What's with all the people arguing about incest? Indou looks nothing like Kagami's mom and if they were related wouldn't Kagami have known that they are related?

In some asian countries it's normal to call a woman thats NOT RELATED to you 'Aunt/Auntie' and that's like a typical sign of respect to a woman older than you

Your main point is correct, but the appearance thing is irrelevant—one side of a family can look very different than another. Indou resembles her mother; who knows what her father looked like?

The real questions for me are: Who raised Shinobu?

She knows almost nothing about her parents (Chapter 1, p. 27), she has been living in the countryside with very little to eat, and she was not living with “another relative” (besides the aunt she mentions) (Chapter 4, p. 114).

I had been assuming that the “aunt” she continually mentions and to whom she is writing the letters was the same person who raised her. She wishes for her presence several times, mentions that she smells good when you hug her, and says that she taught her “with great zeal.” But the evidence now suggests that the “aunt” (who may not be a blood relation) is in fact Kagami’s mother, which seems completely incompatible with the way Shinobu was living.

Which leads to the second question: Why doesn’t Shinobu connect the family name of her “auntie” with that of her senpai?

I know that there are many common Japanese family names, but is “Kagami” so common as to be completely unremarkable in these circumstances? In the West little kids learn the names of relatives (or honorary honorifics for family friends) as “Aunt/Uncle + first name,” but wouldn’t it be “Auntie Family Name” in Japan?

EDIT: it seems that neither “Kagami” nor “Indou” is in the top 100 most common family names in Japan.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2009/10/11/lifestyle/japans-top-100-most-common-family-names/#.XQjGaMopChA

last edited at Jun 18, 2019 7:13AM

Even if that's not the case, she said she was told what to study, not that she was tutored directly.

True, the pre-admission cramming could have been “distance learning,” but Shinobu and the aunt have had enough contact, and recently enough, to visually recognize each other.

Reads last panel
Hold on...
What?

Two hypotheses, neither mutually exclusive:

• hypothesis 1: Senpai got so hot from the kiss that her fever returned.

• hypothesis 2: Senpai wants Mizuki to return with more kissing.

It's really way too simple, doesn't warrant to spark such a debate.

Sorry to be unable to live up to your standards.

It seems highly unlikely that Kagami’s mother had extensive physical contact with Shinobu, let alone relocated from her present home to live with or near her.

As has been pointed out a number of times, immediately prior to attending the academy, Shinobu was living a life of extreme poverty and borderline malnutrition. Yuki the domestic servant did not recognize Shinobu, and seemed to recall “Indou-sama” as a distant memory.

We need further information on all these matters, but occasional contact between Madame Kagami and Shinobu seems much more plausible than Kagami’s mother raising Shinobu in dire poverty.

last edited at Jun 16, 2019 10:36PM

@LookingEast: or not.

^ There’s no way that Shinobu has ever been part of the Kagami household in any way.

Besides the evidence previously cited, the extras between Chapters 5 & 6 contrast Shinobu’s academy daily schedule with her previous lifestyle, which was extremely rural (up at dawn, bed at sunset), home-schooled (two study sessions a day, overseen somehow by someone), and marginally subsistence-level (her main activity of the day was “secure the next day’s food”—snakes and wild boar evidently being welcome entries on the menu).

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/a_love_letter_for_the_marching_puppy_extras#3

last edited at Jun 16, 2019 9:20PM

I was lost for a moment there since we didn't learn that in this chapter and it had been a while since the last update - after re-reading the chapters so far, we learned this in fact in chapter 8.

Quite right—I mixed up those two similarly staged “the girls outside the gate” scenes as I was writing.

EDIT:

It is a good question, though - and while it may be Kagami's mother, the lack of name recognition is now joined by Shinobu not recognizing her from the picture, although it being Miharu drawing from memory, it may not have been as similar to the actual woman as she thought, no matter how well drawn.

And it’s highly likely that Shinobu knew Kagami’s mother only as an ojou-sama rather than as a military officer—so the visual effect would be very different.

Lots of open questions, and I look forward to learning more about them.

last edited at Jun 16, 2019 5:14PM

AAHHH God this wait is going to be torture. So darn cute.

This certainly is a world filled with cute girls and women. Except for a couple of middle-aged shopkeepers (and the men), everybody is quite cute indeed.

