Welcome to the Yuri Garden, where you'll find a whole lot of lilies.note
Oshibana Girls' Academy is a yuri paradise in the Maria Watches Over Us mold. A sacred place where graceful, demure young ladies in elegant uniforms walk the long, winding path to the front door, gather together for tea parties in the rose greenhouse, and trade rosaries during the Maria Festival to mark the deep, emotional connection between onee-sama and imouto under the school's soeur system.
Fuyu Watanabe studied hard to get admitted to the school, so she could surround herself with magnificent girls' love and bask in the glory of yuri. But, as an otaku, she has no desire to actually become part of a yuri relationship. No, all this shy wallflower wants to do is fade into the background and swoon over the other girls pairing off.
But then, the natural enemy of all otaku appears: a Gyaru Girl. Bubbly and gaudy, Ririka Yoshioka upends the delicate, unspoken bonds underpinning the allure of yuri with her forthright, "crass" fashionista nature. As she unintentionally tramples on everything Fuyu holds dear, Fuyu throws herself into the line of fire as a distraction to try and prevent the gyaru's ways from rubbing off on all the elegant young women. However, Rikira mistakes Fuyu's attempt at running interference for jealousy, and starts to suspect Fuyu is actually interested in her. It seems in order to preserve the sanctity of yuri, Fuyu will need to do the one thing she never intended on doing: she will need to become yuri.
Yuriota ni Yuri wa Gohatto Desu?! ("Yuri is Taboo/Forbidden for Yuri Otaku?!"), or Yuri-Goha for short, is a Yuri Genre manga by U-temo, which was published in Futabasha's Web Action from 2020 to 2023.
Yuriota ni Yuri wa Gohatto Desu?! includes examples of:
- Ambiguously Gay: As a yuri parody, it indulges in the stereotypical yuri trope of leaving everything to subtext and implication, and being extremely unclear whether the girls Fuyu admires are actually lesbians or just have a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
- Art Shift: When Fuyu first sees Ririka, she mentally implores the gyaru to realize she's drawn differently from everybody else. For that panel, Ririka is literally drawn as a goofy Yonkoma chibi while the other girls are drawn as elegant bishoujo.
- Bifauxnen: Akira-sama is the tall, princely type with a short androgynous haircut and legions of squealing fangirls.
- Birds of a Feather: When Ririka's sister Miku brings her an umbrella, Ririka runs off to deliver some paperwork to the teacher's lounge and comments that Miku and Fuyu should get along well because they're both otaku. Even though they're not otaku about the same things, they do get along pretty well.
- Black Bead Eyes: When Miku rambles on and on about her fictional crush Ayumu-kun, Fuyu gets little black button eyes as she listens.
- Blended Family Drama: Ririka and Miku are step-siblings, and Miku initially stayed cooped up inside her room because she was upset and alienated. Then Ririka took her out shopping and said they should become friends instead of forcing themselves to be sisters, and they've gotten along fine ever since.
- Cerebus Retcon: When the manga started, Fuyu seemed to have been a diehard yuri fan for many years, long enough to become intimately familiar with the genre's conventions and cliches, and her reluctance to become yuri herself was treated as just part of her otaku-ness. Later though, it was revealed she knew nothing about yuri until midway through her third year of middle school (less than a year before the series started), and she only got into yuri because her friend — who she had a crush on — introduced her to it. This incident is the psychological reason why she only wants to observe yuri from afar.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Fuyu is not a Clingy Jealous Girl, but Ririka mistakes her aggressive attempts to get between her and the other girls as a sign that she is.
- Custom Uniform: While the other students wear traditional Maria Watches Over Us-style uniforms, with long skirts and black shirts with wide white lapels, Ririka just wears a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a short skirt with a sweater wrapped around her waist. She also has big hoop earrings and Girlish Pigtails.
- Cute Ghost Girl: Rei-chan, the ghost of an Oshibana student who seeks a girl to form a soeur partnership with, and who has the exact same Generic Cuteness as the rest of the cast.
- Eyes Always Closed: Aoi Fujiyama is a classmate and friend of Fuyu and Ririka, and she represents the most archetypal "classical yuri" character of the three, compared to the oddball outsiders Fuyu and Ririka. To emphasize her demure, reserved nature, she is almost always drawn with her eyes closed.
- The Faceless: When flashing back to the time Miku's mother married Ririka's father, the adults' faces are hidden by speech bubbles.
- Faux Horrific: In chapter 2, Fuyu imagines the "Ojou-sama Gyaruifying Project (from Yoshioka)", where her classmates are converted into gaudy gyaru who spout things like "Totally LOL" and "super rad" while surrounded by milk tea cartons and McDonald's french fries.
- The First Cut Is the Deepest: Fuyu couldn't work up the courage to tell her friend she liked her in middle school, which is the root cause of her desire to observe yuri from afar and not "become" yuri herself.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: Invoked by Fuyu. She has no intention of actually intruding on all the yuri. She simply wants to watch it unfold. However, when she has to step up and protect it from gyaru-ification, she becomes a protagonist for real.
- Flat Character: Besides Fuyu and Ririka, the rest of the cast are mostly one-note parodies of stock yuri characters.
