I thought it since chapter 1, but this is pretty much literally Bleach with Yuri.
That's not a complaint mind you, Bleach is my GOAT manga, but I find the striking similarities to be... well striking. Is the author of this a former assistant of Kubo's, or a friend or just an inspired fan? I'd be interested to know if they're intentional because there are so many parallels it would be odd if it was coincidental.

And I know the skimpy cover pages of the girls are meant to be fanservice (Which I don't have a problem with) but the way the author does their torn clothing is kinda triggering my trypophobia. ʕ ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°ʔ

Yori really is best girl, even her name's just one letter away from Yuri!
Kanon needs to protecc that precious little thing for all time, AKA get married. :3

Yeah, sure. "Worried about her." Uh-huh.

Credit page crack ship. I miss those girls.
I'm sorry but... THAT bitch and Tazune need to go.

In all fairness, she's under the wrongful impression that he's a stand-up guy who's being cheated on by his pregnant fiancee despite having been a perfectly good and caring husband. Love makes you blind and all that.

I doubt she'd be in love him for much longer if she knew his true colours, unless she's just in too deep to accept/believe it. She might just be the type of person who tends to end up in abusive relationships. You know, the type who's more in love with the idea of their relationship than the reality of it, so they end up making excuses to themselves to justify their partner's bullshit because they don't want to believe in the awful truth.

I kinda like her, she's just a bit dumb and happens to have ended up in an awful situation where she unwittingly ends up helping a bad guy do some bad things because she wants to feel loved and doesn't know any better.

...Come to think of it, that description also fits Midori to a T. They're really very alike in hindsight.
If she became Tazune's girlfriend, she'd probably end up reliving Midori's awful life only without the proverbial light (Maki) at the end of the tunnel. Hope Tazune falls off a bridge or something instead, she deserves better. ^^

last edited at Apr 19, 2020 5:22AM

We went from super fluffy comedy to some dark shit real quick.

In the first chapter she says he was beat up by her parent? does that mean current guardian since her biological parents are both deceased?

We don't actually know which of the girls has the murderous mother backstory, the phrasing leaves it ambiguous whether she's telling Minami that she read the file or confiding her own backstory to bond over.

Personally I suspect the latter considering we know Nakano (the girl who read the file) has a legal guardian instead of parents.

...Is it weird that I find the last page with the three panels of them bonding some of the most adorable in the manga? I mean I know she's still an abusive jerk who totally needs the tough love she's getting right now, but they both really needed each other and despite how it eventually got violent I feel like getting together was the best thing that could've happened to them even though the relationship now is at a point where it either has to end or change drastically.

All's well that ends gay well <:3

Welp, that's it folks. Fairy has officially been lewded at by gay dildo-shaped schoolgirl, endgame reached.

Time to pack it up, nothing left to see here people! Please evacuate the premises in a calm and orderly fashion, and no groping in the lines unless you're both girls.

last edited at Mar 30, 2020 11:55PM

Wasn't this one already here? :O

Adorable tiny chipmunk stuck between two gays and two other gays.
^New series summary plz.

Seriously tho, if she's not gay already she'll turn gay from the 24/7 omnidirectional gay noises indoctrinating her.

last edited at Mar 25, 2020 11:35AM

^You mean stalking is not so bad if you don't actually do anything?

...I mean technically there's no crime if no one is victimized.
Not saying stalking is a victimless crime or anything but relatively speaking, a stalker who never does anything is technically harmless and it arguably would be a waste of resources to deal with them versus doing anything else productive with your time.
(Not counting hypothetical indirect harm like evoking paranoia etc. since those things would arguably break the "never does anything" premise.)

Sort of along the same lines as "what they don't know doesn't hurt them." Some people are fine with bad things going on around them as long as they don't find out about it. Some people (me included) would be fine with having a stalker under the premise that they never do anything with it.

That's not to say it's okay to stalk someone, just that it's a behaviour which is hardly impossible to look past under the right circumstances. Mya-nee is uncomfortable with Kokou's stalking, but she sort of allows it because she knows Kokou is a good enough person at heart to never cause any intentional harm. All things considered, being creepy is hardly a sin in itself and definitely not something (within reason) worthy of legal actions being taken.

Moving on to the topic of the latest chapter:
Hana-chan is gonna get so fat, their solution hasn't so much solved the problem of snacking as it's just shifted where the calories go. The stuff Mya-nee used to eat that gained her weight is just getting added to Hana-chan's intake instead, I hope her workout routines really are as good as she implies. :P

last edited at Mar 22, 2020 4:08PM

Am I the only one who wonders what Kanda would sound like for her to not be immediately outted as a female? But then again..she could have a smokers voice.

Romi Park.

