Select spoilers lay within
Rife with allegories to the point it's suffocating on itself, Yurikuma Arashi seeks to tackle homophobia and societal exclusion, illustrated with the subtlety of a bear paw to the face.

Now, I did overall enjoy watching it - as a gay man who has been a loner most of his life, a lot of its overall messages did resonate with me on a personal level - but I simply cannot overlook the confusing packaging it's wrapped in. Much of the humour is in the Kunihiko Ikuhara wheelhouse of repetition, wherein hearing a line of dialogue for the 12th time in a single cour show is still funny, at the same time it's trying to allegorically send a much bigger message.

I have to give props for the overall creativity thrown into this work and the artstyle that tries to hold it all together visually while blurring the line between what is fiction/dream and reality. The team assembled at SILVER LINK did a great job rendering this world and visually I have no complaints whatsoever. It is a visual wonder at times.

With a significant chunk of its runtime spent on repetition gags, sound effects as the bears "hunt" and "eat" people (represented by sex) and gratuitous nudity - this might be the sugar necessary to help the "medicine" of what is a fairly progressive message (For Japan, at least) go down, but may ultimately distract more than serve the story.

Both being extremely allegorical, and on the nose...

• The "exclusion ritual" votes in which a person is basically voted out of existence "made invisible" - which makes them vulnerable to be "eaten" by the lesbian "bears"
• A "Yuri" court of men which rules on the legality of "eating" someone and whether love is "approved", with a prosecutor hellbent on the rules, a judge more concerned about how sexy it is, and a defense counsel who is more preoccupied with being cute himself.

The bias on display throughout the show and the court scenes does hit a bit harder with the setback caused by the ruling on gay marriage in Japanese courts in recent months and the ongoing threat in the US of rolling back progress barely a decade old, but I fear the overall message of this show is more relevant today than 10 years ago, both in how the exclusion ritual functions, and the societal pressure of boxes, and that does terrify me to an extent.

At the end, I'm left with the feeling that there's too many allegories and characters to flesh out fully, with too little runtime and characterisation beyond the main 3 characters, in part worsened by the repetition of dialogue/visual gags over substance.

There's a lot of good individual ideas woven throughout the show, but it fails to reach its full potential.

I'm very glad I watched it - I've been meaning to watch more yuri content - but despite having already watched Sarazanmai, I cannot help but feel it picked up some of the lessons learned on this project and told a more comprehensible story - which is why I would love to see more work from this creator. Especially now.

We're in a period of extreme volatility around the world, where the backlash against LGBTQ+ rights has parts of the world backtracking even faster than acceptance finally began to roll out.

I just hope he can get more than a cour of episodes to tell whatever story he seeks to tell next, and the script can get a bit more time to cook in the kitchen.

In the meantime, I would still say this show is worth a try if you are a fan of this creators' prior/following work, and if you're not, you might just get eaten. For that is sexy. Shaba-da-doo.