Lilies Complex

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A surprisingly wholesome pervy slice of life manga, that doesn't shy away from showing detailed graphic sex as a normal part of the story and characters' relationships.
I like it very much just by the fact that it made me feel like I was transported to a parallel universe, where prudes didn't exist, and you can just have a normal romance + graphic sex, without it being dichotomized into two different universes of romance and porn.
It's a simple yuri manga really. Art is good. Characters are cute and fun, but not that complex. Relationships are fairly wholesome, even with the premise of "bully" gyaru, and pervy ... nerd that takes "revenge", it's very clear from the beginning that both like each other, but don't understand why or how to communicate it. With the solution for them getting closer, and understanding each other better, being a hentai plot device to get them to have sex right from the start.
It's out of ordinary in how ordinarily it uses hentai logic for relationship progression, while still maintaining the relationship as the focus, it's as if hentai was let out of the perv closet, and allowed to be more than masturbatory aid.

Now the reason I made this review is because I read the only other review on here atm, and it reminded me of which particular time and universe I exist in, and it's the stupid one. Where idiots who probably think they are being media literate, use old feminist film theory terminology like "male gaze", with a meaningless cis prefix, while probably referring to the sexualization of the female body and the hentai based sex scenes. Not knowing that "male gaze" refers to the centering of a visual narrative on a heterosexual male protagonist's perspective which is meant to identify with the male viewer, in a narrative structure where only the male character is the maker of meaning in the story and women are passive bearers of meaning. Sexualization alone, whether it appeals to the male fantasy or not, is not the original meaning of "male gaze". All while this story has no male characters at all, and all scenes are from a homosexual female perspective, written and illustrated by a female mangaka, who primarily reads yuri hentai for pleasure, and authors yuri hentai as a hobby, while sometimes managing to get it published and make money.
But I guess a pervy homosexual female perspective doesn't matter if it's not coded for modern western sensibility.

This is very much yuri written and drawn more with the cis-male gaze in mind, or at the very least has been drawn more in a full-send NSFW doujinshi style, when the scenes are of that type. The unfortunate paradox is that outside of the H-scenes the manga seems to have a completely different style and feel to it. It's almost as if someone threw some hard and heavy H scenes just to fill the "sex sells" quota.

This unfortunate dichotomy between what is seemingly trying to be a serious story versus just being PWP, leads to something that is diffucult to enjoy. Which is ... an incredible shame as the character designs all seem to be well thought out and when they hit, is good.

There's also a level of confusion as there's a B-plot with two completely different characters that drops in out of nowhere and makes this feel like a anthology collection for a moment.

Most readers will probably not *hate* this manga but few will feel satisfied or otherwise enjoy it.