https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/my_girlfriends_not_here_today_ch29#4

Like, obviously she's not telling the truth, but clearly there's no reason to keep being with her if you're willing to say that you broke up right? That's the thing that annoys me so much about stories like this. And I know that the authors intent was to make a complete pain in the ass partner with Yuni, but god damn she's insufferable.

It's fascinating to me how every single one of these characters has reached a point where they're actively self sabotaging. Yuni sticks with Nanase not out of one iota of affection but out of guilt and punishment. Fuuko's backslid to her "I'll be your second" shit, which makes her far less effective at wooing Yuni. Yuki's wishy washy damsel shit has only succeeded in making Yuni hate her and Nanase annoyed at her enough to shove her against a wall. And Nanase is idk distracting herself from peak volleyball performance I guess lol

At any chapter without warning Fuuko could basically end this by finally putting her back into it and telling Yuni "I love you, I want to be your first, you make me happy, I want to make you happy, you deserve to be happy. Stop getting hurt by Nanase, dump that jock and get with this nerd lmao". She's almost certainly not going to do that anytime soon, but she COULD. Yuni's begging for a rescue and "I'll be your side chick" is not a rescue lol.
My actual prediction: Yuni and Fuuko will eventually get together but due to Yuni finally finishing up all her miserable thinking, coming to the obvious conclusion for her situation, and being assertive in demanding Fuuko be her lover the same way she was assertive during the away game arc.

last edited at Dec 19, 2024 2:54AM

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 Iberia 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.

I’m glad you commented. Most comments judge the characters based on their morality as individuals, as if they are real people. This is understandable. Many people come here to cry and masturbate, as I often do. Like you, probably, I have found clarity in the emotional maelstrom by calling upon the immortal science of dialectical materialism. And psychoanalysis. I am no longer using the good book to cast stones onto my ex kind of girlfriend. I hope she rides that stupid man and stops to hit her juul and savors every moment free of strife. I will savor mine. I won’t cite Fisher, but I’ll quote the theme of another work about new labor, repression, and bourgeois neuroses and now also a Taco Bell commercial, “I’m not sick but I’m not well… And it’s a sin to live this well.”

So maybe that is why I have also become quite enamored with this manga and I’d prefer to appreciate its merits as a literary work and locate a kind of societal critique or class conflict in the text. First, I think your reading of Nanase and Yuki are on the money. They represent the hegemonic ideal, smart, ambitious, athletic girls from regular middle class nuclear families. Acceptable despite their sexualities. They participate in mainstream society and contribute to capitalist economy. While the author might not put it in your words, it’s clear they intended Nanase to be a bit basic, sheltered, and shallow.

However, while raised by a single parent and not having quite the same kind of financial stability, I would not say Yuni is exactly proletarian. Their apartment is large and quite nice. This is not disqualifying on its own, and it is manga so there’s gonna be a cool design, but she personally doesn’t have to work, her mother owns a business, and she will pay for her university tuition. The real contrast in their backgrounds is that the mother is in mizushobai, the water trade, or nightlife. The work is stigmatized and it’s a volatile market. The mama must maintain appearances while absorbing all the emotions mainstream society suppresses. Yuni’s identity rests in that boom and bust, with all the uncertainty, emotional manipulation, abandonment, and loss it entails. Nanase, not so much.

Yuni and Nanase are clearly incompatible, but does Yuni desire Nanase because she represents the societal ideal? Are Yuni and Fuuko driven apart by what society demands of their class? I don’t think this is the case. Remember that the characters are all teenage lesbians in Japan. They are closeted. They cannot marry. Family might not disown a lesbian kid, but likely won’t love the idea. Conservative government wants higher birth rates. Society demands they don’t love at all. Fuuko is all but disinherited by her parents. Yuni lusts with the expectation she will eventually be left behind when they get older. Looking at the chapter where Yuni and Nanase first speak, you can see they make their initial connection because Yuni likes Nanase’s gay haircut lmao. That’s their bond. “You’re hot and you’re the first other lesbian I’ve met.” That said, Yuni feels an additional pressure in their relationship because besides her queerness, Nanase is a popular jock with no major trauma. She just can’t really get Yuni, like capitalism can’t really get the crazy deviants who don’t act to merely boost shareholder value and play with dog on the weekend. Additionally, she’d be okay if Yuni was out of her life for good. Yuni doesn’t have many other people to rely on.

I like your reading, but I see Fuuko and Yuni more as comrades, the freaks rejected by rainbow capitalism. I want to write more about Fuuko, Marx, and Freud, but I must pick this up tomorrow. Thank you for your comment! It tickled me

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.

