I re-read the whole thing from the start and I can say with certainty thal all four girls in this are bitches in their own way.

• Nanase consistently treats her girlfriend like dirt she has to hide. And then when she learns that she dared pierce the ear of another girl she starts ignoring her, before somehow learning that piercing the ear of a friend is normal. Words and acts have consequences and she's clearly been a bitch. She refuses to really acknowledge her own flaws, even when others put her nose in it. She perfunctorily apologize, but persists in her ways and treats Yuki like her real girlfriend. i can't wait for Nanase to actually physically cheat on Yuni with Yuki (she's already emotionally cheating with her). That'll be the cherry on top. I'll call her "Narcissistic Bitch #1"

• Yuni is a needy, high-maintenance girlfriend who find herself excuses for whatever wrong she does, because she's terrified of being alone. She wants her cake and eat it too. She was frustrated by her relationship with Nanase because it wasn't rewarding at all and she felt lonely. And feeling lonely has been a constant fear and trauma for her, so she hates it. Her venting account was a call for emotional help, which got answered by Fuuko. She got more than what she wished for. Her inability to reject Fuuko, convincing herself it was for the sake of Nanase, shows that she latched onto her because of her fear of abandonment, but also because she lusted after Fuuko. She was the one who initiated sex with Fuuko as a form of "revenge" against Nanase who refused to call her girlfriend "cute", but she was just making up an excuse. She was eyeing Fuuko's curves way before that. Everyone agrees that Yuni is a shitty person, selfish and cowardly. I'll call her "Lying Bitch #2"

• Fuuko is a highly intelligent girl who's been constantly belittled by her family. Betrayed by her parents, her brothers, the next door girl she loved. She has no friends because she doesn't trust anyone anymore. She approaches Yuni because she got hold of her secret account. In the end, what Fuuko wants is to be the one CHOSEN. She hatches a whole plan for Yuni to cheat, get caught and then break up with her girlfriend and ultimately chose her, but this plan failed a first time when Yuni came back to Nanase. I guess she wasn't expecting Nanase to "forgive" (in appearance) the cheating and for Yuni to keep on lying to herself. But in the end, stealing someone's girlfriend, while rewarding for your self-image, is still a shitty thing to do. She obviously looks down on everyone else. I'll call her the "Sociopathic Bitch #3".

• Yuki is, in appearances, the only innocent character in this, but she's actually the source of many of Nanase's troubles with Yuni. From dragging her around in the festival, indirectly kissing with her, constantly hovering around Nanase and meddling in her life, confronting Yuni about the cheating in Osaka, thanking Nanase loudly about the accessory, at every turn Yuki has been "innocently" breaking Nanase's relationship. I think it's been a while since she's been attracted to Nanase, but didn't acknowledge it to herself. In the guise of being the "best friend", she effectively participates in ruining Nanase's love life. I'll call her "Self-righteous Bitch #4".

So in the end, no one here is good, as intended by the author. It's a clusterfuck of relationships between girls with issues. All characters are indefensible in some ways, making bad and dumb decisions.

This train wreck is both ugly and beautiful and if you can't see it, then it's not for you.

I agree with most of this, except I really don't think Fuuko was scheming to that ridiculous degree. She has a feeling like she just flies in instinct and naturally ends up at the most dramatically satisfying choices lol. Less of a grand master plan manipulator, more of a cold reading fake tv psychic kind of manipulator, and that is imo a more fun archetype

last edited at Nov 25, 2024 3:58PM

I re-read the whole thing from the start and I can say with certainty thal all four girls in this are bitches in their own way.

• Nanase consistently treats her girlfriend like dirt she has to hide. And then when she learns that she dared pierce the ear of another girl she starts ignoring her, before somehow learning that piercing the ear of a friend is normal. Words and acts have consequences and she's clearly been a bitch. She refuses to really acknowledge her own flaws, even when others put her nose in it. She perfunctorily apologize, but persists in her ways and treats Yuki like her real girlfriend. i can't wait for Nanase to actually physically cheat on Yuni with Yuki (she's already emotionally cheating with her). That'll be the cherry on top. I'll call her "Narcissistic Bitch #1"

• Yuni is a needy, high-maintenance girlfriend who find herself excuses for whatever wrong she does, because she's terrified of being alone. She wants her cake and eat it too. She was frustrated by her relationship with Nanase because it wasn't rewarding at all and she felt lonely. And feeling lonely has been a constant fear and trauma for her, so she hates it. Her venting account was a call for emotional help, which got answered by Fuuko. She got more than what she wished for. Her inability to reject Fuuko, convincing herself it was for the sake of Nanase, shows that she latched onto her because of her fear of abandonment, but also because she lusted after Fuuko. She was the one who initiated sex with Fuuko as a form of "revenge" against Nanase who refused to call her girlfriend "cute", but she was just making up an excuse. She was eyeing Fuuko's curves way before that. Everyone agrees that Yuni is a shitty person, selfish and cowardly. I'll call her "Lying Bitch #2"

• Fuuko is a highly intelligent girl who's been constantly belittled by her family. Betrayed by her parents, her brothers, the next door girl she loved. She has no friends because she doesn't trust anyone anymore. She approaches Yuni because she got hold of her secret account. In the end, what Fuuko wants is to be the one CHOSEN. She hatches a whole plan for Yuni to cheat, get caught and then break up with her girlfriend and ultimately chose her, but this plan failed a first time when Yuni came back to Nanase. I guess she wasn't expecting Nanase to "forgive" (in appearance) the cheating and for Yuni to keep on lying to herself. But in the end, stealing someone's girlfriend, while rewarding for your self-image, is still a shitty thing to do. She obviously looks down on everyone else. I'll call her the "Sociopathic Bitch #3".

