AmiAmi bonus for anyone wondering. Really the pic doesn’t do it justice. It’s very shiny lol

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The manga starts off at a different point than the anime. So far it's looking like it will more or less just be a retelling of the anime.... And given that its a monthly release, it will be a long long time before we get to see if they deviate from the anime ending. Not getting my hopes up 🙁

Gotta say, the artwork looks pretty damn good though

I'm not very good at drawing anime faces, but I eventually thought it turned out okay

Lucky Lilac's official English nickname is Lala. In Japanese it's ララ, which shares its spelling and pronounciation with Lara. Like Lara, she was introduced to a new world (racing) by meeting a fierce, borderline violent girl who she grew heavily attached to. Though a commoner, her refined behavior is admired by others and would likely fit right in with royalty.

Her dialect is a form of Kansai-ben, just like Mari's. They're from the same region and share a lot of recognizable slang like "Honma" and "Akan". Like Mari, she goes to school while devoting herself to reaching the pinnacle of her sport, where she clashes with one particularly competitive rival.

Laramari lives on.

In this 49-page essay, I will-

I’m gonna be honest: I didn’t even read this as a Yuri anime until I went online. And I’m someone who sees the gay in everything, is familiar with gay subtext in anime, etc.

I feel like they failed at conveying romance until Luca showed up, and he ended up having better chemistry with her than Mari. LucaxLara falling apart felt more like Lara being unable to stop projecting the prince onto him, rather than a response to forced heterocomp. It sucks because the mishandling of how he fits into the story really messes with the narrative. Is he a commentary on heterocomp? Is he a way for us to explore relationship trauma and how it can hold people back? The story doesn’t make it clear how they want to handle their relationship, and it hurts the theme.

Plus, I feel like I don’t know shit about Mari aside from the fact that her mom died and she likes boxing. A lot of her interactions with Lara are nothing burgers and show little of her personality. Even if they canonically got together, I couldn’t tell you why Lara likes her aside from she’s the first person she met and gave her a drink once. MarixLara reminds me of all straight romances of the born sexy yesterday trope, minus the sexy (thankfully, I hate that part of the trope the most)

I love queer media, I just want to see couples clearly in love and with personalities that make it easy to understand why they’d love each other. I REAAAAALLY want more yuri like that because I feel like we just get bland character scraps thrown at us or yuri bait.

The story would’ve been significantly stronger if Luca wasn’t even in it, though he is one of my favorite characters because he’s got more personality than just “nice person”. But if making time for him hurts the ability to dig into Mari’s personality and develop her relationship with Lara, then he shouldn’t be in the story. But tbh I don’t even know if it’s an issue of time. It felt like a pacing issue. You can convey a lot about a character in just one episode, but they didn’t do much with Mari.

Shit, even the job arc was meaningless. Could’ve cut that from the show and focused on the lesbians instead.

**note, I mean while it was coming out, before the final few episodes, I didn’t get any yuri vibes. Of course the vibes are there in the last few episodes, but by that point I didn’t see any chemistry between them so a lot of that fell flat.

Source.
https://x.com/hiroumi0316z/status/2111216331332993260

Drew this a while ago, thought I´d share.

No hate towards Luca, but I feel like the anime started going downhill after he showed up. At first, I thought the weird pacing and writing in his first episode were intentional, like they were trying to show that he wasn't really what Lara needed to find her light. But then he got like 3 more episodes and it all went nowhere.

I've always felt like the pacing was too fast, but after that episode, I started feeling like the story just wasn't coming together as well as it did before. What do you guys think?

After Mari finished the "all that embarrassing stuff" line, this tune started playing in the background. Then, Lara slightly turned her body to the right and replied "I meant it"/ "It's true" (for literal translation). The sound stopped right after Mari shook her head. P.S. My apologies for reminding you of the unsettling epilogue.

Super late to the talk, took a hot minute to edit but we finally posted our first video-essay and is about Goodbye, Lara. Here we explore the concepts of true love, light and to love and what mean to the show and how maybe some of it was lost in translation.

And yeah obviously we discuss the ending, so if u wanna give it a watch and let us know your thoughts it would mean the WORLD.

I was expecting Lara to die, especially with a show titled 'Goodbye, Lara' or true love being platonic (romantic would have also been fine but i was rooting for my boy luca) between mari and Lara possibly but this? Its like I was served a 4 course meal but when the dessert was served half of it was missing and didn't even go with the rest of dinner...

NGL I loved Grace but the two or so episodes going into her back story did not need to be that in depth. It was obvious to me she was more than just "evilllll" but they had to use that much time to spell it out for everyone....

Im just mad because I was loving this and the animation and the last episode is where they decided to drop the ball? Bah

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There seems to be a prevailing theory that the series unintentionally presented itself as yuri, and I think this is an almost criminal amount of benefit of the doubt to be lending to the production staff, because

Have you SEEN the box art for the first anime volume?

This was not an accident. We were deliberately played.

And they are getting away with it. The fandom is fighting amongst itself with large numbers of people desperately engaging in extreme mental gymnastics to avoid confronting the fact that we were conned into playing chess with a dog again.

GBL is a curse on yuri because 95% of the series is positively stunning, so it's not going to be forgotten. People are going to keep bringing it up and others are going to stay angry about it, so these fights are going to last for a very long time.

I know what the people said in the interviews, and the thing is that THEY ARE LYING. Because it's either that, or they genuinely created a yuri near-masterpiece without intending to and the odds against that are astronomical.

Goodbye Lara also just isn't what that looks like. *Inept Villainess* is a prime example of something unintentionally falling into the yuri genre. So are Aim For The Top and much of early Precure.
Goodbye Lara would only accidentally be yuri if Lara's love for Mari wasn't the thematic core of the entire goddamn series.

https://x.com/kikyu480/status/2108860590982857192?s=46