[Februaryuri 2025] Yuri Kuma Arashi

26 Feb, 2025

(base post on Februaryuri¹ 2025 here!)

Yuri Kuma Arashi (2015)

by studio Silver Link, directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, written by Kunihiko Ikuhara and Takayo Ikami

12 episodes

Summary

For years, the world has been divided in two by the Wall of Severance.

On one side are the cute but predatory bears, who prey on humans and eat them.
On the other side are the humans, and most notably a school full of girls.

In that school, standing out is dangerous. It makes you a prime target for bears who would breach the Wall of Severance. It also makes you a target for the Invisible Storm, a strange school threat that is a weaponized form of bullying and exclusion. After all, standing out makes you evil. Evil should be excluded.

Apparently, students Kureha and Sumika never really got the memo, since they are slowly growing a cute lesbian romance out in the open, in the back of the school, near the lily flowerbed. But relationships between girls in the school should stay as some hidden, uncommented lust. They should not this. This is unacceptable.
It also makes them at risk of being eaten by a bear.
And yes, these bears are girls, and sometimes being eaten may also have lesbian sexual connotations. Sometimes it just kills you, though.

What most students don't know is that bears have already infiltrated the school. That bears can be granted a passage through the Wall of Severance, a temporary human appearance, if they go on trial and prove the strength of their motivation to three strange judges - all men.
And some of these bears have started seducing and eating girls, both metaphorically and literally.

Among them are "transfer students" Ginko and Lulu, who are definitely not bears in hiding. And they seem particularly interested in Kureha for obscure reasons - which may include her delicious smell and the impulse of eating her, but may not be just that.
But Kureha already lost her mother to the bears. She'll destroy bears. She'll never be their friend.

But who can she turn to, then, when both the Invisible Storm and bears at large start to threaten her relationship with Sumika...?

Comment

I... Look, I like this one somehow, but I'm not sure what to make of it, because it's a lot, and notably a lot of problems.

I rewatched it right before writing this review, searching for the feeling of transcendance its finale had given me three years ago when I first watched it. Before reaching its ending again, I was rather critical, as it layered a lot of symbols and messages but stumbled through a lot of them in somewhat hurtful ways - though it was very much an interesting experience since there was a lot to analyze, flaws included.
I reached the finale the night before starting this review, and-- suddenly I understand again why I wanted to put it in this recommendation list. It was strangely eye-opening to switch from analytical frustrated interest to this moment of raw emotion, this "Oh. Of course. How could have I forgotten? This is what I had been looking for. Of course it had a strong effect on me."
But still. There's a lot of uncomfortable stuff to unpack first.

I would not recommend Yuri Kuma Arashi (in what follows, Yurikuma, and literally "Yuri bear storm") to most people. I would if you're interested either interested in Kunihiko Ikuhara's body of work, or more largely a precise surrealist aesthetic; or interested in the history and/or analysis of yuri. Or if you're into things profoundly weird and lesbian.
You would also, however, need to be prepared to a fair amount of disturbingly suggestive scenes of sex and nudity involving high schoolers.

This requires a bit of context.
Yurikuma talks, first and foremost, about two worlds where there is no place for lesbian romance. One is the world of bears, who embody the trope of the seductive predatory lesbian. The aesthetic of its characters echoes the more gratuitously erotic side of yuri. The other world is the world of humans, which is heavily based on the Class S yuri subgenre and its transformations: an all-girls elite school, and an extremely chaste atmosphere with no place for anything more than friendship... except the occasional super voyeuristic sex scenes for an outside audience.

Overall, what I mean to say is that Yurikuma is probably the most surreal way to experience what it felt like to read yuri in the 2000s. The series tries to synthesize all that, and to go beyond it, with girls trying to carve space for more - to break out of these systems.

The problem is, Yurikuma borrows their downsides readily, without thinking about them as much as I would want it to.
The main one is sexualization. The series crosses a whole spectrum of representations of sex and adjacent topics². At its best, it has suggestiveness and implied sexual elements in a way that creates a playfully exaggerated erotic atmosphere while being firmly "the characters are horny for each other but the audience isn't the target". At its worst, it has skeevy closeups and egregious slow camera travelings on its underage characters very much made for outside titillation, and, aaagh. It also has a whole range of more or less full nondescript nudity, sometimes rather gratuitously, sometimes for... uh... barely metaphorical sex scenes.

Through its judge men characters, the series clearly denunciates how part of the yuri genre is made for the enjoyment of men, and notably some of its voyeuristic elements. Yet most of the time, it also puts the audience into that same position without thinking much of it - worse, I do think it uses that blatant sexualization to draw more people in, low-key betraying its own denunciation.
A better version of Yurikuma, in my mind, would have thought long and hard about how to borrow from the erotic side of yuri for its atmosphere, without revelling in some direct obnoxious fanservice of underage girls. It would have found ways to talk about the fetishization of lesbian relationships without casually contributing to it a lot of the time, even when advocating for breaking out of its narrative³. Not that these are easy things to achieve if you want to be a series that still deliberately overplays an ecchi subgenre - but honestly, I think that a lot of the time Yurikuma isn't really trying. That makes its criticism of that subgenre half-baked, and that makes Yurikuma itself a really uncomfortable watch at times.
So, yeah, this makes me on the fence about recommending it to anyone, honestly.

