I don't believe the premise as described in the title by itself is deterministic. If a yuri series with two gyaru protagonists is a slice-of-life story with little to no drama, that is still a creative choice. Even if the gyaru archetype is known for a no-nonsense attitude, that does not mean two characters of this archetype will necessarily agree on things or can resolve every conflict by being honest.

The "gyaru x gyaru" premise also belies the distinct character dynamic of the titular couple. That is, they are both gyaru, but also more than that (just like any good gyaru character). For example, Reina is noted as more shy around people outside of her immediate circle than Yua is, and yet she was the one who asked Yua out. It's implied that she already fancied Yua in their first year when they were in different classes. Their relationship sails pretty smoothly, but it remains convincing because of all these little details in the brief glimpses we see of it.

Other than that, being girls who embrace a more confrontational style of femininity and always stick to their guns is just how I would describe the general, most surface-level appeal of the gyaru character; though to straight people their appeal may be different in ways I can only guess. (For example, from the perspective of a lot of straight men, maybe the appeal is the fantasy of 'fixing' a girl who looks and acts like a 'slut'.)

The specific appeal of gyaru in yuri probably has to do with what the gyaru archetype embodies by default, and what changes about the archetype when it's used in yuri. If I have to ask myself, one part of the unique appeal of a gyaru character who likes girls might be that she uses this confrontational femininity to attract another girl, and is also courageous to be loud and proud about it. (The couple in this series illustrate this well.)

From the other girl's perspective, the gyaru can be a source of inspiration (in attitude and feminine skills) and a source of physical affection even at the earliest stage of a relationship. Hugs between female friends are considered normal, but compared to other archetypes I can more easily think of gyaru characters in yuri who don't hesitate to drop what they're doing to check in with a crying girl and offer a hug even if they're not friends yet.

last edited at Nov 5, 2025 3:46PM

Ayaka offer her support to Hajime was such a lovely moment!

And dating someone that is in love with someone else isn't "cuck shit," Miki's proactively trying to move on from a relationship she can't have, (for a lot of reasons,) and Aya is swooping in with the intent to save her from that. this happens all the time in yuri and in real life. It's often what happens to secondary characters when they can't get the character of their affection. Hell, it basically happened with Aki. She was still in love with Yori, but she knows that isn't going to happen so she's trying to move on with somebody else and honestly it seems like it's going pretty well.

People who read romance stories get way too bogged down in "they met by fate on a windswept day when they bumped into each other on the street and fell in love at first sight" but a lot of real relationships are "Well, I had a crush on some guy whose name I can't remember, who didn't even know who I was, and she came after me anyway and I thought she seemed fun and interesting. We've been married for 43 years."

Very well put! Unfortunately, Miki became a lightning rod for so many people's barely related grievances.

At this point it's pretty clear that one of the main themes of this series is couples who start dating at a point when their feelings are not yet totally requited (i.e., there is mutual interest but one girl's feelings are more intense). This scenario is probably not that rare in real life but it's less commonly represented in yuri manga, so to me it's one of the aspects that makes this series compelling.

I find the way Ayaka asked Miki out and Aki asked Shiho out to be super romantic and heartfelt. Of course, as readers we know that a happy ending is almost guaranteed for all of these girls, but the characters can't see the future. So, while all dating involves some risk, these couples are a bit more explicitly aware of those risks, and I find the way they choose to give it a try regardless to be really heartwarming.

last edited at Nov 5, 2025 12:26PM

I read this on Twitter and somehow totally missed that it was made by Odoroo Dorothy, wow

I figured from the start that this was going to be psychological drama with a lesbian main character, but the Romance tag seems less appropriate for this series with every chapter.

