This was beautiful and wonderful. I really quite loved it. I would have preferred confirmation of what Yuki's state was at the end - was she just living with Azuma, practically married? Does her father accept that? Is she officially working as her maid or something? Idk, I would have liked a little more clarity. I do love it though. Also I didn't read the age gap as that large, I assumed Azuma was in her young twenties, yes, she's written many many stories clearly, but she says that one of her stories comes out each month so it's hardly like she couldn't do that in a short time - let's say she's 22, and started writing at age 16, that's 72 books in that time (which is absurd obviously but even at 1/3 of that rate she'd still have written 24 books without being all that old). Though also I initially thought Yuki was older, so it's somewhat sad that she isn't, I do like yuri with adult age gaps a lot more.

This author has a type don't they? All their works seem to be about a young more timid woman serving or being in some way submissive towards an older, more powerful woman. TBH that's exactly my type though, and the art and stories are somewhat simple but quite beautiful. I'm a huge fan.

E: I didn't realize the girls tended to be that much younger (mention of "still growing" in the yukionna one, and yuki being a schoolgirl in the authoress one) less jazzed about that, I was envisioning them as like, young 20 year olds maybe, not teens. I wish we got more adult age gaps.

last edited at Dec 29, 2019 9:26PM

Okay so this has returned but... should I start reading it again? My recollection was that it was mostly subtext, and also whenever it last updated I tried reading it and just could not follow the story or the actors anymore. What do people think?

This is the sweetest weirdest manga tbh. It's weird in how it's sweet but it's fucking adorable. Also what's a girl gotta do to be an offering around here damn. I want a dommey snake woman to keep me safe and comfortable and happy and all that jazz. And like, also touch me, that too.

Hard same!

Trans lesbians represent. We have simple needs.

last edited at Dec 29, 2019 8:20PM

SillieHonka posted:

Can we get lolicon and ecchi/NSFW tags? Really would have appreciated the warning.

They're clearly in high school. Ecchi/NSFW for 1 shot of panties? That's a overkill.

Maybe a chapter specific Ecchi / NSFW tag, only for the first chapter. It's not recurring, but one huge shot of it in a chapter with only 4 pages is still pretty significant.

Yeah, and with the jokes about and theming around sex in the same chapter, I could see it being on the lower edge of what's considered Ecchi. Light Ecchi, essentially.

I never bothered to read this before, because of the tags, but I tried it on a whim today and like... eh, not as bad as it sounded. Yeah, I think it was bad of her to have sex with her, but I think she clearly felt superiority in that she was better than all the men who were coming onto Akane, not because she hated Akane or something. My personal analysis would be that she feels that superiority because she's been jealous, both of the attention that Akane gets but also of the people that get to be attracted to Akane. I feel bad for her boyfriend, but also he seems kinda like a tool, so not that bad. I honestly don't think she's like, sociopathic or evil, she's just dealing with complicated mixed up feelings from
1) being interested in her best friend and not realizing it
2) being considered inferior to her best friend for her entire life by people that should love her
and 3) her best friend actually liking her.
No shit you start to feel superiority at that point, anyone would. She been put below this woman for her entire life, and now she's saying that she likes her. That's gonna give anyone an ego trip. I'm firmly on her side here, shit's hard and her situation is complicated but she's not a bad person. I do hope she'd break up with her boyfriend after this, but I understand why she wouldn't too, with the way homosexuality is viewed.

last edited at Jan 2, 2020 9:15PM

This is the sweetest weirdest manga tbh. It's weird in how it's sweet but it's fucking adorable. Also what's a girl gotta do to be an offering around here damn. I want a dommey snake woman to keep me safe and comfortable and happy and all that jazz. And like, also touch me, that too.

Adorable. Does the friend know that her friend is a succubus though? The fact that she was like "I need to recharge" and whatever suggests she might, but then the next one says she doesn't? I guess it was a just a joke but still confused me for a sec.

This has been rebooted at https://dynasty-scans.com/series/come_rain_or_shine now, for anyone reading this in the future.

I actually like the more romantic moments here, a nice mix of funniness and like, absolutely beautiful intimacy. I'm game. The first was one I was eagerly awaiting for updates, so a chance to redo it (and continue it further more importantly) is awesome, can't wait.

"I got married to her because of the tax benefits (assuming a future she can), what do you mean 'like her'. I'm only living with her until I find a house I want to buy." surreptitiously shreds a real estate magazine behind her back

PS: What do you mean by "the student council people"? The grumpy glasses girl?

The two who competed for president and pretend to hate eachother while actually living together and liking eachother.

