#kureha tsubaki

[gloams]

YURIKUMAAAAAAAAAA

[keterok]

Merry Christmas, Grr-grr~

[animefeminist]

Becoming Monstrous: Yurikuma Arashi and transmisogyny in the school system

Content Warning: Discussion of queer/transphobia (including slurs), online and workplace harassment, grooming, systemic violence

Spoilers for Yurikuma Arashi, referenced spoilers for Puella Magi Madoka Magica

“This is the nature of systems: the moment you reject them, you are forced to realize that they’re the very ground you’re standing on.” -Ikuhara Kunihiko

Two bears are presented with a choice: will you be invisible, or will you eat humans? They look like teddy bears, and they are on trial. wo girl bears–two lesbian girls–Ginko and Lily, standing before three male judges deciding whether or not they should have the right to exist. In order to have their love approved, they declare: they will eat humans. They transform, taking on human form as they don hypersexualized bear girl outfits, and they enter the world of the school.

Yurikuma Arashi places this strange set-piece towards the middle of its first three episodes. It exemplifies the show’s style, told as it is in enigmatic parables. Ostensibly, Yurikuma is about a human girl named Kureha seeking answers about the deaths of her mother and girlfriend while getting into a love triangle involving the two bears who have infiltrated her school disguised as humans.

However, everything in Yurikuma Arashi is more symbol than literal representation, and I have often mulled over its meaning as I’ve navigated entering the teaching profession as a nonbinary Chinese person. Like the bears, I’ve often asked myself: what do I sacrifice to be allowed to exist within the school?

Read it at Anime Feminist!

[witchofanguish]

[lacevalentines]

♡ See you next bear! ♡

[shining-seal]

🌸🐻 Yuri Kuma Arashi 🐻🌸

[mostly-magical-polls]

Best Magical Trio - Round 1

[randomlonelymusician]

Anime lesbians that not enough people are talking about

Suruga Kanbaru (Monogatari Series)

The entire Monogatari series is quite problematic and very hard to get into, which is why not enough people talk about Kanbaru. But to my experience, at least, she's one of the more accurately written lesbian characters I've seen. She's someone who's felt isolation because of her sexuality, and who's felt that heartbreak of falling in love with a close friend. She has a discomfort with her sexuality (which I found more clear in the novels), but once she opens up to someone about it, she really talks about it. Her sexuality also isn't rigid, and she explores new avenues of it. To me, she just felt like a very real older teen girl trying to figure out herself.

Momoko Sudo (O Maidens in your Savage Season)

I feel as O Maidens as a whole isn't talked about as much as it should be, and Momoko is talked about even less. Momoko's character really captures the experience of having these feelings that don't match what you're being told is normal or what you see around you. And because of this, she can't put words to it. She's part of a literature club and reads a lot of romance, but she's never represented in any of it. I love Momoko because she feels like a real young teen girl trying to put words to all of these feelings she's having.

Kureha Tsubaki (Yurikuma Arashi)

