With the release of Chap­ter 27 by Maki­maki Scan­la­tions, Girl Friends finally brings a con­clu­sion to its first arc — and what a ride it has been.

Cute­ness refined~

First pub­lished in 2007, Girl Friends is hardly amongst the most well-known manga, even in the yuri cat­e­gory. How­ever, its pol­ished art, blush­ing cute­ness, and gen­eral adher­ence to girl stuff is quickly gain­ing rep­u­ta­tion amongst the cir­cles of yuri fans. I was first intro­duced to it by Honya, whom was intro­duced to it by some­one else, so yeah — word is get­ting passed around even as we speak. It seems every time a new per­son is intro­duced, it doesn’t take long for them to quickly become hooked to this mas­ter­piece of high-school romance drama. I was no excep­tion — Girl Friends jumped onto my top 5 manga list by the teens chapters.

Rea­sons to Read:

• Excel­lent and well-paced (inter)character devel­op­ment — Friend­ship came as a chance get, while romance was grad­u­ally born from it. Day to day nor­mal­ity rounded and changed the char­ac­ters with­out gain­ing filler repetitiveness.
• Sweet romance drama in sim­plic­ity — A con­fes­sion between best friends brings out romance drama of the high­est grade, even with­out the bit­ter­ness pro­duced by love polygons.
• Cute~! — I can­not stress this enough. The inno­cent blush­ing and hes­i­tance eas­ily made this one of the most adorable manga ever created.
• Pseudo-pragmatic yuri — Prob­a­bly the most real­is­tic I’ve seen yet, as the pair tried their best to apply all the com­mon expec­ta­tions of romance to their spe­cial relationship.

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Over the week­end, I fol­lowed my anime club to the annual trip to Neko­con (Hamp­ton Roads, VA). Although this is a yearly trip for the club, it’s actu­ally my first time going with them since I’m always too busy with school projects at this time in pre­vi­ous years prior grad­u­a­tion. The con itself felt, greatly dimin­ished, com­pared to my expe­ri­ence at Otakon (Bal­ti­more, MD), mostly due to the far lower qual­ity of its pan­els and the glob­ally lower atten­dance, par­tic­u­larly in the Dealer’s Room and Art Bazaar. But vis­it­ing the con with the full club sure was fun, par­tic­u­larly when half our club attended the Name-your-tunes panel and rocked the event with fan­gasms in our seat­ing sector.

Putting my own adven­tures aside, this Nekocon’s last­ing sou­venir is the set of KEY 10th anniver­sary plushies I came across by surprise.

Kawaaai­i­i­iii~!

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