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I don’t get why Spotted Flower makes everyone so upset, this shit is amazing.

Okay, maybe I do understand. It’s the messy one, a questionably-canon take on the Genshiken cast in their thirties working, having kids, and keeping in touch with one another. Maybe a little too in touch. This is a manga to remind Genshiken readers that the author’s first love was not otaku culture, but cheating dramas. And it’s so much fun for it.

Genshiken’s unspoken forte has always been in depicting the complicated emotions of those who have feelings towards their friends and will not ever share them, just letting it all stew forever ... instead. There’s some real bittersweet interiority there, and Spotted Flower is kind of an entire manga of that! Some of the romantic relationships are swapped around so that the losers from Genshiken actually ended up with who they wanted to. Are they happy now? Well, sometimes. Either way, a giant web of cheating and drama ensues. If Genshiken is het, and Genshiken Nidaime is about yaoi, then Spotted Flower is the yuri one. Few can truly appreciate all three, and in this case being able to do so is a sign of a balanced media diet and good taste.

A lot of people treat the actions of the Spotted Flower cast as completely out of character to their Genshiken incarnations, but I think it’s all pretty grounded, as long as you able were able to grasp everyone’s unvoiced desires and not just what they were saying to each other’s faces. Also, did you really think that the crossdresser everyone had sexuality problems with *wouldn’t* be a homewrecker. If this was a big enough betrayal that your scanlation group dropped the manga, then that’s on you, sorry.

I wouldn’t care about this kind of drama if it was all characters I’d never met before, which is why Spotted Flower's ties to Genshiken are so important. It’s a space where we can witness these characters finally acting on their desires, come what may. It’s liberating and hilarious and made my jaw drop more than once. Another direct Genshiken sequel wouldn’t have made sense – we’d be so many years removed from the original cast that keeping them around at all would eat into their own agency. This is the best-case continuation.

To me, Genshiken has always been about experiencing a college friend group kind of ferment and evolve over time, as people join and graduate and reach new stages of life at different paces. Eventually, more than a few people begin to have Realizations about sexual orientation and gender, there’s ingroup crushes, and things get messy. I’ve lived this! Which makes it so cool to see reflected in media. And while I can’t say that the exact sequence of events in Spotted Flower have happened to me, I maintain that it’s far too maligned for what it’s doing.

I would first and foremost like to thank CynicalRuins for countless hours of work scanlating the later volumes of Patlabor, enabling me to write this review in the first place. The end-of-chapter drawings were also very cute!

Having absolutely devoured my way through Patlabor as a franchise over the past year, I eventually reached the manga adaptation. Clocking in at a hefty 22 volumes, it has surprisingly few narrative arcs, with each one burning very slowly and bleeding gradually into the next. The tone starts off lighthearted like the show, but gradually gets weightier until it's grappling with some really serious situations. Unfortunately, this makes the ... manga feel more akin a generic cop story as it goes on, and that's just not what I come to Patlabor for.

Every version of Patlabor has a different set of priorities within the same general premise, and the manga chooses to focus on the battle between SV2 and the shadowy corporation Schaft. This is fine, but it's not nearly as potent as the moody atmosphere of the movies or constant messing around at the base that the TV show offers. The Griffon is a properly scary villain mecha, and Bud is great, but it's harder to care about most of the men at Schaft. They're pretty one-dimensional, and their constant cat-and-mouse games take away from the far more endearing main cast. Noa Izumi gets as much page time as she deserves (a lot!) but the rest of SV2 is forced to the sidelines to make room for Schaft. There's not really an equivalent to the show's one-off episodes that focus in on a specific supporting character, and the manga really could have used something like that, perhaps as a buffer between the major story arcs.

Speaking of the cast, if you're a Kanuka liker such as myself, you're going to be disappointed. She only shows up near the end, and it's pretty clear that the mangaka doesn't think too fondly of her. She's cast in a very serious role that doesn't properly display her swagger and skills. On the other hand, Kumagami comes off much better than in the show, getting to serve as SV2's serious support woman for the whole duration of the manga, providing her with real character development.

