Junko committed ninety-nine war crimes and still lost the war, but at least she had a good time.

This series is so fluffy. Also, Byakuren having an incredibly dark sense of humour underneath the saintly persona feels weirdly genuine to her character.

Cute as hell, gay as hell, interesting characters, what could go wro-oh yeah its already axed. Up there with Pocha Climb as this cursed years biggest casualties.

I'm starting to think that the universe just despises musical lesbians. The vast majority of anime/manga about music that I've come across have either been bait (Euphonium), reliant on subtext (K-On, every idol show ever) or cancelled (Rock It Girl).

You can't spell mucus without me, you and us. Well, you actually can, but then you'd just be left alone with a pond of snot.

"I want to fuck a girl!"
"...What about me...?"
"No, I like you too much."

unfortunately, this is real lesbianism right here

LOL

I am still waiting for Kirin to launch a diatribe on the segregation of female sexuality and affection in Japanese culture. :3

I'll do you one better and link an entire academic article about it.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://brill.com/downloadpdf/book/edcoll/9789004344198/B9789004344198_012.xml&ved=2ahUKEwjZr-PXybHtAhUrwjgGHR-YAaYQFjABegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw2bVpvAS6T2DnYl7Fv1LwPR

As a pansexual, I'm used to having things like how promiscuous and desperate I am thrown at me constantly, but I'm kind of envious of how chill most people are towards lesbians.

I sorta blame Deadpool for this, since he's pretty much the most prominent pansexual character in Western fiction (indeed, I actually had to look up a list for other examples). Sadly, most writers don't really engage with his pansexuality on a serious level and just use it as a 'quirky' trait- the majority of his relationships, afaik, are with women, and he mostly just hits on men to intimidate them, which is a standard trope of bad queer writing that still hasn't been phased out because people find it hilarious. I'd warrant that most people who write Deadpool haven't even read about pansexuals, and assume that they're different from bisexuals because they're super-horny and will try to hump anything that moves, which is a pretty shitty assumption to make. Most pan folks I've encountered on the internet are largely wholesome people who tend to be particularly inclusive, and there's so much scope for exploring pansexuality in fiction. Lastly, the Wikipedia page for 'List of fictional pansexual characters' lists Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura as pansexual, since the creators have stated that she 'doesn't see gender as a barrier to romantic attraction'. She'd make a much better pan icon than Deadpool, to say the least.

Takashima Hiromi: Today, we're going to focus on the concept of envy.
Readers: Sensei, this is the tenth time you've brought envy to Yamada and Kase-san.

Anyway, if Hyacinthus here showed up in a Western sitcom, he'd definitely be gay- popular with the chicks, into an artistic hobby, gets everyone hot and bothered before revealing that he's actually dating the professor, the works. Dunno if Takashima's gonna pull the same gag, though realistically, I see no reason for the dude to care about Yamada. Maybe he'll just end up giving them some good relationship advice? You'd think a Flower Prince would excel at making lilies bloom.

"Here I come, queen of playboys. Do you have enough lesbians in stock?"

Btw, how do you spell 'cunnilingus' in the language of friendship?

Tongueship?

Tastebuds.

There were some pretty wild people in the vast family tree of the Austrian Hapsburgs in the 1800s for ex, such as Emperor Franz Joseph's youngest brother the Archduke Ludwig Viktor - an open flamboyant homosexual and transvestite whom Big Bro Emps eventually had to exile from the capital after one too public a scandal too many.

Sounds absolutely inspirational. Like the kind of person Netflix would make a drama series about before cancelling it after one season so that they could keep funding The Crown.

Fucking primogeniture laws, man.

Is that what people mean when they say, "It's okay as long as only the tip goes in?"

Nah in that context you're supposed to just j-j-j-jam it in. Inheritance laws strike me as a rather dry and unstimulating topic for bedroom talk, mind you, but I don't pretend to know or understand all the fetishes people have...

Counterpoint- Imagine a lesbian in a Buckingham palace bedroom cracking her fingers and sultrily muttering, "I'm going to stir you up like the Succession to the Crown Act, 2013."

