So Shinmai Shimai no Futari Gohan being displayed in the Yuri section of the bookstore wasn't a mistake...

Also, sadly they name some works that are must reads that haven't been translated yet, can't wait.

I think it's the opposite, how depressing would it be if we had already read all their recommended new titles?

Just saw an instagram video of a straight classmate from high school kissing her friend in exactly that fashion at the new years countdown. As much as I want more romance to be present in this series, you can't make any rash assumptions

Well, uh, considering the rest of the manga it's really not that rash of an assumption.

Mmm, I think quite a few of the girls seem like they're in more of a "just a stage", sexual exploration sort of relationships. Like, even the other characters seem to draw a distinction between what most of them have and then what Ai and Chie have.

Yukino gets waaaaay to much hate. The only thing I disliked about her was that time she Slept with that one guy and that's it. I don't really mind her. She isn't as mature as Setsuko Y'know. She's 18 ( which is the age when teens start doing shit they'll regret later in life ).

I didn't hate her for sleeping with the guy. Her entire conception of her self and her plans for the future were based on her assumption that she was straight. Like, even the fact that she's never really been attracted to men is just explained to her by Japan's cult of female purity, she just assumes that one day she'll meet her future boyfriend and everything will finally click into place.

Sleeping with the guy is a move of desperation, she's not attracted to him. But she's in a really bad place emotionally, and she basically tries to force herself heterosexual... And of course, it doesn't work. It's her lowest moment, but after that she does start to come to terms with herself.

It also kinda demonstrates her changing view of her relationship with Setsuko. When she has sex with the guy iirc she still hasn't really come to terms with them being a couple, in the same way that a man and woman would be a couple. Their relationship is kind of undefined and fleeting - at least to Yukino, who just can't really conceive of two women being a real couple, or of Setsuko being willing to commit in that way. So her sleeping with someone else, especially with a man, is not exactly cheating, because she doesn't know what Setsuko is to her, she doesn't think there's any future there. But later on Yukino does feel guilty over it, because now she thinks of their relationship as real, that they're a couple and that Yukino cheated.

So now that Flip Flappers is finished?

Does it yuri? Or just teasing? Or perhaps baiting?

Much of the show's symbolism suggests that Cocona has romantic feelings for Papika. Every non-yuri goggled review I have seen of the show acknowledges this. It all hinges on what happens in the last episode.

I think the trend of shows like Izetta where the driving force of the show is a clearly romantic relationship which is somehow never fully legitimized on screen is ridiculous (some people may disagree with me on that). I really hope Flip Flappers avoids that fate.

I hold out hope that this sort of thing is the baby steps that condition the audience to accept more from shows in the future. Even if that's not the case, Flip Flappers in particular seems very invested in presenting yuri tropes in a pretty fresh way, and not making fun of them in the process, so I'd call that progress in itself.

It definitely had two episodes that were a lot more... thematically clear? than most other anime yuri. Most traditional yuri, especially anime yuri, is basically just limited to either "girl on girl is hot" or "girls liking girls is cute and doesn't threaten the otaku's possessiveness of their waifus".

But between the Class-S yuri horror episode, and then the multiple Papika episode, it felt like it was regularly and purposefully presenting Cocona as a queer girl coming of age and struggling with her attractions. Both episodes tempt Cocona with what she wants - a romantic relationship with Papika - but only within limitations. In the yuri episode their relationship just keeps circling, lots of sexual tension but no chance of things ever actually advancing. And then the multiple Papika episode, where Cocona's offered a whole bunch of different relationships she could have with different Papika's, starting with a cute little sister, moving to a cute boy, and finally a female seductress. She turns down the seductress because she's not her Papika, not because she's female, and importantly when that Papika says that she likes Cocona, Cocona wants to know what kind of "like" she means.

That's the kind of follow up question that traditional yuri never, ever asks! It depends entirely on NOT asking that question - just like Hibike Euphonium this season, yuri will suggest romantic feelings but always end up keeping things ambivalent, always at a point where they can just say, "Oh, they're just really close friends." And it's exactly that ambivalence that Cocona keeps worrying about, that she's struggling with.

I'm usually more fond of the more political, outright lesbian yuri stories, cute girls blushing at each other gets fucking old after a while. And it feels like those are usually written by queer women.

