I bet this manga is going to end with no make out scene. Yuri manga readers are the only people in the world that read something for literally years just to see 2 people holding hands in a final panel. Like seriously.

You've never watched Kdramas, I take it. Some of the most intimate scenes can occur when the OTP are standing 8 feet away from each other.

You may laugh at this, but this chapter actually had character development. Hino being open about her wish to stay close with Koguma without any strings attached or pretending to trick her is a huge leap in their relationship.

Character interactions, chemistry and comedy can carry anything to be honest. Some of the best things ever made are solely good because of the characters playing off of each other.

Yeah, I didn’t pay much attention to the first couple of chapters of this because it felt like one of those 4-koma-only-in-standard-format repetitive comedy series. But in rereading the whole thing, it has much more substance than I first thought.

Not high seriousness, but very solid fluff, if such can be imagined.

I myself get the impression that someone had read a lot of attenuated manga plots and decided, “Fuck that—here’s how things ought to go . . . .”

Smokey Robinson wrote it, the Marvelettes sang it:

The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBa746RVNHA&list=RDDBa746RVNHA&start_radio=1

If we're on bets for this specific topic, I'm getting on the Sunset Girl being Amane. Not like I lose anything from betting on her. =))

I’m telling ya, my Dynasty Tout Board idea is looking better all the time.

5 lilies on Sunset Girl being a character we have yet to see in the flesh.

Hmmm I'm not particularly happy about this story, setting or other characters but I like this main protagonist a lot. I guess it shows a good protagonist can make or break a series. I might keep reading but idk human trafficking is not a subject I enjoy reading about.

Agreed about the protagonist, and also that this is kind of disturbing, to me on a number of levels:

• The set up is not that huge a tweak on the more traditional "Finishing school for ojou-samas in arranged marriages with rich men" trope--like Marimite or Strawberry Panic! gone really really dark.

• The MC's likability is basically a take on the familiar spunky, sensible, pragmatic, can-do-despite-misfortunes-girl manga/anime protagonist bringing life and hope to the people around her, only without much actual hope so far.

• It's like real-life human trafficking given a schoolgirl-yuri overlay, but with the latter elements stripped of any suggestion of fluff.

So it doesn't allow for the distance of full-on fantasy nor give us the groundedness of realism, where the problems are realistic but so are any potential solutions.

I'm probably just rephrasing random's post here, probably not for the first time, either.

This is a great example of one of those "I like this so far but here's what's going to/should happen" series openings, where Dynasty should generate official betting boards for predicting future developments, with, I dunno, Yuri Points or something (gold lilies, maybe?) to the winners. Odds would change on the individual elements as the chapters come out:

• Any love triangle: 5:2
• Exes reunite: 2:1
• Lizard girl + Camera-chan: 3:1
• Any polyamory ending: 25:1
• Sensei & Gecko: 500:1

last edited at Jul 26, 2019 4:24PM

Yuri on Ice ^^

Photography is too popular for nobody to join that club, especially if it's a successful one. Bet the senpai was found out to be

a lizard person
(or possible gay)

Why not both? Do I sense Gay Lizard, Gay for Lizards, and Reptilian Crush tags on the horizon?

I agree with your (and White Rose's) take on what the story is. However I don't think commenters sharing their personal feelings on bullies, or their emotional reaction to the bully character in the story, indicates that they're genre-blind, or that they're not understanding the manga properly.

In some cases it might not.

As I said, readers are free to use the story as an occasion to hold forth on any topic the story raises.

Seriously where do you people keep pulling this bizarre idea that petty schoolyard bullies are magically all sociopathic master liars who could bullshit their way through a psych evaluation, and why?

As has been previously suggested, we seem to have some examples of Commenter Genre Blindness--this just isn't the kind of story where a person like Kirigaya could cause a serious problem of any kind, full stop.

We recall that in the forum initially there was some uncertainty about exactly what the genre of this story was and how "realistic" it was supposed to be (there was some fairly detailed explication of the physics of thrown baseballs, if I recall correctly).

I think it's safe to say that at this point Nikaidou has displayed a preternatural ability to deal with any problem that may come along. Parsing out the ethics/justice of dealing with real-life bullies is like arguing about the nuances of 1940s warship construction in regard to Space Battleship Yamato.

Could you clarify what your argument is and what the argument you're responding to is?

I’ve said it clearly as I can already, but I’ll try again. There has been a fair amount of discussion as to what “should” or “should not” happen to Kirigaya or what Tadokoro and Nikaidou’s attitude toward her and her supposed reformation “should” be, all in relation to people’s real-life experience with/attitudes towards bullies.

