This story's really grown on me? It was one of those series I'd been keeping up with on autopilot amid other stuff, but this most recent chapter really crystallized its appeal, that special, subtle something which always reels me back in. Fundamentally, this is an incredibly earnest romance, a wondrously clear and heartfelt ode to first loves that sings of infatuation's gifts to moments, lending feathers to feelings and gilding memories in rose, kindling the mundane and banal as fuel for pounding hearts, kneading daydreams into sugary fantasy. Minami's love is so powerfully portrayed, so potent and fiery in its quicksilver flashes and pensive stirrings, so certain in yearning as to leapfrog entirely those sloughy stretches of angst and wish itself indeed into a storm, dispelling all clouds that drape a failed outing or mixed message to reveal once more those silver starmaps that twinkle the trajectory of her hopes. It's rich enough to lend layers, textures and depth to all it touches, a touch-starved Midas tracing her fingertips across a tale with a fairly unremarkable premise and standard building-blocks and leaving it a city of gold, every chapter more charming than the last, eminently capable of pulling readers all bundled in wintry cynicism back into a cherry-pop world.

What really helped this series make the jump in my mind from one I read out of habit to one I'm actively looking forward to is the sheer infectiousness of its enthusiasm to exist, its gamboling, rollicking exuberance in being brightly itself. You see it bursting in Minami's gosh-golly-gee-I'm-so-darn-gaaaaaay non-sequiturs, in the way Tatsumi cuts electrifying promos for local lesbians as proof of cosmic hope and justice, and in the way the girls just gush over how gosh-darn cool Nitori is. It's been a while since I've encountered a story that just loves girls so much- not just girls who're dating or girls with a certain style, but everything about girls everywhere and all at once, gay-as-in-rapture with that almost religious vision of ascending in choral fanfare into your paramour's arms, sighing-singing-praying-gaying class S if all the money that went into building ye olde all-girls school was used instead to build (more) girls. It's adorable.

Yeah, you've got the boatload of tropes, that Takeshi's Castle of silly old moats and ramparts a girl's gotta scale if she wants to be a contender, but the essential zest radiating from every page of this series makes every single one of those hackneyed old tactics work like its the first time anyone's ever belted 'em out. An ambiguously romantic line that our lead doesn't quite know how to process and will haunt her for chapters to come? Oh, rats! A confession that fails to go through because of some external disturbance? A bigger AUGH than Charlie ever Brown'd! A deceptive, unprecedented interest in someone else? Slender Aphrodite, cut me a break! I am slapping my knees and hollering my cheers like a middle-aged parent at their daughter's first baseball game. I want my disaster gay daughter to go out there and play her heart out and come back home all muddy and tired with the biggest ol' gap-toothed grin she can muster at the end of an absolute banger of a match. Fight on, Minami! Aim for the stars!

last edited at Sep 28, 2022 7:32AM

Wake up babe, latest addition to Land of the Tengu canon(?) dropped. Praying for more eventual NishikixHisame content, because their whole 'super femme, dignified, responsible, dedicated princess-who's-actually-a-massive-freak-off-the-clock (she runs the clock)' x 'seemingly rakish rover of the cloud-courts lusting for battle and birdies who's actually incredibly noble when the moment calls' dynamic absolutely rules.

Tangentially, the ties on Hisame make me wonder about the role of bondage in high tengu society. One would imagine the incredible mobility naturally afforded to tengus by flight would make restrictions on movement far kinkier for them than for humans, and the general decadence of courts (which Nishiki's freakiness may be a result or catalyst of) would likely mean the tengu nobility get up to all manner of shenanigans when the owls begin to hoot. Millennia prior to the events of this series, some prehistoric human probably saw a strange winged being floating ominously over the plains and concocted some theory about the tengu being angels or demons watching mortals from above. Meanwhile, the tengu in question was just trying to fly home with one wing strapped behind her back after an attack by one of their many rival clans forced her wife to fly out to war without having the time to properly untie everything. The heavens are a silly place.

Oh hey, Fukaumi Kon's back! I love the peculiar way they use repetitions, echoes and shifts in perspective and memory to create these quiet, pensive tales that unravel years down panels, weaving recollections to realizations, mementoes to melodies, vignettes to visions all shifting as they're formed, a river of creases that whisper secrets in turning pages.

Here, too, there's a wonderful marshalling of space and setting, a helical progression that enacts time and time again that same pattern of closeness and distance, the constriction of bodies in a crowded train giving way to intimate havens that swell to wrap our girls in amicable bubbles, feeding back into the press of hearts that stand pressed in a common beat, blooming then into a vista of the sea as their voices soar to set tomorrow's date. And then we move back to memories clenched in Takamine's mind, panels of pain bordered in shadow, melting again with Sakura's springtime to burst forth into sweeping passions and singing loves, giving Takamine the courage to close the distance and make a commitment, comfortable at last with leaving her detachment behind to exist in a well-felt moment, and accordingly more content then to step back and appreciate a world no longer empty and numb, but positively glowing with promise and light, knowing it shall be every bit as resplendent tomorrow, knowing the girl who set her alight will be waiting. The last funnelling places us in Sakura's mind, reeling and breathless at an affection returned, in the dizzying knowledge that her little pocket of the train will be that much more crowded tomorrow, and all her words will be graced by eager ears, a lonely book read at last, the letters on her pages sent and received.

In every repetition of the pattern, closeness and distance take on new meanings, contextualized anew by Takamine and Sakura's experiences with each other, their memories and expectations, and also made more meaningful for us as we grow to know them better. And this itself ties into Sakura's gushing about the brilliance of books with subtle foreshadowing that take on new meanings, new secret signals with each read, and sequels to them that hint at shared universes and larger patterns without ever spelling them out, because magic shines best in ambiguity. Every aspect of the tale perfectly coheres, every element deployed in perfect concert, creating constellations of emotion that fascinate effortlessly, a naturalism polished so well as to become a dense, organic cosmos of its own- I adore the girl who seems to have a quiet eye of her own on Takamine, surrounded by knowing friends (one of whom seems quite similar to Haru of Haru to Midori fame, making Sakura's subtly-shared-universe comment even neater). All in all, a brilliant oneshot from a master of the craft. I hope we can see more of Fukaumi's work in the future.

Oh hey, double (triple?) episode of Air Crush Investigaytions. Thoughts:

Vol. 3: This series continues to grow more intriguing with each chapter, deepening and dyeing characters and themes in each others' hues, blurring and bending like light in flight, painting what-ifs on feather-brushed skies, and I am just loving it. Sometimes you get these wonderful stories that unite themes and aesthetics so profoundly that you can nearly taste a message's meaning, feel thoughts and reflections and art-dipped ideas thrum and drip across rivers of paint and text, and this is very definitely one of them, conjuring wintry gasps and hot flushes in contemplations upon freedom, singing cloud-strips to garland an elegy to childhood dreams, thatching nests with weavings of service and purpose, awash in humming exegesis of its own melodies. Shizuki soars in tandem with her shadow, painting herself with every wing-beat, particles of mineral dyes too tiny to see dotting the trails she sweeps down the blue, a reminder of heaven-fixed roots in glory, and yet also brambles that nettle her loftiest arcs. Paradoxically fitting, then, that she find refuge in branches, in perching-places, in cozy beds of leaves and ferns where the warmth of life can outshine the glare of the sun, Kureha's flame thawing a heart chilled by altitude, yet melting also those wings of wax that are both her flight and her fall. The chasm between her confinement, pressured into a gem with no choice but perfection, and Kureha's devotion, a purpose she writes upon her body to connect the symbol within, slowly erodes and unites, just as the sky in medleys of dawn and dusk, giving them salvation in witching hours, a place to descend for those granted and gaoled by the skies. There is no name for the passion ensuing, no brand that may impose upon it an obligation or deception, and in these heavens so contested and cartographed, they create in each other's arms a new space, a tender pocket untouched by seasons, unbound by treasons. I adore my birb daughters. Also, Amakake seems... kinda cool? I'd been apprehensive about her whole touchy-feely teacher schtick in the first chapter, but fortunately the author seems to be taking her in the himbo-princess direction for now, and she absolutely rocks the whole jock-schemer, I-crush-celestial-empires-within-the-curls-of-my-bicep vibe. Hope she gets to stir some cyclonic degrees of shit.

