I think the person who suggested that this is the author rushing through the plot points they had planned is spot on. I think they had this beautiful mental image of a slow burn arc where Uta goes to college and has somebody crush on her while Kaoru sorts her life out while taking strength from Uta's love, and they were told to just finish it because readers are losing interest and this is the author just going "oh goddammit fuck fuck fine here's what it was going to be whatevs i'm done"

I mean, I'm pretty sure the idea here is that Uta and Kaoru are effectively married at this point.

Fun point to note, We're all saying double timeskip...I think there's actually three. First we skip to immediate post-divorce Kaoru, THEN we jump to Uta in college, THEN we jump to domestic bliss.

Yes, and good call on the extra time shift.

Given that it took 35 chapters (not counting extras) to accomplish "Kaoru realizes that her marriage is a pile of crap" and "Uta can't bear living with Kaoru but still has feelings for her," the events you describe would be, what, 15 more volumes?

(Let's see, at least 8 chapters for the "negotiating with Reiichi about how they're all going to live in the same building" arc, and then . . .)

Slow burn, indeed.

Well then, at least the tittle didn't lie though.

I think they had this beautiful mental image of a slow burn arc where Uta goes to college and has somebody crush on her while Kaoru sorts her life out

How much do you wanna bet that the someone with a crush was pitched as a guy and the editor was like, "Well, I tried. Axe the series."

THAT ENDING AHHHHH

Yay! now that this pile of slow burnt poop is over I hope author moves to making sweet and wholesome stuff again

Ah I wanted more closure than that

Edit: The people here are toxic as fuck, Jesus fucking Christ. I hated the ending but saying the author betrayed you and it wasn’t worth your time is fucking hypocritical when all of us are leeching free entertainment from that author’s livelihood.

last edited at Oct 21, 2020 2:53AM

Ah I wanted more closure than that

Edit: The people here are toxic as fuck, Jesus fucking Christ. I hated the ending but saying the author betrayed you and it wasn’t worth your time is fucking hypocritical when all of us are leeching free entertainment from that author’s livelihood.

Yeah, i have to agree, a lot of overreaction here and disgusting remark here. I'll admit im a bit toxic as well, i hated the ending a lot because i know what tMnR capable of (atleast based on her Love Live doujinshi, which is really good IMO), and it did showed promise at first, but in my opinion it went downhill from there, and ended so bad that it doesnt exactly instil a great confidence on me for her next serialization. But as you said, i'm leeching of her livelihood, so i wont go as far as the author betrayed me or wasting my time.

Talking about supporting author though, i would love to support a bunch of authors if their books is easily obtainable in my area. Fuck me for living in third world country, where LGBT was shunned to hell and back, even as a simple as showing support was condemned. Only thing available here at best are subtext yuri, even then it was censored to wiped out the yuri. Anyway, /rant over.

They live across from each other now so that they can still be one big happy family ever after. The end.

Eh? What happened? Im confused, o.o arerere well that was fastending tho xD

I think the person who suggested that this is the author rushing through the plot points they had planned is spot on. I think they had this beautiful mental image of a slow burn arc where Uta goes to college and has somebody crush on her while Kaoru sorts her life out while taking strength from Uta's love, and they were told to just finish it because readers are losing interest and this is the author just going "oh goddammit fuck fuck fine here's what it was going to be whatevs i'm done"

Nah, if you get axed 30 chapters in, they give you a couple of chapters to wrap the story up. Let's say she got two, ch36 and ch37, for a total of 59 pages. She just wrote ch35, where Kaoru talks with Risako, learns the truth about her husband and ends up in tears.

So, how she starts her remaining two chapters? 13 pages to get from point A to point B, with 22% of the remaining pages wasted instead of being used more meaningfully. No way. If she just wanted Kaoru talk with Uta she could have continued from ch35 and made Kaoru go to Uta in tears, saying that she had nowhere else to go. Two panels instead of 13 pages, with the rest for more important stuff. Not the best, but better than this.

