Yuricon’s hunky mascot, Yuriko’s birthday is coming and she wants a picture to celebrate! Draw a picture of her celebrating her brithday with her lover, famous novelist Midori for the 2009 Yuriko Fan Art Contest!

Submissions will be accepted until February 22, 2009

Please send all submissions – and questions – to [email protected] with the subject line “2009 Art Contest”

Include your name, contact information that you actually read and will respond to and your age (so we can make sure the prizes age-appropriate.)

Your picture can be sexy, but please refrain from sending anything with explicit sex. Thanks.

Please send the picture at no less than 72 dpi and no more than 150dpi, but you might want to have a 300dpi version on hand, in case we want to use it for something cool and promotion-y!

As always, *all* submissions will be included in the Yuriko Art Gallery on Yuricon!

Yuricon – “For real women who like their woman…animated”

Let’s get this out of the way first, so you can decide if you want to keep reading – I don’t consider Ga Rei Zero (喰霊-零-) to be a “Yuri” anime. Yes, I saw what you saw. Yes, Yomi and Kagura love each other deeply. But Yuri goggles aside, they really aren’t “in love” with one another – IMHO. Your opinion is yours and if it is that they are absolutely positively in love and if only they had been allowed to be together…and, needless to say, that I am a complete moron for not seeing it…well that’s fine too. ^_^

Yes. I see what you see. No, I do not think it’s Yuri. *I* think it’s a very close sisterly relationship – one I could wish I had with my sister, but don’t. I also think Yomi was “in love with” Nori-chan and I quite liked them as a couple.

Okay, that having been said, now those of you who either agree with me or don’t care can move on to what the heck Ga Rei Zero is, if not Yuri. And my apologies for not catching up on this series last season when it aired. It just kept slipping down the list.

What Ga Rei Zero is, is a entertainingly predictable supernatural/action anime that combines big demony monsters, schoolage girls with magical swords that come with a *destiny*, and a fight to protect humanity against the evil that, etc, etc.

We are introduced to the story at the end, which I’m told is part of the actual series, Ga Rei, of which this is a prequel. Eventually we are taken back to the beginning of the story in which Kagura, the daughter of the chief of the exorcists is taken in by another exorcist who has an adopted daughter a little older than she, Yomi. Kagura and Yomi become very close, so when the obvious crisis rears its ugly head and Yomi is forced into the position of bad guy, we can watch helplessly as they battle it out for supremacy. The whole story would have been fine except for one teeny little thing that annoyed me so very much that I nearly stopped watching.

The first handwave – there are demons who pop into this world and we are protected by the exorcists who fight them. Accepted.

The second – these exorcists use weapons created by a mostly naked guy named Michael, who has a somewhat impractical grasp of “useful in battle.” Accepted.

Third handwave – that Kagura and Yomi, with only a few years of life and experience behind them and pretty much no emotional maturity, are the pinnacles of power in the organization. Accepted

Fourth handwave – that not a *single* person in the entire exorcist organization has two brain cells to rub together. Denied.

It was a case of one handwave too many, when the entire organization is unable to see that Mei is the source of all evil, but how fast are they to spot it when it’s Yomi. And also no one in an entire organization that comprises dozens, if not hundreds of people can see that Yomi’s Uncle is a grasping bastard. If everyone had accepted it outwardly, but in private bitched that it was an extremely suspicious thing that a will suddenly appeared that contradicted Yomi’s father’s well-known wishes, well, maybe I could have bought it. But not a single person even blinked at it.

I could deal with the battle iron, filled with holy water and the battle suitcase which shot projectiles. I simply refuse to believe that there wasn’t a *single* person in the entire organization that had the vaguest grasp of human nature.

Once we got past that, the end comes fast, because it’s too late to just, oh, stop attacking Yomi. The final battle rushes forward and Kagura is forced to step up as the leader of the organization and take down the one person in the world she loves. No surprises there.

Overall, a perfectly fine series, with one too many handwaves. And Yuri that, if you think about it for half a second, really isn’t.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 6
Characters – 8
Yuri – 3
Service – 2

Overall – 7

I have to tell ya, all handwaves aside, there is no way that a 14-year-old is going to make a good leader. I don’t care if that’s the basic lesson of all anime, it’s a really silly idea. ^_^