Goyavoyage's den

Reintroducing Februaryuri 2024

Mosaic with the covers of 16 yuri works, titled "Voyage's Februaryuri 2024", made with anime-bingo.aikats.us; the list of titles can be found below

Titles list and links to related reviews, click to unfold

After tidbits of teasing in various previous articles, this rerun has been a long time coming!

In February of this year 2024, witnessing a particularly active and enthusiastic yuri userbase on the now-closed website cohost, I tried to write and post there a total of 16 reviews of yuri manga titles I liked. With the hope of doing a similar thing in 2025, I thought I should preserve these reviews here on this blog before 2024 ended.

And so, during the upcoming ~30 days, I'm going to repost all of these reviews in the same order I posted them then, with - if everything goes well - a rythm of one every two days (which will be easier to keep up with thanks to the magic of scheduled posting, and should give you one new yuri rec every even day until December 24th!!).
I decided to repost them with a minimum of touch-ups, else I could probably spend days second-guessing myself on some stuff (or some titles). I will mostly allow myself the following:

The rest of each review will be kept as is, with the occasional edit mention for clarification if the need arises.

Don't worry: I should also keep updating this blog with other stuff with my overall frequency of one post a week, and I will adapt my home page in consequence so that the other articles don't get drowned in yuri. I apologize for RSS readers, though; I hope this will be a good experience still.
Also, as always: if you notice anything I say that is just plain wrong, or if I forget important elements like a big content warning or anything: you can always reach out! I tend to answer slowly but I read you, and it's always appreciated.

I'll leave you with what I wrote to introduce Februaryuri on cohost at the time - and see you tomorrow for the first update of this big rerun!

February is here, and I thought I'd give myself some kind of incentive to talk about a few yuri mangas I particularly liked in the two-something years since I've started reading yuri, and that I feel bring their own thing, no matter how small, to the yuri genre. So during the coming month, I'll be posting little reviews of each of them!! And so: it's Februaryuri!!

I did a list of 16 titles1. I restricted myself to one work per author2, manga only (though I'll be touching upon other media if they exist), no oneshot. I also tried to select only things I read and really liked - there are yuri works out there that are meaningful in the history of yuri but that I don't like much3 or simply haven't read yet4.

Of course, in an ideal world, I'd be posting one review per day, and I'd be done way before the end of this month. In practice I barely had a backlog two days before the start of all this, and I may just not have the energy, or even be available some (most) days.
But honestly? I've been wanting to do this for so long! But I've always been overwhelmed by the idea of writing so many reviews. So when I realized how Februaryuri had a nice ring to it, I thought I'd try to divide this into little daily tasks then post it all here to bind me a little to the challenge, and I'd see how it'd go.
I'll give you some info on the English and French5 editions when they exist, a summary and CWs (and presence of sexual elements or not) as best as I can from memory, because I want you to know what you're getting into - though my memory is fallible, and I will miss things. I'll also give you my personal comment and/or the strong points I find in each of them, and I'll try to keep it brief, too.
Maybe I'll cover like three of them. We'll see. (edit: well actually, past me, you won't believe it, but...)

Anyway. Worst case scenario I'll continue this same list in Mayuri or something.

Oh, and one last thing: this will be, as reviews always are, subjective. I'll be happy to hear about your own impressions though!

  1. I actually trimmed an initial list of 25, to keep only those I would recommend without having to reread them too much. And it was also a square number, which is nice.↩

  2. Looking at you, Takako Shimura. (edit: I ended up somewhat covering two of her works in one post in the end, haha)↩

  3. I'm mainly thinking of Bloom Into You and I'm In Love with the Villainess here. They have profound elements of disregard for boundaries and consent early on, with some kind of character justification or acknowledgement later on - but I feel like they lack a true apology from the characters guilty of that; and this tends to make me extremely uneasy. In these two cases, no matter how hard I kept reading or tried again later, the romance just squicked me as a consequence of that. They may be to your taste, though; and they do have elements that make them stand out in the yuri genre.↩

  4. This is notably the case of Yuri is My Job! or She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat of which I've heard great things but didn't take the time to find and/or read yet. And possibly others I'm forgetting right now. (edit: I've now started the former of these two, and the French edition of the latter is waiting on my shelves, so they're definitely gonna make it in some future Februaryuri, hehe!)↩

  5. At the very least because I'm French and interested in knowing that too :p↩

#cohost #februaryuri 2024 #manga rec #yuri