^ Gotta say the hints are rather heavy-handed. She throws her down on the bed and pins her there, then we are shown the sky over the city (sky's darkening, time's passing), then it's night and Aya tells Erika she dumped Koto, and the angle hides her face but her thoughts about the stars looking blurry imply that her eyes are full of tears...

Yeah she's teary eyed at the end, but like. She just broke up with someone she truly loved because that person wouldn't respect her. I don't think she needs any additional acute pain to be sad right there. And since we've got her internal monologue, which has zero hints of anything remotely like that in it, I seriously doubt the author intended us to read sex, consensually or otherwise, into that gap. Koto might have been thinking in that direction but I doubt she'd actually force it and I doubt Aya would go along with it.
And just on a metatextual level the author clearly wants us to care about all three of our protagonists and Koto's already on thin ice for being a sympathetic character. Making her go that far would pretty irrevocably push her over that edge into "fuck Koto she can just go die" territory with most of the audience.

Here's a pretty easy explanation for that gap in time: Aya was crying and it look her some time to calm down enough to make that call to Erika and start heading home. Hell, I'm surprised she could make that call without sobbing no matter how long she waited, I probably couldn't in her shoes. When my first love relationship broke up I couldn't even slightly talk about the subject for at least 4 or 5 days. Especially since it was a somewhat similar "We both still like each other but we can't stay together" situation (her homophobic parents found out about us)

last edited at Oct 21, 2024 10:31PM

Oh I really liked this. It had a very poetic feeling to it, like with how far they took the poison and bee metaphors without it feeling forced. And I've always liked these kinds of semi-abstracted stories of children who experience terrible things finding happiness and a place to thrive regardless. The beauty of survival. :)

I lowkey wish Yoru was my girlfriend...
unfortunately she's probably too perfect to exist in real life ;(

I know someone like Yoru irl. She absolutely dotes on her kinda useless girlfriend and actively seems to like all her gf's worst qualities lol. I've sometimes felt tempted to feel a bit sorry for her but they're both happy with that situation so it's working out for them and I'm happy for them. Never seen a truer true love than that.

I don't know what any of that means but I'm glad y'all are having fun.

We probably need to cut the “yuri skeptic/pessimist” community a bit of a break—they clearly still suffer from a lot of past trauma (although I’m not sure we can say the same of the “yuri tag police” aka the “on-panel fisting or it’s just subtext” crowd).

My own personal counter-example was Nettaigyo, which had to work far harder to NOT end up as explicit yuri than it would have done to just go with its own well-established flow—when you have to back off from an “isn’t the moon beautiful?” scene, you’re doing Olympic-level back-pedaling.

I totally agree on this one, though—the mutual blush-sex scenes alone approach NSFW levels.

My willingness to cut them a break stops when they get aggressive about anyone (like me) not being pessimistic. My gaydar is a well built, finely tuned, and lovingly maintained instrument lol. I took multiple college classes that contributed nothing to my major like classes on queer film theory and literary analysis, just for the sake of getting real good at picking up the signs.
(Not that any of that was necessary for a case as obvious as this one, that stuff is mostly useful for picking up subtext in cases where the author is trying to work around explicit censorship like gay novelists from the 1800s)

I still miss the "Handsome Girl and Sheltered Girl" branch of the mochiverse. That ending promised us a BL spinoff/sequel and they never delivered :(

that is like ignoring context to pretend you were right or something, we have many mangas were we were 100% they were gonna end up together only to be a wet fart of an ending, like please spare me the idea that 40 chapters was enough of an indication were i got stories that you couldn’t say they were NOT IN LOVE with one another only for the author to pull the we are best fewnds, so yeah thank got we got 80 chapters to reach this conclusion, should i thank the gay gods it paid off instead of going 130 without anything changing? YAP I’m gonna make an offering to the Yuri Goddess and thank her :3

YOU might have many manga that you thought they were gonna end up together and were wrong, but not me. Maybe I just know how to read better or something lol? To date my one and only failed prediction of canon gay is Lycoris Recoil, and I'm pretty sure that's only because the show got censored (and the light novel follow-ups written by the same author corrected that and made them textually gay).

