Disgruntled mahou shoujo not fitting into genre norms is always a nice premise. Also seeing some real potential between Azurite and Ruby. Chapters could stand to be a bit longer, but I guess there's no way around that.

I appreciate the author's dedication to exploring a topic that many people can't stomach. Some would bellyache about it, others would get upset tummies, and many wouldn't even have the guts to read it. I feel like you could draw a Venn diaphragm of wholesome and kinky stories, and this would be right in the center. The two leads form such a good duodenum, and actively try to understand each other instead of being pancre-asses. There's a mild sweetness to the whole story, like warm haggis, and none of the hydrochloric acidity that ruins so many couples. It's also an accurate depiction of a high-school student's tendency to navel-gaze. This is some real entrailblazing content, and I eviscerate it 10/10.

This site features such good manga each week. It really brings a lot of old gems to light.

This manga's so wonderfully soft that I keep forgetting the lead has a dark past. That might be the intention, though, which is neat.

last edited at Nov 27, 2020 11:41PM

Just to comment cause I don't think it becoming a success "before Steam was a thing" is the most impressive thing related to that, but rather that Touhou never needed to depend on formalized distribution platforms.

That's a much better way to put it, yeah. Thanks for specifying.

^ Taiyaki should nominated for Time's 'Person of the Year' 2020.

^ The original art for the project is drawn by a self-taught artist who singlehandedly programmed every detail of one of the most successful indie game projects in the world (with no advertising, before Steam was a thing). The fanart comprises literal hundreds of thousands of works drawn by people across Japan in every conceivable style and aesthetic, so I'm not sure what you're referring to when you call the art 'bizarre', since it'd be the same as calling all Dragon Ball or Final Fantasy fanart bizarre (there's literally a Touhou x Castlevania crossover that's popular with fans, by the way).

If you don't like the general aesthetic, then it can't be helped, because the character designs are universally acclaimed for drawing on the various millennia of fashion before people discovered trousers, and is extremely rich for it. Not really trying to criticize your taste or anything- it just seems odd to complain about the lack of a certain type of content in one of the most fertile and popular IPs in history.

This picture just sums up the show as a whole far better than any Wikipedia summary.

^ Touko weeps into a cushion for 9 hours~ ASMR. Now available on Spotify.

A cowboy from hell and a dragon mobster having rough lesbian sex? This might just be the one ship that unites every segment of humanity.

Seiga really puts the Eros in Necrophilia.

Good prospects, a cheery attitude and fingers in every pie. This girl's gonna go far.

Ah, the Mata Hari experience. Come for the erotic dancing, stay for the crippling depression.

I appreciate this series' dedication to exploring corporate politics, even though I have not understood one singular word of it. Here's hoping for more mergers between our leads.

'Raised by witches' is universal code for 'gayer than rainbows'. I hope she actually teaches the kid magic at some point, though.

Subaru: Why do you like my sister?
Fuuka: girls
Subaru: What were you doing last night?
Fuuka: Girls
Subaru: What's your biggest regret?
Fuuka: Girls!
Subaru: What do you think about Hinako and Asahi together?
Fuuka: GIRLS
Subaru: Wanna go out and get some coffee on Saturday?
Fuuka: GIIIIRRRRLLLSSS

Best philosopher since Nietzsche, 10/10. We need more smooth operators with rough emotional states in yuri manga, since they simultaneously counteract and reinforce the influence of useless lesbians. Asahi and Hinako made big strides, and I'm curious if Hinako's ambivalence towards personal contact and Asahi's inexperience with any kind of romantic relationships are gonna be explored after they start dating, not to mention the whole coworkers angle. This definitely seems like the kind of dynamic where 60% of the effort comes after the parties shuck up, and this manga's so good at handling the office life vibes and the soft romantic vibes that they'd be sublime when put together (even though the opposite tends to happen in reality, because labour is a soulless drag).

Lastly, I hope that Fuuka can look into Asahi's eyes one day and go, "Your sister calls me Onee-sama too." (Though knowing Subaru, it'd probably be the other way around). Lilies blooming everywhere, folks.

I mean the "reality" of Jesus's birth is a thing headaches are made of, since obviously nobody important actually took notice at the time and the relevant parts of New Testament canon (Luke and Matthew) were written seventy-plus years later, but the basic outlines of the family's travel narrative are plausible and details check out against recorded events.

So I guess you could say that the details aren't very... stable?
Gets struck by lightning

This is a classic parent-child interaction- kids with odd notions get bummed after discovering reality, and parents come up with reassurances to make 'em feel better. You gotta hand it to Taiyaki- she's not just doing mamacon in terms of character design, but actually has the mother-daughter dynamic down as well (only with more sex). Truly, an artist devoted to her craft.

casually includes kiss scene at the end of 28.5

Inb4 the final scenes involve a tsunami wiping out the town and killing everyone, so the last volume is set in the afterlife. Highlights include God literally getting off her throne, locking our leads in a room, and screaming at them to do each other so that millions of people every month can stop praying to her to make Nettaigyo yuri.

Actually addressing the length of time for pairings - looking at page counts, I don't think the length of pages that characters have waffled on extends that far beyond other works in the genre. Yet i cant feel quite unprecedented when considering the length of time, though.

Very true. I think Kishi's doing that what a ton of long-running romcom authors do- he has a general plan for the direction in which the relationships will evolve, and generates episodic ups-and-downs to create a sense of liveliness- characters that are more commonly featured will have a dispute and then make up for drama, and parings that're less featured will pop up with wholesome interactions for a breath of fresh air. There's enough affection, desire and development involved in nearly every pairing to make it instantly distinctive, which allows Kishi to both fulfil and subvert our expectations for the more episodic bits, while still maintaining enough tension to write a quick climax (heh) in case he gets notified of an axe. The way things are going, I'm guessing he'll prolong it for as long as he's comfortable or until he gets inspiration for a new series, and when he's ready to jump off, we'll ideally get a 5-10 chapter dénouement. So the story's simultaneously ready to quickly end or to to go on for five more years, which is pretty much the best setup a long-running writer could have. I'd personally be fine if this goes on forever, though it does seem at times like the cogs of the this yuri machine are greased with Ayano's tears.