• Yuki is, in appearances, the only innocent character in this, but she's actually the source of many of Nanase's troubles with Yuni. From dragging her around in the festival, indirectly kissing with her, constantly hovering around Nanase and meddling in her life, confronting Yuni about the cheating in Osaka, thanking Nanase loudly about the accessory, at every turn Yuki has been "innocently" breaking Nanase's relationship. I think it's been a while since she's been attracted to Nanase, but didn't acknowledge it to herself. In the guise of being the "best friend", she effectively participates in ruining Nanase's love life. I'll call her "Self-righteous Bitch #4".

So in the end, no one here is good, as intended by the author. It's a clusterfuck of relationships between girls with issues. All characters are indefensible in some ways, making bad and dumb decisions.

This train wreck is both ugly and beautiful and if you can't see it, then it's not for you.

This, so very much! The issues with Yuni and Fuuko are obvious, but Nanase's awfulness is the subtle type of stuff. And Yuki has bothered me for a long time since I always felt she has a crush on Nanase and unconsciously doing things. And I feel Nanase returns the feelings since birds of a feather, but also Nanase is just terrible at navigating emotions.

I’m very late to this party, having discovered the series when the official adaptation was published. But since then it’s grown into easily my favorite current book––not only for what’s there on the page, or what's there in the author’s intentions (which I’ll speculate heavily on in a bit), but for what reading the book has illuminated for me about the way I process other manga, and, indeed, other comics in general. This has allowed me to see the alleged “trashiness” a lot of people here seem to complain about as potentially a very deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the author, a confrontational ploy that is meant to engage us in a deeper class analysis which the text is proposing. I’ve seen people complain that the situation of the story hasn’t advanced, and while I don’t really agree with that even on a textual basis, I want to point out that the subtextual reading I’ve been able to enjoy in this comic is very lively, and it works, for me, at least, to develop the book as a piece of art. In fact, I think there is a considerable difference between My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today and pretty much any other Yuri book I’ve ever read. It’s a difference tthat so far continues to make for remarkable reading. I’m going to attempt to explain what I mean, but for haters, I suppose it goes without saying that I obviously have no inherent objection to the subject matter, the cheating or the “trashy” aesthetic––and while I’ve been very hurt by cheating in my own relationships in the past, not only do I not hold it against anyone now, but my current understanding of the violent, changeable state in which we live––the knife’s edge of existence we all tiptoe across––makes it really impossible for me to condemn anyone for finding a new relationship that helps them learn more about themselves, a new, intimate interaction which can extend some of our most vital feelings into the world. As far as the cheating in the story is concerned, I think it has far more to do with socioeconomic class than anyone I’ve seen writing about the series has reckoned with yet. As for the trashiness, trash has never hurt me, and in this case especially, it tastes delicious. But I guess you have to get down in the dirt to know? You can get something from the trashy book you might never encounter in the classy one.

It occurred to me as I have read My Girlfriend's Not Here Today that virtually all other Yuri I’ve read has been written under the sign of capitalist realism. In fact, I’d say most American and Japanese comics I’ve read have this idea that capitalism is some sort of natural state of existence––as old as the cave people, I guess––buried in the bedrock assumptions of what the book is communicating to us. The Frederic Jameson/Slavoj Zizek quote is especially relevant here: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” because this isn’t necessarily a conscious decision on any author’s part, adopting the dominant economic model most of them have lived their whole lives under as a given in their storytelling. Breaking out of that mold to look for truths beyond those assumptions is something that would really set a book apart from the rest. And My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today distinguishes itself first and foremost by not really making that assumption of capitalist realism at all. In fact, the thematic payload of the book so far has largely been an extended illustration of class difference as the essential, defining conflict behind the frustrated romances in the story. It isn’t that Fuuko wants Yuni to cheat on Nanase with her: it’s that the upper-class Fuuko desires the working-class Yuni to be hers and leave middle-class Nanase. In this conflict, it becomes apparent that the author sees a kind of potential magical transfer of wealth and cultural capital a la Cinderella––taking Yuni out of the working class to become part of Fuuko's more rarified world––being held back by middle-class social mores which exist for the precise purpose of keeping such socioeconomic mobility (or socioeconomic friction) from happening. This is the undercurrent that plays throughout the book, providing principal character motivations and the subconscious triggers of conflict.

