Edie looks like she stepped out of one of those science fantasy space opera anime from the 90s where everyone was terminally willowy, and I love it.

This was cute and made me Google the game, which seems to be quite interesting. I might watch a YouTube playthrough or something similar. Props to the scanlators for translating stuff about underrated, slightly-obscure works, though- it's really nice to see some diversity in terms of fanworks.

I know nothing about mahjong, so I was pretty much just chirping "Richi!" along with Youmu like a confused cheerleader.

With that being said, this still seems like it'll be a fascinating, hilarious sports manga. The comedic moments were on point, and Youmu 'Brain Empty No Thoughts' Konpaku is a pretty good protagonist for this type of setup. I'm still mildly disappointed that each chapter won't end with her losing her temper and cleaving the whole freaking board in half, though.

PS: Thanks, DB Scans. I shrivel up if I don't get a certain amount of Touhou per week, so you're a blessing.

I'm liking this series more with each chapter. Underneath the gag comedy veneer, it makes some surprisingly clever points about the tropes and conventions of the genre and how people might rationally react to them. Now that I think about it, creating a system where middle-schoolers have to run around town in embarrassing outfits and tying any changes to their on-field productivity is a pretty scummy practice. Then again, they've also hired a tentacle hentai monster as one of their familiars, so maybe Azurite's just working for the mahou shoujo equivalent of a black company. Ruby, as with most senior employees, gives no actual shits about any of this and is just here to peer at the new intern's ass. Depressingly realistic, I'd say.

Wow, this is definitely a classic. The archetypes themselves have been combined quite often, but there's a subtlety and nuance to both Yuri and Misono that you rarely find in romances, particularly those based on 'opposites attract' gimmicks. Every chapter was meaningful, every conversation felt heartwarming, and the transition from friends to lovers to wives was absolutely perfect. I had a massive grin on my face from cover to cover, and would easily class this as one of the better yuri works I've read.

Interesting. This story's packed with so much obsessiveness and manipulation that it loops back around into being bizarrely poetic.

Ever wondered why the world of Yuru Yuri seems untouched by time or darkness? That's because it's simply a happy, fluffy world of dreams, powered by the unfulfilled wishes of all the lesbians who struggle with depressing, empty lives. Today, Namori pulled back the curtain and gave us a glimpse of how things really are. So we'd better hope that those cheery, carefree kids never grow up.

Ahem. Edgy intro aside, this was pretty good and actually makes me want more dark stuff from Namori, because holy shit, the clash between hyper-moe art and dark, morally dubious relationships is brilliant. I've always believed that the people who write adorable fluff can produce the best tragedies, and Namori certainly gave us a solid example.

It's nice to see KareHika art with some sexual tension. Fanart dedicated to them tends largely towards wholesome and platonic, which is also great, but there's a scene in the anime where Hikari's lying on a bed without pants clutching a picture of Karen and gazing hazily off into the distance. They've definitely accumulated some major thirst over the course of their separation.

Really loved this story. It drives in just how lonely and tragic Yukari must be after centuries of operating as a distant, nearly-mechanical overseer, and how she's not the same as a god born into the job, no matter how omniscient she tries to seem. Not close enough to seem human, not far enough to avoid human miseries- as ironic as it might seem, she's stuck in a gap of her own.

last edited at Dec 13, 2020 11:49PM

ReiMari is domestic bliss at its finest.

I like the setting here. There's tons of rustic, tranquil spots in old cities that get obscured or overrun by rampant urbanization, but if you look hard enough, there are still places cut off from the endless bustle.

You thought you would get a threesome, but everyone just ended up getting screwed by shitty workplace culture.

When the anthology puts so much emphasis on there being girl x girl relationships and literally has yuri in its title, it’s only natural people would assume it be yuri-only. And I would like to ask the question, have yuri-only anthologies/mangas ever straight out said “this is yuri-only”??

Even with so much emphasis on yuri relationships and yuri in the title, I didn't once assume it to be yuri-only. It doesn't seem natural to do so at all as far as I'm concerned. To answer your question, I don't really know if anything is ever identified in that way, but I would hope that they wouldn't go the exclusionary route. I'd hope that most publishers of works by the LGBTQ+ community wouldn't use that sort of terminology even if the stories contained within were literally only yuri and nothing else. We want a community of inclusion, right? Besides, what benefit would people have knowing that there's only yuri and nothing else in it?

