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.

The series began with its two main char­ac­ters, Kumakuma Mariko (Mari) and Oohashi Akiko (Akko) being just friendly high school classmates/acquaintances. Akko is a styl­ish and ener­getic girl who is hon­est, out­go­ing, but bad at her school grades. Mean­while, Mari is the exact oppo­site — shy, com­pletely unaware of fash­ion, yet hard­work­ing in her course­work. A sim­ple end-of-exams sigh brought the two to a com­mon topic, and a hair­style makeover allowed Mari and Akko to gain trust in each other, becom­ing close friends almost instantly.

What began as a granted chance get quickly falls back into a more real­is­tic and com­fort­able pace. In Girl Friends, romance didn’t sim­ply jump out of a rock first sight. Friend­ship was first built upon as the two, plus Akko’s friends Tamamine and Satoko, formed a tightly knit group of best friends. For 10 chap­ters, after school and dur­ing hol­i­days, the quad would go out and just do… girl stuff — shop­ping for clothes and acces­sories, help­ing each other diet, vis­it­ing pic­ture booths, gos­sip­ing about poten­tial dates, vis­it­ing snack stores, doing their nails, you get the idea. The blush­ingly hes­i­tant pre­sen­ta­tion and the bal­ance between the four friends made their adven­tures cute­ness incar­nate. Yet at the same time, it didn’t fill like generic filler mate­r­ial, as bland and point­less rep­e­ti­tion was nowhere in sight. Every scene was pol­ished and uti­lized to develop the char­ac­ters, whether it’s show­ing off their exist­ing traits and intro­duced them (mostly the naive Mari) to the finer points of female social life.

Purikura, the sym­bol of friendship~!

The cast con­tin­ued on from the start with­out any inten­tion of devel­op­ing yuri rela­tion­ships. They went out on sin­gle and group dates like usual. They gos­siped about guys like nor­mal girls would. But sooner or later, Mari started to develop feel­ings for Akko that ran fur­ther than just best friends. The feel­ings devel­oped the way I always wanted yuri rela­tion­ships to — it wasn’t intended, it didn’t jump out of nowhere, it was friend­ship evolved and sud­denly real­ized as one’s heart ached. With­out a doubt, Akko x Mari is the sweet­est yuri romance I’ve ever seen…

But as I men­tioned prior, this was pseudo-realistic yuri romance. Falling in love with another girl wasn’t that sim­ple, and our girls cer­tainly weren’t seg­re­gated from the rest of soci­ety in some ide­al­is­tic micro­cosm all-girls school like in Straw­berry Panic or Marim­ite. Inno­cent Mari felt besieged — she thought that her feel­ings weren’t nor­mal, that her love was one-sided and would only trou­ble Akko, whose affec­tions were merely friend­ship, etc. She held back. She tried to have a nor­mal rela­tion­ship with another guy. She started avoid­ing her. But noth­ing worked.

On the other hand, Akko felt some­thing was wrong. She felt a tinge of jeal­ousy. She was wor­ried for their friend­ship. She even­tu­ally cor­nered Mari, and Mari con­fessed, with the addi­tional dec­la­ra­tions that she will get over it, that she wouldn’t trou­ble Akko over it.

But that’s also when Akko started to real­ize her own feel­ings, and the inse­cu­ri­ties that came with it — does Mari still feel­ing that way? Is she already over it? Would she accept a rela­tion­ship like this?

Hence, drama was born — not from anger, not from unsightly jeal­ousy, sim­ply the slowly matur­ing feel­ings and mis­un­der­stand­ings over a same-sex confession.

It went back and forth, tak­ing three sets of con­fes­sions, before the two best friends under­stood each oth­ers’ feel­ings for what it was and take their rela­tion­ship to the next step.

The day true love was established…

What causes me to adore Girl Friends so much isn’t just the cute art style, it’s not just the rounded char­ac­ters, it’s not their blush­ing or their gos­sip­ing or their nail pol­ish (although those cer­tainly helped). It’s the fact that these char­ac­ters, in every step of the way, thought and acted and responded in ways I could imme­di­ately under­stand, feel for, and sym­pa­thize with. It’s a romance drama that didn’t rely on explor­ing the unpleas­ant parts of human nature, nor did it focus on only the good sides. Instead, it founded itself in uncer­tainty, appeal­ing to the part of us we all face — when we sud­denly real­ize love and is trou­bled by our uncer­tainty of the other side’s feelings.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Search­ing for the Hap­pi­ness within Yuri
• The Heroine’s Strength Is Not Phys­i­cal: Hana Yori Dango
• Arakure and the Yakuza Shoujo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 16:14 and is filed under Manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.