That’s true, she is reaching the point where she’s realized “literally nothing I do makes me happy” which yeah, good first step. And while I’m not a psychologist, I feel like what she really needs is a good support system and people (multiple) who will support her no matter what, and… I don’t think any of these girls are there yet. Fuuko could be, I think the ship has sailed for Nanase. And while Fuuko is finally realizing what she really wants, rather than just telling Yuni what she wants to hear, Yuni so clearly finding her wants off putting while still calling out to her at the end of the chapter makes me really excited to see what happens next.

Reality check Yuni, Nanase is not perfect at all considering that she's oblivious, insensitive, ignorant & indifferent of people's feelings.

And the same thing can be said about you Yuni refusing to take responsibility trying to pass the blame on someone else other than you.

Yuni's is definitely still proletariat. I don't recall if the manga ever said Yuni's Mom is self employed at the bar, but even if she run the bar herself that puts her in the same category as an independent contractor. She doesn't own her means of production, a landlord does. Same as someone who drives for Uber with a leased car. Yuni's Mom saying "don't worry about money" doesn't imply she can just pay college tuition out of pocket, poor parents tell their kids to not worry about money all the time, because it's the adult's job to do that worrying. This implies enough financial security to have hopes for getting loans possibly, although would she even know how much college costs? She didn't go herself and she was drunk when she said it, so she might be imagining a much lower number than reality.

last edited at Dec 19, 2024 1:06PM

If we're going full communist, Karl Marx called this petty bourgeoisie. Essentially, small scale business owners / independent workers who aren't aligned with the interests of the true bourgeoisie. It was believed they weren't a threat, but could potentially cause issues by resisting collective ownership after the revolution or by identifying with the true bourgeoisie.

There's also lumpen proletariat, essentially criminals, and Lenin talked about the existence of a labor aristocracy through imperialism where proletariat in certain countries benefited at the expense of proletariat in other countries. I will leave which characters to assign these roles to the rest of you very committed readers.

last edited at Dec 19, 2024 4:08PM

the mc of these series remember me of a girl i used to date
the apperance, to being dense af to using another person (me) because another girl would not give her attetion and even the f tweets

also she owes me 14 bucks. yea it was 2 years ago, yea i'm not over yet.

anyway, congrats to the author, cause this thing personally disturbs me, and yet I can't stop reading.

Bruh Yuni is finished. One girl is genuinely in love with her but she's too messed up to make it work. The other girl wants to infantilize her to play momy.

Also where's the smut? I wanna see how the sex is between her and Nanase. Some momy- daughter role-playing would also be nice.

Bruh Yuni is finished. One girl is genuinely in love with her but she's too messed up to make it work. The other girl wants to infantilize her to play momy.

Well, I hold out hope Yuni will recognize that love that Fuuko feels for her. In the meantime, we'll all have to put up with more of Nanase's infantilizing.

Let's not forget, after all, who was picking Yuni up and carrying her around like a baby for all to see. Fuuko invites Yuni to play games with her; games where Yuni is a full participant. We can see how Yuni uses the parameters Fuuko has set up for their game to take charge of what happens in their game together, taking control and giving up control to explore the nature of what Fuuko feels for her. The game rewards both the girls and honors their individual agencies. Nanase, by contrast, wants to show Yuni off like a trophy. Her reason for doing it isn't deep love, but possessiveness––she wants to show off Yuni, even if Yuni doesn't want to be exposed to everyone in such a bombastic way (this is a girl who mostly hoped her girlfriend would acknowledge her as such in the classroom and hold hands––she doesn't have grand ambitions to be some power couple in the school. She wants bare-bones acknowledgement of her relationship, and the sense of relative security that would come with it. But Nanase can only process her feelings in relationship to her social role. She aspires to love Yuni only as much as she feels wouldn't violate some mythical sense of propriety (after the zero chapter, it's obvious that Nanase has fallen into this relationship partly because Yuni was the only person who gave full-throated affirmation to her "risky" lesbian haircut. And Nanase's form of affection is to play a game of neglect where only Nanase holds the reigns. Yuni is not consulted, and isn't permitted to impress her desires on Nanase. As Yuni realizes in this last chapter, Nanase has only begun clumsily trying to express affection for her because she's afraid she'll lose Yuni to Fuuko.

It's the one-sided game that's the infantilizing one. The game you play with a toddler, where you, the adult, control the rules and parameters, and allow for no broad transgression––keeping the infant in the dark about your purpose. That game denies the other player's agency, just as Nanase denies Yuni's agency. Conversely, the game Fuuko plays with Yuni respects Yuni's choices and desires, and alters to accommodate Yuni's desire for expression. This game fulfills Yuni in a way that Nanase's hollow show of devotion doesn't. And this is doubly ironic, because the game Fuuko plays with Yuni is conducted entirely in secret––the exact situation that frustrates Yuni about Nanase's strangled attempts at passion.