With that, Yurikuma has other problems(!), namely two of the series' muddled messages I will try to cover briefly.

The first of these problems is the way the series seemingly opposes love and sexual desire at times, and frames the latter as bad. It's not always clear-cut, but it's still there. Yurikuma, at its core, could have been about building something different from both chaste Class S "romantic friendship" and extremely sexual predatory lesbians: lesbian relationships encompassing healthier manifestations of both romance and sex. But it does not do that, because even the school setting features sexual relationships: they are allowed there as long as they are loveless and hidden.
In that revised context, both the schoolgirls' lust and the bears' horniness seem to clash with the tales of "true love" surrounding protagonist Kureha. It creates this central idea that (sexless) romance - sacralized by a kiss, which is the stuff of legends in this universe - is the one actual healthy thing to strive for. And that's... a bit reminiscent of the prevalent Class S idea of "pure yuri", and of sex as something inherently dangerous or bad.

Yurikuma never directly challenges that idea. Worse, it even has an outright antagonization of a manifestation of lust, which a character must part with to access true love. So, yeah, when I said Yurikuma also borrowed the downsides of what it parodied, I also meant that.
Still, there's something of the last episode that makes it feel like accepting and embracing sexual desire, actually. It depends on how you read the wobbly pile of metaphors that Yurikuma has become by then, too, but a bit of hope about it is there. It just feels... unclear how much of this is supported, considering the messages the rest of the series has been sending until then.

The second problematic message of the series is centered on the bears themselves.
The bears start as a clear metaphor for the harmful trope of the predatory lesbian, something the show criticizes and pokes fun at by having them being cute bears literally (but also figuratively) eating people. Some of them, Ginko and Lulu, somewhat try to escape that, but as is said again and again, eating humans is in their nature. And all the other bears we see fit that trope to a T - seductive and manipulative and prone to more or less metaphorical sexual assault.

As the show progresses, it tackles another big main theme: discrimination, exclusion and othering.
We'll get back to this, but the denunciation of these is brilliantly executed when restricted to the human world and the school. But when it intersects with the bears, it shows how bears have their own societies, and religion (another Class S theme), and it comes with the idea that maybe all the things we originally thought of bears were born of prejudice. And maybe bears and humans can be friends.
This is important in theory - seeing the Wall of Severance as a literal tool of discrimination is fascinating - but it causes problems in practice, because the bears we've seen are predatory lesbians.

Slowly, in the latest episodes, the bears get another layer of metaphor: they also start representing out lesbians. In the rigid, outwardly lesbophobic context of the school and the human world, to befriend a bear is to befriend someone outwardly lesbian, and that warrants being excluded and branded as dangerous too.
Once again, this is an interesting idea in theory. But in doing so, this minority really is symbolized by predatory tropes that are never really refuted. It also falls into the common pitfall of fantasy racism: when fictions depict a fictional minority unjustly persecuted, except that minority is literally dangerous in its universe, fueling the rhetoric against it for a reason. This happens often⁴, and it always skews the intended metaphor for actual discrimination. Here, our bears literally eat and kill people all the time. Lesbians do not.

Sooo, as you're probably starting to understand, Yurikuma is a layer cake of metaphors where each layer melts messily onto the next.
The cherries on top of the problems, to me, are probably these two:

• one of the antagonists reproduces grooming tactics she once experienced herself⁵, and does some very reprehensible actions including attempting sexual assault (onscreen, and somewhat sexualized, ackgkhj), and ends on a note that feels too framed as immediate forgiveness for me (even if the rest of her arc serves as a stark criticism of a very Class S-coded obsession for "pure girls" preserved from adulthood);
• and the opening and a lot of the series will make you hope for some clear polyamorous yuri(!), but that won't be the case in the end. Instead there'll be some weird younger brother-older sister side ending stuff, and I still can't pin exactly how much of it is supposed to feel incestuous... but it has these vibes to me.

So. Huh. Yurikuma. If, to all this, I add the fact that the series really starts to get going at episode 5, with the first three episodes very similar in structure to each other⁶ and the fourth a strange fairytale⁷, well. You may as well be asking: why would I watch Yurikuma?
Part of my honest answer is that maybe you should not; the other part is my attempt to give you what of it works on me still.

The first reason that comes to mind is its handling of social exclusion in the school world. There is something chilling to its Exclusion Ceremonies, which depict to perfection how groupthink works, how it makes heavy use of scapegoating and fearmongering, and how it makes you safe from external threats until you're deemed the next outsider of the group because you're not going with the flow. The Invisible Storm endlessly looks for new people to exclude, and for the smallest hint of difference to pick on you.
Yurikuma is a very strong critique of school bullying, but also of a general social pressure toward conformism⁸ - and honestly, in increasingly fascist societies, it feels doubly terrifying. Standing out means getting marginalized and in direct danger of being designated as the next evil. Being invisible and staying quiet is so much more tempting, in a horrible way. Yurikuma understands that deeply, and it hurts.