Maybe this needs to be clarified: the fact that something or other might happen between the female main character and the evil editor lady is already covered by the Yuri tag. The romance genre is a more specific concept; so far this story does not seem to have a pair of women heading down a journey together or in parallel, much less falling in love. Nanakusa seems to be heading down a path to destruction and we now next to nothing about Futami's trajectory. There is not much of a specific connection between them either.

last edited at Nov 5, 2025 12:50AM

Casual dating is such a great setup for slice-of-life yuri series. The way chapter two picks up one year after this pair started dating is also oddly compelling. I know chapter one was a one-shot before the serialization, but it's a beginning that works in favor of this story more than I expected.

I think part of what makes the story feel so fresh, besides just having really solid character writing, is that theyre so open about their relationship. Secret relationships are a staple for yuri, and rightfully so for many reasons, but its nice to see a couple who can just be loud and proud to tell everyone within earshot that theyre dating constantly.

It really is refreshing! I admit at first I was a bit worried that their extremely casual and open attitude suggested the relationship itself would remain casual forever as well. That already turned out to be wrong by the end of chapter one, but every chapter since then just made me feel more silly for having doubts. That open attitude was so unusual that it totally messed with my yuri radar, even though there is nothing bad about it on its own.

Maybe it's just because I saw the Reze Arc movie recently but the eyes in this are giving me CSM women vibes. They kind of stare into my soul, but in a good way

Wow the anime really softened Futami's delusions in episode 1 lmao

So many new Sorawo faces, and knowing that they represent how Toriko sees her makes them even better

Ayooo that hugging scene felt ominous with that pose

I noticed that it was different from before, but I think it could just be that their roles have loosened up? Haruyo is the one who is more vulnerable in the interaction, the younger girl who wants reassurance, while Kasumi is the more mature girl indulging her. So Haruyo does not pull Kasumi's head to her own shoulder like before, and instead snuggles her face into Kasumi's shoulder. Her hands approach Kasumi 'from below' to wrap around her waist, instead of 'from above' around Kasumi's neck.

Haruyo acts less like the dependable older sister in general (other than the speech patterns) in this chapter, and Kasumi doesn't try to correct her. Haruyo is asking for hugs, not offering them. She's happy to accept help with studying. Kasumi is probably uncertain about their future but I think she's warming up to the concept of being someone Haruyo can lean on too.

As for why Kasumi's arms were hanging loosely while Haruyo was hugging her, instead of around Haruyo's back, or what it means, I can only guess. She's clearly not uncomfortable with the hug itself. Maybe it suggests her ambivalence, that she doesn't share Haruyo's optimism, or that being depended on is still a challenge for her.

I like this, the art is cute. But, these kinds of stories always make me wonder. Like, in these kinds of stories, the futa characters still have their normal genitals, why don't they get pleasured too?

I understand that they feel pleasure with their secondary genitals, but it never feels complete. I don't know any other way to describe it.

One possible reason is that there is an incentive to focus on the penis because that (a girl has a dick) is supposedly what the category hinges on. Why expend pages on sexual acts that don't involve it if those can be found elsewhere anyway?

Another is that it's a manifestation of biases and assumptions about penises and the people who have them. Specifically, that a girl/woman who has a penis would naturally have the same preferences in sex as the stereotypical straight man.

This just in: one of the two main characters of the manga series titled Stupid Woman 26:00 is a woman who is a little stupid

A lot sweeter than I expected

One of these days I will snap and start reading the LN in Japanese... But I am grateful for the work you guys are doing, the manga version deserves a good TL

My favorite bit is Atsuko concluding that Phù Thủy likes orgies because of her ancestry

The fact that Manatsu has to fend off flashbacks to the weekend where they crossed the line together is a funny but also underrated detail. I think it's pretty cool that despite being a yuri series about high school girls, this series strikes a neat balance where sexual intimacy is an expected aspect of the relationship but without the story being specifically erotica.

