Letter #71.5: The "Lily" Letter (or, YouTube Stuff, Because Netflix Won't Let Me Watch Things)

Good morning, Erin.

When Netflix once again decided it didn’t want to let me watch anything because my sister and I—who went in on this account together—don’t live in the same house anymore, my plans to spend my Friday off jumping into The Good Bad Mother were somewhat curtailed. Which meant I had time to kill until my alternate viewing methods became available. 

Did I start my You’re the Best! letter? Did I iron my work shirts for the week? Did I clean the pans in my sink? Of course not. I’m not one to waste my time like that.

No, I decided to watch a handful of short Korean lesbian romance series on YouTube. Obviously. 

That’s right, I did some absentminded clicking around on MDL and saw a show poster that set my yuri fanboy senses a-tinglin’—so what other choice did I have but to see for myself? 

And I did. And it was. And so were the three other things I clicked on. And now you get to hear all about it. So, we’re all winners! 

Now, when it comes to yuri, I’m very easy to please: gimme romance, gimme cute girls, and gimme the “b-b-but we’re both giiiiirls!” trope. That’s all I need. And it’s pretty much always what I get—at least, from anime. But would these live-action series be able to live up to those standards? Would those standards even be applicable? Could I be happy without any of those standards having been met?

…exploring all of which is clearly of the utmost importance, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have along for the ride. So, let’s go!

I. LILY FEVER 

A girl goes to get something of hers that her ex-boyfriend left for her to pick up at his associate’s house, only to become entangled with the very forward girl who lives there. 

1. Full disclosure: while this was the title that set me on my journey through the series that helped me bide my time during the Netflix-induced hiatus from my K-drama plans, this was not the first of these series that I watched—though it was the first one I watched on that day. So, we’re going to start with this one (for reasons that will make more sense as we go, I promise). 

2. The lead actress is the “Moriarty” character from Inspector Koo, which is how I found out this series existed. And I remember quite liking her, so I was doubly excited to give it a go. 

2A. That said, it turns out she was also the Queen in Kingdom, whom I did not like, though I can’t remember if that had anything to do with the performance or just that the character was so thoroughly a total biznatch. 

2B. Regardless, though, if you want to gawk at her bare legs for a while…you’re in luck! She gets the It’s Okay, That’s Love treatment, here, with what I might suggest are suspiciously short shorts. (And this show is from long enough ago that she’s, like, 19 at the time of filming.)

3. The big kiss in this web series immediately jumped onto my Top 5 K-drama Smooches list. It wasn’t terribly romantic, but by golly was it full-on steamy. 

4. As will be typical of all of these low-budget web series, there is a major location that is ABSOLUTELY NOT what we’re being told it is. In this case, it looks like a rundown low-rent noodle place that is supposed to be a wine bar. 

5. We really, really didn’t need a full 30-second opening theme song for every single one of these episodes. I mean, that’s a big chunk of a 5-minute runtime, and it pops up way too frequently when you’re just running through the entire series. 

6. There’s some feisty jabbing at the political establishment, here, in that party politics in general are criticized for being entirely unconcerned with serving the people they ostensibly want to represent. It feels more than a little forced into the story, but it’s not quite hamfisted, since there is some narratively relevant reason prompting the criticism. So, I thought it was fine. 

7. Remember how I always complain about how scenes from the end of one episode get repeated at the start of the next episode but somehow don’t have consistent translations of the dialogue? Well, this series did exactly that—and, just as I was going to groan at the TV because of it, the protagonist narration said, “Wait, we already had this conversations—but the dialogue has changed for some reason?!” And I just started laughing. So maybe it isn’t just the translations that inexplicably change but the actual dialogue on all these shows! (Or at least something of that kind, given that this show was calling it out—and they don’t have the whole subtitles/translations thing to hide behind as an explanation.) 

8. For reasons that I can’t quite understand, this series just sort of stops, with its final episode ending at the exact moment the actual plot seems about to start. So…whatever else I can say about it, that’s a big negative. 

9. Have I yet explained to you (or maybe you already know this (you know how I tend to assume you already know everything)) that yuri is just Japanese for “lily,” which is the euphemistic term for girl-girl stories? That’s partly how I knew this was a series I wanted to check out: because the title literally has the word lily in it. (Also the girls kissing on the poster. Which was a more subtle detail. Obviously.)

