this author really just said that accepting refugees into your country will increase crime rates and encourage folks to kill . cringe bro

Technically, the author said that will happen IF YOU TREAT THE REFUGEES LIKE SHIT.

And implicitly, if what you have is a big mass of refugees all stuck together in something like a refugee camp and treated like shit. And really, it's true enough--we don't see big refugee camps full of people with no rights in North America much, but where they have them, it gets ugly. But the very same groups of people behave very differently if they're allowed to blend into society, join a union and so on like everyone else.

All I could think when the two of them were playing was "OK, so the new girl is a really shit drummer then."
Like, if you're drumming to try to make the other instruments disappear, you're DOING IT WRONG.

I dunno, I'm not into this. I mean, ooh, they're subverting a silly old trope that has only been subverted, I dunno, ten million times already. We've long since reached the point where the subversion IS the cliche.

last edited at Aug 8, 2023 8:11PM

Right. Hit her head. I must say I gotta hand it to the author for just head-on having the kid basically not remember. It's not mistaken identity or anything like that, she's just "Ahh, I was a kid, I'm sure I thought it was important at the time but that was a long time ago . . . something happened, I guess."
Really, manga writers never do that. In manga the childhood puppy-love romance is always by far the most important thing that happened in your life, remaining in your mind as though it were yesterday and changing your whole subsequent life course and, often, personality. So this is kind of refreshing even if I think it takes a world class ditz to forget THAT hard.

yeah, i was like, SHE REALLY can’t remember 0.0, question tho, will we get an logical explanation on way her memory of that period is missing???

Not remembering that kind of stuff is normal though, isn't it? I certainly "remember" several kids I used to play with from my childhood while at the same time I'm totally unable to recall their faces/name/whatever at all, they're just like amorphous blobs in the back of my mind haha.

Well, but how old were you then and how old are you now? This is not that huge a gap in time as far as I can see. Which is why even though I think the basic approach is "refreshing" it's still kind of silly. I mean, it's bad when your last gasp of plausibility comes from "Well, maybe she doesn't recognize her because she's got the Superman effect going, unrecognizable without glasses."

My background is strange. I saw the word "stratagem" in the chapter title like that, it irresistibly made me think of 18th century bedroom farces; they were full of titles like "The Rake's Stratagem" or whatever. (they were mostly pretty funny, too)

last edited at Aug 6, 2023 5:16PM

So I'm thinking "Hmmm, the idea's making her melt down too hard, she can't go for the kiss yet, maybe she'll end up with just a hug, wait what?!"

Guess I'm a bit hypersensitive today, cause I found this one a bit irritating. The idea that a straight girl has to be concerned about being closed in with a group of lesbians triggers me a little. It's like suggesting that lesbians are predators constantly on the hunt for fresh prey and will pounce when she wanders into range (never-mind that one did), even if just for comic effect. It felt unpleasant.

She's in the Lesbian-Only Passenger Car even though she's not a lesbian. She's not concerned about being assaulted

Noting where she's putting her hand, apparently not concerned about it AT ALL.

This is more violence than I am used to in my yuri :(

I will keep reading, but :(

I just want Rose to be able to quit her job and teach P.E. or something

I am now imagining her PE lessons. "Come on, kids! You need to get that technique right and put in some speed and energy! How are you expecting to kill your opponent with moves like THAT?" "Um, sensei, we weren't planning to kill anyone! Wasn't this dodgeball?"

You know, I've read het manga where someone goes to an island to find themselves, find love and experience the slower pace of life, and they're always cheerful, so I guess adding to my annoyance is this feeling like we're back to the days where only yuri girls can't have nice things.

Yeah, I really hated the ending. Really, really hated it. No doubt it's realistic to some extent, but it's not like anyone needs to tell us that, especially in a way that comes down to "just submit". Loved so much about this manga, but it took me where I had no interest in going. Bleh.

call me a buzzkill i am so bored of this arc

You're a buzzkill.

. . . What? You ASKED me to--

jfc she's a work of fiction, she has no agency or internal world beyond what the author gives her. Treating a construct the way you would an actual person's actions is literally insane

No it isn't, and really that's a stupid claim. Fictional characters are intended to be, as best the writer can manage, replications of real people. And while on one hand, they inevitably lack a lot of the features that real people have, on the other hand you can't ever experience most of those aspects of real people anyway. We constantly make judgments about people purely on the basis of our friends or co-workers talking about them, even though our experience of those people is less in-depth than our experience of most fictional people we bother to form judgments about. I have given successful romance and divorce advice on the basis of this sort of second hand impression, effectively a fictional account by someone who isn't even a fiction writer.
So no, forming opinions about fictional people as if they were real is what you are supposed to do. It would be idiotic to read fiction and spend your whole time going "Well this is an interesting construct that has nothing to do with creating anything you could call an actual personality"--totally drains the point out of reading a story. It actually frustrates me quite a lot that I keep seeing people say this nonsense. What do you think someone telling a story is DOING, anyway?

Some people really forget that thes eare just high school students. Kaoru was an asshole in the past true. But you cant tell me that is the only side of the character you see now after seeing her with her sister and the manga club.

I mean what kind of punishment would you want for her to redeem her in your eyes, I am genuinely curious.