Vol. 4: Okay, so this was a very plot-oriented chapter in various ways and I'm mostly here for the brooding, meditative flight sequences and the flashy splashes of worldbuilding; I will say that the tidbits about the human conspiracies and the badass seasonal abilities (there's probably a metaphor there about the transient-yet-recurring nature of rulers) were damn cool, even if the author had to wrap stuff up early for practical reasons. I do hope we see more in this universe, whether as more doujins or the promised VN, because I continue to be enchanted by its messy-yet-layered profusions of ideas and imagery, its windswept, horizon-striding characters and ever-deepening and turning setting-spaces. Also, damn do the future versions of these (g)avians have drip- I would give a hand if the other could wear Kureha's murder-opera glove, and Shizuki's hair ornament is so pretty? I'm praying we someday get stories of these two as adults navigating political intrigue and a long-term relationship like the author intended.

Extra Chapter- On the Nocturnal Behaviors of the Mountain Tit: I see that Komera's carrying on the long tradition of multi-route VNs with jarringly introduced and oddly narrated H-scenes. I'm just going to assume that the amusingly awkward likening of a boob to an orb is an in-character extension of Shizuki's fondness for all things mineral, gemmed and bejeweled. Centuries later when she's a legendary figure in tengu history, historians will pore over her memoirs and engage in lengthy debates about the symbolic meaning of the numerous descriptions of orbs, beads and veins scattered throughout her narration of life in the palace. All in a day's (night's?) work for our erogay protagonist, I guess.

Through the Hooking-Up Glass and What Kashiwai Found There is a sequel to the acclaimed definitely-not-for-children's book Kashiwai's Adventures In Want-Her-Land, in which a little Victorian-minded lady once again enters a fantastical world, only to find that all the logic from hers is reversed like in a mirror there. Polyamory in this world is as common as it is successful, and indeed follows more rules than the bewilderingly vague proscriptions of monogamy Kashiwai continues to be disillusioned by. Wedding planners in this world are meant to have their notions and plans for marriage dissolved by their clients, and are beholden to them for appointments arrangeable by clandestine text or bathroom break. Engagement rings are mystic devices that manifest prior to the breaking of engagements in some way, and passengers of the train system frequently find their lives going off the rails. Kashiwai is both unnerved and intrigued by this world of illusions, but soon realizes that she cannot classify it as entirely utopic or dystopian any more than she could her own, because every part of the onlooker exists in the mirror, and the closer one peers for comprehension, the closer the spheres come to meeting. Rife with such humorous incidents as the Unwedding of Humpty Jun before his inevitable breakage, charmingly quaint characters such as the White Knight Awa, playful interspersed poems such as 'Jabberbussy' and 'The Bingus and the Heartbreaker', and many more pleasant diversions, this delightful book is guaranteed to grant you many a pleasant afternoon (in case of such side effects as sobbing, disillusionment or dread, please consult your local polyamitrician).

last edited at Sep 2, 2022 12:56AM

Another exquisite part of what continues to be one of my favorite tales in recent memory. This chapter serves brilliantly to illustrate Naekawa's talents in the field of horror, as intimate to cracks of skin as it is ordinate to churning depths, and never in all its reach too far from the moist machinations of the mind, masticating memory and mining malevolence. Fitting then, that this latest monster shall spring not from sepulchral waves or occultic woods, but indeed from the space between appearance and reality, perception and deception, the knots of the brain that hint at the abject, unavoidable litany of flesh beneath every dream. In a story where dualities waltz across liminality in the light of tidal moons, Ayame's nightmare is the very concentration of paradox, folklore and sin and emotion and residue packed so tight that the corpus has no choice but to crack open a mouth and scream. And the second mouth is no mouth at all, no more than phantoms can be second beings, and yet it gapes and grins and breathes and eats, begging with cranial lips the question- why?

There's also a pretty interesting marshalling of gynaehorror in Ayame's motif-cluster of motherhood, birth, consumption and reminiscence. Eating, as evidenced by the title, is a symbol-act intimately connected to this story's themes and indeed manifests in every monster- Shiori's contractual, tasteful, palate-oriented promises of consumption, Miko's not-quite-charlatan feeding on faith and present auto-cannibalism, and now Ayame's unfolding of herself into both expansion and contraction, of a mouth linked to trauma, sin and injury, whose eating and expression are curses wrought upon the host, imposing upon her a monstrous dependency, chopping what may have once been a composite and intersectional self into that most wretched binary of hidden and revealed, past and present, back and front. The mouth itself is not remotely human, and resembles indeed some creature coiling free of a poisoned, bloated carcass, the tongue a wrinkled, knotted viper whose speech is, in true monstrous fashion, more dread than silence might ever achieve.

Coupled with Ayame's motherly aura, the mentions of a child passed away and the clattering, rusted axe said to have sliced open a body, the composite image is a masterfully disturbing inversion of the birth-script, so to speak. The child that Ayame never bore and delivered now seems to have taken permanent residence in her body, and furthermore not in some womb which would be cumbersome enough to convey a child in, but indeed in the very chamber of her thoughts, seat of her individuality- one hears of mothers struggling not to let maternity define them, but in Ayame that fate becomes a hundredfold worse, for no part of her is now free of that second existence, rendering indeed absurd the very question of a separated 'other', for Ayame's monstrous othering stems indeed from the (un)life couched within the marrow of her mind. Whether this second entity is the stepchild's spirit or some traumatic aspect of Ayame herself (the indeterminacy of the primary individual as mother or child is a very testament to this birth-oriented-horror), the fact remains that it is not an adult, but something engulfing human adulthood, evoking from one side the unsettling primacy of children and stirring on the other a dread of unseen age that hints at innumerable sins and terrors concealed. The mouth is an inversion of the womb, the tongue an inversion of the umbilical cord, the axe wound in its brutal reduction of life and creation of a monster an inversion of the caesarian method that makes careful incisions in the hopes of saving both mother and child, and the monster the inversion of a mother. And yet inversions, too, depend on their antonyms for definition, and so is Ayame in abjection and uncanniness bound inextricably to that nebulous ideal of 'correct' and 'healthy' motherhood that Hinako initially associated her with and is now unsettled to find her violating in every way.

