Um, I thought one of the most basic premises of the story was that Mitsuki’s chosen “cool” presentation gives off a not-feminine read. But Mitsuki is, in her own mind and in the minds of those around her, a young woman.

It’s true that both MCs have been given an “adult” character-design makeover, but to my eyes hardly a radical one.

Also, the ending panel of her sitting down all shy like they haven't been together for over a year now was also weird.

I don't read that as anything remotely like "shyness"--Aya's still miffed that they didn't talk over a major change to their shared space--just as she predicted would happen

I mean, I get it. An author wants to add twists and surprises and emotional reactions from the readers. I'm just not too keen on how it was done in this chapter - telling the readers they're still together after the timeskip could have used a bit more seriousness rather than be revealed with a forced bait-and-switch.

Some of the reactions are really curious to me but the issue is responding to them makes this seem even more of an issue then it needs to be. It's a simple chapter with a well used and innocent joke; I don't get the problem. What really needs more seriousness? Most people seem to get just fine. It's 4 pages. It's not as though it was multiple chapters of wondering. It was a few panels--a page.

Could be that it’s just that establishing that there was a time skip, that the MCs are living together, and executing the joke was a bit much to try to do in 4 pages.

I thought the, “Return home > call out > house is dark > partner nervously says, “I didn’t expect you back so soon,” sounding guilty > suspicious reaction > “It’s a new home theater!” as a callback to Aya’s long-ago refrigerator crack was pretty funny.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/the_guy_she_was_interested_in_wasnt_a_guy_at_all_ch51#2

Maybe the investments that readers have in these characters and the way that the series does take its serious moments seriously (Aya’s reaction to Mitsuki not revealing that she was “Onii-san,” Mitsuki’s reaction to her songwriting being exposed at school, etc.) make it easy to forget just how fundamentally fluffy this story has been all along.

Has there been any conflict or emotional issue in this series that hasn’t ultimately been resolved in the most benign way possible?

last edited at Sep 28, 2025 9:44AM

The author has been giving glimpses of the MCs’ future (specified as “possibilities” since the two weren’t yet officially a couple) since over three years ago.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/the_guy_she_was_interested_in_wasnt_a_guy_at_all_ch18_1

Personally, I didn’t think that the author was implying, “In the future, these two might wear adorable outfits while shopping together and be super-cute putting together IKEA-style furniture in the apartment they share or they might never get together or they might get together and later have an angst-filled breakup.”

I assumed that the author’s implication was, “The MCs will have a lovey-dovey future together and I just can’t help myself from showing you glimpses of it ahead of time.”

last edited at Sep 28, 2025 9:05AM

God this need like an idiot couple squared tag

They're not stupid, they're both in denial (and tsundere).

The Idiot Couple tag isn’t about the overall intellectual capacity of the characters; it’s about their inability or refusal to see that they are a couple, or at least that they are emotionally attached in ways that they can’t or won’t admit to.

While there are other ways for characters to be an idiot couple beyond overt denial or being a tsundere, those are certainly two standard ways of getting there.

Why would she be worried about her bringing a girl home? Saying roommate over girlfriend... I get the vibe they broke up but remained friends?

Why would the series do that?

Right? One of the repeated tropes of this series (a bog-standard one for SOL romance series) is that one of the MCs, usually Aya, feels a tiny bit of insecurity or a transient jealousy-adjacent emotion, and then Mitsuki blows it all away with a trademark mega-rizz moment for a super-cute resolution.

last edited at Sep 28, 2025 7:02AM

Why would she be worried about her bringing a girl home? Saying roommate over girlfriend... I get the vibe they broke up but remained friends?

Right—so the people who were worried about the “divorce arc” turn out to have been right all along. That’s what this chapter is all about.

JFC.

Least realistic thing about this - Aya's mom not realizing the second she sat next to him that the pierced, tattooed rocker guy in the snazzy suit who looks just like Mitsuki is in fact Mitsuki's relative. XD

Or him realizing that she was likely Aya's mom.

Are you kidding? Two people at the graduation who each say, “My kid just got a girlfriend, and they look so happy together listening to Western rock music”?

