I found out what I think is a little off with this.
As much as it portrays various realistic LGBT situations, all the people involved are like ideals.
The lesbian couple is gorgeous, Misora is cute as a button, whether as a boy or as a girl, Touma and Tasuku are handsome, the transgender man looks like a handsome man, Anonymous is bewitchingly ambiguous, even the older gay couple looks nice.
As if average (or even ugly) looking LGBT people don't exist. Lesbians are all lipstick lesbians. LGBT people are all nice people who'd never hurt anyone, cross-dressers are perfect looking and puberty has no effect yet. This manga painfully tries to portray LGBT (or every variation of it) as beautiful, inside and outside, people, nice, caring, struggling within an hostile society, but becoming better for it, etc, etc...
That's cool and all, but pretty unrealistic. Gays and lesbians can be nasty, unhinged, manipulative, cheating, average, butch, imperfect. Like everyone else.
This manga idealizes us a bit, so I actually can't take it really seriously because it doesn't match reality that much. And I find it counter productive at some point. It's cool to be supportive and sensitive, but come on: lesbian bitches and nasty gays exist. We are people too, not gods.
This is a problem with representation in general, don't you think?
The "token XXX-character" is mostly portrayed in some sort of extreme - either extremely bad or extremely good. Nuance eventually comes as soon as people from the own community start to write "everyday-life-stories" instead of the "we-struggle-stories" as well as with a steadily growing library in the genre/representational medium.
I personally am not and never really was a fan of the classic Class-S stories, 404: no men found, all girls high school setting that were prevelant in the oddies, and which are still a genre staple in today's vastly wider library of yuri which has fortunatelly grown since the 2010s. A world in which love between girls is written off as "pure" and "innocent" without the theat of marginalisation through society or the "threat" of heteronormativity and eventually setteling for a man always seemed odd and inplausable to me.
On the other hand the ALWAYS-fated-to-be-doomed vibes of even earlier works of the 80s and 90s also seemed unrealistic to me, because homosexual love has historically sometimes, somehow prevailed despite of its surrounding hostile environment.
Now we are in a time of blooming Lillies of all shapes and colours, which I personally more than appreciate.
There are dull works, autobiographical works, overly dreary works, overly joyful works, works obviously written by straight men and works written by queer folks - for good and for ill.
I masochistically love the gritty and dirty, ugly and despicable people and situations portrayed in Gunjo or Boku no Hentai.
I adore the quircky and hilarious antics of those fucking dorks in Bright And Cheery Amnesia or Kase-san.
I'm awestruck by the beauty and mastery of the sequencial art form in Beloved L.
I can't help but roll my eyes at the melodramatic and contrived obstacles put in place before the protagonists of Citrus.
I feel a deep connection and great appreciation for every single one of Nishi Uko's or Shimura Takako's works.
I am intruiged by the little insights autobiographical works give us into LGBTQ+ living in Japan like in Honey & Honey, Our Journey To Lesbian Motherhood or Hanayome wa Motodanshi.
I'm excited about learning more about other cultures and ways of story-telling in non-japanese works such as Their Story, Lily Love or Fluttering Feelings or even western comics such as Skim, Lumberjanes, Gunnerkrigg Court or Go Get a Roomie.
I laugh my ass off while reading Is My Hobby Weird.
Well, what I'm trying to say, I think, is that there is a lot of stuff to appreciate nowadays in yuri, isn't there? And that small steps of progress are made towards satisfying every single yuri-need there is out there.
Maybe one day I'll also finally read a well thought out and researched realistic sci-fi story with an intruiging plot and a believable and diverse cast of characters which have bigger goals in life than getting with the person they like but still portraying individual forms of love and respect for another person through emotional more than physical intimacy.
I'm glad to be part of this exciting journey until then :)