Yurikuma Arashi is often overlooked due to its presentation (which actually ties into the commentary it's giving), and is the least appreciated of Ikuhara's works. But despite the show being quite messy, I can't help but love Kureha. The show as a whole represents how lesbian women are viewed and portrayed in Japanese society and media, and Kureha's character represents internalized homophobia, and the fear of being "openly gay". The whole series is fantastical in nature, but Kureha's feelings and story remain very true to many people's experiences, including my own.

~~~

I just wanted to share a few characters I connected with and I don't see being talked about enough. I wholeheartedly recommend checking out Yurikuma Arashi and O Maidens in your Savage Season, as they're excellent shows. As for Monogatari... I'd tread lightly and look at the content warnings! But it's still a great series.

General note: Yes, Monogatari is a horribly problematic series. It has a lot that I seriously do not like, but if you're able to get through the bad there's a whole lot of good, such as Kanbaru. So warning!

[pepernoott]

[hakonohanayome]

Yurikuma Arashi - Morishima Akiko

[utopianparadoxist]

The thing about that is that eating fascists is cool and fine, actually. In fact she doesn't even eat them because bears HAVE to eat people--we see ginko and lulu eating regular human food all the time.

Ginko explicitly says she's eating invisible storm members as her small way of trying to protect Kureha, because the invisible storm is targeting Kureha from the very beginning of the show and trying to get her killed, and Ginko knows this.

Predatory bears DO exist, just like predatory kinds of people do exist, but Ginko is not one of them. Yurizono Mitsuko and Yuriika are, and they are a willing participant in the invisible storm system who introduces us to it by praising it for giving her isolated victims to kill as a bear, and the headmistress of the school running the invisible storm system in the first place, respectively.

Also invisible storm girls are lesbians too, they're no less sexual than the bear girls are. There's a whole scene where life sexy watches two human girls making out meant to point this out.

The difference between bears and humans isn't that bears are lesbians and humans aren't, the difference is that bears are honest about chasing their desires--including a desire for love, if they believe in it--and human girls choose the logic of the herd and disavow love as something that doesn't exist, because to be special to someone in particular is to stand out from the crowd and conformity to the status quo is the ultimate goal.

The fact that Kureha and Sumika chose to love each other is exactly why the invisible storm chooses to target them for exclusion/extermination at the start of the show, which is also what the storm did to Kureha and Ginko in their childhoods to tear them apart.

Ginko is fully justified and based and invisible storm girls are cops that deserve to get eaten. It's that simple.

Just got done binging Yurikuma Arashi, because people on the internet we’re saying what a good metaphor for the toxic portrayal of lesbians in yuri it was.

It is in parts, but it does the Zootopia thing where the fantastical metaphorical stand-in for the oppressed minority that is vilified and presumed to be predatory irl is, whoops, actually literally predatory! Hey why are we, the audience, supposed to be happy with Kureha getting together with Ginko at the end? She killed and ate like five girls. Sure they were nameless NPCs and also huge assholes, but like...they’re perma-dead, lmao! It retroactively justifies why The Storm was so Us vs Them the entire show!!

[puellamagishowdown]

Round 2 Has Finished!

Hey, no tiebreakers this time!

Not much to say this time. Most of the results were what I expected but I do have some questions about others (please feel free to answer said questions).

If you would like to see the percentages and some commentary, continue reading. If not, I will see you soon for round 3.

Ayame Mikuri (51.9%) vs Miyuri Yukari

Pia Undo vs Tsubasa Hanekawa (75.2%) - I know nothing about Divine Gate, but I do think Pia's outfit is quite cute. A little sad she lost.

Toyo vs Madoka Kaname (84.3%)

Livia Medeiros (50.7%) vs Rena Minami - ... Really? Alright then.

Sana Futaba (78.3%) vs Asahi Miura

Kaede Akino (56.8%) vs Sudachi Suwa

Mikoto Sena (51.7%) vs Hotaru Yura

Saki Asami vs Mikage Yakumo (82.6%)

Sasara Minagi vs Amaryllis (81.1%) - This was a much larger gap than I expected. Is her story that good or do people mostly just like the design better?

Ren Isuzu (76.3%) vs Kokoro Awane

Kuro vs Nanaka Tokiwa (70.9%)

Kagari Hinata vs Alina Gray (85.7%)