Although I do have quite the fondness for Virgins Empire, and Kishi Torajima's works more generally. He's a funny mix of writing, on the one hand he's got blatant male gaze, and constant sexual objectification of his characters... And yet he can also write with a lot of sensitivity and empathy when he wants to, and he captures that nervously jokey teenage flirting as well as anyone.

It's an interesting setup, and I'm interested to see where the author takes this, but it kinda feels like it suffers from its short chapters. Especially the first chapter, they have to cram in the whole setup for the story and it just ends up coming across as a series of plot points getting rapidly ticked off, rather than being fueled organically by the character's decisions. Hopefully it slow down a bit and we start getting more characterization.

They should keep things like this for a while, I'm sad that they didn't show anything about Dva! she's just making comercials?

D.Va's all about gettin' paid

The thing that drives me nuts with this season is that Season 1 had already felt like it really, really moved past yuri-baiting. There's a sense of physical attraction and flirting that most yuri-bait shows never really have. The show has het folks having het romances, but Kumiko is never really part of that, and then Shuuichi exists pretty much only as a foil to show how uninterested Kumiko is in him and by contrast how she's very into Reina. He's into her, and so he invites her to the festival and to practice music with him. She declines both, and does them instead with Reina.

Right up until S2E1 the camera really follows Kumiko's eyes as she's obviously checking out Reina, everything is designed to be read as a romantic relationship. When they're alone together they're even more physically intimate, it's a great little suggestive detail that KyoAni didn't just add in on accident.

It also worked really well thematically. Kumiko's whole story arc is season 1 is rejecting just going along and fitting in with the group, to pursue what she wants even if it costs an upperclassman their seat in the band or causes hurt feelings. If you read Kumiko as gay, then she's undergoing a similar journey regarding her sexuality. Unlike a lot of All-Girls school yuri where homosexuality is kind of the only available flavor of romance, all of Kumiko's friends are straight, there's a boy who likes her, there's other straight couples in band. But instead of going along with all of that, she pursues Reina.

And then it suddenly just all stopped. Shots of Kumiko checking out Reina or vice versa were no longer used. It's not even a case of, "Just kidding it was bait all along!" They've completely changed how they portray their interactions and feelings from season one.

So what happened, did the publishers of the novel complain and tell them to stop making it so damn gay? Did KyoAni just lose their nerve or was there a staff change in season 2 who wanted to take things in a different direction? I really don't get it.

last edited at Dec 14, 2016 8:02PM

I dunno, I think the problem right now is that Wei Wei is just trying to enjoy her hot young girlfriend without actually making an emotional commitment to her. She's obviously been hurt pretty badly, she's at least partially in the closet, and her girlfriend broke up and married a man.

Her dating a kid just for fun isn't the way to resolve her pain, she needs to be able to actually have a real relationship, and from the last chapter it seems like she's still kind of avoiding getting too emotionally intimate with Ding Yi, even if maybe she's not even doing it consciously.

Plus of course Ding Yi's got her own shit going on, which we still know almost nothing about, but obviously she's keeping all of this a secret from her own family as well. She could very well be hoping that Wei Wei is going to take her away from her family.

I for one appreciate Bloom Into You's strong anti-girls-getting-hit-by-trains stance

But Touko's sister was japanese trucked :P

Hey the trucking industry employees a lot of people.

How would you like to tell those drivers' families that daddy doesn't have a job anymore just because he's been running over Japanese schoolgirls?

I for one appreciate Bloom Into You's strong anti-girls-getting-hit-by-trains stance

I really like this chapter. It being about lesbians helps a lot.

For once, a lesbian couple.

Though it had to be the "horribly abused by ex-husband so turned gay" trope.

The older one may have been gay from the start eventually.

To be honest it sounded a lot more like the "married lesbian in the closet who finally became true to herself" than turning gay from abuse.

I'm leaning towards this, since the text implies a delay between her leaving her husband and meeting Kayo.

That and it said that even aside from the abuse, she never liked the sex--now maybe that's cause he was an abusive jerk, or maybe it's cause she wasn't actually into men (or both).

Anyway, for me the important thing is, it was a pretty sweet love story. Nice chapter.

Yeah, it seems silly to assume that the author is pulling out that sort of tired trope, when the series as a whole has been about a man coming out of the closet and getting divorced. He didn't suddenly get turned gay by his wife, either!

She has a real name, but Tomoko mentally dubbed her "Emoji" because her face looks like, well, an Emoji.