So why is Fuuko's secret game so much more fulfilling than Nanase's public expression of possession? Which of these looks like love to you? One of these two suitors wants Yuni to be herself, and express herself. The other one treats her as though she is fundamentally ashamed to be with her. This show of alleged affection at the end of the chapter, after all, is only a garbled communication with the rest of the school––Nanase isn't declaring anything or standing up to her volleyball teammates so she can have time with Yuni; she's just playing along in a public game––the meaning of which is hidden from the audience at large by being confined to the scavenger hunt card Nanase is handed. Nanase's performative "cherishing" of Yuni humiliates her without conferring on her the public awareness Yuni wants for her status as Nanase's girlfriend to feel substantial and real. There is no respect here, no thought on Nanase's part but a selfish one. She isn't enabling Yuni to have any control of her own person here––almost like Yuni is a baby, who needs to be siloed off in a crib, while Nanase chats with her peers in a nearby space Yuni just can't get to. Fuuko, by comparison, wants to climb into the crib with Yuni so they can be babies together. Which sounds more fun? Which player sounds like they really value Yuni?

As for my previous post, people seem keen to focus on the ways in which Yuni isn't technically lower-class and Fuuko isn't necessarily richer than Nanase. I did a second posed trying to hone this formulation a little more, but in case that didn't come through, I think the author is using the setting of a school which is, basically, full of middle-class girls. Fuuko, Nanase, and Yuni all appear to be––in terms of their physical realities, as the author draws them––middle-class. I don't think the author could readily justify schoolgirls of all income brackets attending the same school. But in literary terms, each of them stand in for a space in the larger socio-economic structure. The way that seems to work in the text is that the author codes the language and behavior of the three girls to epitomize viewpoints and mannerisms of different socio-economic classes––not the classes they actually seem to inhabit, but the classes they serve to represent. So even though Yuni isn't necessarily living hard, she demonstrates traits of someone in the lower classes. She takes care of her hard-working mother when the mother gets home, fulfilling family duties that a working parent is unable to complete because of long work hours. Yuni can't afford the trip to Nanase's game that everyone else we see has no problem affording. Yuni has a practicality about money her friends don't––when they ask to borrow anything from her, quick as lightning, and disguised by a jokey tone, she quotes them a price for the transaction. This is a girl used to counting Yen and Sen, used to making a meal out of whatever she and her mom has in the refrigerator, used to helping stretch her little family's budget and make it last. Look at how tense she becomes once her mother tells her not to worry about the money for college. Yuni knows what that means, and is savvy to the hidden meaning of the phrase. She knows her mom will be making sacrifices, going without to make Yuni's schooling work, if Yuni takes her up on it. Whether or not the author draws her in a big apartment, whether or not the kind of snack bar service worker her mom is can make a middle-class income, the thoughts that are on Yuni's mind are representative of working class struggles, worries, practicalities, fantasies, and dreads. Note how Yuni instinctually doesn't tell Nanase what her mother does for a living––she knows Nanase will look at her mother's job as one to be ashamed of (there's also some ambiguity about whether Yuni's mom owns the snack bar or simply works at it––but it's Nanase who suggests Yuni's mom is a "small business owner," and Yuni doesn't correct it.

In the same way, Fuuko isn't rich like mansion-and-butler rich. But the way she represents the wealthy upper classes is in the haughty way she carries herself, the way she feels entitled to total social mobility (look how the wealthy in the world today expect any door to be open to them). Fuuko's everyday realities are none of them practical matters of survival––not in the way Yuni worries about survival. Fuuko's problem in her own milieu is her failure to equal the conformist achievements of her siblings––achievements which are un-subtle-y coded as masculine and hypercompetitive. Fuuko is not worried about surviving; she's worried about people not taking her seriously; when you have everything already, respect is the only thing people can really deny you. And Fuuko wants respect, wants legitimacy. This is one of the ways the author codes her as upper-class, even though in terms of the school, Fuuko is probably upper-middle-class, Yuni is probably lower-middle-class, and Nanase is squarely middle-class. Regardless of the material reality of their conditions as the author has drawn them (I keep in mind here, as well, that there isn't really a pre-drawn "squalid apartment" background the author can pull as a quick asset for Yuni's brief scenes at home), what's important to the analogy––as I'm trying to make it, at least––is the class differences that the characters stand in for; the class identities they represent. It's a literary device the author uses––my hunch is that the symbolic class analysis it creates comes from common anarcho-communist beliefs which we encounter in a lot of disparate Japanese literary sources––the idea that Japanese society began to "go wrong" with the countrywide postwar pivot towards mega-capitalism, which decimated the communal village life which dominated at least the Japanese cultural imaginary, if not the culture itself, before capitalist values overtook them. It's an outlook that necessarily leads the kind of class analysis I see in the manga to view the main characters as trapped in an impossible stalemate, where the transcendent personal goals of the characters on the extreme sides of class struggle are made impossible by an unimaginative middle class enforcing hegemony (operating as a proxy for the rich, in order to prevent, say, violent insurrection.