If she put those 13 pages it's because they are more important than the content of this chapter. Why? Simple, reread the last chapter and you'll see that that is the ending. The story of Uta's unrequited love ended last chapter with Uta saying that she'll keep her unrequited love, and it's now up to Kaoru. This chapter is just the aftermath.

That was.... Horrible way to end... Disappointing and not even one kiss to help us cope

As the title suggests...an Unrequited love, oh how shocking. But the last page suggests that those two get to know each other again and since Uta is all grown up now she's a different person and who knows maybe fall in love requitedly.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
OH MY GOD..IS THIS WHO WE ARE? IS THIS WHAT WE REPRESENT?

that ending is way too disappointing..like what on earth.. 4years and ended just like that

That was a really weak ending that didn't resolve any character arcs. Really feels like it was canned. What really sucks is that we never found out what was up with Risako. She was by far the most interesting character in this and she was like the only reoccurring character to not appear in the last chapter. Just a mention.

This series is like YagaKimi would have been if the author wanted a happy ending but had no earthly idea how to develop Touko’s character beyond forbidding Yuu to be in love with her, so the story just skipped over the part where she changed.

(Oh, yeah, and Sayaka would just be a nasty jealous bitch.)

Ah I wanted more closure than that

Edit: The people here are toxic as fuck, Jesus fucking Christ. I hated the ending but saying the author betrayed you and it wasn’t worth your time is fucking hypocritical when all of us are leeching free entertainment from that author’s livelihood.

Some people, myself included, were excited when this got picked up for distribution outside of Japan. Unfortunately, the author's choices have made me completely reconsider buying this series and supporting them once it's possible. Buyers and potential buyers both have the right to criticize an author for such a terrible ending, so go back to Twitter if you feel it necessary to call valid criticism "toxic."

I think it was a pretty well put together ending. The only thing that's not completely clear is whether they are just living together or are together, but that's not necessarily a key point.

Kaoru found herself while living for herself, which was necessary to show that now she will do what she wants, not what she feels she should, or what her mother would want her to do.

Uta went to uni, seen more of the world, met more people, and with new knowledge reforged her conviction of waiting for Kaoru, giving those feelings more legitimacy and maturity.

Within a few more years Uta and Kaoru met again and are, presumably, together.

I don't see any need to expand on gap years, it's mostly self-explanatory as to what happened from other dialogue. I'm honestly at a bit of a loss as to what more people would want to see. I think being more explicit in unnecessary points would be to the detriment of the story.

I think being more explicit in unnecessary points would be to the detriment of the story.

People have made a version of this argument all along, and frankly I think it's ridiculous--these are not "unnecessary" points but the only absolutely necessary ones.

This series posed one basic problem at the start: Uta was romantically in love with her sister-in-law, who loved her only as a friend and family member. How would Uta's conflict be resolved?

• Kaoru might never come to love Uta romantically, so Uta would have to move on with her life. (The title at least suggested this might be the outcome.) This is the tragic or bittersweet ending.

• Kaoru might somehow change her feelings toward Uta so as to come to love her romantically as well. That story would need to show how and why such a change occurred. This is, of course, the happy ending.

Without some definitive resolution of the central question, we are left with two possibilities:

• Uta continues to live with Karou, who still loves her only as a friend and family member, which in the past caused Uta dire emotional pain. If living with Kaoru no longer causes such pain, we have not been shown how or why her feelings have changed.

• Karou is now in love with Uta, but we have not been told how or why her feelings toward Uta changed.

The story actually did quite a bit of work to show how Karou's feelings toward Reiichi changed, (something that would need to happen before she could be with Uta as a partner) but it developed almost nothing about a change in her feelings toward Uta.

