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docholligay · 6 years

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Everything I hated about Lesbian Bear Storm

@katrani‘s commission was a little odd this month--she asked that I condense my thoughts on Yuri Kuma Arashi, which she’d heard I’d seen part of. It was a little odd, but I was happy to do it! Warning: None of this is complimentary to the show.

SHOOOOCK! KUMA SHOCK!

Shock is possibly the only realistic reaction to 99% of what goes on in Yuri Kuma Arashi, or, at least, the four episodes I committed myself to before remembering that I have a full and happy life with people who love me, and I don’t have to lash out in self-harm. So it may well be that after ⅓ of the goddamn anime is over, it actually starts to engage with the audience in ways that aren’t “Hey, check out me licking honey off a lily spurting from this girl’s body, in a way that you will be forced to remember is being written by a man constantly and all the time.”

This show is literally about predatory lesbians.

This show is about lesbian bears, who pose as schoolgirls, and literally consume girls. And kill them. By eating them.

And this is “what bears do” and the implications of it AREN’T GREAT and they didn’t think about it, or ask a helpful and honest lesbian, because I cannot imagine anyone with two fucks to rub together would greenlight this sort of thing.

And maybe that’s the trouble. Ikuahara is a man, a legend, and untouchable, and so that leads to ruin, most of the time. He doesn’t give a fuck because he doesn’t have to. He can make whatever her wants and no one is going to tell him no.

At the time, YKA seemed to be the answer to every one of our ineffectual tumblr posts asking why everything was not about lesbians, and in fact, the show helpfully tells you that apparently every woman we meet is (Yuri) and all the bears are also (Yuri) and it also like indicate that school is a (Place) and things are (History) because apparently we have lost the ability to identify things on our own.

I kept waiting for the show to do something with the concept, to tweak the parentheticals so we could see people change, or the definitions of how we see things change, but it never materialized, and I never had the faith in the show that it would.

And that’s the thing. I know Ikuhara can take his time getting running from Utena (Only up to episode 29 pls to not be spoiling!!!) and that gross-ass concepts are a part of some of his larger vision for a story. But by the time I got done with a third of the goddamn show, I WELL KNEW that stuff was happening here. Even in the first episode, the opening story essentially tells you “Utena is dumb about this, we know, wait for it.” Even when the show absolutely squicks the shit out of me AND IT DOES, I trust that it’s going to do something with the broad concepts because...it has.

And YKA never seemed to even dabble in doing anything--it was even more about pushing sexual lines and really bizarre lesbian fetishism than Utena, but it had all the formulaic boredom that Sailor Moon can have. There was always a Yuri Bear Transformation Sequence, for reasons that never fully made sense to me, and then it was just a great deal of plodding along with our main character. Which….you can’t do in a 12 episode anime. I tend to enjoy 12 ep animes more than others because you have to tell a story in an abbreviated fashion. But this never did that. Nothing is ever really revealed in 4 episodes that lends any kind of depth or interest to the storyline or its characters.

There is much more attention and loving detail lavished on the sexual content, up to and including sexual assault. This anime is SATURATED with a man’s hot take on lesbian interactions in a school setting, and it’s exactly as gross as that sentence just made it sound. There’s very little to be had of genuine affection (and the couple that may have had that has one of the girls get killed right off in front) but much to be had of ramming one’s knee between a girl’s legs, crawling on top of her, licking honey off her lily while she’s unconscious (I cannot make this shit up), and other various and sundry acts that read like the personal journal of that one guy whose house you stayed away from a teenage girl, because he looked at you THAT WAY.

And part of the sad and and frustrating thing is that when it is not being disgusting, it is hilariously dumb, so much so that it is TERRIFICALLY QUOTABLE, were you not having to quote an anime that you could not so much as mention to another human being lest they seek out the terrifying and hidden knowledge, opening Pandora’s box and allowing all the sins of the world to fall upon them.

The temptation to introduce myself as Doc Holligay (Yuri) is overwhelming. SHOOOOOCCCKKK! X SHOCK! Is a perfect way to react to anything that is not at all shocking, perfectly carrying over the mocking tone such things deserve. The desire of have and use the “Yuri Approved” gif forever and for all time (and from me! A person who does not respond in gifs to anything, ever!) is painful. But much like the Uranus and Neptune figures from Crystal, beautiful as they were, every time I saw them I would have to be reminded of the thing they came from.

I didn’t watch beyond four episodes, and have zero percent intention of ever doing so, because there are so many better ways I could be spending 4 hours of my life, up to and including underwater basket weaving, which is at least a source of stress relief and will create something functional, which is more than I can say for literally anything happening in this show, but I guarantee you Kureha (Our main girl) ends up fucking a bear, I KNOW this to be true in my senshi heart.

And this is not me being particularly clever. It’s that every single bear who meets her talks about what a ‘lovely smell’ she has, and how badly they want to eat her, because apparently Ikuhara read Twilight and was like “oh shit, this is fucking genius, NANAKO MY NOTEPAD AND HOLD MY CALLS.” So you know that sooner or later, she is going to end up romantically entangled with some bear, probably the tsundere little one named Ginko, who talks about basically nothing BUT eating her, and then will decide not to because true love or something something.

This is despite the fact that literally anyone Kureha has ever cared about in her life has been eaten by a bear, but true sexual assault conquers all. If you’re a bear and you stalk a girl long enough, she will forget every terrible thing that has ever happened to her and go with you instead.

I wish I could say something complementary about the anime, and I suppose the nicest thing I can say about it is that it IS hilariously quotable. Jill and I now occasionally say “Gau gau,” after a sentence (Apparently that is bear accent) and as mentioned, I want to throw the Yuri Approved gif everywhere. But in any part of character or story, I find it lacking. I don’t know why I really care what happens to Kureha, and there’s nothing in her that feels like she’s compellingly responsible for her own problems in the way of say, Utena, or Madoka, where you can be frustrated and interested in their story at the same time. It feels almost UNFINISHED.

I’m not saying this concept could literally never be good or interesting, but I am more than willing to say that Ikuhara seriously fell down here, and it feels like a really amateur effort from a man who wrote the most solid season of Sailor Moon and Utena. I know it doesn’t have to be like this, and it’s frustrating to see someone I know to have potential turn in something so pathetic and lazy and also GROSS.

All in all, I urge anyone reading this to give it a miss. There’s nothing to be gained by watching it, and if someone managed to find deeper meaning in it, you deserve your lit degree more than mine, because I never could get there despite being the queen of spinning literary straw into gold. Whatever you’re hoping to get out of YKA, you are going to be disappointed for, unless what you are hoping is to get a lot of lesbian assault and extremely weird sexual situations, in which case, congratulations, I’m not sure you could do much better.

I probably won’t try anything else by Ikuhara after this--he narrowly toes the line for me in Utena, and it appears time and success has only emboldened him. So I will sit and rewatch Sailor Moon S, and remember that, at one time, he was capable of showing some level of genuine affection between lesbians, making them complex and troubled characters, and not having them assault each other.

That is the sexy way. Shaba-da-doo.

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