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.

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: #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.