I'm 100% just being bitter and shoving my own expectations onto a story that's trying to do it's own thing, but when I start reading a yuri triangle love drama, I don't go into it excited for the very first story arc to be about a boy confessing to the protagonist and trying to date her. We get moments of Tsubasa thinking introspectively about yuri, but that's about it in terms of actual yuri development, especially when other characters in the triangle actively interrupt her yuri thoughts with "don't forget about that boy! You should think about that boy more!"

It's bizarre how short and inconsequential these chapters feel despite being massive (50 pages! Each!) but I feel like most of that time is being spent on this boy drama that I'm not invested in and want to be done with already. I'm just going to have to deal with the fact that I misread what the focus of this story was going to be, but I reserve the right to blame the manga for giving me two chapters of what I expected and wanted before taking a hard swerve into "both the girl you love and the girl who loves you think you should just date that boy you don't care about" territory.

last edited at Nov 14, 2016 5:58AM

Well obviously Mikage Kotooka has some background stuff going on, I'm thinking either she has a crush on Tsukasa Shiratori, knows about Shiratori's feelings towards Washio, or she had an incredibly bad experience with love in the past (or some combination of the three). Nadeshiko Washio probably thinks she is helping Shiratori out and repaying her for the emotional support.

Wait, is it not already 100% clear that Kotooka is in love with Shiratori? I thought it had been confirmed already. Might be wrong about that, but that's how I'm expecting it to go, at least - Kotooka fell for Shiratori, gave up on love because she sees it's unrequited or is sceptical of same-sex relationships, and has been dating boys indiscriminately because she doesn't trust her own ability to understand what love is and/or hopes that random boys will be a good distraction. She's now pushing that hopelessness onto Shiratori and is encouraging her to date a random boy too, because she wants to make it clear to herself that her feelings are impossible.

She has a reason to be pushy, even if it's a twisted reason that's going to make everyone miserable. Washio just seems like she's trying to be helpful without ever bothering to ask what the person she's "helping" wants or needs, prioritising some generic ideal of what girls "should" want out of life over whether or not Shiratori feels comfortable with it, or in the worst-case-scenario, prioritising some random boy's feelings of mostly imaginary, slightly stalkery love over the girl who's ostensibly one of her best friends. There's also the possibility that Washio suspects Kotooka's feelings and is trying to remove Shiratori as a rival, but she doesn't seem like that sort of person?

(I'm still leaving open the possibility that Glasses Boy saw Shiratori's brother while he was crossdressing and fell in love with HIM, and maybe they had a conversation that the brother forgot about, and when he tried to track him down he mistook one Shiratori for the other. That would make his sudden confession a lot more understandable and less creepy, but as far as any of the girls are aware, this is the first time they've ever met.)

Really, Shiratori also should take some of the blame for not making it clear that she has someone she is currently crushing on. I mean the guy is essentially prince charming and if you say that you currently have no one you like, there really isn't any logical reason why anyone would say you shouldn't at least meet him.

I mean, no? She shouldn't actually need a reason not to meet someone beyond "I don't feel like it", especially when that person followed her to her school to confess, apparently without ever having a single conversation with her, which I don't really think of as ideal Prince Charming behaviour.

She's shown that she's fairly reluctant about doing anything with him already, if they cared enough to notice, but they've still been pushing her into "giving him a chance" and arranging dates for her anyway. The fact that she happens to be in love with someone already is kind of immaterial, at this point. If those are the magic words that would make them back off when "I don't know, I thought he was a bit weird, I'm not really interested" is arbitrarily deemed illogical and insufficient, then that makes them bad friends. If we're being generous, we can say that they have their own sympathetic and understandable reasons for being bad friends, but that doesn't really change the fact that they're being bad friends.

Man, forget the love triangle stuff, if your friends are pushing you this hard to hook up with a guy whom none of you know and you're obviously not excited about, they're bad friends. At least her brother took a moment to actually ask her how she felt, even if they didn't end up actually talking about it.

Each story automatically creates a topic in the forum when you use the comment button on the upper right of each story page. Each future comment using the same method gets added to the existing topic linked to the story.

The "Start new topic" button in the forum is for starting a new discussion not linked to the manga page. So if you wanted to start a "Can someone help me find this manga?" or one devoted to a series we don't host, that's how you do it.

I know. What I meant was, I clicked the comment button on the story when there were no comments, which gave me the "start a new topic" prompt as usual, but by the time I finished writing, someone else had already commented first, thus creating the default discussion thread for the story, and instead of adding my comment to the existing thread, it appears to have treated it as a conflicting "first" comment, and disappeared into the void.

Oh, I think my comment got eaten. I guess it's because I wrote it using the "start new topic" form because there were no other comments at the time, but by the time I clicked submit, the topic had already been created? That kind of sucks. Oh well.

