Finished watching Birdie Wing season 1. IDK if anyone else is planning to watch it but haven't at this point but have some spoiler tags anyways, I would certainly recommend going into it blind if you have the chance.
I got baited in an entirely different way. Where did my illegal underground golfing go??? That was peak Anime, and I was here for it. Now I feel like I got tricked into watching a normal school sports anime. It's still seriously great, don't get me wrong, it's not like I dislike sports anime or anything, but that kinda moved it from "best new anime I've watched in years" to...well, it's still pretty high up there on account of lack of competiton, but man. It's like the writer(s) were thinking "what kind of unique hook can I use to get people interested in this story" but the hook was way cooler than the story they were hooking us into. The whole thing with Eve graduating to normal society was very nice and all, but I think I would have preferred it to be the "happily ever after" ending.

I don't think it really matters how close she was. Even if I barely knew someone, if they came sobbing to me like this, the only way I could ever say something so callous is if I was thinking "I hate this person and never want to speak to them again".

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)

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, not a romance. That's why I said it depends on how you define the word.

I don't have a literature degree; I'm just a person who reads, critiques the things I read, and sometimes writes a bit of ff. That said, as that ordinary person, I don't find any kind of categorisation where "tragedy" and "romance" are exclusive categories to be useful in any way at all. I'd suggest that tragedy is on a dichotomy only with comedy; and that no matter where a story falls on the sliding scale of tragedy/comedy it can be romantic or it can be something else in addition.

Regardless of what the Romance Writers of America might say, if you tell me that Your Lie in April isn't a romance story, I'm going to think that's not particularly conducive to having a conversation or understanding each other's perspective.

I would also venture to guess that a large subset of the romance audience wants to read about an "ideal" relationship they can self-insert into, and bluntly depicting the difficulties that arise from (most/all) real-world relationships ruins that wish fulfillment aspect.

This is a good point. I enjoy reading about messy relationships in general, but I do have a red line; it's a particularly unpleasant subject for me, so I don't really want to read stories about cheating. Unfortunately for me, that strikes out a number of stories about established couples.

I will say, though, that this point about tension/conflict in a story after having an established couple circles back to the very start of the conversation. There's a third path, where you both have an established couple, have an "ideal" relationship, and still have tension/conflict: by not making the story entirely about romance. That's what I want to see, and as of yet don't think I've ever seen it in a single anime. In Lycoris Recoil, if Takina and Chisato get together, that doesn't change anything about the story's conflict - the tension was never "will they won't they", it was "government assassins vs. terrorists". We even got a homosexual male relationship, all I freaking want is for them to do exactly that thing they just did but with women now.

I would not agree at all that there is "no shortage of yuri content". You always have to apply a proper standard first. Compared to het and BL works, yuri has an insignificantly small pool to draw from.

Hmm, I'm not sure this is true. I have no idea about manga because I don't generally keep up with het manga, but there's a small enough amount of anime each season that I try to keep tabs on everything airing, and in terms of anime I think that the pool of "yuri" is actually quite close to het, if you're counting subtext and bait, because every season has numerous CGDCT, idol, etc anime and I think the majority of them do yuri bait.

"Romance" is a genre with fairly strict expectations, one of which is the ending must be the two leads getting together and "living happily ever after."

Romeo and Juliet might voice an objection here. It's certainly a common trope in the entire anime/manga/LN sphere, but as an overarching genre of storytelling I think this expectation would not be grounded in reality.

It is of course possible to write a story about a couple who's already together, but it requires you to find some source of tension and conflict other than the "will they/won't they,"

Yeah, I feel like this is the most trivial caveat ever... have you ever been in a relationship? Relationships are never "happily ever after with zero tension for the rest of your life". If anything, it's the opposite. Merely depicting a relationship provides boundless opportunities for conflict and drama.

You can even see this difficulty in Lonely Girl, which I do enjoy, but which kind of stalled out and turned into full slice-of-life once they started officially dating.

Hmm, I don't agree, though? I think it's done a perfectly fine job of continuing the story, with stuff like tension about how much time they spend together, their plans for the future, coming out to their friends. Mind you, it's a fluffy, low-drama story where all of the issues are generally resolved quickly and happily, but it was also like that before they started dating, so I don't think that's really related to the topic at hand.

Also,

as yuri fans in particular are desperate for content.

It's funny, isn't it? Because there's no shortage of "yuri" content. There is absolutely tons of "yuri". But there's so little that actually delivers, leaving us all hungry for more. For lack of a better word, being a fan of yuri feels like being in a perpetual state of being blueballed for years and years and years without end. Probably why my patience for what I perceive to be bait is so low at this point... especially since, in the manga sphere if not in anime, we actually have made a lot of progress over the decades in how forward writers are willing to be.

last edited at Sep 27, 2022 5:37PM

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.

You are just saying the conventions of romance stories drag down romance stories' pacing. I am shocked, shocked I say!

