Not just that, she's an unreliable narrator for narrating any feeling. A lot of the time she seems trustworthy but then even for basic stuff like fear, her ability to describe the degree of feelings or any sort of nuance is very shaky. For example, she describes the beach at the end of the world in a way that sounds relatively "standard" for Otherside encounters, but they ended up so traumatized that they stayed in Okinawa until they stopped having very literal PTSD attacks. She explicitly claims to have no real problem with shooting threats that look and act completely like real humans, and then goes on to have nightmares about them for a week.

My favorite subtle thing about this story is the Otherside appearing whenever Sorawo starts to get intense feelings. There's the Otherside appearing the moment Toriko drops the bombshell in this chapter, but there's stuff like wandering into the interstitial space when Toriko leaves, or attacked by a Self-blinding monster right after wondering whether she told Toriko about her history, or having the ghosts of her dad and grandma appear right after she has an emotional moment about her future with Toriko. The Otherside seems very much related to Sorawo's terror at encountering normal parts of life she doesn't have a script for. It's almost like she's generally un-selfaware, with anti-cult mode being a comforting state where she's purely acting in self-preservation, and Otherside mode being slammed with too much information about herself at once. Cringe is also a form of continuous attachment.

The mannequins here are a nice symbolic thing. What better to complement the feeling of your body being objectified than a tool to sell clothes. What better way to highlight being kinda okay with Toriko being the one to ogle her than contrasting her against a faceless crowd doing the same?

Not just that, she's an unreliable narrator for narrating any feeling. A lot of the time she seems trustworthy but then even for basic stuff like fear, her ability to describe the degree of feelings or any sort of nuance is very shaky. For example, she describes the beach at the end of the world in a way that sounds relatively "standard" for Otherside encounters, but they ended up so traumatized that they stayed in Okinawa until they stopped having very literal PTSD attacks. She explicitly claims to have no real problem with shooting threats that look and act completely like real humans, and then goes on to have nightmares about them for a week.

My favorite subtle thing about this story is the Otherside appearing whenever Sorawo starts to get intense feelings. There's the Otherside appearing the moment Toriko drops the bombshell in this chapter, but there's stuff like wandering into the interstitial space when Toriko leaves, or attacked by a Self-blinding monster right after wondering whether she told Toriko about her history, or having the ghosts of her dad and grandma appear right after she has an emotional moment about her future with Toriko. The Otherside seems very much related to Sorawo's terror at encountering normal parts of life she doesn't have a script for. It's almost like she's generally un-selfaware, with anti-cult mode being a comforting state where she's purely acting in self-preservation, and Otherside mode being slammed with too much information about herself at once. Cringe is also a form of continuous attachment.

The mannequins here are a nice symbolic thing. What better to complement the feeling of your body being objectified than a tool to sell clothes. What better way to highlight being kinda okay with Toriko being the one to ogle her than contrasting her against a faceless crowd doing the same?

The mannequins also highlight the distance Sorawo feels towards most people who aren't Toriko. :) especially for young neurodivergent people with other shit going on like queerness and trauma, meeting another person who is on the same level as you can feel like finally meeting someone who's the same species compared to the alienation of every other "normal" human. Same with moments like representatives of humans in the "interstitial" space talking unintelligible nonsense compared to Sorawo and Toriko being able to communicate and understand each other.
The timing of the mannequins appearing here lines up not just with Sorawo feeling intense feelings, but also Sorawo and Toriko getting close to being on the same wavelength wrt being gay for each other, unlike all the heteros around them. I think it's worth noting they never see a mannequin Kozakura here :P

last edited at Nov 8, 2024 5:12AM

Creepy mannequins are one of those things that just gets to me. It's the whole Weeping ANgel effect with how they move when you're not looking. Ugh.

Don't blink.

Sorawo's game of Extreme Gay Chicken is catching up to her.

Another chapter showing Sorawo's love (and lust--we didn't miss her accepting how weak she'd be seeing Toriko naked). She's slowly understanding and accepting the feelings that are already there, just in her own way. And there was also ghosts and stuff.

last edited at Nov 21, 2024 1:43PM

I've waited for so long. The next chapters are what the Yuri tag is made for.

Sorawo's game of Extreme Gay Chicken is catching up to her.

I was being heavily reminded of Miyagi and Sendai in 5000 Yen... and "gay chicken" is a perfect term there too.

This chapter was sooo good. I love Sorawo at first selectively remembering the conversation from the hot spring with her dialog box covering her face and selectively missing the most important thing she said, only for her to go back a couple pages later and realize "oh shit yeah I told her I love her didn't I. It's my fault she's acting different now". And then to go even further and realize the problem is entirely with her reactions to Toriko, not Toriko's treatment of her. Love to see that growth and reflection!!

... And now to not address that bath conversation again for half a hundred chapters, I imagine.

Not this time.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/otherside_picnic_ch75#21 Panel 1: I always like smug Sorawo. (But it was a really good idea.)

Are we not gonna talk about Toriko wanting to zip their sleeping bags together???

The sleeping bags, the shared bathing proposals, Toriko smiling happily when Sorawo stubbornly refuses to bring anyone else besides the two of them to the Otherside, etc. Toriko knows pretty much exactly where Sorawo is at thanks to that bath conversation (and stuff like Sorawo trying and only partially succeeding at not looking at Toriko's body), and knows she needs little pushes and reminders to keep moving forward lol. Toriko's basically the very best kind of partner someone like Sorawo could hope for thanks to her ability to read Sorawo's expressions and intentions, and her earnest desire for healthy love between the two of them, and it's so satisfying seeing that dynamic at play.

last edited at Nov 23, 2024 2:32AM

Hand-holding: Check

so i'm at ch66 and i winced REALLY hard at how useless the lesbian was.

really, really hard.

i think i've never winced that hard at uselessness before. i've been a netizen of dynasty for a really long time, after all. i'm used to this sort of thing.

and then i saw it.

beyond the black, with my eyes closed.