The only problem that creates is believing that Indou’s face is so stunningly cute that everyone is immediately taken with the way she looks. Don’t get me wrong—she is incredibly cute, but that’s as much because of her intrepid-puppy personality as it is her exceptional looks.

On another matter, the story has been hinting that the (light-haired) former officer Miharu is looking for is Kagami’s mother, but we learn in this chapter [EDIT: actually in Chapter 8] that Miharu does remember the woman’s name.

Is “Kagami” such a common Japanese family name that Miharu wouldn’t connect that woman with her senpai? Or is this yet another mystery woman from the past?

last edited at Jun 16, 2019 5:08PM

So, a couple more data points, leaving me more confused than ever:

• Kagami’s dream in Chapter 4: we see her as a young girl wandering and calling out for her mother. Nearby are the sounds of battle, and she comes across a bloody body, which is face down but clearly of a dark-haired person (surprisingly uncommon in this story).

• Kagami and Indou, a 3rd-year and a 1st-year, can’t be very different in age.

• In Chapter 1, Kagami reacts strongly to the name of the place that Indou says she is from.

• The aunt Indou is writing to in Chapter 5 certainly appears to be Kagami’s mother—same hair and shape of the face, and she lives in a large, well-kept traditional house.

• Miharu is in search of a light-haired officer she met as a child, who in her memory is wearing the same kind of braided uniform that Indou’s dark-haired mother is wearing in Kagami’s memory. (The suggestion is that the officer was Kagami’s mother, of course.)

• An aunt instructed Indou in what lessons she needed to qualify for the academy, which had to have taken place just prior to when we meet her, but when we do, Indou seems almost completely feral. If Kagami’s mother had taken in Shinobu when Kagami went off to the academy, Indou almost certainly wouldn't have been so raggedy and unused to civilized amenities like beds with no patches.

So while all along I thought that the beloved aunt was the same person who raised Shinobu, that seems like it can’t be true. What works with the timeline is:

Shinobu’s parents are killed, and she is raised in poverty by someone. She is sometimes visited by her mother’s old compatriot, Kagami’s mother, who pulls strings to get Shinobu into the academy and gives her the minimal lessons she’ll need to qualify for admission.

What I can’t see is Shinobu having absolutely no knowledge of her parents at the same time Kagami seems to have known Shinobu’s mother when Kagami was a cadet, which must have been in the previous couple of years. So Kagami’s acquaintance with Shinobu’s mother (and the gift of the ribbons) had to have been when Kagami was considerably younger than I had previously thought.

EDIT: We also have no idea why Kagami and her mother are estranged, although I expect we’ll find out soon.

last edited at Jun 16, 2019 12:44PM

So I just want to list what we know or can reasonably infer so far without drawing any conclusions from it just yet (conclusions that are likely to be rendered obsolete by the first pages of the next chapter anyway). Several of these have been mentioned already.

• The domestic servant, who has known Kagami since she was a child, knows of Shinobu’s mother but either does not know or does not recognize Shinobu.

• Kagami’s family is well-off.

• Shinobu grew up in real poverty.

• Shinobu and Kagami’s mother immediately recognize each other.

• Kagami knew and was close to Shinobu’s mother.

• Kagami apparently did not know of Shinobu’s existence before she appeared in town.

• Kagami’s home is within walking distance of the academy.

• Shinobu either had never been in the town before coming to the academy, or doesn’t remember being there.

• Shinobu has been writing letters about her school life to her aunt.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something. My vague guess at this point is that Shinobu and Kagami are not blood-related. But I could be completely wrong about that.

Love the manga and the plot so far, even though ugh it's so painful to watch Amane getting hurt. But totally loved how unpredictable it is so far.

On a side note, the camera nerd in me was so STOKED to see so many different types of camera bodies and lenses. Like, asdfghjkl excited. I know this manga is never going to head for the seinen route where they start to go all technical and spout out stats (and it should stay that way), but also Iwami Kiyoko did an amazing job putting together a list of distinctively different but equally expensive high end-ish camera bodies and lenses XD. One thing I wished was Iwami would draw a thicker straps for the cameras, especially like the one in https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/luminousblue_ch06#5 cos that set up is heavy and lizard girl deserves better ergonomics.

