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?

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

They did. When Yuni had sex with Fuuko, she compared Fuuko's body to Nanase's body. There are even some images about it as I remember.

Ah! https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/my_girlfriends_not_here_today_ch11#9

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

She didn't lose anything. Only losers (and traditional heteros, but I repeat myself) lose from having sex. Yuni only gained 8)

on my knees begging people to actually pick up and read the fucking capitalist realism book before throwing the term around like another meaningless buzzword, please i can't take it anymore

It's still unknown why Nanase and Yuni are dating each other. And Nanase was the one who confessed, not Yuni

everything would be solved if they had a threesome

My money is on this girl being Fuuko's ex.

As for Yuni...my how the turntables.

There were a lot of "stops" and "no's" there in that struggle--seems forced. I don't like this new girl and its good Yuni was there to interrupt whatever was happening. Even if she's an ex, she was clearly unwanted even before Yuni arrived.

last edited at Feb 18, 2025 3:48PM

Poor Fuuko just can't catch a fucking break lately. I really hope Yuni does right by her next chapter instead of going "oh you're clearly together with that person who you obviously are refusing consent to so I'm going to act hurt and leave you alone with them".

Also the way Fuuko's talked I'd be surprised if she had an ex in her past. I can imagine this being a recent aborted hookup/meetup or something, since clearly she's not just a stranger? Twitter led Fuuko to Yuni so I could see her in desperation agreeing to meet up with another Internet person hoping she'd find something similar only to get burned by it.

last edited at Feb 18, 2025 3:40PM

Oh my god the extremely excessive interpretation of the text in this forum is awesome. I don't know that it's wise to spend that energy on this manga in particular but it's hilarious. Thank you for contributing to the world

Also didn't Nanase's sash say "king of Japan"? I guess it could mean today's star in a cultural way. I've never been a Japanese high schooler who won a track meet.

last edited at Feb 18, 2025 3:38PM

Oh my god the extremely excessive interpretation of the text in this forum is awesome. I don't know that it's wise to spend that energy on this manga in particular but it's hilarious. Thank you for contributing to the world

Also didn't Nanase's sash say "king of Japan"? I guess it could mean today's star in a cultural way. I've never been a Japanese high schooler who won a track meet.

It's written 本日の主役

Today's Star/MVP/Main Character

I don't know how you can come up with "King of Japan"...

Oh my god the extremely excessive interpretation of the text in this forum is awesome. I don't know that it's wise to spend that energy on this manga in particular but it's hilarious. Thank you for contributing to the world

Also didn't Nanase's sash say "king of Japan"? I guess it could mean today's star in a cultural way. I've never been a Japanese high schooler who won a track meet.

If I cared about what's a "wise" way to spend energy I'd never post. Posting is for fun. And none of the interpretations we've all been posting have been excessive imo. Going big with it just means having even more fun :)

Oh my god the extremely excessive interpretation of the text in this forum is awesome. I don't know that it's wise to spend that energy on this manga in particular but it's hilarious. Thank you for contributing to the world

Also didn't Nanase's sash say "king of Japan"? I guess it could mean today's star in a cultural way. I've never been a Japanese high schooler who won a track meet.

It's written 本日の主役

Today's Star/MVP/Main Character

I don't know how you can come up with "King of Japan"...

Nanase being labeled in a way that can be read as "Main Character" is super funny tho. Like yeah she sure does think of herself that way huh

A NEW FIGHTER ARIVES

I don't know how you can come up with "King of Japan"...

本日 is one wrong blink away from 日本. 主 is very close visually to 王. Neither are mistakes a fluent reader would make (well, at least not at a second glance) but, like, it is not hard to see how someone with a passing knowledge on the language could arrive at that.