AKA Edward Elric, Histugaya Toushiro among many other male characters.

I can vouch that people this naive from being sheltered really do exist.
I have known sheltered people who would absolutely be this gullible in the most unexpected of ways.

Like, a grown adult who's gone to public school with everyone else, but was then shocked years later to find out that people save and eat left-overs and wear the same clothes more than once. You'd be surprised at what some people don't realize simply by virtue of having never entertained the thought.

I don't get where people are getting the transsexual angle from. Other than being an androgynous-looking lesbian who's stuck "having to" crossdress for her girlfriend, there's literally nothing about her that implies a transsexual leaning. Personally I'm really loving every chapter of this. If this was real life I'd be worried about the train building momentum for an eventual crash, but seeing as this is a fictional narrative written for yuri fans, I'm 100% sure things will work out just fine.

Honeymoons and time off from work after getting married aren't things in Japan?
Something feels really weird about them finally having their wedding and then going straight back to work the next day like nothing happened. Like, I get the logic that she wants to be sure they will always have money even into their old age, but going straight back to work on the very next day after your own wedding and wedding night? Not even starting a bit late? Jesus girl, one day off from work won't put that much of a dent in your savings.

If anyone did that in most other countries, people would think their marriage either isn't going well or they're a workaholic neglecting their spouse. Dammit Mari, take some time off and screw your new wife you fool!

last edited at Mar 11, 2020 10:11PM

Handholding jokes are old and not really funny.

Preach!

Yeah, I realised that after jintor and Boob Twinkler (sorry but that handle makes me cringe) pointed it out.

What's cringy about my handle? ( ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°)
I just wrote something random, does twinkler mean something and I just don't know about it?

The author seems to be impling that Akiho is totally overreacting to Fuuka's situation, because of some humorous misunderstanding, but other than getting the neighbors' genders mixed up, she is dead on. It might be my overactive inner social justice warrior talking but it seems to imply that It's no big deal, that Fuuka is being sexually harassed because it's women doing it.

Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, the whole premise of this manga is a woman being sexually harassed by anothe woman is comedy gold.

Literally the whole point of outrageous humour is to do things that go against conventional expectations and norms.
"Oh they're doing a mum-and-child routine, she's gonna ask for something cute like a hug or somet-NOPE SHE WANTS TIDDY MILK!"

Some people just take this stuff waaaaay too seriously, like it's awful that there's anything in the world that mentions an improper way of doing things regardless of context. The medium of fictional storytelling is inherently a proper context for all kinds of irrational bass-aackwards nonsense unless otherwise specified, and that's how to properly consider it by default.

Anyone looking to manga to learn about how to be a person is being dumb, and it's not the author's fault they're dumb.
So why's it wrong to have something in said manga that doesn't work in real life?

Saying they were "using" someone else's feelings is kind of disingenuous imo. It's not like the person who wrote the letter is gonna find out what they did with it, their feelings are perfectly fine and no harm done.

They don't even know who wrote it at the time so it's not like they're doing it with "them" in mind and ridiculing them or anything.

I'm (spiritually) in this manga and I don't like it.

I'm sorry, like, I dunno how many times I can say this explicitly? I never said her attraction to Satou was subtextual. I said Hinako being a gay person is subtextual.

I absolutely under no circumstances think she won't end up in a romance with Satou. I'm talking about her general identity and romance patterns.
Thanks, this is exactly what I mean, phrased more concisely. I'd add, her general issues are so related to being gay ("Forcing myself to be a normal woman isn't working!"), I have a hard time imagining her overcoming those issues without, at some point, confronting her sexuality.

Well, but this is kind of my point. Would Japanese readers be more likely to find it rude to talk about the specific way you're not normal, even in a story that celebrates not being normal? That is, the yuri readers want yuri, but they might bristle at talking about that stuff out loud? If it's just an ineffable "I like sempai even though we're both girls!" then it's ambiguous and vague. If it's "yo what's up I'm a lesbian," it makes things concrete.

You have to keep in mind that the premise is set in Japan with a "typical" japanese woman as main character.
Japan isn't anywhere near big on LGBTQ knowledge, it's entirely plausible for the thought of being explicitly lesbian to have never even occurred to her, realistic even. Over there, being any kind of alternate sexuality is a very foreign concept that's more associated with the western world and normal japanese people rarely run in to it in real life.

The whole idea of the story is that a "normal" woman starts a journey of self-discovery (prompted by encountering another woman who makes her incredibly happy to be around for some reason) and slowly coming to understand herself better as she is rather than as what she thought she had to be according to society and the people around her.