Indeed, Hinako's horror may be compounded by the largely mental and abstract image she has of her own departed mother, which in seeming reflection followed by violent subversion through Ayame may shake Hinako's own conceptions of the past, leading her to question the process of her own delivery, so to speak, from idyllic childhood to tormented adolescence, providing a glimpse up the temporal-canal at the conception of her present day. Moreover, as a seeming human consumed by a demonic underside, Ayame also reflects Hinako's own liminal position on the cusp of the midnight realm, her scars both mental and emotional, the very stretch marks and C-section stitches manifested in monstrous proportions upon her body reflecting also Hinako's hidden burns. These scars may be hidden from first sight, but weigh heavily upon the scarred subject, alienating them steadily for society and producing the possibility of a complete break from the status of human, although, as Miko and Shiori illustrate, monsters depend on humanity as mouths on eating, children on mothers, moons on stars and so forth, even as they sometimes eclipse or are eclipsed by these semio-symbiotic relations. And on the topic of monsters, this also raises questions on Fishwife and Foxtrot's origins- were they, too, originally humans who fell (or rose, depending on your perspectives on cannibal immortality) to monstrosity after some traumatic or unspeakable event? Could they, would they, should they turn back? With every chapter, Naekawa manages with style and poetry to further complicate their carefully constructed notions of 'monsters', 'wanting', 'eating', and 'me', making monsters scars, echoes, shadows, performances and states of heartmind. I cannot wait to see where this strange, fascinating tale goes next.

P.S: Also pretty intrigued by Miko's musings on whether Hinako's survival in a joyless life was better than the prospect of dying in happy innocence, because it very clearly also ties into dilemmas she and Shiori must face. Miko's example is more obvious, given her first fall from a natural, powerful beasthood to a difficult pretense of humanity that required obligations to the humans she once preyed on, and her second fall from a beloved, influential divinity to a bedraggled guard dog for a girl she's torn between supporting and sampling (not to mention a possible zeroth fall from humanity to monsterhood if the whole monsters-are-accursed-former-humans theory turns out true). Shiori is characteristically blasé about the issue, but if she has in fact developed an attachment to Hinako more meaningful than a customer at a food court to their meal ticket, then she too must face that same prospect of tumbling from a jubilant life of ocean-lining hedonism to the difficulties of a star-crossed love. Relationships are tough, huh? (Official motto of the Monsterqueer Club).

Oh, hey, I read the LN for this and it was v. nice. I love how Ayaka's like "I am CURSED to recall every excruciating aspect of my life in unavoidable detail and TORTURED by the sheer dreariness of daily life and HOPELESS in the face of the randomness of the universe and DETACHED from the dreary labyrinths of social conventions and NOBODY can fully understand my plight" and then Michiru comes in like, "Hi, so I'm a WITCH, like, a really cool, mysterious, liberated user of magic, but also more special than the other witches because I have DEJA VU abilities that I cannot currently define in detail because I'm still obsessed with the VIBES of it all" and then Ayaka's like, "I have EMOTIONS? DESIRES? HOPES? There are people LIKE ME in this world? There are people who actually LIKE ME? There are people I might possibly talk to for hours, uninhibited, about my unique and unconventional, but not entirely incomprehensible experience of LIFE, and they'll GET IT?"

Full speed ahead for Autistic Girl Autumn :)

Communication's the dominant idea in this chapter, and I continue to be enthralled by how masterfully Akiyama braids motifs around this tale's diverse themes, as intricate and complicated, as quick to bunch and unravel as the bramble-flowered relations that filigree our protagonists' affairs. From the message that kicks off our latest match of spousal squash to the clipped private conversations Kashiwai has with her colleagues, as well as the misdirected card from a marriage happier than anything on-page, the anecdote about planners arranging a series of talks to secure an ailing union (along w/ the money they'd otherwise lose), and the granting of a personal contact number, we see channels of contact and secret messages abound across this segment, and yet so often, there's a certain spillage, an unwanted listener or a distortion of meaning. Awa vaguely catches onto the private implications behind Kashiwai's correspondence, although she's violating professional ethics they haven't even put in the rulebook yet; Fukunaga receives a message meant for Kashiwai, detects the feelings she's been trying to hide, and preaches to her from the Book of Lothario; and both our protagonists are acutely aware of the sensuality of the meetings they arrange, and have grown close enough to develop private jokes, pick up on each other's hearts from miles away, and even confess their love (is that thunder I hear rumbling in the distance?)

Much like the transit motif from previous chapters, communication in Iberis serves as a means to dramatize the greater conflict between public and private spheres that runs across the story, as Kashiwai in this chapter comes to realize that just as there's nothing in the world that's entirely transparent, so can there be nothing entirely intimate. Language is both the lifeblood of humanity and yet as private to us as the blood in an individual vein, the words that web and shore our connections lent delicious secrecy, entailment and idiosyncrasy by the ways in which we perform them to diverse listeners. The dissolution that Kashiwai perceives in her notions of marriage and morality, the perilously enthralling complications that Tsuzuki blows into her life like a storm, now extend not only to weddings, but indeed the meetings that arrange them, the words that define them, the vows that institute them and the implications that bind them. And yet there's beauty in the unravelling of concrete paths, in the light that bleeds from shattered chapel windows, for in the spaces of broken language resides poetry, and all the breathless songs Kashiwai hears in Tsuziki's call, the sirens that once sounded the alarm in her wedding-planner mind for the melting of a matrimony now tempting her to jump ship and risk the waves. And leap she does, accepting the indivisibility of private and public, the irresolution of sin and convention, the intersectionality of work and home, both of which Tsuzuki has proved an admirable wrecker. She puts her cards on the table (quite literally in Tsuzuki's case) and lets the drama unfold, hoping to secure her private affections precisely by making them public, by elevating them from shame to proclamation, stepping onto the Other Side and inviting the peanut gallery to judge until their eyes pop out. There is, of course, a mild irony to the audacity of her revelation, a commitment to Tsuzuki that's not unlike a vow of its own, binding her in rebellion to her co-conspirator in sickness and in death (I trust Akiyama will serve up great helpings of both); it brings the motif of communication full circle with earnestness in the admittance of dishonesty, loyalty in disloyalty, a resounding "I do (not give a fuck)". It'll remain to be seen whether Tsuzuki's as much of a Ride or Die (2021) chick as Kashiwai'll need her to be, though regardless of whether they hop on a train or strap in for pain, I think Akiyama and Ching would both agree that you can never quite outrun yourself.

Excellent piece. I've always loved that particular brand of yuri stories that's sad and sweet and smoky, swilling maudlin memories in rueful grins and sleepy sighs, watering tears down with time to sprinkle the begonias with. Here too, there's parts of people curling suspended, captured in apprehensions poetic and orgasmic, the mists of memory and the fog of darkened rooms parted by runnels of light to illuminate the curve of a breath, the flicker of a hand, the chill of a tress, the shiver of an eye, parts hinting at wholes, shadows at bodies we'll never fully see and yearn all the more to know and be.

