A true vanguard of the proletariat!

Shuninta draws some brilliant reaction faces.

I am shocked, shocked to learn that joking is going on in here!

Yah, so far it's entirely up in the air how much importance the whole business is going to have. Is it just a background detail about those two's circumstances or something that'll pay a bigger role down the road? Iunno man - crystal ball's still in maintenance.
ʅ ( • ε • ) ʃ
Though my point was simply that there's no obvious reason to assume the disappearance of the male sex somehow automagically also poofs arranged marriages contrary to what YQ claims.

IIRC it's rather less pronounced in his older works. Beats me why.

Only partially, since it only tells us you need two swappers for it to work. How "interchangeable" the swappers are amongst themselves is still an open question as thus far they've all been faithful to their respective pair-bonds.

I have no clue what you are trying to get at. Nothing in those pages says anything about why they have arranged marriages. Arranged marriages are not even brought up until the very last line.

Given how the two of them talk about the whole thing, they're totally resigned to being betrothed to people other than the one they love. That's arranged marriage right in the face of it, and it's somewhat difficult to see why their families would brother with the whole thing if there weren't practical (ie. economic and strategic) reasons to. And from Sayuri's comment, plus the presumably solidly middle-class Kohane's bewilderment, we know that's something particular to and not uncommon for wealthy upper-class families.
Ie. political marriages between powerful clans.

The stumbling block was literally put in place because of the sexes. Daughters couldnt inherit so they would be wed into another house to form an alliance. Families of only daughters were doomed to die unless they got lucky and were able to adopt the second or third son of another house. If daughters can inherit then who gets adopted into which family? Who gets the inheritence? Its a system built around the patriarchy, remove the patriarch and the system fails.

You're forgetting that the marriage itself forms a certain bond between the two families. This was often the primary purpose of historical political marriages, the whole inheritance shebang often being somewhat secondary or causing problems further down the road (due to inconveniently inherited claims) - or in some contexts all but irrelevant depending on how the relevant laws and customs happened to work.
It's alliance building by the admittedly somewhat primitive but relatively effective expedient of binding the families together by means of marriage and, eventually, children. (Actual track record of those ties has been... patchy to say at least, but practical substitutes have been few and far between.)

cough cough
I'm not sure how you can read those as anything else than it being considered plenty normal for upper-class children to have no doubt strategically and politically useful arranged marriages.

Which is kind of the point. This is politics; the very biological sex of the people involved is essentially irrelevant except inasmuch it IRL places restrictions on eligible couplings. One sex being removed from the equation in this setting merely serves to simplify the calculus by removing that stumbling block.

last edited at May 16, 2018 7:23AM

Here the two girls come from well off families and can have a family together, the only reason they cant marry each other is if their families made very specific deals.

Which is specifically implied to be the case so, yeah. Reminder that just because both of their families are rich gits doesn't mean it is in those two families' strategic interests to form dynastic alliances with each other...

...not really seeing what'd be nice about that. And given there's thus far been no explanation for the ability and why some people have it and most don't, but it's more or less established that if you have it it's for life, that'd mainly be an egregious Ass Pull. :/

Question answered by accidental experiment. Good enuff. (⌐■_■)b

(Always wondered though, shouldn't that kind of accident result in rather painful clashing of teeth and likely split lips...?)

Could also be taken as challenging the audience to explore the sometimes quite messy conflicts between emotions, morals and laws if you want to interpret it that way...

Asagi has a weird habit of randomly derping out on anatomy. I've kind of come to accept it as his quirk.

Except with one gender removed they dont have to work so hard to get male heirs for their businesses, theyre options for possible marriage partners literally doubles because there is no restriction on gender. In todays world their fiancees dont have the option to leave the girls alone and marry each other, in this mangas world there are a lot less reasons why the girls would be forced to marry one certain person unless if was for a very specific business deal.

All that does is simplify the calculations since you no longer need to match sexes, really. Nothing changes in the underlying dynastic logic.

"Everybody talks first draft."
- Larry Niven

How real people talk would an sich look pretty fucking awful in writing you know... Anyway, the dialog here is condensed snapshots whose purpose is to illustrate the characters' personalities and (developing) relationship, not portray "real" chitchat. There's only so much you have room to fit in ca. 24 pages after all particularly when half are needed for wild monkey sex.

The dialogue in this thing is genius. For example
"I'll fall for you." "What?" "Thanks."
Or
"Were you waiting for me?" "I'm going to kiss you for that." "Your lips seem pretty soft."
etc

Yeah, I couldn't tell if that was a translation issue or a writing issue. Everything is so bizarrely disconnected that it's like the two characters are speaking different languages.

??? Seemed pretty obvious to me. Yoshioka throws the "I'll fall for/kiss you" lines as a somewhat sardonic joke with an undertone along the lines of "jeez, you're giving a lady ideas" - and Ookawa takes her up on it. Seems to become a bit of a running gag between them.

And thats why I said that I hoped it gets explained because right now it doesnt make a damn lick of sense. Whatever half a decade deal they have with their fiancees they most likely can get it together. And the fact that the manga says that its so common with the other girls that it isnt some specialized deal and instead just rich girl BS directly transferred from our reality without much thought put into it.

There's no obvious reason to presume upper-crust "dynastic strategy" would change a lick merely because one sex got removed from the scene. It's about power and wealth and alliances, not people, and has ever been that way.

Judging from the author’s notes, it looks like the rape scene was partly to explain how pregnancy works in this world. Of course, that doesn’t justify anything, but I guess that might be a reason why it was shown at all...?

They already infodumped the whole monogender thing in classroom, not really seeing why the reproductive details couldn't be covered the same way.

Established Aoi's yandere credentials if nothing else I suppose.

last edited at May 15, 2018 12:14AM

But anyway, when are these two ever gonna have a serious conversation T.T

That'd require Shun to not go completely loopy around Komaki.
Odds are low.

Reminds me of m k's Jewels comic, where the couple eventually came out to their parents at the ripe age of 27, and the tomboy's mom turns out to not only be A-OK with her daughter being a lesbian, she knew said daughter was a lesbian all along despite said girl-now-woman having trying to hide it (evidently she sucked at that, at least towards her family).

Reminds me of an IRL coming-out story I once read about. Woman decides to come clean to her family and start with her sister, they meet at a café. Conversation in a nutshell:
Woman: "...sis, I need to tell you something."
Sister: (looking goncerned) "Are you pregnant?"
Woman: "Wha- NO! I'm gay!"
Sister: (relieved) "Oh, okay. Yeah we kinda figured actually."

Relatives can be embarassingly perceptive.

Putting that aside, is it just me or is Arisa's default mood "hyper"?

10/10 brutal honesty.

From what we've been shown so far I'd say gay, lonely and desperately horny going by how she was jumping her cute new friend on, what, fourth meeting. Seems to mean well enough overall but, you know...

Also :concern: over her moral compass given said cute new friend is a middle schooler... ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

Yeah Natsume's kinda, how should I put it... not sure if pedo or just really sexually frustratedwasting any time is she?

That was the most philosophical discussion ever had.

Shun, Komaki, you're up.

For a moment there they were almost having something akin to a vaguely normal conversation there...