We can see a lot about this from copious textual clues, which goes to great lengths early on to explicate Fuuko’s relative wealth, in a coded form. Her family owns their home, and even if she doesn’t live in a mansion, her family is the type to take posed group photos, the type to treat an upper level of social and economic achievement as a baseline of success, and we get the sense from her scenes with her family that they would never look upon Fuuko’s choice to date a poor girl as an acceptable use of Fuuko’s energy and resources. We don’t get this made explicit, but it seems heavily implied that Fuuko is meant to be carrying on a name and a lineage or at least the semblance of one (I’m going a little harder on this than the text quite implies––my theory is that the author couldn’t justify too stratified a difference between the characters to make them genuinely, fully separated into the different socioeconomic groups they stand for, because then the girls wouldn’t all realistically be attending the same high school, since there tend to be differences between the school settings for rich, poor, and middle-class students. But within the boundaries of their school you’ll see each of the three main characters standing for a socio-economic class position apart from the others, and they'll illustrate this through their articulated attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, most of which represent the class they are assigned). The stress of conforming to the demands of her coded class seems to push Fuuko to a sort of alienation from her class roots. That alienation might contribute at least a little bit to her wanting to date Yuni, but I think the ways we see that alienation expressed most fully are in Fuuko’s intense romantic interiority, her orientation towards reading and doing well in school (part pressure, but also fantastic ways of socially absenting oneself from pressurized familial situations), and my favorite aspect of her personality: her penchant for theatrical self-reinvention and disguise. Twice now Fuuko has given herself new identities that she self-consciously name-checks. She’ll be Yuni’s Sugar-daddy when Yuni needs cash to continue dating Nanase, and when she wins Yuni back, she’ll be her Mother-figure. Each new identity brings with it delightful dramatic and visual accoutrements, from a wonderfully tacky wardrobe replacement as Yuni’s sugar-daddy to a whole new way of speaking to and treating Yuni as her replacement mother figure. She even has a Vent account personality as a fragile romantic which is a good deal more popular and successful than Yuni’s more flip, cool Vent persona. These transformations turn Fuuko into new versions of herself, and they show us the endless resources wealth can provide (here Fuuko's personal wealth, as compared to other students her age, is crucial to the way she is representing upper-class value-structures), but these theatrical disguises and illusions also make Fuuko into a magical figure in the book; a fairy godmother, who can actualize Yuni’s desires in an almost uncanny way––only it’s a fairy godmother that wants to f*ck in return. And throughout we get little flitters of other alternate characters Fuuko might play for one scene or another––like the meek-seeming lover in the second part of her travel date (after her ear starts bleeding), or the mischievous seducer, or the allegedly cold and reserved member of the health committee. Fuuko is easily the most complex character in the trio; her magical freedom to act seems a result of her class outlook, with its emphasis on impunity. She simply doesn’t perceive any horizons, as long as she continues to magically reinvent herself––and that reinvention is possible in a harsh, capitalist economy through hoarding of and capitalizing endless resources (even though she appears to be upper-middle class rather than a keiretsu-chairman’s daughter or something like that, Fuuko is conspicuously associated with money, and with that accompanying freedom of mobility). But Fuuko’s desire to move outside of her class––to date below her station, to play games and flirt with losing name and money, to utilize extreme intellectual and creative resources to get what she can’t exactly lay claim to with money alone––comes from her alienation from the rest of her cadre. Perhaps one of the reasons for her relentless passion for Yuni is the way Yuni exists so far outside of the ideology of Fuuko’s class background.

Early on in the narrative, Yuni seems very much like other schoolgirls her age, and her integration into several school groups makes it seem she is no different from her classmates. But then there is a sequence of key scenes, in which Yuni’s facade is dispelled for the reader, and we can get a fix on where Yuni stands on the ladder of success––along with the more tenuous grasp on survival that mark’s Yuni’s participation in the narrative. When Yuni's mother appears, we begin to see Yuni in a much more challenging space than most of her classmates would be used to. Yuni is not desperate; but there is instability and need all around, emphasized by the way, when Yuni’s mother comes home from her work as a bar girl, Yuni is the only one available to care for her. We get the sense this has been the uncomfortable status quo for a long time, this exchange of roles and responsibilities––and we see how Yuni struggles to be both a teen who blends in with the rank superficiality of high school life and also a partner with her mother in a very stringent, straightened economic program which far from ensures their chances of survival. We get the sense that no one at school knows that Yuni comes from this sort of relative underclass; no one knows her mother is a bar-girl, or that Yuni lives alone with her single mother––and it’s obvious from the college tour that Yuni is determined no one at school see her as she truly is. None of her friends probably imagines that Yuni cooks and cleans for her mother, and nurses her nominal caretaker through the aftermath of most grueling workdays. This set of scenes also very effectively establishes just what it is that makes Fuuko so very irresistible to Yuni; we see right away that Yuni’s mother is almost exactly the same kind of personality as Fuuko––sympathetic to a degree which outwardly rankles the more buttoned-up, pent-up Yuni, but which is a kind of flirtatious, fantastical expression of love Yuni secretly craves. And Yuni’s mother does for a living what Fuuko does for a hobby, playing dress-up and make-believe, and re-inventing herself to snare a would-be paramour with a fantasy, and sell him drinks and peanuts (forget that last part in Fuuko's case). A lot of people criticize the weakness they see in Yuni, giving in to this very ideal seducer, who so uncannily echoes Yuni’s loving mother’s beguiling charm––but in this scene with her mother I find her very admirable, too; for we see that Yuni has no real ambition in life but to eventually do right by her lone parent, her raconteur, her charmer, her original paramour. She doesn’t want her mother to cry. In a way, Yuni’s chasing of a girlfriend outside of her own class––while not seeming to be a conscious strategy on her part––kind of indicates that she’s hoping to eventually relieve her mother of her financial burden in the only way she can conceive of––transferring that burden onto someone else, maybe someone who can better afford it, like, say, a middle-class striver. “Don’t worry about money, okay?” Her mother assures her, and in Yuni’s assent we can tell she can hardly help but worry. What all this characterization goes to amplify is the scene of the college visit, where Nanase’s position vis-a-vis the other two cranks its way into focus.

