y'all don't know anyone who's been in an abusive relationship huh

y'all don't know anyone who's been in an abusive relationship huh

I know people who were and managed to leave. And they suffered less than this trainwreck.

Ok, this is starting to sound like she got brainwashed by one of those cults in Japan.

Got more and more anxious as that "Look at the Road!" segement went on

I'm shocked there wasn't a truck-kun cameo especially given it's a fairly rural highway at night

Things are getting too intense... I'm excited to see what's next but I'm afraid too.

Man, that scene in the car where Kaede is driving really recklessly with Ai pleading to keep her eyes on the road is something I've known before lmao. Being in the passenger seat while the driver is crashing out puts the fear of death in you lmao.

I also really like how the more Kaede talks about fate and how they're connected the more Ai dwells on her relationship to Kon, and how the special connection she and Kaede used to have falls to nothing compared to what she has with Kon right now (though with a side of squandering it).

Deeply unfortunate that Ai's phone got soaked too, though it is a decent way to cut her connection to Kon as it makes a comparatively easy exit impossible. She is now well and truly stuck here until/in case Kon shows up. Because leaving means leaving Kaede to die, and as disillusioned Ai is with Kaede (alongside the emotional abuse she's heaping on Ai) it's deeply hard to leave when by all rights you are made to believe that will cause them to kill themselves.

In many ways, Ai needs Kon to help support her here, because she can't actually stand up against Kaede on her own. Even if she no longer loves Kaede, even if she no longer trusts Kaede, Ai still can't bear to hurt her, afraid of what she might do.

last edited at Jun 13, 2026 6:06AM

Had to reread to understand why Ai wasn't eating the food, Christ. I'll say I really like the direction this is taking, Kaede seemingly flip-flopping between life and death but her flippant attitude towards dangerous situations is really unnerving. Ai is probably extremely exhausted on top of being extremely concerned that someone she cares (cared?) about might take their own life for reasons you can't begin to understand. I find the "just leave" type comments silly. Comparisons to real life abuse victims aside, what kind of melodramas have you all been reading/watching where the protagonist takes the most logical and easiest way out? Yeah, let's just end the entire plot of this manga in one simple chapter and let the main couple have their happily ever after... boring.

Being in the passenger seat while the driver is crashing out puts the fear of death in you lmao.

thankfully have never experienced this happening to someone in the driver's seat, just the shotgun seat, but man it's still nerve-wracking. Cars are just scary man.

Ts garbage

Getting in a car with a murder-suicide proponent is not a good choice.

Ts garbage

what

Can Ai be any stupider? I don't know what she's waiting for to leave that piece of shit. And if she kills herself, so what?! That's not your problem or your fault. Let her just kill herself. Better that way. Ridiculous, staying with that psychopath.

Kaede is a great, manipulative cult of personality who believes everything she herself says with her whole heart. If she ever was putting on a front, that's certainly not how it is now. I'm sure Ai seeing her say everything with such conviction is not helping her be able to leave. The way she talks about the Blue Garnet being inevitable, "why even throw it when it will come right back" so Ai doesn't even try. It's manipulation and Kaede's honest belief.
There's time for my praise to fall apart, but I'm surprised how well this is being handled, and I genuinely don't know how we'll be ending.

last edited at Jun 13, 2026 10:40AM

Oh hey we get to see Kaede's husband again. I was wondering why he wasn't doing anything in the middle of all this

Wow, this sure is horrible. Reminded me of my last ex a little bit.
Will wait for updates with great interest!

The car scene is terrifying. I was in the passenger seat when we avoided a head-on collision by a hair's breadth. It was many years ago, but just thinking about it still scare the shit out of me.
I hope Kon finds Ai before the later psycho ex can "become one" with Ai...

Did Kon san just say..
She's Ai san 's girlfriend? /)⊙///⁠☉(\
( Shouted a little bit.. shouted a little bit Dx)

last edited at Jun 13, 2026 4:28PM

At this stage it will take both Kon and Kaede's husband to deal with the situation. Time can be running out, giving Kaede's continuing being in a murder-suicide mode while Ai is completely unable to leave Kaede out of concern. This is high drama.

oh, she is crazy crazy! Ai is definitely not into Kaede anymore, but she is definitely scared of her killing herself and she doesn't want that. She probably just doesn't want to leave, because if she leaves, Kaede will die.