The workers in the story occupy a liminal role, shoring up, per Saki's ideal, a client's self, melting into them to make them more solid, crystallizing pleasure in movements and moments, that they may forget themselves in love, become complete in the arms of another, and bear with them a sliver to light the hollowness, led back some nights to secret hearths. It's a spiritual take on the trade quite common in this subgenre, and illuminative of a telling irony in which holy matrimony's mechanical and illicit pleasures sublime, where fairytales flower in dingy motels and paramours spring priceless from coin, telling of a legitimacy in illegitimacy, a comfort in exchange and trade for queer lovers whose affections don't figure in the daylight economy of relationships, and in becoming more economic still by night, create as by water-forged wine a value more fulsome for the secrecy, more precious in deprivation. In such an upside-down world, a shadow's as substantial as a person, a session more pleasurable than lifetimes, and so Miya can only taste life by descending into the underworld, where the ghost of her love for Izumi sure enough becomes flesh, the shadow vanishing in the absence of light, leaving only a body, a pleasure, and a farewell.

This circular dance of yearning strangers would be admirable enough by itself, painting in Miya and Izumi's relationship the ultimate irony as the yearning bridesmaid becomes the pleasure pursued, the happy bride a moonlit seeker, but it is Saki who elevates this tale to brilliance, breaker of cycles, beacon from purgatory. She puts up the star that guides Miya in choppy waters, letting her circumnavigate the oceans of her heart and find at the end of it all a place she can call home, even as she continues to rove a concrete sea. Saki teaches Miya of the pleasure that lives in a soul, the light that sparks itself and thus finally ends the search for suns, the hunt for shadows. She teaches her of the infinitude of the present, the eternity of nights, and the ability to make every union as sweet as first love, and so escape the shadow of an origin, the myth of the one that got away. It is Saki, being of both worlds and a world unto herself, who ushers Miya into the night where she can find parts of herself too faint to spot in daylight, and Saki who accompanies her back into the day once she's come to know herself in shadows. And perhaps just as Miya immersed herself in the night long enough to move the clock again and begin a new day, so too might Izumi, having bid her first love goodbye, decide someday to leave the shadows of brides and sirens to their dances and seek a solid form again. A crosser from one world to another, a dweller of both, and a drifter in neither- it's in a masterful interplay of these three characters that this story manages to puff binaries and archetypes to smoke and create a glittering taste of the delicious complexity of life in all its glorious feeling. Definitely a fave.

Oh wow, I didn't think I'd be seeing a follow-up to this one anytime soon. I really love this series' worldbuilding and ideas in general, since the application of a lot of general fantasy elements such as unique superpowers and ruling clans with dark secrets is nevertheless refreshed and honed by the very specific focus on tengu, flight and nobility that defines the premise. I'd be pretty interested in this setup even if it wasn't yuri, and I'd argue that establishing a strong collection of central themes and motifs will also make the sensual elements that much more compelling and striking when they do take center stage. Case in point, the establishment of Shizuki's gemstone-eating tradition and Kureha's fiery spirit made that scene where she's enchanted by Kureha's ember-gemmed eyes immensely more layered and complex than an equivalent 'Your eyes are so pretty' exchange without the added context would be- is Shizuki moved by the poetry of it all? Will she now hunger for Kureha's gem in a possessive, consumptive way? Shall the flame she'll almost certainly be savoring set her cool blood alight like a sun on the winds? And will Kureha, glowing upon inspection, made ever more glimmering in the radiance of Shizuki's brilliance, discover facets she never knew she had, come to value herself in new and ambitious ways? The possibilities are endless. Worldbuilding was created so gay people could engineer their own universes with physics and cultures that allow for otherwise-unimaginable exercises of homosexuality, and so this is the grandest application of the fantasy genre. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

P.S: I also love how the tengu's wings are framed as not purely biological, but granted upon them by a deity and thus a symbol of the degree to which they're favored by the heavens. In a practical sense, it is a cultural narrative that helps justify their ruling systems of clans, inheritance and family trades, building upon the mythic-motif of a birthright to imbue the privileged with a sense of genealogical supremacy while also encouraging those less-blessed (by standards the ruling classes have created, mind) to meekly accept their lot in life and perpetuate this unequal system. Even so, wings may likely break, bend, fail or be torn away, and the family superpowers are known to manifest in different ways, including virtually unprecedented ones like Kureha's, making people like her sites of tension, struggle and doubt, especially as she comes to lose certainty in her brutally competitive and hierarchical view of tengu society. Moreover, the tengu being granted wings by an unseen deity implies themes of stewardship, regency and an interpretive merit that may very well be overturned by force, allowing successful usurpers to claim that they now have heaven's mandate and recognition, staking new claims to segments of a fundamentally indivisible and unquantifiable sky (only a mildly exaggerated version of what happens with political disputes over land). The tension between the current narratives of descent, royalty and divine rights of rule established by the latest alliance and the lurking threat of an uprising from within or without that plunges the sky back into jungle law and makes the tengu as animals and humans again seems to inform in miniature the relations between our present characters. I do hope that either this series or the planned visual novel explores these themes in greater detail (just give me one route where birb-bians tear an autarch's wings off at the crest of a blooming horizon).

Borderline puritanical class rep characters who implode the moment a woman smirks at them deserve more appreciation, because they're the equivalents of those pro wrestlers who really excel at selling and can make the tiniest little guy waffling noodle punches look like a runaway freight train. Yatosaki Haru in particular has refined the portrayal of sapphic half-lives to an art form, and this is truly one of their finest displays.

There's something wonderfully poetic about Hinako gradually falling for Shiori, moving from thanatos (death drive) to thanatos (romance option), because those churning, coruscating emotions she now lets emerge from a heart both drowning and surfacing are so deliciously, poignantly human, enchanting in both Shiori's briny eyes and our invested-for-the-past-15-chapters ones. The stench of rot-in-life recedes, the tides of gloomy pasts retreat, and a child beached upon her scars begins to breathe anew, and yet that movement is seduction to predators, to those that'd snap this fledgling rebirth up and turn, with flicks of silver tails, back into a darkening blue. As Hinako rises from numbness, discovers her pleasures and pains, so too does Shiori the longer she's stained by land and light, dreading the imposition of names and fates, and of a value that is not meat. She crows selfishness, sings avarice, pledges allegiance to appetites, but whether they stem from a self increasingly less certain of its role, or are defined by her relations to other swiftly changing as well, the center cannot hold, cannot keep from leaking, taking on a fluidity of symbol and form that is, ironically, the very image of her swirling home.

Miko has already revealed a monster's potential, their capacity to grow just like their prey, each defining the other as not-itself, and yet, in evolving and changing, necessarily altering their opposites, until one suspects the line is merely one in the sand, vulnerable indeed to the wash of a tide, which so blurs sand and salt and swirl as to recreate the very bloom of life. Shiori jeers at this and is yet unsettled, disturbed by the success of her own venture, because Hinako was only human insofar as a monster wanted to eat her, and if her humanity grows self-contained and self-transcendent, moving to love both herself and others, including the very creatures who aspire to end her, then wherefore the monster, how now the prey? Shiori dreads eroding, falling as Miko did from her demonic estate, and yet even as Miko's tales are bound to her tails, every bite reducing the potential of her story, rendering more ineluctable the return of her beasthood, so are Shiori's possibilities multiplying, each scale a star, each drop a cosmos, vulnerable to interpretations she dreads and rejects, for in being a looming Other, nightmare on the waves, she is powerful. To eat is to consume and yet to be textured, to savor a flavor and alter your humors, to be blessed and poisoned, rend flesh to feed hearts, and with every chapter, those profound contradictions of life and nature grow more prominent, further disrupting that quaint little casting of Hoods and Wolves and Toothy Grandmas sketched at the opening of this tale. But in such an age, perhaps that is the very loam that'll give these drifters on times and tides their long-desired fairytale.