It doesn't have to be that way, though. Just because it's the norm doesn't mean it's not worth complaining about. Lonely Girl is by far one of my biggest favourites in recent years, precisely because it has none of that. That's not to say it doesn't use many of the tropes we've all become familiar with, but the tropes are usually used to push things forward rather than back. They were already making out and cuddling from the start and we got several entire volumes after they officially started dating. I want more of that in my life. Like, 100000x more of that. You can tell romance stories about people who are a couple. It's possible! It really is!

Lots of replies to stuff I wrote but I have nothing new to add to the conversation because my mind is currently being blown by Birdie Wing. I have no idea how I overlooked this one.

So we're in full agreement that this was done for marketability of merchandise, you just have a more optimistic view that it was done with more benevolent intentions. But I'd contend that the intentions don't really matter. At the end of the day the result is the same, and I can't say I have any respect for writers who place pleasing that particular demographic above everything else. It worked, sure, of course it did. It was the most popular anime of the season, they've got this pandering down to a formula. But that's exactly the problem. Nothing will ever change as long as they keep doing this, again and again and again and again. The fact that male homosexuallity was depicted but that female homosexuality isn't shows that even as they lose their fear of alienating homophobes, they're never going to give up the lucrative market of selling merch to gross otaku who fantasise about schoolgirls. And it's a self-perpetuating cycle: the more they do this, the more they alienate normal people, meaning they have to go even harder to bat for that one demographic, and so on and so forth....

Also, I recommend not forcing yourself to sit through something you dislike!

Well, this is probably good advice, although at this point this basically rules out watching anime for me. Feels like the entire medium has driven off a cliff over the past few years. Every season, it's the exact same thing: the same isekai Gary Stu self-insert slave harem story 5 times per season, these formulaic CGDCT yuri baits that pander perfectly to the otaku who buy lots of merch, and a couple of het romance stories with a loaf of bread for a male protagonist. It's a real tragedy because I think anime has the potential to be the most amazing medium for telling stories: the perfect coalescence of not only art and animation but also music, voice acting, special effects, and everything else makes it so that when anime is good, it's better than what any other medium can accomplish. But it's been years since I've seen anything taking advantage of the strengths of the genre. Now it's just nothing but waifus.

last edited at Sep 25, 2022 11:30AM

Sure thing. MadoMagi is subtext. LycoReco is bait. There's certainly no confusing it when they explicitly had a canon male couple - this is not a series that feels the need to render homosexuality to reading between the lines.

it's very hard to me to see this anime as bait.

It totally was actively, intentionally baiting, though. It's one thing to show a close female friendship and entirely another to do what LycoReco did, which was something more akin to "here's some pseudo-lesbians for men to draw lewd art of together, but also they're not actually gay so make sure you buy figures and pillowcases of your imaginary schoolgirl girlfriend." I really can't see it as anything other than "yuri for straight men".

Overall all I think the show is amazing and since I never had expectation of them confirming anything, I'm perfectly fine with how the show ended

This was my other problem, I actively hated the show already and the potential for yuri was the only reason I kept watching. The entire anime was nothing but dissonance and tonal whiplash. You had scenes of schoolgirls being executed literally back to back with sickeningly cutesy cute girls doing cute things d'awwwww. There are anime that pull off this kind of thing well, like Madoka Magica, because they give weight to the darker scenes and make them seriously impact the characters. What happens in ep3 of MadoMagi is something that the girls spend literally the entire rest of the anime contending with emotionally, and it influences their decisions. Here the girls behave like perfectly happy-go-lucky schoolgirls from beginning to end, as if their friends and coworkers weren't being murdered by terrorists on the daily.

Also, despite being well-animated, the action was terribly written. The level of plot armour is just objectively bad writing, for both the protagonist and antagonists. Nameless Lyco gets hit by a car, she's a goner. Chisato gets hit by a car, not even a scratch. Majima tanks literally dozens of bullets that incapicitate anyone else after one or two shots, and is unscathed by a point-blank rocket explosion. The key to suspension of disbelief is internal consistency - it's okay to write a goofy action anime with cartoon-tier violence, but if you do, it should be consistent. As it is, the action has no weight to it and yet sometimes it ends with schoolgirls being brutally murdered and at other times it doesn't, with the only consistency to it being "named characters are invincible".

Lycoris Recoil finale
fucking yuri bait

Chisato/Takina dynamic was the only thing this terrible anime had going for it so I watched til the end in the faint hope that it would redeem itself, but no. We can't have that. Oh, sure, we can have a homosexual male relationship, of course we can, but the schoolgirl main characters need to be ~available~ for the horny male demographic to fantasise about being their waifu. Just one fucking time I'd like to see a canon yuri relationship in a story that isn't explicitly about the yuri. I'm so fucking tired, I don't know why I even watch anime anymore.