Well, I think the two student council people definitely need elaboration, we got one facet of their very temporary relationship. The cosplayers too, they're now long distance, that increases the complexity of what's going on by a huge amount. Ai and Maya too, I thought they had a bit of a thing, but they didn't anymore later on? (that's also the previous love triangle Canno used in her works, they had one for a bit with Chiharu for sure). Anyway, I'm just saying, all the relationships had a lot more complexity that could be shown if they'd got the sole spotlight and/or more time, that's a curse of the format, not an issue with the polyamorous relationship. Also, I believe there's a distinct passing of time within the polyamorous relationship, it feels to me at least like a week or two, and my own situation started with me dating the first girl, then 3 days later I was dating them both and things had been kinda-resolved (very temporarily, that relationship had a lot of problems, but as for the problems arising specifically from polyamory).

@BugDevil
I mean, "magically" is kinda weird. They already had pretty heavy emotional intimacy due to their relationship online, so suddenly this connected with the real life people (remember, an outside source had thought, from hearing about their conversations, they'd been flirting online already, so they were quite close for sure). In addition, in my experience, having someone you love, love someone else, actually makes it pretty easy to start liking that person. You start viewing this person through the lens of someone who loves them, start spending more time with them by nature, and suddenly you've got feelings. For Nina especially, her actions seem really erratic and hard to understand, but she's just kinda going through a breakdown and losing it with all her conflicted feelings. On one hand, she loves Asakura and wants her to herself. On the otherhand, she knows Asakura loves Hiruma, and wants Asakura to be happy. On one hand, she hates Hiruma, because she's getting in the way of her and Asakura (to her perception). But on the other hand, Hiruma has been her friend for longer than she's known Asakura, and is super close to her, and has been endlessly kind to her, even in the face of her hatred, and has helped her work through her feelings, and so on, and she's starting to feel attracted to her. But on yet another hand, she doesn't think you can be attracted to multiple people and still have it be "real". I honestly relate very hard, she's got everything going on and it's just falling apart and she's scared of losing everything, and she's just acting out in random ways because of that. Like yeah, it could have done with more time to play out and more narrative attention, but I thought the ideas were excellent, the events and ways they happened were nearly perfect for me. Now yeah, it's a super high-difficulty high-maintenance situation, it's essentially 4 relationships (AB, BC, AC, ABC) all in 1, and you have to deal with all that. But we don't really see much of them after they've gotten together, just a few snippets of them navigating it well. You could bring that same argument against a few of the relationships, it feels to me like a lot of your problems with the polyamory are a mix of not really being a huge fan of polyamory in media in general and of problems AnoKiss has overall that you feel are amplified by the extra character and the extra complexity of the relationship. Still, I hope you understand why I love it, and why I don't think it's quite as unrealistic or as bad as many people on here make it out to be.

@Blastaar
Okay, it seems like in general we're pretty in agreement, sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying.

I guess my point is... If you want to write believable polyamory you can't write it like a love triangle. Which is why this does not seem to go that direction. But that could change.

I think that's a really good point. As you suggest, harems tend to be "one idiot who can't/won't choose" or "several idiots who won't give up." To me, the (very unsatisfactory) resolution where one leg of the triangle just resolves to share the beloved indicates the central plot problem--the poly resolution of a love triangle tends to rob one or more of the actors of individual agency. Somehow it's got to work out that three separate individuals freely choose two others, and the poor track record of that in real life doesn't supply many models for fictional depictions.

But I don't think that happened in AnoKiss. In AnoKiss, it was never really a triangle. From the start, Asakura had picked both of them. It was just about them coming to terms with that, with Nina also being sucker-punched with feelings for Hiruma, there were 3 separate points where each one of them in turn freely chose the other 2. First was Asakura choosing Nina, then choosing Hiruma. Then was Hiruma initially rejecting Asakura because of Nina, then figuring out how she felt more, understanding herself better, and choosing Asakura. Then Nina strongly rejecting Hiruma's choice of Asakura, before getting her own feelings for Hiruma. Then Hiruma chooses Nina, over and over, until Nina finally figures out her own feelings and gets acceptance. What I'm saying is basically everyone keeps having to repeatedly make the choice over and over, but there's certainly no lack of each choosing the others. It just takes a bit for Nina.

Edit:

That said, I thought the poly in AnoKiss was as well done and plausible as anything else--the indispensable (for a trio) character of Amane was, in herself, not very believable, but given the givens we were given, I thought it was effectively done.

Oh I thought Amane was perfectly believable, at least in her feelings for polyamory. Every form of real life polyamory I've seen involves someone who's newer to it and someone who's more comfortable in their identity. Amane's infinitely-abundant niceness and denseness on Nina's feelings were less believable than her polyamorous inclinations to me.

last edited at Dec 28, 2019 4:46PM

Somebody in the group suspects and is keeping quiet about it--certainly. But everyone? I really think not.

I'm going with, "Somebody in the group suspects and keeps trying to convince the others who are like 'I mean I bet they like eachother but no way they're together'"

Oh I forgot about that extra section - it's very cute, kiiiinda gay I gotta say. "Oh I wish I had a boyfriend I could hold hands with after school" > immediately holding hands with her friends. That'd be the real twist ending their other 3 friends all get together.

