Floating Catacombs

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 12

It is my sworn duty to document the yuri genre as it continues to graduate from high school. Here’s the pickings from this year.

She Loves To Cook, She Loves to Eat

Two women who live by themselves in the same apartment complex slowly bond over making and eating food together. There’s a fundamental feminism at this manga’s core which says yes, we will be talking about periods and eating disorders and shitty families and institutional sexism instead of being trapped in our own coffins forever. That alone makes She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat a landmark work, but it’s also extremely relaxing and sweet. By some metrics it’s one of the most popular manga for women in Japan, and it warms my heart to know that it’s reaching the people who need to hear what it has to say.

Also, it received a live-action adaptation that aired on NHK during prime time. It’s definitely worth watching! While the manga will use a good third of its panels to depict Kasuga devouring a meal from bite to bite, the show instead places the camera on Nomoto watching Kasuga eat. It’s an interesting inversion, keeping us more locked into Nomoto’s perspective, and makes sense for the medium. There is no clear cultural box for what these two women are doing, something which they’re each keenly aware of. And yet, they continue to take care of one another, cutting through the fear and loneliness dinner by dinner. Watching through this with my girlfriend healed my relationship to food just a little, and I can’t wait for the second season to adapt some of the really juicy parts of the manga.

Cheerful Amnesia

A woman gets in a terrible accident and loses the last three years of her memories, much to the chagrin of her girlfriend during that time. This is a sex comedy with exactly one joke, and the bluntness with which it is applied won me over. I probably would’ve hated Arisa if I had tried reading this a year or two ago, but now that I’m familiar with High Femme Camp Antics I can understand what’s going on with her. It’s so stupid, and arguably not very good, and yet I had fun. Though it is genuinely great that the latter volumes shift the subject matter to the perils of coming out to your family and the heartbreak of planning a wedding in a country that won’t recognize your marriage, but keep the tone exactly as lighthearted.

Umineko-Sou days

I mostly picked this up because it appeared while I was searching for the Umineko manga on my reader app. It was fine.

Naoko Kodama’s true calling, though, is writing cheating manga. Her newest is “A Lying Bride’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage”, a manifesto of a title if I’ve ever heard one. There’s only one chapter so far, but the heteropessimism on display is so scorched-earth that it’s hard to fault the lesbian protagonist for any homewrecking that may occur down the line.

Kodama is on a fucking mission with this one

A Face You Shouldn’t Show

Thank god you can just publish fetish porn in Comic Yuri Hime now. I approve of this on an ideological level, if not always a personal interest one.

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All of the manga on display here are chipping away at the purity complex endemic to yuri in their own ways, and that’s the real miracle. Here’s to newer, weirder lesbians, now and always. Merry Christmas.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2022, Day 12

Merry Christmas!

I got pretty sick last night (doing better now) so let’s keep this one brief. As per usual, I’m ending my blogging season with some yuri I read this year that focused on adults.

I Love You So Much, I Hate You

This one’s a short but tightly-wound office lady drama. It’s a bit more sensual than a lot of its peers, which I always appreciate, especially in a subgenre that frequently writes its characters too immature for their age. We’ve got affairs and a manager-employee relationship here, so this manga would probably come off as highly dubious if it was heterosexual (something it alludes to when a different, straight workplace affair is exposed halfway through). But for better or for worse, we’re still in a cultural moment where It’s Okay For Girls, and this manga got me thinking about that double standard. Good stuff.

I’ve always loved how the women in these OL comics work in the most nondescript positions possible, such as “systems development” or in this case, “sales”. Here’s hoping we start seeing more interesting professions depicted in the future. I want geoscience yuri, air traffic control yuri, and cybersecurity incident response yuri.

Our Days Under One Roof

There’s nothing more heartwarming than a good autobiographical yuri. While I’m not really familiar with Inui Ayu’s fictional output, she knocks it out of the park here with a simple and sickly-sweet manga about her daily life with an office lady she picked up. I see shades of my own relationship in the two of them, and while it’s all pretty universal, that doesn’t mean it’s any less enjoyable. Give this one a shot next time it’s 4AM and you’ve finished throwing up from food poisoning but you just can’t fall asleep. It may not physically heal you, but it will keep you relaxed and spiritually nourished and that’s really the best you can hope for.

Take care, yall.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2021, Day 12

Merry Christmas!

These past 12 days have been a whirlwind, but I’m so glad I was able to get all of my blog posts out on time without compromising on quality. Let’s wrap this year up as I always do: with a review of all the yuri I read this year that focused on adults.

Accept My Fist of Love!