Of course it's not that I don't like smut, I just think this middle ground is important, especially because of how much school girl stuff still dominates the genre. I'm sure there are stories where keeping some ambiguity about whether the two girls want each other carnally might be a benefit, but in many other cases the hush-hush about sexuality just feels kind of cowardly or conciliatory. What matters to me here is not that the audience witnesses the sexual intercourse directly (in case that needs to be said), but that it's not a mystery to the audience whether sex is on the table on the relationship. Even small details like one of the leads trimming their nails before a sleepover or googling "how do two girls do it", can serve as a foot in the door for the topic even without necessarily explaining anything to the audience.

I didn't know I had a take on this at all until I read this series. I guess for me a lot of this is about a years-long gripe with the kind of inherent sexism and lesbophobia in a large segment of the genre keeping up ambiguity just for the love of the game when straight romance curiously doesn't do this, but I assume sex being less of a taboo to touch on in yuri works about teenagers might be even more important to younger readers.

I might be forced to eat my words about this series not being erotica if Amazaki Suika shifts gears and makes the next sex scene last for a whole chapter, but I'm sticking to my guns for now.

last edited at Oct 6, 2025 3:33AM

While I'm not normally into feet, goddamn, the raw emotion and feelings displayed with how the hands and feet stretched, flexed, gripped... holy shit.

Yeah. I appreciate the attention to anatomy in general here, especially Euphie's muscles on some panels. They also look a fair bit taller or lankier than the official character designs, God bless.

the fake futa thing ruined the one shot >.>

so the whole thing that ruined this one shot is the damn hebtai trope of her fainting “cuz the dick feels too good”

Skill issue + you were warned

last edited at Oct 6, 2025 1:57AM

God this need like an idiot couple squared tag

They're not stupid, they're both in denial (and tsundere).

The Idiot Couple tag isn’t about the overall intellectual capacity of the characters; it’s about their inability or refusal to see that they are a couple, or at least that they are emotionally attached in ways that they can’t or won’t admit to.

While there are other ways for characters to be an idiot couple beyond overt denial or being a tsundere, those are certainly two standard ways of getting there.

This is definitely what I meant.

But the denial of feelings and the possibility of being together is a huge staple of the romance genre. If the idea is to add Idiot Couple simply because it would look funny then I guess it doesn't matter, but if it is to be useful then it can't be added on just any random series where the characters are not honest with themselves.

Dynasty currently seems to use it only on comedy and slice of life series, which implies that there is an inherent silliness to the concept. Meanwhile one of the quirks of this series is that it plays very little of the central dynamic for comedy in the typical sense. (It is often funny, but the humor is so dry it's usually hard to tell if a joke was meant to be a joke.)

Well at least the crazy is mutual. Still has worrying implications for the future of the main couple if Sayori and Mizuki are supposed to be parallel to them. Maybe Kasumi's suicidal tendencies will activate something in Haruyo like a sleeper agent.

I'm pretty confident that HaruKasu will not follow the same path because even though the couples in the short stories of Hanamonogatari share some obvious common themes, from what I've heard each has its own unique obstacles and conflicts. If Dear Flowers is aiming for a bouquet of stories about various couples (each with their own flower theme, similar to Hanamonogatari), then HaruKasu's story and SayoMizu's story will likely share some common themes but will still be different enough to make predictions about one based on the other unreliable. That is to say, although both couples will have to find a way to thrive in a world where two women are not supposed to claim each other as lovers and life partners, I suspect their challenges beyond that will be different.

Particularly in the case of Sayori and Mizuki, I can only make guesses as to how them being a lesbian couple affected their relationship. The number one reason I can think of is that maybe both of them were so isolated from their peers that neither of them had a trusted third person to talk to about their relationship candidly. I figure that because Sayori tells Kasumi that the fact that they are a couple is still a secret, but it's only an inference and could be wrong. In any case, having to keep a relationship a secret for years would be a major source of stress on it.

