ah, my poor baby :(
that last page where her hands start shaking almost made me cry.
How has this manga gotten good so quickly in the past couple chapters?
It also reminds me of other manga like Still Sick. It must be a thing, for gay women that are in the otaku sphere to like, try to live just through fantasy situations. I mean shit, I definitely do/have done some of that myself. But that image you get of someone else's mind that they've so desperately cut off the possibility of being attracted to anyone in reality to hold their pain inside and protect themselves... it's really tragic. It always makes me want to give them a hug and do some queer mentoring lmao.
I think for me the serial manga side of things where she's observing and building yuri in the school hasn't been that interesting to me, and I don't think it's been particularly well-integrated into the honest, emotional side of things. Even this last chapter, it felt like the entire emotional side of the story was just set down so we could do some more of the yuri watching conceit, and then that was set down for the emotional story to pick back up. They don't weave together. Like the dynamic between the two leads is absolutely fantastic and feels so grounded and real, especially on yoshioka's end slowly and openly coming to terms with her attraction to another girl, but we've only started seeing the same depth on our MC's side in the past couple chapters, it feels like, and that seems to me like kind of a missed opportunity. I can see how having a fairly shallow, episodic manga side of things from the MC's end could be an artistic tool to show how much of her own soul she's left behind by cutting off her genuine attraction to girls and living in a fantasy world, only to break into something more nuanced, connected, and emotional as she's pulled back into a starring role in her own life and overcomes her trauma, but for that genre-representing-psychology view of things I would have expected her yuri shipping to start to collapse and slip into something else as her comfort zone at the bottom of the well is challenged. I just don't see that happening, they seem to be remaining discrete, and I think that's kind of a shame.
The main ship is just so good and adorable, now that yoshioka isn't entirely being ignored, and yoshioka herself has been such a good character that it carries that missed potential and I still really like and look forward to new chapters of this story anyway.
last edited at Apr 3, 2023 8:27PM