10. So…was there a love story? Sort of! Were there cute girls? Yes! Did we get a “b-b-but we’re both giiiiirls!” trope? I…did not make note of it, but I don’t remember there being much of a hesitation on the part of the protagonist when the girl-girl aspect of the story started up (at least, not any hesitation over the girl-girl aspect itself). So, not a great score on the ol’ Daryl Yuri Criteria Scale. 

10A. …but that aside (and ignoring the reasonably amateurish production quality), the only real problem I had with the series is that it seems not to be much of anything, between its sudden cutoff point and lack of any real character progression at all. The acting is fine, and the writing is neither particularly serviceable nor particularly awful. It seems more like a proof of concept than a finalized project, and, as such, I wouldn’t recommend it. (Unless you want to check out the protagonist’s legs. In which case…big recommend.)

II. SHE MAKES MY HEART FLUTTER

Recently dumped by her girlfriend, a young woman is taken by her friends to an out-of-the-way “ladies only” bar to take her mind off of things—only to discover that her aunt is secretly its proprietress.

1. So, this is technically the first of these YouTube yuri things I watched, and I in fact watched it mooonths ago. I just never had any reason to bring it up. (Unless…did I? I remember wanting to include mention of it in a sidebar in a previous letter but not whether I did it or not.) 

2. I’m mentioning it now because, yes, this is my yuri web series letter, so it’s the perfect time to talk about it—but I’m listing it second, here, because this is the first of the three remaining series I’m going to discuss…and they are all from the same creator (Soo Not Sue on YouTube). This one is chronologically last in her filmography, but it was the first one I saw, so…here we are.

3. I didn’t really take notes on this one, so I’m working strictly off my memory. So…romance? Yes! Cute girls? Yes! “B-B-But we’re both giiiiirls!”? No—but also a little bit yes.(And we’ll get to that in a moment.)

4. This whole production feels very amateurish or college film project-y (apart from perhaps the acting…but that’s neither here nor there), so it’s to be expected that the major location for this series (the “ladies only” bar) is clearly not an actual bar…but it’s also hilariously just a college dorm common room that they’ve placed a bartop in. Like, there’s clearly a dormitory desk, someone’s tiny college CRT television, those standardized green library lamps, bookshelves—they try to make it seem like it's some kind of deliberate aesthetic, but it’s not fooling anyone. 

5. My favorite thing about this show (and this creator, apparently) is how even-handed the central character conflict is: the protagonist is very open about her sexuality, but her aunt is very much not. The protagonist thinks this is silly (not quite to the “loud and proud!” degree, but close enough) and ends up having a big fight with the aunt when the aunt pushes back against her—because the aunt is several years older and, as such, her default philosophy is to try not to draw social attention to herself and her romantic intentions. It’s a generational clash of perspectives, and (though one side of this issue unsurprisingly wins out over the other, in the end) I really appreciated how the story didn’t belittle the aunt’s hesitation and reinforced that the protagonist has no right to decide how someone else gets to feel about her own feelings. They ultimately learn from each other, and I think a nice balance is found—in theme, at least, if not entirely in message. 

6. But would I recommend it? I think yes. It’s not high art, but the characters are mostly charming enough (particularly the supporting cast, who I wish had more focus) that it’s worth a look.

III. CHALNA

A short film about how quickly two strangers can fall for each other and what happens when they just sort of go with it.

1. …at least, that’s what I think the film is supposed to be about. It’s so very flimsy, ending just when you’d think the story was going to start. The very beginning is kind of interesting, but it loses all its momentum when the effects of the initial scene are no longer important to the action of the story (such as it is). It isn’t doesn’t even manage to be a meditation on the premise, in the end. 

2. This has the absolute silliest location that isn’t what they want us to think the location is of all: a very obvious college club room (probably the manwha club, if I were to take a guess) that is supposed to be a trendy cafe. They don’t even decorate it. It’s just a big table in the middle of a medium-sized single room lined with bookshelves filled with comic books. We never even see anyone who works there or where the supposed drinks might come from. In fact, there’s only ever one person with a drink in any of the shots of people at the so-called cafe. 