On the other hand, the fact that Kasumi finds herself attracted to another girl seems to contribute to her fears about her relationship with Haruyo in a more straightforward way. We also have more clues about where her other anxieties and insecurities come from, and at least to me they don't seem that similar to Mizuki's. And if we consider Kasumi and Mizuki as the more unstable people relative to their partners respectively, they are also different in that only the former is noted to be less wealthy than her partner (given that she attends the school on a scholarship). Honestly, the more I think about it the more different the two couples seem than similar.

last edited at Sep 28, 2025 5:07PM

Adding one more notch to the trans-adjacent themes in this series with the selection of a new name. (Not saying either of the girls are actually trans in any way.)

I had to read the chapter multiple times to notice that on page 15 Sayori has her knee between Mizuki's thighs. Like I know since chapter 10 all bets are off and I feel bad for not being able to come up with something more intellectual but... When I started reading this series I did not expect to see anything like that.

Anyway, I was in a bad mood but this chapter kind of fixed me

last edited at Sep 26, 2025 10:47PM

It makes sense, I get where you're coming from. I agree that the tone quickly shifts to something far brighter in chapter 3.

If I have to think why the two male party members being like that don't bother me... For one, from what I understand these guys are mages just like May, so they come from a different track than the men Elizabeth trained with. That would not guarantee that they're not sexist, but we have witnessed a culture that expects the mages to act in a supporting role to the legendary hero, which I think colors things a bit.

Perhaps guys who aspired to assist the legendary hero from the start instead of becoming said hero themselves, might be more secure in their masculinity and thus capable of clearing the low bar of taking orders from the legendary hero even if she's a girl. The fact that these guys respect Lady Lisa now does not mean that they would have believed she could become the hero when she was just Elizabeth, it just means that they are doing the job they've been preparing for.

Well, it's possible I'm putting more thought into this than the mangaka, and that the themes of Elizabeth's origin story will end up being irrelevant. I understand your worries in that regard.

I call it the curse of Action+Yuri series. :-( Almost all manga I've read that combined those genres got axed before their time...

It feels like there's little overlap between the audiences of the two genres, so a series that tries both ends up unpopular in either...

Don't get me wrong, I do love this series a lot, but I also think it had that ongoing problem that there was no big plot going on in the action part. In romance, we had this 'I will make her fall in love with me' which is a cute trope, but it was not the main focus. And at the action part, there was never a big threat or plot coming together like I was all along waiting for some big enemy to appear, and I thought that this whole monster rising was because some evil man was trying to attack the country and start a war, or ruin the Black Knight, etc. And I know it's basic, but I was so ready for the enemy to realize Clair is important to Frost, so they get her and other typical stuff that would have made this more interesting. Because even though I love this manga a lot, I always missed the big threat (or if they actually had one coming later, maybe they should have introduced it in volume 2). I think this story needed a bigger threat than the dragon, and maybe more drama? Who knows. I just understand why people got bored with where the story went. And even if it hadn't gone axed, I can't really see where the story could have led, which is maybe a problem. But I know it was the writer's first manga, and I'm glad they at least can have an ending to the story.

Action yuri tends to have a lot of the same problems that I notice in action isekai series. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that action is hard to do well in a manga. In animation or live action you can just have a well choreographed fight scene where the spectacle of the fight carries the scene, but if you draw that same choreography as a series of unmoving manga panels, it loses most of its energy and looks way worse. You need extra elements to keep it interesting most of the time. Maybe if you're a once in a generation talent you can draw something like Berserk where most of the action takes the form of a short series of incredibly detailed and violent impact panels and let the art quality carry it, but for most artists that isn't a real option.

Most of the yuri action (and bad isekai) I've read loves to throw the protagonist against mindless animal monsters that have no personality or complex thought. Which is incredibly boring. Human enemies with big personalities are way more interesting. With human enemies you can have banter, you can have a clash of ideologies or personalities, you can have more personal stakes, you can resolve the fight in a wider variety of ways, and you can have the enemy use intelligent or interesting tactics.

Another thing you can do (that this manga doesn't) is to do Jojo's Bizarre Adventure style puzzle fights. The protagonist has a weird superpower, and they have to figure out how the enemy's weird superpower works in order to find a clever solution. This adds an additional layer of mystery and tension to the fight and you can write a whole manga around this kind of thing (see Jojo's, HunterxHunter, Kaiji, honestly half of all the shounen out there).