The character art is suitable, but it's the mechanical artwork that really shines - Ingram and all of the other Labors are drawn with real love. You can feel all the gloss on the Griffon, for example. Mecha is a difficult genre to work with in manga form - you lose out on the dynamism and fluid animation that makes shows so impressive. That being said, Masami Yuuki did an admirable job keeping quality high, especially considering the duration of the manga.

Even if it's all main plot for a series that's at its best telling random side stories, this is still Patlabor. It's got a great setting and a real down-to-earth approach to mecha, which the manga falls on the more technical end of. This definitely isn't the best work of the franchise, but it's also extremely unlikely to be the first that someone tries. If you've finished the TV show and movies and OVAs and are still hungry for more, then the Patlabor manga is absolutely worth a shot.

It is a genuine miracle that Birdie Wing is as good as it is. The animation is rough, the financial backing from a metaverse company is sketchy, and the sport it adapts is terribly dull. But it’s clearly a work of love, with one of the most fun scripts in recent anime history. Anything could happen in Birdie Wing, and the whole show feels scrappy in a way that you can’t help but root for. Knowing this, how did the second (and presumably final) season of Birdie Wing turn out? Well, alright.

We’re dropped in right where the first season left off: the middle of a ... tournament arc. Luckily, that’s wrapped up pretty quickly, as the real meat of this cour is The Strange Fates Of Two Generations Of Young People Who Were Caught Up In The Ego of Adults (actual episode title). It turns out that all of the adults just kind of floating around in the first season have messy, intertwined backstories, and their sins have been passed down to our two main characters in dueling attempts to create the golf übermensch. This is all good fun, the exact soap opera drama I’ve come to expect from Birdie Wing, and the fact that they’re all meant to reference Universal Century characters makes it all the better. While the first season of Birdie Wing pays a lot of homage to old-school sports shounen, this season is arguably just as much of a Gundam show as G-Witch. The generational drama also means that star-crossed golfers Eve and Aoi have to face their biggest obstacle yet: the incest allegations.

Unfortunately, this season has a bit less going for it overall. The underground golf mafia, easily the best part of the first season, plays only a small role here. Eve and Aoi spend most of their time in generic professional golf tournaments, gradually unlocking new abilities and suffering the consequences. I hate to say this, but Birdie Wing gets stuck in a rut! Don’t worry, there are still incredible moments every episode. But the overarching plot noticeably suffers due to the constraints of the game they’ve confined themselves to. Golf is truly a terrible sport, and Birdie Wing shines when it’s being disrespectful. There is far less golf disrespect this season.

The pacing and production values also take a hit, with the final episodes in particular rushed beyond all belief. I wish this had gotten a twenty-sixth episode, or a movie, or anything to help smooth things over. And also so they’d have more time to queerbait me. The constant tournament arcs mean that Eve gets far fewer chances to be a lesbian chad this time around. Birdie Wing was never going to be a show with incredible gay representation, but they could have at least followed through on more of the yuri-tinged narrative threads.

If this review has come off as somewhat harsh, it is largely out of love. Season 2 of Birdie Wing is still an absolute delight to watch, and only pales in comparison to the first cour. It is never boring, has a great balance of melodrama and sleaze, and is absolutely unparalleled in the world of sports anime. In my ideal world, we’d have a show this funny and stupid and dubiously lesbian every season. I hope Birdie Wing gets an official western release, because I would gladly vote with my wallet to make that known.

Takashi Ikeda is responsible for Sasameki Koto, perhaps the most bog-standard 2000s girl’s love series out there. His newest manga, on the other hand, is a cut above.

"The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This" is a yuri 4-koma about scriptwriter Elly and her voice actress girlfriend Wako, and their domestic life together. There’s a significant age gap between them that leaves Wako as something of a cute pet in the relationship, and while this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I found it quite charming. To hammer this in further, the two of them are drawn in noticeably different artstyles, with Elly receiving more ... detailed linework and Wako being far more moe.

