelle!

Sound Euphonium, the animated series, follows the haphazard learning process of euphonium (or baritone) player Oumae Kumiko, a somewhat reluctant first year member of the Kitauji High School Concert Band. Kitauji suffered a schism the year before, when the more serious first (now second) years quit over their lazy seniors’ lack of effort.  A new instructor, Taki Noburo, has taken over leadership, which attracted Kumiko’s fellow first year, trumpet virtuoso Kousaka Reina to the school. Kumiko had been trying to escape both band and Reina, after a ‘dud gold’ placement in middle school. SE’s first season built up a certain amount of dramatic tension between the two girls, which the second season glances at in the first episode, but then takes Kumiko and the rest of the episodes in an entirely unexpected ramble through the other relationships in the band.

If you love the trumpet, Sound Euphonium Season 2 is worth watching; the trumpet solos are sublime. If you watch anime not for music, but plotting and story pacing, SE2 would have trouble rating a dud bronze.

Kumiko is a mild, friendly, pleasant enough character. Through the first season, she spent most of her time with Reina. In the second season, they tossed Reina to the side, leaving her to pine over sensei while Kumiko wandered wide-eyed through relationships she didn’t really understand. There is also some attention paid to Kumiko’s relationship with her sister and Kumiko’s need to play music with someone she has an emotional connection to. The resolution to that plot point was shoehorned uncomfortably into the end of the season in a way that didn’t strike true for me with any of the characters involved. However, the smaller stories about other band members were short arcs that did actually catch my interest and my heart, unlike any of Kumiko’s antics. I mostly just felt like she was wildly out of her league emotionally, very naive.

Yuri: Let’s get the KumiRei question out of the way first off; it’s never really caught my interest as a combination, both girls seemed to be playacting. The first season of Sound Euphonium, Reina’s crazy boldness and how much I disliked her caused me to start yelling ‘devil trumpet player’ at the screen during her antics. The wonder and puzzlement of Sound Euphonium Season 2, is that just as I started to sympathize with her, she disappeared from the story.

If you look at Sound Euphonium Season 2, with no expectations it becomes the story of a young euphonium player’s innocent trampling through relationships more adult than she is capable of understanding, while searching for an emotional connection. Meanwhile, her weirdly intense best buddy from Season 1, the piercingly talented trumpet player with a crush on teacher, slips from story center to a near silent sideline participant, though still an epic trumpet player.

Non existent KumiRei chemistry gets eclipsed by the fragilely emo oboe player, Yoroizuka Mizore and the slightly swaggersome former flute, Kasaki Nozomi, suffering from one of those mutual misunderstandings that seem to plague fictional young girls who might have mad crushes on each other but never seem to talk about ANYTHING. This phenomenon always puzzles me when sighted in the wild. But this time, we get to an understanding, and a bonus nice moment that might lead the audience to think flautist and oboeist had kissed and made up at some point, but were refraining due to public location. And then Reina and Kumiko make fun of them, acing their callow youth best. There are also some exchanges that could be mistaken for flirting between several of the other band members, as well as the continued pining of trombone player, Tsukamoto Shuuichi, male, after Kumiko.

And we also have a pool episode, complete with bikinis.
 
RATINGS
Art 7 — some nice lighting, lots of outdoors moments, makes playing in band not visually boring
Story 5 — too unfocused
Characters 7 — many of them interesting, but leads let down by plot/pacing issues
Yuri — 3 (is that the right level for make it up and/or close your eyes and imagine)
Service 2
Overall 6 (watch it for the music and the flute player so get at least halfway through)

Erica here: Sound Euphonium, Season 1 and 2 are available streaming over at Crunchyroll. 

Thank you! I appreciate both the balanced perspective and the appreciation for music, although I’ll always be biased for woodwinds over brass. ^_^

The phenomenon you speak ofwhen characters just do not *talk to one another,  I refer to as “Jondalar syndrome” after the male protagonist of The Mammoth Hunters, who desperately wants to have sex with female protagonist Ayla, but just never tells her, for 400 pages. It was excruciating. Irritated the pants off me. ^_^

Posted in English Anime, Guest Review | 2 Comments »


Yuri Manga: Season Theater Theatrical, Volume 1 (シーズンシアターシアトリカル )

January 31st, 2017

In Season Theater Theatrical, Volume 1 (シーズンシアターシアトリカル ), Manabi is a director and Taiyo is an actress and together they create Yuri-themed musical performances for online streaming site Play Play Douga. But Manabi has bigger dreams. She envisions an all-Yuri musical performance revue! 

Enter Shinomiya Kise, the young, exceedingly cute CEO of the Shinomiya Group. Kise has never really had too many friends, but she loves sitting and watching performances on Play Play Douga. And, of all the performers, she likes Taiyo most. She really likes Taiyo. So, when Kise-chan approached Taiyo and Manabi with an offer they can’t refuse – use of a custom built theater for Yuri-themed plays – they don’t refuse. And, so, the Season Theater (named after Kise) is born.

Taiyo falls almost immediately for Kise’s personality, (which is so shy and scared, she reminded me of a small prey animal. A shrew perhaps, or a vole.) Kise’s maid, Aoba is multi-talented and Manabi integrates her into the staff immediately. 

Now, they just need a cast! Manabi decides to do auditions on Play Play Douga, using popular Yuri couples from the streaming site. She ends up with the two members of  duo “Jewel Box,” Jueru and Hakobe, as the supporting cast. And, when all is said and done, they perform “Yurizukin-chan” a “yurified” version of Little Red Riding Hood 

This manga is drawn by Minamoto Hisanari, creator of Fu~fu, for Comic Cune, which, while it does have Yuri, is more focused on the moe than the Yuri. So, yes, there are Yuri couples and yes, they are all adults, but they all look like they are toddler to 4 years old and everything is extra, super, teeth-grindingly adorable. The plot is amusing, there’s very little drama and it’s a fun read, without being even slightly stressful.

That said, there is one moment when I absolutely wanted to hug this manga. Jueru shows up at the audition with Hakobe all attitude and tsundere. She’s pretty obnoxious, actually. And when she and Hakobe come in second to Taiyou and Kise for the lead roles.  Jueru is all ready with a dramatic exit. “And so, the losers will take their leave!” she says and begins to sweep her way out of the theater. Manabi reminds them that they need other actresses, too, so they are kept on to play the little sister (rather than the grandmother) and the wolf. But the meme Jueru inspired,  “The losers will take their leave!” is granted eternal life on Play Play Douga. Aoba is right on it, and starts to mock Jueru, before the end of the scene. This shows some insight on online cultural dragging and I really appreciated it. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – erm….moe. REALLY moe
Story – Goofy, lovable
Characters – Also goofy, lovable
Yuri – Yep
Service – Nope

Overall – YMMV but I’m feeling generous, so let’s say 8

The story is ongoing and I can’t say I’m hooked, but it’s certainly worth following for some light reading. “Our Theater” the cover reads. How I wish it was….

I particularly like how, according to the author’s note, Minamoto-sensei became hooked on all-female musical review troupes as he did research for this series. “I’m off to Osaka!”” he says to Fujieda Miyabi-sensei, “Wanna come?” “Um..no, that’s okay.” ^_^

 

Posted in Minamoto Hisanari, Yuri Manga | No Comments »