This was absolutely golden.
I must admit that I never quite get the perennial complaints about “cliches” and stories being “generic,” etc.—schoolgirl yuri is a genre, not documentary realism, and the characteristic tropes are what make it so. (You might as well complain about detective shows where the protagonist is a maverick who doesn’t play by the rules but always gets the job done, etc.) What matters is what a story does with the tropes, and I think what this one does is almost always surprising and sometimes amazing.
For instance, that kissing scene in chapter 2 has quickly become one of my all-time favorites—Ena pulls away from the sudden kiss not in shock—as we’ve seen a million times before—but because she doesn’t know how to breathe while kissing (there’s a knack to it, dear—just keep practicing), and where other stories would then have the MC brood about the meaning of the kiss for a chapter or two, Ena just pinches Mishio’s cheeks and tells her how cute she is.
Ena was such a sweetheart.
Very true, but “sweetheart” really hardly begins to cover it—Ena is a freaking angst- and drama-destroying yuri super-ninja. Somebody upstream asked how you make a character be so consistently excellent without turning her into an unbelievable Mary Sue. I think this story does it, but at this point I’m not quite sure exactly how. So I’ll have to read it a couple dozen more times and figure it out.
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