SEABIRDZ that is a legendary post, it's going on my wall.

Super unpopular opinion probably but the sex scenes, graphic and all, were too focused on penetration. A little boring and not what I personally look for in yuri (I read some het when the fancy strikes and these honestly registered more like sex scenes in het. There are ways to write/draw sex w trans women that don't fall into this btw.) Still, it'd be great to get more NSFW yuri of this quality, w more Rilke quotes please.

yeah agreed. this was something i noticed too. it's hard to explain but the whole thing felt like it was framing ruri as Male(tm) instead of just girl-who-has-a-penis. i don't read this artist for the sex so much as the art and story, so i just kinda overlooked it but... the sex dynamic felt bizarrely het for being ostensibly a yuri love triangle, which is a shame.

Yeah the main thing that distinguishes futa stuff is that having a dick usually gives you a magic sex drive that makes you constantly raring to go. I enjoy my fair share of it, but its definitely not super relatable if you're comparing it to sex with actual trans women haha.

I loved how the story started pretty tame but somewhere around chapter 3 just went fully into high symbolism craziness with the play and the boulder and stuff. On a reread you can tell how much the author's paneling and composition improved throughout the work, as well as how the sex took on a much more narrative role for advancing the character's own states. As other's have said, the crumbling status quo that eventually bursts wide open at the end was really well executed and overall just so much depth and meaning crammed into just 5 chapters.

I think this is pretty important context, specifically for the Sisyphus boulder metaphor. It's my belief that the boulder isn't about Hime trying to keep her feelings for Rurino hidden, but about maintaining the status quo.

This is correct. The Sisyphus myth isn't so much cited directly as the interpretation of it by Camus, where this is broadly how he interprets the myth in the context of the human condition. How does Sisyphus live? He has this specific task he must accomplish day-in, day-out, and he never so fully completes it (pushing the boulder all the way up the hill) that he is able to complete the task, but must spend yet another day in basically the same state as he did before. Now, Camus is not an ancient philosopher; his essay is certainly written inside of a capitalist economy, but I think he is broadly correct that the notion of a daily grind is pretty universal for humanity across history, especially considering people gathering professional expertise in a field and the need we all have to feed ourselves. That is, you, as a typical human being, probably have a routine workflow that you're confident in your ability to do and has some social value. It is an experience slightly different from the Sisyphus myth because it's not a divine punishment being inflicted upon you, but the limitations of your existence are certainly things that are outside of your power.

Camus comes up with an interesting interpretation of the myth in this context: we should think of Sisyphus not as suffering, but as happy, because his experience is ours. What value is there to life if all we could expect from it is misery? If Sisyphus cannot push the boulder over the hill, why would he put any effort into this task? So, yes, ultimately Camus gets brought up because his interpretation of Sisyphus and us is that maybe we should think about us being content with the status quo, because the struggle of survival is real and we'll never be rid of it.

If you've seen Burden of Dreams, the documentary about Werner Herzog making the film Fitzcarraldo, which is also centered around the metaphor of pushing a really big thing -- in this case, a boat -- up a hill. Herzog is clearly making some reference to Sisyphus in his construction of the film and about the creative process (the realization of the creative impulse as a material product, the labor of turning thing and idea). Fitzcarraldo is based on a true story, but the person the film is based on did not try to push the boat up the hill in one piece, instead choosing to take it apart in pieces where it could be more easily carried. It's a more striking scene visually, but Burden of Dreams spends a lot of time making it clear there's more to the metaphor than just the idea of "we move boat". If it were, there would have been much easier ways to portray the movement of the boat on film than what actually happened.

Burden of Dreams also gives us this excellent monologue from Herzog about what the jungle is like. While he does not explicitly reference Camus at some point, he focuses on the jungle as a crowded place of banal survival and obscenity, and, he says, despite his negative description of it and, in his words, his better judgment, no, he loves the jungle. In a way, I would claim that he sees everything in the jungle, from the trees to the vines to the smallest insects as their own Sisyphus per Camus, happy in their struggle.

It's also just a great monologue in general and as I was writing this post up I came to the conclusion that if I were ever asked to publish a review of Orihi Chihiro's work, I would probably just quote from this monologue. (It should be noted that there's a lot of Bataille's frameworks of eroticism and degradation in Herzog's interpretation of the jungle here, too, and I do think that it might help make sense of some of what the author is getting at with the reading list.)

I will say that I am less familiar with any given Love Live setting; most of what I know of Hasunosora comes from fanwork like this. From the (sigh) fandom wiki page, I can see why someone would look at Rurino and immediately think of the Sisyphus myth, where she seeks to find the fun in anything and to keep the people around her happy. It's interesting that this story is largely focused on her inability to maintain a happy, stable relationship between Hime and Megumi, due to their tense competing interest in her attention / sexual availability, and that this was spurred on by Megumi wanting to make sure that Rurino was not under excessive tension.

I think the creativity metaphor is fitting with Hime, as well, in the same way that the comment now suggests that Hime is no longer an ascended fan but an equal part of mira-cra park with Megumi. In the first chapter, she sees herself as far less than equal to the established [business] yuri couple of Megumi and Ruruino. If her goal was to embody the same lesbian energy as her faves when she started out, then she managed to perfectly manifest her creative desires by the end of the story, something that she was so uncomfortable with doing at the beginning that she effectively depersonalized, objectified herself to be part of.

last edited at Oct 15, 2026 1:24AM