The anime for Bloom was really, really well executed. As far as the manga I really liked the first half of Bloom but the fact the whole aromantic thing ended up being another "but we're both girls!" and a few other peeves ended up kind of souring me on the series. IIRC it ran in a shounen magazine so its a bit of a different flavor than a lot of other yuri, though the pairing itself is a pretty standard case of disaster senpai noticing the meek kouhai.

In the end I think Citrus was probably the more memorable series, though Citrus Plus is still ongoing.

last edited at Dec 12, 2022 11:36PM

... fifty love interests? the hell kind of VN is this?

Its supposed to be like a gacha otome Tokimeki Memorial I think.

This is such a fun series.

I saw the title was "Confession" and didn't know what to expect... lived up to its billing.

Seems to be a new season of Symphogear on the way... in 20XX

https://twitter.com/SYMPHOGEAR/status/1594293709906251776

You know, everyone seems to assume this is Elsa from the future. And don't get me wrong, I get the appeal!

But... like, couldn't it also just be one of Elsa's birth parents?

I kind of considered that myself... and considering the power she has over the villainess system she might have something to do with Evie's reincarnation too. She looks like Elsa though.

Friends will be friends, Queen, 1986.
(I'm sure there's a grungier option too, but Queen dominates like 30% of my musical brainspace.)

That's the thing I don't think a grungier option really exists. I guess the White Stripes "We're Going To Be Friends" is easy to play/sing if nothing else.

what about "hollow" by pantera

I'm excluding songs about dead (or comatose) friends but there's probably nothing more grunge than Say Hello to Heaven in that regard.

last edited at Oct 31, 2022 12:27AM

Friends will be friends, Queen, 1986.
(I'm sure there's a grungier option too, but Queen dominates like 30% of my musical brainspace.)

That's the thing I don't think a grungier option really exists. I guess the White Stripes "We're Going To Be Friends" is easy to play/sing if nothing else.

But you've now got a strong desire to sing "You've Got A Friend In Me" at Karaoke?

Seems like there should be a more rockin' ode to friendship but I can't think of anything.

I don't know if I've ever seen such a tense badminton match in manga. Cute chapter regardless, Yaya and Ichigo are one of my favorite pairs right now.

Now I want to see the Steins;Gate Zero version of older!Elsa's timeline that led her to make this potion and take it back in time.

Is this like, a "you haven't heard Shakespeare until you've seen Hamlet in the original Klingon" thing?

Pretty much. Though that Star Trek kinda sucked overall.

I wonder if they'll go to a concert on a date... seems like they kinda have to.

Radiohead is cool and all but it doesn't compare to the original Prince version of Creep - https://youtu.be/42-RBnhiYkA

I feel like one of them is due for a makeover and I'm not sure which. Let's see how this "friendship" goes...

...but everyone gets paid in tea and free rent I guess. Capitalism, Ho!

I was intrigued for the first episode or two but at this point Novice Alchemist is really sort of boring to me... nobody other than Sarasa has really established any sort of personality yet and it feels painfully generic.

Ear plugs can only go so far... though I recommend the silicone ones.

Silicone ear plugs work great for swimming, but their noise reduction isn’t as good as the foam ones. And noise-cancellation headphones won’t work when it comes to Yamada and Kase-San.

Silicone are really good for sleeping too, though I guess the foam ones are better if you're jackhammering. Not sure if Kase and Yamada are quite at that dB level but maybe when they live together they'll load up on toys so who knows.

Ear plugs can only go so far... though I recommend the silicone ones.

We're also lacking a Nanami so far. Moooo.

I'm not sure if yuribait is enough for me to watch a Gundam for two cour, I love Macross and some other mecha but Gundam is too dramatic. I'll give it a few episodes at least.

Did me just telling you that I can give you a list of 100 forever season 1 het anime that dont end conclusively fly over your head?

I'm not sure why you want me to give you points for saying you could give examples.

You cited a het anime as an example of the princely girl not being gay. Impressive. But I am talking about the application of that trope in yuri.

And before you were talking about the origin of the trope in shoujo manga, which is what I was addressing.

Maria-sama ga miteru is THE defining turning point from old-school Class S into proper yuri.

I mean I'll give you that Marimite was important, but that was because Marimite was basically a revival of Class S with the exact same focus on friendships and such.

Do you honestly deny that in most het romance stories many characters start out as friends or as strangers that become friends and THEN lovers (unless it is a harem story in which case there will never be a definitive conclusion)?

I mean a tsundere exists to basically avoid being friends, and like I've already said osananajimi have a pretty terrible success rate. Familiarity doesn't inherently lend itself to romance in life or in manga.

I don't really remember Tokushusen Asuka being particularly gay at all, though I guess its possible the manga went that direction. If you want something both incredibly edgy and nonchalant about two women dating there was Mnemosyne from 2008, though their circumstances as far as opposite gender relationships were... complicated.

