Pretty sure this is the only time I will ever see Shoujo Sect and "precious" in the same sentence.

^ And yet, I'm still back once or twice a year, hoping. Even though I know it can never be the same. I mean, the author/artist will have changed a lot in those years. Hard to recapture the same sense.

"Actually..." and then we completely jump scenes!!!

sigh -- Don't mind me. Just hanging out on the edge of this cliff for another chapter.

The title pages for each chapter have been bothering me for a while with the strange clock mechanisms in the background. I'm hoping this is just symbolism of the time limit that Miku's imposed....

Time seems to be an ongoing theme in this series. I mean, I haven't seen it written in kanji anywhere to confirm, but doesn't the title translate to something like, "After Today, the Future"? Which is an obvious play on Kyouko (today) and Miku (future).

Edit: Or maybe that the Future is (chasing) after Today?

last edited at Sep 9, 2020 5:46PM

Lovely as usual. And still that friend who "collects" men still remains nameless.. guess I'll name her Fleabag lol

I don't think I've ever noticed before that she officially has no name.

Yay, another update!

But I can't help but notice that the bonus chapters appear out of order...

Edit: I see it's been fixed. Thank you, nameless chapter elf.

last edited at Aug 29, 2020 11:26PM

Haley Joel Osment could see dead people. I can see Bad Yuri Endings. It's my curse. I've been taught to always expect the worst.

Yes, but he couldn't see them before they actually died!

last edited at Aug 21, 2020 11:32AM

Not my thing overall, but seeing Gourai greet the other FA Girls by shaking their finger (and their confused reaction to it) is adorable beyond words.

Timeskips may be a trope, but trope and cliches can work if executed in an original way. And I think this is one of the best written timeskips in any manga I've seen. Perhaps even better than Bloom Into You's.

This chapter allowed us to infer a whole lot of Maki and Midori's life together while acquainting us with a character we had only known as Midori's bump previously. We know that M&M are still close friends with Komari, that the two of them still are very different people (uptight Maki and laid-back Midori), that Tazune is in Kon's life, that Komari made her peace with her hometown, etc.

None of that was exactly mission-critical except the fact that they stayed together after the "wedding," but it tied things up nicely while still showing us something new.

Exactly. It didn't spoon-feed us a collage (graphic exposition) on everything that's happened in the years since. Rather, it tapped into the essence of "show, don't tell" by setting the stage and simply implying everything that's out of view. It was an incredibly efficient use of story telling that encompassed far more than would have been laid out by following the main couple without it feeling forced. I would call this the best-quality chapter in the entire series. Rather than feeling rushed (as some are implying that the series was axed), this feels like it's been thought through for months.

Such a surprise ending, but so well executed!

Does that even count as Ecchi? NSFW certainly, but I don't feel like there was anything pervy to that.

Sheesh! I don't think I've blushed like that since I first started dating back in college. Almost too intimate.

Edit: And I say that as someone who thinks the whole handholding joke has long run its course.

last edited at Jul 27, 2020 7:08PM

From
"impossibly light"
to
"kind of heavy"

That's the most depressing transition in the story for me, because it implies she'll never grow her wings back.

Holy cow! For all these years I've been misreading your name as "MrEgregious".

last edited at Jul 25, 2020 11:43PM

BeanBeanKingdom said:

Sorry for the image spam that's about to ensue, but I've wanted to do this for a while. I fell in love with the setting, the town of Nagahama in Ehime, and I took the time to find some of the landmarks that appear in the manga on google maps because I love when stories accurately reproduce settings that aren't the usual big cities everybody knows. And so, bear with me as I take you on a little sightseeing tour.

[Much imagery removed.]

Hope you enjoyed!

Yes, thank you! (Also, glad I'm not the only one who's gone on a Google virtual tour of Nagahama and environs.)

The author didn't abandon anything, Tranquil spring on the other hand....

So the status 'Abandoned' is when the author is still writing but the scanlators have stopped working on it, and 'Dropped' is when the author cancels it? Or how does it go?

