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Adachi and Shimamura's Second Season

An essay by Audrey of the joystick system

Revealing and analyzing the plot of Adachi and Shimamura's never-yet-released second season of anime.

TL;DR

Adachi and Shimamura, the yuri light novel series by Hitoma Iruma, is extremely good. The currently serialized manga adaptation by Yuzuhara Moke is also good. The anime is good too, but not finished.

The novels go some rather surprising places, and this essay is about those surprises and how Adachi and Shimamura, quite unexpectedly, proves itself a very unique series quite unlike many others in the yuri genre.

Mainly because it's secretly also science fiction.

Video version:

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Text version under the cut. Feel free to watch or read or read along while listening to the video version!

[cohost version]

Future video essay/transcript: Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

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Prologue: Triviality & Psychology

Despite not having read a single word that Hitoma Iruma has written, I think I’ve been convinced, with relative certainty, that he’s probably a pretty good writer.

The English versions of his work that we have read, which are written by other people, based on his novels written in Japanese, that we haven’t read, give the impression that his novels are pretty good.

Of course, the specific work we’re here to discuss today is Adachi and Shimamura, but of what little else we’ve read of his work, mainly the first chapter of the Bloom Into You spinoff novels, there’s a consistent focus on introspection and careful characterization and articulation through all sorts of details, both trivial and otherwise.

This may sound arrogant, but I knew early on that I was talented.

When I say “talented,” I mean that I can get results when I work really hard and that I can maintain those results, too. I think I understood the value of those two things much sooner than the other kids.

Thus, I didn’t mind that my after-school schedule was full of lessons. There were ikebana classes, calligraphy school, piano, cram school, and once I was a third year in elementary school, swimming lessons, too. I was considering taking on English speaking classes next. I pretty much took anything available to me. As a kid, I felt lucky that I was even allowed those choices.

Even a child could see that that my house was a respectable one. We had a lacquered gate, a side door for the help on the left side, and many tall trees in our garden. The surrounding walls were tall enough to prevent anyone from peering inside. Our house was bigger than the entirety of the light-green apartment complex across from us. In addition to my parents and I, my grandparents on my father’s side and their two cats lived there. It was quite a lot of space for so few people.

Growing up in that house, I knew I had no choice but to be talented. No one actually said as much, but I knew instinctively that it was true. As long as I kept moving with purpose and produced good results, my parents never seemed upset. What parents wouldn’t be happy to have an exceptional kid?

[Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Vol. 1 by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda

Published in English by Seven Seas in 2020]

The first pages of the Sayaka novels open with Sayaka describing her school curriculum and extracurricular activities, her awareness that she’s a gifted student, and that she’s incredibly committed to being one, so much so that she rarely quits something. She is devoted.

And this characterization informs the rest of the work quite readily, as Sayaka finds herself first annoyed by another girl at her swim practice, who to her, appears not devoted.

Devoted perhaps, not to swimming, but to Sayaka herself. And then her first lesbianic encounter with that same girl results in panic, in her running away, in her quitting.

Quitting for the first time she can remember.

And her quiet surprise when her parents just accept that.

All this is told to us, in prose, in monologue, it’s delicate and psychological and intriguing and it leaves us wanting to know more.

And yet somehow, we read all this, were fascinated, and then our attention span burned down around it and we forgot about it for a year or two.

So, yeah, that happened. And we also forgot about… until one day very recently I, Audrey, decided to wrangle this mess of a brain and have us settle down to read it… Adachi and Shimamura.

Part 1: The Adashima-daptations

1.1 Anime vs Manga vs Light Novel

Most of y’all know Adachi and Shimamura for being an anime. And, that’s fair, I guess, it is an anime after all. But it’s also an adaptation, as most anime are. And specifically an adaptation of a novel, or a series of novels, the first four of them at least.

Those four novels are only the first act of the story. There’s now ten, with at least two more planned, and we’ve read eight of them, and I have opinions. So you’re going to hear them, because someone has to. Unless you don’t want to, and then you can leave, I guess. We are fine with people leaving. Anyway.

Concerning the anime, we have some feelings about it. Our overall opinion is that it’s good. It’s a pretty good anime, it’s a competent adaptation, and we don’t really have a lot of complaints as to its quality in either of those respects.

It’s not a particularly lavish production, nowhere near as technically impressive as Bloom Into You (which is one notable example of “probably about as close as you can get to a KyoAni level work without being from KyoAni”) but it’s pleasantly storyboarded, elegantly scored, and overall perfectly watchable.

It’s good enough to recommend as an entry point into the story (although the Moke manga is the far better adaptation), but woefully insufficient as a substitute for it. Partially for the obvious snag that it ends before the relationship gets going, and there’ll likely never be a second season.

But there’s also some speedbumps that have, somewhat unavoidably, arisen from adapting the story to a visual medium.

1.2 Shimadensity

When the anime aired, the thing I most remember is people being confused as all heck why Shimamura was so… dense.

That is to say, blind. A blind blonde, an unnatural blonde at that, being blind to the obvious homosexual before herself, being extremely homosexual towards her in her presence and drinking mineral water, which, as anyone who’s seen the film Heathers knows, is a universal signifier of homosexuality.

And, well, you see, there is an answer to that. Shimamura is not blind whatsoever.

She knows something is up with Adachi, and it’s not as if she’s not pretty nearly drawn the conclusion that Adachi is attracted to her, but she’s just sort of averted her eyes from it.

She’s decided, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that thinking about Adachi being gay is troublesome. Answering the question of “why Adachi wants to hold my hand, wants to be so close to me,” and all that, isn’t a path she’d like to take, and so she just ignores it.

Shimamura’s gotten through life this way, by not thinking too hard about it. Just going with the flow, letting everyone around her take her wherever, putting up a path of least resistance through life. She finds forming genuine, lasting connections with people difficult, and doesn’t really feel very strongly about most of her peers.

But she also feels that she needs people, anyway, so she masks through it, politely smiles, and lets her relationships just happen, come and go like the waves. This does bother Shimamura, if for no other reason than that she finds it tedious and tiresome, but she just kind of rolls with it anyway.

Meanwhile, Adachi is explicitly an introvert to the extreme, and not in the Bocchi kind of way, where she wants to make friends but can’t; no, Adachi straight-up doesn’t want friends. She finds friendships burdensome, to the point of being soul-crushing.

An anecdote in the novels has Adachi describing how, in elementary school, she made an honest attempt towards being more socially active, but found that each new friend she made felt like another chain on her soul.

But these forced friendships weighed down on me, suppressing my emotions, erasing all my imperfections. Whenever one of them spoke to me, I had to craft a fitting response and keep the conversation going. No part of this was genuine; I just parroted whatever I heard other people saying.

Every time I repeated this process, I grew restless. And every time I gained a new friend, I boxed myself in further, closing off my exits.

But then one day I threw it all in the trash and walked off without them…and that was the day I noticed just how freeing it felt. All I needed was a single breath of fresh air to finally realize that I was meant to live my life alone.

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 4 (Chapter 3: The Moon and Courage) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

Eventually coming to accept that, at least in her view, she was not built for close relationships with other humans.

To put it simply, it’s not a skill issue. She just doesn’t care for the grind.

1.3 They Who Don't Remember Your Name

In middle school, she comes off towards her peers as an ice queen, and there’s this really really interesting chapter- the first chapter, in fact, in the fourth novel, where Adachi is described from the perspective of someone else. An unnamed fellow student, with whom she is delegated to work the school library counter, who tries and fails to form a connection with her.

And this student’s description of Adachi is fascinating. Adachi is described as someone who, in step with her desire to eschew friends, is seen by the student body as seemingly unattainable. And this student is startled, then elated, to have the opportunity to even sit near this person.

But Adachi, unconscious and undesiring of her semi-celebrity status within the school, deflects all attempts to break her shell, and so there this unnamed student stays, stays looking, stays admiring.

And then one day this girl, this unnamed student who we never again hear of, who has no significant characterization to speak of, no importance to this story other than to be a lens through which we see Adachi- happens to run into Adachi once again at the beginning of their high school’s second semester, and takes the opportunity to say

“Thank you.”

For something that Sakura Adachi didn’t know. Didn’t see. Couldn’t feel. Didn’t realize. Something so incorporeal to her, yet so powerful to this one peer of hers, as having been allowed to be in proximity to her, to have a memory of her that none else can claim to have.

And Adachi doesn’t get it, and can’t possibly have it explained, and it’s just… that’s it, really. That’s just that chapter.

It was gut-wrenching to read, because it tapped deeply into a specific desire that’s been stuck within us for a long time, that we’ve previously found it… really hard to articulate without sounding weird, or creepy, or wrong.

The desire to know how we were seen, the impact we’ve made on people we crossed paths with whose names we don’t know, whose faces we’ve forgot, or whose lives just briefly overlapped with ours at one time or another

to know if they’re okay, to know if they even remember us, or, the person who we used to be, whoever that was, to be able to affirm that those connections, however tenuous, were important.

