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.)

In case you can't read the tracklist or don't feel like running it through MTL:

1 [SIDE A] ハート・シェイプト・ボックス / ニルヴァーナ
2 [SIDE A] ウォーク・ディス・ウェイ / エアロスミス
3 [SIDE A] ハイヤー・グラウンド / レッド・ホット・チリ・ペッパーズ
4 [SIDE A] ルーザー / ベック
5 [SIDE A] ブラック・ホール・サン / サウンドガーデン
6 [SIDE B] 禁じられた愛 / ボン・ジョヴィ
7 [SIDE B] <コピイングメカニズム> / ウィロー
8 [SIDE B] セイ・イット・エイント・ソー / ウィーザー
9 [SIDE B] シャイン / コレクティヴ・ソウル
10 [SIDE B] ミスター・ブライトサイド / ザ・キラーズ

1. Nirvana – Heart-Shaped Box
2. Aerosmith – Walk This Way
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Higher Ground
4. Beck – Loser
5. Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun
6. Bon Jovi – You Give Love a Bad Name
7. Willow – Coping Mechanism
8. Weezer – Say It Ain't So
9. Collective Soul – Shine
10. The Killers – Mister Brightside

I don't know about y'all, but I think that tracklist is perfect.

While I was listening to the drama CD, I realized that the biggest barrier to making a good anime (or live-action drama) out of this is probably music licensing. The background music on the drama CD includes all your hit favorites from gunge bands like Nibana and alternate rock bands like the UFO Fighters, which is to say it's bland name stuff that sounds vaguely like songs from some of bands namechecked in the manga. A huge part of the charm of the manga is the specificity of the girls being super into bands that were at their peak decade(s) before they were born (believe me, writing that out hurt me more than you), and without that, it's less compelling.

OK MAYBE I WAS WRONG https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/UIJY-75274?rm=t&vg=3bac952f-e3a3-4030-7623-3b63e4f5868c

Trying to decide how badly I want this… I have a little while to decide, but getting vinyl sent overseas seems like a super dicey proposition.

That's cool and all, but does anyone actually care for these minute-long episodes series? (I would totally watch it tho)

I liked I'm Kodama Kawashiri enough to buy the Blu-ray+book of the series from Japan and hand-remux the English subtitles into it, so yeah, people do. There's something about a really good OP + the way a short episode can really let a capable voice actor cut loose (which Aoi Yuuki takes full advantage of in that series) that makes those kinds of series unique. And the slightly longer series like Play It Cool, Guys, where it's a few minutes of concentrated sitcom energy, are also really good. They feel like they really are the animated equivalent of 4-komas or Twitter comics.

The anime adaptation had the extreme misfortune to come out the same season as two other shows about girls making music, with considerably more resources put into them. Girls Band Cry really nails the band / band drama part, and Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night seems to be delivering the yuri goods. This is… fine? so far, but without Eku-sensei's killer art, it feels unfortunately generic, especially when set next to those other shows (it doesn't help with me that Girls Band Cry is on track to be my anime of the year).

After watching Yuri is My Job, I kinda wish that Passione had gotten the nod to do this adaptation – they seems to understand yuri visual language pretty well (it's kinda weird how much this adaptation is borrowing from Sasaki & Miyano), they're good at adapting distinctive manga designs for anime, and their art and animation aren't flashy but look super good. About the best thing this adaptation has going for it is the voice acting, which has been very good throughout. And, I guess, they've done a pretty good job of capturing Aki's complexity – maybe it's just that this is like my third or fourth time through the story, but I feel like the anime does a good job of giving her a prominent role without stealing the focus from Himari or Yori.

All this to say that yes, and anime is going to be a more difficult task but if they could pull something like de the CD Drama, it could~~ be possible, but with it's duration.....it's has to be well done or an anime of 15 min maybe, not a full 30 min or so. That is my opinion~

While I was listening to the drama CD, I realized that the biggest barrier to making a good anime (or live-action drama) out of this is probably music licensing. The background music on the drama CD includes all your hit favorites from gunge bands like Nibana and alternate rock bands like the UFO Fighters, which is to say it's bland name stuff that sounds vaguely like songs from some of bands namechecked in the manga. A huge part of the charm of the manga is the specificity of the girls being super into bands that were at their peak decade(s) before they were born (believe me, writing that out hurt me more than you), and without that, it's less compelling.

Format-wise, I think it would work pretty well as a set of super-short minute-long episodes like I'm Kodama Kawashiri, especially if they kept the manga's color scheme and used highly stylized (maybe rotoscoped low framerate?) animation.

This manga singlehandedly convinced me to trek down to Fukouka on my last trip to Japan, and also led me to several extremely memorable meals (I could eat that mazesoba from the first or second chapter literally every day), so I'm both super happy to see it back here and mildly disgruntled because now I want to go back to Fukuoka for delicious karaage.

So Yukiko has entered her idol era now that she's freed of the shackles of Futaribeya… I'm here for it. I like how there's a little of the edge from "Cats & Sugar Bowls" without it going all the way out to her darkest stuff.

Two lesbian ships passing in the night…

Nice to see Ranka working on this, even if it was only a commission (once…).

Ranka says that this is a "little heavier" than "Even If It Was Only Once", but I dunno a lot of the themes (functioning in the adult world, poverty) are the same, and that one even had some homophobia and comp het laid over the top… I should look into SAD's commission rates. I'm unemployed but I'd like to see SAD keep going on this one…

This is like the inverse of that manga about the anthropomorphized tuna that wants the girl to eat her that we got exactly one (1) chapter of like a year ago.

I wasn't sure about this one at first, but I've come to really like it. Everything seems like such an effort for Sena, but she keeps trying. It's inspirational.

I just returned from a trip to Japan where I did… uh… a lot of manga shopping (multiple additional suitcases were purchased to get everything home) and I gotta say, this manga is a genuine phenomenon in Japan. It was the only manga I saw that got a whole shelf for a single volume to itself at Animate Ikebukuro (in the unlabeled yuri section lol), and it was featured (sometimes in multiple locations) at pretty much every manga store I visited (although I think I only saw one used copy, at a BOOK-OFF in Kyoto). It was really cool to see something so distinctive and stylish getting such a major push from its publisher.

Also, as other have said, most Kinokuniya locations in the US seem to be carrying this. I picked up my copy back around American Thanksgiving at San Francisco's Kinokuniya and there was a stack of like 20 copies, which almost never happens. Once I got to Japan I kinda wished I'd held off because I found a couple copies that still had bookstore exclusives (at one of the Animates in Tokyo and Shosen Book Tower).

last edited at Jan 14, 2024 6:38AM

Somehow this and Tsuruze’s other Twitter series got compiled into two print volumes? I was literally shocked when I saw them on the shelf. I bought them immediately.