Perfect ending coming to a perfect series. I hope that when this is over it will inspire more Mangaka to make yuri.
I have to say that I can easily imagine authors trying to emulate this specific series and just making boring manga.
Nakatani’s strengths in YagaKimi have been truly excellent staging and pacing, highly disciplined structure, and very subtle use of motifs, verbal and visual echoes and callbacks. Not everyone can do that, and it’s easy to do it clumsily if you try.
There’s no vivid antagonist—as we’ve mentioned, all the characters are basically good, well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing (most of them are pretty smart and thoughtful, too—some of them, like Sayaka, amazingly so).
There are no sudden plot twists or surprising reversals—the big scenes (the play, Yuu’s confession, Sayaka’s confession, etc.) were baked into the story almost from the very start, and they played out very much as we expected them to.
And yet, as the conversations here have indicated, we were often on the edge of our seats wondering what was going to happen next, and theories about the characters and their motivations, some of them fairly outlandish, flew thick and fast.
So as a general exemplar demonstrating that it’s possible to make excellent serialized yuri manga, YagaKimi should be an inspiration to others; as a specific model or template for others to follow, I have my doubts that it’s even possible to replicate.
last edited at Jul 28, 2019 11:57PM