And just like… yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if what I’m saying even makes any sense, but those many little encounters, those small moments that made us who we were

have left us conscious of dozens if not hundreds of possible branches in this life, that could have butterfly effected us somewhere completely different from where we currently are, and we can’t know, and we can’t say

but it’s just it, that basic feeling of I wonder how you’re doing, I wonder how life could have been if we’d followed after you, I wonder if you think about me too.

And that desire to achieve closure, something articulated, actualized, in this unnamed girl saying thank you, and at the same time, saying goodbye. To another Sakura on the wind.

1.4 Adachi Recollection

These events are not adapted in the anime. They are not adapted in either of the manga adaptations.

But there is such significance to this anecdote, such immense weight that is given to this random no-name and her view of Adachi, a story about Adachi to which Adachi herself was nearly entirely oblivious.

But then later in one of the most pivotal moments of Adachi’s character arc when a shady fortune teller convinces her to do something about her friendship with Shimamura before they drift ever further away, and she remembers that girl,

Every now and then, I thought back to this one time in junior high when I worked as a library assistant. There was this girl—I couldn’t remember her name or even what she looked like, but she asked me if I had any friends. At the time, I told her I didn’t, and that I was fine with it…but looking back, I couldn’t help but wonder why she asked me that. Was she going to offer to be my friend?

Even then, my answer would have remained the same. I would have told her I didn’t need any friends. But part of me regretted how that interaction played out. Part of me felt that we should have talked it out first, like actual human beings, instead of me one-sidedly slamming her with rejection.

With that in mind, I didn’t want to add to my list of regrets. I couldn’t keep sticking my head in the sand. No, I was going to take action. And if I ended up regretting that, then so be it.

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 4 (Chapter 3: The Moon and Courage) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

And this is such a hugely emotional payoff. Adachi did remember. That girl did affect her life. Even despite Adachi’s efforts to refuse connections, still, such a trivial interaction still made her who she is, still contributed to altering the course of her life, and that’s just… y’know, like, gosh.

This is so fucking cathartic to think about, y’know? Even if that person you remember, you wish you could have known, isn’t thinking about you, barely remembers you… you still were there. You still did something for them. Even if it was just being there, even if your feelings didn’t reach them right then, even if even if even if.

The fact that you crossed paths with them, alone, is significant.

It’s that affirmation of that fact that I see in this small, insignificant seeming novel-only plot beat, from which I feel so much meaning is exuded, and, why it's a shame it was excluded.. It may have seemed trivial, seemed unimportant, and seemingly that’s why every adaptation adapted this out,

but that triviality is precisely what is so important about it.

I cannot exaggerate enough when I say that I feel something essential is lost by this piece of story being discluded from every other version.

And that’s really the curse of adapting Adashima, in general. There are so many other details of the characters and story, too numerous to list, that the prose takes time to explore and develop and clarify, that would be tedious to elaborate on in an anime or a manga, and are thus cut.

And rightly so, for the sake of telling the story economically in those mediums, but what is lost as a result is the essential psychological depth of this narrative. And yes, it is a psychological narrative. A cerebral one, even.

Yes, it’s true. Adachi and Shimamura is a calmer, gayer, Kaguya-sama.

And that’s why

Shimamura is so

fucking

dense.

And why Adachi and Shimamura, is so, fucking, dense.

Part 2: A (mostly) calmer, gayer Kaguya-sama

2.1 Cold War of Gay Panic

Once you’ve read deep enough into Adashima, there is absolutely no way around it, this is a deeply psychological conflict. The characters’ mental states and attitudes, the things they won’t say, say so much more in this story than anything else. Which is why I think, although the adaptations are pretty good:

The Moke manga adaptation is actually really good, it does a much better job visually illustrating the psychological aspect of the story than the anime does, and, I think, if you’re really allergic to prose but really want to read Adashima, you should read the Moke version.

It’s not a perfect 1 to 1 recreation of the story, no adaptation ever is, but it’s pretty damn up there. Nonetheless, the adaptations are still limited in how far they can go in elevating their versions, and Adachi and Shimamura, the anime, is good.

Just good.

It’s a competent slice-of-life anime and an incomplete romantic drama. And it’s nice to have a visual companion to the story. But as a standalone piece of media, it’s not all that much more. It doesn’t get the time to develop things further, or to get to the things that make Adachi and Shimamura, as a story, something truly unique.

So, I mentioned earlier that Adachi decided she can’t do relationships, of any kind, and you might be thinking, well that sounds like a terrible protagonist for a romance story, and oh gosh you have no idea. Adachi is a total disaster of a human being. And just to drive that point home quite clearly, I want to read this particular quote from volume 5:

Besides Shimamura, the current me had nothing. I was empty.

Were you to peel back my skin, you'd find not flesh and bones, but her. Shimamura.

And yet. And yet. I felt like I might start tearing out my hair soon. Simply allowing my mind to wander caused my eyes to grow wet with tears.

The fantasies I'd indulged in were not based on anything. I knew that. Even so. Even so.

Was it really that wrong, wanting to be rewarded? Wanting your efforts to pay off?

[From Adachi and Shimamura, volume 5, "Shimamura's Sword"

Written by Hitoma Iruma

Translated and published unofficially by sneikkimies]

To be quite exact: This particular bit of text is from the fan translation of Adachi and Shimamura volume 5. I do not know what the original Japanese says. I do not know what emotional connotation the original Japanese carries. The official translation from Seven Seas, meanwhile, rather says:

Outside of Shimamura, I had nothing. Cut me open and I would bleed Shimamura. So how could she do this to me? Every time I let my guard down, tears welled in my eyes. I knew my feelings were one-sided, and yet…was it so wrong to want her to return them?

[Adachi and Shimamura volume 5 (Chapter 4: Shimamura's Blade) by Hitoma Iruma

Translated by Molly Lee

Published by Seven Seas in 2021]

The official translation is quick, concise, sharp. It cuts thick, as it says, like the slashing of a knife across skin. In this version, Adachi hardly lingers on this emotion, her mind races, her thoughts tear through her.

But in the fan translation, the feeling is mulled over, gradually peeled away, as it says, revealed slowly, with intense deliberation.

The chapter from which this comes, Shimamura’s Sword- or, Shimamura’s Blade in the Seven Seas translation, is perhaps the most psychological chapter contained within the entire series. It is a chapter that, knowing Adachi, you know is coming from the very first few pages, when this illustration of one of the upcoming chapters is shown.

It is Shimamura and Tarumi, her childhood friend who has tried to rekindle their connection after years apart, and Adachi, working a food stand, watching as Shimamura goes out with a girl- a girl who she doesn’t know, a girl who isn’t her.

We knew this was coming from this very moment, and yet, it still smacked, it hurt, when we got to this chapter. Adachi pondering, stewing in this jealousy, after days of depression, as her mental state reaches a boiling point, before erupting straight into the receiver of her cell phone, in the form of her screaming crying voice, transmitted straight to Shimamura’s ears.

Our pulse had steadily begun to quicken as we read this on our own cell phone, our heart in step with Adachi, as she began to speak these words, and we stopped reading, almost too afraid to turn the page.

We did eventually go back to it, of course.

It was not too long after that I realized why this chapter had tripped us up like it did. We saw ourselves in this. No, it’s quite accurate to rather say that we were worse than this.

We too, when we were Adachi’s age, had a crush who saw us as a friend, to whom we had limited access. We too, grew depressed and jealous and angry at being away from them, as a result of us having few other friends and no one else particularly on our mind or in our social life. We too, were bitter about our negative home life.

But we didn’t stop quite at where Adachi stopped, at airing our grievances, at assaulting our crush with our undue anger- no, we made a specific threat.

I won’t be repeating that here, but needless to say, we never followed up on it. It’s been nearly a decade since then, and we haven’t ever not regretted it whenever that memory resurfaces.

While the things we said up to that point, the emotions we aired, were probably not as bad as the things Adachi says here… the threat kind of compensated for that. I’d say, in the end, we were just about as bad as Adachi at her age.

We were not ready for a romantic relationship with anyone, at that age. We probably still aren’t, and personally, I don’t want one. I have doubts that it’ll ever go well. My headmates feel different, but, they’re not talking right now, so…

Anyway. Shimamura is annoyed, doesn’t even follow what the fuck Adachi is on about, hangs up, and Adachi thinks she’s thrown away their friendship.

But then she works up the courage to call Shimamura again, or, perhaps more accurately, lacks the emotional maturity to let it go, and they reconcile.Although weirdly, Shimamura doesn’t seem bothered.

And then, although Shimamura tries to get Adachi to make more friends, it doesn’t really work, one of the most FUCK YOU I’M AUTISTIC AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS scenes ever, happens

And then the next volume, Adachi tearfully confesses to Shimamura for a second time after a first time blundering it and passing out while gripping her close in the bath while they’re both wearing swimsuits, gosh that’s also the most fucking hilariously cringe scene, just imagine how embarrassing it must be to pass out from telling your crush how you feel about them, and

THEN Shimamura accepts Adachi’s feelings, and then they are officially girlfriends.

2.2 "Problematic" Yuri

And the whole time I was reading this. The whole damn time, I could not stop thinking. I can fucking see it. The thinkpieces, the ones going, “How Adachi and Shimamura exploits queer teenage girls, by depicting queer teenage girls realistically.”

