Aoi Hana
Sweet Blue Flowers

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Aoi Hana deserves to be in the conversation whenever the great romance and yuri manga are discussed. The art is a joy. Viz Signature has published a double volume set with 4 gorgeous books, each with 2 volumes of the manga. Reading it in this format is a pleasure. The characters and the setting are so well developed that you quickly forget it is a work of fiction.

The flaws are obvious and well documented. Instead of a manageable one or two subplots, we have a half-dozen stories involving side characters whose names we can not remember. The sheer number of short stories that interrupt the ... journey of our heroines becomes frustrating and breaks down the natural flow of the plot. With a stronger editor, this would have been 5 or 6 volumes instead of eight. All could have been forgiven if author had stuck the landing, but the less-than-satisfying ending combines with unnecessary fillers to make Aoi Hana a solid 9/10.

A classic manga that will be remembered for generations? Maybe so. But not perfect by any measure.

I would only recommend reading Aoi Hana if you were really desperately starved for some yuri in your life. As I know good yuri works are pretty hard to come by and if you are after some school-girl angsting yuri crush story, then yes. Give Aoi Hana a go. (Though I think Sasameki Koto is a lot better.)

Though Aoi Hana is looooooong. Long in the way that it drifts over to the side characters pretty much constantly and if you don't remember names well then it can be pretty confusing. A few times I was reading thinking 'wait who's this?' 'what's the deal with ... that?' when really all I would rather the story focus on is the development between Akira and Yumi.

Akira is a great character. I have nothing but love for Akira. Though, Yumi, our lesbian-angsting main character... leaves a lot to be desired. Expecting lots of angsting and Yumi feeling sorry for herself. And crying a lot.

I am probably being a little hard on the series, but I just didn't feel that Aoi Hana deserved the hype that it got. Yumi's relationship with one of the schoolgirls was hard to read ("get me my towel" "yes! of course!") and even with Akira being adorable, it doesn't make up for everything else going on.

Though Akira IS adorable. If I was rating this for Akira, she would get a solid 9~

The pacing was all over the place. Like, there were lots of moments where things were going by really quickly and it left me really confused. But there were also parts where the story was going way too slow, and it left me feeling bored and uninterested. I really wanted to like this manga because I had heard so many good things about it, but like this manga was really painful to read for me. I think part of that issue either comes back to the translators or the mangaka herself. Plus I was really put off by the fact that a lot of the ... jokes are very distasteful and come off as very rude.