Homosexuals for obvious reasons have certain problems with that whole "producing heirs" bit that're pretty relevant here, pending considerable advances in reproductive medicine (still WIP) or outsourcing certain parts of the process which... might have some issues with those selfsame laws, given the whole emphasis on direct descent and all. :/

Sad, but true. I also feel like there'd be a shit-ton of pressure enforced behind closed doors on any member of the Royal Family who wants to come out as gay, possibly even from a tender young age, and especially if they're high up in the hierarchy and want to be very public about it. Maybe things will have changed enough in a half-century or so to give us a lesbian Queen who also has access to facilities that might let her have kids, although by that point in the future, I'd rather they just abolished the institution as a whole instead of pumping huge amounts of money into it.

^ Yazawa was hospitalized in 2009, got better in 2010, hasn't continued writing Nana since (though she has worked on a slew of minor projects). Far be it from me to speculate about her reasons, but if a series as popular as Nana kept publishing as planned and actually had a yuri ending in around 2011-12, it would've been pretty huge for the genre. Might've changed the perception of yuri as niche and altered the course of the industry. All we have today are what-ifs, but it's an interesting prospect.

Fucking primogeniture laws, man.

Is that what people mean when they say, "It's okay as long as only the tip goes in?"

Nah in that context you're supposed to just j-j-j-jam it in. Inheritance laws strike me as a rather dry and unstimulating topic for bedroom talk, mind you, but I don't pretend to know or understand all the fetishes people have...

Counterpoint- Imagine a lesbian in a Buckingham palace bedroom cracking her fingers and sultrily muttering, "I'm going to stir you up like the Succession to the Crown Act, 2013."

Kirin, you seem to be arguing a broader point about manga readers - and this manga in particular - that hasn't been demonstrated to exist within the confines of this thread. Your first post, especially, is highly dismissive towards other people who may not have the same perspective or level of knowledge that you possess. I can appreciate comedic exaggeration, but in this case you went too far.

Point taken. The original observation seemed to revolve around a demand for the author to 'prove' a character's femininity, which I found to be in rather bad taste, hence my reply. But I apologize if the tone of my counterargument came off as condescending.

Fucking primogeniture laws, man.

Is that what people mean when they say, "It's okay as long as only the tip goes in?"

I love Konbu's thought process when it comes to writing stuff like this and SekaOppa: I wanna talk about love and I wanna talk about sex. Most people put one first and another later, but I wanna talk about them at the same time. Oh, but I don't actually want my characters to date, 'cuz that's the endgame. Oh, I know! Let's give them the thirst of a chick who's been in horny jail for three centuries, and the emotional maturity of a maiden in a castle tower! Best of both worlds, bitches. Btw, how do you spell 'cunnilingus' in the language of friendship?

I wasn't talking about manga, but about the perception Japanese people at large, even outside of media, have of lesbians. See note at the bottom here: https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/liberty_ch15#5

It's not specific to manga. It's a more general stereotype.

I mean, people who straight-up assume that lesbians are horny and sleep around would generally behave in two ways. They would a) look down on lesbians and not read media about them at all, in which case series like these would be irrelevant, or b) see this as erotic and actively seek out manga featuring lots of hot lesbian sex, like this one, which, as I've pointed out, is a fairly progressive depiction of lesbians exercising sexual agency and indulging in their desires, outside of this chapter (heck, the endgame is our protag reconnecting with the girl she had a crush on). Either way, I don't see lesbians as a whole suffering because of Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels!.

If anything, I'm pretty sure the main demographic for this manga are lesbians who want to read something funny, sexy and heartwarming instead of Blushing Schoolgirl Story #991, so while you claim that 'lesbians are horny and sleep around' is a stereotype, the vast majority of lesbians who actually read it would see it as a USP (if nothing else, the folks on this forum seem to like it). So from a representational perspective, it captures a side of lesbians that's not often covered with the appropriate nuance and empathy, and from an entertainment perspective, it establishes an identity and caters to a market. It'd be different if the manga stated that all lesbians love to cheat and sleep around, because that would be malicious- in this case, the horniness is constrained to an escort service and the women who peruse it (possibly because they can't easily have relationships in ordinary society). It'd be weirder if they didn't have tons of sex.