The twitter threads going, “is Shimamura right, for not taking Adachi’s shit right then, or was she being an asshole, instead of, y’know, it being revealed that her patience has limits but also she later feels like maybe she was a bit too cold and made a mistake…” or like, “is Adachi a womanizer, or a yandere, or a dangerous abusive codependent manipulator”.

Were the arcs of volumes 4 through 8 to be adapted to a second season of anime, there’d be plenty of fuel for opportunistic media criticism weirdos such as ourselves to say… “is Adachi and Shimamura problematic?”

And, no, it’s not. It’s dramatic. This is a psychological romantic drama about a deeply emotional neurodivergent teenage girl who has human flaws. Like, yes, Adachi is jealous and controlling and even a bit mean, and she knows this.

And we’ve seen these articles and twitter threads about Adashima, about Yagakimi and about other queer media in general, floating around, that are just like, is this lesbian relationship between two mentally ill teenagers dangerously codependent or abusive?

We sometimes even floated around to that idea ourselves, reading all the yuri stuff we read- we read a lot of yuri stuff, and, a lot of the time the answer is just, yeah, maybe.

Is that wrong? Is it wrong to depict these things as part of a normal story with stakes and drama? Don’t these people need to have issues in order for the story to have somewhere it can move up from?

There seems to be a subset of the queer leftish internet and hell, pop cultural media criticism internet in general, that just doesn’t want things to happen in narratives

And like, Joyce sort of had this phase herself, in reaction to her breakup last year, where, she wanted to believe that the fact that she was a fan of Love Live was the problem. The fact that Love Live occasionally features shots of teenage girls’ legs, that would’ve been the issue, not that she had a difficult personality or overinflated expectations of her partners.

She just stopped reading yuri for a while, because she just thought, maybe the fact that I was reading yuri stories that just pretend these issues don’t exist, maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe the fact that these stories have male gaze, because they’re targeted at men, is the problem. Maybe I’m actually a man, is the problem. And y’know, this is all just bullshit. This is all just self-directed homophobia as an excuse for happening to be a bit of a fucked up person who is queer.

And that’s really all that is. People don’t criticize straight romance stories for characters having realistic relationship issues. People don’t even criticize straight romance stories for being exploitative or fucked up or weird or anything.

Well, some people do, but y’know. No chance would the average online anime fan be having such takes on like, I don’t know, oregairu. But even the most like, reasoned takes on Yagakimi from very smart people online, have to acknowledge, oh yeah some of these characters check off all the boxes for the “predatory lesbian” trope.

That sentence says everything, doesn’t it? There is a predatory lesbian trope. Is there a “predatory heterosexual” trope? Is there heterosexual shipping bait? We sure could pretend there is one, as a bit, but like, no. The answer’s no.

And like, yes, the depictions of queers as uniquely specifically unhinged and dangerous by straight people is a thing that is a thing because of queerphobia, itself, and maybe it makes us look good or better somehow to paint ourselves as not having awful personalities or issues with relationships so that bigots have less rhetorical ammo against us.

But somehow the more I think about all this the more I think that, maybe, the predatory gay tropes in straight media aren’t just straightforwardly to make queer people look bad, but to make us afraid of ourselves. And to make us afraid of art that depicts us as human beings and not just soft uwu girls.

Maybe the reason was to make us afraid of Adachi.

Anyway. I’m just going to say it. There is no problematic media. Fictional, and especially animated or drawn media, cannot be declared immoral simply on the basis of what it chooses to depict. And it’s high time we stopped deluding ourselves into thinking it can be.

And I know this is all very much an extremely online discourse, and most normal people offline don’t tend to think of media quite that way, but it still pisses us off, y’know? It pisses us off that this stupid problematism bullshit around fictional media had us brain poisoned for like half a fucking decade. So we’re really rather ticked off by that.

…That’s not the point of this essay. Maybe it’ll be the point of another one.

2.3 Drama Lesbian Queens

So, yeah, to sum it up, a lot of yuri things that the average concentration of yuri fans like tend to be free of too much conflict, and quick to gay. And Adachi and Shimamura fulfills the former requirement, most of the time, at least, and especially in all the material adapted by the first season.

Past volume 4, however, things start getting more intense, because, well, Adachi, first of all. Adachi is a whole person. Tarumi is also a whole person, although we don’t get to see too much of her, it seems pretty clear she’s going through her own general turmoil away from the center of the story, and yeah.

Yashiro also. What the hell is with her? Well, it turns out, she actually is an alien, or at the very least her being an alien is a much more plausible explanation than anything else. We’ll get to her in a bit, maybe.

The relationship happens, with Adachi and Shimamura, being girlfriends, and that’s just adorable the way that works out. Shimamura isn’t a hundred percent certain she loves Adachi, but she doesn’t dislike Adachi, she’s certainly not indifferent to Adachi, and she’s open to trying Adachi out, so, she accepts.

Adachi is at first her usual jealous self, taking this as license to be even more aggressive about not wanting Shimamura to speak to or even look at any other girls in the world. Adachi’s literally never had any other relationships, not even with her own mother, so, that just makes sense, she thinks of being together as special itself.

Which prompts Shimamura to try to think of ways to raise Adachi’s bar for things being special, by such things as… making Adachi lunch. Kissing Adachi’s forehead. And that’s where that stays for a little while! The third base of lesbian, homemade lunches and forehead kissing.

And that’s all really cool and satisfying, cause there’s not a lot of yuri stories, hell, not a lot of romance stories, period, that actually depict the work of the relationship. Most yuri just rush to have the girls kissing, and that’s that. It’s a lot of casual fluff, with not a lot of particular focus on how the relationships develop, or anything.

In devoting her time to doting on Adachi, Shimamura neglects Tarumi, and the distance between them widens again. She one night thinks in a dream, ominously, that Adachi, in her quest to have Shimamura all to herself, has ruined Shimamura’s relationships. But Shimamura’s not sure that bothers her.

And Adachi continues to have her personality issues, but, she and Shimamura are both happy for now, and so not too much active drama ensues- just anxiety, just tension, just slow development.

And this continues through volume 7 and 8, but Iruma makes a very interesting creative choice to capture the totality of the narrative. Starting in volume 5, certain alternate contexts for the beginning of Adachi and Shimamura’s relationship are depicted.

In the first chapter of that volume, Adachi and Shimamura first meet as small children in preschool, during which Yashiro introduces the basic concept of an alternate timeline to us readers.

Then in volume 7, we get vignettes where Adachi doesn’t decide to close the distance between herself and Shimamura, and instead continues hiding on the second floor of the gym. Where Adachi and Shimamura never meet in high school, and instead find each other as adults. Where Adachi and Shimamura encounter each other at the end of the world. Where Shimamura is an alien- or perhaps, I should more accurately say, a foreigner from space, whose language Adachi spends years learning just so that they can talk.

And all of this is written from the perspective of Adachi and Shimamura feeling as if this is random chance, a simple coincidence, luck of the draw, the one twist of fate that changed their lives forever.

But then in volume 8, Iruma skips ahead a decade.

2.4 Ending the Second Season

Adachi and Shimamura are now living together, both 27 years old. Is Adachi still clingy and jealous? Less so, apparently, but, it’s not explored fully. How are Hino and Nagafuji- I’m just realizing I’ve barely if at all mentioned them in this entire essay. How’s Tarumi, is she okay? I don’t know.

But regardless, adult Shimamura goes and says hello to Yashiro, the small child-shaped alien who’s taken up an unofficial position as the Shimamura family pet, and Yashiro says something very interesting.

Shimamura and Adachi meeting is not chance whatsoever. It is in fact, destiny. According to Yashiro, anyway.

In every timeline and reality, she says, they are fated to encounter each other- not because they’re special, not because the universe is eyeing them closely or anything, but simply because they are. Because, apparently, reality likes being consistent, or perhaps finds it too exhausting to get particularly creative. Adachi and Shimamura just meet each other because, the code for reality gets copy pasted. Or something.

Yashiro has no answer for this, particularly, other than that it just is, and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Shimamura doesn’t think too much of it either, and then she and Adachi go off on their overseas vacation and reminisce as a framing device for the rest of the novel, which is about the school trip they went on in their second year.

And, about how Adachi is horny, but, doesn’t know what the hell to do with that. And about their classmates who are grouped up with them for the trip noticing that they’re a same-gender couple, and surprisingly, supporting them! At least, one of them does.

Well, it was surprising to us, and surprising to Shimamura, who expresses in her internal monologue that she was afraid of facing a much less nice reaction after Adachi, in her lack of care for how she’s seen by others, basically outed them.

But it’s also not that surprising, because in the Reiwa era of the yuri genre, it’s pretty normal for there to be more straightforward acceptance of homosexuality and less “just a phase” framing, that there is.

This is a thing that our friend @studentofetherium went into in a tumblr post, well, volunteered to go into it rather, after they mentioned this fact to us and I told them that I was writing this. Also, they take credit for coining the term “reiwa era yuri” so if there’s another term I guess someone might tell us, but otherwise we’re just gonna continue using this one.