Welp

My dreams, dashed already. Oh well, I'd forgot.

I glanced at the title and for a moment I thought it was the sequel to this. But I guess I should probably give up on that by now.

Oh god I wish.

@BugDevil
I find it unrealistic to say that polyamory is "unnatural." It's socially ostracized and uncommon certainly, but it's not unnatural, just like gay or trans people aren't unnatural. I think it was a little rushed, but like, I've literally lived large chunks of what happened in it, so it was incredibly believable for me. Dating a polyamorous person while just quietly and internally hoping they won't date anyone else because you're unhappy with it is literally an experience I've been in (from both sides in fact). Having a polyamorous person already in a relationships interested in you, initially rebuffing them, then figuring out your own feelings on the matter and coming back to them? That's how my first relationship ever started. And following that up by comforting the preexisting partner of the person you're dating, getting to know them better, handling their fears, and having them end up emotionally intimate and interested in you, while still having complicated and difficult emotions on polyamory, was also how that relationship ended up. Essentially, this was realistic as hell imo, because I lived almost all of the issues polyamorous people deal with in it, all in the same 3-person relationship that was my first relationship ever (which ended up being toxic, emotionally abusive, and shitty as hell, but hey, that's not a polyamory problem that a person-that-I-dated problem).

So yeah tl;dr the arc with the 3 of them first getting together is almost literally exactly what happened with my first relationship, with myself in the position of Hiruma, and I've lated dealt with selective parts of what happened from the perspective of Asakura, so I think it's quite realistic.

The rushedness is like, literally the biggest downside of anything in AnoKiss, and it's a problem that more than half of the relationships face, nonetheless, I still felt that what needed to happen happened. I also think saying AnoKiss's polyamory was written like a love triangle is... a bit unfair, because while it started in the first chapter like that, the whole point was that Nina started developing feelings for Hiruma too, while being incredibly conflicted about it (also been there, feeling uncomfortable with my partner's polyamory while myself starting to be attracted to another person, before having to sort out my feelings on polyamory and trust in my partner more). Essentially, I liked it because I thought it was an excellent representation of polyamory, that rung quite true for me, and made me feel seen, like trans yuri does, getting to see the people like me actually appear in the medium I like so much.

Oh I forgot about that extra section - it's very cute, kiiiinda gay I gotta say. "Oh I wish I had a boyfriend I could hold hands with after school" > immediately holding hands with her friends. That'd be the real twist ending their other 3 friends all get together.

Idk, I really liked the polyamory in AnoKiss, I don't know what to say. I thought it was sweetly done, that it could have used a bit more space to execute but that what needed to happen happened (which is how I feel about almost all the side pairings) and that the open and honest acknowledgement of polyamory, by both the author and characters, which is something I have not seen before or since, was outstanding. I enjoyed all 3 of the specific characters, and the idea of a character who's already unknowingly friends with someone who sets herself up as a love rival feels so natural for the tropey world of yuri that I felt like it was a trope or I'd seen it before, when I know I haven't. I was very happy overall, and I think giving it more room to shine will only make me happier, if Canno doesn't regress for this one (and if it ends up polyamorous. I'm a lot more tired of love triangles).

And for anyone who doubts the other 3 'know'? lolz they know! And I dare-say they approve, eh? :->

Eh, it’s always theoretically possible, but l’ll need to see a lot more evidence than we have so far. The dynamic in this arc is completely consistent with groups of friends where one, or more than one, pair is extremely close—if two besties are suddenly on the outs it throws the whole group off.

These girls still strike me as utterly unable to stifle their squees if they knew the truth. Maybe Rei-chin, who seems a little more mature and laid-back, but really I just don’t see it.

I'm still calling that the other 3 will have discussed it without them at some point, a while ago, and had a few discussions, and have varying ideas of it. They're gonna tell their friends they're dating and one of the friends is gonna be like "HAH! I knew it!" and it'll be revealed they've been discussing the possibility for a while.

Canno refers to the three of them as "joshi" (女子), so she's under 20 at the very least.

Well, that's good. I'm hoping both are highschoolers.

Anyway, on another note, I'm super excited if it's polyamory. I think the polyamorous relationship in AnoKiss was pretty great, and every decent love triangle I see I pretty much just think "this should end in polyamory" anyway so like, if it does that's A+.

So it's a girl who's just leaving middle school, and then a girl who's presumably a first or second year in high school, and the tutor, who is... hopefully around the same age. Yeah, that sounds cute, and if it's polyamorous I'm gonna die, longterm decent polyamory yuri would absolutely wreck me, I'd be so happy. (If the tutor's a full adult I'm gonna be a lot less interested, let's hope she's not, that's like... too much age gap at that age)