In a way, all the joys and pains of this work come out in that stalemate between the three proxies for rich, poor, and middle. The lack of imagination in so self-satisfied a character as Nanase obliterates the more specific and meaningful fantasies of the other two. And the values Nanase fronts to enforce her point of view (values which clearly oppress both Yuni and Fuuko) are so effective because of their hegemony; Yuni and Fuuko have internalized these values themselves. This is what leads to Yuni's indecision––because even if the passion and care she recognizes from Fuuko seems real, it flies in the face of the middle-class values and virtues Yuni has internalized all her life. She thinks there is virtue in staying with your first choice of love, even if the person is a bad choice for the part. She sees Nanase's hollow overtures as being proof of affection––and she accepts Nanase's hollow words as truth over and above Fuuko's more genuine constancy––because she recognizes Nanase as a figure embodying authority (look at Nanase in the latest chapter, playing a very fasc-y figurehead at a disturbing pep-rally). Words can be proven hollow, but if they're said by the so-called "right people," most of us tend to believe them anyway. Another way to slice this: notice how the character whose living conditions we never see is, in fact, Nanase––because we don't need to see it. Don't we already know Nanase lives as the epitome of the middle-class? As with everything that is Nanase, we can read it in, accept it as true because of her position, rather than anything else. That's what you're supposed to do for the figure who represents cultural orthodoxy, like Nanase does.

And, hey: Nanase gets worse. When the three girls confront each other, and Nanase wins Yuni back, she doesn't mount any effective argument to do it––she just insists on the assumed, inherent integrity of her feeling, as representative of social orthodoxy. Fuuko, meanwhile, constructs a complex argument and in a sense actually proves that she a) listens to Yuni, b) respects Yuni, c) cherises Yuni above others, d) yearns to make Yuni happy and that e) Nanase actively does the opposite––but it doesn't matter. When the volleyball star says "I can has volleyball and girlfriend both! Bookworm girl baaaaddd!!!" it lands with the weight of orthodoxy behind it––never mind that it doesn't add up, or that Nanase has proved time and again that she doesn't value Yuni enough to be recognized as her girlfriend (In fact, Nanase actually calls Fuuko crazy––rather than offering an argument for her own devotion, Nanase can only point at the girl who just made a case for her passion and pronounce her outside of the fold, a roamer of the borders. Discredit her, and the defender of orthodoxy need never answer her piercing challenges, nor her sound reasoning).

Something else comes out of that confrontation which really moves me, and that's when Yuni discovers Fuuko's Vent account. Fuuko has posted a picture she has taken after setting up the star projector to make her overture of love to Yuni. The caption is Fuuko, baring her hopes and dreams to her Vent followers (is this why she is so much more popular than Yuni on the platform? Fuuko shares her vulnerability on the platform, while Yuni can't help but show a mask still). Fuuko says under the picture of the star projector, whose constellations she was about to show Yuni, "I hope she'll tell me it's beautiful." This is the Rosetta Stone of the writer's sympathies. Fuuko is fanciful, creative; maybe even a little ephemeral. She plays games with Yuni, prodding and drawing Yuni out––but Fuuko doesn't lie, and doesn't deceive. She yearns for Yuni in a breathless, poetic way, and she approaches Yuni with sincerity. Nanase, meanwhile, lies to Yuni about remembering their anniversary, lies in a larger way about how important Yuni is to her, and consistently leads Yuni to get her hopes up about an advance in their relationship which never really comes. As representative of middle-class values, the meritocratic hegemony the middle-class fronts to the world, Nanase is given the benefit of the doubt, and even taken MORE seriously than fringe elements like Yuni and Fuuko. But she is completely full of sh*t at just about all times, so deep in her own lies she doesn't realize they aren't true. To dovetail ungracefully back to the first argument I was trying to make, there are really only two characters in the narrative we're meant to understand as individual people, beyond their representation of one class value or another. Nanase is never really in the picture as more than a guard for the orthodox position––we hardly get any deep insight into what Nanase thinks. In front of us, she acts like a dope, a thug (her response to Fuuko: "Get away from my girlfriend!"), a patsy, and an ignoramus (she does not see her friend is into her, and a way better match––but beyond that, Nanase is palpably ignorant throughout, as when she stumbles in on the star projector and immediately draws the curtains, spoiling the image without even a hint of curiosity). This isn't about a character whose embodiment of class values makes her little more than a prop. This is about Yuni and Fuuko, who burn, flame and burst with passion. It's about the genuine feelings Fuuko has for Yuni, and about the genuine feelings for Fuuko which Yuni tries so hard to deny––because accepting them goes against her assumptions of how her world works (and, by extension, since the girls all serve as stand-ins, as metaphorical representations of different classes, dating Fuuko rather than Nanase disrupts Yuni's blithe ignorance of the real nature of class war, and of the socio-economic assumptions she has made until now). I hope this all doesn't end in tragedy––though there's that chapter where Yuni fantasizes about choking out Fuuko. But to me the only reasonable way to see it is to hope for the happiness of the two really obvious main characters here––the ones that think and feel deeply, not just as shallow representations of the way people assume things should be. Breaking tradition––breaking peoples' expectations––is hard, convulsive, painful. Moralizing the situation––in this case, especially––is such unnecessary torment.