So, the school trip happens, things happen on the school trip, and the whole time Shimamura is wondering, do I really love Adachi? Is this relationship going to go okay? Will we have a future together? And when her classmate asks her these things she just… doesn’t really know.

And then, in a twist of an ending to the eighth volume that feels custom fucking made for the hypothetical second season of the anime to end here, Shimamura has an epiphany. As she’s stumbling through the fog that’s emerged around their school trip bus, she realizes that she’s looking through the fog… for Adachi.

Because Shimamura really does love Adachi, really does care about Adachi, want to live with Adachi, and they find each other and meet each other’s eyes and it’s just this entire love magic cinema moment

and then that night they sleep together.

By which I mean, they just sleep. The idea that one or both of them want to have sex is floated, but neither of them are emotionally ready for that. So they just lay down, and they chat about how their future is going to go, how they want to one day go even farther than there- and the last chapter cuts ahead to them, in the future, again, going home from their overseas trip, from whence they've gone farther.

And it’s just like.

Huh. Neat.

Part 3: The Trouble With Life

3.1 The Improbability of Endings

Most yuri, most romance, stories just kind of end at, they dated, they kissed, they’re together now. The end.

Even Bloom Into You, a romance story that we like so much that Yuu Koito literally infected our brain, just gets its two leads together, has them fuck, and has an epilogue going, “yeah, so they got married, they’re fine now.” And it’s not out of a lack of care, or consideration, or laziness, or anything, that so many romance stories end this way, it’s more that human relationships are kind of metal as fuck.

So metal, in fact, that they take years and years and are fickle as hell and, no matter how much work you put into them, will constantly collapse under the slightest pressure, like a run of your favorite roguelike, or some kind of massive long-term jenga tower of social pressures and favors and feelings that you just cannot stabilize.

And this is something Shimamura and Adachi are both very conscious of, that Tarumi is conscious of when she encounters Shimamura again after all those years, that everyone in this story is painfully aware of- human relationships are not built to last. Especially not in a world like this, in an economic system like capitalism that’s seemingly hell bent on tearing us all away from each other at every turn.

Dealing with all that is hard to do within the framework of a traditional narrative. So, a lot of romance stories do end with the couple getting together, because, that’s economical. It’s easy. It’s satisfying. You don’t need to think about it too hard, don’t need to think about how most relationships just kind of fizzle out and fade and everything.

And Adashima does ponder the fragility of relationships so much more than most other romance fiction we’ve read, and it takes its time to try and make the relationship between its leads special, to make it believable that this will last. The fact that Iruma puts so much time and thought and effort into this relationship and its development and strengthening makes it come across, in context, as just a little bit off when the story just

Skips the rest of them.

The reveal that Adachi and Shimamura are literally bound by fate is not handled as cheaply as you might think, or, really, cheaply at all. It doesn’t ruin the story, Shimamura doesn’t really have any regard for it, she’s just kinda like, yeah, well, our relationship happened and it’s fine regardless, I don’t need to understand all the fate stuff.

And its y’know, it’s good. It’s good that it’s working out. But I still have so many questions. Adachi’s personality. Shimamura’s devotion. Is she devoted, I don’t know. She doesn’t seem devoted, so how’s that working out? How’s it going to work out if and when Adachi asks for something that Shimamura can’t or won’t give, and then that’s the point at which the relationship is truly strained?

Tarumi. Do they stay friends? Will Adachi ever meet Tarumi? Will Tarumi be upset that someone else likes Shimamura? How’s Shimamura going to take all that? And everything, and everything else. How are their parents going to take it? It seems that it’s fine in the future, but was there drama, was there difficulty? Or did they just not care that much? I don’t know.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see the future stuff more, it’s nice to see a more thorough exploration of an adult couple’s life in a yuri story than we’ve previously really gotten. We all want that sequel to Bloom Into You. Cause it’d be nice to capture that experience in an art piece.

But the way it’s paced, well, it feels disappointing because I don’t really like the way that it kind of arbitrarily makes the story end, before it, keeps going, but also I can’t really criticize it for that because, well, I can’t think of a particularly better solution. I know we all want answers to these questions, we all want to see more of this, and Iruma would probably like to write more of it, but they have other things they want to write and unfortunately aren’t immortal.

In the eighth of Iruma’s afterwards, which consistently fail to convince us that they are not writing their autobiography here, it is explained that volume 8’s flash forward to the future is the ending. Or at least, an ending. You could say, a contingency, so that if Iruma stops writing the novels prematurely, then there will have been an ending.

There’s currently eleven total volumes, and there’s going to be two more, or so says Iruma, with the eleventh one having come out while we were working on this essay. So, yeah, that’s the reason why this feels so weird, so much like a forced ending to the series at the expense of the larger plot’s pacing. Because this one person can’t spend their entire life writing the life of a fictional cast of characters.

And that’s just the tragedy of our finite lives, isn’t it, that we can’t spend all our lives chilling out, eating food, and making art. Hopefully one day someone’ll have that figured out. But in the meantime.

Reading this, and considering both the conclusive way with which volume 8 ended, as well as the fact that there was a change in illustrators starting with volume 9, and the thought that this would be the ending of the hypothetical second season of the anime… Which is our own original thought, I should clarify. We decided it’d make the most sense to treat it as a clean break in the story, and read volume 9… later.

After reading… the Anime Special Novel. Which is also quite interesting, for some different reasons!

3.2 The Time Lord Cat

Just in case you’ve never heard of this before, I probably need to explain what the hell it is. So, when Adachi and Shimamura, the anime, got a blu-ray release, the publishers wanted to include some incentives for buying the thing even if you’d already seen the anime on TV or wherever.

As such, they asked Iruma to write them something to include as a bonus. And so, four new light novel chapter-sized pieces of writing from Iruma were distributed in the first runs of each of the four blu-ray volumes. And these stories, which, otherwise have seen no official release, got translated into English by the same people doing the fan translations of the main novels.

So it might be more accurate, technically, to describe these as four different discrete novels, but that’s a huge linguistic nuisance. It’s four chapters, that’s only about a chapter or two smaller than the average light novel, so I’m just gonna describe it as a four-chapter novel, because it basically is one. Anyway. The Anime Special Novel is about Yashiro, and how she is an immortal cat.

Did I already explain who Yashiro is? I don’t know. Anyway, Yashiro is best explained as an alien and corollary to Shinobu Oshino, anime’s other mildly famous non-human immortal child, who one day waltzes into town and sweet talks all the humans into giving her food. And we say, “Wait, an alien, really?”

While the anime provides no real answer, the novels eventually get around to clarifying, “Yes, an alien. Really.”

Yashiro is most definitely not a human, and not a documented Earth species, so she’s probably an alien. Her pockets are bigger on the inside. She can read minds. She barely ages after ten, seventy, and then thousands of years. She can apparently time and space travel all by her lonesome, and she loves humans and apparently favors spending time with them far more than her own species, who she is ignoring. She can fold to comfortably fit into spaces smaller than herself.

Therefore, Yashiro is indisputably a Time Lord. Or, Time Lady, Time Maiden. Whatever.

Taken in context, the most questionable claim Yashiro makes is that she is 680 years old. It is later shown that she is terrible at keeping track of the time, so much so that later, she views the difference in time between three thousand years or thirty thousand, as something trivial, that it doesn’t matter if she flubs up a bit. She’s just like that.

Yashiro is an extremely interesting character, who, very curiously, perceives herself as the least interesting thing in the entire world. She claims to have come to Earth for a rendezvous with her fellow aliens, but she never treats this task with any degree of urgency.

While she’s never specific about the details of this plan, my guess is that she, like Adachi and Shimamura, only decided she wanted a piece of their slice of life because she was playing hooky. At least that’s how I’d prefer to think of it. The idea has thematic resonance, so as far as I’m concerned, that’s canon. But the other thing is that, unlike Adachi, Shimamura, and basically every other human in this story, Yashiro has only one emotion.

She is happy all the time.

Yashiro is never bothered by anything, whatsoever. She always has what she wants, and she’s never bothered by not getting what she wants- if she doesn’t make her goal, she moves the goalpost. Yashiro does not seem to have any worldly concerns whatsoever; she eats all the time, not out of an apparent need to sate hunger, but rather for the simple pleasure of doing so.

She doesn’t face much opposition, either, she’s such a cute child that everyone just wants to pet and feed and pamper her, and Shimamura’s family takes no issue with her just chilling at their house for ten years. The only thing Yashiro is ever described as not liking is baths, and even then she’s never really angry about being made to take one. In her internal monologue, Shimamura consistently describes Yashiro as being like a cat.

And she really is, isn’t she? She eats and sleeps all day, she doesn’t like water, and she is happily accepted as a freeloader for years in the homes of human strangers. And that’s just normal, even though Yashiro… is… well, humanoid, at the very least.

But the bizarre factor of Yashiro’s character is increased exponentially when Iruma takes her out of Adachi and Shimamura, and plops her right into Girls’ Last Tour.

