Mr. Editor please respect Maekawa's personal life, if she says she already has plans for the night, postpone your out of the blue plan for her.
But that aside this manga actually handles cliches really good, so even if 'the long awaited date gets cancelled' card is played here, I'm sure the author will handle it nicely

Also, been having a few too much of such overlapping plans in irl, and those situations really suck

The problem won't be that the date was cancelled, but that Maekawa went with him, the exact person she was worried about Maekawa cheating with.

Honestly the teacher was just a dick. She acts like she helped their relationship by playing a villain, but she really didn't. She stalled their relationship temporarily and hurt both of them all for some nebulous potential benefit. She deserves to be fired for trying to screw with her students' relationships.

Poor Izumi, so used to lying and to hiding and here is she telling the thing on Nanaki's face. Don't think she will get it, I hope that friend of her was just shocked not afraid, I want Izumi to be happy.

I think Nanaki could help Izumi overcome her internalized homophobia, by reacting normal to the confession. Just like how she didn't hesitate dumping her own gyaru group for Kurokawa when they were making fun of her.

I don't know; I still feel like this would be a shit outcome for her. She gets the reality of homosexual relationships in schools: the pool of potential partners is shallow as fuck and entirely in hiding usually, so she crushes on straight girls and never has any happiness from relationships until college or even later.

Meanwhile, neither Kurokawa or Nanaki was a lesbian before this. They were just previously straight girls who magically happened to fall in love (well there's signs at least that Nanaki was unhappy with boyfriends, but that have to mean anything specific). This is something pretty rare to happen in reality.

Izumi is getting a bit of a raw deal purely for being a side character. Then again, maybe the series will account for this and manifest a girlfriend for her.

last edited at Jan 12, 2020 8:02AM

Sometimes (and not usually or often, but sometimes), I enjoy reading a series where all of the characters are pretty heavily flawed. This series fits that description almost perfectly. Every character introduced so far has some serious problems.

Aya is maybe the least flawed but just barely. She's willing to have sex with a woman she's met three times previously while acting as a replacement for somebody else during the sex just so that the woman will be her friend online. Seriously? Yikes.

Kuro and the best friend are even fucked up than she is, obviously. Kuro fantasizes about her students, which I guess would be acceptable even if it's a little creepy (you can't control who you like) except for the part where she went after a student from a different school (so she wouldn't get in trouble). On top of that, she is stuck on a single rejection that happened many years ago and can't have sex without muttering the name of the person who rejected her confession once. The best friend is easily summarized with the phrase "has a bad case of yandere" and doesn't seem like she'd be out of place in a hardware store looking for a chainsaw to "help Aya see the light".

I prefer over-use of Google in modern fiction to under-use of it, though.

Since it was unclear in the earlier comments, both this manga and its sequel/reboot are completed. They each lasted '1 volume' (but were long - the first with 19 chapters and the second with 20 chapters). The spoilers a few pages ago seem to be a joke.

Usually, cuteness is something I handle silently - appreciating it, sure, but I don't ever really feel the need to say anything about it (except maybe kittens because OMG KITTENS). However, the images of the mute girl holding her notepad up triggers something inside me that wants to scream "OMG THAT IS ADORABLE".

So, since the translators seem busy with real life at the moment, I decided I'd run OCR on the Chinese raws and then do automated translation on the resulting text. I did this partially because I was bored, partially because I wanted to see how useful the result would actually be, and partially because I absolutely love this series.

Obviously, there's going to be a lot of mistakes. This is not a professional translation job. Even though I cleaned up some of the grammar issues (I wasn't overly concerned with that though either), there are some sentences complex enough where the meaning itself is lost or could have been seriously warped from the original intent. The biggest problem is that negation words like 'not' can be lost, which means the actual sentence sometimes means the exact opposite of what the machine translation result said.

That said, it came out better than I expected, honestly. Especially when you consider this is a translation from Japanese -> Chinese -> English and the second translation was done using Google Translate and some OCR to read the Chinese characters. The result is about 90% understandable (and probably about 80% accurate I'd guess in terms of getting the correct interpretations of the meaning of the sentences).

Chinese raw for Chapter 14 (link is from earlier in this thread): http://m.dm5.com/m432086/
Chinese and English text for Chapter 14: https://paste2.org/62fmY0dj

Also, if people want to talk about Chapter 14 stuff here, they should probably use spoiler tags, since I assume the mods want to keep non-spoiler conversation to professional translation releases only.

Oh, might as well give a rough summary of Chapter 14's juicier bits:
Yuu wants to take her relationship with Nana further but is scared of using the truth to achieve this result (because she thinks saying 'I love you' could make Nana immortal). Yuu brings up kissing as a potential way to satisfy her bloodthirst, since human saliva would have some positive effect. Nana realizes this is just an excuse to kiss her and tells Yuu that she isn't willing to kiss for the sake of bloodthirst, and that she is providing as much actual blood as Yuu wants, so that shouldn't be an issue. Nana then says that if Yuu is serious about kissing her for reasons not related to being a vampire, then she's willing to do it.

The narration card at the end makes it extra obvious in case the audience is oblivious I guess and just straight out says "They are in love."

last edited at Jan 7, 2020 6:36AM

It was pretty unclear to me exactly who was speaking on Page 11 when they promised to call them 'by their names' (apparently it's Aya - it was hard to tell because their mouths are right next to each other). Even that phrase was unclear; I mean at face value, their names are 'Aya' and 'Sei', but Sei immediately begins calling her 'Yoru' right after that.

It seems like that sentence is trying to say "You can call me by that name (Yoru), and I'll call you by yours." But that's not what the text says at all. Maybe there's some nuance that didn't get translated right.

