So lovely. I had to go back and re-read the last few chapters to get the whole situation in one blast.

So, the girl who likes meat kind of has a resemblance to a sweet dessert. And the girl who loves dessert has a definite "meaty" feel to her. No wonder it's pretty clear they want to eat each other.

Stupid. She’s tough so she’s not a girl but she loves sweets so she actually is a girl. This is the logic of the deranged and neurotic. I love food and cooking as much as anyone but personally I’ve had enough dessert. When the manga girls are eating headcheese and offal, I’ll be interested. Conservative censorship, otaku fordism, and gacha mindsets have created a vacuum of creative intrigue. The artists with an appreciation for the eroticism of liberated young women railing lines and having affairs no longer find an outlet in manga. We desperately need our delinquents back. 90% of new releases are the fantasy of people who both fear and shun the DoorDash courier and all the world they cannot see from their gaming chair. And oh, she’s a violent gang leader who secretly eats pastries all day and mostly just accosts street artists minding their own business? She’s a cop.

it's just a romcom pal chill

I get where they're coming from though. I really am not a fan of these one-note premises. Just way too shallow. Maison Ikkoku was a romcom and from 40 years ago. Why can't we have a yuri romcom like that? This is just air and nothing.

Have you WATCHED Maison Ikkoku again recently? I was fond of it, but everyone was pretty much one-note. And most of the episodes were filler. And there was a ton of "Take step forward, forget it ever happened by next time". It was fresh because all the stuff it was doing hadn't been done to death yet, and it was good because the characters' single features were good ones. It had good features, but in general I think we often remember old stuff as better than it really was. I mean, I remember when Strawberry Shake Sweet was about as good as yuri usually got. And thinking back dispassionately, it was kind of fun but quite frustrating and really made pretty much no sense at all. (Girl Friends is still awesome though)

last edited at Aug 10, 2024 11:41PM

This would probably seem like a pretty good chapter if I could remember who all the characters were. As it stands, all I could really tell was, she wasn't talking about music.

Genre changed halfway from introspective to drama to comedy

So . . . slice of life, then.

Do not think of this as a psychological story. Do not ask what personal motivations drive these characters. This is a sociological story, just one anecdote in a country full of ruthless and vengeful selfishness. (...)

tfw you read for the gorgeous art but then are hit with a mini-piece about the cultural impacts of revolutions in China

Wouldn't pay too much attention to that mini-piece; it's kind of from the jingoistic American school of history.

BTW, I googled the exchange rate, and apparently the amount that she stole is equivalent to about US$14,000. So she didn't exactly get rich off of this.

Excuse my nitpicking, that just happens what I based my entire personality around:

First of all, we need to account in inflation. Assuming the story takes place in the futuristic year of 2006 (based on her mother leaving in 1984) ¥117'600 would equal about ¥176'428, which is more like 24 grand. Additionally, roughly approximating living costs via the BigMac index, these have a 50~100% higher relative spending power. So whilst it might not seem much, it's a rather realistic estimate for what a single-income lower-middle class household can build in savings over 3 to 6 years.

It's what now? How the hell is a single-income lower-middle-class household supposed to save up that kind of dough in 6 years?! (Or, really, any dough at all) I guess things are different in China from North America?
(that said, the details of what the amount, um, amounts to are appreciated)

last edited at Aug 1, 2024 12:17PM

An excellent way to quit smoking. (Even if it was also the reason one of them started.)

Also, I just have to say, when Fukumura came back and sat down on the same side of the table and convinced her to sleep over instead of going home, all my brain was thinking was "Why don't you just miss the last train?".

Oh, great! Now I'm binge re-reading that.

As to this, I'm not big on smoking in my yuri, but I'll make an exception for a quitting-smoking yuri. Plus it's cute.

This is absolutely darling.

Must say I wasn't expecting that. Good show.

Yea i dunno im not a huge fan of the short-haired girl. I get they were going for the cute kinda possessive but her actively sabotaging her friends social life is too toxic for my taste.

Yeah, seems pretty dysfunctional.
The short-haired one has this weird "I refuse to define myself as more than a friend even though I'm obviously obsessed with this girl, so the only way I can be exceptional is to make sure she has no other friends" thing going.

Oof, the Little Empress is finally showing her claws. I hope she understands that she is officially declaring war on the Dowager at this moment, and has made off-screen preparations accordingly. :-)

I mean the Dowager's scheme here was already kinda declaring war on her. What was she supposed to do otherwise, let them smear her as a violent abusive empress?

That is indeed what she was supposed to do, according to traditional filial piety expectations. Doing so would deescalate the situation, and place the Dowager back on top of the pecking order in the Rear Palace.

