Sorry for awayness

Sorry. There's been no posts for a while due to some relationship troubles. I'm currently in a long distance relationship with my girlfriend of four years, and there's a lot of...difficulty sometimes. So yeah. I'll leave some funny or neat gifs here for you guys to stare at, and probably work myself up to visit my usual blogs in a bit, but I also have a lot of midterms this week. Shit's overflowing.

Thanks all for reading and sticking with yuri. I'll be back to normal (or at least a semblance of it) hopefully soon!

Two of these are gifs. Gotta click on them. :D

Girl Friends by Milk Morinaga

After the last post, where I confused a few innocents, and made others recoil defensively in regards to boyish girls (amusingly, 'tomboys,' as they're called in Korea), I've gotten around to writing about a yuri manga I've recently read, called Girl Friends. It stars Mari Kumakura, and Akko Oohashi, two girls at their high school. It begins simply, as do all school life mangas, with Akko approaching Mari one day, and asking if they'd take the train together afterschool.

Androgynous Asian Eyecandy

A girl named Bihyul, apparently.

This isn't yuri, but I'd call it something like eyecandy for both genders. Hope you all enjoy, even if it's not the usual girl-on-girl goodness. Basically, in Korea/Japan/China, there's girls that like to dress as guys, and some of them turn out pretty damn good looking, and extremely androgynous. Makes me get all confused inside.

Non-Yuri Fun of the Week: Touhou Lucky Star

Today, my Yuri toplist is over. I still have a lot of series to write down, and even more reviews and comments and summaries and discussions on series themselves, but I think we all deserve a break from Yuri, especially since ilikeicecream has been so blunt about it.

"I had enough of it," he said, before he turned his back on the shining beacon that was my Yuri. Those five words shattered something within me, and from then on, life was never the same.

My Top 5 Yuri Manga: #1 Sasameki Koto

Cover of Volume 2. Left: Ushio Kazama, Right: Sumika Murasame

Sasameki Koto, meaning Whispered Words, is a manga by Takashi Ikeda that's about a girl named Sumika Murasame. Her closest friend, Ushio Kazama, is a girl who absolutely loves cute girls, and cute girls only. Murasame harbors a secret crush on her friend, but unfortunately, Murasame is tall, good at karate, coordinated and generally not cute at all. Hence she keeps it inside, and Kazama has no clue, and depressingly, whenever Kazama's feelings get smushed by rejection, Murasame's always there to comfort her, knowing that Kazama has no feelings for her whatsoever. Whee.

My Top 5 Yuri Manga: #2 Aoi Hana

Aoi Hana~ Even the name is kind of sweet, although you can immediately tell the style of stuff if it has a 'hana' in it, since hana means flowers. So yes, this manga is a particularly gentle, soft-style, relaxed one. It epitomizes slice of life for me, and the writing is nice, where the characters develop and learn about themselves gradually. It has, as far as I've noticed, very few cliches in it (and before I am corrected, tropes are not always the same as cliches); so if you like clear cut and stereotype-ish things in your manga (I mean stereotype in the best possible connotation), this series will be somewhat difficult to follow. Notice how I also emphasize its slow, gentle nature. 

This manga is very much a slow paced one, so if you're an action fan (like me!), a psychological manga fan (like me!), a horror fan (like me!), or a fantasy-sci-fi-otherworld-magic fan (like me!), it's not necessarily for you. But if you've got the patience inherent to people who read seinen seriess, or the love of something that really unfolds as it goes along, and holds unexpected, but gentle surprises, take a look at this one.

My Top 5 Yuri Manga: #3 Husky and Medley

Number three--Hasu x Medo! I expect I'm going to get a few reactions of 'wtf what is this' because of how freaking awesomely obscure this one is. I remember when it was just a passing thread and when people were squinting over a video made by an awesome Vocaloid artist in tribute to this...and now it's grown up into a manga! Basically, Husky x Medley is a sweet, absolutely breathtaking manga based on real events. You really gotta know the history to appreciate it. It started off as a thread on 2chan, the Japanese imageboard...

Responding to Comments 10-12-10 (AKA: How come Blogger doesn't have an easy way of responding to awesome comments?)

Yeah, when I think about yuri and naked women everywhere, my face remains utterly stoic. That's how awesome I am. Maybe I allow myself one or two secretive enjoyments for a brief moment, but then my expression quickly returns to a stony-faced, harsh and weathered thousand-yard stare.

My Top 5 Yuri Manga: Honorable Mention: Strawberry Shake Sweet

By Hayashiya Shizuru. The last post I had on Hayate X Blade segues into this unique, flavorful manga. That mangaka has a flair for ridiculous, occasionally wtf humor, and it really shows in this one. Though my masculinity is starting to feel drastically diminished by posting all these all-girls series, I shall nevertheless forge on, and recoup some of it later by drawing swords and bboying and shit. >.>

Protip: Drawing muscle-y pictures of yourself does not make you more masculine.

