shout out to cute needy girls with praise kinks

Nene posted:
Seriously, these days I've been a little bit dispirited -- because a "schoolgirl yuri" manga that I used to love, after a long time on a downward slope and accelerating, finally crashed and burned. But now that I've read this new chapter of My Blue Garnet, all's right with the world again.

It pumps me up to know that there are authors like Akiyama Haru out there. People who will bring me the good stuff, who will keep it real and won't make fucking concessions to anyone or anything. Hell yeah.

You say that, and, funnily enough, if there's one thing I think Akiyama Haru does really well it's conveying hypnagogic feelings in romance.

In this case I would say the story is especially effective in using environmental detail to make the characters seem trapped, closed-off or suffering from tunnel vision. Narrow panels, lots of close, overwhelming background detail, perspective convergence points that tend to be near the center. You'd see this sort of stuff in her Galette one-shots but it's especially effective here, I think, contrasting with the way that backgrounds open up when characters make connections with each other.

Not to speak badly of Octave by any means, but whatever she was up to in the ~7 years after it was published gave her a massive level up in her compositional work. This is some of the best stuff in the genre.

last edited at Mar 4, 2024 10:07PM

Nya-chan posted:

Cue for the MC to wake up from a dream.

see, you get it, you understand the vision.

muteKi posted:

White Rose posted:

Poor Hinoka. I wonder if Tsukushi realizes she has just hurt her horribly.

I wonder if she realizes Hinoka can only take her attitude as cold rejection.

Probably not.

I think the funniest thing that could happen is if the next chapter opens with Hinoka having a dream where Tsukushi returns her kiss and then gets really depressed and anxious about it

LET'S FUCKIN GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Gabinomicon posted:

Presumably the implication is that glasses girl is mad that hot girl is dating her brother instead of dating her.

I would also argue that the "brocon" response is to get back at the girl who, just moments after openly insulting her, has put herself in a position as if demanding some kind of immediate physical relationship from her. A more indirect way of saying "damn, you're fucked up" to someone who is unwilling to be honest about her actual feelings; this isn't a romantic encounter in the sense that it's not about the sorts of feelings we'd think of as romantic

I'm not the hugest fan of these sorts of stories, but given how much shorter it is than the ones in this style I tend to like (Iwami Kiyoko, Kodama Naoko), where we get a fuller characterization of the people involved, I consider it pretty well-told.

I can't believe I've never heard of that case before. Huge victory for women's rights and women's wrongs

I mean Angelique was pretty big, and if the goal of the story is to subvert tropes that are established already in shorthand, picking the big popular entry seems like the only way to make it work without dragging. Othrwise it wouldn't be terribly coherent.

Beefaroni posted:

The part that confused me was what the really bitter part was.

Did she see her boyfriend right after or something? I feel like I'm missing something there

No, it's clarified a bit more on page 13. It's that (even if she doesn't totally want to admit it to herself) she has had a profound crush on Sakuma for about as long as she's known her, like about a decade. And then she drags her out to these extremely romantic spaces, and just complains about the people she's dating who don't even treat her well. I think most people would find that upsetting!

The funny thing is that aspects of this story remind me a little bit of a short story I wrote for a thing quite a while ago, though I was very pressed for space and was working with established characters. I quite liked this one.

(I was trying to figure out if one of her one-shots inspired this new serialization. Doesn't seem to be the case, but I caught new insight into her other works)

It's a little awkward, but it's also a line I could see making sense when delivered in a certain cadence. "She's so distrusting that she doesn't trust anyone." Like, not even a single friend or confidant

resonance posted:

I could have sworn I'd read this before. Am I just tripping?

I somehow missed the first chapter until this second one was posted -- which is a clear sign I hadn't read it when it came out a couple months ago -- and also had this uncanny feeling I'd read it before. Either I'm having some kind of brain problem situation or I've got to go check my back-issues of galette

Weird that people seem to think this didn't get the characterizations right. That's...that's what I find compelling about this, that it actually did rather than use the way the characters dress as shorthand for their entire personality.