Mikura Komachi vs Yu (76.9%) - Please, I am begging someone to tell me why Yu. Why is she so popular? It can't be because she's a serial killer, other serial killer magical girls have lost this already.

Himena Aika (62.5%) vs Sayuki Fumino

Ashley Taylor (70.7%) vs Meiyui Chun

Mel Anna (77.1%) vs Ryoko Natsu

Hazuki Yusa  vs Eternal Sakura (71.2%)

Mayu Kozue (53.4%) vs Kako Natsume

Rui Mizuki vs Kanoko Yachiyo (64.8%) - Aw man, the resident chuunibyou lost...

Masara Kagami vs Juri Oba (57.3%)

Kyoko Sakura (88.8%) vs Tsubaki Mikoto

Riz Hawkwood (75.4%) vs Kanna Hijiri

Chiharu Hiroe vs Mito Aino (59.2%)

Corbeau vs Tsuruno Yui (70.4%)

Yuma Chitose vs Mitama Yakumo (77.6%)

Yuna Kureha (66.2%) vs Riko Chiaki

Ayaka Mariko (74.6%) vs Meguru Hibiki

Momoko Togame vs Ui Tamaki (52.1%) - This was a little closer than I expected.

Ao Kasane (52.7%) vs Suruga Kanbaru - For a while, I really thought Suruga was going to win this.

Gunhild vs Homura Akemi (85.2%)

Sae Kirino vs Nagisa Momoe (74.3%)

Iroha Tamaki vs Yachiyo Nanami (62%) - It feels early to have two major characters face off, but the RNG willed it. And it wasn't that close.

Seika Kumi vs Nayuta Satomi (52.6%)

Karin Misono (56.7%) vs Kanae Yukino

Konoha Shizumi (68.9%) vs Shigure Miyabi

Oriko Mikuni (76.9%) vs Lapin

Olga vs Mifuyu Azusa (59.5%)

Felicia Mitsuki vs Mami Tomoe (72.2%) - Even against another major side character like Felicia, Mami has dominated. All hail Mami.

Rika Ayano vs Sayaka Miki (66.3%)

Mitsuru Inami vs Ikumi Makino (69.5%)

Kirika Kure (63%) vs Konomi Haruna

[witchofanguish]

We must be phantoms.

Now, let us begin the Purging Ritual. Friends are the most important thing in the world. Everyone gathered here is a friend. That is "us." And those who would reject "us" are horrible, aren't they? Those who stray from the herd are wrong, aren't they? Those who refuse to join us are a nuisance, aren't they? Those who do not follow are evil. Man and bear are divided by species. Yet some have tried to cross that divide. Now is the time to select who is evil! Let's search evil!

[vandalizedai]

SOUND VOLTEX OFFICIAL YURI MASTERPOST:

Compilation of (most) of the small instances of Girls Love/yuri/lesbianism in SDVX. This is by no means a full detailed list of all yuri occurences in game (at least for Kononana in which there are many scenes which I still have to go through translation, for others these scenes are small and not much known!) The ship names are by their english name only, as I'm not fully aware of the japanese ship names.

Konoha x Nana (Kononana):

Relationship status: canonically a couple

Konoha official profile: "It seems that she is attracted to Nana, as occasionally they can be seen together on campus."

Valentine's Day event 2019: "No wonder the students are restless! In the corner of the classroom, there's a black cat girl and a vampire girl being all lovey-dovey, you know?! Talk about a youthful romance! Gyahahaha!"

"This year's confession is very unique! "Ah… I was looking for you. Do you accept this?" With a shy smile she held out her gift. Yes, today is Valentine's Day, the day in which you tell your loved ones about your feelings. Just the two of us in a classroom, we pledge our hearts to each other."

Fluorine x Flowry (Fluoflow)

Relationship status: mutual love (not yet to be confirmed as a couple)

Fluorine official profile: "She went undercover to find out what was going on in the Ludwigian State, but she fell in love with the voice of the diva, learning about the truth in the lyrics of her songs, so she helped in her escape."

Flowry official profile: "They are very close and always think dearly of each other."

Hiyuki-chan x Ondine Shifika Chiha (Onyuki)

Relationship status: one sided love (implied liking from Ondine's part, not much is known about Ondine in general, but their relationship is very yuri)

Ondine official profile: "When she met Hiyuki, she witnessed the ephemeral beauty of glittering ice formed from the water droplets she controls. 'For the first time, tears came out from my eyes… Realizing that it is okay for me to exist.'"

Ortlinde=NBLG=Valkyria x Satan-P*L-Iblis (Satanlinde)

Satan-P*L-Iblis (which I will personally refer to with it/they pronouns) has canonically an unknown gender identity, implied to be out of the binary. nblw can still be yuri.

Relationship status: one sided love from Satan's part, they seem to know each other for a very long time.

Satan official profile: "It seems to have taken a liking to the silver-haired Valkyrie since her days as a human." Honorable mentions: Mystérieux Rouge x Cinema Storia: They seem to be together in a lot of jacket art, in their profiles it is mentioned that they spend a lot of time together. Ms. DD x Sherry F. Arresters: They are coworkers and are always together because of that, Sherry seems to be the only person who knows of DD's true self rather than the flirtarious front she puts on for work.