So if Fuuko stands for the upper-class socio-economic strata of her society, and Yuni for the working underclass, where does Nanase sit in this equation? People seem to really hate Nanase here on the board. Hell, I hate her too, no argument there. But a lot of the criticism of Nanase tends to start and stop at personal behaviors, the ways in which she makes Yuni feel first neglected, and second small, and petty, for feeling hurt about it. Nanase is the police of the story, swooping in to break up the fun and games. The truncheon she wields is indicative of the values of her class; guilt, shame, striving, merit, delayed gratification, and, most deadly to the other characters in the narrative, entitlement. In a way, Nanase is the paramour as trope of a lot of Japanese fiction––suggestive of romance because of the character’s intense dedication to an ideology. In her pursuit of volleyball perfection, she is redolent of the glasses-wearing, too-serious, misogynist boy geniuses of many high school romance manga, redolent too of the samurai in her unwavering focus, and this is the source of a lot of Yuni’s obvious pain and suffering (notably, the samurai often served as a buffer between the rich and poor in an era before the middle-class existed, both the middle-class defenders of orthodoxy and quasi-police authoritatians, and they were largely supplanted by the merchant class, which eventually became the middle-class Nanase stands in for today). It’s clear that Yuni feels enormous pressure to value Nanase more as a girlfriend because of her unsmiling drive for merit, even as this is the principal element that excludes Yuni from Nanase’s world. I think it’s because Nanase’s dedication is such a universally-recognized, almost self-sufficient-seeming value in Japanese society that this needs no significant explication in the story. Focused dedication to an ideal is so common a value that it’s the defacto theme in a huge majority of Japanese popular fiction (how many manga and anime devolve a protagonist's purpose into exactly that need for seriousness and dedication to...tennis? Student council? Saving the world? Being a "good" cop?), and buried under it is the cultural assumption central to its middle-class origin: the idea that we live in a meritocracy.

Nanase is middle-class; I’ve hardly seen so dead-center, straightforwardly middle-class a figure in fiction. She personifies the belief in a meritocracy which underpins a middle-class value structure. It’s crucial, I think, to realize here that neither Yuni nor Fuuko are really convinced by this world-view. Both of them value passion over unwavering dedication, inspiration over fairness, fantasy over fact––in contradistinction with Nanase, whose principal value is earnest striving towards a reward fixed in the future. For Fuuko and Yuni, their affair is an awakening, a realization of their dreams for right now. Yuni has the passion and the attention she craves in Fuuko, Fuuko has the excitement of a kindred outcast from another world. But Yuni can’t be happy with her affair, because she feels such extraordinary guilt for it. That’s because the affair, for Nanase, is just a crime. It’s a violation of Nanase’s trust, of her earnest striving––and, quintessentially, it’s a violation of Nanase’s sacrifice, the delayed gratification she has committed to (without telling Yuni, who must be on board, right?), which puts the fullness of her romance off until later, after she has made something of herself in sports. Also, as the college tour chapter tells us, after she and her girlfriend go to colleges where they study things for careers. And after they go into careers, well, then, in the time they’re not striving after merit at work, then I guess they can romance one another. Is it really even necessary (there is a kind of sadomasochistic aspect to Nanase that seems to stealthily resent having to participate in this relationship with her girlfriend)? The belief that her achievement in track is connected to her life success, is connected to her romance is a big part of the way Nanase embodies middle-class values, and a part of the way she serves as an endless buffer against the poor girl and the rich girl, who are actually quite a lot more compatible; a buffer to keep them from getting together. Nanase’s belief that her society will reward the merit she works for spurs her to repeatedly neglect Yuni. Nanase isn’t trying to put Yuni through the wringer (or is she? Is part of the middle-class outlook Nanase embodies a kind of lacerating self-hatred, directed outward at those closest to her?); the college tour episode makes it clear that Nanase believes there is no difference between her circumstances and Yuni’s––and in that assumption, wouldn’t it follow that Yuni must feel the same as Nanase, and recognize the sacrifice Nanase is making by neglecting her––all in order to be a really good volleyball player? What could be more admirable and important than that? This is about their futures, after all. And what Nanase doesn’t realize is that the world doesn’t work this way for Yuni at all. There is no real way Yuni sees out of her socioeconomic class; and thus no benefit to bearing any such delayed gratification. When Yuni attends the college tour, we hear the bleakness in her distress––she simply doesn’t see a future for herself in the way Nanase does. The poor are often better-served with generous helpings of cynicism; it has a bitter taste, but you've got to put something in your stomach. It doesn’t matter that Yuni’s attending school now; it won’t lead her to success, a poor girl in a world dictated by values she can't easily replicate. Yet Nanase assumes a level of success in her future comparable to that in her current life, and strives to achieve it. But Yuni knows from her mother’s experience; hard work doesn’t make you comfortable, or happy. No one helps the poor person up when they’re striving, the way they might with Nanase. And in Fuuko’s position, value is assigned at birth; some are destined for success, others marked out for failure. For Yuni, there’s no future. For Nanase, the sky’s the limit, if you earn it. For Fuuko, there isn’t anywhere to go but down. The three girls sit in highly differentiated spaces, regarding one another with alien fascination. Both romantic impulses, Yuni and Nanase and Yuni and Fuuko, are based on this exotic connection between people from different worlds.