If people want to use this story as the occasion to express their opinions about bullies and how to deal with them in real life, they certainly have the right to do so. I am saying that in the context of the story, much of that discussion is essentially irrelevant to the story and to probable future events in the story.

EDIT: A story that White Rose characterizes quite well above:

the fantastic universe of Super Nikaidou the woman of steel and her adorable sidekick Tadokoro the angel girl.

last edited at Apr 22, 2019 8:35PM

Seriously where do you people keep pulling this bizarre idea that petty schoolyard bullies are magically all sociopathic master liars who could bullshit their way through a psych evaluation, and why?

As has been previously suggested, we seem to have some examples of Commenter Genre Blindness--this just isn't the kind of story where a person like Kirigaya could cause a serious problem of any kind, full stop.

We recall that in the forum initially there was some uncertainty about exactly what the genre of this story was and how "realistic" it was supposed to be (there was some fairly detailed explication of the physics of thrown baseballs, if I recall correctly).

I think it's safe to say that at this point Nikaidou has displayed a preternatural ability to deal with any problem that may come along. Parsing out the ethics/justice of dealing with real-life bullies is like arguing about the nuances of 1940s warship construction in regard to Space Battleship Yamato.

Nikaidou and Tadokoro don't have access to that info.

I think you're underestimating Nikaidou.

For sure. If Kirigaya actually is faking her repentance, that poses a threat not to Tadokoro, Nikaidou, or to their relationship, but to her own continued survival.

One might almost think that there’s something interesting about stories of forbidden love. . .

I guess the conclusion is that Sabu just struggles with storytelling.

I think the short pieces and elements of the series show that she can do individual scenes quite well, her character conceptions aren’t uninteresting, and she can be very good at comedy. (This is in addition to the art itself, which is uneven in quality but pretty expressive at its best).

But Citrus is a great example of a story with a splashy and intriguing premise that presents an apparently unresolvable problem, but the author ultimately has no real idea how to resolve it.

The Dynasty forum featured months and months of readers’ meticulously detailed speculations about how the various plot obstacles (the school, the fiancé, family, etc.) could potentially be overcome, but ultimately none of the theories panned out because all the conflicts that had been built up over the whole series were handwaved away in a single page of silent panels.

I don’t know why a writer would set themselves a task like that without having some idea how to eventually complete it (“the absent dad saves the day,” “the mom and the grandpa knew all along and were working together to make it OK,” whatever—just something).

But like I said—creating art of any kind is never easy, and sometimes things just go off the rails.

I mean, they are still kids basically so it's not like I really wanna see them going at it every night if they genuinely feel uncomfortable with it for whatever reasons.

Absolutely. But after the high romantic drama of the Chapter 41, with their dramatic declaration of love, and with nothing standing in the way of the long-dreamt-of endless future of Yuzu being "happy and lovey-dovey with Mei!," their closest approach to physical intimacy of any kind is:

almost holding hands and then deciding not to.

The only one who seems to be getting any skinship in that relationship is Mei's teddy bear.

I still don't get the hate towards Mei

There’s a hell of a lot of difference between hating the character and disliking what the author has done with her characterization.

Most of the people posting here liked Mei—for me she was by far the most interesting character, partly because she was the most volatile. She was the one who could rock the sociopath-era Matsuri back on her heels, and who could keep Yuzu guessing (perhaps inadvertently) about where their relationship was going.

The near-catatonic shrinking violet we’ve been seeing these days is . . . far less interesting.

Well... That’s called change.

Yes, it absolutely is called "change." A character who was once sexy, forceful, and interesting because of her complexity now is, in the opinion of a number of readers, not.

There is no one who could deny that that is called "change." You can even look it up in the dictionary.

But my problem is actually more with Yuzu than with Mei, haha

Well, they're part of what should be a complementary matched set, so that's not too surprising. :)

At the point in the story I quoted, it looked like Mei was going to open up and show more of her warm and caring side (the qualities she explicitly mentions admiring in Yuzu), while Yuzu would become less impulsive and more responsible about living in the real world. You might even argue that they are doing that right now in Citrus +, but the further implication was that such individual changes would be part of a process that they would be doing together.

But the further the series went on the less they seemed able to communicate directly with each other (to the point that Mei goes MIA for a long stretch of the plot), perhaps at least partly because Saburouta couldn't figure out how to soften Mei's character while still retaining her alpha qualities.

The initial sizzle in this series came from the clash of two very vivid characters--I would have expected by this time that their main conflict would be about seeing who gets to be on top every night.