The argument that the story doesn't need to show how its central thematic issue gets resolved because readers can just headcanon in the details is really no argument at all.

last edited at Oct 21, 2020 10:55AM

I’m spechless... Why ??? ......... I can’t put my reaction through words ... I’m leaving

aaaaaaaaand it got axed, quite hard as well I must say. Guess another one bites the dust

Even if I can agree that those feelings could have been expanded upon, I don't think I agree that nothing has been said about it either.

Considering all the events (at least how I see it):
- they stopped being family after the divorce, scene at the grave also states rather directly that their time as a family is over,
- Kaoru moved away and they didn't see each other for at least a year,
- Kaoru is shown dedicated to living for her own sake and working to build her own happiness,
- Kaoru came back after a long time and end up living with Uta as adults,
I think that pretty much the only conclusion one can get out of the story is that she explored the feeling and came to the conclusion that, with her familial obligation gone and, presumably, feelings for Uta remaining, she can love her for her. Not because of the obligation of loving a family member or fear of being left alone etc. Love her for the sake of being happy.

There is also a much smaller probability, that Kaoru is a sadist and willingly jumped into a situation where she drains Uta's affection for her own happiness, while not reciprocating her feelings, but she was not portrayed as that kind of person, so I don't think it makes sense.

I also don't think that Kaoru remained unshaken in interpreting her love for Uta as loving a family member until the very end. The end of ch 35 IMHO shows that she at least might consider Uta's love as what she longed for romantically. A "genuine" love, not based on any obligations or other factors.

And even if I agree that open-ended conclusions are usually a way for the author to avoid commitment to a specified ending, I think this one works rather well, even if it leaves some space for interpretation.

last edited at Oct 21, 2020 12:12PM

dissapointment , but it was a fun ride. I loved the friend's couple more than the main couple.

Even if I can agree that those feelings could have been expanded upon, I don't think I agree that nothing has been said about it either.

Considering all the events (at least how I see it):
- they stopped being family after the divorce, scene at the grave also states rather directly that their time as a family is over,
- Kaoru moved away and they didn't see each other for at least a year,
- Kaoru is shown dedicated to living for her own sake and working to build her own happiness,
- Kaoru came back after a long time and end up living with Uta as adults,
I think that pretty much the only conclusion one can get out of the story is that she explored the feeling and came to the conclusion that, with her familial obligation gone and, presumably, feelings for Uta remaining, she can love her for her. Not because of the obligation of loving a family member or fear of being left alone etc. Love her for the sake of being happy.

There is also a much smaller probability, that Kaoru is a sadist and willingly jumped into a situation where she drains Uta's affection for her own happiness, while not reciprocating her feelings, but she was not portrayed as that kind of person, so I don't think it makes sense.

I also don't think that Kaoru remained unshaken in interpreting her love for Uta as loving a family member until the very end. The end of ch 35 IMHO shows that she at least might consider Uta's love as what she longed for romantically. A "genuine" love, not based on any obligations or other factors.

And even if I agree that open-ended conclusions are usually a way for the author to avoid commitment to a specified ending, I think this one works rather well, even if it leaves some space for interpretation.

I have agreed all along in these discussions that readers are capable of making up material in their own heads that will enable this story to make sense--readers have in fact expended enormous amounts of imaginative labor doing so.

But I don't think anybody can point to one single piece of evidence contained in the actual text itself that Kaoru has ever had any sexual interest in girls generally or in Uta in particular. We do know, however, that she has had a serious and long-lived interest in heterosexual relationships, and we have seen her in sexual situations with her husband.

If the story means for us to believe that she has now developed romantic feelings for Uta, that means that we have had dozens of chapters showing in great detail Kaoru's growing awareness that her marriage was unsatisfactory, and exactly zero panels depicting her romantic/sexual feelings toward Uta.

In any case, we certainly have wildly different ideas of what constitutes an ending that "works rather well."

last edited at Oct 21, 2020 1:33PM

Buyers and potential buyers both have the right to criticize an author for such a terrible ending, so go back to Twitter if you feel it necessary to call valid criticism "toxic."

Comments have a right to criticize other comments.