Yurikuma Arashi

Episode 10

WARNING: This review contains minor spoilers for Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

After last episode's emphasis on Ginko and Yuriika, it's time to catch up with the rest of the cast. Kureha reads to the end of her mother's story to discover that the Moon Girl and Forest Girl unite by destroying their reflections at the Door of Friends. When this happens, they'll move beyond the Wall of Severance. Kureha is disconcerted by this. This shows that, despite her commitment to not “back down on love,” Kureha is invested in the “yuri” world, even as it continues to exclude her. This is the difference between her and Reia, as well as what she'll need to overcome in time for the conclusion.

This was also our much needed Lulu catch-up episode. Having betrayed Ginko, Lulu finally gets to have a heart-to-heart with her rival in love. She admits to having been jealous of Kureha all along, that Ginko is filled with self-loathing over Sumika's death, and that bears become human by making a pact with the Court of Severance. Kureha most likely doesn't remember Ginko because she traded love for the ability to assume human form. For divulging this information, the court revokes Lulu's ability to transform, leaving her vulnerable to the Exclusion Ceremony's bear hunt. Lulu tries to sacrifice herself to them, but Kureha intervenes. In an echo of her mother, Kureha carries Lulu to the Door of Friends, where there's a secret passage beyond the Wall of Severance. She lets her go with the promise that if they ever meet again, it'd be as enemies. Kureha is then cornered by the Exclusion Ceremony, who seek to punish her for aiding and abetting bears. A feral Ginko, however, is waiting in the shadows for an opportunity to consume her love…

It looks like Yurikuma is progressing as I'd predicted in earlier recaps. Ginko and Kureha need to destroy their own self images, and Yuriika's emotional lineage extends beyond her death. The solution Reia proposes will probably be rejected, though. It's based on the Kureha/Ginko pair and not the Kureha/Ginko/Lulu trio that it looks like the show is gearing up for. It's also eerily similar to Japan's historical lesbian double suicides, which isn't a good thing. Reia's a flawed person whose limitations may have been better articulated in a more explicit fashion. She's an idealistic empath who caved into society's expectations by entering into a relationship with a man. Not to victim blame – it just means that she's a fallible, vulnerable person rather than the show's unwavering moral compass.

Lulu continues to be the best yuribear by a fair margin. She's so moderate and honest about her negative emotions when speaking to Ginko! At this point I almost want her and Kureha to run away with each other and forget about Ginko. All of the main characters are love martyrs now – Ginko tries to die for Kureha, Lulu for Ginko, and now Kureha for Lulu. Kureha's threat against Lulu seems more like a tactic to keep her away from the human world than a real expression of hatred.

We've also reached Max Camp levels through the introduction of the armored anti-bear assault vehicle. It's powered by an undead cyborg bear Konomi on a treadmill and shoots lasers out of a giant phallic lily. Anti-bear penis lasers. Never change, Ikuhara.

Now that that's out of the way, it's time for a digression about theme. Yurikuma Arashi has a lot of them, but for this write-up, I'm going to focus on one that's been kicking around my brain for a while – Yurikuma's criticisms of yuri as a genre. I'll be comparing it to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, because that show is, one, the biggest magical girl property since Sailor Moon, two, contains elements of Class S, and three, has a large crossover in its audience between straight men and queer women.

For as meaningful as Madoka is to a lot of queer ladies (and legitimately so!) I think that people tend to forget that it has its cake and eats it too when it comes to actual lesbians vs. lesbian fetishist appeal. Don't get me wrong – PMMM is a fantastic work and there's a strong feminist argument to be made for it, but it does play into a particular trend that Yurikuma Arashi is dedicated to skewering. That trend is the double-edged sword of leaving queer content (or subversive content in general) at the subtextual level. As Class S, it started off as a necessary shield for the much vilified queer feminist voice, but now it's become a way of welcoming the straight male gaze (and the associated $$$) into an otherwise queer work.