don't claim victory before the match's over fella

Lol nobody's ever called me a "fella" before. The gender being wrong is an obvious problem but also like who talks to this in the modern day. Who goes around calling people "fella". I don't think I've ever heard anyone else called "fella" either.
But also this "match" IS over. Akebi's Sailor Uniform is gay. The gay Sailor Uniform ship has sailed. I did predict it four years ago before it happened but it's already happened by now, Komichi explicitly said she is in love with Erika. That's why the "subtext" tag on this manga got replaced with a "yuri" tag!

last edited at Oct 21, 2024 6:48AM

I've felt 100% confident this was intentionally textually intended as gay since all the way back in chapter 43, from four years ago. Since then we've had explicit confirmations of gay relationships, gay kisses, every other character shipping Komichi and Erika, and Komichi explicitly saying that her feelings of love for Erika expressed in the video they made are real, not acting. Anyone still afraid they're getting baited is way too paranoid, we're long past the point of no return to denialability lol.

That scene outside at night was absolutely gorgeous, wow

Sure it's all on there, but looks like much worse quality and rushed out by weird jerks from what I can see. I'll patiently wait for the good releases published here :) It's not like there aren't other things to read in the meantime. It's good to have quality scanlators you can trust, the extra time they take while ensuring quality is a feature, not a bug. One of the series I read on Dex, "Yuria-sensei's Red Thread," (which is fantastic if you like award winning manga about 50 year old women with gay comatose husbands) updates once every two months and is years and years behind the official release. To that I have nothing to say but "thank you" to the scanlator Meg-chan because I'm glad to have those once every two months high quality releases. If I want to read the series faster I'll finally get around to learning Japanese lol.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/lets_hang_out_when_the_black_plague_is_over_a_slow_life_of_modern_civilization_in_the_world_of_middle_age_europe_ch02#38

Apologies if someone said this already, but "Franken District" is probably Franconia, and "Roman Empire" must be "Holy Roman Empire". Going by Wikipedia, Franconia is plausibly a major wine source for the HRE. It's hilariously not for the 'real' Roman Empire.

To be fair to the author, the Holy Roman Empire certainly claimed to be the 'real' Roman Empire lol. I'm sure there's even some people out there who'd argue it was, like sure it's in a different place with a different structure of state and different religion and not much of an empire anymore but that's like Ship of Theseus stuff it can still be the Roman Empire!

Pliny the Elder preferred well water best of all, while Columella preferred spring water and put well water beneath that. Lupus Servatus, abbott of Ferrieres, echoes Columella in placing cistern water dead last. Hildegard of Bingen's ranking is, from best to worst, well water, spring water, rain water, and river water. Hildegard also advises that snow water is dangerous to the health, while river and swamp water should always be boiled, then cooled, before drinking.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/deleted_by_user/h5bjn7s/

There's a fourteenth-century text that purports to be a letter from a Valencia man to his sons at university in Toulouse that instructs them to "cook" the water they get from a couple of nearby rivers because it's known to be dirty!

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ajkpga/where_did_medieval_europeans_get_drinking_water/eewz0dm/?context=999

That second source, where the guy assumes his sons would drink unboiled river water if he didn't warn them about those particular rivers, feels like a good piece of evidence that drinking river water was indeed a thing sometimes and in some places. If you're in a very rural area without upstream livestock then it'd make perfect sense to me to drink from the river instead of putting in the effort and resources required to dig a well. It might be taking a risk, but these people didn't know to wash their hands after going to the bathroom so all the fear of rivers in the world couldn't stop digestive diseases from being an everpresent threat no matter what you did throughout most of history.
I also wouldn't be surprised if the taste of water was a bigger factor in these judgements and practices being formed. Does your local well taste chalky but your local river taste clean? You'd probably drink the river.

last edited at Oct 20, 2024 3:25AM

maybe dark magic only pops up in women and the prince is actually a trans girl

This is what I'm hoping is true. Same for the new Osamu Nisha manga "Ichi the Witch," which is similarly about a supposed "boy" gaining magical powers that have previously been exclusive to women. Considering how much she likes to get queer with it in her main manga "Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun," for example having an arc where the MC dresses in drag and joins an idol group to help his lesbian friend win a competition against her polyamorous lesbian love interest/rival, I think there's a real chance, too. Not sure about this manga, but we can always hope!

Edit: also the author says they "imagine most people drank wine diluted," but I don't think that needs much imagination: wine was essentially a disinfectant used to make safe drinking water for common use. The wine is an additive to stop you from getting dysentery, not the main part of the drink.