The issue seems to be the binary between 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' content, wherein people assume that a relationship could only really be one of these- for instance, even if one of the people involved in a lesbian relationship was bisexual and had dated men before, her current relationship would be homosexual, or in this case, yuri. So if the story focuses upon this relationship, it would be yuri, and that's all the classification you'd need. Even if ex-boyfriends are mentioned or star as characters, they wouldn't be part of this relationship, and so there'd exist no need to further specify the yuri tag. However, the existence of polyamory and polycules fundamentally challenges the monogamous relationship model that society often considers a norm, making it possible for a relationship to be simultaneously homosexual and heterosexual- not either yuri/yaoi or het, but both at once, at the same time.

So the polycule in this case would be both yuri and het, which falls under the yuri implications of the title and marketing. However, many readers of yuri have a visceral reaction to seeing a guy involved in a lesbian relationship owing to all the 'yuribait' stories they've suffered through, which involve a shoehorned het relationship at the end of an ostensibly-lesbian romance, and so they react with anger. The reality is that this is something entirely new, something that covers largely uncharted ground, and so the existing tags and classifications of monogamy-normative society wouldn't suffice to describe it. And to consumers looking for reliable, standard narratives of yuri, the new formation produces a reaction of fear, unease and discomfort, because they're not sure how to deal with it. It'd be different if there was an anthology solely for polyamory or this FFM structure, but people weren't expecting to be hit with it out of nowhere, and hence the debates.

Personally, my issue lies more with the lack of development than the relationship itself, since it doesn't feel like an attempt to properly depict a polyamorous relationship and operates more like a 'solution' to the question of 'how do I make everyone happy?' Compare it something like Canno's work, which takes the effort to introduce the concept and put in good, solid foundations and development so that people can understand the appeal and dynamics of polyamorous relationships, and this story feels juvenile and reductive, especially with the, "Oh, polygamy was legal all along" part near the end. Of course, the author didn't have anywhere near as much space or time as they'd get in a serialization, but qualifying the polyamory from the very beginning rather than putting it in as a plot twist would've been a far better narrative decision. As it is now, the story suffers simultaneously from doing something that the target demographic didn't actively expect or want, and also failing to properly justify or establish why this new structure is just as legitimate as 'conventional' yuri. In short, good intentions, poor execution, and an unprepared audience.

Going from a mostly-serious Chapter 1 to these PVs was hilarious.

Yuu and Mari would probably be the greatest parents in the world.

Gunjo in reverse, eh? Neat.

Don't wanna name names, but I think one of the girls here might be a bit dangerous.

I suppose the publishers needed to establish their 'twist' or 'take' on the extremely saturated otome isekai villainess genre and decided to go for the girl on girl angle. Besides, the use of the word 'capture' is very clearly tied to dating sim games and implies forming a relationship, which is generally monogamous owing to the 'route' structure of videogames, so both Japanese and Western readers would've obviously assumed that it was yuri even without any tags to that effect. As a similar example, a title like 'I'm the heroine, but I triggered the villainess' H-scene!' would lead people to imply that sex was had between the two, but you could technically shove a guy in there as well, since you never mentioned that the H-scene was yuri- people would just assume that the term 'villainess' H-scene' would render it one-on-one.

It's a bit manipulative, and honestly not that wise, since people are obviously going to be mad and salty about the content even if it isn't 'false advertising', per se. Regardless of the quality of the stories, they would've still gotten mildly better rep if they made it all yuri. I wonder what persuaded them to include the story- were they pressed for time? Was there not enough variety in terms of choices? Or did the author they commissioned abruptly decide to put in an FFM polycule far too late for the editors/publishers to suggest changes or dismiss their efforts? The whole thing's just odd. I might be more interested in the thought processes of the people making this thing than I am in the actual stories at this point.

last edited at Dec 13, 2020 8:48AM

You are not going to convince people to change their minds based on what you post here.

By that logic, no one would ever discuss anything. Talking things out and exchanging viewpoints is productive- fundamentally, it helps you examine your own arguments and revise your perspective on the world. Without conversations, without communication, we'd be no more alive than a bunch of rocks. On this forum itself, I've discussed things with tons of interesting and diverse people. I've had engaging conversations, been proven wrong more times than one, learned new things, and made an impression. Looking back upon it all, even if I failed to produce a clear result nine times out of ten, I wouldn't say that it was pointless. I understand that these conversations and topics can get exasperating- it would be quite fun to live without needing to think about statistics and ethics and morality, in a world where everyone was happy and carefree and united in their love for fictional lesbians. But even if such a world exists, it isn't what we've got in the present day. Convincing yourself that history is irrelevant is to deny your own existence, and dismissing the value of discourse is to invalidate your own opinion. It's a contradictory, knee-jerk reaction that flies in the face of everything a 'forum' is supposed to represent. So while I understand that you might not want your feed to be clogged up with 'political' news, I don't think it should come at the expense of people who legitimately want to talk about their lives and the state of the world around them. As sad as it may seem, none of us can live in a vacuum.