It’s safe to say, though, that Nanase doesn’t recognize the difference between herself and Yuni. She makes assumptions that prove this, like when she guilts Yuni into attending the away game she can’t afford––and she often belittles Yuni when Yuni’s expression of her values proves different from the middle-class mores Nanase confidently assumes are just the way things are. The guilt that torments Yuni throughout the series is effectively communicated by Nanase as a common cultural value––and yet, nothing in Yuni’s world teaches her to value the rigorous, boring constant settling for less that Nanase’s volleyball striving demands of Yuni. Most disturbing of all is the way in which Nanase consistently isolates Yuni, putting her in the position of secret girlfriend, a permanent tagalong, hiding from everyone but her alleged "lover." For Nanase, this is all a typically middle-class show of devotion––a variation on the lonely homemaker wife, who prepares any extravagant meal for a husband and his spontaneous dinner guests, invisibly, and without complaint. That's how that little lady loves her man, after all, and it's a model inherent to Nanase's worldview, compatible with her theory of striving and delayed gratification leading to eventual success. Nanase assumes Yuni will tolerate this because from her viewpoint, Yuni must internalize the same cultural values that she does. At the same time, the isolation of Yuni has a kind of sadism in it that is part and parcel of the value-package communicated by all this middle-class striving. Pointlessly delayed gratification, isolation of power that must be contained, (here Yuni is representing what might be considered the feminine agency that must be controlled in a sadomasochistic, inherently misogynist worldview (like a capitalist worldview, for instance)––and Nanase does seem to view Yuni’s release of feminine energy and enthusiasm as shameful and embarrassing enough that she wants it locked up for no one else to see. Nanase also has an amplifier for her meritocratic world-view––her friend Yuki, who reflects the same depressing outlook she has and doubles its impact with her support. In the college tour chapter, every assumed value Nanase places upon Yuni is echoed by Yuki, who further isolates Yuni using these assumed hegemonic values as the lever of her harassment. In the world of college, and, by extension, of the girls’ high school, middle class values confer a kind of cultural capital, and how close you come to embodying those values gives you, really, the most capital. This is why Fuuko and Yuni, neither of whom have much of this cultural capital, can be bullied by the exceptionally dull Nanase and her coarse toady, Yuki (we know Yuki’s interest in Nanase is ultimately romantic, and based on shared attitudes, but for the purposes of this reading, Yuki’s value is in reinforcing the values of the middle-class as the principal structure of this rigid society).

The most oppressive use Nanase has for her cultural capital is in the way she uses it to reclaim her girlfriend from Fuuko. Fuuko’s case that she should be Yuni’s legit girlfriend is supported by an upper-class reading of the situation: Fuuko really deserves Yuni, doesn't she? She has been receptive to Yuni’s feelings, and they mirror her own. Love excites them both, and that excitement should be the reward for those talented and inspired enough to grab it (her hatred of Nanase seems to spring largely from Nanase's flat, uninspired way of "loving"––what Fuuko values––brilliance, inspiration, fortuosity––is aligned with her class values, also––the shininess of gold! the magic of one's lucky birth) Nanase’s initial breakdown over this criticism pathetic, and fun to watch, because it's all true, and she really has no answer for it. But she eventually comes back with a killing blow. Because middle-class meritocracy is essentially hegemonic (insofar as it serves to placate the suffering lower classes and divide them into smaller, more vulnerable ideological groupings, preventing an uprising against the rich), Nanase can leverage instant acceptance of her worldview on the part of her competitors Fuuko and Yuni––both of which see this worldview as baked in all around them, and both of whom view their own differing value structures as personal faults or aberrations, rather than expressions of their varied life experiences. Nanase can’t justify neglecting her girlfriend as she has, and so she just ignores it, and makes the ultimate in meritocratic pitches. Why can’t she just have it all, if she works hard enough? If Nanase is just a better girlfriend, taking it more seriously, surely she can still strive for volleyball (never mind that the situation will never devolve that way, and volleyball will always be her preference)? It is telling that neither Fuuko nor Yuni has an argument in the face of this––it is, essentially, what they all believe that everyone believes––the argument they all feel they must capitulate to. And this argument conjures up Yuni’s guilt and uses it to imprison her once again in an unhappy relationship that is essentially unchanged. Nanase is free to keep her devotion to volleyball paramount, and Yuni’s punishment will mean continued isolation, along with added helpings of guilt, and the feeling she has to earn back Nanase’s trust. There’s another meritocratic assumption undergirding Yuni’s guilt which isn’t quite expressed on the page, but which is likely an element of Yuni’s surrender to Nanase’s flat, stupid assertion that she can just have everything, and that’s the common cultural believe that there is merit in mating for life with your first partner, incompatibility be damned. This folk-belief is as oppressive as any other to people from the middle and lower classes––though the rich have always had their workarounds for this absurd assertion of "morality." Yuni seems to have a knee-jerk preference not to trade up her relationship, and this baseless meritocratic assumption that there’s value in being first in line is helping to cage Yuni alone with her unhappiness, isolated by herself with a girlfriend who wants her only insofar as having Yuni means winning and earning, somehow. Fuuko, meanwhile, offers Yuni ultimate freedom, with no fixed, required way of being, and no authority greater than passion––but Fuuko, like Tinkerbell, runs off her audience’s belief in her magic, and she almost literally shrinks away when Yuni accedes to Nanase’s unromantic, possessive bellowing and steps away from the brink of real love. Who knows what these girls from opposite sides of the tracks, with so much need and fantasy in common could make of one another, were they free to? But Nanase’s dull, paralyzing world view holds these volatile representatives of competing classes apart. It wouldn’t be all right for Fuuko to deny her own birthright and love a commoner; and Yuni might be able to advance into the middle-class rather than the upper (in some isolated, means-tested cases, this has always been acceptable), but only if she completely transforms herself into one of them (rather than perpetuating the smokescreen she puts up for her classmates). Until that happens, Nanase will continue to isolate and belittle her––heck, Nanase might keep doing this whether Yuni meets her demands or not. Either way, the buffer will keep the exploitative relationships of the capitalist system in place, and inequities will be masked behind the illusion of a merit-based system.

