It has been quite a while since I read a yuri manga that honestly and succinctly addressed the issues LGBT members face in a conservative and patriarchical society like Japan…
As for the story itself, it is the perfect fantasy yuri set-up with a high school lesbian moving to a new place with a beautiful woman who could immediately be her love interest, where everything is convenient and falls into place. But the way this set-up is completely subverted right out the gate is done so well.
This entire comment is exactly what I was looking for. This manga is, at the moment, breaking new ground and setting up to be something very special.
I can’t imagine how people would think this story is cliche. Three chapters has been enough to demonstrate that “effectively homeless gay highschool girl” is not just a window dressing, it and everything it entails is being treated seriously, and if the rest of the setting is (arguably) fantastical, this part absolutely feels realistic, and that makes all the difference. It’s like saying Madoka or Evangelion are just a mess of genre-standard tropes, or that the romance in the new She-Ra is old hat, predictable stuff. We can see that’s obviously false because of what it does to those conventions, the places where it refuses to suspend disbelief or tells a romance story that does not get to be told in popular media—all those things create new, very different stories out of the trappings we’re used to.
This story is directly challenging the established yuri convention of women in love with women who are very carefully made not gay, and all the effort that typically goes into avoiding any societal commentary. Call it escapist fantasy, call it squeamish, I’ve been getting pretty frustrated with Japanese yuri lately because of how it feels like there’s this layer of film separating it from reality. A lot of the Chinese and Korean modern-setting yuri has this more grounded sense of reality and verisimilitude, because the gay women are fucking gay, whether they’re on lesbian internet communities, have read shit like Citrus and make references to it, talk about the dangers of falling for straight girls, or literally just use the word lesbian at all, ever, at any point in their series.
Nearly all Japanese yuri series I’ve read on this site seem to exist in a world where there is zero queer community, zero place for self-identification as someone who is attracted to women—where all the trappings of a heteronormative society exist, like comparing one’s love interest to boys or a presented scarcity of female/female couples, or where characters start out unaware that women can even be together. You know who doesn’t do that? Still Sick, So do you want to go out or…?, and Even if it was just once, and do you know what else they have in common? They fucking slap, first off, but also they are innovative and soulful, and I still think about them months or years after I’ve been reading them.
I’m hype as fuck for this manga, and if you’re not, that’s cool, but I’m not hearing it when people start talking this “clichéd” shit like it’s not brave as hell for the artist to defy genre conventions so starkly and bring up real societal ills that seemingly nobody else will speak to. We can never know how a series will go ahead of time but so far the author has demonstrated a commitment to respecting the scenario and talking real shit with us about queerness and homophobia, and I’m here for it.
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