I wish action yuri was more of a thing, but I understand why it isn't. It requires an author who understand both how to write a compelling romance and how to write compelling action, and having even one of those skills is rare even among published manga artists.

You make some good points, but I don't agree with your conclusions.

For one, I suspect when you say "action yuri" or "yuri action", you're talking about yuri fantasy/isekai with some action scenes in it. Because other than that, a subgenre of yuri that truly focuses on action doesn't really exist in manga. The action genre is where combat is at least in part the main event that people show up for; in most yuri fantasy/isekai this is not the case; they can get away with mediocre combat as long as other fundamentals are covered.

Next, it's totally possible to create a compelling yuri story even without romance-writing skills. 'The Executioner and her Way of Life' is a series of yuri fantasy light novels that puts more thought into combat and magic system than its peers (the isekai category in general included), and while it is light on romance in the typical sense, the plot is still in large part driven by intense feelings between girls/women. 'Otherside Picnic' is a series of yuri sci-fi novels that initially hooks the audience with its strange world building and surrealism, and its romance plot only comes to the foreground after several volumes. I would also like to point to yuri anime (even if some are not officially yuri) without a direct source material like 'Princess Principal' and 'Madoka Magica' as examples of how a story can be compelling as yuri without a clear romance plot.

And the uncomfortable bit: the most prestigious segment of action-oriented manga mostly consists of series that primarily focus on male characters and their bonds with each other. Virtually none of these stories are overtly gay, but they can be compelling for fujoshi. (In the minority where women get to do anything, the M/F relationships may get praise too.) Never mind that premium quality action-oriented yuri series are rare (especially ones that go beyond just ship teasing or subtext), premium quality action-oriented series about women at all are rare.

We live in a world where women are expected to be weaker than men by default, so stories where women consistently get to use physical force in solving conflicts, as effectively as men if not better, contradict social norms. On top of that, women are expected to prioritize finding a man to marry over everything else, so of course stories where women fall in love (or get obsessed) with other women instead of men also contradict social norms. So which is more likely: that a compelling action-adventure with a lesbian theme just happens to be too difficult to create, or that a lot fewer people are motivated to try and a lot fewer people are interested in reading it?

last edited at Sep 24, 2025 8:38PM

Yukari concluded that she fancies Shouko so quickly that it makes me wonder if she already knows she likes girls. I didn't think too much of it in chapter 1, but she hasn't second-guessed herself about this since then. She's the type of person who thinks a lot about how she fits into society, so it would be a bit odd if she came to this conclusion so easily if she hadn't already thought a lot about this topic before. And this story is not set in a de-facto 'homo-normative' world (like SasaKoi is); Yukari herself assumes Shouko must have feelings for the same boy as Tenri, and she has not entertained the idea that Shouko could be in love with Tenri.

her being bi doesn't bother me so much as the way the whole thing is framed. it's just Too porn lens for my taste, i think. feels like the artist is a straight dude who washes a lot of irl porn videos (the sex scenes were totally referenced from stuff like that, it's so obvious). i liked the art up until the porn started, too, because although the bodies looked nice, the expressions were so exaggerated i couldn't take it seriously. and outside of the abrupt sex, there doesn't feel like there's any chemistry whatsoever between the leads. main girl was also reading horny shoujo manga, which... is statistically likely to be het, but not guaranteed i suppose, or maybe she's reading it for the boobs and we just don't know it. without further context, it just feels like "sure i'll fuck girls too, i'll fuck anyone" x Normal Girl(tm) who's a little confused and inexperienced. and that's... the thing? we have little to no context, and what does exist isn't that good. i'm definitely not continuing this, and i wish anyone who does lots of luck. (honestly, seeing that it was lazy lily that TL'd it explained everything lmfao)

Yeah, when I saw "mostly does het" on the artist's Dynasty profile, I thought "that tracks". It has nothing to do with the elf being described as bisexual and everything with...everything else. Instead of "male gaze" yuri, I propose the term "this artist has not read a single yuri manga in their life" yuri.

