⌕ What is yuriboxd?
Yuriboxd is simply a collection of reviews of yuri manga I’ve read. I started this last year on a private account and decided to share it, both as a way to connect with others who enjoy yuri and to help people find recommendations. All reviews will be posted under the tag #yuriboxd.
⠀ ⠀ ✦˖ A few things to know ⤵︎
⠀ ✧ The reviews I post are mostly based on the personal impact these works had on me and my own tastes. Don’t expect any in-depth technical analysis—I just want to keep track of what I’ve read and jot down my thoughts somewhere.
⠀ ✧ The length of my reviews can vary—sometimes I write a simple two-line note, other times I will write like 10 paragraphs. The quality of the work itself doesn’t really factor into this; it just depends on my disposition.
⠀ ✧ I’ll be posting my old reviews from both past years and present days on the tag, and I’ll usually include the date I read them. Re-reads will also be included here.
[ID: A Revolutionary Girl Utena redraw of a shot from The Truman Show. Anthy, dressed in her pink outfit from the finale, stands at the top of staircase set against a background painted to look like a realistic cloudy blue sky towards a black doorway. She happily spreads her hands as if saying goodbye while Chuchu takes a bow to her side, her suitcase to her other side. End ID]
The thing is, their relationship isn't even messy—it's somehow cozy. The anguish that permeates everything around them stems from the mundane: lives are too different to ever truly align, leaving them in a cycle of dissatisfaction and mutual desires that never quite come together
The closing panels are my favorite part. When their pent-up emotions reach a breaking point, spill beyond their bodies and affect their surrondings in a very direct way, forcing them to finally confront them... it was both of their hands that slipped and broke that glass.
Me: "Damn people are REALLY BAD at knowing when to tag their eyestrain art/images...either that or they just don't care about photosenitive epileptic people like me. I feel really sad now."
Person: "But Allison, what if they just don't know or understand what qualifies as eyestrain and what doesn't?"
Me: "You know what? That could be a factor...While it is always better to be safe rather than sorry (so YES people should always tag eyestrain even if they're unsure if it "counts" or not) maybe you've got a point?"
Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
Full eyestrain AF page link
"But Allison! How were you able to screenshot that example if you're so sensitive to eyestrain?"
I dimmed the HELL out of my computer screen and looked away while taking the screenshot and did the same when putting it into this post, that's how lol. BUT YEAH ANYWAYS!!! Once again:
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
As I've stated before, I strongly associate my girlfriend and I with Akira and Utako from My Female Friend Comes Every Now and Then by Sumiko Arai. Akira is attached to a routine that has remained unchanged for years, while Utako is a free spirit who travels constantly in search of new experiences. They find each other in an odd way, yet quickly grow close.
Utako returns home to Akira between her travels, and they care for each other equally, easing each other's worries and finding comfort together unlike anywhere else.
I see Akira and Utako as resembling me and my beloved in many ways, though with our roles partially reversed. My girlfriend is the one who is always traveling while I remain settled in the same place, yet I share that same free spirit and a desire to live more freely. She has inspired me greatly in that regard. More than anything, what resonates with me is the nature of their bond. They are more than friends or lovers, what they have transcends any label, and they yearn for each other endlessly. Just like me and her.
dvd commentary ► the story of torment itself is a very beautiful one.
or: my kyoji and satomi mixtape project, at its first stage of becoming.
You probably wouldn’t have guessed this was a derivative work for a character pairing by how rarely a graphic designer appears in an environment composed of illustrators and painters, let alone guessing this was a multimedia derivative work. And I couldn’t fault you if it were merely eye candy, or a busy visual work that perplexes perception. Because these likely impressions are secondary to my pursuit of catharsis, which is precisely what this derivative work is.
You see, I hadn’t designed a poster in a year and I was lost without this mode of creative self-expression. I had been wandering my haunts, both online and offline, with only casual modes of self-expression. I had prioritized securing a source of livelihood that was divorced from this passion of mine, and developed a merch addiction in response to my income. Everything I had wanted to explore—first through experience, and then through reflection—came in bursts that left as soon as they arrived. This, primarily an apt description for the micro-blogging activity you know me through.
