This was pretty well-done. It's a cold, dispassionate look at terrible people, one of whom tries not to think about the consequences of her actions, and another who actively glories in them. The lack of clear moralizing or overt drama makes for a very unique experience, because it feels as if every judgment you could ever make has already been made by the characters, and the end response on both theirs and our part is to just shrug and accept this dismal state of affairs, mining as much enjoyment from it as possible. They're not victims and they're not oppressors- simply acquaintances-in-sin drifting through a cold and careless city, dispensing with emotion and leaving pleasure up to coincidence.

The biggest obstacle to writing a story about cheating is the threat of audiences flat-out rejecting the story on the basis of the premise, or quitting because they realize that there won't be a neat conclusion, but the hazy, moody ambiguity of this story neatly circumvents all those emotional brambles. Rather than some shocking moment of revelation, like walking into a room to find your girlfriend sleeping with someone else, it dwells far more on the mixed, grim sense of detachment in dingy hotel rooms, knowing that you've gotten away with this before and shall do so again, and wondering where you'll go from here. Infidelity is thus converted to a moral dilemma, every bit as inevitable as the trolley trundling down the track in a philosophical experiment. The only choice that's left is whether or not to pull the lever, because even if you walk away, the pressure that's built up for so long won't disappear.

Perfect sense. And Kaname must be satan because she had snuggled with the snake(Yatsude) before, and tried to tempt Jesus(Tsubaki) later.

If Tsubaki is Jesus, then who is Judas?

Judas is clearly the large, sweaty Middle-Eastern man who has been creeping around shiftily in the background of every chapter and spilling salt everywhere. You really need to squint to see him, though.

T O T A L Y A K U M O S A T U R A T I O N

Whipped cream is for amateurs. Real connoisseurs use red-hot curry.

Marisa: Are these the embodiments of scarlet devils???

^^^ Fate really just needs a Close-your-eyes-and-try-not-to-think-about-the-implications-cest tag.

Love the details on the clothes.

Eyes focused solely on the abs
I see that elven wisdom is as profound as ever.

Virgin Lesbian: What's your type?
Vampire Lesbian: As with a dash of blue hair.

Touhou's Buddhist and Taoist factions going from having religious wars to actually dating each other will never fail to amuse me. I guess yuri really is the key to world peace.

Sooooo.... being a normal hero gets you overwork, no actual appreciation, massive occupational hazards and requires work life balance. Being an Antinoid lets you blow shit up with your lesbian gf, get validation regardless of whether you're a nerd, a weeb or a shipper, and also allows you to have daughters with said girlfriends. Poor Hayate. I'm glad she at least managed to get herself a partner.

Also, the regular tag isn't enough for this one. We need Science, Baby! here.

The idea of having a little child that is subservient to your every need and seems to have literally no other personality traits beyond wanting to service you is some pretty blatant wish-fulfilment fetish material. I guess Japanese OLs are mad repressed.

This was very sweet. I also think it might be physically impossible to write a RenMerry doujin without addressing the looming threat of separation in their future, but I guess that's one of the reasons they're so popular.

This gets more disturbing the longer you think about it. Then again, I guess that's also rather Touhou-like, in a sense.

• First characters conceived of were Akutami-sensei and Hiiragi.

• Ningiyau's favorite character by far is Fuji. She absolutely adores her. I think, if she could marry her own creation, she would.

So in the beginning, all of creation was just Hiiragi's edgy darkness, and then Ningiyau said Let there be therapy and created Akutami-sensei. On the second day, she created Fuji, who was literally perfect. Ningiyau spent the next four days removing virtues from Fuji to make her more human, but this only made her love Fuji more, even though Fuji couldn't actually walk in a straight line by this point. On the seventh day, everyone else was created, and School Zone came into being. All the girls were initially supposed to live in the garden of Yuri, but Ningiyau kicked them out after Yatsude groped Fuji, since she was jealous of Eve (Yokoe) and smaller Eve (Kei). Also, Tsubaki is Jesus, because she suffers for everyone else's sins.

^^ Now that I think about it, Kotomine Kirei:

1: Is seized by powerful urges that clash with a conservative background.
2: Has an extensive knowledge of the Bible precisely for the purpose of proving that it is bullshit.
3: Wants to top wife, but is so shy to say it that she literally kills herself out of impatience.
4: Simps for a golden bitch who is simultaneously the gayest and most homophobic person in town.
5: Gets a new hairdo to represent coming out, then refuses to leave house out of embarrassment.
6: Interacts with girls along the lines of "Hi, I'm-" -stabs, runs away, pretends nothing happened.
7: Excels at fleeing from powerful women.
8: Eats spicy food to feel something deep inside.
7: Wants to talk to the CEO of evil to figure out what the heck is up with life.
8: Dies duelling a redhead with swords in the mystical equivalent of a parking lot.

Ergo, Kotomine Kirei is the best portrayal of a lesbian character in all of fiction. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

So Ucchi is dreaming about herself dreaming about Kuroko sleeping on her shoulder, only to reveal that she actually slept on Yuri's shoulder, only to reveal that it was all a dream-within-a-dream-within-a... okay. Cool. Being gay is one hell of a drug, and Ucchi is definitely smoking.

This straddles the boundary between wholesome and lewd.

