YMMV / Girl Friends (2006)

• Arc Fatigue: The manga suffers from the usual issue with a romance story: because they have to fill 35 chapters with Will They or Won't They?, every time that it looks like Mari and Akko are going to make a little progress in their relationship, they slide back to Just Friends because they can't read each other's signals. After the school trip, they finally get over it and move into a relationship. Truth in Television: Any high-school-aged homosexual will tell you that misread signals are all too easy to come by (and moreso when you're trying to avoid the attention of your heterosexual friends).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: It is one of the best known Yuri manga outside of Japan, much loved and praised by fans for being one of the most realistic portrayals of a budding lesbian romance in the genre. Its digital version keeps popping up in the Best Sellers list of J-manga even long after it was first released internationally, and both volumes of its Omnibus collection debuted in the top 10 of the New York Times Best Sellers list for manga. Due to this, it may be surprising to learn that Girl Friends only has a fraction of its international popularity in Japan.
• Ho Yay:
  • Sugi and Tamamin tease each other frequently and kiss while drunk.
  • When Akko mentions Sugi likes to apply her perfume to her waist and thighs, both Kuno and Urara blush and have an Imagine Spot of her doing so in lacy lingerie.
    Urara: Sugi-san rocks. <3
    Kuno: She's got it going on. <3
• LGBT Fanbase: Girlfriends is one of the most popular 2000s-era yuri manga amongst LGBTQ women due to it being more of a Queer Romance work than other contemporary yuri series.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: The series focuses a lot on fashion, cosmetics, and other typically girly things, giving people the impression that it's a Shoujo manga. Even the fact that it's a Yuri Genre series doesn't prevent this, since Yuri Genre is popular amongst females too so people just assume that it's meant for a LGBT conscious young adult audience considering how realistically it handles the issues of a budding sexuality. Thus, people tend to be surprised when they discover that it ran in Comic High, a seinen magazine.

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