Feedback Appreciated

I just wanted to say that I'm honored to be getting some nice responses + feedback on the site and content. From the comments on Hayate X Blade:

Jilldine, I hope to sway you into reading one. Same goes to Mistah Goodman. I'll inundate everyone with girls. Pope Smurf is correct. Yuri is like Yaoi but with girls. And Yaoi is like Yuri but with dudes. But really, whatever your tastes, I respect them, because everyone's got something that they like out in the world.

ElChristo, thanks for the remark about my drawings. I know they're pretty sloppy, and more talented artists could make even better quick-drawings, but I think they help illustrate my posts sometimes. Also, MrLantel, I appreciate the comment. I've put in a page break on some of the extra-long ones, and I might do a summary toplist after I finish the 5 here. That way, I could link to them all if people wanted to read my longass paragraphs on them, and I could link to another webpage containing more info on it.

Thanks, everybody. Feedback is definitely appreciated. And now, back to work.

My Top 5 Yuri Manga: #4 Hayate Cross Blade

Bam. This particular series is a bit of an unusual sort. The setting is an academy that has its trademarked Absurdly Powerful Student Council (damn tvtropes popping up everywhere), and besides education, it has an entire separate branch of stuff called 'Sword Arts', which is kind of a duel-your-way up thing with wooden swords. There's a complex system of stars and dueling pairs, and various different rankings of which I'll attempt to do a quick summary.

My Top 5 Yuri Manga: #5 Kannazuki No Miko

So I was all thinking, what should I post next? And then it hit me. Lists of things! Yes! That's exactly what I should do, to keep my thoughts in order. So here we will have my top five yuri manga. 8D.

#5 Kannazuki No Miko

A Poll! The most Generic of them All

I have set up a poll.

Not that kind of poll. Wait, that's not even a kind of pole. 

Anyhow, it's the most generic poll I could come up with. A slathering of different genres and the such, and hopefully visitors can give their opinion on it, and smack me around when they find out that I've omitted their favorite genre. For this purpose, I didn't put stuff like yuri/yaoi, and gender bender up there because those are more like...stuff in the genre, you know? Like your meal is chicken, and your stuff is a kind of awesome sweet sauce. And you could have meals of chicken with beef, or maybe salmon and pasta, but all of those could have the sweet sauce in it. So you could have action/adventure series, with yuri in it, or you could have horror/psychological series, with yaoi in it. But then you could also pour more sauce on top, like meat sauce, and dumpling sauce, and soy sauce, and salt, kind of like when series have gender bender plus yaoi plus some shotacon-ish stuff but overall they're an action-adventure-fantasy-school life-harem series or something. ...I'm not sure if I'm making my point well, so I'll stop before I look dumber. Not that I don't feel dumb already.

Holy craps

Something is definitely wrong here. I never even used to draw these kinds of pictures at all, much less on MS Paint. I suspect that starting this blog might not alleviate my symptoms of seeing yuri everywhere, but that it might actually worsen them. I think I'd better be careful.

Tomorrow, or in a few days, I'll spend some time talking about and reviewing the manga that I be readin'. Hopefully it won't absorb all my time. Got studying to do! 

Studying like crazy right now.

How it is Everywhere, and the Mediocrity of my Design Skills

And my capitalization choices. Excrement on a stick, my capitalization choices for this title suck. Knowing that my design skill is horrifyingly subpar, and that my ability to create webpages is about as good as a worm's ability to tap dance.

...Goddamnit. Anyway, this is fairly serious. A week or two ago, I was perfectly fine milling around life, not thinking much on topics of manga. I was working on some art-style crap, contributing to a project online, doing some mild, noobish bboying, and generally feeling accomplished in a lazy way. And then stuff blew up in my face. I stumbled upon HasuxMedo, that real life story of two girls who fell in love which was eventually turned into a manga, and then from there on I ran into Sasameki Koto and ended up whirling around viciously in a sort of cacophonous, freestyling desire for more of the same. I'm not even sure if my writing's at all clear at the moment.


But this actually travels quite a bit further back. I didn't start my like of yuri just weeks ago--it was kind of an extended, drawn-out period of time, much like a courtship in the 1800s. Think of me as the gentleman, and a billion other mangas as my women. Wait, what do you mean that's not how it worked back then?


It started with the manga that had a bit of yuri on the sidelines. Mahou Sensei Negima's Setsuna x Konoka, for a prominent example. I had touched (fondled?) Kannazuki no Miko some years past, and experienced the bizarre wonder that was Strawberry Shake Sweet, but I didn't consider myself a purveyor of yuri manga. I just read manga as a side thing, a source of amusement, ...but unfortunately, now, I think I'm starting to get a bit obsessed. Maybe it'll pass. But now, because of this, I dedicate this blog to the ups and downs, the minutiae and the macrocosms, and the oozing possibility of addiction to yuri that I may have in the future. Argh, yuri everywhere. 

See?! It's even in my MS Paint now. Gnhghngh.