IIRC they have a radio show where they'll do listener-submitted scenes

I mean, it still kinda means something that they're choosing to do those sketches, and that the Japanese fanbase is obviously not buying the "oh they're just close friends" handwave either. But it's not canon in any way.

KumiRei was pretty gay...and then there is Taki again. Since they erased almost all Shuiichi parts, they should just remove the Reina-Taki ones too. They could keep Taki's back story, but damn this yuri -het exchange from one minute to another is just bad. They are trying too hard to prove this is just a phase.

It is seriously annoying me. Season 1 felt so fantastically genuine between Kumiko and Reina, now they've totally retreated from that into just the occasional vague yuri cliche.

It's especially aggravating when you then go check out Yuri on Ice which is just unapologetically gay. It's actually a lot like S1 of Hibike, a story about a person's personal growth, with a side helping of great gay romance. The difference being that in the end KyoAni only cares about marketing their cute girls, while Yamamoto Saya is interested in actually making meaningful art.

Shoot, at this point I have more hope for Flip Flappers than I do for Hibike Euphonium.

Boku wa Mari no Naka felt like the author was just kind of done with it. I know he had already started a new series, and you can really notice that he's obviously investing less time on Mari in the later chapters. More blank backgrounds, bigger frames, and the plot progress starts really dragging. It just kinda seems like the author wanted to do his big plot twist, and once that was obvious he was ready to be done with it.

I do still read Mari as totally gay though. Like, in the early chapters we learn about her having a ton of anxiety over various aspects of her life, especially the stress of judgment from her peers, and her attempts to keep up her perfect appearance. That she then has a romantic encounter with another girl could be read as the final straw, she already is stressed out at trying to fit in, now she's learning about her sexuality and realizing she has to hide that too? We know she had already been turning down boys who had asked her out, and Isao also finds girly mags in Mari's closet. You could read it as one reason why Mari envied Isao so much, that his sexuality was catered to while she has to keep hers hidden.

The show mostly stays as just a cringe comedy. But the manga's sense of humor has gotten a lot gentler, and things are better for Tomoko now. It's kind of gone from only Tomoko feeling awkward and confused to Tomoko making a larger cast ALSO feel awkward and confused. Emoji is one of those girls, Tomoko has unintentionally triggered some real complicated feelings in her, all without the slightest clue that she's done anything.

There are earlier yuri manga you can look at that reference same-sex marriage being legal in various European countries, but it's always pointed out kind of wistfully, that some random country far away is more accepting, there's no realistic plan to go there.

But the US isn't just a military superpower, it's a cultural one as well, especially in East Asia. Students study English, pop musicians include English lyrics because they're cool and they export well across the region, American movies and TV shows are watched and enjoyed. America is both cool and familiar.

And really you can look at the evolution of the way that yuri manga talks about sexual identity as tracking a great deal with the growth of gay civil rights in America. Classic yuri often has that star-crossed lovers vibe, that their love is beautiful but inherently tragic, or it goes the other way and just treats it as a childish fancy that will be grown out of eventually. But now magazines like Yuri Hime have stories that are increasingly confident in viewing their characters sexuality as an identity, that they are writing lesbian love stories, and their love is equally valid as a het romance. Even the Japanese term for lesbian is an English loanword.

Asia paid attention to the growing visibility of gay people in the US and the dialogues in the US about gay identity during the gay marriage debate, and when gay marriage was legalized nationwide they really noticed. That's not just some far-away country in Europe they don't know anything about, they're familiar with America! They consume the culture, they travel there, they send the kids to college there. I don't have the link to hand but even in Korea, which is more socially conservative than Japan, the press was interviewing a Korean gay rights activist and he said how important the US legalizing gay marriage was to his own movement. He said that Koreans want to be like the US because the US is cool, so legalizing gay marriage would send a big signal that maybe it's actually OK, especially to younger people.

There's been some bits that make we wonder if Cocona and Papika have some greater connection, but "Cocona might be gay" has been a strong enough theme that I'm not too worried about it (seriously, that bit with dress Papika alone...)

My main fear for the show is actually that they'll never develop Papika beyond a generic manic pixie dream girl

It is kind of interesting just by itself though that Papika is a MPDG for another girl. Not something we get very often.

Kuzu no Honkai is kind of half fucking terrible, and half actually really interesting. The plot itself is dumb and soapy and has way too much pointless scheming just for the sake of people being terrible.