As far as slices of life go, this is top-tier, 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. Wako and Elly are sweet, understandable characters, and their interactions with each other feel genuine and true to life. Given how emotionally immature yuri characters tend to be, even in adult-focused series, this is a breath of fresh air.

While at first it seems like the supporting cast are going to detract from the central relationship (as notably happened in Sasameki Koto), Wako and Elly’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. Of all things, there's an incidental trans subplot late in the manga. I was terrified Ikeda would drop the ball on this, but it's handled kindly and left open-ended without much incident when the manga concludes.

That's my one knock against this series, it ended serialization after 104 chapters but could have just as easily went on for 100 more. While I wish it had, I'm more than happy with what we got.

This show is good enough that it got me to round up my lesbian friends and play mini-golf. That’s the short review, but I can go long as well.

You should know going into this that I despise real golf and everything it stands for. But lucky for me, Birdie Wing is not a show that respects its sport. In the very first episode, our main character declares “I don’t play golf. I hit a ball with a stick for money.” She's so stupid. This *show* is so stupid, the kind of stupid you get out of 2000's anime and can't help but adore. It's also ... the most fun I've had out of a seasonal in years.

Birdie Wing’s production details have been a hilarious mystery to unravel. Original sports anime are quite rare, so I was baffled as to how this show even got made until I started digging further. Bandai-Namco is our production company, which quickly becomes evident with the tongue-in-cheek Gundam product placement. But behind the scenes, Birdie Wing is inexplicably being financed by HTC’s virtual reality branch. On top of the anime, this partnership will result in a “metaverse museum” and a Nintendo Switch game.

So how well did they use their VR bucks? Well, Birdie Wing’s production values are never excellent, and CG is understandably used to cut corners on the golf courses. However, the character designs are superb, with plenty of unique outfits for the main duo. The animation can be limited at times, but it hits when it needs to, with absurd golf swings and imposing shot angles. The Osamu Dezaki-styled dramatic watercolor freezeframes are an excellent homage. It’s pretty clear that someone on the production team has a waifu, as Aoi is animated way better than everyone else.

Perhaps the greater miracle is that Birdie Wing is good. Everything I mentioned above ends up being a pretty sketchy foundation for a show, and since it’s an original, the screenwriter attached to the project matters a lot. They ended up bringing Yosuke Kuroda on board, whose writing credentials include girls-with-guns kinda-yuri Madlax and the extremely pornographic combat definitely-yuri Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. So we’re getting lesbians, and we’re getting ridiculous over-the-top action scenes. Somehow, I think he was one of the best possible picks for this.

His script does the impossible and makes golf entertaining. We get a main character who despises her sport and tears it apart with brute-force power and precision. We get a seedy underground golf mafia arc. We get a roulette of increasingly depraved older women in said mafia. We get golfing abilities described with brazenly pornographic innuendo, delightful over-the-top melodrama, classic sports anime rivalry, and maybe even an assassination or two. And most importantly, we get delicious, delicious yuri-bait.

Look, I’m a lesbian first and a golfer last, so I’m going to be real with you. This is a “show, don’t tell” kind of yuri. There’s plenty of plausibly-deniable romance scenes, but you won’t be getting any confessions up-front. However, actions speak louder than words, and when Eve hits a ball so far that Aoi can see it from her flight about to take off, and Aoi makes vows to meet her again while wearing a Char cosplay on a VR golf course, that’s the kind of stuff that counts for me. If I’m reading the foreshadowing right, there’s a nonzero chance that they’re going to be revealed to be sisters in the second season. It would be a laughably bad move, but given the unavoidable skeeziness of some of Kuroda’s works, I can’t say I wasn’t ready. Also this show does the delightful women’s sports anime thing where most of the side characters pair cleanly off with each other.