... shit, now I actually really want to see that. Like do a Handsome Girl and Sheltered Girl thing, where the prince is trying to disguise that she’s a woman because she doesn’t want to lose the villainess, but then she finds out the villainess is gay because she’s in love with the heroine so she reveals herself and they poly it up. Shit, maybe I’ll write something like that...

This would be genuinely brilliant. And the endgame plot twist would be that men died out 500 years ago, leaving the kingdom inhabited solely by lesbians trying to disguise their genders to blend in with the guys without realizing that the 'guys' were also all just confused gay girls. The truth is revealed when everyone gets drunk and spills the beans at a court orgy, and the next morning, they declare a public holiday to commemorate 500 years of uselessness while energetically making up for lost time. And that, kids, is how World Lesbian Day was created.

When you make claims of certainty that are contradicted by your own sources, it's not a good look.

Except that if you properly looked at my sources, the culpability of the U.S. is pretty clear in every sense? The only reason there ever was a 'debate' is because the U.S. suppressed discourse and because the ethics around dropping the atom bomb were still undefined around the time. There's also the fact that this occurred directly before the Cold War, a period marked by jingoism and patriotism wherein the U.S. idealized itself as the heroic, democratic counterpart to the 'evil, dictatorial' Soviets. As Throbelisk pointed out, the debate isn't about whether or not it was 'justified'- you could never hope to justify instantaneously murdering over 100,000 people for the actions of a government that they didn't vote for, because Japan throughout the 1930s and 40s was under military rule and had become a single-party state in 1940. The reason I linked the Wikipedia article wasn't to singularly prove my claim, but to give people a list of perspectives and sources that they could read up on in their own time, because a Wikipedia article alone is bound to be vague and self-contradictory. You'll see that most of the people who supported the bombing were reliant on outdated data and estimates, or from pro-government camps that rely on the whole 'every Japanese citizen would die for the Emperor' myth, with some even saying that 'there were no civilians in Japan'- a pretty convenient excuse to butcher said civilians. Heck, if you read the pro-bombing arguments carefully, you'll see that the article itself undermines them- the segment about Japan's 'refusal', for instance, is undercut by mentions of how unstable and deadlocked the country really was on an interior political level- not exactly a bunch of 'fanatics' that the U.S. had to demoralize. And the article about the necessity of a decisive bomb also mentions that the firebombings on Tokyo had killed just as many people, but still not prompted surrender, suggesting that only the Soviet Union's declaration of war was what truly defeated Japan, because they realized that the one power that might help them negotiate a conditional surrender was completely against them- a fact that could've been handily proven without the bombings if the U.S. merely waited. So yes, there really isn't a debate anymore- the vast majority of modern discourse upon the subject agrees that the bombings were a war crime intended to field test the bombs, strike terror into Russia, and cement U.S military supremacy. Anyone who says otherwise is either a mad devotee of the US government, woefully reliant on outdated information, or simply trying very hard to win an argument.

I Wanted To Create A Story That Would Be Included In An Otome Game Villainess Yuri Themed Anthology, But My Original Proposed Title Failed To Measure Up To The Minimum Length Criterion, So I Was Forced To Add Another Two Paragraphs Of Unnecessary Verbiage That More Or Less Summarized The Entire Plot In Order For It To Be Accepted For Publication.

It's Rather Hilarious How Industry Saturation And Rampant Consumerism Has Taken Us All The Way From Short, Punchy, Memorable Titles To Compressed Wikipedia Articles, All In The Interests Of Helping Folks Pick A Story (That's The Title Of My Otome Isekai Novel About Media Dynamics, Btw, And Yes, The Stuff In The Brackets Is Included).

At this point, I'm convinced that Subaru just writes romances between boobs and sketches the lesbians in afterward.

Ah, so the author scribbled the word yuri on a dart, went into a library, blindfolded themselves, took three shots, and converted the genres into lesbian stories. Good show.

Wow. I was hoping that the next story in this anthology would do something innovative, but an FFM polycule was not what I expected. There's probably gonna be a ton of folks salty about this one. Can't say I blame 'em- the prince's main trait was 'being handsome' and pretty much nothing else, so visualizing him as part of the relationship just feels odd. Heck, I'm still not sure if it's just a political marriage with yuri behind closed doors, or if the prince gets in on the action. I get that the author wanted everyone to be happy, but I feel like there might've been a better way to utilize the prince- I initially figured he'd just be a shipper and supporter, but having him be a part of the relationship when neither party even seems to pay much attention to him over the course of the story is just weird.