Kureha x Tsubaki x Mitsuruko: Old ship based on the fact that the three of them are very close friends and were always together in older official artwork.

[yuripoll]

KNOCKOUTS: Yuri Kuma Arashi (2014 - 16)

Yuri Kuma Arashi is a three volume series illustrated by Morishima Akiko based on the anime directed and written by Kunihiko Ikuhara.

Some time ago, the asteroid Kumaria exploded in the depths of space. The resulting fragments became a meteor shower that rained down on Earth, and for some reason, bears all over the world rose up and attacked humanity! In "Man vs. Bear," the bears ate the humans and the humans shot the bears, resulting in a seemingly unending battle and a cycle of hatred. In the end, a giant "Wall of Extinction" was erected between the humans and bears and a state of mutual nonaggression came to pass... The human world. One morning, Arashigaoka Academy students Kureha Tsubaki and Sumika Izumino were by themselves and saw the "Yuri Flower" that bloomed in a flower bed. The two are friends as well as lovers. The flower bed is an important place to the two. At that moment, the Bear Alarms ring out! The bears are invading the human world, and humans are being attacked! Are they really those bears? One mystery invokes yet another mystery, one after another... - MAL

Official JP available on Book Walker, and the digital edition of the official ENG is available on INKR.

CWs under the cut. General severity ranking: moderate.

suggestive scenes, non-explicit sex & nudity; quite a lot of fanservice-y stuff like pantyshots.

some pretty light violence depicted, references to off-screen murder

sexual harassment / assault - teenage girls get flashed by an adult man in one scene. to a much lesser extent: a minor plot line towards the beginning has one of the girls being pressured into a relationship w a boy.

references to cannibalism

not abuse necessarily? but some shitty parenting (mother)

child death (car accident)

adult/minor - one scene has an adult mistaking a teenager for her girlfriend when half asleep and kissing her, the incident is referenced afterwards & there's a couple of gags about them having a threesome, but nothing actually comes of it.

[pinkarachnia]

Lesbian Anime Review #8 - Yuri Kuma Arashi

Shrek voice: “Dykes are… like bears”

When I started watching this show, I didn’t know the name Kunihiko Ikuhara. I watched the first few episodes with my partner and commented to them that this show reminds me a lot of Mawaru Penguindrum. I don’t know whether I feel very smart or very dumb but I guess I got that vibe for a reason.

Man, I really like Ikuhara shows. I was looking at his credits on MyAnimeList and he directed the opening sequence for Aoi Hana, which I praised in my review. I watched the first of the two Penguindrum recap movies and I still love that show. I hadn’t seen the full lyrics to Nornir translated before, and it goes harder than I remember from 2011. I can only imagine that YuriKuma sprung forth from his mind when he learned that despite the release of Revolutionary Girl Utena, homophobia still exists. Keep fighting the good fight, Ikuhara!

First, non-plot elements. The animation is good but it’s not Eizouken, you won’t be blown away constantly. I like the art in this show a lot. I never stopped thinking the bears were adorable. It has a classic Ikuhara extended transformation sequence but it doesn’t appear in full after the third episode. I don’t mind this really, I felt like after I saw the bear girls lick honey off naked Kureha the third time I had seen it enough.

Oh yeah this show is horny as fuck. They loaded this with classic yuri yearning, but what if they could touch each other while they yearn? All the yearning appears to be kiss related, but other activities are fair game here. More on that in the spoiler section later.

I like the opening and endings to this. The opening theme to this makes me understand why people like ASMR. The ending has a cute dancing bear and I’m always happy to see that little guy bounce around.

Every episode someone stands before a court of three bear men called Life Sexy (judge) Life Cool (prosecutor) and Life Beauty (defence) and they judge whether they have the right to transform from bears into humans. I didn’t want to put this in the plot discussion section. Fuck you.