I was just also saying that this whole game of "I know she likes me, and I like her too, but instead of saying anything I'm just going to deliberately date (pretend to date?) a bunch of shitty guys and get frustrated when she doesn't take advantage of me when I'm drunk and vulnerable" she's playing is absurd. Like, the manager doesn't even know that dating her is an option for you, she's totally convinced that you're straight. You aren't going to disabuse her of this notion by telling her about all the guys you've dated and how low your standards are when it comes to men. And telling her that you can't be her soulmate unless the feelings are mutual is a great way to push her into giving up and moving on, too.

If you want someone to play out your fantasy with you, then you have to actually show them the script. You can't just expect them to play along perfectly and then get mad when they have no idea what you're doing, especially when the problem is that they respect you TOO MUCH.

last edited at Nov 10, 2016 8:42AM

Kinda expecting it to be a scenario like "I'm in love with my best friend, but I'm terrified of her finding out and being disgusted/scared of me, but I met this person who I'm not really in love with but has helped me out a lot, and even confessed to me while knowing about my feelings for my best friend and said that she would be fine dating me or pretending to date me even if I didn't love her yet, so maybe if I say I'm dating her then I'll be able to come out to my best friend and she won't feel threatened by me because I'm 'taken', and hopefully I'll eventually be able to get over my feelings for her and fall in love with this other girl instead, only it's a horrible mistake and if only I'd had the courage to be honest about my feelings in the first place then my best friend and I would've been happy together years ago and none of this would have happened". That's the feeling I get reading the first chapter, at least. This author sure likes her ironic unrequited loves.

Wasn't there... Something something ToLieAngle (?) that was basically a shonen yuri manga? It was like a generic ecchi harem thing, except the clumsy protag was also a girl. I only saw a handful of chapters translated, though.

Oh damn I just realized: She waited 7 years meaning for her, the last Fallout game was 2008. She missed out on New Vegas! Wow. Unbelievable :(

This is the real heartbreak of the chapter - she waited so long for a sequel to Fallout 3, but New Vegas, her true soulmate, was there the whole time, just waiting for her to notice. And now she's going to be too focused on her pretty but ultimately shallow fling with Fallout 4 (and her real girlfriend, I guess, whatever) to ever realise it. Brings a tear to your eye.

Wow, going from meticulously detailed establishing shots of the city and countryside straight into entire pages that don't even have a trace of screentone on them almost makes it feel more unfinished than if it was all linework and nothing else.

I mean, we're still far from Hunter X Hunter "I drew this chapter on a napkin with a packet of ketchup and a toothpick" territory, but still. You can almost feel the assistants being told "actually, we need these pages done yesterday".

last edited at Oct 10, 2016 6:27PM

Looks at tags

Ooh, this is going to be interesting!

"B-ko-san"

Oh, it's going to be weird.

Ohh, it's this one. It's funny, I can be really ridiculously sensitive about stuff, but this one doesn't bother me at all. It's just too surreal, I guess? The bit where she gets torn open and doesn't even have any ribs or bones or anything just made me laugh. It's supposed to be a metaphor for the pain of death or whatever, but it's too silly to get any of that across, so it ends up being weird and meaningless.

So... I kinda read it like Satoko was basically right about Yuka not actually being in love with her, but rather than her wanting to be nice to a friend or doing it out of obligation or whatever, it's that Yuka wanted to feel loved? Or that she was moved by Satoko's feelings and wanted to hold on to them? That's not a terrible place to start a relationship, and it certainly doesn't seem like Yuka's against being with a girl, but I don't know if it's terribly reassuring for the kind of insecurities Satoko has. In that case, I can see her worrying about whether anyone else would do just as well if they also confessed to Yuka, or if Yuka might find someone she actively wants to be with instead of just passively appreciating Satoko's feelings.

But that seems a little incongruously pessimistic and uncertain for the seemingly bright and cozy tone at the ending, so I don't know if that's actually what the author was going for. Not sure what to make of it.

I thought it was a fantasy until she started being like "Wait, slow down, this is embarrassing, let's stop" and it seemed weirdly specific and elaborate for her imagination. Had to go back and specifically look for the scene transition, and even then it was hard to spot. It's like there's a scene missing.

Yeah, I'm guessing she was "a place far away", as in another world or time or whatever, but "very close" because she was hanging out with Renko/Reimu as Merry the whole time. Or something. I don't know what Koishi had to do with anything, or if she understood something important, and the last few pages seem a little bit incomprehensible, but I think that's what the general idea was supposed to be? I have a feeling it was a difficult translation.

Hey, wait a second! There weren't any crepes at all in this chapter!