Happy Thanksgiving to the American comrades! Be safe.

Thank you! Going to have a four-cheese stuffed crust pizza, because turkeys are our friends.

Totally agree. I feel like every festival that revolves around murdering a certain animal for delicacies ought to just turn it into an appreciation day for that specific critter. I mean, people consume enough meat daily, especially in higher-class restaurants that breed rare animals for the sole purpose of flushing 'em down some rich bastard's gullet. Can't hurt to have one day when you just look at a creature as more than a product waiting to be packaged and consumed.

The stuff with Mash, especially, has a certain sapphic tone to it all. Just in general, the player shipping stuff tends to lack that unpleasant hard edge, and fits right in the strike zone of my gay little heart—even though I do wish things didn’t revolve so much around the PC.

Ahem. Anyway. It’s the most pleasantly I’ve been able to go into a space clearly primarily designed for straight dudes. I think it deserves some recognition.

That's a fair assessment. I checked around some of the other major gacha games at the time, and it's a heck of a lot better at being ambiguously sapphic than, say Azur Lane. I think Arknights might be better than it in the overall diversity department, but I don't know all that much about it, so let's just agree that FGO is a decent compromise. It does make me wish for a game that's unambiguously, uncompromisingly designed for a lesbian audience while still having a decent overall story and premise. A lot of Bushiroad's games come quite close, with Love Live, Bandori and D4DJ starring all-female casts, though the plot is pretty SOL, while Symphogear and Magia Record are more action-oriented, though not as great in their story department as their respective anime. I'd personally say that the best compromise between fascinating plots and lesbian appeal is Revue Starlight Re Live, though it's also SOL around 80% of the time and is notoriously badly managed in terms of rates and events. Still, whenever the writers produce a good main story event, they really knock things out of the park.

And we’ve got the subtle cute stuff like Okkie/Musashi, who keep showing up together in events or event art, have the same magatama necklace, and shippers in the writing/art crew, which is lovely.

Okkie and Musashi are adorable, and so are Nobukita. Surprisingly, when the game does commit to actual couples instead of having someone talk at the screen, they're often some of the best dynamics in the game. Ryoma and Oryou, for instance, are a genuinely perfect mix of hilarity and pathos, and all the KOTR have some spicy drama brewing as well, not to mention Gil and Enkidu. It does give off the impression of there being good writers on the staff who want to create compelling relationships between actual human beings, but have to complete a certain quota of wish fulfilment first. The main issue, at least in my view, is that the cast grows so quick to keep up with market demand that the game often risks collapsing under its own weight, and is likely to consign many characters to obscurity or specifically release more fanservicey variants of them to maintain sales. Also, I've heard that they're starting to experiment with different bond lines based on the gender that Guda(k)o plays as- while this might go a long way towards reinforcing the sapphic tone you talked about, I also fear it might lead to characters emphasizing the whole 'just a bunch of gal pals' angle too. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Love the outfits. Touhou's oddly like a FromSoft game, now that I think about it- you get into it for the action and lore, and stick around for the fashion.

This is why we need Sumireko to introduce fashion from the Outside World to Gensokyo.

I'm surprised I didn't come across this earlier, since stories about witches dealing with skeptical societies are my jam. It's an interesting one, to be sure- we've got an incredibly likeable main character who's equally relatable and mysterious, and I appreciate how the story doesn't pull its punches in establishing how hard it is for someone with no easily-marketable talents to survive in modern society.

Neko's battered, spunky optimism never feels fake or saccharine, and her small victories genuinely make you cheer. Minamine operates as a great foil to her, and though the dynamic is a pretty standard privileged captivity versus humble freedom setup, there's a spice to their interactions that feels quite genuine, especially since Minamine doesn't go maximum gay for Neko after one chapter and continues to be quite critical of her (though I hope this changes in the future). They remind me of Reimu and Marisa, if you gave each one of them the flaws of the other, and I'm definitely invested in their relationship, though this manga's absolute, uncompromising devotion to making every displayed romantic attraction heterosexual does crush my hopes for possible yuri, so this'll probably be around Ayakashiko in terms of gayness. I hope they at least let the subtext thrive, though.

The first ten chapters or so were kinda weird and almost made me drop the series, thanks to a lack of overall direction and some really tired ecchi humor- the Hey, what if your adorable pet was a sexual deviant secretly lusting over your every move trope should've really died a decade ago, and the whole Yuina's gonna be a hottie when she grows up line almost made me nope right out. Belial as a human is a bit less obnoxious, but still puts a bad taste in my mouth every time they roll in with the panty joke tidal wave. Some of the other characters, like Kiiki, also feel mildly underutilized, and I got the feeling that this was one of those series that'd sacrifice the depth of its main cast to focus on episodic characters.

Fortunately, the story grew more focused and streamlined from thereon out, and generally just better at using the problems of random passersby to evoke unseen sides of our leads. I really like the decision to give Neko a (relatively) stable gig and have her contend with the complicated practice of dealing with customers, especially in regards to the ethics of her magic and her dilemma between expressing her opinions and using her powers, because the introspection on a witch's role in the modern world is the best part of her character. With two-part episode structures and clear development from chapter to chapter, it finally feels like this story's found its footing and a good balance between its comedy and themes. I've got some high hopes for it moving forward.

last edited at Nov 26, 2020 2:56AM