Does something like that happens in the novels ? These Chinese works always make me fearful of them remaining subtext due to censorship laws and whatnot

Despite this being Dynasty forum's favourite factoid, there are no Chinese laws censoring yuri stories. Several years ago a conservative Chinese publisher chose to censor a comic, as any private business has the legal right to choose what not to publish in any country, and a game of telephone combined with rabid anti-Chinese bias led to this misinformation spreading like wildfire. Please stop contributing to it.

last edited at Sep 19, 2022 10:08AM

so happy ending is IMHO close to fantasy or only happens in manga

"I didn't get a happy ending, so happy endings are fantasy" is a weird take. I'm sorry things didn't go well for you, but I had zero problems from coming out, because I wasn't friends with homophobes in the first place. Obviously your mileage will vary, but that's exactly my point; everyone has their own circumstances, so it's strange to say you can't come out without a bad ending.

My Gay Villainess Bully Lover Adopted A Demon Lord, And Now We're Raising Her Together?!

...is what the title of this novel should have been.

Sure context matters.

If your hobby is having sex with other people, then you should be in an open relationship or a poly one. There is a context in which this is not cheating.

Right, that's the thing. There is no universal standard for cheating. Cheating is whatever breaks the boundaries set in a relationship. And if you have incompatible boundaries, well, there's going to be some tension... at any rate, my point was that it's silly to call having certain boundaries you don't agree with 'fucking stupid'.

Forget about the sex dolls thing, the first page of the chapter is senpai calling a 2D character cute and kohai calling it cheating.

I agree that if it were only this, those would be some impressively narrow boundaries. However, I think it's pretty clearly meant to be taken in context of a greater whole. This is obviously not the first or only occurence, and judging by her actions in other scenes (buying lewd dakimakura in Ch1, excited over the guy's doll later in the chapter), there's a bigger reason her girlfriend is exasperated with her that goes beyond "she called a 2D character cute".

but calling someone a cheater for their hobby is pretty fucking stupid, and also obviously toxic.

What if your hobby is having sex with other people? Okay, great, we've established hobbies can be cheating. So how about fantasising about having sex with other people? It's not literally cheating, but it's cheating-adjacent, I'd say. Or perhaps just "emotionally cheating". Even if it's a fictional character, it feels pretty messed up to be devoting that kind of emotional energy to the point of buying sex dolls while in a relationship. Obviously if your partner is okay with it go for it, but calling the mere idea of someone being uncomfortable with it "fucking stupid" is the real toxic take here.

Never forget the golden rule: more than one waifu will ruin your laifu.

I truly do not care whether it's a happy or sad ending, the only thing I want from this anime is for it to be canon. I'm hopeful since there's already a yaoi relationship but if it ends up being yuri bait trash I'm going to be so upset

evie no

Does that make me (and most of you I'd wager, who aren't paying a dime) less interested in the story?

Personally, no, but it makes me enjoy it much less.

Remember, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.

I beg to differ! I know this is supposed to be a clever little quip, but boy is it wrong if you think about it for two seconds. There are plenty of things in life that are so bad that they cross over into making my life less happy because they exist. This isn't one of them -- I don't personally hate this manga, I begrudgingly take the bad with the good and there's enough good for me to still be here -- but there are plenty of things I genuinely hate and it doesn't make my criticism of those things less valid if I voice my criticism of them rather than "being indifferent" and not saying anything.

If I say I hate homophobes, and go on at length criticising the ways in which homophobes are bad, and then somebody says "the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference" -- what exactly is that supposed to mean? It means they want me to shut up, is what it actually means.

last edited at Sep 11, 2022 10:08AM

They read like Japanese cops to me. Japanese police are very friendly and helpful, and Japan has a 'problem' of "too many police officers, not enough crime", so they often have time to kill... buying lewd dakimakura covers, I suppose, like any respectable person with time to kill in Akiba.

I do like the hat theory, though. We need more yuri with hats. That's what's great about Touhou, ZUN is a creator who truly understands the importance of girls in hats.

ぷにぷに

People who are saying this is rape I suspect have never had an actual sexual relationship with another human being.

I dearly hope you aren't saying this as in "I routinely force myself on my partner when they say 'I don't want to have sex today'".

??? She's just unemployed? There's plenty of legitimate reasons someone might be unemployed. This is pretty excessively harsh on a girl we still know very little about.

She seems to have been unemployed for multiple years, though, and I think the more telling thing is that she was seemingly ungrateful and didn't bother doing chores even when living at Ruriko's place for free. Then she meets Ruriko again and literally the first thing she does is ask to freeload some more, even though Ruriko is now married. That is... not a good look, to be frank.

Anyway, mikami announced this manga is coming to its end

Huh, I didn't realise it was being published elsewhere than ガンガン. Sad news, since the later chapters are much more consensual, which is why I stuck with this. Would've really liked to see more of their relationship as an official couple adapted.

Isn't your logic a bit circular there? "Rapeyness doesn't make it trash, because rapeyness is normal in trashy smut"...? It's a bit strange to try and come to the defense of the scene while at the same time calling it trashy, which basically means you're agreeing with the criticism...?

This story has/had the potential to be a lot more than trashy smut, so it's no surprise that people are disappointed when they find it doesn't live up to its potential.

last edited at Sep 8, 2022 12:10PM