i'm trying to find a series that i'm pretty sure i read on this site maybe 8 years ago.

it had dinosaurs, like the real non-moe kind, wearing uniforms and going to high school. it was a comedy/satire type thing. i think there were male characters? there was almost certainly yuri. the main character was a t-rex girl who i'm pretty sure ate another dinosaur character at one point. I remember it being tagged lizard but when i check the lizard and not lizard tags it isn't there anymore.

did i hallucinate this story? i remember it actually being decently funny

edit: nevermind, i found it lol. it was tagged not lizard, i just wasn't looking hard enough. for some reason i remember it as a series: https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/the_young_maiden_in_love_is_a_carnivore#1

last edited at Jun 13, 2021 10:02PM

you think "age-gap" refers to the daughter and the tutor but then you realize it really refers to the tutor and the mom lol. i love it

Honestly? Hajime's desire to make a movie reminds me more of Kumiko's growing antipathy towards music at the start of Euphonium and her eventual realization that, yes, she does in fact still love music and the euphonium. Yagakimi's play was never about the play but about Touko realizing that yes she deserves a life outside of pretending to be her sister. That she can have her own dreams and desires.

Hajime isn't making a movie for someone else, she making a movie to make a movie. Because she enjoys film. And while she was finally pushed over the edge because of a pretty girl, her love of film is something that is truly hers and not something that is given to her.

Honestly you could make a better argument for similarities between this manga and Revue Starlight.

i never finished eupho so i wouldn't have thought to really compare them. the thing about it and review starlight is that those stories are centered around competitions, which makes me feel like they're more like each other than they are like this. i feel like the girl through the viewfinder is more about discovering how to go about creative expression rather than like, honing your craft to perfection. and i feel like hajime's emotional arc isn't going to be that similar to kumiko's. you said it yourself that kumiko starts out from a place of disliking music, whereas hajime starts out complacently static about making movies. she's always wanted to, but she hasn't met the thing that will push her over the edge into actualizing those desires until now. as a writer it's very relatable, and i feel like it's different from what kumiko goes through. there probably is a character in eupho who starts out complacent and gets pushed over into actualization, but i can't remember anyone's name.

and i'd say that yes, the play in yagakimi was about touko realizing she doesn't have to pretend to be her sister anymore and that she can have her own destiny outside of that role, that's definitely some of the baggage and character growth that's attached to it. but the play is also where touko realizes that she has a knack for acting and that she actually likes it. and she continues acting after that because she likes it. it was both an ending point and starting point for her. hajime can't relate to the ending point pretending-to-be-your-sister stuff, but she can definitely relate to the starting point stuff, so i feel like that's consistent with my argument. she doesn't have to be exactly like touko to be reminiscent of her.

i should probably rewatch revue starlight. the first time i saw it i had a hard time telling what was diegetic and what was theatrically symbolic and whether that mattered at all even. that show confused me a bit.

last edited at Mar 29, 2021 10:17PM

will you also deny that strawberry panic ripped everything from marimite? the difference between yagakimi and strawberry panic is that yagakimi isn't a soap opera and is actually good (seriously, i tried to rewatch it a while back and couldn't get through even half of it).

Strawberry Panic was pretty much a methodical parody of Marimite, not a ripoff of it.

I still don't see much evidence for the overall thesis you're putting forth. The play in Yagakimi had a very specific function in the plot and in the dynamic of the characters. The movie here just seems to be the occasion for getting this group of characters together (and I can think of a half dozen other manga that have had some kind of play/movie/performance as the instrument for allowing the various characters to interact).

was it a parody? parodies are supposed to have jokes in them, right? they're supposed to use a premise to make jokes and be funny. i don't remember the core of strawberry panic being comedy. like, it's not that the jokes weren't for me or something, it's that it they just weren't there. it took itself too seriously most of the time. and i can't say it was a satire either because there just wasn't a message. what was it trying to say about the relationships between girls at private religious high schools? what was it trying to subvert? i don't think it was trying to say anything other than "isn't this dramatic". the most you could say is that it was tonally inconsistent. i think it was played basically completely straight--marimite, but this time it's a soap opera and the relationships are perhaps more explicitly "real".

and yeah, the play did have a specific function in yagakimi that was tied to touko and her baggage and in this one the baggage is different, but i don't think that's inconsistent. again, if literally everything was the same about the play and the characters that would just be plagiarism/creative theft. my argument is that the characters and premise are reminiscent of yagakimi because of how many tropes are in common between them, but you could definitely say that it's reminiscent of other things as well or instead of. unless the mangaka publicly says "yeah, i was really inspired by this other story" we won't know what their intent was. this is just what i happen to be thinking when i read it.