But in re-reading Citrus +, it seems like the major theme is that, now that they have resolved all the conflicts keeping them apart, two hotties who previously couldn't keep their hands off each other are voluntarily not getting any because virtuous reasons.

^ @Nismy
This actually makes me feel rather better about what happened in the main series. It seemed clear to me that after Volume 6 the author really didn't know what to do with the story--the subsequent introduction of Shirapon didn't really link into any of the established themes or indicate a coherent plot trajectory going forward (even though I came to kind of like the character herself), and then the story just seemed to wander around until the sudden re-introduction of the arranged-marriage conflict.

Authors can struggle, and serial narrative makes it easy to write yourself into jams you ultimately don't know how to get out of. If Saburouta had been cynically spinning out the story just to cash in on its popularity, or worse, was executing what had been planned all along thinking it was great writing, I would be (and had been, since I didn't keep up with any news or information about the series outside the text itself) much less sympathetic.

But I can see how the audience expectations that came along with the massive popularity of Citrus could lead to writer's block/brain lock such that the author might try to just write cute scenes for a while in hopes that the inspiration for how to deal with the big picture would present itself, and the series certainly reached a point where the specials and extras seemed to come easier to the author than significant advances in the main plot.

By the way, the old Mei I was referring to is well on display here, and it's not the early psycho-Mei--it's her telling Yuzu not to drop out of the student council election because she values Yuzu's qualities and wants to be more like her, the point being that at one point it seemed like Mei could change for the better as a person without abandoning the fierce pride that once defined her character.
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/citrus_ch19#29

last edited at Apr 21, 2019 11:40AM

I still don't get the hate towards Mei

There’s a hell of a lot of difference between hating the character and disliking what the author has done with her characterization.

Most of the people posting here liked Mei—for me she was by far the most interesting character, partly because she was the most volatile. She was the one who could rock the sociopath-era Matsuri back on her heels, and who could keep Yuzu guessing (perhaps inadvertently) about where their relationship was going.

The near-catatonic shrinking violet we’ve been seeing these days is . . . far less interesting.

Well the only other possibility is that Sabu is planning for Mei and Yuzu to reach breaking point of holding back and then just make out like crazy.

I mean, I am fairly sure Yuzu’s behaviour is like pent-up frustration misdirected towards studying lol and same with Mei’s depressive state. As I don’t want to think she suddenly decided to portray the 2 have zero chemistry.

Or maybe the earlier sexual chemistry was entirely based on the thrill of forbidden love, and now that everyone is cool with them being together, they're reduced to spending all their energy working on their career plans.

Yuzu will probably make a cute OL, though.

Maybe in reality Mei wanted to be go for Udagawa.

Don’t be mean—I’m pretty sure he’s gay anyway.

...I think Mei is just horny...

If that were true and they showed some indication of it besides Mei looking miserable, it would improve her characterization 1000%.

The worst I can say about her is that she's taking some roundabouts steps in supporting Yuzu, but baby steps, for someone who never really had a good grasp on social conventions, she's doing way better than I waould've gave credit for.

That bears almost no relation to the character as first presented in this series--for all her psychological and emotional dysfunction, Mei was explicitly defined as super-competent (to the point that she was de facto running the school), and she was very used to interacting with adults in public (as she tells Yuzu in Chapter 24)--if anything, Yuzu was much less sophisticated about social conventions than Mei. This person who cannot haul Yuzu off into a corner and make her listen up is not the same person who started this series--and not one, in that respect, changed for the better.

Harumin suddenly sees that Mei has a cute and caring side, at any rate--which readers have known since the first chapters.

EDIT: @Dreamloop above--that is precisely the scene I was thinking about in regard to who Mei once was, and no longer seems to be.

last edited at Apr 19, 2019 4:18PM

^ I had a feeling I was echoing somebody. It was also a reaction to just watching a Kdrama, which I do enjoy, but the "plot point introduced that can't possibly be resolved sooner than 6 episodes from now" thing can get kind of wearing--I get enough creepy suspense from the real world these days.

A big bad no-shit motherfucker solving problems right now is just what I'm looking for.

EDIT: Props also to Blank Mage for some fine writing in the quoted post.

last edited at Apr 19, 2019 4:22PM

Blastaar posted:

I personally tend to read genre fiction to see what the author does with the genre conventions

I don't mind reading stories for that too, but this specific premise I read so many times, I'm currently sick off it and prefer to look for different kinds of stories.

Wait, the "I can love you only because you can't love me" premise? Because that's the only thing that does seem unusual to me.

Or something else?