I'd almost managed to forget about these cursed things, which are apparently a Costco Japan exclusive. I have read several posts and even seen a couple videos about them, and nobody seems to know why they exist. I wonder if Costco in Japan got started after Japanese people got experience with it in Hawaii…

Also someone should get Kuran a FACELESS TECHNO BOLLOCKS T-shirt. As a DJ and producer, I feel both seen and attacked by her takedown of DJ culture.

Seriously – seriously – what is it about the Japanese and the Red Hot Chili Peppers??

A sequel to my favorite yatosaking one-shot? Straight (um, you know what I mean) into the favorites with you!

I am 95% sure I've seen this artist's H account because their art style is immediately recognizable, and given their interests there (largely various Magia Record ships) this is not what I would have figured their non-lewd account would be like.

There actually have been two more doujinshi published that continue this story. They are extremely horny and also pretty cute.

I am fully recharged now, thank you little lesbians in my phone.

This, only for the latest chapter. Seeing Eiko so flustered by Enami-sensei is healing for my soul.

This really is a palette swap for Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games, only in that the competitive tension between the leads emerges naturally from the text of the story, and here it feels incredibly forced. There is absolutely no way for a guitarist in a duo or trio to wrest control of the flow of a song away from the drummer, who is there to act as the timekeeper and tempo regulator for the music. It kind of blows my mind that 15 years on K-ON is still somehow the manga / anime gold standard for more or less accurately depicting the intraband dynamics of a high school band, especially given how much time HTT spends doing anything but working on music.

Those screwtails are ridiculous and remind me more of Souryu's Machimaho (the magical girl parody where the a yankee is made a magical girl) than I Favor the Villainess or Marimite.

What is it with Japanese rockers and the Red Hot Chili Peppers? If these girls are math rockers they should be listening to Polvo or Slint or something.

Sorairo Melancholic isn't canceled, it's on hiatus. And only the first chapter of two full volumes has been scanlated, so it's not like there's not plenty there if people want to find it / help Yuri Project get it scanlated.

I really liked the paneling and how faces were framed / cut off in this one.

Yukiko's style is a good match for these girls. This was cute! Thanks for the translation!

The true yuri is hallucinating an entire dramatic love story after spotting two women giggling together on the bus.

Yuri Espoir has entered the chat.

(I thought that series was too fluffy to deal with at first and it has its silly aspects (like the forced marriage framing story), but it's been getting steadily deeper as it goes along and now it's one of my favorites. The quoted text is pretty much the entire premise of the manga, where the main character imagines yuri lives for pairs of women she sees out in the world and then later we see the reality of those two, which is frequently different from her delusions in surprising ways.)

I want this all to be a long con on the part of class rep to get closer to the prince.

Given that this story is set in the gayest school in the history of Japan / the story's insistence in pairing off every character who shows up in more than one panel, I think you're probably right that it's going to be the Yuri Hime version of My Sister's Best Friend, My Lover. I mean, Miki seems pretty aware already that remaining hung up on her sister is not doing her any good, and also that Swimming-senpai is a nice girl (and also that Himari's situation at the beginning and hers are very much in parallel). This story seems only moderately more committed to its melodrama than Anemone Is In Heat. It seems like Miki + Girl Who Is Also In This Story are going to be a thing before too long.

It was just recently that shoujo decided to take a more wholesome approach to romance ie sonó bisque doll, shikimori is not just cute, tonikaku kawaii, the dangers in my heart etc

I know that the above quote was posted literally a year ago, but I just saw it, and it cracked me up that every example listed here of a "more wholesome" shoujo romance is in fact a shounen romcom / romance.

A big part of the split I see in responses to this story come down to how tolerant people are of melodrama and shoujo tropes. Messy feelings, acting out, wanting things that are bad for us, refusing to let go of doomed feelings – these are all shoujo tendencies, especially when deployed in a melodrama. I'm not going to say that shoujo is all vibes and feeling and shounen is about realism, because it's not true and leads to fruitless argument. One thing I do think is true is that shoujo fans enjoy mess / interpersonal melodrama / toxicity more than shounen fans, and it's interesting to see that play out in this comment section.