I’m so glad this show exists, and that it’s somehow the opposite of a soulless money-grab given its circumstances. I could care less about the planned tie-in content landscape, but what matters is that Birdie Wing the anime is made out of love. In my ideal world, we would have one of these every season. Sports yuri is the good stuff, and I can’t wait to see the golf butches being teased for Season 2 in action.

The first in the "Clamp School Trilogy", Man Of 20 Faces purports to be a phantom thief thriller, but it's actually a romance manga between two elementary schoolers. And for whatever reason, these children and their friends and family are fascinated with the philosophy of love. Characters will monologue for pages on end about what true love really means, with the youthful thievery only an afterthought.


This is all well and good, but the central ideas presented in this manga are just plain terrible. It screws up so badly that the very happy ending left me more cynical of love then when I started. Oops.





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They didn't even have the guts to make Santa Claus real in this universe. Cowards.

Pretty much as soon as they made their debut, CLAMP launched an extensive shared manga universe revolving around an elite city-sized school campus shaped like a pentagram. Their Clamp School works don't seem to be fondly remembered these days, but I suppose they paved the way for the future Tsubasa/xxxHOLIC/Cardcaptor shared universe, which miraculously took off.

My opinion on Clamp School Detectives is that it sucks ass, so I went into Defenders with the minimum of expectations. It's still not *good*, but it's miles better. School Detectives is ostensibly a comedy, but it has a hard time landing even ten percent of its jokes. School ... Defenders succeeds in being a little funnier by sheer virtue of being a gag manga. The tokusatsu bits run dry pretty quickly, but what emerges is an unfathomable romance followed by a bizarre third-act twist straight out of Rocky Horror. It's weird, it's stupid, and if I had bought a Tokyopop volume of this as a kid I would have eaten it right up.

Let's be real here, I'm giving this manga a lot of pity points because one of the main characters repeatedly mentions how he's in love with his superhero partner and just wants to be his tradwife. Sometimes a transsexual from thirty years ago successfully reaches through the pages and makes me feel something, anything, from reading a mediocre CLAMP manga.

Like any reasonable person, I love vampires and lesbians and vampires who are lesbians. However, one of my more unique penchants is manga that starts off incredibly promising but goes off the rails in the last stretch, leaving me with both murky appreciation and disappointment. Let’s look at what went wrong here.

Vampiress Lord starts off strong with a hefty dose of worldbuilding. Our protagonist is turned into a vampire, but that’s okay, because this series defangs most of their mythical weaknesses and portrays them as once-ordinary people who have gotten a little weird with immortality. Her newfound curse actually a blessing, Yuunagi continues going to ... school as a vampire Mary Sue until eventually romance starts to blossom.

As you may have noticed, this series is relatively conflict-free. This lack of central tension extends to the manga’s relationships, where it is actually quite welcome. Most yuri concerns itself with drama that threatens or delays the core relationship – lacking self-worth, family issues, jealousy, and miscommunication are all common themes. Since Vampiress Lord avoids this drama, it actually gets into some relatively unexplored problem spaces, such as nonmonogamy. When Yuunagi sucks another girl’s blood (an act with obvious sexual implications), she feels guilty about it and has a conversation with her girlfriend, and the two of them set open relationship boundaries that leave them both satisfied. It’s good stuff! And nice to see it come up naturally in a manga.

It’s at this point that I run out of nice things to say and have to address the elephant in the room: Vampiress Lord was cancelled shortly after the first volume, and the mangaka had to cram everything she wanted into the next two. As such, the second half of this series is rushed to the point of tearing apart what made the first half good. Yuunagi’s relationship with her girlfriend goes from slow and exploratory to deadly serious with the drop of a hat. Right afterwards, the series pulls the desperation move of “introducing the council of the most powerful vampires”. It really doesn’t help that this whirlwind of flat characters includes two whose only traits are ‘slut’ and 'otokonoko’. The last couple of chapters got bad enough that I had to stop and ask myself “wait, was this series written by a man the whole time?” because it started feeling like *that* kind of yuri.

