With Sono Han­abira ni Kuchiduke wo trans­lated, I thought back to my fun time with Aoi Shiro and grabbed it in a flash. Well unfor­tu­nately things didn’t go as I would like— the game ended up dis­turb­ing me in under ten min­utes. Why? Because this is no yuri romance story, it’s almost pure yuri H, with two really per­verted girls nonethe­less and prob­a­bly more H text than story writ­ing… Really, the cute title and soft color pal­lette fooled me. But it’s been a long time since I’ve dis­liked a yuri story and that got me thinking—

I wish I had an onee-san like Yuki-chan

Most peo­ple clas­sify yuri as a pri­mary genre, like romance or action (as opposed to secondary/tertiary gen­res, like psy­cho­log­i­cal, school, etc, which are more like descrip­tor tags). This implies it’s amongst the main rea­sons to watch a show, and that if you don’t love yuri then you can’t enjoy the show. To date I’m still not com­pletely sure of this view. Yes, I’ve picked up yuri for the sake of it being yuri, but is yuri the tar­get that I’m look­ing for? Or, is yuri merely a medium of deliv­er­ing what I really sought? I’m reminded of what ETERNAL said:

Yuri, like all set­tings and devices and what have you, is sim­ply a premise.

Maybe when I sought yuri, I’m sim­ply look­ing for a really cute romance with an ele­gantly refined atmosphere.

*nodnod*

So after look­ing back into all the yuri series I really enjoyed (and those I passed), I came up with the my three rea­sons for watch­ing yuri:

.

The Atmos­phere

When yuri is men­tioned, one of the first thoughts that usu­ally pops to head is Marim­ite. Most peo­ple seems to find its ele­gant and tran­quil mood, this speak softly and walk slowly approach, to be the defin­ing attribute of ‘shoujo-style yuri’ (except that’s a mis­nomer in itself, as the yuri fan­dom tar­gets males). Although this con­cept is often used as a back­drop to make the yuri premise more refined, thus giv­ing it a more inno­cent image, I don’t really think it stays con­sis­tent with the devel­op­ing mood for most yuri series. Things change, by and most, either from the rela­tion­ship drama or the ener­getic frol­ick­ing; but that doesn’t stop us from enjoy­ing a cup of after­noon tea or a Gokigenyo greet­ing.

My per­sonal top rea­son for watch­ing yuri attrib­utes to a dif­fer­ent mood: the cute light-hearted slice of life. The ‘this is so cute I melted’ fac­tor is com­par­a­tively the same as the ‘this is so moe I died’ expe­ri­ence. So in a sense, yuri slice of life ele­ments are on about the same wave­length as moe­blob series, or ultra-fluffy shoujo series (e.g. Yumeiro Pat­tis­sere). I would def­i­nitely con­sider the early series fluff of Straw­berry Panic sim­i­lar to that of Kanon, and Saki was a per­fect exam­ple of just how well yuri blends into the Moe arena.

lol wut

Candy Boy stands as my favorite in this per­spec­tive, since it’s pure yuri slice of life and gen­er­ate a mood which reminds me of watch­ing K-ON. I’d love another sea­son of this— if only yuri had been as pop­u­lar as moe.

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The Romance

The yuri ghetto may really exist, and that yuri is still always told through yuri ele­ments, but in the end girls love is still romance, pure and sim­ple, and not some strange vari­a­tion of. Just because the series is about a group of “girls who love each other too much” (Straw­berry Panic will always be remem­bered by that line), doesn’t make it much dif­fer­ent from your nor­mal, straight ver­sion. Really, the char­ac­ters just hap­pened to be girls, and they just hap­pened to fall in love with fel­low girls— don’t judge them; claim­ing that the only appeal of shoujo-ai series is the yuri make one not much bet­ter than those who claim “anime is only for kids”.

This is the best phi­los­o­phy ever!

Of course, just as seinen romance-comedy is often plagued by harems and generic males, yuri has its own prob­lems with unre­al­is­tic love, espe­cially how dear het­ero­sex­ual social per­cep­tions rarely make it into the minds of these char­ac­ters. It’s prob­a­bly the rea­son why I’ve rarely thought seri­ously about yuri, and sim­ply laid back to enjoy the mood. It’s also why my favorite yuri series is Girl Friends, because it does go the extra mile to describe each step of how friend­ship grad­u­ally evolved into true love.

That being said, girls love does have a spe­cialty atmos­phere to its romance, as I’ve men­tioned above. But I sure wouldn’t con­sider this unique to yuri: Kimi no Todoke cer­tainly presents the exact same thing with Sawako’s inno­cence and Kazehaya’s moe. At the same time, nei­ther is all yuri like that: Aoi Hana sure rolled fast into a per­sonal drama series with all the emo­tional sting of one, far more about the char­ac­ters redis­cov­er­ing them­selves through that life-changing first love expe­ri­ence than sim­ply two girls fawn­ing over each other (although plenty of that did happen).

.

The Drama

In these days, just about every­thing have some ele­ments of drama to spicy up the story; yuri is cer­tainly no excep­tion with its per­sonal and rela­tion­ship drama . But when you get down to it, how is the tri­an­gle drama of yuri (say, Aoi Hana) that dif­fer­ent from the love poly­gons of heteromance/drama shows (e.g. Toradora)? I mean, you still have your close friends who pine away with their unre­quited love, not want­ing to reveal the truth and hurt the exist­ing close­ness between friends.

I guess if there’s one dis­tinc­tion, it’s that in yuri the best friends pair tends to fall in love with each other, rather than best friends falling for the same per­son, which is a sta­ple in heteromance-drama. But this is more of a reliance on the tried-and-true recipes more than any­thing else.

Just like reg­u­lar romance, some­times it’s about dis­cov­er­ing whom that truest impor­tant per­son is.

[Also, if you’re look­ing for a good yuri drama with a dose of social real­ism: Girlx­GirlxBoy is a really good 1 vol­ume short read fea­tur­ing a strange but very well devel­oped tri­an­gle. You can grab it at the Wings of Yuri site here]

Although, remind­ing myself of how alike yuri is to nor­mal romance doesn’t seem to fix this sad­ness that the Spring 2010 sea­son is sur­pris­ingly short of yuri. I need my sea­sonal yuri ship­ping—!!! (and nor­mal and BL…)

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Girl Friends ~ Shoujo Yuri at its Finest
• Simoun’s Cre­ative Fan­tasy and Setting-driven Storytelling
• Every­thing You Want At Once: Baka to Test to Shokanju

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 19:59 and is filed under Analysis, Anime, 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.