Her character's entire conflict is that she's been obsessed with being "normal" and finding "normal happiness", the only reason she's breaking away from it now is that she's had enough experience to conclude that she's "too broken to be normal" and it's prompted her to re-evaluate herself and her views. If anything it would be very odd for her character to conclude something as outlandish as "maybe I'm gay" without some very drastic cause.

No kidding. It caught me completely off-guard when the date they were trying to set her up with was the most boringly normal guy imaginable and not an ikemen as this kind of narrative usually dictates. It was a nice touch.

Well, there was that good ikemen guy in the first chapter already. So they already did that, but based on her reaction and refusal to start dating him, they probably figured he wasn't her type.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/crescent_moon_and_doughnuts_ch01#5

It's not unrealistic for a beautiful woman to find and go out with an equally beautiful man who seems great in general though, it's only unrealistic for it to be every guy the beautiful woman ever finds. In this case I feel there was even a good reason to have him be so great.

The first guy was likely only so perfect to illustrate that the main character's issues with dating men is not simply about finding someone good enough, since it couldn't work even with such a perfect nice guy. It makes clear from the outset that her "solution" to finding happiness in all likelihood lays elsewhere and she has greater reason to be open to outside-the-box thinking than she was previously while she genuinely believed finding the right man would make her happy.

It basically skips us past the whole "Maybe I just need to try a better man" stage of her life in favour of immediately getting to the point of the "Men don't make me happy, how do I become happy?" question. (To which the answer is beautiful fluffy yuri hugs and kisses~)

Personally I like how the author did it a lot, but YMMV. ^^

last edited at Jan 22, 2020 4:18AM

Cool point of view! Never thought it that way. Guess it's kinda hard to judge characters when the POV character is a self hating girl with...persecution complex?

It's a bit vague if what she fears is potential persecution or if it's the more-encompassing-but-vaguely-defined idea that "someone who doesn't conform can't be happy" which she seems to have. She's never elaborated on how she believes it would manifest in detail so it's a bit tricky to pinpoint if she's being paranoid about becoming persecuted or if she's just being a depressive-pessimist in general.

I definitely feel she seems to have depression though, only written through a lens of Japan's culturally different understanding of the condition.

I do wonder though if her somewhat irrational idea of what a woman has to be or bad things will happen is based entirely on previous experiences or if there's any basis in a psychosis, considering the likely depression.

DISCLAIMER: Lots of hypothetical speculation up there, could be all hogwash or maybe not. Who knows? \o/

last edited at Jan 22, 2020 3:58AM

Ladies and gents, we've got a threesome. \o/

Aside from all the fluffy and sugary reasons this story is great, what I'm really appreciating so far is how it shows everyone else in the story as just normal people as well. The men aren't predatory shallow assholes, the friends aren't jerks trying to peer pressure her into being normal and her male "love interests" aren't perfect specimens of japanese ideals or stereotypes.

People come off as insensitive or "mean" almost exclusively due to the main character's insecurities leading to assumptions and self-imagined peer pressure rather than any actual malice or agendas on anyone's part.

It's so refreshing to see a story that shows everyone, even the people "inducing peer pressure" as just normal people trying their best and being normal flawed people. The friends come off seeming like shallow bitches only because of the narrative, and you can tell that from a less biased viewpoint they're probably just normal girls hanging out with their like-minded friends without knowing that one of them is secretly miserable only because she won't tell them about it.

Sooooo what's FWB?

Friends with benefits.
IE friends who hold hands.

Tsuki is right though; whereas in the west the catch-all term is "submissive" despite it having specific connotations, in Japan the catch-all is masochist, or M.

I wasn't arguing otherwise, merely against the assessment that the character is not a masochist because she didn't explicitly get off on physical pain in the chapter or because "masochist" is often used "incorrectly" in japan.

One could make the case that humiliation and submission inflict forms of emotional "pain" and therefor that enjoying them is "enjoying pain" in a sense, making the terms "Submissive" and "Masochist" parasynonyms in both cultures. While not technically synonyms, it's not strictly inaccurate to use them interchangeably.

last edited at Jan 16, 2020 3:06PM

I'm in this manga and I don't like it.

How incredibly ironic considering it's about an exhibitionist. :P

Given that humiliation tends to be about ego-reduction and making someone 'smaller' mentally, allowing them to be more easily controlled, yeah, i'd say she's submissive to a heavy degree, and not really a masochist.

Just because she isn't literally indulging in some kind of "painful" play in the chapter doesn't mean she's not a masochist.
The title+context make it clear that regardless of whether the chapter explicitly enacts it or not she's intended to be a masochist, and that's all the confirmation/evidence that's required unless something which actively contradicts that claim takes place to bring it into question.

Absence of explicit confirmation does not equal confirmation of the claim being wrong.

last edited at Jan 16, 2020 12:01PM