The point that Nanase is essentially treating Yuni like a child is a good one. It makes me wonder if perhaps Fuuko's recent pitch about being her mama is partially based on thinking maybe that's what Yuni wants in a relationship, since she keeps staying with Nanase. If it was, Yuni would be far from unique, a whole hell of a lot of people irl seem to want parents instead of peers for their romantic partners (smdh).

PS did the Citizen Kane clap irl at calling Nanase in the gakuran fashy lmao

The mental gymnastics you guys are doing trying to paint Nanase as the bad guy and Fuuko as the savior is crazy.

You are giving the author way too much credit. Everything fell off a cliff once the cheating got out. Nanase for some bs reason can't give up on Yuni ( like the good cuck she is to keep the story going)

Fuuko is just getting crazier to keep things fresh? I admit I didn't see the momy thing coming lmao.

For the rest the manga is just running circles, I would be way more engaged if Yuni and Nanase actually had any chemistry. But there is nothing, nada. Unless Nanase is crazy over Yunis looks I don't see why their are dating at all. And dont tell me it's because she complimented her haircut.

Since people instinctively compare themselves to their peers, it's not that strange to use the school is a comparison for "society" when it comes to class. By that, I mean income inequality is a better predictor of various kinds of social ills than wealth itself because if everyone poor then people tend to feel like they're doing decently well. I am kind of experiencing this myself. I live in an area with many immigrants, legal and otherwise, as well as their descendants. I live off what's considered a poverty level income.

I've encountered various peoplewho seem to see me as a destitute person with a difficult life. This is either in other places or with people who are from other places. Still, I can afford a nice place to live, transportation, I can afford entertainment options like museums, etc. I could pick any restaurant at random and likely afford to go there. The reason is that all of these must be set up to be accessible to the people who live here. I therefore have a sense that I'm getting to fully participate in society and not missing out on anything important. I'm curious if that will change if I move and get re-exposed to US income inequality.

If we take the school, the sense of full participation very much does not apply Yuni. She mostly posts on instagram and waits for Nanase. There's lots of free activities she could be doing with other students like hanging out in parks and playing games . However, the social life of the school is not designed around that. Nanase in contrast embraces the school's social life, while Fuuko stays aloof from it for various reasons.

I do think that, if the author really wanted, they could have people 'truly' of these incomes at the same school. For instance, it could be a rich elite school with a scholarship tuition program, making it a burden for Yuni's single mom to simply pay for things like uniforms. If Nanase and Yuni were both on scholarships, that would give them another reason to initially be drawn toward each other despite being a bad fit for each other. It would also explain Nanase's obsession with maintaining her image at school, especially as it pertains to sports where she is fully accepted and admired.

The author not coming up with something like this likely means they didn't intend for us to focus on economic classes this much, despite relative income levels still being treated as story relevant in places like the Osaka arc.

last edited at Dec 20, 2024 9:55AM

The mental gymnastics you guys are doing trying to paint Nanase as the bad guy and Fuuko as the savior is crazy.

You are giving the author way too much credit. Everything fell off a cliff once the cheating got out. Nanase for some bs reason can't give up on Yuni ( like the good cuck she is to keep the story going)

There’s a difference (a key one to my mind) between “discussing characterization” and “painting imaginary people as good guys or bad guys.”