I'll lay down my marker here and say that while I think that Takeshima Eku is a ferociously talented artist, I have yet to see a story or character drama from her that I find compelling. That said, when I look at her paneling, her character designs, the flow of interactions between characters, and the tropes she deploys in the interest of writing drama, she neatly splits the difference between shounen and shoujo. It's pretty striking, and the only other mangakas I can think of that follow that pattern even a little are other women primarily publishing in shounen manga, like Shinichi Fukuda with My Dress-Up Darling. It's interesting to see the ways in which putting your story in a yuri magazine frees you up to tell it in an unconventional way (even when the story itself is deeply, deeply conventional).

Also, whether she planned to or not, she did manage to innovate a bit by stealthing some toxic yuri into what started as a super fluffy coming of age story / yuri romance. At the very least, it was good at starting fights!

(I'm not gonna comment on the recent developments with the anime because I predicted it was gonna be a trainwreck and I take no pleasure from being right.)

I know it's a very small thing but Sunamori sitting in her room drinking a can of ORANGE JUICE made me laugh, like yeah can't let her be drinking beer so let's just make real clear that she's just drinking

ORANGE JUICE

what

it's delicious

I had a copy of the collection of this drop in my mailbox on Friday because that's the tier of Galette I'm currently subscribed to (I think… things have been pretty confusing over at Fantia with all the nonsense going on with American credit cards on Fantia and Pixiv… I have to buy Toranoana Bux from some shady-looking American web site and then redeem the codes on Fantia's web site, and remember to do this every few months because autorenew doesn't work with the fake currency…) Anyway, I had never even heard of this story before, although I guess I had seen it in Galette, and it's really cute. The whole "oh no we've gotta go back to the inaka" part feels like a Hakamada Mera plot contrivance and the art does kinda look like Yatosaki Haru and Yorita Miyuki, so it makes a lot of sense that this ran in Galette.

I like it. I like that Rurika is so twitterpated that she's begging her weird fangirl to come along so that she doesn't collapse from the sheer anxiety and stress of trying to keep up her cool-girl act for a whole day. In real life that's gonna lead to an awkward day at Tokyo Disneyland, but I'm interested to see how it turns out here!

I saw the pairing and then the mangaka and all I could say was, "oh noooooooo."

Person who has only ever seen Bocchi the Rock: This sure reminds me a lot of Bocchi the Rock!

I have some… ah… questions about the pacing of that first chapter, but I admire the main character's burning urge to not be stuck on her own during the class trip.

Also, this manga contains an excellent collection of sourpuss ojousama faces.

I'm still on the fence with this one but I will note that it fits Usui Shio's pattern of the tareme-eyed girl being a troublemaker (in a positive sense).

OH NO u guys… she went VIRAL!!!

…also i had extremely vivid flashbacks to the fall of 1992 when suddenly everybody started losing their shit over Slanted & Enchanted and just would not shut up about Pavement…do you know the band "Pavement" indeed…

This is just Suito-to! shoved through an industrial grade moe filter. Subscribed!

Also I'm surprised this was serialized in shonen jump, though I still don't really understand how the genre classifications work

It wasn't serialized in Shonen Jump, but Jump+, the online-only magazine where they run a lot of more experimental / less accessible stories (another notable Jump+ yuri serialization, at least for the last few years: Virgins' Empire). Jump+ is interesting, having serialized a bunch of stuff that I would have guessed was josei or seinen before learning where it was published. Like Comic FUZ or Comic CUNE, its serializations don't neatly fall within demographic lines.

As a heads up, the story has been translated through to the end by an anonymous group and is up over on Mangadex. The translation is pretty rough in places (and I want to know how they got their raws, given all the bizarre artifacts in them) but it does complete the story, and the ending is pretty satisfying (except, as always, it makes me really hungry).

I want more goofy mashups of rando yuri plot with aggressive regional food marketing. Maybe Hiroshima or Kobe? Or Fukushima?

I would say that the trailer for the anime is a bit ominous but for two things:

1. The studio, Shuka, doesn't have a huge portfolio, but two of the shows it has done, Durarara and Natsume's Book of Friends, are all-time classics that aren't, like, KyoAni beautiful, but are visually striking and good adaptations of the original materials' distinctive styles.
2. The series score will be provided by Kensuke Ushio, who is seemingly everywhere right now (and crushing it), but very notably did the soundtrack for another story about teenage girls making music, Liz and the Blue Bird. That is in my top 5 for soundtracks to anything, animated or otherwise, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does with this. (If you want another recent example of how his work can really take something to the next level, check out the shounen romcom The Dangers in My Heart – there are a few times (especially towards the end of the second season) where his score took what was a cute and somewhat generic scene and made it genuinely moving.)