The interesting part is the way it approaches HS romance as much more about A) being horny and wanting to get laid, and B) as a way of seeking status among your peers, being cool and being perceived to be sexually active and desirable, and the feeling of self esteem that comes from being desired. The main couple aren't really into each other, but they're both cool and so they start dating even though they're actually into other, unavailable people. And then from there they start a sexual relationship as well, not because true wuv but just because it feels good and they're horny teenagers.

The main girl's best female friend is in love with her, and after some stuff happens they start having sex. And she actually thinks that it feels a lot better than when she's with her phony boyfriend. But she apologizes and breaks it off because she's still not into her friend, and doesn't want to hurt her, she feels guilty for leading her on just to feel good and feel wanted.

So on the one hand it's not yuri, but on the other hand the main female character definitely seems to be bi, her friend -with-benefits being female is not why she breaks things off. Though I haven't read the more recent chapters since then so things may have changed, I dunno.

I think it's just going to depend a lot on the adaptation, and how in depth they're going to explore her sexuality. It's an important, if occasionally fuzzy, theme in the manga, but I can't imagine the anime is going to be quite so explicit about things.

last edited at Nov 17, 2016 6:53PM

I did enjoy Shuuichi in season 1, because he largely functioned as a prop to demonstrate how uninterested in boys Kumiko was, in contrast to how totally into Reina she was.

The first episode of this season was so damn gay I was sure they were actually going full bore with it, but since then I've been getting increasingly frustrated with KyoAni.

Weirdly I hated the extra shipping that Hibike threw in the last episode. When it's just Kumiko and Reina being all gay for each other in the middle of their otherwise obviously straight classmates, it makes it feel more like a genuinely queer story. But when more girls are getting romantic overtones to their relationships it's just a sign that none of it actually means anything, KyoAni just think girls liking girls is cute (but don't worry they're just friends!).

One of the things that made season 1 feel really unique is that het relationships were around, and yet Kumiko couldn't be less interested in being in one. Her friends even thought Shuuichi was cute, and she's just like "lol nope" to the idea of going out with him, and whenever anyone talked about cute boys she was plainly at sea - but her narration repeatedly notices good looks in women. So not only did she feel like an actually lesbian character, but her characterization had more to it than that, she's got a whole story about her realizing how much she loves music and that she wants to work her ass off to be great at it. When mainstream yuri is so often infantilizing towards its female characters it was awesome to see something like that.

Yeah I don't think it's fair to class this in with "Will they or won't they" stories that just depend on constant misunderstandings and coincidences to keep the story in a state of status quo. Ssamba's really interested in depicting in close detail the growth of a relationship, and the two of them working out what it is they want from the other.

Like, they feel like a way more real couple than tons of other fictional couples who are officially together, and their relationship has deepened a TON since they first met, as well as their understanding of themselves.

Some of it is also just that Ssamba wants to write a story about restrained desire too, I mean she loooves Carol and The Haidmaiden, and she's plainly going for a similar sort of vibe. This is not some, "Oh we're just friends, tee hee!" bait and switch!

I'm sorry I never wanted to be rude (in fact I'm an ace) I came at that conclusion by the lack of desire towards his partner and many other reasons that I saw, maybe she's homoromantic o she's not
(I'm not good in English, sorry if I made a mistake )

You weren't being rude. I just think that we really don't know what sexuality she is because she doesn't even really know.

It's cool if you can relate being an ace to her experience, but personally, IMHO, I think it's best to hold off. Depression can really do a number on one's sexual drive. (from personal experience I know this)

Yeah, she's dealing with big time depression and also social anxiety, neither of which are very helpful to the libido. And she's hardly the only person who's ever been too nervous to get aroused during a first sexual experience.

She seems pretty sure that she's into women sexually. It's just that sex isn't actually what she was needing, she needs friendship and intimacy a lot more right now.

Like, the thing to me is that if you read them as just friends you're just left with a ton of questions. If you read them as yeah, they're totally dating, or at least in sort of that teenage not-quite-officially-dating-but-definitely-a-thing relationship? They totally make sense. Kumiko's got her friends, and she acts one way with them, and she's got her girlfriend, and she acts more intimately with her. Remove like, two lines from Reina about Taki-senseii and the entire rest of the story works on that interpretation. Add in those two lines, and Kumiko's (lack of) reaction to them, and it's like... What the hell is this relationship exactly?

last edited at Oct 13, 2016 1:55AM