The “some reason” Nanase can’t give up on Yuni is, as has just been explained at length, her sense of ownership. She’s not particularly invested in what Yuni needs or wants, she just objects to someone “stealing” something she thinks of as “hers.” Everyone is free to decide if that makes Nanase “a bad person” or not, but that moral judgment is irrelevant to how she functions as part of the story.

The mental gymnastics you guys are doing trying to paint Nanase as the bad guy and Fuuko as the savior is crazy.

You are giving the author way too much credit. Everything fell off a cliff once the cheating got out. Nanase for some bs reason can't give up on Yuni ( like the good cuck she is to keep the story going)

There’s a difference (a key one to my mind) between “discussing characterization” and “painting imaginary people as good guys or bad guys.”

The “some reason” Nanase can’t give up on Yuni is, as has just been explained at length, her sense of ownership. She’s not particularly invested in what Yuni needs or wants, she just objects to someone “stealing” something she thinks of as “hers.” Everyone is free to decide if that makes Nanase “a bad person” or not, but that moral judgment is irrelevant to how she functions as part of the story.

I'm sorry, but did the author confirm that, or is this just pure reader-response theory? Where's your proof? That one moment when Nanase yelled, "Get away from my girlfriend," is a perfectly normal response. That doesn't mean she's seeing Yuni as something she owns.

This is complete overreach if I've ever seen one—or you could almost call it projection. Interpreting and speculating about their motivations and such is fun and all, but don't act like it's definitive.

I could write a whole wall of text with tons of theories and examples to prove a point, but it would still be purely anecdotal and prove nothing.

last edited at Dec 20, 2024 11:53AM

The “some reason” Nanase can’t give up on Yuni is, as has just been explained at length, her sense of ownership. She’s not particularly invested in what Yuni needs or wants, she just objects to someone “stealing” something she thinks of as “hers.” Everyone is free to decide if that makes Nanase “a bad person” or not, but that moral judgment is irrelevant to how she functions as part of the story.

I'm sorry, but did the author confirm that, or is this just pure reader-response theory? Where's your proof? That one moment when Nanase yelled, "Get away from my girlfriend," is a perfectly normal response. That doesn't mean she's seeing Yuni as something she owns.

“Perfectly normal responses” is precisely how ideological hegemony works. If you believe that the only legitimate readings are consciously intended by the author, enjoy your reading of the work.

The mental gymnastics you guys are doing trying to paint Nanase as the bad guy and Fuuko as the savior is crazy.

You are giving the author way too much credit. Everything fell off a cliff once the cheating got out. Nanase for some bs reason can't give up on Yuni ( like the good cuck she is to keep the story going)

Fuuko is just getting crazier to keep things fresh? I admit I didn't see the momy thing coming lmao.

For the rest the manga is just running circles, I would be way more engaged if Yuni and Nanase actually had any chemistry. But there is nothing, nada. Unless Nanase is crazy over Yunis looks I don't see why their are dating at all. And dont tell me it's because she complimented her haircut.

lmao. "You all are doing mental gymnastics and giving the author too much credit by analyzing the story's themes. On an unrelated note, I can't understand the character motivations in this story for some reason?" hmmmm

The mental gymnastics you guys are doing trying to paint Nanase as the bad guy and Fuuko as the savior is crazy.

You are giving the author way too much credit. Everything fell off a cliff once the cheating got out. Nanase for some bs reason can't give up on Yuni ( like the good cuck she is to keep the story going)

There’s a difference (a key one to my mind) between “discussing characterization” and “painting imaginary people as good guys or bad guys.”

The “some reason” Nanase can’t give up on Yuni is, as has just been explained at length, her sense of ownership. She’s not particularly invested in what Yuni needs or wants, she just objects to someone “stealing” something she thinks of as “hers.” Everyone is free to decide if that makes Nanase “a bad person” or not, but that moral judgment is irrelevant to how she functions as part of the story.

I'm sorry, but did the author confirm that, or is this just pure reader-response theory? Where's your proof? That one moment when Nanase yelled, "Get away from my girlfriend," is a perfectly normal response. That doesn't mean she's seeing Yuni as something she owns.

This is complete overreach if I've ever seen one—or you could almost call it projection. Interpreting and speculating about their motivations and such is fun and all, but don't act like it's definitive.

I could write a whole wall of text with tons of theories and examples to prove a point, but it would still be purely anecdotal and prove nothing.

Responding to people making informed literary analyses and calling them something as juvenile as "pure reader-response theory" simply means you do not understand what we're doing. This isn't meaningless game theory shit, nor is there a sole objective factual deduction that can be made. It's a structured form of analytical thinking. feihong's dropping posts in this thread that are good enough for college literature class essays (or they would be if included inline citations and a bibliography anyway lol), not just guessing at random.