Looks to me like Hayama is using a Canon 5D series body. The long lens looks like one of the long zooms, as indicated by the straight barrel and the the depth-of-field gauge mid-barrel, maybe the 70-200mm/f2.8.

Her shorter lens (as seen in Chap. 3) is pretty generic, so I can’t tell. Canon normal lenses tend to be pretty short and/or tapered in at the body, so that could be a 60mm macro.

I also can’t tell much about Kou’s rig. The back dials look like a Canon, but the front reminds me more of Nikon at times. (Faceplates are blank, of course.) I don’t know much about rangefinders, either, so I don’t know what her old camera would be. Looks like a nice one, though.

(That’s obviously one of those Fujifilm Instax Minis in Chapter 4. My money would be on Kou going for a pink one, although the purple or lime green wouldn’t be out of the question.)

Can someone please restate how this "gay in Japan" debate affects the interpretation of this story/its characters?

(I realize that it is relevant, but I've lost the plot a bit on exactly what is being claimed about/for/against this specific story.)

Thanks.

Sometimes I wish the anti-cheating crusaders would just look at the Cheating tag and take their energy somewhere else where they can be happy rather than furiously ranting about the moral turpitude of cheaters.

We know, cheating is bad behavior—that’s why it’s called “cheating.”

It’s also a thing that happens in the course of human events, and therefore is a thing that sometimes happens in stories. And that’s also why there’s a tag called Cheating.

last edited at Jun 15, 2019 6:33AM

I love reading this over and over again. This story deserves so much more attention. I'm glad this story didn't end with the sandals by the ocean being the last image in order to leave an open ending. The awkward mask match and dialogue from their friends made it a great ending

This is a real gem, in my opinion, no doubt about it. The way Ena constantly flips the script on yuri drama/angst tropes is a continuing joy.

last edited at Jun 14, 2019 10:21PM

That is one doomed senpai.

The kouhai too, but unaware of it yet.

^ I’m not saying they have the same moral status, I’m talking about genre content. Who cares what it “says about the author”?

The themes of the story carry weight, because they're the persuasive part. When I take in entertainment or art, I'm trusting the creator with my transportation. If the creator is sneaking in bad messages, it could have a bad effect on people... or on me!

Reading about a story that simply contains a person behaving immorally is not necessarily the same thing, because the themes communicated might be orthogonal or even against the message that the immoral behavior is justified.

Of course people find plenty of things unpleasant and are free to not read things they think are unpleasant for their own entertainment (does anyone in the world disagree with this?). But there IS a difference between stuff we have to be vigilant about and stuff we don't.

This really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. If you’re a reader of crime thrillers but you absolutely object to, say, rape themes, you’re probably going to have a problem sorting through the crime thrillers.

^ I’m not saying they have the same moral status, I’m talking about genre content. Who cares what it “says about the author”?

The objection to the content can be on any basis the reader wants. But if you’re reading that genre, that content is always one of the basic possibilities.

last edited at Jun 14, 2019 2:28PM

I can certainly understand why the topic of cheating would be a deal-killer for some readers based on their personal experience.

That said, when the genre is romance (very broadly defined--essentially stories focusing on interpersonal, usually pair-bonding, relationships), there are a limited number of plot trajectories available. While the enormous number of "Story A" yuri stories ("Two girls fall in love. The end.") indicate that cheating isn't a necessary element, it's definitely one of the things that happens in real-life pair-bonding interpersonal relationships.

It's sort of like being a reader of stories about the American West. It's perfectly reasonable to object to stereotypical treatments of Native American peoples in such stories, and to find any examples of that a deal-breaker as a reader. It's quite possible to read lots of Westerns about sheriffs and outlaws and ranchers, etc. without reading objectionable material about Native Americans. But you're probably going to come across it sooner or later, a fair chunk of your chosen genre will be closed to you, and, who knows, somebody might write a really good story that deals with Native Americans in an interesting and nuanced way.

Does fiction reflect reality or does reality copy fiction?

Yes.

I do not think I ever saw a series taking this steep of a nosedive before. Certainly, there have been plenty of other stories that started out strong, and then kind of lost their way after a while ("My Unrequited Love" comes to mind in recent times, "Aoi Hana" amongst the classics). But that things turn from promising to utter garbage, plus that it happens this fast, I honestly can not remember the last time I saw something like it. The writing on this is atrocious.