I dunno. There's a few different kinds of status at play here; the "elder generation" status is one, but only one. There's also simple hierarchical status, where the emperor is actually the head of government and the dowager empress is not. And oddly there's gender status, because supposedly the emperor is a guy--something the dowager empress may actually be miscalculating because in her head the emperor is NOT a guy. Traditional China was sexist as hell. Of course the empress doesn't directly collect either of those statuses--but as the emperor's wife she gets some by association.
Gender also comes into play with the filial piety thing--sure, the dowager empress gets some respect for being the emperor's mother . . . but it's not like she's anybody's FATHER, which is where Confucian filial piety really comes into play.

Finally, it would be different if it was the Empress' word directly against the dowager Empress' word. But it isn't--the people making the allegation are a couple of servants--high ranking, high status servants, probably minor nobles in their own right, but it's a bit outrageous that the dowager Empress is making a claim that the Empress' word should be of less import than theirs. In effect, the dowager Empress is not just trying to put the Empress below HER in the pecking order, she's trying to put her below the SERVANTS. Letting that pass doesn't "de-escalate" the situation, it puts her on a path to being the servants' servant eating gruel or some damn thing.

There's also the fact that the Empress hadn't been making a move--she was fine with the dowager Empress being top of the pecking order. She was cheerfully bowing down to her, giving her respect, doing penance over little imagined mistakes. The dowager Empress didn't need to be RESTORED to the top of the pecking order, until she created a crisis by trying to push the Empress far further down it than would be correct for her position.

last edited at Jul 18, 2024 1:23AM

What is it with rain and colds?

That part I understand, but what's with the common cold knocking someone out cold for a full day--and then they're 100% back in shape the day after? Not like any colds I've ever seen at least

Manga colds
--Never involve sneezing, coughing or snot
--Always involve fever and weakness
--Often involve hospital visits and fever medication
--Are usually fast-onset and end quickly and cleanly once the fever breaks

I have this feeling that sometime way in the past someone translated "24 hour flu" as "cold" and everyone has just followed that original translation ever since . . .

I did not expect a random rape scene to happen pretty much in the background / two panels aside of this story, without any real tie to the plot... Huh. Eww...

Yeah, and it's set up to make it seem like succubi casually whipping people up into a rape frenzy is a regular occurrence and is also not treated as very serious. It kinda feels like Ascendance of the Bookworm where the main story is usually light and low stakes but the world just around it is absolutely brutal

That is not a comparison that would have occurred to me. Maybe because Ascendance of a Bookworm is, um, good. And the thing is, when the brutality of that world gets put in front of the MC, it BOTHERS her; the contrasts aren't ignored, they're used.

I really wasn't sure what to think of this at first, so much chaos it wasn't clear just where it was going. But after a few chapters . . . well, it's pretty funny.

This seems really good. I like to see a character with pizzazz. Not as indestructible as she seems, I notice.

Alternatively the simpler answer, this series isn't named "Smart Woman" :P

Point. :D

The WTF is strong in this one.

This is interesting. The one thing I don't quite get is, why are they running away? The wife would be a suspect, but she didn't do it and has a strong alibi. The girl who actually did it, there's no reason she would be a suspect. I mean, just try floating the theory as a cop:

"OK, hear me out here--What if it was some woman who doesn't know the guy and barely knows his wife, and she murdered him either out of a sense of justice for the abuse the wife is suffering that we don't know about, or out of a twisted attraction based on a kind of sexuality we'd prefer to pretend doesn't exist?"
"Uh, OK. Ah, do any of the possible bare acquaintances have histories of violence or extreme senses of justice or lesbianism?"
"No, but--"
"Soooo, that co-worker said he had a mistress; have we scoped that out yet?"

Their chances of getting away with it by just carrying on normally are very strong. On the other hand, if they run, that's like admitting guilt and the long arm of the law will be looking for them and trying for extradition if it finds them. Their chances become . . . fair. Plus they have to try to start their lives over from scratch. How is this a good option, aside from "it lets the story happen"?

This is the future that liberals want

liberals have better taste than I thought.

Well that got dark rather suddenly.

I love this, it's like the good ol' days of quarterly yuri hime but with more polish

Nail polish, to be precise. But yes, it does have that lovely old school yuri girls feeling.

Wait, wait! WHERE is her underwater hand?

Getting pedantic, but I don't think the lady in the mirror is a ghost. Well, she might be, we don't know very much about how she got that way. But the impression I get isn't so much girl dies-->haunts mirror as girl alive-->gets trapped in mirror, either as a whole or just her spirit or something. The difference being that once you're dead, coming back to life is generally not a thing, but if you're trapped, you could escape. Right now her plan is to escape by possessing our heroine, but it's all kind of vague . . . she doesn't seem to know how exactly. Given the general uncertainty about just what is going on and how it works, I don't think we've foreclosed on the possibility of her getting out in a more solid sort of way.

Hopefully the princess stands up and hits the stone cold stunner on that assistant

Prophetic words. Smack!