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.

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: #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

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.