When I casually express myself, I live in the moment and leave it, too. In retrospect you won’t find me in my musings with the same degree of immersion, or rather: each reflection had come with limitations that casual self-expression arranged for me. I’d gone so long with micro-blogging as a mode of casual self-expression that I therefore recurrently encountered a wanting for creative self-expression.
I missed producing a creative project and was often jaded by my unchallenged casual mode of self-expression. I grew weary of sustaining a relationship with stories that opened up the world to me by micro-blogging. I approached it earnestly each time, yes, but I discerned it was unfulfilling on its own and at the frequency with which I did it. The fact remains: I had a hunger in me that begged to be satiated and I could only find my feed in the act of creation.
Playlist curation has been a pastime of mine for the last five years, though my eleven public playlists may not be the one to shape your opinion. I make monthly logs, to monthly favorites, to mood playlists and I rarely publicize them. I regard this pastime as a byproduct of my five year old pursuit of forming my taste and knowledge in music. I gravitate to formative artists, albums, periods that I couldn’t have known within the mainstream. Through this, I developed a relationship with music that is private and personal, independent of spectatorship, whilst sporadically indulging in it, as you can see in the eleven public playlists I have thus far.
On the rare occasion that I tune into someone’s playlist for a character or a character pairing, there are tells in their curation that compel me: indicators of mainstream, the curator’s listening pipeline: a pre-extensive formation of their own tastes before it is others’. It is no feat to track the sameness in the countless playlists there is. You can tell the search feature has been put to good use, leading users to each other. I have a propensity to express myself through whatever medium I engage with art in and that’s how my playlists come to be.
Thus brings us to the story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. The playlist preview has three different layouts, depending on whether you're reading this post via web or mobile app. The link stays, so feel free to click away for the full tracklist. Maybe give it a listen as you continue your read, somewhere down the line. I published it as a multimedia work on X and Bluesky at nineteen tracks, failed to include the nineteenth track in the visual work, and to neutralize the odd number, finalized it at twenty tracks, which I plan to reflect visually during the second stage of this project.
When I create, I need just one trigger. It seizes me and I can only surrender to creation. For the starting point of a Kyoji and Satomi playlist by me, it was: Call It Fate, Call It Karma, the eleventh track off the 2013 album, Comedown Machine by The Strokes. I have immortalized this moment of possession and there is only one record of it. This goddamned post (said with so much love) from the 11th of August, 2024 when it occurred to me that the lyrics resonated with pictured sequences from Chapter 9 and Chapter 12 of Let's Go to the Family Restaurant.
I was seized by the relevance of this verse:
Can I waste all your time here on the sidewalk?
Can I stand in your light just for a while?
I've waited around, oh
Having a hard time watchin' you (watchin' you)
Wayama Yama’s comedy seinen manga series, Let’s Go Karaoke! and its sequel, Let’s Go to the Family Restaurant. is a story of waiting and wanting between Narita Kyoji and Oka Satomi. It’s a relationship whose intimacy is identified by the transition of Satomi in totality while entwined in Kyoji’s presence. Kyoji follows Satomi in his Toyota Century all throughout Ka! and its continuity is interrupted by Kyoji getting both his car and himself busted from a collision he maneuvered, which in turn leads to Satomi being the one that follows Kyoji. Because of the motive of the collision, Kyoji cuts off the opportunity of continuity to following Satomi once more when he disappears from his life for four years, only to follow him again at an airport, the image of his Toyota Century long gone as it too changes into transit and walks, mutually pursued by both Kyoji and Satomi.
Fa. unfolds in anticipation of meeting each other beyond the events and the environment of Ka!, from boyhood to adolescence, from fixed locations to assorted locations—albeit each time with individual feelings of guilt for waiting and wanting. Kyoji is less impertinent but ever keen on meeting Satomi whose word establishes a meeting or not. “Anywhere is fine as long as it’s with you,” Wayama writes of the mutual sentiment of this pair’s behavior with each other, only for the readers to perceive.
Kyoji and Satomi are a pair whose relationship dynamic beget the questions in Call It Fate, Call It Karma:
Can I waste all your time here on the sidewalk?
Could Satomi want to confirm and distinguish what forms of intimacy he wished to pursue with Kyoji? Where did his sense of duty to Kyoji end and begin again: was it during karaoke lessons as Kyoji's teacher? Was it when Kyoji faced him again after four years with a tattoo of Satomi's name on his wrist, which for yakuza, showed its owner's identity to the world?