“Deliberate polysemy” is a tactic that entertainment uses to appeal as broadly as possible. “Polysemy” refers to the capacity for something to have multiple meanings. Here I'm using it to refer to when different audiences read the same work in different ways. The big example of this in US television is Archie Bunker, the bigot character from the classic 70s sitcom All in the Family. When the show came out, half of the audience enjoyed being able to relate to the character's racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs, while the other half viewed him as an amusing caricature of middle American ignorance. Both audiences helped make it one of the most popular television shows of all time. Although this particular incident of polysemy wasn't intentional, you can bet your butt that the people who run mass media picked up on it. They're not dumb. Exactly how and to whom a show will appeal is calculated beforehand, and effective use of this can potentially multiply your audience. That's why when something noteworthy in its progressivism happens in pop culture it's usually only a little bit more radical than the norm. It's profitable to look ahead of the curve, but only if you don't scare too many people off.

The PMMM girls are both compassionate depictions of the emotional double bind adolescent girls are placed into by society and creations whose forms are designed to be sold to men. This contradiction is by no means unique to the show – in fact, it's rampant, and not even the most egregious example that I can think of (that would be the Monogatari series). The Sapphic undertones are a part of this, and the male reactions I saw to Yurikuma episode one suggest that making the sex too explicit alienates at least a significant portion of the male viewership.

Yurikuma Arashi is also about this double bind, but it sacrifices most of its appeal to a libidinal male audience by emphasizing female sexual pleasure and the culminant reunion of the lesbian couple. It's furious at the male gaze and its associated narrative limitations on the lesbian couple, like the butch/femme binary, the avoidance of sex (particularly female-bodied sexual pleasure that does not see an equivalent in its male-bodied counterpart), and their inevitable tragic separation. This makes it a much more niche show than PMMM, but also one that risks more by splitting open the conventions of the genre they inhabit.

A lot of this is probably informed by Ikuhara's time working on Sailor Moon. That's probably the first example of “magical girl show as a trans-demographic mass-media enterprise.” It was probably a crash course in how audiences interpret and consume fictional relationships between women.

I've been down on Class S a lot throughout these write-ups, but they really were important and progressive for the time. Leaving subversive material at the subtextual level is an important shield for a lot of radical media. It's plausible deniability – when Nobuko Yoshiya was writing in the 1920s, you couldn't speak openly about lesbianism. You could, however, depict the emotions associated with lesbianism if they were masked and made a token effort towards maintaining the status quo. Under this veneer of conformity, people who were “in” (who could relate to these emotions) would get it, and those who didn't would consider the work innocuous, ideally. This has been going on since at least the medieval era, judging by my current study of 16th century playwrights. Many comedies from this era (including Shakespeare!) are quite subversive in their depictions of class relationships but got a pass because they ended with a return to “normalcy.” All of the otherwise gasp-worthy canoodling between nobles and servants happened in the middle, and that was OK because the playwright tacked on a moral at the end. In the same way, girls in Class S works are allowed to stew in their mutual longing so long as they're separated or set back to the "hetero" setting in the end. This is better than nothing.

The problem is that there's a point when it stops being a shield and becomes a limitation. As homosexuality becomes more accepted in society, mainstream art should become more overt in its depictions of it. It should reject lesbianism for heterosexual male consumption. Yurikuma Arashi is arguing that mainstream yuri needs to “smash the world's shell,” so to speak. This show argues that the protective barrier has been compromised to limit queer narratives by pandering to the straight male gaze rather than allow for their full expression.

Dubbing Yurikuma Arashi was always going to be a thankless task. The crossover between “people who are interested in Ikuhara shows” and “people who are casual enough anime viewers to need a dub for this” is very slim. Ikuhara fans are the sort of maniacs who will look up academic sources about sexuality in Japan in order to better understand his work, so I don't think subtitles are much of a barrier for them. Even if this dub were great, I don't think I'd be able to recommend watching the show in English. Ikuhara is so involved in every aspect of production, including voice work, that you could be missing out on intended meaning. For a show that's already a challenge to decipher, that might not be worth it.