The second reason to watch Yurikuma is, to me, if you have a particular affection for shows with a precise surrealist aesthetic. Something of Yurikuma's makes me happy simply because it has many locations that are extremely symmetrical, literal boxes and framings onscreen that announce "Location: [Name]" or "Flashback" or anything happening in extremely ritualized ways, and lots of symbolism and lines and moments that echo each other very clearly. Something of it feels... rigorous and calculated and strangely satisfying to me.
As I mentioned earlier, Yurikuma is also an attempt at a meta-commentary and analysis on established tropes of the broader evolutionary history of yuri, and notably some kind of deconstructed, self-reflective Class S⁹ - even if, when you scratch the surface, it yields at best an extremely sloppy management of sexualization and metaphor layers.

The third reason to watch Yurikuma would be its ending, I think. It should not be the only thing to carry you throughout your watch - once again, I'm not sure selling you Yurikuma for its ending is a good thing, because the road to get there is... bumpy, to say the least.
But there's definitely something to that ending.

The most fascinating thing is that it is announced. There is a fairytale introduced around the middle of the series that mirrors and foretells some of what may happen in the show - something preposterously hopeful about building love across two thickly separated worlds. It feels impossible, and maybe it is. But maybe two girls can still set forth beyond Severance.

Even with that expectation set up, even knowing what was coming during my recent rewatch, I found myself crying at the end from the moment of transcendance the show still manages to execute in its last episode. I don't know how it does it. It may be all things layered until then that culminate there, almost effortlessly.
I just know I feel it in my bones each and every time.

Yurikuma is a show about building actual love amidst different warped expressions of lesbianism. Yurikuma is also a show about discrimination and prejudice and exclusion, both in general and directly targeting lesbians. Sometimes, it trips over its own metaphors. Often, it does things that make me angry and that I really think it shouldn't do.

With all this, it's a show that openly depicts how lesbian love wins - not for an outer gaze, but assessed only for and by lesbians themselves. It wins defiantly, triumphantly, against so many people wanting to crush it down. It wins in a way that inspires more to leave the reductive box they live in.

And somehow, I keep remembering that feeling. Sometimes, when I'm not obsessing over widely different media that convey a somewhat similar idea without this many problems, when I feel ready again to face this particular show and its particular tale of it, I still think it's worth experimenting this feeling again.

Extra

Yurikuma has a manga version, written around the time of the production of the anime, that I have yet to read but that seems to be a really different story. The most notable thing may be that it is illustrated by Akiko Morishima, a long-time lesbian mangaka who has been making yuri mangas since the late 1990s. She also got creative control over the Yurikuma manga, and to me this speaks to how Yurikuma as a whole is decidedly meant to be an empowering lesbian media, in spite of its problems.

A lot of Morishima's work has been either far (read: adult yuri at a time that was really scarce!) or critical of the usual Class S yuri tropes of the 2000s, though some of it also has really problematic elements (unaddressed incest or relationships between a minor and an adult, most notably). This excellent article by Ariel 'Solowi' Nakandakare on AnimeFeminist is a very good recap of her carrier that is mindful of those elements and recommends points of entry to her works. Not many of her mangas have actually been translated to English, from what I can tell, but you can find a lot of fan-translations here, where you may want to be wary of the tags.

Much could be, and has been, written about Kunihiko Ikuhara, the director of Yurikuma but also of Utena that I covered earlier this month. I still feel like I have a lot to explore around his creations myself, though I have now watched the four animes he directed (and will watch Sailor Moon, to which he contributed, one of these days).
Once again, though they are deeply influential and often praised, I would not recommend to most people his other animes, Mawaru Penguindrum and Sarazanmai - they're extremely strange, layered things with much hard to stomach content, and I think you have to be ready for that to tackle them. On my end, the first half of Penguindrum traumatized me and I blanked out most of its second half. Sarazanmai ended up being among my favorite things of 2024, and I mean it!... but only on a second watch with an enthusiastic friend, after a year recovering from how uncomfortable it had made me on my first attempt.

Overall, they are media that may work better on you if you are looking for surrealist works about overcoming unfair systems to sink your teeth into for years, and if you're not particularly impacted by depictions of sexual violence and/or incest notably around underage characters, among others. And it's definitely understandable if that's a hard no. I do feel like these works exceed my own threshold at times too, though some of what they do and of their intricate and weird construction still leaves me fascinated.
With all this, I think Utena is probably both his most accessible and his best work: its harsh elements increase slowly, and are here to be tackled, and the core of them are addressed rather brilliantly. Not that there isn't something to be found in his more recent animes, though: some of them keep pushing the limits of queer representation in anime at large, and directly confront how systems prevent queer relationships from existing out in the open. Ikuhara's persistence about this topic, and how important it is to me, make me obviously interested in whatever his future works may hold.
Still, for the ones we have for now, I suppose my best piece of advice would be to be careful about your own limits, and about what they throw at you.

#februaryuri 2025 #yuri