P.S: I love how Miko deals with the profoundly unsettling knowledge that her bestie/ward/divine-subject is dangerously attracted to an unfathomable fiend by acting like a stock romcom rival- "You're in her death wishes, I occasionally convince her of the value of life and friendship in a cruel and senseless world. We are not the same."

P.P.S: Not in the mood to speculate on MILFistopheles until we know more, but I like how she eerily echoes Hinako's mother, continuing the theme of all the monsters being bound to Hinako's past even as they do seem to have unique histories and tales of their own (Naekawa-sensei should really pen more spinoffs in the Tabeverse); it places the story in this fascinating space between being a tale of 'encounters' in a fictional world w/ detailed mechanics and traits to which the lead is a spectator and new actor, and a more personal psychodrama wherein all supernatural elements are largely meant to be interpreted as projected figments of a central character's imagination or psyche. In some sense, it mirrors how we take folktales and myths stemming from their unique sociocultural settings long before us and yet also find traces of resonance and meaning in them that lets us constantly adapt them in innovative new ways to the circumstances and concerns of our times, playing our own part in fostering their immortality, simultaneously making those myths our own even as we find, interpret and express reflections and aspects of ourselves in those very adaptations.

"I leave Ritsu drinking cheerfully in her apartment! One always finds a crushing beauty standard again. But Ritsu teaches the higher infidelity that negates social standards and raises a glass. She too concludes that all is well. This body henceforth without a consistent weight seems to her neither uncomfortable nor tragic. Each atom of her supper, each curve of her blissful gay chubbiness, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards a swiftly-abandoned diet is enough to furnish a girl's whimsy. One must imagine Ritsu happy." - Nikumaru, The Myth of Weight Loss and Other Essays.

A former hero, a gorgeous manipulator and a malevolent troublemaker all on a couch in hell, able neither to completely destroy each other to end their stalemate and nor deny their occasional passions for each other, cooperating if only to ruin another party... Touhou 17 is just a very creative adaptation of No Exit and this image captures that spirit perfectly.

Came across this because the title caught my eye, and wow, it just hits all the right notes? The misty, painterly panels blending inkily into each other, ribbons and fingernails cusped along the sail of a breath, words echoing weathers down the mansion's quiet halls, vampiric marble softening at the touch of a maid's quicksilver, cradling two hearts, one timeless, another eternal, to thread scarlet through foggy gloom... it's sublime. Now here's a story that captures just a glimpse of Gensokyo's otherworldly beauty, of the strangeness of its nature, of the scale of its mystery... the smoky, shaded interiors of the mansion ebbing and flowing to crest at last into that panorama of an azure lake and the gothic castle still shade-slouched adjacent, topped by lithe arms of leaves that descend as a curtain over the scene, pulling you in and yet also reminding you, for better or for worse, that here lies a place of fantasy, never to be reached except in dreams, is such a haunting, lingering image, beautiful enough to make you weep for a loss you can't quite recall. I stared at it for ten minutes straight without ever noticing the time.

Regarding the narrative(s), I also adore how this strange, mirage-like tale captures an aspect of Touhou that I've rarely seen addressed in fanworks- it's not merely a place of illusions and memories, but also of stories, of figures quite literally lent swells and sediments by language, coursing riverrun down histories etched and whispered, tributes giving way to tributaries, meanders to esoterica. The youkai don't merely react to these tales, but swim within them, breathe oddness in to sigh folklore, enact existence itself on starlit stages curtained by flushes of dawn. It stands to unreason, then, that they'd be great lovers of stories too, and couch within their cavernous memories epics, elegies, mythologies untold. Stories to them are anchors and winds, the very bones that fort their dewy flesh, the very blood that sings for raptures more, founding their legends in mountains of words and yet letting them flow from snowy peaks, interpreted endlessly in recollection's rebirth- not a circle, but a helix, much like the caduceus that twines Remilia's dress.

Sakuya breathes life into tragedies by wording them to color, gearing her pocketwatch of blood to make obscure tales beat fresh again, and Remilia drains that life into herself by imposing on them an interpretation, fangs descending upon a yarn of infinite implications to dye them in her signature themes- fate, authority, inheritance and law. The irony of monsters extolling divinity is not lost on Sakuya, but she lets her mistress have her way, sharing her tales as one might pass back and forth a steaming mug to ward off the gloom, for Remilia's blasphemies come from a time before faith, from her eternity in a capricious youth that sees all gods and devils for what they are- words and images, pretty and sparkling, woven into endless formations to pass innumerable nights, septettes for a dead princess. And so eloquence gives way to petulance as Remilia demands another trick, as if every tale before was not a trick as well, and so Sakuya obliges by reaching into her robes again, adroit as a street magician minting mysteries from the unseen, and feeds Remilia once more with tender words, born of the heart and thus redder than any old gore. The maid makes the mistress, the teller the tale, the clock the time, the doer the deed, and so Sakuya's promise, in a land of fantasies, is no different from a miracle wrought upon the world, a cosmos she spins with embraces and words to let her dreamy little bat curl maudlin hours away.

This was one of the first yuri stories I ever read, and it's certainly quite moving to see it arrive at a conclusion. Sometime's a writer I find quite interesting, since there runs through a lot of their work, longer and shorter, an intent to play around with expectations of genre and appearance, not necessarily looking to 'subvert' them (a term that often tends to impose a false homogeneity upon the subject of its presumed overturn), but to texture them with queerness. This is manifested, of course, in their foregrounding of queer characters themselves, but this also extends into a wider illumination of queer readings and themes implicit in the conventions and appeals of a genre- in case of this story, the transforming sentai heroes who become truer and grander versions of themselves (I love how they yell "Trans Up!") in recognition of a common, generally outside threat such as aliens, are 'claimed' by queer characters who use them to protect their status quos, finding a sense of self and a place in the system by recognizing the virtues of humanity and working to protect it.

However, while an uncritical or simplistic application of this theme can be used to endorse conservative, pro-police and pro-military standpoints about protecting an imagined community from outsiders by donning a patterned uniform and joining a cause greater than the individual, Sometime also acknowledges that queerness is spiritually incompatible with such pro-establishment narratives ("Yuri Terrorism" is another charming, if tongue-in-cheek instance of their rebelliousness in this regard), since those very establishments have historically aimed to erase queer communities and people. Therefore, they present in this story the common queer desire to reclaim and integrate into these established narratives of 'protection' and 'service' to gain a sense of power and normalcy, but also alloy it with a willingness to challenge and complicate those narratives by asking, through the Antinoids, exactly what makes a 'monster'. Honey's defection serves immediately to shatter a simple human-good, Anti-bad binary, being not a midseason twist or a sixth ranger's gimmick, but the central thrust of the premise, a commitment right off the bat to avoiding narrow divisions of virtue and vice in favor of exploring the deeper motivations that drive people to align themselves with various causes.

Sometime's consistent humanization of the Antinoids, who indeed make up a bulk of the cast, makes it almost impossible to engage with the series via simple hero vs. villain lens, and the fact that the Antinoids, who grapple with a consistent sense of alienation, are further displayed to engage in interests and fields often taken up by queer people to find a sense of belonging and challenge popular narratives, adds a great deal of depth to the genre-staple-allegory. Melt's interest in playing around with biology and genetics as well as Kyouka and Cool's interest in fandoms, the latter especially finding her sense of humanity in media positively depicting queerness, allows for a spectrum of deeper readings alongside the standard toku action fun, while also directly helping improve the series' execution of those very sentai tropes leading into its moving denouement.