This is in an of itself an extremely common myth that is not true

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/comment/ce1r5xw/

Drinking undiluted wine was only if you were trying to get drunk, which Rachel probably is not doing at 4am on a,
Sunday.

this part is very true though

I don't know if it's a myth as far as if it worked or not, but there are records of people believing mixing wine into water would make it safer and recommending others do it. European sanitation standards were weird as hell for a long time and pretty much all based on superstition.
I'd also be skeptical of "they probably didn't use river water," because why wouldn't you use river water if you've got a river? Most people around the world at the time certainly would, I've researched the intersection of environmental and indigenous histories in the US (I loved working on this topic) and found oral histories from Midwest Indians about getting sick with stomach problems after Europeans moved in upstream from them.

I've been in a similar situation, getting asked out by a young woman way younger than me and wanting to let her down easy and so making up an excuse and promise like that makes sense to me (I did not personally do that though I instead claimed I wasn't single lol). I find it kinda funny that people are so hung up on the ten years as if it was intentionally planned or waited, their reunion was probably just random luck one day and they happened to be available at the time. That too young woman who asked me out back then would be as old now as I was then, if we met again then yeah maybe I'd be open to it since we're both grown ass adult women, far past the point where a few years difference matters.
The only thing about this story that doesn't feel relatable and sensible to me is the teacher being willing to date her former student in the first place before dumping her. It wasn't illegal or anything, a graduating student is 18, but 18 year olds are still basically babies to me lol.

Honestly looking back at chapter 14 Yuni is basically in the right here? Yuki accuses her of not taking Nanase seriously and tries to force her to break up, but isn't it Nanase who is unserious about their relationship, especially before she knows about Fuuko and gets competitive. Forcing Yuni to act like strangers in public when Yuni doesn't want to so that Nanase can deny their relationship, only for her to just tell somebody without asking Yuni or even telling her about it? She had to learn about it from some nosy bitch with obvious ulterior motives getting up in her business instead? I know people consider Yuni and Fuuko to be the more serious violation due to the sex involved but what Nanase did is still a huge betrayal of trust and particularly feels nasty that she's the one who insisted on the rule of secrecy that she went and broke behind Yuni's back. Yuni being furious is definitely not her being "less sane" it's a completely understandable rational response.
Nanase's behavior implicitly frames herself as the boss of their relationship, the person in charge who gets to make the decisions and judges what's okay and what isn't, while Yuni's expected to just sit there and listen to her. As far as I'm concerned for anyone who acts like that in a relationship, if they get cheated on they had it coming.

last edited at Oct 19, 2024 12:48PM

rainbow8 posted:

Forks were indeed late. Spoons, not so much. I've never heard of the Church having an opinion on how you eat, unless maybe they had an anti-knife thing for "please stop killing each other at dinner".

The mention of spoons as some kind of "sneakily" used thing is indeed false. There was no significant religious restriction on spoons. The author made that up.

Forks were more controversial. Some religious figures criticized the use of forks in the early Middle Ages as a symbol of decadence, but this wasn't an official Church position.

Using hands to eat was normal, but there was no strict religious requirement to do so. Same thing for the spoon facing down. It wasn't really a thing required by the Church (maybe some local superstition?)

So, I think the author just made stuff up (or read urban legends) and charged the Church as guilty.

Yeah this chapter felt way more shaky to me on the details. It's hard to prove a negative of course but some of these things just feel off, like Rachel wearing keys on her belt. Locks and keys were specialized very expensive artisan crafts and most peasants have nothing worth that expense to lock up. And would she really bring a knife to church with her? Also feel iffy about her casually eating honey for breakfast at her status, given the labor that goes into harvesting it: as far as I know before the invention of the industrial beehive box in the 19th century honey had to be harvested by destroying the beehive, then waiting for a new bee colony to rebuild for the next harvest. Maybe the author will get into honey production in a later chapter idk.
The stuff about "The Catholic Church says put your spoon face down so demons don't get in it" definitely feels wrong, and with how centralized and dogmatic they were it should be really easy to document if it were true.