I feel like all these tropes were already very popular in older yuri stories, waaay before Bloom Into You. The tropes you listed can all easily be found in say, Strawberry Panic lol. What Bloom Into You did well was give a more realistic and deep portrayal to these tropes. Like you said, it's how Bloom into You was executed that made it good, but yeah, hard disagree on these being tropes created by/made popular by Bloom Into You.

I don't really feel like this series is similar to Bloom Into You at all. It has a lot of common tropes as well (I mean what school girl yuri series doesnt?), but aside from the unrequited best friend role (which a lot of series have), this has a completely different theme, story and character relationship. I actually feel like Honami doesn't resemble Sayaka at all aside from the "seemingly unrequited love" part. I think people just think of Sayaka first because Bloom Into You is a lot of this generations' first introduction to a proper "school girl yuri" series.

I actually think it's kinda funny how you can tell what generation people became yuri fans by the examples of series they first think of. Just like how the first series that came to my mind when thinking of those tropes was Strawberry Panic (unfortunately hahahahaha).

that's not what codified means. of course these individual tropes always existed because characters with these characteristics have always existed in this genre. a trope becomes codified when an influential work takes it and makes it popular. that's what I'm saying happened her. those individual tropes in combination are popular right now because yagakimi was influential. this is what i'm talking about: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Trope_Codifier series like evangelion and sailor moon, that type of thing. they weren't the first of their genre and yet they still codified tropes that are used to this day. i kind of doubt yagakimi will be quite as influential as those two because yuri is probably more niche than mecha and magical girl.

and you don't have to have all the individual characteristics of a trope character to be participating in their trope. like, if honami just literally had all of the same characteristics as sayaka that would be plagiarism lol. instead, i feel like the mangaka went "let's do yagakimi, but we'll focus on the play arc, and instead of a play it's a movie, and instead of meeting in high school sayaka and touko are childhood friends, and they're all in the same year now." that's basically what i see.

also, don't assume i'm a newb because my account is less than a year old and i'm focused on a story that came out recently lol. my first yuri anime was also strawberry panic and i watched it in like 2009 or something. i've been using this site for more than a decade now. the reason my account is so young is because i lost the password to my old account and i have no desire to retrieve it.

will you also deny that strawberry panic ripped everything from marimite? the difference between yagakimi and strawberry panic is that yagakimi isn't a soap opera and is actually good (seriously, i tried to rewatch it a while back and couldn't get through even half of it).

last edited at Mar 29, 2021 3:41PM

new tropes have definitely been codified.

Honestly I don't think this is true at all. Bloom Into You is a well written and deep series but it doesn't do anything thematically that other series haven't done in the past. What it does is tie a lot of those preexisting themes together and does them well in the span of a single narrative. This is not a bad thing, stories do not need to be unique to be good and/or enjoyable. Indeed, they don't even need to be well executed either.

i'm not talking about themes really. i agree, bloom into you doesn't like, revolutionize storytelling with its themes or anything. i think at its core the themes are pretty clear and straightforward, and i think the way they're executed on is what makes the story so good, is what gives it such complexity and depth. it's those tropes that i'm talking about, the sayaka character, a watchful best-friend who's one leg of the love triangle and whose love is doomed to go unrequited. the touko and yuu characters, they have an uncertain dynamic for most of the story--and sure that's common enough, this is literally a staple of romance stories. but they're specific in that it's a senpai/kohai relationship, there's love at first sight (basically), one of them doesn't really understand love, and the other has trauma and doesn't want her love to be reciprocated. those last two are the barrier to their relationship, that's where their character arcs are.