You don't need to take responsibility for what you read here. It's pretty neat, you can actually see stuff! It's like there's leftover light in each of the corners of your eyes, and with me wincing harder, they distorted diagonally downwards and my brain thought of them as angry eyes (because of the pareidolia phenomenon), and then I thought "oh wow it's that thing in the manga where they said the brain can do shit after you close your eyes" and my overactive imagination turned them into long, white corridors for a moment. They had long, white hand railings to go along with them for some reason. Which is another perfect example of pareidolia, by the way. So yeah, moral of the story is, if you're too useless of a lesbian, a ghost will come to you!

Ok I'm caught up

Toriko.exe had a catastrophic crash. Please reboot your lesbian.

This made me laugh more than it should have

Omg she finally reunited with her red person, I’m so happy for her ~ warm & cozy

Oh my goodness, thanks for scanlating!

After years (maybe 3-4?) of waiting, I'm gonna finally see it drawn. I can't wait!

To recap my fave scenes drawn just because I'm excited:

1. Chapter 63- Sorawo cuts her hair with a knife when Satsuki grabs it. Then Sorawo has this weird convo with Satsuki before getting slapped by Toriko. This is also when Toriko realizes she loves Sorawo.

2. The next coming chapter (or maybe the one after that depending on the pacing) I can't wait! Bonus: Any scenes with red person

3. The whole Kisaragi Station & Operation Rescue Arc- highlights how well our girls work together at the infancy of their tandem.

Also: Best girl Kozakura. Honestly I didn't think much of her at first, just a normal foil to the tandem. But she grew on me because as you read on, you'll learn she holds all the morality among the whole group. She's genuinely a good girl.

It's a shame that it's impossible to translate the absolute wrongness of the red person in a visual medium, but Mizuno Eita is doing an incredible job as always despite that.

What’s wrong about being warm and safe and wholesome though? Sorawo x Red Person OTP, Toriko is just NTR.

Oh, okay, so that's why she went back home at all - because she met "something" in the hotel, and that "something" took the cultists as sacrifices, I assume. So when she went back, the house was empty.

Interesting to know she's had direct supernatural encounters even before the story. So, is the red person this "something" she meets? I was confused as to how to interpret this chapter, but the comments seem to be implying so.

My favorite subtle thing about this story is the Otherside appearing whenever Sorawo starts to get intense feelings.

Very well observed, I wouldn't have noticed that by myself at all. This work makes me appreciate being able to read alongside others.

Still, it makes me sad. Doesn't this mean that it's not just Sorawo's mentality getting in the way of our yuri, it's the whole Otherside itself? Sheesh, can't two girls get frisky in peace?

Yes, the red person has appeared before during the pandora box chapter, and there’s a short paragraph in the LN quite early that talks about her first meeting with one while she is on the run the cult and her belief that it is her mother. Not sure exactly where it is in the manga, but seems important enough I’m sure it’s there.

I think it’s fair to say that the Otherside is closely tied to both Sorawo and Toriko and that Sorawo has massive unresolved trauma that takes a lot of time to work through, not a single epiphany moment (of which we’ve had a few so far). Kozakura has been perceptive about this trauma and skeptical that Toriko can date her - comes up a lot in the hot springs chapter.

^ Gotcha, didn't catch that on my first read either. Going to reread Pandora's Box next, then (not before I reread Toriko telling Sorawo her boobs are cute, though).

As for rereading - isn't this stuff happening right now?

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/otherside_picnic_ch63#19

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/otherside_picnic_ch63#20

So, that day was red, she cut something off (maybe this is Toriko shooting the Sorawo-faced goat?), the horned faces came flowing (definitely happening right now)... Sorawo would die, there would be a trial, it's unforgivable as a person, and because she can't forgive it, Sorawo would burn down, and when only her bones are left, she would come to the otherside...

The order of these is really hard to pin down. Does that mean Sorawo is dead right now, and what's happening is the trial? Then what comes next is everything burning down, like the red person originally told Sorawo to do back then (the bit with the kerosene).

last edited at Jan 28, 2025 9:32PM

Wow good eye. Yeah that seems directly related to the red person stuff.

Since it’s not in the same place in the manga, here’s the specific short, self contained except from the LNs where the red person first really appears. This is the first text in LN3 case file 9 Yamanoke Presence - so seven case files before where we are now.

Back when I was still just a victim... During the time I left the house to get out from under the eyes of the cult, and was hiding out in the ruins of a love hotel, I can’t confidently say that I was sane. So, I’m not entirely sure why it is that I thought the big red person that embraced me from behind as I lay in the fetal position in a makeshift bed of dusty linens was my mom. Still, for some reason, the experience was a warm memory for me. That was why, when dawn broke, I immediately left the hotel and returned home. Then, I waited in the tatami room, alone with a tank of kerosene, for what felt like forever. I remember when night fell, and the house went dark, I felt awfully lonely. At the time, I had a thought: I need fire.

After this short bit, I think the red person next directly appears in Pandora, but as you point out it gets alluded to whenever Sorawo is having a breakdown/otherside babble.

last edited at Jan 28, 2025 11:22PM