This realization on the author’s part of how middle-class meritocratic values serve to hide inequality, stymie the social mobility of volatile members of other classes, and enforce the deliberate striation and isolation of people within class structures so far seem to be the dynamic underpinning the book's melodrama. There are so many moments when these structures, and the way the characters fit into and don’t fit into them, are underlined––and the quintessential conflict is one in which both Fuuko and Yuni are trying to shatter the status quo, and Nanase, with her status-quo value structure and her larger helping of social capital, is essentially holding them back from doing. People seem to feel that the story does not advance, but in a sense, this is a tale of class-based detente, in which two people trying to transcend their inherited value structure are repeatedly stymied from doing so––both by the people around them and by their inherited senses of inadequacy and unworthiness (which they have primarily inherited from a middle-class worldview that doesn’t map to their own life experiences and offers them no truth). Yuni stands a chance of happiness with Fuuko that she doesn’t with Nanase; but so long as Yuni remains prisoner of an assumed set of values that don’t serve her and aren’t hers to begin with, Yuni will remain stuck. The structures that impede Yuni from accepting the love she wants from Fuuko, the structures that cause Yuni to read Fuuko as the “wrong person,” are there to preserve a socioeconomic status quo which serves neither Yuni nor Fuuko. Nanase, as the exponent of these values, thinks of herself as a beneficiary of them, but in reality she is the thug enforcing those values, stopping the other two girls from finding happiness together, in a world more open to vast flux and socioeconomic change. And from this depiction of the stagnation of passions, the author creates a proxy exposition of the way a capitalist social structure preserves its own sclerotic structure at the expense of the people trapped in its system.

Is this the author’s formulation of themes, or is it just my interpretation? I’m not positive. It is credible for the author to have simply internalized––or more consciously externalized––the kind of anti-capitalist critique common to a lot of Japanese artists of the previous century. Peter Yacavone reads a lot of similar critiques in the midcentury action films and melodramas of Seijun Suzuki, so why not a Yuri author in an era where these concerns dominate our politics more than they have in a very long time? My hunch is that this is all conscious thematic construction on the author’s part, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the story kind of leaves this setup behind as it tries to drill down on a resolution––similar to the way in which Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk offers us an inspiring Hulk that wages war on the capitalist establishment, before abandoning that greatest-ever Hulk storyline in favor of a story which pulls familiar characters together into a kind of psychological showdown. The political storyline––which expounds helpfully on the way nostalgia, for instance, is weaponized by capitalists in order to disrupt organized resistance––cedes the stage, and the need for the Hulk to rebuild his own shattered psyche takes over as the main plot line. Here, it’s quite conceivable that we’ve seen the last of this anti-capitalist critique as part of the overt text, and that the story will become more focused on the plot going forward (it seems as if they’re preparing a second conflict between the three main characters, in which perhaps Fuuko wins out––not sure if that’s an intended conclusion or just the next leg of the conflict––but I think the author is being very clear in setting up the ways in which we empathize with Fuuko and with Yuni––and the ways in which we tend to empathize much less with Nanase (who has an ideal girlfriend waiting in the wings). But I think the situating the author has done, positioning these characters according to their sociopolitical social roles, will continue to inform the relationship conflict going forwards, and that the book will continue to be exciting because of it. There are not, so far as I’ve seen, Yuri manga that undergird their romance with a dynamic class reading like this; capitalist realism is an assumed stance in even the more sophisticated Yuri I’ve enjoyed, from Octave and The Brides of Iberis to Run Away with Me, Girl, to Whispered Words (a rare book that is cognizant of class differences between characters, but which does not explore them in depth or offer a reading that challenges any of our assumptions), to any of the Takemiya Jin stories. This sociopolitical valence to the conflict adds enormous complexity to the book, and makes each chapter feel fresh and entertaining, so far. And that’s a significant part of the really high esteem I continue to have for the story. It keeps impressing me, and it keeps relentlessly engaging me. It’s the comic I most look forward to reading in the right this very minute immediate now.

last edited at Dec 19, 2024 7:18AM

@feihong
I have nothing to add, but that was one hell of a post, bravo. Your read of the story is credible, though I don't agree that this is consciously intentional on the author's part, certainly not to this extent.