Lastly, the example you've cited states that the Japanese see lesbians as people who often cheat. Putting aside the accuracy of this claim or the sources that the scanlators used to come up with it, I'd like to point out that this manga doesn't even feature any cheating or infidelity. I get criticizing the non-con part, because that made me wince a bit as well, but the rest of your criticisms are misplaced at best and actively unrelated to the topic at worst.

idk this is getting pretty gay for a non-yuri manga

This is a non-yuri manga?

Author's drawn some pretty clear yuri stuff before, and this doesn't seem to break from tradition. Probably just a case of the 'mahou shoujo' aspect taking precedence over the 'yuri' one in terms of advertising and tagging. Although I'd personally like to think that magical girls are so gay that it's a given that any series about them would feature lesbians.

Today I learned that poultry manufacturing might actually become a thing. How about that.

"What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
"Ma'am, this is a Wendy's and you haven't placed your order yet."

^ Based on 7-8 name documentation websites that I looked at, Aki is almost exclusively used for girls in Japan. It's also a Finnish name for boys, though I don't think that's relevant here. There are unisex names that go for both genders, but Aki isn't one of them. Only way a guy would be referred to as Aki was if you were shortening part of his original name, like Akira or Akito, or perhaps a surname like Akiyama (or if the guy in question had parents with a weird naming sense, or simply took on the name despite knowing that it'd draw odd looks). And again, with the yuri tag + character design, you'd be hard-pressed to miss the character's gender. Tons of small clues therefore coalesce into a clear picture.

It plays a little bit too much into the Japanese tropes that lesbians are somehow horny all the time and are sleeping around.

I'd warrant that 90% of lesbians in Japanese media are schoolgirls in denial about their own feelings who couldn't make a confession if their lives depended on it, and the remaining 10% are depressed OLs who fester in heteronormative workplaces and either cry themselves to sleep at night or frantically conceal their one existing relationship. There are barely any manga that demonstrate lesbians hitting up bars, sleeping around with random chicks and flouncing off in the morning with zero angst about the road not taken. If anything, Japanese media seems intent on veiling lesbians behind tons and tons of ambiguity, or fetishizing them for straight men. This manga is one of the few works I've seen that actually represents lesbians enjoying active sex lives instead of waiting for that one perfect relationship that lasts throughout adulthood and old age. As skeevy as the implications in this chapter might've been, I'd argue that this series as a whole is an important work, because it shows intelligent, adult women enjoying sex without being actively pornographic. It's not pure yuri (ugh) or a tribbing exhibition for dudes, but a work that puts women foremost and emphasizes their freedom to indulge in casual sexual pleasure. I'd say we need tons more stuff like this and Shuninta's I Wouldn't Mind Being Loved.

And you do realize that not everyone is a Japanese culture aficionado?

Your point was that it wasn't clear that she was a 'she-wolf'. I pointed out that her name is female. Manga, as I'm sure you're aware, is written primarily for a Japanese audience, not a bunch of people reading scanlations on a website. The intended audience would've gotten it, hence removing the need for the author to 'clarify' or 'prove' her femininity. You could ask why the scanlators didn't put in a TL note explaining that the name was female, but maybe they assumed that most people would look at the character design and the 'yuri' tag and have the presence of mind to get it. Clearly, they thought wrong.

This story's focus isn't on the fact that they are lesbians, but that they are sheep and wolf.

Reasonable.

And the fact that they are both female looks like a gimmick to make it look like less "predatory" (it's a wolf and a sheep after all). If it was a male, it would be less cute and more rapey.

Not exactly- the story seems to be using the assertiveness of the sheep versus the hesitance of the wolf for comedy, precisely to invert the predatory dynamic. It's even stated that wolves in-universe are treated with suspicion, and that our wolf-lead has something of a complex about it. Your argument would make sense if the wolf was dominant and aggressive and if the sheep was passive and afraid, but their actual dynamic is more-or-less the opposite. Using the appeal of lesbians to dress up problematic content is an issue with some manga, but it doesn't apply here, because the dynamic is largely positive and the point of the story is to break the assertive butch vs. submissive femme stereotype, using animal races for moe + allegory. So the gayness is not a 'gimmick' or a 'disguise'- it's part of the central appeal, both on the part of the author, who probably wanted to draw cute kemonomimi lesbians, and on the part of the readers, who appreciate them.