As far as Birdie Wing I'm guessing that after tournament arc we'll probably have an arc dealing with Eve's past.

I'm really tempted to pick up the LN for this... hmm.

The reason I bring this up is that "yuri" is a romance subgenre. When people set out to write a yuri manga (or novel or whatever), they largely have romance genre tropes to fall back on. And as @Licentious Lantern says, romance tropes exist for a reason; the "will they/won't they" dynamic provides an inherent tension and a clear goal that automatically makes audiences invest in it. (Manga like Nisekoi and Rent-A-Girlfriend can persist literally only on that for hundreds of chapters...)

Also, this doesn't affect the larger point, but Clannad absolutely has a "happily ever after" ending.

It can go either way for Key adaptations. The formula for Key visual novels (and Jun Maeda anime) was called nakige (crying game) and I'll let Wikipedia explain it:

Games from publisher Key often follow a similar formula: a comedic first half, with a heart-warming romantic middle, followed by a tragic separation, and finally (though not always) an emotional reunion.

The thing is -- there are formulas for maintaining (or introducing) tension even after the main couple gets together. I brought up Kase-san earlier in the thread because it follows a proven shoujo formula for keeping things going; its not like "will they/won't they" is the only way to keep people interested.

I am sorry, this is Dynasty, is it not? I may have experience with het works, sure, but it is obviously not a focus of mine. That being said, your exceptions don't matter. I could make a list of 100 het romance anime that are not complete in a 12 episodes season. Even more if we add non-romance focused ones. What does throwing around names prove? As usual I have to note that you have tunnel vision. And it appears to me that you are far more knowledgable about het works than yuri every time we talk. Not that this is a flaw or anything, enjoy what you will. It just means that often you seem to be hyper-focused on the things you are familiar with over a broader perspective.

Is this what they call "projection"? You're the one who decided to invoke comparisons to het in the first place, if you're not knowledgeable enough to back up your own assertions maybe stop making them?

Yuri has little to do with Shoujo romance? Except a majority of early yuri manga used Shoujo tropes, Shoujo artstyles and dynamics. The distinction only came about slowly. I suppose there are two schools of thought there of course, one being Shoujo-like yuri and the other being Class S style yuri, both birthing different aspects of the genre. But tropes like the "handsome school prince" who pins girls against walls and crossdresses etc. are 100% steeped in Shoujo origins, where the girl first and foremost had to replace the role of the boy.

AFAIK a lot of early yuri was tragic. And don't get me wrong, I love dramatic shoujo here and there (Ai Yazawa is one of my favorite mangaka ever) but I'm talking more about bubblegum romance here. Otherwise... I'll give you that the "princely girl" came from shoujo but more often than not she's not even gay. Ouran High School Host Club gave a "prince" character a reverse harem. I wouldn't consider them a gender swap either though I'm sure they've been used that way.

In your previous comment you asserted what you consider the "bedrock" of yuri works, but you failed to mention any of the dynamics that are part of this side. Beyond the more recent "gyaru x shy glasses girl" tropes that you brought up, there have been the "Onee-sama/garden of lillies" works or the "tomboy x sheltered lady" pairings etc.

Nobody thinks Class S is actually yuri these days (I hope) and no yuri LNs I know of are this insipidly stretched out as you claim (with the exceptions being those which dont actively focus on romance and... AdaShima, but just because AdaShima is a unique case of Iruma's madness).

I don't believe AdaShima has face sitting but I was definitely thinking about it when discussing dragged out LN. And going through an exhaustive list of yuri tropes was never my intention either; that's a conversation for a different thread. As far as Class S though I'd assume people still consider Maria-sama ga Miteru yuri, which was pretty much pure Class S. It casts a really, really long shadow over modern yuri, though at least the more problematic implications of Class S were lost to time, though I don't want to diminish what it was for its time here either.

Being firends before being lovers is literally what 90% of Japanese romance is like though.

...but you just admitted het isn't your focus in a previous paragraph so you're basically pulling numbers out of your ass. And you don't like examples either so I'm not sure how to respond here. If your point is that 90% of yuri romances start as friendship that's basically my criticism of the genre and why I'm talking about its roots in Class S and relationships that overemphasize friendship in the first place.

It feels like you're just trying to derail and score some internet points here but the discussion I thought we were having was 'subtext vs bait vs slow burn' and because I know yuri relationships have historically been a 'road to nowhere' the burden is IMO on the slow burn to prove its going to be different. If it can't really do that in one anime season I just don't see it any different than bait, though Class S is probably a better label.

To answer your point(lessness) though I guess I will give you that childhood friends are really common in het but they tend to be unsuccessful in love. I'd give them like a 10% success rate with plenty of memes about the childhood friend losing. I know very little about BL (aside from some BL bait here and there) but I got the impression rivalries were a more common basis for a relationship than friendship. Maybe I was mistaken.