@feihong, you have the best wall o' text posts on Dynasty--always glad to see one.

It's in that spirit, because you're such a notably good writer and sophisticated critic, that I point out that the term for "habitual cultural values" is spelled "mores," although it's pronounced "morays."

last edited at Dec 7, 2024 4:23PM

That was a fantastic essay of a post, hell yes. I love media analysis of that level. My only critique is even bothering to question authorial intent because really, does that matter? On some level it's kind of like a "does that politician believe what they're saying in their heart" kind of notion: who cares if they believe it internally, they're still saying it externally. I would guess at least most the elements you've pointed out are absolutely intentional: Yuni's poverty and Nanase's privilege is textually highlighted with the away game arc, after all. I don't really think Nanase and Fuuko are actually in different economic classes though, just two people who respond differently to the toxic cage of privileged respectability. Nanase is perfectly at home in that mainstream normal, Fuuko is super not. Yuni, in her poverty, never even had a chance to fit those expectations. She hides her class now and I bet that's due to past bullying over things like cheap thrifted clothes and old shoes and not going on field trips. Yuni desperately wants to fit in with Nanase and people like her because she knows what they do to people like her if they find her. It might not be Nanase specifically who bullies her but enough people *like" Nanase would to make her school life an isolated hell. Ironically, she's experiencing an isolated hell ANYWAY due to Nanase keeping her in a cage. Poor Yuni :(

Edit: in fact Nanase being so ultra "normal" to the point where she's practically the poster child for "good normal people" even though she's a lesbian points to possibly even more of a privileged economic status than Fuuko. You've got be pretty well protected from the world to know you have to hide your sexuality and yet never once question that. People like that, every other aspect of society besides the heteronormativity is working just fine for them so they never stop to question society. Fuuko meanwhile is a lesbian, artistically inclined in a stemlord family, and not exactly neurotypical, so society really isn't working well for her even past sexuality.

last edited at Dec 7, 2024 8:40PM

Lol I just realized that Fuuko is also the kind of person who'd read a "trashy" yuri romance on her phone and then write a full on literary analysis essay about it in the comments and get annoyed by "incorrect" interpretations. She just like me fr

That was a fantastic essay of a post, hell yes. I love media analysis of that level. My only critique is even bothering to question authorial intent because really, does that matter? On some level it's kind of like a "does that politician believe what they're saying in their heart" kind of notion: who cares if they believe it internally, they're still saying it externally. I would guess at least most the elements you've pointed out are absolutely intentional: Yuni's poverty and Nanase's privilege is textually highlighted with the away game arc, after all. I don't really think Nanase and Fuuko are actually in different economic classes though, just two people who respond differently to the toxic cage of privileged respectability. Nanase is perfectly at home in that mainstream normal, Fuuko is super not. Yuni, in her poverty, never even had a chance to fit those expectations. She hides her class now and I bet that's due to past bullying over things like cheap thrifted clothes and old shoes and not going on field trips. Yuni desperately wants to fit in with Nanase and people like her because she knows what they do to people like her if they find her. It might not be Nanase specifically who bullies her but enough people *like" Nanase would to make her school life an isolated hell. Ironically, she's experiencing an isolated hell ANYWAY due to Nanase keeping her in a cage. Poor Yuni :(

Edit: in fact Nanase being so ultra "normal" to the point where she's practically the poster child for "good normal people" even though she's a lesbian points to possibly even more of a privileged economic status than Fuuko. You've got be pretty well protected from the world to know you have to hide your sexuality and yet never once question that. People like that, every other aspect of society besides the heteronormativity is working just fine for them so they never stop to question society. Fuuko meanwhile is a lesbian, artistically inclined in a stemlord family, and not exactly neurotypical, so society really isn't working well for her even past sexuality.

I think if you were to zoom back on the society in which the girls live, they would all basically slot into the middle class. Yuni isn't necessarily facing extinction, Fuuko isn't really rich, per se. But in the microcosm of a school full of middle-class students, the different economic coding the author has assigned the three girls becomes pretty consciously differentiated. To me, Fuuko is coded as the representative of wealth over Nanase, because she embodies the cultural values of the wealth. She is cultured herself, and she sees a virtue in projecting idleness and ease (even as she works hard at all sorts of things)––essentially she projects a sense of being above it all, and she seems to inherit that attitude from her family, who champion values of old-world money, like a perfectly manicured family picture and the crushing conservatism of Fuuko's mother, believing it was a "mistake" to have a daughter who might make the family "look bad." This is all upper-class bullshit, focused on the generational transfer of wealth, power, and influence, and the maintaining of self-conscious facades––all of it basically antithetical to the middle-class bastion of merit––merit doesn't even figure in. Whether or not Fuuko's family lives in genuine wealth and luxury is less important to the text than the way in which they are the projectors of this upper-class value system––just as Yuni carries the working underclass value system by internalizing it, regardless of the level of actual poverty she experiences (which doesn't really feel like terribly visceral poverty as it's presented in the story). Nanase really sticks out to me as the one blindly fronting and gatekeeping the kind of notional meritocracy that preserves the status quo for the rich, and which situates the middle class as defenders of its hegemony. If you put the guard in charge of castle security, he soon comes to feel that the castle is "his" in some way––even though it absolutely isn't. Nanase is carrying water for a system which––in the microcosm of the story––benefits Fuuko's family's value system more than Nanase's own treasured future, filled with assumed promise.