3.3 Yashiro's Last Tour

Girls’ Last Tour, if you aren’t aware, is an anime (AND MANGA) about Girls on their Last Tour. It’s a survival kirara where moe blobs have a picnic in a dying world full of remnants of a fallen civilization. It’s all moody and pensive and about small girls who do not seem particularly bothered by the inevitably of their death. One of them is into vore.

Relevant here is that one of these two moe blobs is named Chito. And, coincidentally, the protagonist of the Adachi and Shimamura Anime Special Novel, who is also touring a dying world full of remnants of a fallen civilization, is also named Chito.

Did Iruma do this on purpose? Probably not, but there’s an excuse to recommend Girls’ Last Tour without needing to make a video about it. Go watch it. Uh, probably go read it too. We haven’t read it, but it’s probably really good. Both forms. It’s great.

Anyway, Chito Number Two is also hanging around Yashiro on another planet, not Earth, which we’ve never seen before, that at some point was colonized by Chito’s ancestors, but then it turned out that the planet sucked at sustaining crops and so everyone fell ill and/or starved, and unfortunately died.

Which sucks.

So, Chito is just wandering this basically dead civilization, aware she could be the last human alive for all she knows, but not really caring much. Yashiro is here, accompanying Chito and chatting her up, because she finds it fun I guess. She doesn’t really seem to care very much about the whole humanity dead thing, but she’s very eager to tell Chito this one story she has about these two very nice girls who gave her a lot of snacks to eat some thousands of years prior.

Yashiro tells four separate stories to Chito, which are each set at different points in Adachi and Shimamura’s adult lives together. All the typical things, really. Going shopping, going on onsen dates, kissing- well, no, they don’t directly kiss, but Shimamura does reminisce about their first bloody kiss. And also, Shimamura dying.

Yes, Yashiro confirms, in canon, that Adachi and Shimamura died. But she’s not particularly bothered by it. She’s just as cheery as ever. It’s not like she’s happy about them being dead, but she’s not especially sad, either- no more troubled than she’d be if Shimamura refused to give her candy.

And common sense, common familiarity with tropes about immortal people, says this should be existentially terrifying, shouldn’t it. A living creature that is only ever happy, that never dies or grows old or grieves. This is the basic setup for some lovecraftian horror story or another, or several, isn’t it?

And it is, on a basic level, kind of unsettling to see Yashiro just… not being bothered by living thousands of years, by the people around her dying, and just remaining a child forever, but… It’s not really, is it? Look at her! She’s too cute to be scared of. She’s a human shaped cat! Isn’t it adorable?

Humans typically live longer than cats, I know. But if a cat lived longer than humans, do you think it would give a fuck?

One of the most interesting parts of Adachi and Shimamura is the middle part of volume 6, where, as I think I already said, it’s revealed that up till now, the love of little Hougetsu Shimamura’s life has been not a girl, not even a human, but the other Shimamura family pet.

The dog that lives at her grandparents’ house, Gon. Gon was Hougetsu’s best friend, Hougetsu’s only true friend, the only living creature she ever loved, and for a time, the only reason Hougetsu wanted to come back.

And it’s only just now that Shimamura is really realizing just how strange this is, though, she’s come to accept that she’s really rather strange, that she doesn’t particularly care. And now, she’s coming back for the yearly Obon visit to her grandparents’ house, to see Gon for what is probably the last time.

This dog, who was once young and spry, once quite literally bounced up and down at the sight of little Hougetsu, has now grown old and frail, barely able to walk. This dog, who Shimamura loves more than her own mother, is dying, and Shimamura finds this prospect… What’s the word? Disquieting, perhaps. Disquieting.

Shimamura is disquiet with thoughts of age, thoughts of love, thoughts of death. As she still finds herself puzzled over what Adachi’s feelings are, what Adachi wants out of her, knowing what Adachi wants but not really able to admit it to herself, wondering about her own life, about if she’ll have companions in her future, about if it’ll suck, and it’s just…

I don’t know. Shimamura thinks about a lot, and I don’t have words for a lot of it. The main thing I remember is her speaking to the odd old man who’s her grandparents’ next door neighbor, and it being firstly really funny because he just is walking around with a teacup that his granddaughter made and bragging about how great of a potter she is. Just because he can. Just because he’s a weird old guy, and people will let weird old people get away with these things, and he can.

And he gives Shimamura a fishing rod, as such, so he says, because he can.

Yeah, so just to repeat what I said, Shimamura runs into this weird old dude on a family trip, he says, “hey, my daughter’s real damn good at pottery and that’s why I’m toting her special teacup around, how about you go fishing with this fishing rod,” refuses to elaborate further, leaves. And that’s just great.

Well, he does elaborate a little further before he leaves, says she should enjoy her childhood while she can, and then gives her some fishing advice, I guess. And that’s all very nice of him.

And then Gon shows up, walking all slow like he does, and Shimamura asks the old man,

“Is it tough growing old?”

His answer wasn’t going to affect anything. Things were going to continue the same way as they always had. And yet, despite all of that, I just couldn’t help but ask.

Mumbling to himself, the man shook his head slightly. His turban shook as well.

“I see. So, your questions too have a hint of philosophy to them, huh? I guess that only makes sense, given your name and all.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean…”I hadn’t meant to grumble that out loud. No, it was simply my instinctual reaction to the situation; if I had to call anything here philosophical, it would be his needlessly obtuse answer.

“It’s not tough for me, no. Why? Well, I got this teacup from my granddaughter, that’s why. Haha. Does that answer your question?”

You could see the man’s eyes sparkle as he said that.

“Hmm, I guess.”

It really didn’t. Apparently, I’d picked the wrong person to ask.

[From Adachi and Shimamura, volume 6, "Home Town Dog"

Written by Hitoma Iruma

Translated and published unofficially by sneikkimies]

And that’s just sort of… mellow, and funny, and surprisingly sage. Well, maybe not that surprising. I don’t know. It’s just an entire moment. It’s also a little surprising, just a teensy little bit, because...

This is a kirara, isn’t it? This kind of story doesn’t usually go there. Like, according to Iruma, the editor’s prompt that resulted in Adashima was “write something like Yuru Yuri,” and Yuru Yuri is a stupid and silly nonsense comedy about immortal lesbians violently assaulting each other both physically and sexually, which is really funny, because they’re literally a bunch of gay Looney Tunes.

Or maybe that’s just the anime, I don’t know, I guess the manga might be different, but even still, the manga’s never aged these characters a single day as far as I can see. Really the only kirara I know of (other than Girls' Last Tour) that addresses the fact of the cute girls eventually dying is School-Live, but like, that’s an edgy one isn’t it? It’s literally set in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not exactly subtle.

You don’t really want to think about, say, the keions getting older and dying, do you? I mean, maybe you do, and if you do you’re probably a little weird, and that’s fine. So like, this is just kind of… I don’t want to say weird, because in the context of the story, it isn’t.

But I’m quite sure that people who’ve only seen the first season of the anime aren’t really expecting this, y’know? It’s certainly a place to have gone, and be going.

It’s so comical, so caustic, so casually morbid, to see the cast of Adachi and Shimamura reflect on their life, their future, their love and their relationships and their families and drifting apart from their friends and peers as the rivers of life all take them all the different places they’re going to, towards their eventual deaths, and all these very difficult human things to be thinking about, and Yashiro just… is happily prancing around eating donuts.

But it’s also not… that weird, really. Although Yashiro is so transfixingly childlike as she is, she’s also so pure and straightforward and earnest as any sentient creature can plausibly get. Although she doesn’t share in the complicated feelings of the humans around her, she’s never unsympathetic to their emotions, and to their needs. She’s always happy and childish, but she never forces that on people- she just accepts people as they are, and she does her best to do right by people.

Which is unsettling, not because it’s undesirable, exactly, but rather because it’s impossible. But if it were possible, and, hey, maybe it is possible for Yashiro, a non-human, to be emotionally stable and pleasant and good, but it’s not possible for us humans all the time to be that way, just the same as it’s not possible to live immortal and ageless as Yashiro does…

…

I guess the conclusion that I just came to is that Yashiro IS the part that’s like Yuru Yuri! Yashiro is the immortal gay looney toon! But given new meaning by being placed in a world of actual people dealing with gross human problems like jealousy and unfulfilled desires for affection and burgeoning sexuality and age and work and family and death!

And Yashiro is, Yashiro is just great! Um. She’s a great child, and a great cat. Like, probably the best cat! Okay, and now I have to explain why she’s the best cat.

Final Part: The Lesbians of All Time

So, the last story. In the second chapter of the Anime Special Novel, Chito and Yashiro run into another girl- a girl named Shima, described as having black hair and feeling like Chito already knows her, and then you turn the page and THERE’S THE ADACHI CHIBI THERE IT IS THERE’S ADACHI

and they keep exploring the desolate deserted planet and then in the fourth and final chapter, Shimamura dies.

The story that Yashiro has to tell. Is about Shimamura. And told to us from the point of view of Hougetsu Shimamura, age 85 ish, who describes her relationship dynamic with Yashiro as having gone from little sister to daughter to grandchild on account of Yashiro still not having aged a single day after all these years.