The art is strange and not in a good way, but it isn't enough to stop me from reading it. The love arcs are very quick, unfortunately. Otherwise, it's decent.

Super awesome; I love this premise.

I put a little more thought into it, and I think I understand their relationship a bit more. Mio was in a position where she could have made Shizuka concede things (such as the truth about Kaoru or extracting promises of faithfulness), but she chose to give that up because she wasn't sure how stable her position truly was. That is, Mio believed that most of the affection shown towards her by Shizuka was for Kaoru's sake. If a person like that, who uses people like tools, was confronted by somebody denouncing them strongly for cheating, they would discard the relationship immediately and find a new tool. That's what Mio feared happening in that conversation. She had basically assumed that Shizuka wanted to break up, so she took control of the conversation and tried to use the limited influence she had from being cheated on in order to ensure they could have a date.

I guess the reason Shizuka makes me so angry is because I have felt what it is like to be in a similar situation, and it is fucking awful. When you're in a situation where you seem to care about the other person far more than they care about you and they seem to be far above you, betrayal hits so much harder. If you get anxiety before, you can tell yourself "no, they promised they loved me" or "they find all these things about me interesting too". The part where Mio says 'The first words I thought were "I knew it"' - I felt that way before once as well. Then if you get anxiety after being betrayed like this, those words stop working. They're hollow and false because your experiences have proven to you that anyone is capable of lies and malice.

Maybe my line of thinking is unreasonable, and it wasn't as if the two of them were in some sort of unbreakable union. They had dated once (arguably) and kissed a handful of times. That's not exactly a lifelong pledge of loyalty.

last edited at Jan 5, 2020 3:53AM

I think it is a fair assumption that they'll need Mari's power to escape from wherever they end up. Alice is strong and has mastery over most common spells, but that did not look like a common spell. Mari seems to be able to use some very high level magic (conditionally, maybe? it was activated by strong emotion in the case of the frog I think).

Mari seems like she's one of those 'very powerful but has no real control over those powers' characters. Getting home for them from wherever they end up could be as simple as Mari feeling homesick and wishing to go back to the school (though I doubt either of them will realize that).

You know, wouldn't it be a neat twist if magical ability with a full range of emotions was insanely powerful, and because of this, the witches have been purposefully left this way? The dead hearts and inability to use magic while in love could be a two-part system to limit witches from reaching their full potential and outstripping humanity. We know that the witches pledged fealty to different nations, so it wouldn't surprise me if this was a condition of their loyalty.

Mari in that hypothesis would be a witch who somehow was left out of this, discovered by the academy, and now they want to learn how she's so powerful in order to eclipse their masters.

Main problem with my theory is that they have to be unaware of the downsides of the dead heart thing for this to be possible. Alice did seem to know about both restrictions, but maybe she was taught that this was just a fact of nature with no exceptions.

Yikes, I just caught up with all the recent stuff, and I strongly dislike the way things played out between Mio and Shizuka. The thing that bothers me the most is that in their confrontation, Shizuka -lied- about her feelings for Kaoru. Mio obviously saw through it, but it really bothered me that she decided to lie on top of everything else even after being caught. Then, to make matters worse, she flips the conversation to be about how unfair Mio is being for speaking her mind instead of just giving in immediately. The worst part is that this tactic is successful, and thought that Shizuka has when entering the room "I'm sure Mio will forgive me because Mio is kind" ends up being correct. She suspects Mio will be such a pushover that they can get back together, and she's right.

In fact, Mio begins to blame herself for the anxiety attacks in the next two chapters caused by Shizuka's betrayal. On top of that, Shizuka hasn't given any promises or even really tried to set her mind at ease. Even simple reassurances like "I promise I won't leave you or kiss other people" would go a long way. She's also not bothered to explain Kaoru to Mio (sure Mio hasn't asked, but she should volunteer that now).

I hoped there was going to be some more development here where Shizuka actually had to take some responsibility for some of the huge amount of emotional trauma she has dealt to this girl, but apparently no, we're going to treat it like Mio's fault for having the unmitigated gall to trust the word of somebody she loves.

The fact that the latest Mio chapter is a kiss montage with everything fully back to normal irritates me strongly. I want them to stay together, but I feel like Shizuka needs to understand just how badly she hurt this girl first. She clearly doesn't.

The irony of this whole thing is that Shizuka did to Mio the same thing that Kaoru did to Shizuka back in middle school. She fooled around with another girl and showed no value for their relationship. Shizuka broke up with Kaoru for that. Mio forgives her, and she doesn't seem to show enough gratitude for this.

There are ways the author can salvage this story, still. I'm just pretty disappointed that this situation was basically dropped after the talk in Chapter 157.

last edited at Jan 4, 2020 12:56PM

Nika definitely has feelings for Kurumi. If anyone doubts that, go reread the section where she makes that scarf. There's like sparkle effects all around one or two of those panels, which authors use to indicate a strong outpouring of emotion. How strong they are in comparison to her feelings for Jun is up for debate, though.

Still, if her feelings are this strong, this fast, then I think her future with Kurumi would probably have been fine over time.

It's amusing because that one side girl who is obsessed with Alice would probably be in love with her if it was possible (I guess she just has emotions close to love like admiration, obsession, and maybe envy). If Mari cast that spell again near side girl, I bet side girl would lose her powers almost immediately because she'd be in love with Alice.

So, it sounds like the hearts of witches are destroyed or dead in some way, and Mari's AoE Revive spell from Chapter 2 accidentally revived Alice's heart, allowing her to fall in love (and then she fell in love with Mari).

Mari is obviously some weird special case. She doesn't seem to have a ridiculously traumatic past (unlike the other witches), so she had no special hatred of humanity and displays a much broader range of emotions. The demon calls her "tainted one", which could also imply something is different with Mari.