It's nice that lesbianism seems to be a normal occurrence in that world (are there even males?), but then, does it mean it's a yuri story, or just a story?

This is... a surprisingly good point, actually. However, the story's probably gonna focus on the central romance and the wolf vs. sheep issue, so the all-female cast is probably just gonna be something that readers take for granted instead of an attempt to explore the dynamics of lesbian relationships in an anthropomorphized society (though if it gives us non-science interspecies babies, it'll be totally worth it).

As for the question of whether it's yuri, I'd say that it is, since yuri is a marketing, demographic, genre-based and subcultural term rather than an in-universe phenomenon. Most characters in zombie fiction don't ever use the word 'zombie', but a movie about fighting an infestation of shambolic monsters that look like walking corpses would still be marketed and consumed as a zombie movie, regardless of whether they're powered by voodoo, bioweapons or a fungal infection. The term 'yuri' isn't something that people in real relationships use to describe themselves (imagine one guy going, "Oh, I'm yaoi for my boyfriend!" and you'll realize how absurd it sounds), but explicitly something that readers and consumers of fiction use to label and classify certain types of media.

@ Nya-chan You can see her breasts in quite a few panels (below her clothes) - very noticable in her first panel- and even naked boobs in several panels. And I thought her face looked more feminine than masculine.

I agree there are a lot of pannels when its not obvious though - and it would be better if they made it clearer by actualy saying her gender at the start..

You do realize that 'Aki' is a female name, right? Readers in Japan would've gotten all the information they needed right there, removing any need for the author to grab a megaphone go, "This here is a woh-mun." Plus, she's not even all that butch. Y'all need to learn to appreciate androgyny instead of going, "She doesn't seem female enough on panel #5 of page 14 because I couldn't see her double D honkers and be assured that this yuri series doesn't feature a guy." People like to present in different ways, and women who dress in suits and have androgynous, angular features are extremely popular with lesbians, both in Japan and in the West. It's a veritable cultural phenomenon- look up otokoyaku from the Takarazuka Revue.

It's funny how a series about prostitution somehow manages to make sex feel more heartfelt and natural than 90% of the romcoms I've read in my entire life. As various people have pointed out, the profession is not exactly a fun avenue to self-discovery, but this series excels at avoiding the traps of drama, voyeurism or objectification, and presents bodies as extensions of people, as a means of connection and enjoyment. The art, for all its sexiness, never feels pornographic or leering so much as it is traced by someone with a genuine love for the human form, much like what'd you see in Otome no Teikoku. Casual, one-off flings are part and parcel of the premise here, but rather than making them seem pseudo-romantic or overtly mercenary, every sexual encounter feels like a giddy, lighthearted exchange between people who enjoy sex for what it is, offering each other pleasure and expecting nothing more. Good stuff.

last edited at Dec 1, 2020 2:04PM

Huh looked like I was wrong - this wasn't an Isekai anthology after all. That said, even with how out-of-nowhere the isekai part of the first one-shot was, I think I actually preferred that one more. There just isn't enough focus on the maid and her mistress' relationship in my opinion.

I agree. The whole confrontation scene in the court is something that I've seen more than a dozen times by now, right down to the dialogue, characterizations and even the general aesthetic of the place, and it's worth mentioning that I don't even read all that many otome isekais in the first place. They've put so much effort into reconstructing a clichéd situation, devoted so much time to a melodramatic confrontation that gives some arrogant blowhard more dialogue than both our leads combined in what is ostensibly a yuri anthology, and traded in every chance to actually develop the relationship in order to flesh out a mystery that we know can only be resolved in one way. It's like you got a hundred million pounds to make a show about gay British nobles, and then did a shot-for-shot remake of The Crown before having two girls hug each other in the final episode. I love the art and the intensity of expressions, but this entire story felt like a bunch of exposition pages that I had to rifle through to get to the point, except for the fact that they're supposed to be the be-all and end-all. Honestly disappointing, especially since the maid angle was new and much more interesting than listening to Generic Talkative Royal Asshole #592 throw a tantrum.