- Friendship Trinket: At the aptly named "Maria Festival", an older girl presents a rosary to a younger girl to cement their relationship as onee-sama and imouto. In typical yuri fashion, it's unclear if this is anything more than a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
- Genre Savvy:
- Fuyu, as a yuriota, is extremely familiar with the tropes the elegant ladies around her are playing out. She's also savvy enough to recognize, when she suspects she is becoming half of a yuri couple with Ririka, that she's about to become part of the "Gyaru x Plain One" subgenre.
- Fuyu is so genre-savvy that, in chapter 2, she imagined Akira's ideal yuri partner to be a shy childhood friend watching over her from the shadows, and thenturned around and immediately spotted the girl in question peering around a tree.
- Gyaru Girl: In contrast to the elegant young ladies, Ririka is a little gaudy and gauche — she makes "insensitive" remarks that break the unwritten rules of yuri, she wears a stripped down version of the uniform with her blouse out and a sweater wrapped around her waist, she does her nails in class, and she wears a face mask because she's too embarrassed to be seen without her makeup.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Despite Fuyu considering gyaru the enemy of all otaku, Ririka — though a little tactless — is sweet and polite to everybody, and she makes a big effort to befriend her new step-sister Miku when Miku is feeling upset about their parents' remarriage.
- Hammerspace: Witnessing yuri allows Fuyu to pull out visual props to emphasize her joy, including trophies with "Win" embossed on them and, in one case, a complete drum kit.
- Identical Twin ID Tag: The Kitadake twins each have one Odango bun. Sana wears hers over her right ear, Yuna wears hers over her left ear.
- Irony: Fuyu wears the predominantly black, prim and proper Oshibana uniform, while Ririka wears a predominantly white, loose and casual Custom Uniform. However, Fuyu wears loose white socks that resemble the legwarmers gyaru are often associated with, while Ririka wears straight, knee-length black socks. Visually, it almost seems like they're walking a mile in each others' socks.
- Magical Realism: It's a yuri comedy about the everyday lives of girls attending a Catholic school. Oh, and there's also the ghost of a former student who hangs around the main characters, but it's no big deal.
- Medium Awareness: When Fuyu spots some yuri in the first chapter, she just wants to melt into the background and watch. She's drawn as one of the little shojo bubbles floating through the air.
- Meta Guy: Fuyu is a yuri otaku, and her Inner Monologue constantly explains the tropes and the conventions of the genre while she watches it play out.
- One-Gender School: The series takes place at Oshibana Academy, a Catholic all-girls' school. Naturally, this leads to a lot of Pseudo-Romantic Friendships between the students, and Fuyu enrolls there solely so she can see "elegant girls love" unfold in real life.
- Otaku:
- Fuyu is a fan of elegant yuri stories, and she chose to attend Oshibana because she wanted to see it happen for real.
- Ririka's step-sister Miku is an otaku for the mobile game SpeDol, and particularly its very handsome main character, Ayumu-kun.
- Outside-Context Problem: The root of Fuyu's dislike of Ririka. Fuyu wanted to bask in the elegant yuri at Oshibana, but she wasn't expecting a gyaru to pop up and threaten (in her mind) the school with gyaru-ification, where the graceful ladies are converted into airheaded fashionistas. Ririka's presense is a problem that Fuyu will offer herself up as a sacrifice to stop.
- Pastiche: Of Maria Watches Over Us, and other works in the "yuri in a Catholic girls' school" genre. Fuyu is a fan of these works, and she attends Oshibana hoping to see similar yuri happen "in the wild" — and it does — but the sudden appearance of a gyaru throws a wrench into her plans and threatens to upset her beautiful worldview.
- Satire and Switch: The manga began as a parody of "Catholic schoolgirl yuri", where Fuyu swoons over her classmates and fantasizes about their relationships, which represent stereotypical yuri pairings. However, as it continues, it devotes more and more time to the (intentionally-cliched) Flat Characters and their relationships, and effectively becomes a straight example of "Catholic schoolgirl yuri" except with a Genre Savvy narrator.
- Something We Forgot: In chapter 8, Fuyu and Ririka cross paths on their day off and spot Fujiyama leave a present for her onee-sama behind. They run out of the bookstore to return it ... and accidentally forget about Miku, who is still browsing the bookshelves asking where her big sis went.
- Sudden Video-Game Moment: In chapter 10, when Ririka unwittingly intrudes on a tender moment between Akira and Midori, Fuyu pulls a sumo torpedo to get her out of sight. While Fuyu's status bar lists her full name, Rikika's just says "Gal".
- Twin Switch: After Yuna hears about Aoi's fondness for "strange people" (meaning Fuyu and Ririka), she pretends to be her more popular twin sister Sana to try and get Aoi to be her onee-sama.
- Umbrella of Togetherness: Chapter 4 revolves around Fuyu's attempts to see an onee-sama and imouto (any onee-sama and imouto) share an umbrella in the rain, but she finds herself thwarted at every turn. Akira-sama was offered an umbrella by practically every girl she crossed paths with, and Aoi's onee-sama forgot she brought an extra from home. In the end, Fuyu watches Ririka and Miku (actual sisters) walk home under the same umbrella and concludes that's just as good.
- Wall of Text: When Miku starts rambling about her favorite game, SpeDol, she fills the entire panel with text.