Aah, Ai always had a foot to leave so now she should make sure she stay

This chapter is a pretty blatant parallel to the scene in chapter 4 where Kon is driving while begging Ai not to die, and Ai is telling her to look at the road. In the next chapter, Kon apologizes for it and says that she doesn't want anyone to get hurt. Here, though, Kaede is totally unapologetic about it and later keeps pushing for a double suicide. So it goes.

There's the thematic parallel of Kon telling Ai, "If you die, I'll die, so don't die," and Kaede telling Ai, "I'm going to die, so come with me." Kaede drags Ai along behind her, and Kon chases after Ai.

Sadly, I'm definitely getting the impression that things aren't going to work out for the better this time around. It was a series of coincidences (or fate, if that's how you want to think of it) that brought Kon and Ai together time and time again, and now, coincidence/fate will drive them apart forever.

I think if anything, my main criticism of this author is that she doesn't know how to write actual happiness. Whenever there's a moment during the story where things are supposed to seem truly alright, it just feels incredibly fake, like you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And those parts also end up feeling obviously rushed, like you can tell the author doesn't really like writing them, and is just eager to "get back to the good stuff". It makes it a little hard to get invested, because a tragic ending feels utterly inevitable. I don't think this author even knows how to write a truly happy story, so I can't believe she'd write a happy ending for this (and for the record, I know she's written non-angsty manga, but my opinion is that they all feel similarly empty and "off").

I suppose that might be fitting for this particular manga (what with the aforementioned themes of "fate" and "inevitability" and all that), but it just makes it a little hard to get emotionally invested when there's not at least some impression that there might be hope, you know? In this case, the story is just so relentlessly miserable the whole way through that it feels monotonous, like wading through Depression Sludge, so even though it's playing with some genuinely compelling themes, I just end up feeling like, "Ehhhhh..." In short, there's too much darkness and not enough light to balance it out, at least for my tastes. Bit too indulgently angsty.

I also think the author is kind of mishandling Kon as a character. Her core conflict was set up so well in the first chapter, but it has been so underutilized and poorly integrated into the rest of the story since then that it feels practically criminal. For one, the parallel between her and Ai having a shared background of being abused seems ripe for exploration, yet it has gone completely unaddressed, and Kon's abusive mother barely has a presence in the story, in stark contrast to Kaede, whose abuse of Ai is the primary driving force of the plot. Kon has had some wonderful moments of characterization sprinkled throughout the work despite that, and she has the makings of a great protagonist, which is why I feel especially sorry for the misery she will soon experience as everything goes to shit.

Well, those are just my thoughts and predictions, at least. I'd love to have my pessimism proven wrong, so we'll just have to wait and see.

(As an aside, I think the color symbolism is interesting. Kaede is red, while Kon and Ai are both blue. Kaede's desire is to merge with Ai and become one with her, but in actuality, Kaede and Ai are on completely different ends of the color spectrum from each other, whereas Kon and Ai are "gradient neighbors" and are therefore much closer to actually merging with each other... That's how I'm inclined to interpret it, at least.)

Ts garbage

what

See it's funny, because for the longest I was used to prejudice representing itself as people ignoring the existence of queer people in fiction even when there was no heterosexual explanation for characters' behavior. Now, we're in a brave new age of transmisics being among the first to propose a queer interpretation of any given text. I'm not sure I like this overcorrection, but if there's a culture war, they've definitely lost it already.

I think if anything, my main criticism of this author is that she doesn't know how to write actual happiness. Whenever there's a moment during the story where things are supposed to seem truly alright, it just feels incredibly fake, like you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And those parts also end up feeling obviously rushed, like you can tell the author doesn't really like writing them, and is just eager to "get back to the good stuff". It makes it a little hard to get invested, because a tragic ending feels utterly inevitable. I don't think this author even knows how to write a truly happy story, so I can't believe she'd write a happy ending for this (and for the record, I know she's written non-angsty manga, but my opinion is that they all feel similarly empty and "off").