Fuuko is definitely outside of the boundaries of upper-class norms in a lot of ways––but that's a trope of the upper-class as well––the prodigal son, the one who rejects his birth, still subconsciously carrying the upper-crust values he's absorbed out into the world even as he rebells against them. Fuuko's subtlety, her fanciful trickiness, the way her sense of "right" and "wrong" is totally divorced from conventional morality...these are upper-class values Fuuko brings to the story whether she wants to or not. She's the prodigal son cliche, but she's also the king who dresses as a beggar to walk amongst his subjects, and that lust for the romance of living roughly is in Fuuko when she protects Yuni from the predatory boys in the street at night, and in the sense that Fuuko always seems a hair's-breadth from running away from home (I believe she even seems to have considered it during the away-game date, when Yuni asks her if that's what she's doing). And just like the upper class and the working class in most societies, Fuuko and Yuni instinctively recognize that the meritocracy Nanase wields like a club is an illusion. They instinctively recognize it, even as their subconscious actions in the world betray how enslaved they are to this conventional moral imprisonment.

I guess when I think about the author's point of view, I wonder how far they might take this. Could these characters be alienated from their assumed class interests? Could they achieve some form of recognition of their positions vis-a-vis one another? How would that change the dynamic at play? Or would self-consciousness on the part of the author change their reading of the text going forward? I still have bitter memories of the anime Wonder Egg Priority, pulling a nearly complete 180-degree pivot and pursue an opposite ideological agenda in the last third of its episodes. Of course, I believe that was the result of firing the lead writer and replacing them with someone with an ideologically opposite viewpoint. But I'm still worried about the book remaining rich in its themes, and so, in that context, what is conscious storymaking on the part of the author does matter a bit to me. Thanks all for the kind words––I went back and tried to fix some of the errors in the writing, sorry if that made things hard to parse before!

last edited at Dec 8, 2024 5:55AM

This is good stuff. Really nothing like it.

last edited at Dec 18, 2024 4:19PM

Fuuko saying some unhinged shit and Yuni just replying "That's scary" is amazing

I truly believe that the happiest and healthiest ending for all three of them is if they never see each other again after high school

A decade of moving on and therapy might get them to the point of “friends who talk sometimes”

Bruh, Yuni is should be mentally hospitalized

Everyone goes on about girlfailures but few people are brave enough to examine the girldisaster. God bless this comic

Everyone goes on about girlfailures but few people are brave enough to examine the girldisaster. God bless this comic

Not every author can be so brave.

Wow

We already know these girls have issues, and I know this isn’t the most thoughtful or original observation, but wow Yuni needs therapy yesterday.

Girl is not okay.

Hoĺly sheep, she is just an irresponsable girl that can't handle

This truly is a series that has the courage of its convictions.

All 4 of these girls should just never talk to each other again after high school. One finds excuses for everything she does and doesn’t take accountability so when things are too much for her to handle she retreats into her shell(aka cheating). Another is trying to fix the relationship when it’s already too late to fix it. One is actively trying to make them break up while simultaneously trying to get with them because she found a “good” reason since one cheated. The girl that started it all either tried to make them break up by blackmailing her or she just wants to stay as the second choice even though everytime the girlfriend pops up she gets super pissed while getting her to wear matching things trying to show off with it.

All 4 of these girls should just never talk to each other again after high school. One finds excuses for everything she does and doesn’t take accountability so when things are too much for her to handle she retreats into her shell(aka cheating). Another is trying to fix the relationship when it’s already too late to fix it. One is actively trying to make them break up while simultaneously trying to get with them because she found a “good” reason since one cheated. The girl that started it all either tried to make them break up by blackmailing her or she just wants to stay as the second choice even though everytime the girlfriend pops up she gets super pissed while getting her to wear matching things trying to show off with it.

This isn't a callout to anyone in particular, but I still cannot grasp the interpretation of Yuki as some sort of cunning character who is trying to sabotage Yuni and Nanase's relationship so she can score the rebound. She reads pretty clearly as a girl who is in love with her best friend but hasn't quite realized it yet. Her flaws are being overly defensive of Nanase and lacking social awareness, but I cannot recall any action that she has taken with explicit malicious intent towards anyone.

That wasn't what this chapter was about though. Yuni isn't even fit to be in a relationship with her own hand at this point. That's wild.

I'm not sure why everyone is saying Yuni should have therapy now. Not saying she doesn't need it, but this is the first chapter since the beginning in which she seems to be pretty honest with herself, and with Fuuko. It looks like she is starting to sort out her feelings, which is a good thing. Of course she is going to be even more a of mess while doing it, she has so much to unravel.

Another excellent chapter from the master. Thanks for the TL!

Oh my god, just be honest. If you’re not happy in the relationship, end it. Should’ve ended it sooner ngl

But better late then never ig

I wonder how long this manga is? I’m curious if there will be a resolution and at the end of the manga, everyone is more normal and mentally sound, or if it’ll keep going downhill from here

The fact that Nanase looked at Yuki first instead of Yuni is pretty much telling that Yuni is not really her first choice. At least not anymore. I don't blame her, Yuni is such an unlikeable biatch