It always seems like an odd habit of doujin writers when they want to make a dark and dramatic story, to just turn most of the cast into yandere types. It's almost a genre of its own, really.

last edited at Aug 28, 2016 11:21AM

So I think the implication there was that Kase made a point to watch Yamada going about her plant appointee business after school, even while walking home with Inoue? Seemingly to the extent of being a noticeable and memorable habit, even. Yeah, it's strongly looking like Miwaki is just spreading baseless gossip without thinking of Yamada's feelings. You'd think "Wow! Kase-san might've dated that pretty senpai at some point!" would lose its edge a bit compared to "Wow! Kase-san is 100% confirmed dating my best friend!" But apparently Miwaki's thirst for gossip and intrigue is only rivaled by Kase's thirst for Yamada.

After reading this, I almost felt like it deserves some variant of "wtf" tag, but then again, what is eyeball licking, really, if not a very specialised form of WTF in itself?

I had been wondering why she was wearing an eyepatch on the cover, but not at school. Was that a clue? Should I have seen it coming? Could I have seen it coming? I was thinking maybe more along the lines of an eye infection (seriously, mouths are full of bacteria, don't lick eyeballs) rather than, y'know, cannibalism.

I guess there's a part two, as well? If she was so obsessed with that eyeball, I wonder if she's still attracted to the other girl now that the one feature she fixated on is now gone. That'd be fucked up.

It's pretty rapey, even if she got into it after a minute and started reciprocating, because she didn't actually have a way to give consent or not to begin with. Being smacked in the face firmly established the threat of violence as a punishment for non-compliance, the only choice she actually had was "bear with it and hope she finishes quickly" or "try to resist and maybe escape, but risk being beaten further and raped anyway". The fact that she loves it and wants more once her resistance is broken is hentai rape tropes 101, we're just more used to seeing it with men involved.

It's not the worst thing ever, of course, and it's sweet/creepy how they shift to a gentler dynamic halfway through, but it emphasises the non-consent thing pretty hard at the start, so I don't see a way to just ignore that bit and pretend it was all happy consensual sex.

Wait, that eyepatch, dark hair, past career in the air force... Is this secretly a Strike Witches doujin? Major Sakamoto's life after losing her magic?

Is she just committed suicide with freezing cold snow? Becoz she said "if you get used to the cold, it will become your resting. Abandon the warmth." Resting --> Death. Warmth --> Hope
Or am I wrong?

I read it as more a "give up hope, and you won't be disappointed" kind of thing, and not necessarily suicide.

I sort of wondered if the other girl was going to say "I'm going to stay with my mother, you should come with me" but never got the chance to. She was going to say something, anyway, and she didn't seem unhappy about it before she was cut off, so who knows. Do we know for a fact that this is a series? There are more chapters listed in the contents, but nothing that obviously points towards sequels. I'd like it if this wasn't the end of the story, but it could easily stand as a gloomy oneshot.

Always wondered why Japanese cartoon octopi always look bright red and curled up. It's kind of funny how that's become the recognisable visual shorthand for even living octopus characters, if that's just what happens when they're boiled.

Seafood can be pretty brutal when it comes to cooking things alive. I get that it's standard practise, and everything, but it still makes my skin crawl.

last edited at Aug 2, 2016 11:27AM

I just assumed Takumi was a girl at first because it's a yuri collection, and the rest of Canno's stuff that I've read have all starred girls. I was like, "Huh, she's pretty tall." Or "She's pretty androgynous in general, isn't she? Cool!" And even "Is she wearing trousers with her uniform? Wait, isn't that actually the boys' uniform? Why would a girl be wearing it? Is it going to be a character thing?" Took me fully half of the story before I even realised it might just be a guy. Whoops.

Anyway, like a lot of Canno stories, it was a pretty interesting setup, but didn't really go anywhere. I get the feeling Canno really likes making up new characters and new scenarios, but starts to drag when it comes to actually following through on those characters with stories and events.

Eighty six days?! That goes way beyond "we had a fight", that's "we broke up for a few months and then got back together"! I'm kind of shocked how nothing it was for them to just stop seeing each other for that long.

Wait, wait, slow down! Please! They still haven't talked about Mew studying abroad, Ice just confessed, Donut still thinks Mew kissed Ploy, and now they're meeting the homophobic father? What? How many more plot points do we need? Does Donut have cancer? Are there any childhood friends we should know about?Where's Truck-kun? Is Mew being forced into an arranged marriage? Is Mew's fiance Truck-kun?!

I just realised that, other than a couple of brief flashbacks set years in the past, chapter 10/11 is the only time Sea and Fah have actually had a conversation on-screen, and it's just them saying their internal monologues at each other. Always seems weird how often authors will skip actually showing characters spend time with each other and acting like they care about each other, in favour of going all in on the drama and just having them say they "I love you" a lot to make up the difference.