Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana Ep.01 - Ibuki x Botan is nice, but Botan x Kanade is...

Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana is one of the anime series airing this season based on the manga of the same name, written and illustrated by Hey. The genre is Girls' Love, comedy, and slice-of-life; at this point, you already know that this is automatically at the very top of my watch list for obvious reasons. I love my yuri.

The story follows a 20-year-old college student named Botan Kamiina as she interacts with other college students (all girls) in her dormitory, fostering friendships and getting closer to them. The catalyst to make them more friendly to each other? Of course, it's alcohol! Lots of it, really.

See? Even Botan fully approves of this review. I knew I did a good job! *pats her head*

The switch between serious and smart elder to cute girl for Kanade was moe.

This also connects it to the whole "gourmet" subtext of the girls enjoying various types of alcohol and using it as a pretext to be more open with each other. Usually, "gourmet" is relegated to enjoying delicious-looking anime food, but this works too, to be honest. It's basically "cute girls doing cute things," but in a more adult setting with girls who are of legal drinking age.

There are six girls who are part of the main cast, and the web of relationships between them is a lot more complicated than you would guess. For example, just from the first episode, we can see a strong connection between Ibuki and Botan, but Kanade also seems to be very interested in Ibuki.

We haven't seen much of Akane, Yaeka, and Chin-lan (the other three girls), but I guess they want to introduce them slowly to give time for their character traits and interpersonal relationships to be revealed properly. Design-wise, I think the one I like the most is Kanade with her more traditional look.

Botan has a great personality, and her facial expressions were one of the highlights of the episode. The series is strongly carried by the art direction, which makes the girls look extremely cute and younger than they are. If you removed the alcohol element, you would easily mistake them for high schoolers.

The eye catches use a particular style that makes them look really impressive. I wonder who's the artist.

Botan preparing herself while standing near a drawer full of alcohol. Calm down girl, you can't go on alone in this battle!

The girls introduced well so far (Botan, Kanade, and Ibuki) have their own very distinct personalities, with Botan being a bit pushy/friendly, Ibuki being more of a reserved wolf, and Kanade being the reliable one—except when she gets drunk and becomes kind of a cute mess.

Overall, I think *Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana* had a great start, and I'm definitely going to keep watching this weekly. I'm still debating internally which are my favorite ships, but I'll get more into that once they show the personalities of the other three girls.