And up till this point, knowing that Shimamura was already dead in the future, I’d been thinking, oh gosh, oh fuck, it’s gonna absolutely SUCK if Shimamura dies first and then Adachi is all alone and miserably depressed for the rest of her life- and thankfully that doesn’t happen.

No, it’s Shimamura who is all alone, and literally everyone else who is dead. Adachi, Hino, Nagafuji, Tarumi, Shimamura’s little sister, everyone she knew is dead now. And Shimamura, now, too, is also dying, of old age.

Shimamura thinks she might be seeing Adachi’s ghost, because she’s evidently gone and introjected Adachi after Adachi’s death, but she’s also not quite sure about that whatsoever, and she’s just tired and lonely and reflecting on all her life up to this point and how fondly she remembers her high school years with Adachi and her only other thought is

Damn. All my friends are dead, and being old is boring.

To relieve her boredom, Shimamura takes her sister’s games console, which, no longer works with modern TVs, because it’s the future, so she goes out to an electronics store and gets an adapter. Also, because it’s the future, there’s been alien visitations and humanity is looking into space traveling more. But Shimamura’s been born too soon to care.

So she goes back to her home, boots up a JRPG on her sister’s old games console and makes a party of characters which she names after Adachi, Hino, Nagafuji, Tarumi, and her sister, and then finds out that video games are good. So Shimamura decides that her life’s goal, for the rest of her life, is going to be to finish Dragon Quest.

Does she finish it? Who knows. No idea. The story ends.

But before Shimamura dies, she asks Yashiro, her immortal alien child house cat, if she will ever see Adachi again.

Yashiro says yes. She will. For it is destiny.

And Shimamura’s dying request of Yashiro, is for Yashiro to make absolutely sure that every Shimamura across the universe finds their Adachi.

Yashiro promises earnestly.

And thus, here, in the present of the future of the end of humanity in a dying civilization Yashiro looks at the two last known living humans on this planet, says, “My job here is done!” And then shortly thereafter fucks off, assured in the knowledge that she’s fulfilled her promise to Shimamura:

Play matchmaker for her most recent reincarnation and her destined wifey.

So, yeah, that’s what happens. It might be just about a wrap on humanity, or at least this particular humanity, but The Lesbians of All Time are still gay.

There’s several Things About this particular chapter.

One, it’s, unintentionally, a particularly stark distillation of the classical American millennial slash zoomer fantasy of having the economic security to retire at an appropriate age and spend your last years in dignity, after a good life of living well with a good partner who you were happy with (or, multiple or no partners, if that’s your preference), and then dying peacefully of old age playing video games.

Yeah, uh, oof.

Two, it’s a particularly stark distillation of the perhaps not as common but particularly appealing fantasy of being assured that you and your partner will reincarnate and get together again, by your cat, who promises to make extra sure that that comes to pass all throughout every time and place and timeline. Because your cat likes you, and is a Time Lord!

Yashiro is good!

And three, um, yeah, it’d be really nice to know that you’re going to reincarnate with your soul mate. Like, that’s just convenient. For some people. I’m sure.

Okay, so, anyway, do I have anything to say about this story? Yeah, I probably do, probably a lot. But I don’t know if I can coherently say very much of it without repeating a lot of what I already said. It’s melancholy as all hell and it’s also just not something I expected at all from this series when we started reading it. Iruma even reflects on that fact directly in their afterward, saying,

“Anyway, yeah. That's the sort of story this became.

Death approaches!”

Heh. I guess it does. I guess it does.

There’s a lot else I feel I have to comment on. If I had infinite time, I’d also add on analyses and comparisons of the two Adachi and Shimamura manga adaptations. I’d read volumes 9 and 10 before finishing this video, and talk about my feelings on however Tarumi’s arc gets resolved- if it gets resolved. I barely even began to discuss or analyze Hino and Nagafuji’s relationship and their additional flavoring of the story as a side couple. And did my tangent on Adachi’s jealousy really go anywhere, did I have an answer? Well, no, but the volumes that I read up to didn’t really have an answer, either. Do I want to try to pretentiously psychoanalyze Iruma and his writing more based on the incomplete information I have from these English translations?

There’s another series, also, Iruma’s apparent debut series, where a girl and a boy who fall in love have childhood trauma about being kidnapped a long time ago and are being retraumatized by a serial killing incident in a small town and that has some HELLA TAGS on the site’s it’s listed at- does this psychological horror crime fiction have some connection to Adachi sometimes thinking a teensy bit like a serial killer? Is the electric child in Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl, another thing I haven’t watched nor read, a proto-Yashiro? Is Yashiro really a corollary to Shinobu? Did the Saeki Sayaka novels contain secret Adashima foreshadowing? Did Iruma say something super interesting in an interview somewhere that someone translated on Twitter maybe? Can I get answers to any of these questions without knowing how to speak Japanese?

Are we just going to have to learn Japanese and read all the rest of the things Iruma has written ourselves?!

And this has now just about broken ten thousand words, and I cannot answer any of those questions just yet. So, much like Iruma and Adashima volume 8, I’m going to arbitrarily force an ending to my unfinished work despite these loose ends and hope it’s good enough in case we never get around to writing a sequel.

In lieu of a better wrap-up, I guess I can just say, and as such,

ANIME GIRLS CAN DIE TOO.

The end.

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joyce-stick · 1 year

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Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

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Video of recommendations of girls (And media) which halfway through turned into a Bocchi the Rock video essay.

Transcript under the cut.

Previous video essay/transcript: Adachi and Shimamura's Second Season

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Hello everyone, it’s Audrey. So, it’s been some time, I was writing a script about problematic things, and then Joyce came along and started a separate script about things we had to recommend. I finished that script, and the end result of this process was a great incoherent mess, so I’m taking it from the top.

First thing we have to talk about today is Moonshine!~

Moonshine is a doujin visual novel produced by the now seemingly dissolved doujin circle Sakura Mint, whose origins I don’t have the resources nor Japanese language knowledge to trace any information about. It was released in 2007, and then translated to English in 2008, and, quite frankly, the fact that a freely available English translation exists for easy online downloading is a goddamn miracle. It’s really short, like, about an hour, or two if you’re slow like we are. Nonetheless, this VN made us cry like a little baby child. The reason for that being, it’s about a trans girl. And the other reason for that being, it’s about a trans girl falling in love with a gender ambiguous main protagonist who is, well, gosh, really.

This is a really raw and emotionally powerful little story with a really strong theme of how to move on with your life. From a life where you didn’t belong or weren’t loved, or from a life that you love but that can’t follow you, and how either can be equally painful, how change is always painful, even if it truly is for the better, and it’s just a whole lot of feelings. A story that made us cry this much needs to be read. The English version is available freely, it’s only a bit of time, and it’s very well worth it. You might need to fuck around with your graphics settings to get it to display in proper 4 by 3 if you want to play it in fullscreen without it stretching to 16 by 9, but still, very very worth it. Probably one of the best pieces of queer fiction that we’ve ever read, and the fact that it got translated the year after its release is incredible.

It also has a sequel, called Tsugi no Terasu, which is probably not called “Sunshine” in English because that’s not what the kanji means. This sequel never got any sort of digital release either officially or otherwise and it looks as if the doujin group that made it has long disbanded given that the web domain name they used to occupy is now populated by casino advertisements, sooo all their work is probably just kind of, gone, unfortunately. As is often the case when independently produced niche media exists and no one is doing any work to preserve it. These things just sort of go and vanish.

Unless it hasn’t vanished, and someone does care! Like, I dunno, the girl reading this. I dunno about y’all, but I’d prefer that this thirteen year old VN that’s a sequel to a sixteen year old VN about a trans girl gets to be read, by someone, and hopefully continue to exist, and not evaporate into the mists of time. Sure, we can’t read it, but, details details. We’ll learn! How to read. I hope.

So I found a copy of Tsugi no Terasu for sale on akibaoo. Presumably this copy’s used, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work with our computer, or that it won’t be scratched to hell, but hey, you have to take some chances sometime in life. So, I bought it, with a portion of our, uh, meager, monthly Patreon earnings, so that we can collect it and take some form of action to preserve it in some form. Because this is what we’re supposed to do. I know we don’t have that much money, I know we’re probably going to have to eat a lot of rice for another month, but, what the hell, are we doing this youtube shit for, if not this shit? And I for one, am tired of watching hazel do all the awesome Japanese media preservation actions. I would like to have some of that glory! Somehow.

And that’s the thing.

So if you’d like to support the thing, that is to say, acquiring and assessing niche subcultural Japanese media so that we can talk about it and maybe help make it accessible to other people, and making video essays about these exploits and our emotional discoveries from them, or whatever else we do, which all apparently comes ahead of eating a proper diet because we’re insane… then please, please, donate money to us via Ko-fi, Patreon, or whatever. You will be rewarded in some way, I assure you, unless you don’t feel rewarded, and then you won’t.

So here, I’m gonna tell y’all about other interesting content that we’ve had a look at.

Witch from mercury!

Okay so I had a whole thing written about this show. And then I had a whole other thing. And then Joyce simplified that other thing to its base components. And I don’t feel like summarizing what she said about what I said. But really I just think you should look at the tweet I wrote. Which says,

“So basically this is the story of what'd happen if us talking to girls in our discord chats but we had mechas and were all caught in the middle of corporate/government space politics-wars-ing

“I’m sorry”

And also,

Suletta didn’t do anything wrong.