I mean that a happy ending is literally listed as a requirement by the Romance Writers of America (I'm aware we're talking about Japanese media, but it's more or less the same there):

Ehh... have you ever looked up MAL ratings for the "romance" tag? There's an overwhelming number of tearjerkers at the top; stuff like Clannad, Your Lie in April, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, etc. And Makoto Shinkai has made a career out of scenes of longing (between two people who barely know each other, mind you) against the backdrop of an immaculately rendered golden hour sky.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of "happily ever after" but Japan really seems to favor the bittersweet as well.

To be an "anime only" is the audience's own shortcoming in this particular case. It is nearly foolish in this day and age to expect an adaptation to complete a story in an industry that purposely picks on-going series as their targets.

To be an unsatisfying anime is still the series shortcoming. If you're the type of person to pick up an LN series after watching the anime that's your prerogative, many of us aren't so the anime is the only opinion we have of a series. If its not particularly compelling in its early going -- again it just doesn't matter what happens in LN volume 7.

In fairness to Otherside Picnic the adaptation was a bit butchered. I actually kind of tried to read the series but didn't really enjoy it enough to stick with it. There are series I get into here and there; yuriwise I loved ILTV and enjoyed Sexiled but the odds of me picking up an LN series are still pretty slim.

There are rarely any anime that are definitive within 12 episodes. If such things get rated highly, then it is simply because anime onlies are desperate for conclusions, which makes a lot of sense of course.

Um... are you one of the people who doesn't really watch or read het romance? Because your assertion makes no fucking sense otherwise. Off the top of my head there's Kokoro Connect, Tsuki Ga Kirei, Horimiya, Bakemonogatari, VN adaptations like ef, and I'm sure a lot more that I can't think of. Yeah, two cour is a lot more to work with but that's also a lot more room for a love triangle or an amnesia subplot or some such.

Nothing about Kase-san is intentionally Shoujo manga like. Not any more than most Yuri manga are, as Yuri is tacitly an off-shoot of Shoujo manga to begin with.

Hmm... that's not completely wrong but sort of misleading. Yuri has relatively little in common with shoujo romance and was built more on amplifying female friendships that existed in shoujo and especially class S. Kase-san is more in line with typical shoujo romance.

Being friends before being lovers can be limiting when it comes to romantic tension, I guess that's the crux of why I think yuri kind of has a variety problem. I also don't really know how to quantify an LN series that is 6 volumes of friend zone with a final volume of "please sit on my face". I'll take the face sitting but I guess I'm just generally not fond of class S. It kind of feels like a relic from another time.. which I guess it actually is.

Title aside it kind of reminds me of Shinka no Mi a bit.

I will be charitable and assume that you did not just equate any of the slowburns you or me listed as bait.

Depends on which ones, but generally what happens in volume 7 of an LN doesn't really matter for an anime only watcher. I don't consider them much different especially when the romance isn't in the forefront like in Executioner and Otherside. And Symphogear always aimed to be Schrödinger's yuri.

To be fair to your greater point 2018 had Citrus, Bloom Into You, Kase-san and Morning Glories OVA, and Happy Sugar Life. I generally don't get people who hearken back to some kind of yuri "good old days" but that was a pretty good year. I'm still cautiously optimistic about The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady next year, and hopeful that ILTV will get adapted... someday.

Romance in general tends to be like this, however. Be it yuri, BL or het, most romance focused works will take their time. There are hundreds of season 1s awaiting their continuation that will never arrive, completely ending without any satisfying conclusion (at least in the anime adaptation). To get from 0 to 100 within 12 episodes (or less) would either require an unfaithful adaption or a source material that was rather short itself. Unsurprisingly the popular ones tend to be longer form, though, which means the ones being picked for an adaptation tend to be slowburns.

I don't think I agree with that at all; what usually drags things out are harems, love triangles, or in yuri roadblocks like "but we're both girls!" I guess there's meme manga that somehow gets 3 seasons like Rent-A-Girlfriend but that's not exactly the norm. The more memorable and/or highest rated het romances are usually pretty definitive over 12 or 24 episodes, especially if they're adaptations of shoujo. I've always been partial to Kase-san because its basically a shoujo manga with two girls.

Yuri actually tends to be sort of formulaic; its really heavy on themes of self discovery and it always kind of comes back to classic trope pairings like 'meek kouhai X disaster senpai' or 'gyaru X plainy' -- though occasionally something like Citrus will mix it up a bit where its gyaru X disaster senpai. And don't get me wrong I enjoy it but there's something to be said for stuff that's gay but detached from some of the tropes that are the bedrock of yuri as a genre.

Anyway I'm impressed someone else watched Gekidol, it was... interesting if nothing else.