"But we're both girls!" - The Yuri Thread

setokaiba

setokaiba

Student Council President
D1tchd1gger said:
The cover does look nice, but looking at the preview the backgrounds in the actual story look very plain:
bookwalker.jp

君に紡ぐ傍白 (1)

夢を諦め新たな生活を送る遥香 夢を追い舞台に立ち続ける菜央 舞台というものにそれぞれ真逆の想いを持つふたりが 出会い惹かれ合っていく 言えない想いと聞けない言葉を隠しながら…。 隠された過去が交錯するフルカラーラブストーリー。 ★単行本カバー下…
bookwalker.jp
This is the first thing from the mangaka and the preview is from the first chapter, so things might improve later.

My next pick up will be School Zone Girls after I saw a very passionate YouTube video about it:

The MAL page has Wasteful Days of High School Girls as a recommendation, so if it's as funny as that I'll definitely like it.
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Thanks for sharing the preview! It does seem a little plain compared to the covers but still pretty. As long as the story is good I'll like it, and I do like how it seems to be a non-high school romance that deals with themes of finding your place in life. Those types of stories are always interesting to me.
 
RadFemHedonist

RadFemHedonist

Dragon Knight
I'm watching Sakura Trick and really enjoying it, it's so cute and so much kissing OMG! XD Any other fans here? :) I've also really been enjoying the soft yuri vibe of Amanchu, their bond is so touching and sweet, and I'm gradually working my way through what is mostly a rewatch of Maria Watches Over Us (I've seen all of Seasons 1-3 before and about the first half of Season 4 - I'm on Season 2 of the rewatch) :)
 
WMD

WMD

Railgun
RadFemHedonist said:
I'm watching Sakura Trick and really enjoying it, it's so cute and so much kissing OMG! XD Any other fans here? :) I've also really been enjoying the soft yuri vibe of Amanchu, their bond is so touching and sweet, and I'm gradually working my way through what is mostly a rewatch of Maria Watches Over Us (I've seen all of Seasons 1-3 before and about the first half of Season 4 - I'm on Season 2 of the rewatch) :)
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Sakura Trick is very good. At first I thought the premise was just a contrived way to have the girls kiss every episode but after a while i realised it was really a safe way for them to explore their sexuality without having to openly admit it.

Also Amanchu! is bloody amazing!
 
setokaiba

setokaiba

Student Council President
RadFemHedonist said:
I'm watching Sakura Trick and really enjoying it, it's so cute and so much kissing OMG! XD Any other fans here? :) I've also really been enjoying the soft yuri vibe of Amanchu, their bond is so touching and sweet, and I'm gradually working my way through what is mostly a rewatch of Maria Watches Over Us (I've seen all of Seasons 1-3 before and about the first half of Season 4 - I'm on Season 2 of the rewatch) :)
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Maria Watches Over Us really interests me! I wish it had an English manga release, as I'm dreadfully slow at watching anime and it seems kind of long.
 
Tweek

Tweek

Completely Average High School Student
I rather enjoyed Maria Watches Over Us when I watched it a few years back. Sakura Trick is a lot of fun; glad to have it on DVD as I watch it every year or two. I'd also recommend Yuru Yuri which provides plenty of laughs; it can still be watched on Crunchyroll.
 
Dai

Dai

Stand User
Looking at the back of the box for Funimation's US release of Adachi and Shimamura, it appears to be an import-friendly region A/B set. I'll be ordering it soon anyway so I'll report back on whether it's really region-free once I have it.

Meanwhile, A&S light novel 8 came out recently and was another good one. After the alternate universe side-stories of the previous volume, this one did something even more surprising: it's not the final volume, but it includes the series ending! The bulk of the volume is about the characters going on their high school trip, but it's book-ended by scenes set ten years later when the characters are in their late 20s. The author states in the afterword that they had decided what the end of the series would be, and published that part now in case they die before having a chance to write the rest of it! It kind of works, since the future scenes leave some things ambiguous.

I also read Whisper Me a Love Song manga volume 4, which has changed gears quite a bit after the developments in the previous volume. It's at its best when it focuses on the romance angle, but this volume starts to put more emphasis on band drama. It's still good; I just hope it doesn't get derailed as the series progresses.

On the anime front, I've watched a few episodes of Strawberry Panic and I'm having trouble getting into it. Part of the problem is the distractingly bad formatting of the subtitles on the Anime Works blu-ray set. I've never seen such chronic overuse of ellipses. When a sentence stretches across more than one screen of subtitles, the first screen ends like this...
...the middle looks like this...
...and the end looks like this.
Worse is that there appears to be a coding error where the subtitling software doesn't recognise the accented É in Étoile, the title of a character who is mentioned several times in most scenes, and it turns into another ellipsis, "...toile".
They even use additional ellipses when the main character stutters, which happens often early on. Add all those together, and there's one screen that literally just looks like this, ".........to..............."
 
setokaiba

setokaiba

Student Council President
Dai said:
On the anime front, I've watched a few episodes of Strawberry Panic and I'm having trouble getting into it. Part of the problem is the distractingly bad formatting of the subtitles on the Anime Works blu-ray set. I've never seen such chronic overuse of ellipses. When a sentence stretches across more than one screen of subtitles, the first screen ends like this...
...the middle looks like this...
...and the end looks like this.
Worse is that there appears to be a coding error where the subtitling software doesn't recognise the accented É in Étoile, the title of a character who is mentioned several times in most scenes, and it turns into another ellipsis, "...toile".
They even use additional ellipses when the main character stutters, which happens often early on. Add all those together, and there's one screen that literally just looks like this, ".........to..............."
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That's a shame to hear, I would have considered picking it up since I really like Strawberry Panic! I really particularly like those type of GL stories and it was my introduction to the genre. Definitely deserves to be done justice better than that.
 
zrdb

zrdb

Adventurer
I have all the Strawberry Panic dvd singles from Media Blasters and have watched it exactly once-as far as I'm concerned it was a long drawn out soap opera and not a particularly good one, yuri or not.
 
