Once again I'm sharing a @Goyavoyage post with one of her yuri manga recommendations, because I think these are great and deserve a wider audience. I like to add a bit to what she writes, so...
I've embedded above the 5-minutes-plus-credits “Kase-san and Morning Glories” video that @Goyavoyage mentioned. You can think of it either as a teaser trailer for what later became the Kase-san OVA or as a music video that stands alone. Either way it's a lovely video, and you can tell that the people who made it really love the manga and put their hearts and souls into animating it. I've embedded the official Pony Canyon version, which I'm pretty sure won't disappear. Unfortunately it doesn't have English subtitles; here's one that does.
One thing that is a virtue of the Kase-san series that I think eventually becomes a weakness: the series has a bright and rose-colored view of the world that is very endearing and inspiring. Pretty much everybody loves Kase-san and Yamada, both within the story and without. So whatever conflict and angst exists arises primarily from internal sources, e.g., Yamada’s fears and jealousies.
This works well while their relationship is being established, but once they become a couple for real and the story moves to them attending university (i.e., in the Kase-san and Yamada sequel) it gets to be a bit contrived and repetitive. It might have been better if Takeshima had turned the manga into a pure slice-of-life rather than trying to periodically inject fresh doses of drama into it.
But that's a minor quibble. Overall the entire series is one of the best (if not the best) examples of “wholesome yuri”. (I mean, even the sex scenes are wholesome!)
One thing that is a virtue of the Kase-san series that I think eventually becomes a weakness: the series has a bright and rose-colored view of the world that is very endearing and inspiring. Pretty much everybody loves Kase-san and Yamada, both within the story and without. So whatever conflict and angst exists arises primarily from internal sources, e.g., Yamada’s fears and jealousies.
This works well while their relationship is being established, but once they become a couple for real and the story moves to them attending university (i.e., in the Kase-san and Yamada sequel) it gets to be a bit contrived and repetitive. It might have been better if Takeshima had turned the manga into a pure slice-of-life rather than trying to periodically inject fresh doses of drama into it.
I would say I agree -- I think at first this feels like something that occurs naturally in the comic. If you read the first volume, there's actually a lot of content in it that just goes by wordlessly. In the early stages of their relationship, neither character is portrayed as coming from a lifestyle of talking much. They're silent, and slightly aloof. And that leads to some of these relationship anxieties coming up and the two of them finding them hard to address naturally, because it's so outside their regular skill set.
And of course the problem is that because nothing bad ever really happens to them, the lack of developing that skill set, even as the manga becomes more focused on dialogue and conversations, increasingly stretches credulity. It's a similar sort of storytelling to what you might get out of Morinaga Milk, where the characters are just inherently anxious and that's their main source of conflict. Of course both characters actually have a pretty good wealth of resources at their disposal, and in real life most likely someone would have at some point suggested they get checked out for an anxiety disorder.
Now, that said, the newest chapter seems to be trying to bring this anxiety/communication arc to a denouement; things are, broadly, looking up, and the characters are being open in recognizing their flaws. If you asked me how I'd take the story from here, it would be specifically about how they negotiate communication between each other, as it's not something they've had to deal with to the extent that they do from here on out, and with more of a focus on a shorter-term conflicts with happy endings compared to, say, How Do We Relationship.
Whether or not that actually happens is of course up in the air, but either way I found the series a pretty easy read, though the explicit nudity in the bath chapter in one of the volumes of the first series (high school / Kase-san &...) may not be to everyone's tastes. It's a bit disappointing that, with the new series, the new publisher doesn't seem to be as interested in depictions of nudity, so despite having a few intimate scenes between the two of them as adults, you actually wind up seeing less of their bodies. An editorial decision that hits kinda weird.
If you want a similarly anxious relationship but with more explicit sexual scenarios you could pick up My Cute Little Kitten by Morinaga Milk, or if you want something that's a bit more serene and laid-back that develops its relationship at a similar pace, you could read Ano Koro ni Aoi Hoshi (which you'd have to get from greymarket sources in English). Both can be supported by crowdfunding; the former is published in Galette, which is supportable on Fantia, and the latter is self-published by the author on Fanbox.
In addition to pointing out this additional rechost by the OP (which I'm putting in a link to prevent everyone's timeline from blowing up), I got a comment on my last post by @StillEnjoyingManga that I think deserves more attention than to just sit as a comment; my curmudgeonliness got in my way, I think, because I certainly agree with the points being made here:
It's the same publisher. The tanks are even still published under Hirari's imprint. In Wings magazine it apparently has more restrictions than Web Wings, but the tanks should still have the same freedom as the early volumes.
I think its approach to nudity has made sense for what the different scenes were trying to achieve.
With regard to the first point I was thinking that this might be like a Yuri Hime / YH Wildrose sort of difference, though admittedly even in the original series the majority of the nudity in the chapter I was thinking of only existed in the tankoubon. Of course since Wildrose was phased out, they've had no issue putting sexually explicit content like "does it count if you lose your viriginity to an android" in main YH issues.
(I also was probably confusing Hirari and Tsubomi, the latter of which was more likely to actually have series that were fetish-focused. They're different publishers; Hirari and Wings are Shinshokan, while Tsubomi was Houbunsha -- who are also the publishers of all the Kirara lines. A very silly mistake in retrospect.)
And while I grouse, I do think that I have to agree. I want to be clear: I think Takashima is a master of communicating tone through the story's art, and I agree that the chapter in question (chapter 8) uses nudity very effectively to communicate. You don't usually see the sort of headless figure shots that the middle of chapter 8 throws at you as a reader, and it comes across as very voyeuristic and uncomfortable -- and that's entirely the point! For me as a guy where there'd basically be no circumstance where seeing that in that context would be a crime, though, it's maybe a bit too effective at creating those feelings of discomfort (which is what I mean about being a curmudgeon here).
In comparison the actual sex scenes in the follow-up manga are subdued and almost the opposite of voyeuristic. While I'm on the side of "the human body isn't shameful and shouldn't need to be covered up in these contexts" the sparing detail does also impart a delicateness and joy to the scenes that isn't present in the other scene in question. The most recent one is one of the most joy-filled intimate scenes I've seen in a manga, along with an also not-explicitly-sexual scene between Saeko and Yuri in How Do We Relationship.
Ultimately, I grouse, but can't deny the point -- they get the feelings across very effectively.