Edit: also the author says they "imagine most people drank wine diluted," but I don't think that needs much imagination: wine was essentially a disinfectant used to make safe drinking water for common use. The wine is an additive to stop you from getting dysentery, not the main part of the drink. Drinking undiluted wine was only if you were trying to get drunk, which Rachel probably is not doing at 4am on a Sunday.

last edited at Oct 19, 2024 12:23PM

I really like Gao's art. It's really evocative and kinda unnerving, especially the way she gave the person and the animals similar eyes. Haro meanwhile is fucking boring. His art sucks, his rivalry sucks, his plot sucks. Can we just follow Gao instead? She's a way better protagonist, she has interesting motivations and a novel perspective, and makes art that I actually find interesting instead of Haro shoehorning the same boring ass overly perfect male gaze ass version of the female form in everything he does. He reminds me of the one "artist" guy in Watamote that always draws girls with the same face, which unintentionally tricked Tomoko into thinking he had a crush on her when he drew her "cute". I could accept the concept of "every drawing has be a nude" if there was body variety, some kinda indication he's studying figures and anatomy, paying attention to individuals, but nah just the same idealized image of that lady he saw naked that one time, for basically every drawing, drawn in mostly the same style. One of the most one note characters I've ever seen as the supposed protagonist of a serious long form story.
For contrast from another manga you can compare Haru to Kaguhara of Kaguhara's Fetish Notebook. She's got sleazy intentions but her art has variety and real care put into it, she really highlights the things that make each of her subjects different and special in her eyes. Her art lets us get a look into how she sees the world and the other girls she interacts with, and is frequently surprising and very well done.

last edited at Oct 19, 2024 1:52AM

Does this have spoilers? I haven't got into the series yet but rather wait for it to end. That is if it ever ends

You already know the one big spoiler of the series if you read the original one shot. While this is an alternate take on things that also happen in the manga, it's a thing you already know will happen based on the very last page of the first one shot.

This title is interesting but in cases like these where something grabs my attention but has risky tags, I check the comments to check for triggers. This is the first time this strategy has completely blown up in my face thanks to this comment section being full of extremely weird people oversharing about masturbation and arguing about rape, fucking yikes.

Whaaaat? The author's coloring is 100x better than the AI colored one

Fishing for compliments lol. I'm sure a whole lot of readers are correctly telling her how much better her art is than the dumb ai filter one. It probably did the job faster, at least, but yeesh it ignored the lineart in multiple places, most obviously the entire right hand side of the character is just completely garbled, and unlike with a human artist or assistant it can't get better at this and it can't correct mistakes, only roll the dice and generate a whole new attempt that will just have different random errors. There's probably no way for it to ever get details they rely on human context right, like the hair on the right side that is partially hidden by the shoulder, which looks fine in her version and like a random bit of hair is stapled onto the shirt in the ai version

This is cute, it's funny how relatively open minded and honest the gyaru is when the honor student is pulling her into a serious dramatic plot structure. They're such an odd couple it's closer to "characters from two different genres of queer fiction" rather than "characters from two different cliques at school".
Also the girl eating the tomato on page 16 is so funny, eating that tomato turned her into a muppet or something

So is basically Omegaverse right? The protection on Yashiro to make sure demons don't harm her is that she's an Alpha and all the demons (and possibly angels too?) are Omega. I didn't clock it at first with Maou but Maou's a kid: Seb made it super clear lol.

last edited at Oct 16, 2024 7:06AM

Yeesh, I try to let stories go places I wouldn't got the sake of telling a story, such as this kind of age gap thing, but I simply cannot abide by this MC looking at a perfect woman who loves her and going "no! I don't want her, I want this person who's the same type but a child instead!" I can accept a protagonist who makes the wrong choice but that's a lot harder to stomach when the right choice presents itself on a silver platter and she deliberately throws it away. Considering what the primary differences between Mimai and Megumi are (age and vulnerability) it REALLY does not look good for this MC compared to if Megumi was the only thing going on in her life.
Most age gap stories include details to make it feel a bit less potentially gross, typically making the younger person the more aggressive one, making the older one really earnest and devoted, etc. This author instead boldly refuses to offer us anything to ease the discomfort, not even being open about the discomfort with framing like we're supposed to be disliking these choices. It's even stopped being a comedy and is just a straightforward drama about if our hero will get to fuck a kid or not.

last edited at Oct 16, 2024 1:05AM

Okay, who do I need to bonk on the head for instating this yuri kiss censorship? Totally puts a damper on my yuri enjoyment.

That wasn't censorship that was just a random bit of dust on the camera lol. They just keep happening whenever girls kiss for some reason, entirely at random!