Forum › Land of the Tengu discussion

Win%202
joined Nov 12, 2020

Tengus which AREN'T Touhou related?

How intriguing...

Yaa%20898
joined Apr 24, 2022

Tengus which AREN'T Touhou related?

How intriguing...

really???
impossible

joined Jan 5, 2018

I find the artwork makes it hard to read and understand what is happening with this one.

F94f4454-2d43-4522-a33a-00c2b6de5666b
joined Jul 24, 2020

they used akai ito as a reference, now i'm VERY curious to see what's up with the story

joined Jan 13, 2021

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.

Yuibless
joined Jan 30, 2017

they used akai ito as a reference, now i'm VERY curious to see what's up with the story

Sexy blood-sucking, probably.

But seriously, anything related to Akaiito/Aoishiro instantly fires me up, I love those VNs so much!

joined Aug 21, 2017

I like the chapter because of the wings because they are big and go "whoosh"

Yuu
joined Mar 28, 2015

Hum... While the Tengu theme looks interesting, it's kinda confusing and kinda bland at the same time.

I feel like I've seen that plot in other settings.

And the art is both nice and art to read.

last edited at Jun 25, 2022 4:14AM

18992b47e3036da3324d1a85848e4b9e
joined Jul 16, 2019

Kujou Sara Where?

Avatar
joined Dec 18, 2020

Tengus which AREN'T Touhou related?

How intriguing...

Well looking at the artist's pixiv there is a lot of Touhou on there.

Ykn1
joined Dec 20, 2018

Interesting start, hard to tell where it's going from here, though. Hoping for the best, then, but remaining cautious.

joined Jul 26, 2016

Oh hey it's that Japanese OCD about shoehorning every. fucking. thing. into a totally-not-modern-highschool-without-serials "academy" setting again .-.

ArtemisOnVtubers
1689895377338
joined Dec 16, 2021

Girls with wings are great
I am predicting that teacher will made this a love triangle

Sayaka_ava
joined Nov 23, 2014

Needs more tengu noses.

Tumblr_p5pa4n7ag21tandono1_400
joined Feb 21, 2019

You know what they say about girls with big wings

joined Jun 10, 2022

Seems promising. Loving the gay birb girls

Pocchi-avatar2
joined Jun 15, 2021

Not bad. For some reason I thought suddenly about Kouga Yun's Earthian when I read this manga. Maybe I just like creatures with wings, whether it is an angel, or a Japanese myth character.

last edited at Jun 26, 2022 1:01AM

lord-of-roses
Ce1
joined Apr 11, 2016

Winged Girls. Just what I wanted .

joined Mar 20, 2012

Kujou Sara Where?

The only reason I knew what a tengu was before this manga.

Aaaaaaahmaka!!!
joined Jul 22, 2014

Very interesting and original, let's hope for a long history

Smol%20dankkonata
joined Oct 10, 2018

This is interesting so far, but quite a bit of an information overload. Too many characters too fast for sure. I still have pretty high hopes though, good stuff.

joined Jan 13, 2021

Oh wow, I didn't think I'd be seeing a follow-up to this one anytime soon. I really love this series' worldbuilding and ideas in general, since the application of a lot of general fantasy elements such as unique superpowers and ruling clans with dark secrets is nevertheless refreshed and honed by the very specific focus on tengu, flight and nobility that defines the premise. I'd be pretty interested in this setup even if it wasn't yuri, and I'd argue that establishing a strong collection of central themes and motifs will also make the sensual elements that much more compelling and striking when they do take center stage. Case in point, the establishment of Shizuki's gemstone-eating tradition and Kureha's fiery spirit made that scene where she's enchanted by Kureha's ember-gemmed eyes immensely more layered and complex than an equivalent 'Your eyes are so pretty' exchange without the added context would be- is Shizuki moved by the poetry of it all? Will she now hunger for Kureha's gem in a possessive, consumptive way? Shall the flame she'll almost certainly be savoring set her cool blood alight like a sun on the winds? And will Kureha, glowing upon inspection, made ever more glimmering in the radiance of Shizuki's brilliance, discover facets she never knew she had, come to value herself in new and ambitious ways? The possibilities are endless. Worldbuilding was created so gay people could engineer their own universes with physics and cultures that allow for otherwise-unimaginable exercises of homosexuality, and so this is the grandest application of the fantasy genre. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

P.S: I also love how the tengu's wings are framed as not purely biological, but granted upon them by a deity and thus a symbol of the degree to which they're favored by the heavens. In a practical sense, it is a cultural narrative that helps justify their ruling systems of clans, inheritance and family trades, building upon the mythic-motif of a birthright to imbue the privileged with a sense of genealogical supremacy while also encouraging those less-blessed (by standards the ruling classes have created, mind) to meekly accept their lot in life and perpetuate this unequal system. Even so, wings may likely break, bend, fail or be torn away, and the family superpowers are known to manifest in different ways, including virtually unprecedented ones like Kureha's, making people like her sites of tension, struggle and doubt, especially as she comes to lose certainty in her brutally competitive and hierarchical view of tengu society. Moreover, the tengu being granted wings by an unseen deity implies themes of stewardship, regency and an interpretive merit that may very well be overturned by force, allowing successful usurpers to claim that they now have heaven's mandate and recognition, staking new claims to segments of a fundamentally indivisible and unquantifiable sky (only a mildly exaggerated version of what happens with political disputes over land). The tension between the current narratives of descent, royalty and divine rights of rule established by the latest alliance and the lurking threat of an uprising from within or without that plunges the sky back into jungle law and makes the tengu as animals and humans again seems to inform in miniature the relations between our present characters. I do hope that either this series or the planned visual novel explores these themes in greater detail (just give me one route where birb-bians tear an autarch's wings off at the crest of a blooming horizon).

joined Apr 16, 2022

I kinda wanted Kureha to remain hostile to Shizuki a bit longer since I really enjoy the "one-sided rivalry leads to love" premise, but it is more realistic that she'd mellow out after actually interacting with the object of her envy and resentment.

I'm really enjoying how the author is using the fantasy elements to spice up and make deeper typical romance tropes. For example, as Temp says above, the "your eyes are beautiful" scene becomes a lot more meaningful since Kureha's eyes both represent her own clan and herself (the fire within them being her clan's birthright but also her own unique ability) and the gemstones which both form the basis of Shizuki's clan power and are literally consumed by them. The world building has been pretty heavy in this manga but as long as it continues to be used to provide context and nuance to the characters I think it's totally justified and often pretty fascinating.

I'm also, of course, very much enjoying Temp's commentary lol.

18992b47e3036da3324d1a85848e4b9e
joined Jul 16, 2019

Kujou Sara Where?

The only reason I knew what a tengu was before this manga.

Me neither

last edited at Aug 9, 2022 2:48AM

joined Aug 21, 2017

The art change is really "be careful who you call ugly in middle school". My word that's an upgrade.

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