I’ve thought about this quite a long time, and others have kind of said it more succinctly, but I think that Suletta made, not the best decision, but a reasonable decision in this circumstance, to protect her fiancee from the guy pointing a gun at her.

I think the appropriate thing to do then would have been to emerge from Aerial apologizing profusely for the traumatic experience that Miorine just had of watching a dude get killed, instead of what she did do. That would have been the human thing to do. But Suletta didn’t act like a human in this situation because her mom told her that this behavior was a show of emotional strength. And that’s what’s happened here. And that’s interesting, because it plays really well into the story, I think, in showing that the shonen protagonist pluckiness that Suletta was trying to approach her circumstances with, doesn’t really work all of the time! Suletta, the main protagonist of this series, acted the most protagonist like that she’d ever acted in this scene, and it was the most out of character she’d ever acted, and like, gosh, I’m looking forward to seeing how they follow up on this. That’s really what I have to say about that.

Oh and also the show was good.

So yeah, that helped.

How Do We Relationship?

Which I’m going to refer to as Tsukiage, a shortened form of its Japanese title, from here on out.

Tsukiage is a story about lesbians.

And yes, yes, I know, there’s many stories “about lesbians” that I’ve told you about before. No. This isn’t like those. Tsukiage is About Lesbians. Tsukiage is about the experience of being a lesbian in This World, with all its gross bigotry problems. Tsukiage is about the experience of being in a group of heterosexual women and being asked what guys you like, and being unable to answer. Tsukiage is about the experience of being someone you know your parents would hate. Tsukiage is about the experience of being a teenager with no adults to trust in your life, but also about being an adult uncertain if you can trust the other adults in your life, and about the ennui of living isolated in a place you’ll probably never find your way out of, and about,

Tsukiage is about two twenty something lesbians who date each other because they’re the only lesbians they know and they have no idea what else to do, and who are really good at having a lot of sex with each other but are also really bad at dating and even worse at dating on the days when they're really bad at having sex with each other. And they're also both young and both had traumatic high school romance failures because, being a high school student is plenty traumatic in its own ways, and those wounds are still fresh to both of them even if they want to pretend they aren't, and it's bound to follow them still in this town they've lived their whole life in, and it's just a lot of spicy drama about that! I’ve been only three volumes in so far, and Miwa and Saeko are the first main pairing of a yuri manga we've seen to whom I’ve kind of ended up saying “nope”. I don’t get the sense that these two are made for each other in the same sense we got reading Adashima or Yagakimi or Sasakoi. They argue, they bicker, they feel jealous about each other, and about, maybe, 2 thirds of the way through the second volume, I realized I was reading a breakup narrative.

I mean, look at the back covers of the first four volumes. They telegraph it visually!

But also that makes this manga even more compelling for what it’s going for, because, um, conflict is good! And two people not made for each other is damn well better! Just yes, please do try to eventually get these two back together and sell me on this horrible relationship sorting itself. Or don’t, that’s also fine! I’ve not actually got to the chapter where they broke up, because, gosh, and tough, but yeah. And also this is probably the first manga I’ve read that actually shows how school can be traumatic, when it presents a supporting character who was deemed “gifted” in high school but ultimately wasn’t as good as their sibling and then was extremely othered by her family, and just is, generally, awfully maladjusted to, reality, because of the sheltered and overstructured way in which they lived being forced to rank as high as possible on exams, and like, shit! Like, I know Japanese high school is brutal, and it’s a plot point in a lot of anime and all, but this is the one time I can recall offhand when it was actually something that impacted the story and characters outside of a relatively contained studying arc, and it’s probably some of the realest fucking shit I’ve ever read.

Oh, also, um, Tsukiage is really damn funny. Like, the early volumes had me laughing involuntarily so much that I was seriously concerned about attracting noise complaints from others in our living space, or, around, generally? It’s a really good story, the art and faces are really good, the humor is really good and that's pretty damn essential, I think, for a story that deals in such heavy topics. The whole thing is good, so, yeah, read it!

Bad End Theater!

So yeah, I already used this game as b-roll in the Adashima video, so if you watched that, you probably already know that we liked this. And we do. It’s quite good. This game starts with, as Joyce said, *ruffles papers* “an unawakened lesbian is eaten by a demon… and in the next part of the game, the lesbian meets a demon lesbian who wants to eat her in the other way… and in the later part of the game, a reply guy apologizes for replying with violence… or actually replies with violence.”

So anyway this game took us a couple hours to 100% all its Steam achievements. Very short game, very good game, nice little queer vignette about the tragedy of people from different social backgrounds not understanding each other, and then understanding each other, one hopes. It’s not free, but it’s quite good, and easily recommendable! So yeah.

5, Spark the Electric Jester 3!

It’s a Sonic game. It’s basically a Sonic game. It’s much like the earlier game, Spark the Electric Jester 2, which is much like the earlier games Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog, the video about which we were going to make is apparently not coming out until it does, because we keep getting distracted by pointless bullshit. The developer of this series is a former developer of Sonic fangames and started with the 2D Spark the Electric Jester 1, which we could not finish because we suck at 2D platformers.

One really interesting thing about this game is how it treats the lives system. Yes, it has one, but only for the final level. I find this super super interesting, because while we were playing the Sonic Adventure titles with a friend of ours, we kinda generally came into the agreement that the lives system of all these games was a mistake. And Sonic Team seems to have agreed, because they, uh, removed it, from Sonic Forces onwards. But Spark 3 puts it back deliberately, only for the final level, and the final level is basically designed to make you lose lives. Not through difficulty, exactly, because while it is difficult, it’s not insurmountable, once you know the lay of the land- but rather, through compounding difficulty by length. Utopia Shelter doesn’t feel exactly like a level, it feels like a whole city. It feels like, I suppose, if at the end of Sonic 06, the whole of Soleanna became a level from which Sonic had to escape- oh, well, I guess that sort of did happen, huh. Sorry, just um…

Sonic 06 is cool? I’m very sorry to say so. It’s a horrible mess, but it also is cool.

Anyway, Spark 3’s acknowledgement of lives as a part of the Sonic Adventure experience feels like, kind of great? Like it doesn’t just go, “oh this part annoyed people, let’s throw it away” it says, no, dying in Final Chase repeatedly and falling out to the main menu is part of this kind of game, let’s just, give the player a chance to experience that, at least once. Let's make this a part of the game, but make it better, by making the level earn it, both by being an awesome level whose difficulty feels contextually justified, and also by being in a game with phenomenal 3D controls and platforming and movement physics where the appeal of such a difficulty modifier isn't spoiled by deaths that don't feel like your fault And it’s done in a way that feels accessible, with the option of going back and just, playing more of the game more, if you feel like you need more lives to endure the stage, but odds are if you’ve done all the optional stages you don’t need that many. I got to the end of Utopia Shelter on my second try, with lives to spare.

And yeah, so, anyway. Spark 3. It’s a really good game. It’s got pretty great level design and a great sense of visual style, really good music, good movement except for those damn cars that glitch and start going sideways all the time… I started just doing the car stages on foot because I couldn’t be bothered. But other than those, great game!

And finally;

Bocchi the Rock!

Okay, so I’m not sure what about Bocchi I can say that isn’t already said by other people but y’know what, fuck it, Molly’s convinced me, I’m gonna tell the weird age gap crush story.

So, when we were like, 16, 17, thereabouts, we were presumed a cis boy, and about six entire feet tall, and because of this, non-attentive viewers would often mistake us for a college-age dude. This factor, alongside the color of our skin and the general, uh, emotional neglect, of our parents, lent itself to our delinquencies, i.e., doing basically whatever the fuck we wanted at the expense of getting verbally and/or physically harassed by our parents who weren’t happy with us doing whatever the fuck we wanted but were slowly giving up after whatever point at which they stopped paying for the therapy that didn’t fix this brain immediately. So it was one night, while we were out of the house, as we usually were, talking to people at a charity event for the community org we volunteered for back then, that we saw her.

That woman who played guitar. Who was, back then, about the age we are right now. Maybe a little bit older.

Don’t think I need to describe her elsewise, really!

We had played guitar, too, once, for several years even. But I think we’d given up on music, like, the year before, after our mom harassing us to practice the “right” way made it not fun for us anymore. Seeing that beautiful, talented, very nice, woman almost made us want to try again. Although, we didn’t, because our mom didn’t want us to ever touch an instrument again unless we were truly serious about trying to make money with it, because those lessons are expensive, and I guess that’s one of the many ways we disappointed her, by ostensibly wasting her money.

But anyway, this woman. She was nice. That’s most of what we remember about her. She was a nice, cool, and to our eyes then, pretty, older woman who felt easy to talk to, and seemed to empathize with our anxieties, as, little of them as we felt comfortable telling, and, we were awkward around here and didn’t say much other than to compliment here and to talk about Edgar Wright’s movies, but like, y’know, she was good. She was good. Remembering how she smiled and how she looked at us like… well, probably the same as she smiled and looked at everyone, but still, it seemed like she liked us, or liked having us around. Although, now, being a performing person, we understand it’s kind of in your best interest to smile at everyone who comes to see a show. But. Yeah.