When people do something wrong, I find the biggest thing for me is if they say they're sorry. With some sincerity, as in, they have figured out what they did was wrong and they will try not to do it again.

I am finding this arc interesting, and I'm willing to accept that in many years of telling this story, the way the characters are defined in the author's eyes has shifted some. Sometimes, even though that's for me the ideal, you can't really make a claim stick that a character has really been given a consistent personality. But I will say I think that's a failure in the writing, particularly since not nearly as much time has passed for the characters. I suppose it's not impossible for people to just sort of organically become less bitchy as their hormones surge a bit differently, without any real psychological events or reflection, but it doesn't make for particularly convincing writing. In this case I guess it's just part and parcel of the whole thing gradually getting a softer edge.

last edited at Jul 31, 2023 10:11PM

This is the problem with letting the Catholic church run your revolution.

Vankomycin posted:

Miyoshi is basically that joke where they're just "really good friends" but she's such an airhead, that she actually does just think that they're just the best friends ever, but also she's definitely 100% in love with Ayano.

My prediction is that she's 100% in love with Ayano, but is terrified to take the risk of confessing because she doesn't want to lose Ayano as a friend.

My prediction is that she's 100% in love with Ayano, but is too much of an airhead to realize. I'm afraid we would need an "epiphany arch" kinda thing to have her realize she can't go on like this. Like, a guy confessing to Ayano.

Which would be hard, considering that aside from Earl Sandwich and a few other odds and ends like that, as far as I can remember there have been exactly two guys in this so far, both of them gay, both of them married (to each other), and an idiot couple to boot, so not that likely to be confessing to Ayano.

last edited at Jul 25, 2023 4:22AM

"You took the part
that once was my heart
so why not take all of me?"

I'm so glad I'm insomniac at this moment. Girl almost confessed right there and then

Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons.

This is why you don't play games with your S.O.; why open your relationship up to yet another avenue for problems? Why add another thing to fight over?

I dunno . . . if that's the first thing that comes to mind when considering spending more time with someone, maybe they're not a person you really want to be with?

Great!
I could tell from the first look that it was the same mangaka as Maitsuki, Niwatsuki, Ooyatsuki, so I was expecting something good.

Credit page is back to being great!

She asked the girls at the bar what Hiroko's type is. None of them ever met "Senpai." They would have run down a list of the kinds of women Hiroko tends to hit on. She likes dark hair, she likes this kind of hairstyle, etc. It just happened to be that because Hiroko was hung up on Senpai, that's reflected in who they've seen her go after, leading to the unintentional resemblence.

You're right that none of them ever met her Senpai but we saw in earlier flashbacks that Hiroko told at least some of them (bartender at least) the gist of the story. It's hard to say how much she said about her Senpai's appearance, though.

In an era of cell phones, it's likely she showed them a picture/s. To get it that close in the first place they must have had something to go on.

We need to make the "wait I'm a ghost so I can't fuck" plot beat happen after all

I've seen plenty of ghosts who can.

Um . . . in person?

Aw! That cute iron gummy dummy!

Oo! Frottage!

Although Babylon's theoretical motives are kind of positive, my understanding is that that is not who they have been killing. To the contrary, they have been attempting to keep things calm so that change can (in theory) happen naturally in the longer term, by killing refugee leaders who agitate too much.

You said this in two different comments, but where did you get that idea?

I suppose it's open to SOME interpretation, but I got it from this line:
"Our influence exists only because we sow accidents among the refugees, namely those who threaten the peace or otherwise prove detrimental to the administration"
"Even if it means condemning them to oppression and exploitation?"
"They will not remain outsiders forever"

That kind of sounds to me like what I was talking about.

Right, yeah, that's what I thought, but reading it again is starker. The organization is definitely a force for the status quo, and huge assholes, either way. They clearly don't have a problem with murder and seem to believe in some long-term assimilation or something. I mostly got the positive part from how the Bishop states that they both started with the hope of helping the refugees, but disagreed over methods. So I assumed that was still the goal.

I really don't understand why campaigning for change, but not through violence is ever considered being "a force for the status quo", which is 100% why I can't agree with any of you.

Well, except we have no evidence that they campaign for change. To the contrary, their stance seems to be that if nobody does anything, change will eventually happen by itself in some organic way, and so the only important thing is to keep the powder keg from blowing up in the mean time. This seems delusional under the circumstances--many immigrant refugee populations do assimilate in a generation or two, but not if they're stuck in an apartheid situation with no opportunities to advance their status or integrate into the broader society.

On the vigilante force I'm somewhere in between people's positions about them. I don't think they're fascist, in the sense that they don't seem to be oppressing the general population or enforcing any broader regime or following any big leader or anything. And I do acknowledge the difficulty of their situation, which is such that many well-meaning people could feel that they have no alternative, and it's plausible that in that situation practical people with good intentions could end up doing that.

That said, I don't think that is actually the only alternative. They might be reasonable in thinking that it is, but they are wrong. There seem to be quite a few actually existing groups who are poor and oppressed, who nonetheless manage to emphasize community solidarity, restorative justice and stuff instead of fear and brutal punishment. Since it actually happens, I presume it is possible. But it's hard, and I will acknowledge that it seems to be much more common among indigenous groups with already tight-knit society, like the Zapatistas; it would be very hard for a fractured bunch of refugees.