I think that’s what distinguishes the complaints about this one from series where people just drop into the comments to bash something they don’t like—this story started out being, if not highly unusual or original, pretty solidly good.

It set up Maki as a basically likable, naive character with plenty of room for growth and self-exploration, with Liz as her mysterious, knowing, sexy foil who would spark those changes in Maki.

When the story actually started revealing what lay beneath Liz’s aloof facade, however, it quickly became “What The Fucking Fuck?”

Liz suddenly seemed to regress in age about 5 years, and her “sexy edge” turned into narcissism and psychopathy. Her dark, secret, life-changing, psyche-twisting trauma turned out to be that old cliche of “dumped at graduation” (I swear I’ve seen a yuri 4-koma where that particular tragedy was cured by friends getting together for ice-cream sundaes).

Maki, meanwhile, never the sharpest instrument in the toolbox, seems to have shed 50-100 points of IQ, and become someone who puts up with physical and psychological abuse not because she’s into it but because she’s too bovinely stupid to be aware of what’s happening.

I can take or leave D/S as thematic material, but now I sort of want a series like this one seems to think it is, with the naive sweetie protagonist discovering her need for kink, and helping the damaged femme fatale to channel her real trauma into a healthy, mutually supportive kink relationship.

I think I may be getting something not unlike that in Yuki and the Authoress, which is light-years better-written than this one.

Loralei, I imagine your idea of a realistic school manga is one where every character is Sayaka from Bloom into You, acting calmly and reasonably at all times and negotiating problems and conflicts with poise and patience like a grown-up. But in real life the teenage mind is a device for amplifying trifles, ephemeral occurrences and meaningless mistakes into life-obliterating calamities and WWI trench warfare. This story gets that across pretty well.

One might almost think that love/infatuation/sexual attraction/raging hormones sometimes made people act in irrational, thoughtless, and impulsive ways.

I have heard rumors to that effect . . .

I'm convinced that Loralei is actually a manifestation of Miki in our reality.

Jokes aside, I'm more like Kanade before pointless change irl. I'm not successful, BUT STILL! I asked my friend for opinion. And she agrees with me that this manga is dumb, unrealistic and pointless.

Oh, your friend—well then, I guess that’s that.

I don’t think anyone objects to the mere fact that you don’t like the manga; anybody is free to like or dislike anything they want.

Many rational people who intensely dislike a story just stop reading it and move on to more rewarding pursuits in their lives.

Why you feel compelled to show up in the comments with every new chapter and hold forth with unconvincing assertions about how bad it is—that is a more puzzling question.

If for some reason that’s fun for you, well, there it is. Just as making fun of you may be fun for other people.

Excuse me since when being hella jealous over mistake is "realistic"?

Um, since the beginning of recorded history?

Any chance of sharing what you like about it with the rest of us?

The story, the art and the characters.

OK, then.

I guess I'm the only one here who likes this manga, then?

Oh well... so be it...

While it's far from being one of my favorites, I do like it well enough. The amount of negativity here really was a surprise for me.

Yay, there's at least two of us!

Any chance of sharing what you like about it with the rest of us, many of whom once had high hopes for it but have been disappointed with its development?

Dudeeee my heart!!.

Am I the only one doesnt think sempai had anything to do with their break up?.

Sempai is only one of several possibilities (that we know of), but she's the most obviously duplicitous and manipulative person that we've seen so far.

So if there is a reason for the breakup beyond Nene's loss of interest in/tolerance for Amane due to natural causes, sempai is the #1 suspect at this point, simply because she has a potential motive to separate the two.

Evidence against that theory: Nene seemed genuinely surprised that Hayama was aware that Nene and Amane had previously been in a romantic relationship. So if sempai did have anything to do with Nene's change in attitude, it would have had to have been indirectly.

Some other elements that haven't been mentioned: something that I myself have overstressed is Amane's surprise at the the graduation-day breakup; she specifically says that Nene had been getting distant all during their third year. BUT Nene still applied to the same high school.

That last part is one reason (of several) to see Nene's reason for the breakup as at least more ambiguous than her explanation--she had the opportunity to make a clean break then and didn't take it.