And we knew we never had a chance with this nice older woman, and that our crush on her was inappropriate, but, still… we still thought about this nice, talented, tall, pretty, interesting woman, and how much we wished we could be closer with her, but alas, and curses, age gaps, strike something again. Our heart, most likely, but maybe something else too.

And you know where this is going, don’t you.

Yeah.

[Kikuri Hiroi, a clip]

Kikuri is far, far more unhinged than that woman. The woman we knew was, uh, hinged, enough, to not drink around the absurdly tall and cute 17 year old that kept coming to her gigs for unknown reasons. Kikuri meanwhile is hardly ever seen without a can of sake nearby. And she’s also a bit more, y’know, open, with Hitori-chan, whose face around Kikuri is constantly a mixture of mild terror and grand astonishment. And, yes, Seika and Kikuri, is definitely, the more appropriate ship, and the one more likely to happen in the actual story, if any explicit lesbianism did happen, which I don't expect it to, but Hitori and Kikuri, in my opinion, is much more compelling, precisely because of how inappropriate it is. There’s just something particularly compelling to us, anyway, in the thought of our dead-in-the-water teenage crush, or something adjacent to it, actually going, someplace. It’s true that had we acted on it in real life, assuming we weren’t just rejected and told to abscond permanently, it’d almost certainly have gone extremely badly, for all the reasons it’d have done that, but, y’know, fiction is meant for exploring those culturally taboo fantasies of these sorts without necessarily needing to consider those unsafe and undesirable consequences. Although… you can, cause that’s conducive to drama.

So anyway, as far as, the actual show, goes, I dunno, I think it’s all pretty clear in this moment. This entire surreal bit with the psychedelic rock concert, where Hitori sees Kuroi reach out to her in this imagined intimate moment and whisk her away through this weird and new aspect of music and life experience that she’s not felt before, and it’s just like… Yeah! Yeah, that’s how it felt to us back then, watching that nice older girl on that stage. It was really kind of nostalgic actually. So, there’s one layer of the appeal of Kikuri’s inclusion in the show, Hitori’s feelings for Kikuri as someone who is a mentor figure and has things to teach her. You could say the thing Kikuri has to teach is music, or, something else, and though Hitori isn't eloquent or brave enough to articulate whatever her crazy teenage feelings are, it's clear she… has some! Which are ambiguous enough that they could be interpreted as just her wanting to be like Kikuri, which was also an aspect of our teenage emotions about our cool guitar woman, or that Kikuri playing in front of her triggered a spicy homosexual awakening! Not wrong either way. Though I think it's both.

And the other layer of the appeal is just… well, Kikuri herself. And our adoration of and relation to Kikuri as not just a stand-in for our teenage age gap crush, but also as a character in our age range who is relatable to us as a young adult who feels similarly to her about life!

I don’t think I need to explain that one, but I will anyway.

Kikuri is an alcoholic.

At some point after we turned 21, when it wasn’t us, but Joyce, Joyce discovered alcohol, during one of the low points in our life when we were unstably housed, and gradually started to rely on it a fair bit more than she should have. For a good year or two there, Joyce was drinking off our ass about once a month, sometimes twice, and y’know, just sort of thinking, who cares. If I die, if I lose, if I go out. Who cares. cause I’m not going to! We only really stopped drinking as much as we did because it started costing money and we started finding ostensibly better ways to hurt ourselves, like buying the disc of an ancient Japanese-only doujin game and telling ourselves it’s media preservation. I don’t think we were ever as much of an addict as Kikuri but, just, watching Kikuri, and watching her ruin her life in, basically the same sort of a way, is extremely relatable and gross and eugh

And the whole gosh contrast of THIS WOMAN being Hitori’s mentor figure who she takes her cues from and then embarrasses herself trying to do it

Is just incredible and perfect and gosh

Both these lovely women are both ruining themselves trying to be cool and likable and awesome, and… SUCCEEDING, because, the… the people LIKE the women, ruining themselves! and it’s beautiful.

I’m sorry, it’s beautiful.

Anyway Bocchi good. Bocchi good.

We've been reading the manga of Bocchi since writing that bit, and I think the Bocchi manga is just, for one thing, somewhat inherently let down by not being an anime and not having songs play in it, but, it's got more humor, at least one more crazy adult, and it's got more happening in it, as there is in every manga, and I really like it.

[I had to transcribe this part because I ad-libbed it. - Audrey]

I also like how it goes about, y’know, putting forth the, general, thesis or idea that, you know um, quote, “Rock Touches People’s hearts, because it’s coming from a loser, but you can’t call it rock if it’s from a successful person” Because that’s a- that’s a statement to make. That’s a statement that I’m kind of into. because we’re very not successful and uh. Seeing characters like Kikuri, and Bocchi, and y’know, and her, underground band, and uh, characters like Aiko, and her… Shady Underground Journalism, and the fact that the manga presents all of them, all of these very unsuccessful women, as cool, because they are cool, and that’s, real, rock!

*giggling lightly* uhhhh ahaha and you know but also *mutters sheepishly* please donate to our patreon- *laughs*

And one thing that I’m, one thing that I, one other thing that I really like about the manga is that it, it focuses so much, it’s like- it’s not so school-centric as a lot of other manga about y’know, music teenagers, tend to be, like- They’re not the light music club! They’re- they’re, a real underground band and you know that’s…

That’s freaking cool! *chuckles* That they are, they are, y’know, actually doing concerts for money, and that’s, y’know, it’s about doing the concerts, for money, and about working with adults who also have been doing concerts for money! and drugs *laughing quietly*

And also the fact that so little of it is set inside the school, like, y’know, th-the one moment where like, th-the online journalist writer who’s just like spotlighting, who’s y’know, writing about bands, and looking for Hitori. And then she goes to the school and she’s just like… Kicked out of the school! Because she’s not- she’s… she’s a creep! Who doesn’t belong! In the school! A-And *laughs* And then y’know, in like, another manga where it’s the light music club that that’d just kind of be where the plot… stops! Where that plot line… stops! But she- But then she finds out that y’know, they don’t perform at school, because they’re not a school band, and then, she… goes to the live house… and advances the plot. And is also a kind of… fucked up, self-interested woman, who tries to… sequester Hitori into… agskjhgdkfhkdhjfdddd because she’s afkhjdhkhf she’s interested in money, and promising more than she’s probably able… able to give, she is……

[trails off laughing]

This- this chapter…! This is- This is a scene where, *hiccup* This is a scene where this woman tries to buy Bocchi, buy Hitori, with the promise of exposure! *laughing* That- That is literally: That is the literal description!

[long pause while Audrey gets herself under control]

Okay, I’m done ad-libbing.

One thing I wanted out of the anime, watching the anime, was to see the group grow and expand to the point where they actually do become a famous and successful band. That's basically what I figured it'd head for since, Hitori is already a successful YouTuber, as YouTubers go, and since Nijika said that's where she wanted it to go, that she wants to grow the band and become popular and help everyone reach their dreams. We kind of do have the whole "high schoolers become music celebrities" thing in Love Live, but I'd love to see that sort of thing be done in a way that feels more grounded and believable in a world where people actually seem to worry about money, outside of the fantasy confines of a nationally famous school club, and have it done in a way that the story doesn't stop happening once they graduate! Given how much the story already focuses on adults who are implied to be varying levels of fucked up just as well and seriously as its lead teenage characters who are implied to be varying levels of fucked up, it feels like the sort of story that's kind of made to transition to follow these girls out of their school lives. And I hope it goes there, and I also hope that the anime eventually gets further seasons because the material of the later manga chapters has itself a fantastic foundation if the rest of it is adapted in the same way, so, yeah.

And that's just the feelings I have on that. If you're interested in more bocchi content then um, sakugablog has a couple writeups and translated interviews which talk about the production which is itself its own really interesting story! It also got us to read the manga, because the way that the anime's character designer expresses such passion for Hamaji's work is utterly palpable and gosh things. Also I think it's really funny that Kerorira decided to animate the Bocchi ice bath scene with her wearing a school swimsuit because that adds another deeper layer of hilarious cringe that isn't quite present in the manga version of the scene when you see that she's so mentally conflicted about the merits and demerits of this scheme that she can't bring herself to fully expose her own body to the ice water which would, uh, probably make the intended effect of catching a cold more likely and thus make the plan work better, and also the scene probably couldn't have become as much of a twitter meme if they'd decide to illustrate her without the school swimsuit like the manga does, since then instead everyone would be mentally and sometimes textually debating the merits and demerits of bath scenes in anime, again, except it'd be funnier than that because it'd be about *this* scene and that would be goshdarned hilarious.

I think that’s really kind of it for this one. We’re out of time. So we’ll see everyone next time. And thanks to our patrons.

Brea,

Dorian Newlin

hikari no yume

L Tantivy

pigeon

Sally

Scimitar

And Thijs

And everybody else.

oh wow that was, that was a, that was almost 48 minutes, okay um—

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