1001: Yuriyurarararayuruyuri

Hello! And welcome to the first post-1,000 post on this blog. I hope you like the “New Game+” redesign I’ve done. I figured it was worth doing something noticeable to highlight my achievement. And now I’ll stop blowing my own trumpet. Back to business as usual.

I’ve been continuing my journey through the strange and bizarre world of anime recently. I finished watching The World God Only Knows a while back, so I was looking for something new to explore. I have a few DVDs of recommendations from my friend Lynette on the way, but I was interested in trying something a little bit different while I waited for them to arrive.

So it was that while browsing Crunchyroll I came across Yuru Yuri, an anime that I’d seen mentioned by a few people around the place. I didn’t really know anything about it save for the fact that “yuri” is a term often used to refer to “girls love” or, to be less euphemistic about it, material with lesbian themes. I had no idea whether Yuru Yuri’s title actually had anything to do with yuri as a genre, or whether it was just part of the name. “Yuri”, after all, is also a fairly common Japanese name that means “lily”.

As it turns out, Yuru Yuri (literally “easygoing yuri”) is most certainly a yuri work, though more in a sense that it focuses on close personal relationships between a group of girls rather than having sexual overtones at its core.

Yuru Yuri centers around a group of middle-school girls who start an “amusement club” in the defunct Tea Club’s premises at their school. They essentially use this as an excuse to goof off and avoid doing anything that would actually require effort, and over the course of the series, their relationships with one another (and with a small cast of supporting characters outside the main four) grow and change — in some cases into love; in others into fantasies about one another that will (probably) never be fulfilled; in others still into close friendship. The show doesn’t make a big deal of the fact that seemingly almost everyone at the all-girls school they attend is homosexual; instead, it’s simply treated as the way things are. People can like each other, regardless of gender, and this can lead to exactly the same sort of awkwardness and confused feelings as in heterosexual relationships. Just like real life! Who’d have thought it.

All this perhaps makes Yuru Yuri sound a bit more serious than it actually is. The girls’ relationships and feelings for one another are an important part of the show, sure, but for the most part it’s very much a “slice of life” anime in which the cast get into various amusing scrapes that are usually resolved by the end of the episode. It’s very lightweight and cheerful in tone throughout, and the characters are all very distinctive and exaggerated in terms of their appearances, personalities and iconic behaviours — though the show isn’t above subverting its own tropes at times if the opportunity to play something for laughs exists.

One amusing aspect of the show is that Akari, the character set up to be the series’ “protagonist” in the first episode, gets some fairly harsh treatment throughout. Not necessarily in terms of the things that actually happen to her, mind — this isn’t a show that does nasty things to its characters — but in the fact that more often than not an episode ends up focusing on the other characters to her exclusion. On more than one occasion she gets sidelined in favour of seemingly incidental plotlines, and in some episodes she’s not even present at all. This particular aspect of the show is lampshaded continually, with the “next episode” previews often consisting of the characters arguing over who is actually the protagonist, regular references to Akari’s lack of presence (often represented by her literally turning invisible) and the pre-credits “Yuru Yuri is starting!” sequence (hosted by Akari) getting increasingly ridiculous as the series progresses. It’s a fun commentary on the “blank slate” nature of a lot of anime protagonists.

There are also plenty of silly things that happen in almost every episode, too. For example, Chitose, one of the supporting cast members, is obsessed with her best friend Ayano the student council vice-president getting together with Kyouko, one of the main four cast members. Every time Chitose takes her glasses off, she “tunes out” of reality because she can’t see and ends up fantasising about what Ayano and Kyouko would get up to if they ever admitted their feelings to one another. These fantasies are usually rather suggestive, but always stop before anything actually happens, usually because Chitose has a near-fatal nosebleed as a result of her pervy thoughts.

It’s a strange show, to be sure, and an acquired taste. It’s one of those things where nothing of any particular note happens in any episode, but the comfortable familiarity of the characters and the gentle sense of slightly suggestive humour that pervades it gives it a very endearing feel, assuming you can stomach its unrelenting moe cuteness. The whole cast — main and supporting — is likable and distinctive, and it’s just a very pleasant watch if you don’t want to have to concentrate too hard or be bombarded with The Feels at every opportunity.

You can watch Yuru Yuri on Crunchyroll.