3. And it goes 0 for 3 with my criteria. Which is even sillier. 

4. All of which is to say: skip it. (There aren’t even any ludicrously short shorts!)

5. Oh, for the record: this chronologically the second project from this creator. 

IV. OUT OF BREATH

A girl saddened by her recent breakup is encouraged to try a dating app…and meets a girl who agrees to help her do all the things she never got to do with her ex-. 

1. This one is legitimately good, and I would totally recommend it. Is it great? No—but it’s also working with the same kinds of low-budget restrictions that the other stuff is, so it was never going to be. But what it manages to do is almost completely skirt those restrictions to make the story seem intimate rather than low-budget. The story is focused, the dialogue is tight and believable, the cinematography seems somehow more professional than either of the projects that came after it, and the actors give notably more solid performances—probably because the script is so much more refined. I was surprised by how good it was, and…y’know what? I’d watch it again. 

1A. The weirdest thing about this, though, is that this is the chronologically first project from this creator. I don’t know what made the difference, here, but…credit where it’s due. 

2. There are really only three characters in this series, and the lone secondary character is fantastic. Good part, acted really well. And I recognized the actress from She Makes My Heart Flutter, which I thought was kind of fun, the director using someone she liked in more than one project. Except it’s not just the same actress but the same character in both series, with Flutter being a vague, quasi-sequel to this series. Anyway, she doesn’t have a lot of screentime, but what she has is packed with emotional complexity and layered character writing. (She probably has more going on in her dozen or so lines than the main protagonist does in the whole of the series—which is saying something, because the main protagonist isn’t exactly two-dimensional.)

3. Much like with Flutter, the central character conflict is a clash between the main protagonist’s hesitation over openly expressing her sexuality anywhere but within the safety of her own home (which means pretty much nothing but stay-at-home dates…which I think sounds great, personally) and her newfound love interest’s “society can f*** itself” openness. And, once again, we get that good balance of “your feelings are your feelings” in that clash, even as there is one side that is obviously meant to come out on top, in the end. But the discussion is more pointed, here, probably because it lacks the generational differences aspect that the aunt/niece story has. Which is fine, of course, and which I appreciated just as much here as in the other series. 

4. I’m going to be generous and say that this series managed to sidestep the whole “this location is not what it looks like!” issue the other stuff we’ve discussed had, because I think it’s possible we’re supposed to think the love interest girl is working from home rather than at an office. Either way, I’m pretty sure they filmed her scenes in a dorm room, but the shots they chose for those scenes didn’t fully give away the actual location. It just sort of felt like it was a dorm, is all. 

5. Also, because I did it to everyone else: Romance—check! Cute girls—check! “B-B-But we’re both giiiiirls!”—kind of! Which I’m saying counts! Woo-hoo, three for three! 

And…yeah. Thanks for joining me on this trip through my “lily” YouTube downtime.

Speaking of YouTube, though: my new favorite thing is videos of tarot card readings. It’s a total bop. Like, whatever else I might think about astrology or tarot cards or psychics, I think it’s fair to say that these kinds of videos are just a much longer version of newspaper horoscopes—which is to say I think they’re meaningless entertainment. 

I mean, the people who do these videos pretty much say that the readings they do, because they are done broadly for one star sign or another rather than a specific individual, should only be taken seriously if any bits and pieces of it feel applicable to you and that you should ignore the rest—literally an “if none of this sounds right, it’s only because it’s not a message for you and definitely not because this isn’t real” disclaimer. But they mask this with phrases like “take only what resonates,” which encourages you to basically create the meaning behind the reading yourself, which would seem to me to be, y’know, not the point of this kind of thing. 

Has that stopped me from watching A TON of these videos? Not even a little. Like I said, it’s a bop. And I know to treat it as nothing more than a bit of fun, so I’m as amused as I am skeptical. 

…that said, literally every one of these Pisces readings has said that someone from my past is coming back into my life, which I think is a very strange coincidence. And definitely not something I’ve been worrying over for the last week. 

Anyway.

As soon as I post this, I’ll start on the The Good Bad Mother letter so I can have it to you before the weekend. 

Unless…

[shuffles tarot deck; draws random card; reveals Four of Cups]

Oo, procrastination card. 

Well, you heard the spirits.

[plays Harry Potter game]

--Daryl