The mental gymnastics you guys are doing trying to paint Nanase as the bad guy and Fuuko as the savior is crazy.

You are giving the author way too much credit. Everything fell off a cliff once the cheating got out. Nanase for some bs reason can't give up on Yuni ( like the good cuck she is to keep the story going)

There’s a difference (a key one to my mind) between “discussing characterization” and “painting imaginary people as good guys or bad guys.”

The “some reason” Nanase can’t give up on Yuni is, as has just been explained at length, her sense of ownership. She’s not particularly invested in what Yuni needs or wants, she just objects to someone “stealing” something she thinks of as “hers.” Everyone is free to decide if that makes Nanase “a bad person” or not, but that moral judgment is irrelevant to how she functions as part of the story.

I feel there is also a sense of competition, she refuses to lose even if it means ignoring her feelings for Yuki. In the last chapter, she looked at Yuki first but then went to Yuni, her reasoning 'Refusing to lose'

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.

Oh my God, I love this commentttt like sister (or sibling), ignoring the part where you attribute an anti-capitalist intent to the author of this story which, I don't know if it's present... I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful to have a yuri story that actually talked about social class and how it drives the dynamic between the characters... You really are using some kind of marxist analysis to argue that the rich girl who is conspicuously also the most complex, interesting, beautiful, with the most vivid interiority, who happens to be the most loving of them all should get the girl, it is her Destiny, she should be able to give the middle finger to her rich family/social class by getting the poor girl, by Degrading, Tainting Herself with the Poor Girl. And this is definitely the best option for the poor girl btw, nobody else could love her as well as the rich girl, her savior. No, I absolutely love this essay, it's like... There are some genuinely interesting points but the main argument is like- kind of amazing, honestly. Are all first world leftists like this? This HAS to be a psyop

I gotta say this is all very interesting but in the end it's still purely speculative. I have no probs with interpretations and such but claiming to know for sure what Nanase's or Fuuko's motivations are is just bs.

Your analysises can be as deep as the Mariana trench and it still will be nothing more than speculation. Some humility might be in order, I mean interpret all you want but don't act like the authority unless the evidence is definitef.

You can't know ANYTHING for sure, you think you're reading a forum post but you might actually be dreaming right now. You might be in full dive VR and being experimented on without knowing it (a scenario my Philosophy professor was absolutely obsessed with when I was in college). At some point we have to start rounding: accepting the most likely thing as true unless proven false so we can take actions, think thoughts, and go about our day. It's true we don't know for sure what the author intends for Nanase's interest in Yuni, or anything else, or if this manga is even real instead of merely a shared hallucination. When we take a step back and look for the most likely thing, there's a ton of evidence pointing at Nanase being possessive and competitive rather than earnestly in love with Yuni. And so we say that. We're all adults here or at least are pretending to be, we don't need to constantly put "in my opinion" on all our statements, we can assume it because none of us here are the author, or nor is anyone pretending to be.

I gotta say this is all very interesting but in the end it's still purely speculative. I have no probs with interpretations and such but claiming to know for sure what Nanase's or Fuuko's motivations are is just bs.

Your analysises can be as deep as the Mariana trench and it still will be nothing more than speculation. Some humility might be in order, I mean interpret all you want but don't act like the authority unless the evidence is definitef.

Reading this, I have to presume you aren't familiar with Roland Barthes' literary theory people refer to as "Death of the Author." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

It's ubiquitous enough at this point I don't usually feel like I have to reference and explicate it. The argument the theory makes that is germane to what we're talking about is the idea that meaning is created by the reader interpreting the text, not by the author crafting it. It is a literary theory by-and-large assumed to be part of the firmament of modern criticism, and it seems as if most of the readers here understand that I'm assuming it as a premise when I'm writing here.