I meant him not realizing, as a parallel to Aya's mom not realizing above.

Ah, I see. The crucial missing "not."

Least realistic thing about this - Aya's mom not realizing the second she sat next to him that the pierced, tattooed rocker guy in the snazzy suit who looks just like Mitsuki is in fact Mitsuki's relative. XD

Or him realizing that she was likely Aya's mom.

Are you kidding? Two people at the graduation who each say, “My kid just got a girlfriend, and they look so happy together listening to Western rock music”?

I will never understand how the lack of STDs in (fictional)porn is something that people care about, or the lack of hygiene-condoms, etc. lol

it's not that i care exactly. more like it occurred to me while reading and i thought it was funny, because with her body count it's not that out there? and in a very much porn manga it would never ever be addressed. like the realism adds an absurdity, i guess

Maybe I’m just a unnuanced categorical thinker, but I guess I’ve always assumed that once you say “isekai” (not to mention “elf”) most elements of realism are pretty much fading in the rear-view mirror.

i get the ending kind of fits with the tone of the series (for the most part) but it's quite the slap in the face for people who have been reading this for... fifteen years?? and gotten invested in these characters and their relationships. all but a few of them were just kind of... left there. like i could never reread this knowing many of the couples will never get anthing more substantial than playful flirting.
just feels empty man

Slap in the face?

There is some het in this "yuri", but everyone is completely calm about this fact, since it is mentioned only on a few pages. It's like there's a little bit of crap in your dinner, but you don't mind because there's only a little bit of it.

you need to touch grass

Seriously, the extreme biphobia present is not okay.

The majority of that person's relatively few posts appear to be complaints about het content or calling a series "garbage" for content as minor as a single panel where a character walking by happens to see a het couple making out in an alley.

So take that into account.

Honestly, if we're being realistic, almost none of these girls end up together, that's just not how high school relationships work out. Most series get around this by focusing on a single couple/pairing, because while MOST people don't pair up for life out of high school, SOME people do, and the story can just be about one of those without stretching plausibility.

By making a series set in a girls school with so many pairings, relationships, and prospective relationships, you're left with the dilemma of either making an ending where many of the couples end up with long term prospects but it feels contrived and false, an ambiguous ending where you do a graduation arc and maybe a couple of them get together but mostly it's just leaving everything up in the air, or a time-skip/class reunion ending where you find out most of them broke up or never got together, and a lot of them married guys, and then it feels pretty shitty.

So while this feels on the face like a wildly unsatisfying last chapter, I could also sympathize with Kishi-sensei's decision to just go "eh fuck it the end." And at first that's what this looks like, but then I think about Honoka and Elisha's story, and I think there's something a little deeper going on here.

I think the reason he gave Honoka and Eli an ending specifically was because out of everybody, they had THE MOST to overcome if they were going to end up together, with Eli being an exchange student and leaving the country after a semester. Many of these couples have a whole year or two together before they graduate, many of them might attend the same college, and even if they don't, they're still all in the same country, they could end up at the same company, or find themselves in the same town, etc etc. But Eli and Honoka are going to have a literal ocean between them, and until the very end there it's kinda ambiguous if they're actually that committed or if they're just playing around. The fakeout in the ending where you start off thinking they fell out of touch works because honestly it would feel very real if they did. So the message here is:

"Look, we all know not all these girls are gonna get together, and I'm not going to dash your dreams by telling you which of your faves didn't work out. So instead of giving everybody an ending and deciding it for you, look, look here: The couple with the most obstacles is happily living together in quasi-marital bliss happily writing manga together, probably about Thomas Jefferson taking it in the butt from Tokugawa Ieharu. If they made it work, whose to say your favorite couple didn't?"

And y'know, I think that's probably about the best compromise between realism and narrative that you could probably do for a series like this.

I agree with everything you say.

But, but . . . no more MahiMahi . . . sob

This was such a great series. There's now a hole in my soul called "no more MahiMahi."

But a great series nonetheless.