There is no attraction, no connection, no sexual tension, nothing, even with 20 pages of setup. Then when the sex occurs, the human character being a girl is completely incidental, maybe even irrelevant other than her anatomy. Oh, and the elf being a girl is also irrelevant to the human girl, also except for her anatomy. Yes, the elf is an "expert" at cunnilingus, but we don't get to know how she feels about doing all of that to the human girl. The same way, we don't get to know how the human girl feels about getting all that done to her by a girl. It's like the idea of two women being attracted to each other is so alien to the creator that they can only imagine lesbian sex that emerges from a sort of gender-blind libido where "anyone will do". They leave even the most basic yuri tropes like "her eyelashes are so long", "she's so damn soft", and "she smells so good" on the table.

Even in porn, questions like "why would a human girl not kick out her house guest who just walked in on her masturbating and starts insisting to 'help' her" can have a more interesting answer than "well, she's just really horny and her roommate is a foreign sex worker who is never off the clock". Or at least one that's a bit more life-like, such as "because she is attracted to her house guest". Some of the drawings are pretty good, but there is such a gaping void instead of a story here that they might have been better as loosely connected illustrations without dialogue.

last edited at Sep 21, 2025 4:07AM

Pretty stupid so far. The story initially gunning for a rape/revenge angle before essentially wiping the slate clean with an offscrean century of training, followed by the introduction of (what initially appear to be, though I would be happy to be proven wrong) a cute wholesome team of adventuring buddies, is flatly dumb. The emotional and thematic throughlines of the first chapter are just...gone by chapter 3. Rape to make the new team dynamic more comforting. Rape as a hook to a generic fantasy story.

But also the first thing this party does is literally a homestuck bit. That's been stuck in my head since I first read it. They do the exact same thing Dave did when he couldn't pull that sword from a rock. I honestly might keep reading to see if future adventures also are comedy gags played straight. That's not to say that I like it—this manga feels like a mess from basically every angle story-wise—but it might end up being very, very funny, which is kind of like being good if you squint

I never got the feeling that this was going to be specifically a rape revenge story. From the start it's crystal clear that Elizabeth wants to become the legendary hero of her generation. That goal is established first and it never changes; being betrayed by the men at the academy, which also directly leads to her torture, rape, and death by the hands of the bandits, are obstacles to that goal. She gets brought back to life because the Goddess has already chosen her, and then she starts her journey as the legendary hero just like she originally wanted.

'Roll Over and Die' is a yuri dark fantasy series (with an upcoming anime adaptation) that features a protagonist who is initially betrayed by her party leader and sold into slavery. She does kill the slaver that she was sold to and every subsequent slaver she encounters, but the main plot is still about the war against the demons.

In both of these stories, the Cruel Fate that happens to the protagonist at the beginning is not the main event, but a way to underline her position as an underdog and to give her an excuse to stop being nice. (Whether that's good or bad writing is a different matter.) And I think it's important that Elizabeth's Cruel Fate does not start and end with being raped; after all that and her murder was only the culmination of the way the sexist academy treated her. It makes more sense to think of the bandits as a weapon that the men of the academy used to get rid of her. That's why she kills most of the bandits off-page, but we see her go all "you have failed this city" on Beaubert. The academy is full of self-serving scumbags who actively sabotaged her despite her potential because she's a girl, but now they're forced to play nice with her. That's the power fantasy here.

I also don't expect Elizabeth's new cool personality to be set in stone. She might have 150 years of fighting experience, a bunch of strategies to defeat the demon king, and the confidence of a veteran, but that's not the same as general life experience or emotional maturity. I assume part of her character arc from now on will be to learn to trust the other three on her team and to be vulnerable again, especially with May.