Oh wow, I'm very interested in this, I think. Lots of thoughts. Uh, let's see:
1) The conception of tengu as 'sky-eaters' who consume the heavens is fucking metal and entirely too cool for what seem to be largely a bunch of uptight warring houses squabbling over airspace and indoctrinating cool kids like Kureha into thinking that they need to belong and serve the nation to be valid and valued. I hope she eventually realizes that the power of flight is just objectively better if you're using it to mock the silliness of borders and traditions and transcend everything to kiss your birb GF at the first blush of dawn above the cloudscape. (Also very interested in the other Eaters)
2) Loooooove the art. It reminds me of a bit of those wildlife photos that focus in to grab a snapshot of a diving bird juuuust above the surface of a lake or in the process of hooking onto prey, wherein the surroundings are shifting out of focus due to the immense speed of the event, but the camera still captures the ruffling of feathers, the glint of talons, the sparkle of raptor's formidable eye, all that jazz. For some reason, I just adore art that's very obviously 'doujin-y' (?) in the sense that it's not really even trying to look fully composite and is openly like, "Aight, this is my blorbo rendered with beautiful precision in an idle moment and around are chicken scratchings and sketches to create a sense of space and signify that there exist people who are not my blorbo, but who I have rendered regardless to give my little guy abstract little creatures to interact with". You also sort of see this in Caelum (another new yuri series I'm mildly obsessed with) and I just find it really fun when a series is just sorta wavy and bouncy and scribble-y and foregrounds the "Uhh, um, lotsa ideas that make brain go whirr and I gotta just, um, splash them all onto a wall right, right now" aspect of creativity and art as opposed to the illusion of a very coherent, organized, 'complete' edifice with all the Unities and Phases and whatnot. It's a good energy, is what I'm saying.
3) Really interested in the author's note about visual novels and stuff? I've been very intermittently reading Akai Ito (the pacing is sorta glacial even for a VN, but Kei's internal monologue is hilarious enough to keep me coming back; she's such a funny little wood pigeon of a human being and I hope beautiful women fire her out over the horizon and take turns shooting at her in a very homoerotic way) and I definitely felt that same sorta, hard-to-define-but-you-definitely-know-it-if-you've-encountered-it type of 2000s occultish cryptid shoujo yuri vibe from this series, wherein you've got ambitions and worldbuilding and big concepts, but also this strange sense of fragility and obscurity that came from the overall nicheness of yuri in those (and also these) years that the creators were also aware of on some level, which just gives these stories a strangely frail, wispy, fever-dreamish vibe, as if they could vanish and pop in the telling and leave you wondering if all that actually just happened (there's probably a tangent you could build on there about queer media self-conceptualized as ephemera on the margins of the mainstream that constantly negotiates, alloys, undercuts and inscribes its own obscurity with and upon tropes taken from the mainstream zeitgeist and complicated, queered, in sense if not in system...). Anyway, it's interesting to see that the author's also taken inspiration from those works and I hope they do successfully get the VN out someday, because I'd be really interested in a Japanese fantasy multi-route yuri VN, which is a subtype that's distressingly rare in the already-niche genre of yuri VNs- like, I actually tend to prefer the linear, one-set-couple-narratively-centered approach that a lot of the current yuri VNs take in general because it allows for quality-over-quantity and yuri VNs already tend to be much shorter than regular ones on average, buuuuut I also just really want to see a yuri work being bold and ambitious and colossal and multibranched and trying a dozen different things at once across a messy-ass epic narrative of conspiracies and allegiances and paradigm shifts, because the genre deserves that kind of space and reach (and also because I, personally, deserve a work massive enough to lose myself in and hyperfixate on for ages that's not a fucking gacha game oozing repetitive, soulless content out for however many years it can milk for profits, which is why I like big VNs and also fantasy novel series- they're immense, complex and filled with the potential for interpretations and fanwork and speculation while also crucially being complete and driven by an installment-model that's centered mostly on artistic vision and not indefinitely-extensible-profit-generation-schemes).
Anyway, yeah. Me like this series. Hyped for more.