I kept struggling to put my finger on what was making this story so unsatisfying and stressful to read when I've enjoyed far messier stories, and now I see that it's this. And that feels weird to me, because I'm keenly aware how much I don't enjoy misery porn. I have an easy time recognizing misery porn in film because I know the visual language they use to accentuate it, but I guess it just doesn't crop up in yuri often enough for me to get a good sense of it. Thank you for sharing.

I think if anything, my main criticism of this author is that she doesn't know how to write actual happiness. Whenever there's a moment during the story where things are supposed to seem truly alright, it just feels incredibly fake, like you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And those parts also end up feeling obviously rushed, like you can tell the author doesn't really like writing them, and is just eager to "get back to the good stuff". It makes it a little hard to get invested, because a tragic ending feels utterly inevitable. I don't think this author even knows how to write a truly happy story, so I can't believe she'd write a happy ending for this (and for the record, I know she's written non-angsty manga, but my opinion is that they all feel similarly empty and "off").

I kept struggling to put my finger on what was making this story so unsatisfying and stressful to read when I've enjoyed far messier stories, and now I see that it's this. And that feels weird to me, because I'm keenly aware how much I don't enjoy misery porn. I have an easy time recognizing misery porn in film because I know the visual language they use to accentuate it, but I guess it just doesn't crop up in yuri often enough for me to get a good sense of it. Thank you for sharing.

I actually wasn't quite sure how to articulate what was bothering me about this story either, until the day I made this comment. It had been nagging at me for a while, too.

I'd actually be curious to hear your take on the visual language of misery porn in film, since it's not something I think I'm particularly adept at recognizing, myself. Either way, this is a very nice comment, thank you. I'm delighted to hear that me sharing my thoughts was able to help you better understand your own.

I'd actually be curious to hear your take on the visual language of misery porn in film, since it's not something I think I'm particularly adept at recognizing, myself.

I feel it mainly comes down to a lot of little tricks they use to emphasize the negative. More use of shadows to prime your mind to expect uncertainty or hiddenness, a more muted color palette and uglier environments to avoid giving any reprieve, characters' default expressions trending towards moody so the viewer mirrors their negative outlook, expressions of grief or pain being carefully not exaggerated so they read as more genuine, the camera lingering longer on people suffering or dying, a sort of reverse-bathos where any genuinely positive moment needs to be negged somehow...I suppose I said "visual", but there's audio cues as well. More scenes have subdued music or ambient tracks, characters bellowing or shouting are given the same dynamic range usually reserved for gunshots and explosions, music swells to emphasize moments of violence or revenge rather than any uplifting moments that come after. Not that all of these are exclusive to misery porn, but seeing several of them in the same shot is usually enough to turn me off something.

Either way, this is a very nice comment, thank you. I'm delighted to hear that me sharing my thoughts was able to help you better understand your own.

^_^

If you think about it, Kaede isn't really wrong about "fate".

In the first chapter, Ai grabs Kon, thinking it was Kaede, even though they don't look alike at all. But somehow, Kon was actually linked to Kaede, as they had crossed path in a gas station. How fateful is that?

Just when Ai was about to get rid of the necklace, it falls under the bed where she find the business card of the husband, which Kon was sure she had thrown away, but somehow resurfaced. What are these coincidences?

In "Brides of Iberis", fate and "God's will" were already implied themes. Here, Akiyama Haru rekindles it with the recurring theme of "fate". It was even the tag line of the first chapter.

So, what does fate has in stock for these 3 women?

last edited at Jun 17, 2026 3:57AM

Ts garbage

what

See it's funny, because for the longest I was used to prejudice representing itself as people ignoring the existence of queer people in fiction even when there was no heterosexual explanation for characters' behavior. Now, we're in a brave new age of transmisics being among the first to propose a queer interpretation of any given text. I'm not sure I like this overcorrection, but if there's a culture war, they've definitely lost it already.

I think you are misreading "ts" as "transsexual" instead of "this shit".