This manga was officially published in English under the title Catch These Hands!, which is easily one of the funniest localization decisions I’ve seen in years. I wish I could give the same glowing praise to the manga itself. Two former delinquents, now working adults, stumble into a relationship and attempt to make things work. The bulk of the series is the two women trying and failing to find activities to do together. Without shared hobbies or emotional intimacy, they’re stuck reminiscing about high school.

While this is billed as a comedy, a lot of the humor falls flat because reading about two characters with bad chemistry just isn’t very fun. The manga does manage to stick the landing in its final chapter, however, something a surprising amount of yuri fails at.

In conclusion, I wish the girls fought hand-to-hand more times. Combat is the real yuri, after all.

The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This

Takashi Ikeda is responsible for Sasameki Koto, perhaps the most bog-standard 2000s girl’s love series out there. When I learned that he was the one penning this manga, I was genuinely taken aback. It’s a cut above anything else he’s done for sure!

The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This is a yuri 4koma about a scriptwriter and her voice actress girlfriend’s domestic life together. There’s a significant age gap between them that leaves voice actress Wako as something of a cute pet in the relationship, and while this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, sometimes older gay women are exactly what you need to see. The two of them are drawn in different artstyles, which really hammers their dynamic in. As far as slices of life go, this is top-tier stuff, highlighting all the cute, sweet, and strange moments of living together with your lover. It’s not pornographic, but it’s also not afraid to talk about sex. Given how emotionally immature yuri characters tend to be, that’s a welcome sight.

While at first it seems like the supporting cast are going to detract from the central relationship, Wako and Eri’s friends are good fun to be around. It’s neat to see small circles of lesbian friends depicted in something like this so realistically.

There’s currently an interesting trans subplot, and it looks like things are going to be handled well, but I sure hope mister Ikeda does not drop the ball on this one.

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Yuri is something with near-spiritual qualities to me. In Utena terms, it’s kind of a shining thing. It can be dangerous to dabble in the notion of lesbianism-as-purity, but as discussed in the podcast I linked yesterday, the disparate elements of a good yuri manga combine to create something that is genuinely healing. Thank you for reading my blog, and I’ll see you next December.

Or maybe sooner, because I’ve got one last post up my sleeve.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2021, Day 11

As usual I am taking a Christmas Eve writing break, but if you want some more words from me, here’s a podcast episode I guested on earlier this year. Me and six other people talk yuri for almost an hour, and it’s not nearly as much of a clusterfuck as it could have been.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2020, Day 12

It’s easily been Floating Catacombs’ most successful year, with far more posts that I’m proud of than previous times. With that, I’d like to round out the year with something of a tradition on this blog: sharing some yuri manga featuring adults, because I will never get tired of emotionally compromised women working things out.

Crescent Moon and Donuts

An office lady who’s constantly stressed out about not being normal enough falls into an anxiety spiral only to be consoled by her coworker, who it turns out is just as trashbrained, but in slightly different ways so they’re able to strengthen each other. Crescent Moon and Donuts is a surprisingly good meditation on anxiety and feeling like a fuckup, and trying to navigate these feelings between family, work, and romantic partners. As someone with self-doubt almost as bad as these ladies, who both strengthens and is strengthened by her partner with her own slew of struggles, I really felt this one.

Runaway Girl

Runaway Girl walks the tightrope line between cutesy and devastatingly messy. Now a working adult, Maki has a chance encounter with her old high school sorta-girlfriend Midori. While Maki’s still a pent-up lesbian, Midori got knocked up and is planning a shotgun wedding with her deadbeat fiancée. What follows is a lot of unraveling of compulsory heterosexuality, with Midori eventually realizing that her situation is abusive and trying to find the resolve to change her situation. It’s the love and support from the women in her life that finally reaches her. This manga has some heavy subject matter, but it’s dealt with using a certain level of fluffiness that keeps it from being outright depressing. Concluded with 4 volumes, this one is a quick but strong read.

Even Though We’re Adults

Ah, Takako Shimura. I don’t have many thoughts on Aoi Hana, but Wandering Son is deeply vivid and cruel in a way that caused me to read the entire second half in a single afternoon and left me in a trans haze. She can weave truly messy webs of character dynamics, but her stories aren’t without unreasonable moments. So with some caution, I caught up on the scanlated chapters of her newest work. Even Though We’re Adults is pretty much Runaway Girl but on a higher difficulty setting. A woman has a sloppy hookup with her bartender, only for the bartender to discover afterwards that she’s married to a man. The hard part is that the husband isn’t a blatantly awful person like in Runaway Girl – when he finds out that his wife has been cheating with another woman, he’s confused and concerned first and foremost. The worst part is that this bartender has been betrayed time and time again by dating women who turned out to be married, but she can’t ignore this one for horny and lonely reasons.