my issue is that it feels like a lot of the stories i've read recently have main characters with the tropes of touko and yuu without really understanding why they worked so well in bloom into you. it just feels surface level, like a pale imitation. the main one i'm thinking of here is whispering you a love song, which i admittedly haven't been keeping up with lately. from the first chapters of that story all i could think of was how similar those main characters are to touko and yuu. (and there's a sayaka character too.) and then the story just... didn't seem to really get it. it just felt like it took those tropes to try to tell a story similar to bloom into you without understanding that tropes are only surface level.

i'm not trying to say that all of the yuri that's been taking inspiration from bloom into you is bad or that taking inspiration is bad. there are some that i really like, actually. it doesn't feel like come rain or shine takes many of those obvious touko, yuu, or sayaka tropes, but it still reminds me of bloom into you, because i think arata iri gets what made it so good (she definitely read it)--it's the fundamental stuff that's key to romance stories, the themes and complimentary character arcs. the rest is window dressing.

and on the other hand, a monster wants to eat me feels like it more obviously takes from the bloom into you character tropes, but i've still been thoroughly enjoying it. maybe it's because of the beauty and the beast factor and the monsters, or maybe it's because it gets it--right now it's a bit too early to tell.

but yeah, this is just something i've been noticing in yuri (the yuri that gets translated at least) and i felt like commenting on it this time. like, this story is taking from the obvious character tropes AND rushing all the way to the play arc within the first 3 chapters. it's taking so much from bloom and just speeding it up. i don't even know these people yet. it makes me worried that it doesn't understand that it's the broader strokes that actually matter. it's obviously still too early to tell right now, but i just felt like talking about it.

i dunno, maybe my head is up my ass--i'm a philosophy major, that's par for the course for us.

i think someone is eventually going to have to write a thinkpiece about bloom into you's influence on yuri as a genre because almost every new series I've read in the past year now seems to resemble it in some way. new tropes have definitely been codified.

i'm conflicted about this. on the one hand, bloom into you is a masterpiece and i get why you'd want to take inspiration from it, but on the other hand, i think a lot of this new wave of yuri is wearing their inspiration on their sleeves in a way that doesn't work for me. like, if i wanted to read bloom into you again i'd just do that--i actually do do that, quite often, because it's a really good story. but i want new things to read too.

they never use their first names so i had trouble remembering who was who at first lol

cats do usually smell really good for some reason. i too have cat-sniffed.

Will she groundpound everyone?

Is no one able to stop this rampage of seduction?

last edited at Dec 12, 2020 5:50AM

does pekora really dislike strawberries? ...who dislikes strawberries? they're strawberries!

To be fair, Eli is the tachi most of the time so I don’t know where you get that perception. I honestly wish there were more fanfics and art with Nozomi as the tachi but this works just fine.

Tachi??

"seme" but for lesbians.

and the lesbian equivalent of "uke" is "neko" i think.

literally nobody in this manga is happy

i love it

Ah, an old favorite. Miracles do happen. I was a like senior in high school last time this was updated

Thanks, lililicious. I hope you guys’ll finish it one day

last edited at Oct 7, 2020 3:21AM

how abrupt. way too few pages to tell this kind of story imo

I come to a nice ElixUmi pic and this is what I find, someone annoyed that someone else—*gasp*—commented in Spanish! Amazing. What is this middle school “you can’t sit with us” bullshit lol

o boi

holy fuck

i really love this mangaka normally

but holy fuck

not what i was looking for right now tbh

A good one, this

Top tier crack ship, I love it

aww, she's showing her tongue and fang

i like the showa records club, sue me. they’re definitely ending up together

i do wonder how nekozaki’s gonna process that kiss tho. i bet she’ll misinterpret it

^^ What surprised me most is that they went straight to touching without even kissing (as far as I know).

Pekomiko is my favorite of the ones here

Not everything is about being trans

says who, the fiction interpretation police? you’re late to that discussion anyway, so why sulk now?

her mom holding the knife at the end feels vaguely threatening

i don't really remember the moment i figured out i wasn't ever gonna like boys, but media definitely played a role in it for me too. back in the era of the 10-minute video length limit on youtube i'd watch bootlegs of queer film in chunks. But I'm a Cheerleader, Bound, Fingersmith, D.E.B.S., Water Lillies, stuff like that.

Searching "girls kissing" on youtube--everyone did that, right?