The final chapter of the series is an omake in which the mangaka explains how the series got axed and apologizes for its rushed state, as she had to crunch her 7-volume plan into a few chapters. It’s genuinely sad, because while the material that I wasn’t a fan of still would have shown up in those potential later volumes, there would have been plenty more chapters about the gentle undoing of societal expectations for the sake of fluffy yuri.

A butch woman wrote this manga and frankly, who am I to argue against her.

My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness is, well, very clearly about being a lesbian and being lonely. My Solo Exchange Diary has a less straightforward title, but its theme still becomes apparent pretty quickly.

My Solo Exchange Diary is about your mom.

It’s about all the things you have to hide from her. It’s about trying to come to terms with how she raised you. It’s about trying and failing to escape her unceasing mental and physical gravity. It’s about looking for substitutes for her seemingly uncaring warmth. It’s about being a family disgrace in so many different ways.

Peppered throughout are the mangaka’s reflections on depression, motivation, separation, ... and self-harm. It’s pretty potent stuff, and her melty two-tone artwork puts an air of cuteness on top of all this suffering.

I'm not sure if I'd call it warmful, but reading this manga does make me feel a little better about myself.

Last month a very strange thing happened. I found myself reading, God forbid, a heterosexual manga. And on top of that, I found myself sincerely enjoying it too. So how did I even get into this position?

Well, it’s my love of Akiko Higashimura’s previous works that brought me to Tokyo Tarareba Girls. The cast consisting of women in their 30’s was the part that really intrigued me. It’s so rare to see mangas about people past high school and young adulthood, and especially ones from the perspective of working women. The closest other thing I can think of to this perspective is Turning Girls, the ... hilarious and overlooked Trigger short about female coworkers struggling together as they face the prospect of turning 30. Tarareba Girls feels like a continuation of that spirit, in name and in plot. Our girls are into their 30s, haven’t married, still have boozy girl’s nights together like nothing has changed in a decade, and are generally terrified about their futures. Reading this through my birthday gave me some very relatable feelings!

Packed into this romantic/depression comedy is a lot of explicit and implicit social commentary. Lots of grumbling about how underwhelming the men in Japan are, lots of questionable guys doing creepy things, some discussion about the role of married women as workers versus housewives, just the whole works. You start to get the feeling that within the current societal romantic setup, everyone is kinda suffering in some way. And this isn’t just a Japan thing! While some of the sexism and ageism is pretty specific, a lot of is totally applicable to any culture. My takeaway from the early volumes was that heterosexuality is terrifying and as long as it entails inherent relationship power imbalances, nobody will be happy.

This sounds sad and hard to read! But I promise, once the manga gets rolling it ends up being way lighter reading. The trio oscillates in and out of all sorts of relationships, some messier than others. A better work-life balance is achieved. The one thing that stays the same is the girl’s endless nights drinking and badmouthing their men. During these drinking escapades they’re visited by anthropomorphized representations of milt and liver who fill their thoughts with ‘what-if’ questions and aging anxiety, which is a nice callback to Clara from Princess Jellyfish.

Milt and Liver also run an advice column chapter at the end of each volume, in which real world ‘what-if’ women mail them their romance problems to sort out. This is a really interesting role for the mangaka to take on, and it’s played fairly sincerely – obviously there’s a lighthearted air to it, but she does try to offer serious advice. The problems get weirder and more convoluted as the manga goes on, which is always a fun time.

Speaking of romantic advice, I actually kind of disagree with the ending that Higashimura went with. But that’s not a problem at all! I’m younger than the depicted women, my world view is way different, and the ending still carries a very coherent message: don’t regret yourself or make excuses, just keep on living to your best.

Like most of Higashimura’s works, Tokyo Tarareba Girls has a painful autobiographical undercurrent to it, which makes it feel all the more genuine. It kinda sucks being an awkward aging romantic mess of a girl, but I love seeing the mangaka reflect and work through it over the course of multiple manga series!


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Men still suck though. Try to avoid them if you can.