As for humility, I feel that you're misinterpreting the tone of my writing. My goal in writing is to make my act of interpreting the text make sense, and I feel strongly that in order to make sense, the ideas have to be presented very directly, and without any demure. If I begin every section with a preamble indicating that what I'm saying is just something I think, and not some sort of inside knowledge of authorial intent I've gleaned from the author, it only gets in the way of making the interpretive argument cogent. That a theory is speculation, based on close reading of the text, is something which can be assumed. It's an assumption I make in regards to everyone's theories of the text written here, yours included. I feel like you're receiving a certain aggression from my writing, and all I can tell you is that it isn't intended. I write how I write, based on the kind of literary criticism I read and enjoy. If it sounds arrogant, all I can tell you is that it is the main way I know how to construct meaning and make arguments, and that every argument offered therein is simply, as you say, a theory. It being a theory is what makes it mine; no presentation of facts was ever intended––and I don't believe any presentation of facts was overtly communicated to most reader or contributors to the forum. Furthermore, ANY interpretation of a text, absent the author's voice of assent, for whatever that is worth, is inherently over-reach, vis-a-vis the original text––any interpretation is extra to the text––including, I might add, translation, which inherently alters the meaning of the original work. If we apply Death of the Author theory here, I think you can easily make a credible case that anything an author says about their work is also extra to the text, and therefore not dispositive of meaning. So I acknowledge that you seem to be upset with my writing, but I don't see that you are making an argument towards any purpose. I am not the author of My Girlfriend's Not Here Today. Therefore, any interpretive writing I do on the subject, however lengthy or brief it is, over-reaches from the concrete text––though the idea that the text is concrete is not so clear-cut to me, in the first place.

How is one meant, for instance, to integrate the chapters into the work that appear exclusively on particular platforms, like the zero chapter? In the official English language publication of the book, that chapter doesn't even appear. What about the extra chapter where Yuni thinks about strangling Fuuko? Is it meant to be part of the continuity of the story? Is it a diegetic event in the story, or a dream? None of this stuff is clearly established by the author, so far as I can see. All we have to help us integrate all that into the reading is our ability to interpret the text. And the whole point of my writing this is to offer one avenue of possible interpretation. You can see how some readers here respond to it with their own formulations, or with amendations and criticisms of the arguments I'm making. This is what we're doing, interpreting and making arguments for or against certain interpretations. It's exercise for your brain––it's meant to be fun. By nature, doing this does not nail down any official meaning to the text at hand. I do hope you can come around to being okay with this. No argument here is meant as a personal insult, after all. I just don't agree with your assertion that the text presents Nanase as an ideal, or even and acceptable girlfriend for Yuni. And I'm trying to argue that there are many signposts in the text that Nanase's tone, her lack of character development in comparison to the other two main characters, and her leaning on status in lieu of either argument or genuine feeling means that she cares for Yuni less than Fuuko does, and inherently fills the antagonist role in the story. Nanase loves Yuni, as Cordelia says in King Lear, "according to my bond, no more nor less." Lear interprets that in the Shakespeare play to mean the conditional bond of subject to ruler, but in fact Cordelia means their bond as father and daughter, which she is trying to imply means more than Lear's status as liege, and is, for her, ultimate and unconditional. In My Girlfriend's Not Here Today, Nanase's bond with Yuni is much shallower; it's the bond of high school girlfriend––and I think we tend to understand that as a bond which has very little stable value. One need not love one's high school girlfriend; dating is a pro forma activity for people of that age, people sometimes hardly know what they want of one another's intimacy. And by comparison, Fuuko loves Yuni far outside the range of their extremely tentative bond. They are acquaintances, but Fuuko treats Yuni as someone she has made a serious commitment to. We do see that this is pretty much the only way Fuuko can communicate or receive affection (she has no friends, it seems, only would-be exes and family she is quasi-divorced from), but it really comes down, in my formulation, to whether the title of "lover" is more or less vital than the substance of love––the difference between the performance of love ("performance" here meaning all it implies about artifice) and the act of love. Nanase does not want Yuni to occupy much more of her time and consideration than the position of high-school girlfriend might imply; Fuuko clearly wants more for herself, and more for Yuni. And the masochism we see in Fuuko comes across, I feel, as proof of far more sincerity than Nanase's insubstantial protestations of a love she never really has to prove. It's clear from the outset that Fuuko is willing to sacrifice a lot to be with Yuni. She is willing to do without the respect of others, willing to sacrifice her self-respect, willing to take a chance on a feeling that won't necessarily be reciprocated. Nanase, meanwhile, is not willing to sacrifice anything for the same. When I look at those two that way, in the context of fiction, where we are generally encouraged to pick winners and losers, those deserving and those not so––in that context, one character is deserving of love, always denied it, and still tries for it again and again, hopefully. The other character acts like devotion is owed her, and does not grow as a character to understand the relationship she's being handed, or the needs of her partner. Of course, that's just my opinion, but that's the whole point––it IS my opinion. It is my interpretation of the text. It is the reading which validates my participation in the creation of meaning around the text. And that's it, at the end of the day.

last edited at Dec 20, 2024 6:48PM

is it just me or the scenes between fuuko and yuuni feel more insipid lately?, it feels like iwami is cooking but midway is like meh. I don´t think there´s really anything than can lift the series everything feel like a formality at this poing

Have Yuni and Nanase actually ever had sex yet? Or did Yuni lose her 'first' to Fuuko?