It’s going to be very hard to talk about the plot of this show without spoiling it, but to give you a very general idea, Yuri Kuma Arashi is about a world that is split into two halves; one where the humans live and one where the bears live. They’re separated by a huge literal barrier called the Species Divide. They have always hated each other, but they have always loved each other. The main character, Kureha Tsubaki, is a human girl. Bears have started infiltrating her high school in disguise as human girls because they want to eat her. She seems to be a prime target for bear attack. Humans in this world are always vigilant for bear attack and a lot of them seem to have firearms. Kureha herself practices with a rifle in case of a bear encounter because her mother was killed by a bear when she was younger. The plot kicks off when two bears disguised as humans infiltrate the school, Ginko Yurishiro and Lulu Yurigasaki. All the bears put Yuri in their human names so you can always see it coming. What could this mean? I know the answer to that. Let’s go on an adventure into the least subtle subtext I’ve ever seen.

Spoilers from here. That is sexy. Shabadadoo.

I don’t really want to talk about the plot to this show, I just want to talk about what the plot means. Just like Penguindrum before it, this show is very heavy on the symbolism, but unlike Penguindrum I found it really easy to decipher what it all means here.

This is a show about gay persecution. The bears are gay people and the humans are straight people. There are a couple of exceptions where you see a human character partake in a gay activity but that appears to be the overarching theme here. It’s pretty on the nose from the point where you clock that every bear has Yuri in their name, but the most prominent examples of this are with the main character and her deal and with her mother and her friend, the school principal.

The principal, Yurika, is a bear. She was close friends with Kureha’s mother, Reia. Yurika goes through a terrible grief when Kureha is born because she realises that Reia never loved her the way she loved Reia. Sorry you fell for a straight girl, Yurika.

As the plot progresses it quickly starts revolving around the relationship between Ginko and Kureha. They were friends as kids because Kureha crossed the Species Divide to find Ginko and brought her over to the human side of the world, where they lived together for a time. She has no memories of their friendship, which we’re lead to believe is because in order to gain the power to turn into a human girl, Ginko forfeited Kureha’s memories of their friendship. At the end, they reveal that this wasn’t quite accurate, it was actually Kureha who asked the court to allow Ginko to become human. The court tells her that this is an arrogant wish, that it’s presumptuous to assume that Ginko would want to become human to stay with her in a world that hates bears. Kureha is a child at the time so she doesn’t understand that conversion therapy is wrong, so she does it anyway, forfeiting her own memories as the price. At the climax of the show, Kureha stands before the court again and makes a new request, that she be turned into a bear. They’re happy she finally gets it and she goes bear mode. Then she and Ginko get to kiss and it’s the end.

There’s a great subtitle in episode 12 and I don’t know if it’s a line from the dub, but there’s a firing squad of human girls aiming at bear Kureha and Ginko and the leader is saying, “shoot her! She’s a bear! She’s disgusting!”, but the subtitle for “she’s a bear” was “she’s gay” just in case you didn’t get it. I really like this. Why not drop all pretences in the final episode? This show was always about this.

There’s a recurring sequence where a league of school girls called the Phantom Wuthering (Toumei na Arashi) get out their phones and vote for who amongst their peers is the evil one to be eliminated and it’s always Kureha. Since she was a kid she’s been branded a bear sympathiser so she’s the obvious pick to all these girls who have been trained to eliminate gay people (bears). But also, they’re constantly manipulated by a leader figure who either is a bear who wants to eat Kureha or is being manipulated by a bear. Some bears are just evil, but I guess some gay people are evil too so whatever.

I will happily fly the banner for Ikuhara’s brand of surreal storytelling, but I would like very much to know if the girls survived at the end or if they died to the straight girl firing squad. Just this once I’d like it if we could be slightly less vague about it. Literally every other gay gets buried in this show, and they did leave it ambiguous; the straights are pleased with themselves because the gays have been removed, and neither Kureha or Ginko were in the bear afterlife scene with Lulu at the end, but they just say, “no one knows where they went” and to be honest I am a little dissatisfied with that. I just don’t think those straight girls would be celebrating if there weren’t cadavers.

But I digress, this was a lesbian ass anime. Genuine props for making it about homosexuality and the fear of being outed in a group where you would be hated by your peers. I can’t wait for Ikuhara to learn about trans people.

Final thoughts:

I’m going get some honey and pour it directly into my mouth.

I’m giving this one an 8/10.