Weekly Round-Up, 30 July – August 5 2025: Plus-Sized Misadventures in Love, Queer Summer Anime, and Fluffy BL

AniFem Round-Up

Brief Connections: A Nobumoto Keiko Career Retrospective

Less well known during her life, Nobumoto was the storytelling core of classics like Cowboy Bebop and Tokyo Godfathers.

How BL and Yuri Helped Me Face My Sexuality

One of the important things NSFW media can do is provide a safe and abstracted for people to sort out their own desires.

What’s your favorite Precure series?

Quite a few are available for easy streaming these days, which is an exciting development.

Beyond AniFem

BL Manga & Anime Recommendations to Celebrate 801 Day and Every Day There After! (Yatta-Tachi, AJ Mack)

Recommendations trending generally toward grounded or fluffy stories.

College students Kohei and Taichi make for an unlikely duo. The loud Taichi is not that academically gifted, and he’s not that rich either. Most days he ends up skipping lunch entirely. It turns out that the handsome and enigmatic Kohei makes incredible bento though, and offers to make one for him if he agrees to share his notes from class. Kohei is slowly losing his hearing, and the teacher doesn’t talk loud enough for him to hear. Meanwhile, he never seems to have any issues when talking to Taichi.

There are so few manga in the world that depict people who are both queer, and disabled. This is one of the few that do, and it’s a wonderful one! The story is the real draw here. The characters are all complex, with their own motivations and their own flaws. It’s quite a slow burn romance, but all the better for it. As the series goes on, Taichi and Kohei both get more involved in the Deaf community, and it helps to open up to wider discussions about what it means to be disabled, and the different outlooks people have based on the level of their disability, and how they came about it.

Maebashi Witches: Season 1 Anime Series Review (Anime News Network, Steve Jones)

Another solid endorsement for last season’s magical girl series.

I could gush about every arc to this extent (and more), but I don’t want to spoil everything about a show that I consider a hidden gem. I just know, from my experience, that the deft handling of Azu and Rinko’s story convinced me to watch the rest of the series, and I hope my summary of it can do the same for you. I can, however, give you a taste of what else to expect. A non-exhaustive list of topics broached by Maebashi Witches includes: influencer culture, bullying (online and offline), poverty, gender nonconformity, parasocial dependence, VTubers, internet predators, burnout, and living in society. Moreover, none of these cases feels too sensationalized. The series is a frank interrogation of the myriad anxieties and dilemmas facing adolescent girls today, dolled up in a fashion-forward girly-pop aesthetics and cushioned with a quirky sense of humor.

Maebashi Witches, for all of its ambition, doesn’t overreach either. It’s radical yet realistic. The keystone to the show’s ethos comes from Yuina when she says, “But there are some things that can be solved without solving them.” That oxymoronic motto sums up the show’s appeal better than I could. You see, the titular witches are witches-in-training. Their magic isn’t omnipotent, and they deal with problems that often don’t have perfect solutions. The writing recognizes the limits of their powers as people, women, and teenagers participating in and beholden to complicated systems outside their control. Nevertheless, it also recognizes the value in doing what they can do. The anime is at its strongest when it focuses on tiny acts of alleviation born out of the girls’ love for each other.

Dear me, I was… Review (Nintendo Life, Ethan Zack)

A short visual novel recently released on Switch 2.

Over the course of its roughly hour-long runtime, Dear me, I was… chronicles the life of an unnamed woman from her early childhood years to adulthood and beyond. The narrative jumps between pivotal points in the protagonist’s life, capturing snapshot moments of joy and sorrow as she develops connections with the world and people around her. Most importantly, it depicts her lifelong journey as an artist and the way in which her relationship with this creative medium evolves as the years go by.

It’s a simple, grounded story devoid of the major twists or melodrama one might expect from the genre, but that’s entirely by design. The woman’s life is one that the average player can likely relate to on some level, and that makes her struggles, discoveries, and experiences all the more resonant. I was genuinely caught off guard by how hard some of the emotional moments hit me, in spite of the game’s abbreviated length. The story tackles themes of loss and self-doubt with an impressive degree of realism and restraint, which makes its heavier beats feel earned rather than coming off as cheap tearjerker attempts.

Hundreds rally in Tokyo to protest racial discrimination (The Asahi Shimbun, Chika Yamamoto)

Xenophobic rhetoric has been on the rise, with the growth of parties like Sanseito.

Lawyers Keiko Ota and Shoichi Ibusuki, along with Sumiko Hatakeyama of Peace Boat, music producer Kiyoshi Matsuo and writer Yuka Murayama, were among the 12 organizers of the rally.

They estimated that more than 1,000 people gathered in the square in front of the station.

“By each of us speaking out against misinformation and discrimination, society can take a step forward,” music producer Shuya Okino told the crowd.

A female office worker in her 20s from the capital’s Setagaya Ward joined the rally after work. She is a member of the LGBT community and has a relative who married a foreign national.

She said statements during the Upper House election campaign that denied the rights of the LGBT minority and foreign residents made her feel uncomfortable.

“I hope society will become a place where we don’t have to say the obvious, that discrimination is unacceptable,” she said.

Ota and other activists are also waging an online petition (https://chng.it/WMKhZTJmPp), urging Diet lawmakers to strive for a society where the dignity of all people, no matter their nationality, is respected

This Week in Anime: Rainbow Days (Anime News Network, Christopher Farris and Steve Jones)

Touching on some of the queer subplots in multiple series this season.

