Introducing Februaryuri 2025

01 Feb, 2025

February is here again, and with it Februaryuri, my attempt at posting throughout the month reviews of yuri works I liked!

As with last year, my objective is to make for each of these titles a dedicated post with a summary and CWs from memory, to help you know what you're getting into; along with some more or less wordy personal comment, notably but not only yuri-wise, that I find in each of them; and mentions of extra elements if need be (movie sequel, manga adaptations, etc).

This year though I tried to pick a slightly different theme from the one of the previous edition. That is: (almost) all the works this month will be anime originals, meaning the prime way of enjoying them is to watch them¹!
I've been wanting to do that because when we focus on adaptations, the bottom line is often "read the original" - sometimes after, sometimes instead² of watching the anime version, depending on the quality of said adaptation. Here, that won't be the case; and even for all the works here that have sprouted adaptations to other formats alongside their production as an anime or after it, these other versions are most often alternate tellings of or extras to the story, and not a 1:1 reproduction.

I also wanted to have this specific this year because yuri anime, and in particular yuri anime exclusives, is a bit of a different world from yuri manga in my experience. They have higher hurdles to clear to feature explicit love confessions or kisses onscreen, and there is a tendency for a lot of anime exclusives to tell not really or not just a romance, compared to that predominant manga narrative, but to be some kind of genre fiction, with a foot firmly set into a genre other than yuri - often the story of a group of girls, or some bizarre one-of-a-kind narrative with queer implications, or both.

As a result, the roster of titles here is shorter than last year, which will give me more breathing room between two posts, too (to calibrate it all a bit more for potential future runs). If I manage to do it all, I may use the extra Free Space slot to put together a longer list of yuri and yuri-adjacent animes (including adaptations, this time, and originals that didn't make the cut here) that I watched at some point or other, and that may not have spoken to me as much as the list here, but that had at least some interesting elements. All these titles would then feature small tidbits of comments still, just so that you would have a bigger anime yuri list to choose from if some pique your interest. But we'll see how this goes.

The posting pace of these posts should be every three days, which means the next one should be the fourth, then the seventh, etc; this would last precisely until February 28th if I use that extra Free Space post. Once again, we'll see in practice: I'm never completely sure I'll manage this steady pace, as I have no backlog at the moment. This is always kind of a challenge for myself, too.
But I'll definitely try it this year again.

And with that, see you in a few days!!

#februaryuri 2025