Personally, I'm glad that the series is getting an anime adaptation, because that's a strong indication that it's been a big success with readers and it bodes well for the mangaka's future as a creative person. But while I have no doubt that the anime could very well be successful, I value this primarily as comics. (Granted, given the series' central theme of music, the addition of a soundtrack could benefit this story even more than with many adaptations.)

But it will be interesting to see what might be done with the most distinctive feature of "The Green Yuri"--I have never thought the story would benefit from either full-color or standard B&W. And the trademark treatment of oblique framing and the dense layering of dialogue and figurative elements in the panels have kept me coming back and re-reading this one over and over (it's not uncommon for me to re-read favorite yuri manga, but not often just to look closely at the details of the panels). I like that the pictures don't move in this one, because that means I can spend as much time with them as I want.

And while the pacing of very small installments has kept me yearning for more pages as much as the next person, I think of the resulting narrative dynamic as being an integral part of the overall effect of this very special series.

last edited at Sep 15, 2025 4:59PM

Man, this one really has that “cute text/scary subtext” thing down cold, doesn’t it?

I keep thinking we’re going to keep finding out “Oh, yeah, there’s one more person involved” until we come to a serial killer.

Cute. Nice to see those elf ears being put to more than an aesthetic purpose.

And I don’t mean this to be judgmental in the slightest, and in general I don’t really care that much about “tag accuracy,” but doesn’t this go beyond NSFW to merit at least a Lots of sex tag?

My concern is mostly about acknowledging the amount of work the story is putting in.

Man, I think this is definitely yuri.

Knight heron translators notes are the best thank you

Came here to give some love to the notes as well—nicely done.

I'd honestly not thought either of them had entirely parsed they were into girls enough for Sakura to coherently identify that her feelings towards Takamine could be romantic like that.

Yep. It seems that both girls are well aware that the other one makes them feel a lot, but they’re pretty much unaware of what exactly they’re feeling. But Sakura seems to be developing a clue.

Don't worry, it stays pure fluff.

Yeah, I never imagined those last pages could be ominous. But then on re-reading them, an extended "See you tomorrow" sequence like that could be a red flag if this were an entirely different kind of series. Or maybe not even all that different on the surface (manga series have been known to suddenly up the drama out of nowhere)--but ultimately quite different.

But it seems like this chapter really was all about "here are the MCs, doing the things they do," so the good-byes fit in completely with that.

I think the yandere onee-sama backstory has tended to overshadow how messed up Kasumi’s whole “I’m so worthless I need to find a worthy new girlfriend for my kouhai/onee-sama” project is.

We’ve seen lots of basically wholesome yuri stories where an MC with low self-esteem gets healed by her loving partner. But Kasumi’s internal darkness has always seemed rather more significant than that.

"he's making his move again" so he's tried multiple times to get with Oosawa.

This is just the second time—Ono previously complimented Aya on her dress at the prom, then Mitsuki arrived and he was left in the dust. It’s implied that the reason the Aya-Mitsuki Protective Squad even notices what’s happening is because Ono is known to be shy and bit oblivious.

Most likely. Tho, with how Nakajima expresses it, Ono may have approached Aya other time off screen as well.

Well, no—Ono literally breaks the 4th wall to remind the audience who he is and what he did at the prom and explains that he has been “cramming Western music” since it was all “left up in the air back then.” This chapter he’s trying again.

"he's making his move again" so he's tried multiple times to get with Oosawa.

This is just the second time—Ono previously complimented Aya on her dress at the prom, then Mitsuki arrived and he was left in the dust. It’s implied that the reason the Aya-Mitsuki Protective Squad even notices what’s happening is because Ono is known to be shy and bit oblivious.

Don't know why people have to read so much into this. This is just a chapter fully establishing Mitsuki and Aya's relationship in front of everyone (As if the official peak art by Arai Sumiko isn't enough) it doesn't have to get any deeper than that, it is still a fantastic chapter though. :)

The original question was not about "why did the characters within the story announce that they were dating?", but "What exactly did readers who, before this chapter occurred, were somehow unsure if the characters were actually "dating" need for the story to show in order for such readers to be certain that the characters were dating?"