Steve: Vampirism as lesbian praxis is indeed an unforgettable facet of Call of the Night’s thematic prism. And to make it all the more relatable, the series follows that up with another part of the lesbian experience: finding out your crush wants to settle down with some random dude.

Chris: Isn’t it sad, Kabura?

Steve: Seriously, though, I love all of the complicated emotions that this creates in Kabura’s relationship with Nazuna. Like, she has a surrogate daughter who looks exactly like the ex she never got over. And naturally, that makes Kabura so, so normal.

Chris: Kabura hadn’t been much of a stand-out to me in Call of the Night’s first season, so she had a lot of room for her stock to shoot up with this arc. She now really embodies the messy emotions that are so good, both in this anime and in queer romance in general.

And as an advancement of Call of the Night’s themes and indication of its direction, it gears me up to wonder where else it’ll go this season. Don’t think I haven’t noticed all the past/present pairing contrast of Nazuna and Anko in that new OP!

Steve: I mean, the latest episode concludes with Nazuna pondering what kind of emotional baggage pushed Anko to pursue her vendetta against vampires, so I think it’s safe to assume there might be some parallels with Kabura here.

The Summer Hikaru Died couldn’t work without its queer themes (Polygon, Aimee Hart)

Being queer in a small town is a cornerstone of the narrative.

As a queer woman who also grew up in a small town, I recognize the draw of what Yoshiki is going through: Validation of your queerness can be a lifeline. While Yoshiki doesn’t face ostracization for being gay (because he hides it), denying the obvious allegory of The Summer Hikaru Died, about growing up in a conservative town while being queer, would be denying the anime’s entire premise. Yoshiki gets warned about “mixing” with the wrong crowd. His friends tease him, saying Hikaru’s been clingy with him. Yoshiki tenses up at any signs of other people’s homophobia. This is predominantly a compelling psychological horror story, with plenty of body horror and emotional trauma, but the queer thread that runs throughout the anime only adds to the horror. 

What do you do when the one person who intimately understands you and loves you is also infecting the only world you’ve ever known with supernatural torment, leaving death in its wake? Can either of you survive the separation and go back to normal, and would you even want to? The Summer Hikaru Died seeks to answer those questions, and I, for one, am loving every moment of it.

The Tension Between “Artistic” Adult Games & Pornography, And How A Distinction Cannot Exist Under Capitalism (Adult Analysis Anthology 3, Stanley Baxton)

Includes interviews with multiple adult game devs on the role of the genre.

The desire for AAGs to be made distinct from porn games, and seeing wider respect as an art, however, is one that can only be applied as a double-edged sword. This will be intimately familiar to anyone who’s been on a platform that has undergone “porn bans” or attempted to restrict adult content. Often, these are supported by certain members of the userbase, usually under laws and rulings quoting the safety of children online. But, as is almost always the case, these categories don’t actually care about “protecting children”, only that marketers—arteries of capital—are not angered by arbitrary puritanical checkboxes that are in constant flux.

Queer games in particular, adult or not, have been under constant pressure from all sides for the simple act of depicting queer experiences. The existence of queer bodies, particularly trans ones, are immediately classified as sexual by the ruling class of capital. To them, it doesn’t matter how the body is used, or even if the body is shown in an explicit manner, everything is “just porn” if it ticks the right boxes. By letting AAGs be defined solely by market categories, it risks handing over autonomy of what is and isn’t pornographic without questioning why those categories exist in the first place, as they only do for ever-changing standards of “marketability”.

This even brings into question the social distinction. This essay differentiates AAGs and porn games, but these are fluid in of themselves. An AAG may include scenes and content that are purely for sexual gratification, rather than serious reflection, and a porn game might veer into topics that are intended to be analysed critically. It may be the desire (and even the artistic point) for an AAG developer to have their game standing side-by-side with pornographic games, supporting the scene it originated from, and not shying away from and perhaps even being proud of the classification.

‘Shangri-La Frontier’ and ‘Wind Breaker’ Voice Actor Allegedly Accused of Grooming a Teenager (FandomWire, Diganta Mondal)

The original thread was posted to Twitter.

There have been accusations of grooming and soliciting that have recently come to light against voice actor and VTuber Arthur Lee Walker III (popularly known as Kiba Walker, Kyle Davis, Elex, ElexVTuber, and Salem Moon online). He even had roles in some of your favorite anime, like Shangri-La Frontier and Wind Breaker.

But little did we know, he was allegedly engaged in inappropriate behavior with fellow VTuber Korey Solomon, better known online as Blade or BladeWillBe.

In a statement shared publicly, Solomon claimed that Walker sent and solicited s*xually explicit messages and media during a period when they were still underage. And the fact that both individuals have been active within the VTubing space further amplified the attention surrounding the situation.

VIDEO: Trailer for the upcoming Plus-Sized Misadventures in Love anime.

VIDEO: Route playthrough of Black BL visual novel crushed.

AniFem Community

Here’s hoping that more fans will continue to discover the series.

These 2 are constantly fighting for the top spot

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— The Cooler Ref Garnet (@refgarnet.bsky.social) August 5, 2025 at 10:32 PM

My favorite is Healin’ Good, but Soaring Sky is a very close second!

— Pearl (@elysiondream.bsky.social) August 5, 2025 at 12:11 AM