The traditional emphases on love, empathy, friendship and togetherness blown to epic proportions in the final chapter are classic messages of a genre generally aimed at children, which might feel cliched at first to a desensitized adult reader, but are lent an incredibly affecting authenticity by the series' aforementioned foregrounding and implicatures of queerness, because to people who've been consistently discriminated against, erased, othered and either excluded from or stereotyped by popular narratives, the ideal of an all-accepting love that moves beyond good and evil (endorsed verbatim by the series) is immensely cathartic and appealing. It may resonate therefore with particular force in the hearts of an adult queer reader precisely because it represents our hope that there may come a day when we may move on from the traumas and loneliness of our pasts to find communities that love and accept us for who we are, creating not merely a world where there's no need to transform, but a world attained precisely by our transformations, by 'transing up' and 'combining', a world where queer people may finally become themselves. Adding to this, the standard post-finale aftermath where the characters are shown to be leading quotidian lives is not a standard 'end of adventure', 'coming of age' denouement, but an utopic achievement, because a genuinely accepting 'normal' is so much harder for queer people to truly settle into, and so much more precious when it is achieved.

Sometime is thus able to masterfully deploy and interweave themes of queerness into the series at levels so deep that it goes beyond just being 'tokusatsu with lesbians' and is able instead to breathe into the tropes of the genre an entire micro-epic of queerness, lending it incredible relevance and vitality and letting it become every bit as cathartic, heart-pounding and inspiring as a more traditional sentai series might be to a child nostalgically looking back on the past. Sometimes, then, doesn't merely revive that past, but is able to actively reclaim it, to engage with the exclusionary tropes of a genre that may make queer viewers feel alienated and meaningfully challenge them, even as they also present us with queer heroes and queer optimism, allowing their characters to be more than heroes or villains firing at each other across lines in the sand. The transformations, combinations, costumes and explosions key to the genre are made delightfully camp, bringing to the forefront the implications of fluidity, transitions and fulfillment-in-cohesion that younger or less prudent viewers may have missed, even as those performances necessarily reveal the falseness of an absolute virtue and vice and emphasize instead authenticity in the moment and the interweaving of personal rhythms into a symphony that celebrates individuality, the masquerade that bursts joyously into unity and revelation. All in all, it works delightfully to not only recolor a popular genre in queer hues, but to assertively create within it a space for both subversion and expansion, and is a shining example of what a skillful 'queering' of a traditionally masculinist, cisheteronormative genre can achieve, making it both truer to itself philosophically and capable of socially-relevant reinvention. I loved this series, plan to reread it soon, and am also quite interested in Sometime's current Afterschool Re-Reincarnation, which seems to be aiming for a similarly innovative queer-rebuilding of the DQ-inspired-isekai genre.

This is really nice! Starlight was one of the first shows I really got into, as well as my first big fandom, and while my passion for the wider franchise isn't what it used to be, this fanwork really reminded me of why I fell in love with the anime in the first place. Beyond the theatricality and symbolism, one of Starlight's strengths was just how brilliantly it captured the rhythm of relationships between people, that unique, special little pace they develop, and all the habits and quirks they come to share, learning over a million etudes of me and you to perform us. And with time, with repetition, with their mastery of a script they trace onto each other with quills of time and memory, they create also the potential for improvisation, an infinite chain of exhilarating little discoveries about their partners induced precisely by how they've changed each other, inspired by the chemistry of actors riffing off each other to create moments beyond the sums of their parts, heartbeats harmonizing into intimate eternities. Watching Starlight, I really could believe that two people could fascinate each other forever, pull epics and sagas from the flutter of an eye, the tails of a dream, and Karen and Hikari especially express this like no one else. Their enchanting story of a shared love for stories maturing and blooming into a love for each other as storytellers, as surprisers and superstars, for their story, was indescribably captivating back when I first saw it, feeling my heart swell like it never had before, and reading this fanwork, I'm fortunate enough to have felt a phantom of that same captivation, which is the highest praise I can give.

last edited at Jul 9, 2022 8:29AM

Commenting only to say that the kids in puppy love are nice and all, but the uncle? Damn. Music-schmusic, I just want him to sell me his gender.

Realllllly liked this one? I adore characters like N- difficult, crusty, testy, temperamental, catlike people who can never quite settle down, but are also, in their uncompromising, wary rejection of sentiment, perhaps more romantic than people like the Player herself. She measures sugar by the grain, by the scrape and grating of sweetness upon a tongue, by solidity in small things, unformed things, fleeting things far wider and frailer than language, than words, turning upon the infinitesimal shift of a mood, a simple look or word or feeling that might ruin the softest moment because its not perfect, though her trouble is that she's never found perfection, a flawless flavor, and must reluctantly admit that perhaps an aspect of dishes is who you dine with, and there's never a dull dinner with the Player.

If N is moody, if she's difficult, if she's unpredictable, then bliss for her must surely arrive as suddenly as annoyance, a shiver of kindness or gentleness, of affection provoked by the slightest things, that lets her love as suddenly as she hates, not trying, as she so cynically puts it, to 'twist' things, but simply to follow through on the trueness of her moods, the sparks of her heart, which seem knotted and labyrinthine only if one attempts to look for a set pattern, to trace her feelings from A to B without addressing them in and of themselves, produced by the flux of a moment- not the reductive, deferred, substitutive suggestion of the alphabet the Player organizes her loves by, but by a signification that looks to move beyond that narrow language, to articulate the tenor and texture of her own honesty, to rearrange and disperse and queer the grammar of love into poetry, into performance, into song, and so to fascinate endlessly the Player, to let her fall in love a hundred different ways.

N looks to seduce her lover not with sweetness, which cloys in excess and fades in paucity, but with the numerous flavors of her quiddity, of her life not as a dish, a combination concluded at the moment of its serving, a product packaged and foreclosed like the Baumkuchen that is bound in all its layers and depth to a circle of bonded sugars, but indeed to cook their time together, not with a view to its conclusion, to its consumption, created and destroyed for appetite, but to create from meals a mealtime, and from mealtime a time together, a space, a potential for creativity, for the seeing of herself as more than sugar or salt or bitterness or umami, but as all these things beyond the sums of their parts. She won't live by sugar, by empty lightness, by words whose weight she cannot feel, dishes that sweep away the contours of her tasting with a single strong flavor- N's palate is a bit more refined, but it's that refinement that lets her redeem sugar as well, to reincorporate and make it her own, to be sweet in her own catlike, difficult way, to make sweetness a part of her flavor rather than its sole consequence or purpose.

And then the Player, so drunk on honey, so soaked in saccharine, might taste and taste again, and come to savor each of her moods, look forward to mealtimes and snacks and changes, and come perhaps to polish her tastes precisely by tasting N in every way, until she moves from alphabet to name, from name to symbol, from symbol to mark, a point of expansion and not reduction, a taste unbound to nostalgia or time, but refreshed and complicated in every moment, mouthwatering and heart-nurturing, an acquired taste held close. The way to both their hearts is truly through their stomachs- for the Player, sustenance and appetite, food as productive and not consumptive, and for N, her gut feelings, all her adoration and unease and complexity distilled into moments with their own diverse flavors.

last edited at Jul 1, 2022 5:30PM

This is definitely one of the most autistic pictures ever and I felt it on a spiritual level. Keep being iconic, Miss Sunflower.