Aerith must be understood as a service worker who wants nothing more than dropkick a bunch of the customers who are shitty to her. The way in which she manages those urges are key to understanding what sort of character she is, which includes manifesting as being very forward and aggressive any time she can get away with it. Case in point!

last edited at Feb 29, 2024 5:07PM

Mr. Jones posted:

It's Kagiana but it isn't Nodoka x Yui. Help, I'm confused.

Hm, apparently it's adapted from his Comitia 143 release. That would explain why there haven't been too many updates from the past year.

Gabinomicon posted:

My main thing about arioto I didn't like was the child predator bartender lady. Same reason I don't like wataten.

Ironically, I kind of wish the story had actually been about that but it would have had to take a massively different tone and wouldn't have meshed with the more jejune "actually gay people are just like everyone else" thesis it seems to have been exploring, especially in the context of the lesbian bar scenes. It makes the earlier parts of the story worse by association; just kind of paints everything else before it that could be interpreted as coercive in the worst possible light, Aya pushing this stuff onto Marika because this was how she learned about it all.

Granted, "gay people really are just like everyone else, which means that they also, like everyone else, have communities that include predatory people; those predators will try to find ways to project an air of respectability and make themselves impossible to remove from their base of power" is a significantly harder story to tell well.

I guess I should be clear that it's not the wager per se that annoys me about arioto (I mean, that would be more like a laundry list of complaints) but that the nature of the wager seems based on the idea that Marika isn't gay and the story (at least in the manga) doesn't do a good job of establishing otherwise up until that point, so the whole thing feels off. Here, though, I can come up with no other reason for actually initiating such a wager rather than just, like, studying harder and getting better scores and then bragging about them against her; none of this makes sense unless both of our main characters are gay as heck.

I'd say this is definitely closer to Kiss and a White Lilly than Arioto, mainly because the whole wagering sexual favors for academic accomplishments makes me buy into the belief both these girls are actually gay and not just being coerced into it for financial reasons.

Man arioto is so fuckin weird

I've had that exact diet conversation with my wife....it's true though...her cooking is too good

Does anyone know the author's pixiv or twitter account?

Gotcha fam

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/169854

I like that the character isn't being treated as a joke so far. It's admittedly a personality type that not everyone is going to fit well with but I appreciate that she gets to be complex and sympathetic.

I on the other hand am so elevated as a yuri reader that I know that playing strip hanafuda on a holiday is just what any pair of girls who are roomates would do. "Subtext". Bah. [garth_marenghi_subtext.jpg]!()

rphjas posted:

Noto is still creating Aikatsu!!

sucks in air through teeth mmmmmmm....

I thought the baby was supposed to be more a couple months old at this point but I suppose that's the part of the storyline I paid the least attention to

shanks posted:

This plot line has rocketed straight into “Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko” levels of bullshit. Hopefully it won’t take 20 chapters to explain the reasoning

I gotta level with you, I think this post presumes that our heroine is capable of reasoning -- and I'm not so sure about that

White Rose posted:

Poor Hinoka. I wonder if Tsukushi realizes she has just hurt her horribly.

I wonder if she realizes Hinoka can only take her attitude as cold rejection.

Probably not.

I think the funniest thing that could happen is if the next chapter opens with Hinoka having a dream where Tsukushi returns her kiss and then gets really depressed and anxious about it

I maintain that with its focus on the sea the title should have been rendered as "*blue planet*" but that's getting a bit far from here. It's certainly more explicitly a romance story and thus something that people complaining in here will probably enjoy reading

ChikyuuNeko posted:

Oh it's a featured series, I recommend this for anyone wondering if it is good or not.

I'm kinda put off by the subtext tag as I often find subtext series incredibly frustrating, how is it in this case?

I say read it anyway and if you're frustrated at the end go read ano koro no aoi hoshi for closure