Sapphic stories can sometimes have a hard time breaking through the noise. In anime and manga especially, so much of what we consume is fueled by male-orientated fan service as more earnest stories fall through the cracks. This almost happened to Love Bullet, a supernatural action yuri manga created by Inee.
Debuting in Media Factory’s Comic Flapper magazine back in October 2023, Love Bullet is about a high school girl called Koharu Sakurada who is a popular matchmaker at her school. If you ask her for help with a confession or have her watch over the romantic exchange, the chances of bagging your crush are guaranteed. But she neglects her own feelings because of this, and when her close friend Aki Tamaki confesses out of the blue, Koharu has no idea how to react. Then she is impaled by a stray piece of rebar and drops dead.
But in this world, anyone who dies without ever experiencing love is reborn as a Cupid. To return to the mortal world and earn another chance at life, they can play matchmaker for all humanity. But instead of heart-tipped bows and arrows, these modern day wingmen handle automatic weapons, grenades, and all manner of military equipment. It is instantly evocative, propelled forward by a queer main character discovering who she is for the first time as she struggles to navigate the afterlife.
If you’re after a couple of cute yuri manga to read after Love Bullet, I’d recommend Bloom Into You, She Loves To Cook, And She Loves To Eat, and Hanamonagatari.
Inee has only released a single volume so far, and continues to publish chapters at the time of writing, but Love Bullet has otherwise failed to garner an audience in Japan. I recall many of its pages going viral a few months ago because of its impactful imagery, and reimagining Cupid as young victims of violence ready to fire pistols at mortals to make them fall in love is a ridiculously compelling concept. Now though, with the help of international audiences over on Twitter, Love Bullet is experiencing unparalleled success.
Physical copies of the first volume at most online retailers have run dry, with a restocking from the manufacturer expected later this week, while digital sales have topped charts around the world thanks to queer audiences coming together to give this story another chance. It’s been so cool to see fanart, narrative theories, and positive discussions about Love Bullet thanks to people seeing a queer story unfolding without the support it deserved. I’m up-to-date on it now, and cannot wait to see where it goes and where exactly it wants to take this concept of Cupids wielding assault rifles.
If you want to pick up a physical or digital copy of Love Bullet, the community has put together this handy guide for non-Japanese speakers.
While Koharu and her fellow Cupids are invisible to the mortal realm, it seems they are able to interact with the physical world, eat food, or even disguise themselves as humans to talk with living beings. But the second they disappear, all memories of them vanish too. There is a lot of world building on display here, and potentially wider ramifications to exactly what the Cupids do and how it influences their own world. I have a lot of questions, but mostly I want to see where its cast of characters ends up going.
Koharu might be a natural matchmaker in a past life, but having to fire ethereal bullets at those she wants to pair together is infinitely more complicated. Some panels have Cupids firing off sick headshots, or the equivalent of a collateral in Call of Duty as a heart-shaped round goes through two unsuspecting souls at once.
Our heroine’s first assignment is, quite tragically, to find a potential lover for her childhood friend, the very same one who watched her die five years ago. She has to simultaneously return to her death, abandon her potential feelings, and accept that the people she once loved have moved on without her. Now she has a chance to grant them happiness and help her closest friend process half a decade of grief in one fell swoop.
There’s also Koharu’s mentor, Kanna, who is happy to lend a hand and teach her the best way to be a Cupid, even if it means delaying her return to a happy life. And Chiyo, who can come across as hostile and playful as she frequently engages in firefights with her friends.
It seems that while they are all living in the same strange limbo, Cupids must also compete to take on assignments and garner enough points to gain a second chance at life. It’s like a bigger player is calling the shots from the background, which I have no doubt Inee will expand on if this sudden success keeps up momentum. What I love most about Love Bullet’s giant presence in recent weeks is that Inee informed her community of the first volume’s lacking sales, and they turned up in droves. A small fandom reached out to a queer community that it hoped would engage with such a unique story, and it’s done that and then some.