Oh hey, it's another chapter of my one of my favorite ongoing series, Kash and Zook's Extramarital Adventure! Thoughts:

1) I've probably said this before, but Akiyama really knows how to employ space and locations to brilliant symbolic effect. I love how the station where they first saw each other recurs at the start of Vol 2 as it did in Vol 1, reflecting in general a site of transitions, uncertainties, arrivals and departures, both the movement-as-order of Kashiwai's very traditional conception of a wedding as a natural, organized step in a monogamous relationship (the train as a means of getting to your preplanned location, perhaps even a commute unto 'normalcy') as well as the movement-as-freedom of Tsuzuki's lifestyle and ideals (the train as presented in a million cheesy romcoms as a means for lovers to escape hostile locations, or a site of unexpected meetings, or a point of connection wherein a partner dramatically reaches a hand out from a car for their sprinting lover to grab onto before the train leaves). I feel like that juxtaposition of purposes, that tension between trajectory and deviation, the 'right' time and place, and intersections of paths and momentum are very essential to this series, since it looks to complicate and queer the idea of monogamy and marriage even as it doesn't actually stop the proceedings so much as it accelerates them towards a breaking point, a crossing of tracks, so to speak- there are no stops on this manga's (bridal) train.

2) Fascinated by Kash's dedication to making Zook the happiest bride ever, because it feels like a deliciously ironic way for her to 'resolve', in a very temporary way, the initial contradiction she perceives between her conceptions of Tsuzuki as a bride-to-be ('pure', dedicated, simple) and Tsuzuki as a freewheeling seductress (fun, iconic, complicated), because she's now grasped that Tsuzuki's openness with her desires is by no means profane or corrupt, but in some sense incredibly, almost envy-inducingly honest, a way of life that's completely true to her present desires, to love as a spark felt in the moment rather than marriage as the echo and result of a love that once was, a love that sets you on a track. She wishes, indeed, that she could be as 'pure' as Tsuzuki, lose herself freely in desire, live unbound by strictures and norms, to venture into what she sees as Tsuzuki's world (which she's physically invited into when Tsuzuki tells her to pop over to her bachelorette pad); at the same time, she's also compelled to distance Tsuzuki from herself, to place her in a different world, be it the transgressive world of the night she initially pegs Tsuzuki as a strider of, or indeed the idealized world of love and marriage she sells and builds for her clients- anything that reduces the immense complications Tsuzuki brings into her life. Of course, Akiyama isn't letting anyone escape perdition, so I doubt Tsuzuki's free-love-fairy bliss is going to guard her from immense angst for much longer, assuming she already isn't torn up inside (Tsuzuki: Why, this is super-hell, nor am I out of it./ Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of a girl/ And tasted the eternal joys of our sweet liaisons/ Am not tormented with ten thousand hells/ In being forced to pay for a never-lasting wedding?)

3) I am actually rather surprised by how... pleasant I find every character in this story so far? Like, I'd initially assumed this series would be kinda like Octave, wherein our lead trainwrecks would be generally sympathetic despite their ethical dilemmas and mild moral bloopers, while the side characters would vary from 'wise, but unable to directly help' to 'amiably passive-aggressive' to 'holy shit dude, how the fuck have you not been arrested yet?', but the denizens of the Iberian Pain-insula so far have been pretty likeable? All the boys, from Malewife Supreme Jun to Dogboy Groom Hiroki to DILF-in-Chief Fukunaga have been pretty soft overall and I think they should kiss each other, but I also fear this might make the coming pileup even worse, much in the tradition of the best tragedies, which involve a bunch of essentially good-natured people descending into misery because all they ever did was follow what they thought was the right way to live. Of course, that angst might then make the rare moments of fluff and possible happy ending Akiyama affords Kash and Zook even sweeter, as is evident in how heartwarming the recent chapters have been, driving a cycle of progressively brighter highs and darker lows that shall escalate until either this manga or I end. Can't wait.

Mm, definitely loved this a lot? It feels like U-temo's built very profoundly upon a lot of themes present in their other works, such as the intersections of queerness and art as well as the multifaceted desire that people considered 'different' have to both belong and integrate themselves into existing systems and paradigms and yet also their need to create a shift that can accommodate them more completely and let them not only fit, per se, but grow and stretch and overflow.

That constant negotiation and reflection upon being, becoming, belonging and believing in selfhoods and tomorrows feels incredibly relatable to me, and moreso because U-temo's fascinatingly portrayed intersectionality here as not only a combination or connection of labelled differences or deviances, but also a process of apperception and feeling from the perspective of the intersectional subject who cannot naturally or easily arrive upon a self-categorization of themselves as, say, an Autistic Demisexual Lesbian, but simply see themselves as themselves, as an I given in language that takes up more space than it signifies on paper, that cannot fit between words and into sentences and produces therefore a certain weight, a complicating, queering abrasion that both Takahashi and Yamashita begin to feel, leading them to experience an alienation that necessitates an acceptance of separation and nonconformity, a reluctant diagnosis of their uniqueness-as-selfhood that must bear them into terminology that still feels like, in its provision of labels, foreign and external, an imposition and reduction. This also exemplifies why a lot of queer people, and especially some queer creators and critics, dislike and strive to complicate labels of identity and genre ranging from 'gay' to 'top' to 'transbian' to even 'yuri' that they feel do not quite convey the texture of their this-ness.

The way Yamashita and Takahashi thus look to find themselves in art is perhaps my favorite aspect of this work, because it expresses beautifully the complexity of art and queerness in a modern world, in contexts that, as fantastical or tropey as they may be, cannot be detached from reality. On the one hand, someone who's not 'normal' might look for art that represents them- not even explicit representation, mind you, which is both rare and does not necessarily equate to resonance with a queer person's feelings even if it represents the labels or categories that they would fit into, because 'lesbian' or 'trans' are heartening words to hear in media for those hitherto erased, but are not ideal types or terminuses of representation, but must necessarily be pathways unto an opening. Thus, this 'resonant' representation may be and often is the kind that pops up in gacha games or other similarly otaku-esque media that might not be made with queer audiences in mind, but still have features that lead queer people to see themselves within in and grow invested, emotionally and financially, in these pieces of media (hence the practice of queer 'claiming' applied to a lot of works with no explicit representation, but still a common resonance among queer audiences). On the other hand, the financial aspect is its own issue and rabbit hole, because these pieces of art in which Takahashi sees herself are also produced by the same capitalist machine that drives her to labor and fit a narrow conception of productivity and predictability, and so she faces the hellish prospect of working her ass off in stifling, repressive jobs in order to fund her investments and purchases in franchises and gacha games that don't necessarily care about representation so much as profit, and will continue to squeeze out those ambiguous, noncommittal, don't-ask-don't-tell bits of media so long as people like Takahashi are willing to pay for their content-parcels, which, again, requires her to work a shitty job- a positively Sisyphean fate, and yet also part of the complex reality of queerness, and perhaps even neurodivergence (hyperfixations on gacha games, anyone?) in late-stage capitalism. Yamashita as a manga artist looks to produce this sense of representation and resonance internally rather than seeking it externally, but this too, is an issue, because the publishing industry, the tyranny of demographics and genre, and the narrow definitions of realism and commerciality bar her entry into the field, making her unable to create images that might serve as points of resonance for those similar to her across Japan, which in turn shall leave them alienated and lonely because they don't feel seen or represented in stories. This may drive them in a best-case scenario to create those stories themselves, and be barred once again, just as Yamashita was, from mainstream success or even basic entry into a cultural industry that necessarily privileges neurotypical narratives and forms unless an author can slant their narratives enough to pass and gain access, leading perhaps to someone like Takahashi to pick up on the subtext and desperately try to find more- a microcosm of the way queer, neurodivergent and other such marginalized groups have always narrowly managed to indirectly support and see each other in media across the ages, despite thorny and omnipresent systemic obstacles.