In the last chapters the scanlations got to, the husband decides to move with his wife back into his family’s house, and you can already imagine the in-law tension that begins boiling there. Even Though We’re Adults will probably turn out to be a messy bisexual family drama instead of a decidedly lesbian break like Runaway Girl. But what I read of it was interesting, and with an official translation on the way, we’ll see if Takako Shimura’s still got it.

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I need gay women in my life to survive. I’m glad manga increasingly has me covered, with more of these genuinely interesting LGBT+ series coming out every year.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2020, Day 9

There’s only so much yuri manga out there, and not everything can be Bloom Into You. There’s plenty of garbage, and most of their core issues, like ‘written with a noticeably male gaze’ and ‘relationship has no chemistry’, aren’t fun to write about. But this year, I stumbled on a handful of girl’s love that was bad in more interesting ways.

Fragtime

Notable for being the only manga I’ve ever fallen asleep reading, Fragtime has no idea what it wants to be. A guilt-free horny timestop manga? An exploration of what it’s like to lose the thing that makes you special and how that affects burgeoning relationships? The manga waffles between these two as it goes through the motions of the plot, and ends up throwing them out the window for ‘actually, both of these girls were psychopaths the whole time’. While I love a good psychodrama between two terrible women, it’s absolutely not deserved here? Neither is the final genre shift to two broken girls pulling themselves together mutually. Their mutual moments of vulnerability feel underwhelming, especially since there’s really no lead-up to them.

Fragtime also got an OVA this year. It manages to feel even slower than the manga, thanks to some extremely limited animation from a nobody studio that went bankrupt right after finishing it. The audio mixing as well as the music are surprisingly terrible. It’s hard to make yuri this boring, but Fragtime pulls it off with aplomb.

Seifuku no Vampiress Lord

Vampiress Lord is on the other end of the bad yuri spectrum, an overconfident manga that bites off more than it can chew and collapses inwards. As far as vampire lesbian media goes, it’s relatively conflict-free, and most of the negative aspects of vampirism are defanged or made into melodrama instead of existential conflict. The focus instead shifts to how personal relationships are affected by the main character becoming a sexy vampire Mary Sue, and there’s honestly some charming and underused narrative threads in the first half. It’s sweet to see an earnest discussion of nonmonogamy carried out through the main couple setting boundaries for Yuunagi’s bloodsucking of other girls.

Then things start to go wrong. The publisher pulled the plug on Vampiress Lord after poor sales of the first volume. With seven volumes of story planned, the mangaka raced to cram it all into the remaining two. The central relationship goes from slow and exploratory to deadly serious in no time flat, and suddenly a shonen-style council of the most powerful vampires are introduced to shock us out of the school setting. This whirlwind of new characters includes two whose only traits are ‘slut’ and 'otokonoko’, which left something of a sour note. The final chapter is an apology omake from the author, and it really does seem like a bad situation. A trainwreck for sure, but at least the train made it to some nice places before derailing. Vampire yuri has a kind of shoddy track record, so in the future I should probably try to get my vampire lesbian kicks via getting bitten by women.

Miyuki-chan in Wonderland

not even the mirror demon can save us from this one

Eagle-eyed Clamp fans will notice that I missed a manga when combing through their works, and that’s because I was saving it for here. Clamp have made countless yaoi doujins and homoerotic scenes with guys, but the lesbians that show up in their works are usually treated as a joke or a threat. Miyuki-chan in Wonderland is their honest attempt to make a yuri manga, and it’s appalling. They turn X and RG Veda’s predatory lesbian trope up to 11, with the main premise being a girl repeatedly getting isekai’d into fantasy worlds filled to the brim with horny women who want to ruin her innocence and won’t take no for an answer. It’s sleazy, it’s demeaning, and it’s not successful as a comedy, yuri, or ecchi. Thankfully each chapter is only like 9 pages so you can leaf through the whole thing in 10 minutes, tops.

Clamp’s approach towards horny women is surprisingly consistent throughout their works? They really like showing off women’s legs via skimpy fantasy armor and bunnygirl outfits, and this happens a lot now that I’m thinking back on all that Clamp manga I read. I guess that style is their attempt at reaching out towards straight guys? They’re certainly not aiming to pander to lesbians, otherwise they would have written literally anything but this.

The final chapter is the main character going to see the X movie and honestly that’s a good enough joke/cross-promotion that it got me to see it.