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setokaiba

setokaiba

Student Council President
zrdb said:
I have the all Strawberry Panic dvd singles from Media Blasters and have watched it exactly once-as far as I'm concerned it was a long drawn out soap opera and not a particularly good one, yuri or not.
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I think it just depends what your preferences are. If you like a more "forward" GL/yuri where two girls just head into a relationship and that's the plot, Strawberry Panic probably isn't for you. The modern ones tend to take that forward approach but I think Strawberry Panic is more old school with how dramatic it is and the religious school taboo themes.
 
Dai

Dai

Stand User
setokaiba said:
That's a shame to hear, I would have considered picking it up since I really like Strawberry Panic! I really particularly like those type of GL stories and it was my introduction to the genre. Definitely deserves to be done justice better than that.
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I finished Strawberry Panic today, and fortunately that subtitle error in Étoile is only in the first six episodes; they switch to writing it without the accent after that to avoid the problem. It felt like there was less overuse of ellipses later on too (though there were still quite a lot), so I was able to stop being distracted by the subtitle formatting and just enjoy the show. Looking at a listing for the old single DVDs, the first volume had six episodes, so it's probably a problem that carried over from the earlier release, which is especially likely since the blu-rays have burnt-in subtitles.

I thought the series was quite patchy in the first half, with some entertaining episodes and some boring ones. It picked up in the latter half and ended pretty well, though it bothered me that they never addressed what happened to Nagisa and Shizuma's relationship long-term, since Shizuma was only months away from graduation. That last short scene of Nagisa sullenly standing outside Tamao's room was an oddly downbeat note to finish on too. I'll give it 7/10 overall.
 
Lordhippos

Lordhippos

Stand User
That Yuri is my job one sounded ridiculous. I'm in.

This season we have Executioner and her way of Life which is fairly yuri but not in an explicit way, and Demon Girl Next Door which is similarly yuri-esque but more in a CGDCT way.
 
D1tchd1gger

D1tchd1gger

Baka Ranger
I've been reading Yuri is My Job. It's definitely more dramatic than comedic or romantic. This is the first time I've read a manga before an anime got announced which went on to get one. I've read a few knowing that an anime was on the way though.
 
Dai

Dai

Stand User
Bloom Into You Anthology vol.1
Pretty entertaining, but not what I was expecting at all. I thought these would be short stories giving more insight into the characters, but instead it's a bunch of different writers/artists giving their take on the characters in their own styles.

Whisper Me a Love Song vol.5
As I suspected, the story is veering more into school band drama than romance now. I suspect there are some pent-up romantic frustrations behind the feud between bands, but this volume doesn't get us there if that's the case. Also surprising is that the main couple are almost completely absent from this volume. Still a good series though, since it handles the band drama as well as the romance.

School Zone Girls vol.1
I could see a good comedy anime being adapted from this in the right hands, but it's doing nothing for me in manga form.
 
Dai

Dai

Stand User
Citrus
If step-sister incest is a red flag for you, don't even start this show because that's the shallow end. According to Citrus, love means never having to say you're sorry for sexually assaulting your step-sister. Practically every episode has one one girl or another forcing herself on someone, and that isn't even as creepy as the show gets. Once pink-haired psychopath Matsuri shows up the creepiness factor hits the redline, culminating in her blackmailing a girl into letting a random old man rape her. While that ends up being averted at the last minute, the bad taste remains. Worse is that there never seem to be consequences for anything; everyone just shrugs and carries on.

Unfortunately, the tone of the content isn't the only problem. Despite only being 12 episodes, the plot goes round in circles repeatedly. It becomes an endless loop of one sister or the other flip-flopping her opinion between it being okay for sisters to kiss/sleep together or not. There's little sense of progression to either girl's feelings about this; whichever one isn't feeling amorous on a particular evening will just arbitrarily act like it's all obscene, and then the roles are reversed in the next episode. Likewise, the attitudes and personalities of the supporting cast pinwheel whenever the plot needs to ramp up the drama, resulting in some truly nonsensical dialogue scenes where people are trying to ruin others' lives one minute and then acting like they've always been best friends the next. Plot cohesion hits rock bottom in the final few episodes, where people go from being strangers to friends to best friends to lovers and back again in the space of a school trip. How long are Japanese school trips?!

If MAL viewing figures are any indication, this seems to be the most-watched of any GL anime. That's a real shame, because it's also one of the worst I've seen. When it was being simulcast, I gave up on it around episode 8, and it's only the dearth of new GL anime that made me give it a second chance. I watched the whole thing this time, but I shouldn't have bothered.

4/10
 
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