In that regard, I love how U-temo expresses how normal doesn't exist, and is an imitation without an origin, a copy of a copy, with people like Yamashita and Takahashi, who reluctantly learn and do the bare minimum to fit into capitalist and neurotypical conceptions of normalcy primarily so they can support the queerness, both physical and spiritual, of their private lives, representing, like lavender marriages or drag shows, the artificiality of everything that is presented as 'conventional' or 'acceptable', but conversely also the potential of the 'abnormal', the divergent and the queer to make a home amidst it all, to reject the tyranny and glamour of normalcy, the deferred ideal of a perfect belonging, and create within the present queer utopias, queer space and queer time, queer refuges bigger on the inside than the outside, queer dimensions that let them embrace their multidimensionality. To be normal, then, is to surrender life, reject the deliciousness of paradox and the thrill of changeability, to scrape and squeeze oneself into an image without weight or form, a corset crushing ribs that strive to imitate the lightness of printed pictures on paper, and restrain the very breath that would let them paint images of their own, to blow themselves aflame and alight. The fact that Yamashita and Takahashi can find a quotidian queerness, a daily drive, a regular multiplicity, is their triumph over alienation, their success in not fitting in, but expanding past the lines of normalcy, proving that their divergences are not reductions, but multiplications, expansions into and beyond their selves. And what a wonderful affirmation that is to see!

Oh wow, I'm very interested in this, I think. Lots of thoughts. Uh, let's see:

1) The conception of tengu as 'sky-eaters' who consume the heavens is fucking metal and entirely too cool for what seem to be largely a bunch of uptight warring houses squabbling over airspace and indoctrinating cool kids like Kureha into thinking that they need to belong and serve the nation to be valid and valued. I hope she eventually realizes that the power of flight is just objectively better if you're using it to mock the silliness of borders and traditions and transcend everything to kiss your birb GF at the first blush of dawn above the cloudscape. (Also very interested in the other Eaters)

2) Loooooove the art. It reminds me of a bit of those wildlife photos that focus in to grab a snapshot of a diving bird juuuust above the surface of a lake or in the process of hooking onto prey, wherein the surroundings are shifting out of focus due to the immense speed of the event, but the camera still captures the ruffling of feathers, the glint of talons, the sparkle of raptor's formidable eye, all that jazz. For some reason, I just adore art that's very obviously 'doujin-y' (?) in the sense that it's not really even trying to look fully composite and is openly like, "Aight, this is my blorbo rendered with beautiful precision in an idle moment and around are chicken scratchings and sketches to create a sense of space and signify that there exist people who are not my blorbo, but who I have rendered regardless to give my little guy abstract little creatures to interact with". You also sort of see this in Caelum (another new yuri series I'm mildly obsessed with) and I just find it really fun when a series is just sorta wavy and bouncy and scribble-y and foregrounds the "Uhh, um, lotsa ideas that make brain go whirr and I gotta just, um, splash them all onto a wall right, right now" aspect of creativity and art as opposed to the illusion of a very coherent, organized, 'complete' edifice with all the Unities and Phases and whatnot. It's a good energy, is what I'm saying.

3) Really interested in the author's note about visual novels and stuff? I've been very intermittently reading Akai Ito (the pacing is sorta glacial even for a VN, but Kei's internal monologue is hilarious enough to keep me coming back; she's such a funny little wood pigeon of a human being and I hope beautiful women fire her out over the horizon and take turns shooting at her in a very homoerotic way) and I definitely felt that same sorta, hard-to-define-but-you-definitely-know-it-if-you've-encountered-it type of 2000s occultish cryptid shoujo yuri vibe from this series, wherein you've got ambitions and worldbuilding and big concepts, but also this strange sense of fragility and obscurity that came from the overall nicheness of yuri in those (and also these) years that the creators were also aware of on some level, which just gives these stories a strangely frail, wispy, fever-dreamish vibe, as if they could vanish and pop in the telling and leave you wondering if all that actually just happened (there's probably a tangent you could build on there about queer media self-conceptualized as ephemera on the margins of the mainstream that constantly negotiates, alloys, undercuts and inscribes its own obscurity with and upon tropes taken from the mainstream zeitgeist and complicated, queered, in sense if not in system...). Anyway, it's interesting to see that the author's also taken inspiration from those works and I hope they do successfully get the VN out someday, because I'd be really interested in a Japanese fantasy multi-route yuri VN, which is a subtype that's distressingly rare in the already-niche genre of yuri VNs- like, I actually tend to prefer the linear, one-set-couple-narratively-centered approach that a lot of the current yuri VNs take in general because it allows for quality-over-quantity and yuri VNs already tend to be much shorter than regular ones on average, buuuuut I also just really want to see a yuri work being bold and ambitious and colossal and multibranched and trying a dozen different things at once across a messy-ass epic narrative of conspiracies and allegiances and paradigm shifts, because the genre deserves that kind of space and reach (and also because I, personally, deserve a work massive enough to lose myself in and hyperfixate on for ages that's not a fucking gacha game oozing repetitive, soulless content out for however many years it can milk for profits, which is why I like big VNs and also fantasy novel series- they're immense, complex and filled with the potential for interpretations and fanwork and speculation while also crucially being complete and driven by an installment-model that's centered mostly on artistic vision and not indefinitely-extensible-profit-generation-schemes).

Anyway, yeah. Me like this series. Hyped for more.

WataTabe spinoff where local moms line up to feed Shiori anything they can think of and happily commend the zest with which she eats.

Shiori polishes off an entire deer carcass "My! It's amazing how she doesn't waste anything! You should see how picky my kids are."

Shiori laps the tongues of fire from a 50 vehicle pileup "Oh, dear! She's always so ready to try on new flavors! I never have to worry about whether a dish is too experimental for her."

Shiori swallows a small island, the borders of her mortal raiment parting to reveal the abyssal tendons coiling and churning beneath "Wonderful! More sacrifices on table three, please! She's a growing girl and she needs her nourishment!"

The particular brand of interactions this manga provides that're essentially just "Oh, hey-" (tries doing something cute or playful or friendly and ends up being profoundly homoerotic) "Ah, sorry" (Tries to deescalate, but does so in an even more homoerotic way) "Okay, let's calm down" (flustered, does something that maxes out the homoerotic meter) "Argh!" (lapses into helpless silence that is now indisputably and painfully gay) never cease to entertain me, and approach levels of fruitiness in mundanity that I haven't ever seen outside of date events in Blue Reflection Tie. Hijiki deserves a medal.