As I understand it, Dropped is when the scanlators announce that they are discontinuing the series and Abandoned is when they just stop working on it without notice. Dropped makes it easier for other scanlation teams to take up the project.

Yay, Amano Shuninta returns! Feels like it's been ages since I've read anything new by her.

(And it looks like I totally missed the 10-chapter dump of Ayame 14 back in March.)

I couldn't remember who Kirigaya was either, so I went back and reread the whole thing. Totally worth it.

Man, the mom doesn't just ship these girls; she tosses them into the boat and casts them adrift at sea!

It's not even just the lack of communication; it's clear that these girls don't feel comfortable being themselves around each other, and that's pretty much a death knell to any emotional intimacy. It's one thing to open yourself up to someone only to get your heart broken, but I don't think they are ever going to open up enough to be hurt or feel betrayed. Maybe we'll learn why that is, maybe we won't. Maybe they'll open up a little, but probably not -- certainly not if it follows the original short.
Rod Sterling voice: "Welcome to ... The Friend Zone" Do-DO-Do-do-Do-DO-Do-do

Edit:
Not that I'm hatin'. Thanks to the short, I have no expectations of a rosy (lily?) outcome, and the story is well-told. But if you're looking for a fluffy story or a big payoff after the drama and angst, you probably won't find it here. (Actually, I keep wondering if this story is at all autobiographical. I missed the notice if there was one.)

last edited at Jul 4, 2020 11:49AM

I spell it as "sempai" because that's how it's pronounced. ん isn't the same as "n". The moraic nasal is pronounced differently depending on the following sound. Before the bilabial consonants, "m", "b", and "p", it takes the form of the bilabial nasal, "m". That's why "tempura" is the standard spelling, not "tenpura".

This is also why "grandpa" becomes "gramps" instead of "granps"

I hadn't thought of that one. The example I would use is something like how the same prefix is "in" in "invincible" but "im" in "imperfect".

But that's sorta a different issue, since there is a single accepted English spelling for most English words. When you're spelling out Japanese words, there are several competing standards, and sometimes people ignore all the standards and just go off and do their own thing. Kovachi Luka is not the "right" way to romanize 古鉢るか by any standard, but that's how she spells her name.

It's not just that you have competing standards for romanizing Japanese words, but the standards for converting kanji to kana have only been established in relatively recent time. Between regionalism and the desire to preserve tradition, it can be a somewhat contentious topic. Most of the reforms happened between 1920 and 1960-something. (They never really "completed" the reforms so much as threw their hands up and said, "Good enough.") For a period of ~250 years, the Japanese language didn't even distinguish between /n/ and /m/ sounds. In fact ん (n) is a fairly recent addition, and the character む (mu) was used for the syllabic nasal until the early 20th century. This is the case for the poem Iroha, which is sometimes used for the ordering of kana, similar to our ABCs.

last edited at Jul 1, 2020 4:32PM

"Secretly from everyone, the two of them are dating."

Never thought I'd be so glad to see those words again. Resume the fluffiness!

Can't believe this series still doesn't even have two pages of comments.

It needs more love, dammit!!

Looking at what's been tagged with this so far, it seems like the defining characteristic is that both of the leads are objectively ridiculous, like a comedy duo with no straight man (uh, so to speak).

Right. It's basically boke x boke relationships, where the tsukkomi is either a side character or missing entirely. I like this tag. When I see it, I pretty much know what I'm in for.

Poor Suzu.

I suppose it's confirmed that they do have sexual moments outside of the story we see.

And what if that's what Nagori-sensei wants us to think?
Yeah yeah unreal but hey let me live

You mean all the suggestive peach eating wasn't proof enough?

The presentation of this manga is kind of odd. It has the sensibility of a 4-koma but isn't confined to a format the way 4-koma is. (Plus, it's certainly not all rainbows and laughter like most 4-koma.) Even though I enjoy it, I sometimes struggle with the shifting continuity. Is that just me?

I can't really see a professional publisher accepting a work like this, but it's nice to have something without all that polish, too. And some of the characters are equally "unpolished," which makes it work really well, IMO.