It's also just really difficult to dub Ikuhara shows faithfully and in an engaging manner. The dialogue in Yurikuma is, at the same time, extremely specific, simple, opaque, and important. They cram the most meaning into the least amount of words, often layering on new intent episodes after a phrase is uttered. It's actually a substantial risk that they're dubbing the show before it's completed and the entire text is there to reverberate back on itself. Just look at the Kumaria/Kumalia thing – I don't think that transliteration would have happened if they'd had the whole show ahead of time. That's not to say that we should wait for an entire show to come out before translating; this is simply the reality of this line of work, and now we're going to see it bleed over into dubs.

Taking all of this into account, it's almost a triumph that Funimation's dub doesn't actively ruin the show. The Revolutionary Girl Utena and Mawaru Penguindrum dubs couldn't accomplish that. In fact, this dub is, for the most part, quite smart in its production. I wouldn't recommend it over the Japanese, but considering the massive constraints they're under, it does its job without breaking too much. Here's the breakdown:

• The script is mostly faithful. The only thing I had an issue with was the translation of “delicious smell” as “I bet she's delicious” during Ginko's introduction. It brings in a meaning that wasn't present in the original – that Ginko wants to consume Kureha right off the bat. In Japanese, this meaning was implied, but it was a misdirection as to Ginko's motivations. We're supposed to presume that she's more villainous than she actually is at this point. The English dub fails to carry over the misdirection by rooting that villainy in character. These are the stakes in adapting Yurikuma – tiny differences can have huge implications that aren't immediately apparent. Otherwise, they're good about not altering the phrasing in a way that changes intent. There's also an error during their introduction when one of Lulu's lines is given to Ginko. Hopefully that's not intentional and will be fixed for the home release.

• Lulu sounds the best out of the three main characters. She's voiced by Jamie Marchi, who also wrote the adaptive script. I think she succeeds mostly because Lulu is the most comedic character. Yurikuma Arashi essentially alternates between two modes of performance – extreme sincerity and extreme camp. It's much easier to adapt the latter than the former, especially for Funimation, which tends to spice up its scripts with jokes anyways. The injected teenspeak actually works quite well for Lulu, who reads as the same character with a different vocal register.

• Alexis Tipton's Kureha is alright, but suffers from the team's general trouble nailing the “extreme sincerity” half of the show. The “yuri” characters are stilted compared to the Japanese track, but it's difficult to pinpoint why. Sumika in particular is a sore spot. Her Japanese voice is very high and soft, conveying extreme, almost childlike femininity and vulnerability. The effect is that it makes Sumika someone we want to “protect” (sort of a feminist use of the moe archetype), but it doesn't quite carry here. Elaine Wagner's performance can be too assertive and perky.

• I'm most worried about Monica Rial as Ginko. Rial is a great voice actress, but her performance as Ginko is too animated. At this point in the story, Ginko needs to be a cipher, but Rial's performance gives away too much information about the character's real self. The worst part is that I think it's a little off from how Ginko's character will ultimately end up – she can be goofy, but she's never smarmy, as Rial's delivery sometimes comes off. Ultimately, the character doesn't speak enough in the episode for me to fully condemn the performance, but it's a rough first impression. Unfortunately, it'll also be a while before the character gets anything juicy to say.

• They leave Kumaria as Kumalia. It's become apparent that Kumaria is a pun on the words “kuma” and “Maria,” the Japanese name for the Virgin Mary, and that association is important to the show's meaning. They're probably trying to be consistent to the subtitles, which were decided upon before the name change became known, but it would've been more accurate to change it.

• The Life trio, however, is spot on. J. Michael Tatum, Christopher Bevins, and Josh Grelle are excellent equivalents to the Japanese voices, and the dub's tendency towards camp works perfectly here. It's the only point when it sounds completely at ease.

• We have much less of an onomatopoeia culture than Japan, so they changed the cute sounds like gorigorigori and gao to chomp chomp munch munch and growl. They're less cute now but you've got to adapt it, I guess. They kept kuma shock as is, however, and that's important as the stinger.

Overall it's fine. Couldn't have expected much better when it could have been much worse. Have you ever listened to that Penguindrum dub? It's so bad that I cannot understand what Kanba is saying without subtitles. It isn't perfect, but we should be thankful Yurikuma didn't wind up the same way.

Grade: A

Yurikuma Arashi is currently streaming on Funimation.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.