Can I stand in your light just for a while?
Could Kyoji bring further turbulence in Satomi's life by his mere presence despite giving Satomi more room to decide on whether they meet or not? Where did Kyoji's sense of accountability begin and end: was it when he never quite gave Satomi a choice to give him karaoke lessons? When he sought after him after four years of no contact, intervening once more in Satomi's life, with a tattoo of the boy's name on his wrist no less? Was it when he put himself within reach and spoke only when Satomi decided?
I've waited around, oh
Having a hard time watchin' you (watchin' you)
Kyoji and Satomi, wrestling through varying personal and private degrees of attachment and detachment, grow as a pair. A duo. Partners. They wait on each other, with their wants. The world around them sees the two as a distinct entity, singular: that entwinement of two different lives factual, incontestable.
Ultimately I started putting together the playlist a year after the song left an impression on me, and it was the sole track I added to begin my curation on the 10th of September, 2025, with the succeeding tracks rolling in a month after, on the 16th of October, 2025. I picked up the playlist again three weeks ago from the day I wrote this, which was approximately on the 10th of May, 2026.
Each one of us has a personal canon: of music, and other art. When curating character playlists, I look to my music canon. The majority of these artists whose tracks I've collated, you will find spread out across my public playlists. I've likely initially had other playlists for them in mind and deduced their relevance to the story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. by tuning into them, while others reached me in a timely manner for the first time. I was keen on carving my own path with a derivative work for Kyoji and Satomi, thus the layout, composition and format of my graphic design project.
I'm aware of the likely impressions my work would receive which motivated me to opt for a straightforward format of presenting it: a pair of GIFs. First, the poster design, succeeded by the unabridged quote that I obtained the derivative work's title from. Second, the tracklist that completes the multimedia derivative work.
The poster design is the visual identity of the story of torment itself is a very beautiful one.
The quote is an addendum to the title of the work.
The tracklist is the indication that this multimedia derivative work is a mixtape project.
"The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one," is a phrase I took from this passage I read and annotated for safekeeping two years ago from the 1998 edition of Hélène Cixous' collection of essays, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, published by Routledge. This annotation is the very passage I echo on my graphic, for the purpose of providing a door to the inner workings of my mixtape for prospective listeners who would encounter the graphic design. Kyoji and Satomi endure a torment of their own wait and want, and this quote speaks to the development of their power dynamic across the series. It opens what the tracks tell you of Kyoji and Satomi's pursuit of each other.
I want my audience to embrace my understanding of Kyoji and Satomi's relationship through graphic design, through literature, and through songs. I want my audience to know that these characters that have lived within me since early 2024 move through an extended world I've created for me to engage with the author's world. I want this multimedia derivative work to tell you that I am utterly in love with Wayama's brainchild, and it is personal, and private, even as I share it. And I hope that if this is anything to you, it is my creative self-expression of my two year old relationship with the world that Wayama Yama created for Narita Kyoji and Oka Satomi. And it's still in its first stage of becoming, because the love is a living, breathing thing.
⠀✶ Yuriboxd #8 ﹕ “I Love You So Much I Hate You” by Yuni ✶
⬩ Status: Finished; ⬩ Volumes: 1; ⬩ Chapters: 9.
✧ Read on: 08.25.2026
⭒࿐࿔⠀⠀⠀⠀One of my favorite types of yuri stories is one where physical intimacy begins right away, but emotional intimacy deepens gradually… It's a short and satisfying story: the chemistry between the protagonists and their well-developed personal growth make it a joy to read from start to finish. It’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of both protagonists and feel truly relieved to see how their love helped them heal from the wounds of past relationships and break free from the expectations weighing them down. I highly recommend reading the short sequels + prequel as well, they're sweet and provide further insight into the characters and show what their life is like together as a couple. I’d like to take this opportunity to mention another aspect I loved: the way intimacy and sensuality were portrayed. Yunii draws these scenes in a way that makes you feel both the heat and the emotion of these moments.
Uncharacteristicly good pictures from my phone camera of this Formica exsectoides specimen! There was a crab spider on the same plant as well but I haven't research on them yet so once I do, I'll post em!
