It’s so awesome to see a yuri manga with a complex relationship between realistic, human adults. Don’t get me wrong, the cutesy stuff is really nice, but I feel that one of the big challenges for lesbians (and queer people in general), especially in places like Japan where being open is neither accepted nor common, is the lack of realistic representation of what one’s experiences might be like. I remember reading an article a while back proposing that one of the great burdens homophobia and heteronormative society places on queer people is preventing us from openly exploring romance and our sexualities the way straight people are encouraged to, thereby denying us an important chance to learn how to establish and maintain healthy relationships, and I believe the lack of accessible, realistic queer media compounds that problem. One of the valuable things about media of all types is that it allows us to learn from others’ experience or provides a scaffolding for counterfactual thinking, giving us the opportunity to have low-risk, low-cost experiences for ourselves that help prepare us for the future, or ready us for nuances of life that are difficult to pick up on one’s own; with that in mind, the ability to read about or see romantic relationships between people like you is crucial to help the romantic and sexual development of queer people at any age, even more so when we don’t have ready opportunity to experience things for ourselves or talk to others like us. Thus, I think this work is not only excellent and interesting on the level of an artistic pursuit (which of course has its own value, but there’s been lots of discussion about that), I also think it has a real value in terms of human well-being, too; this kind of work, which explores the positives and negatives of a specific lesbian relationship in a concrete way (that is, the scenario isn’t abstract “anime bullshit” that represents a cool idea, but is rather a depiction of the human condition), meets an important and rarely-fulfilled need for realistic representation, and seeing that kind of thing really gives me hope. I’m really grateful for what tmfly is doing here, and I can’t wait to see where the story leads!