Quirky Gensokyo shenanigans are as fun as ever. Incidentally, the power to see 'cracks' in a relationship would either make Maribel the most sensitive partner ever, or an absolute nightmare to argue with.

By the way, shouldn't this have the Kasen X Komachi tag? It does exist on this site, after all.

Minimalist colouring is such a great artistic choice, especially for characters who 'pop' like Marisa. Azuma's got a knack for condensing the sweetness and bitterness of Touhou's brilliant world into bite-sized chunks, and this story was particularly delicious. Marisa going from a rambunctious little explorer to a well-known witch grappling with her mortality is excellently portrayed, and the question of her future continues to be fascinating, both within this story and in the greater universe of Touhou in general.

It'd be pretty depressing for the grand gods of old to be disregarded in the modern age, bound as they are to the very masses who discredit them. Lots of points have been made about how the gods must be crazy or cruel or sadistic, but Touhou points out that the people aren't too kind to them either. Beneath the idealistic trappings of faith, it's all naked materialism, but I guess religion is the process of always wanting to find something more. I like how vulnerable this story made Kanako and Suwako seem. Did Azuma never write the second part, or was it just never uploaded here?

When I first read Sumireko's "What a wonderful death!" line in ULIL, it legitimately gave me chills, because just for a moment, we got a peek behind Touhou's eternal status quo, beyond the chaotic everyday that Reimu tries to protect in the land of illusions and fantasy. This series of vignettes really drives in the flow of time in the outside world, where everything rushes forward so quickly, and yet we're made to wonder if life in Gensokyo is really better. Everyone compares Sumireko to an isekai protagonist, but to me, she always felt like a character from one of those fantasy children's novels in the 20th century, like The Chronicles of Narnia. Underneath the escapism, there's always this vested anxiety, regardless of whether she lingers on for too long or chooses to return. I really liked the way that this story explored that future.

A RenMerry story by our lord and savior AzMaya? Is it okay to be this happy?

But yeah, the afterword really contextualizes so much of this story. There's this subtle, shifting sense of trying to fight against fate, to ignore the inevitable, as Renko and Merry try to hold on to each other in a tale that's half SOL, half occult mystery. The center just won't hold with these two, but they've got to keep trying, even as the conclusion draws near. It's hard to see a happy ending for them, but we can only hope that it was worth something.

^ Incidentally, the artist of the manga is now adapting Do You Think Someone Like You Can Defeat the Demon Lord?, which is a hyper-gory, mind-bendingly dark fantasy story that is also yuri. The adaptation's a bit rushed and uneven, but the existing translations for the LN are also kinda wonky, which is sad, because the series gets really intense. I thought it was pretty cool, even though I'm not a fan of dark revenge stories. I really hope it gets an anime adaptation, because it's got gore intense enough to make Re Zero look like a PG-13 show, whilst also featuring badass lesbians.

Ultimately, I guess that some series, by virtue of not 'progressing', become perpetual motion machines.

I agree with your whole long post, but this raises the question of (although I know quite well what the strict-constructionist purists are looking for) what exactly is “progress” in a series where the protagonists are together for life basically from the first chapter and who form the model yuri couple for all the budding lesbians around them.

I mean, your standard 'progresion purist' probably has a mindset that goes like this:

Chapter 1: If they don't confess, the manga's a mess.
Chapter 2: If they don't kiss, the manga's a miss.
Chapter 3: If they don't French, my fists will clench.
Chapter 4: If they don't get to second base, they're not worthy of my grace.
Chapter 5: If there's no cunnilingus, the author's just conning us.
Chapter 6: If they don't trib, I shall return to the comments and crib.
Chapter 7: If they don't cohabitate, I shall spew forth torrents of hate.
Chapter 8: If I don't see a wedding, there shall be a beheading.

On a more serious note, I'd say the desire for marked, clear 'progress' comes from a tendency to view relationships like videogames or TV shows, where there's always something better or new waiting as you get further in. The entertainment industry is tasked with fetishing and glorifying romance for vast numbers of consumers, the majority of which have not entered into romantic relationships by themselves. Portraying romance in an understated, pragmatic, subtle way wouldn't lend itself well to a seasonal entertainment system or a three-act story structure, even if real-world romance is rarely so linear.

Audiences want to see melodrama, overflowing emotions, dramatic confessions at airports right before planes take off, wonderful sex between beautiful people, and the longer they're invested in a relationship, the more dividends they expect to gain from it. This, I'd argue, is primarily a Western phenomenon, since the SOL genre does not exist in Western television, or is at least not nearly as popular as it is in Japan. Most of the readers on this English forum are presumably Western, and have thus grown up consuming stuff churned out by Hollywood.

These ideas, which initially began as entertainment, start to be taken as common knowledge and become actively aspirational, so if you're not rolling in romantic partners and having orgies by the time you're twenty-five, you've basically failed in life by the standards of popular entertainment. The rise of incels in America, for instance, could be directly linked to the increasing sexualisation of American culture and media, which idealizes sex as an activity between young and beautiful people, leading those with inferior self-images to construct a warped world-view. However, if all it took to have the ideal relationship was to be conventionally attractive, then the love lives of celebrities wouldn't be anywhere near as messy as they are.

Coming back to this manga, I'd say that these progression-purisits are people who fundamentally seem to engage with fictional romance as an investment-reward game, and want to receive repeated 'signs' that the couple's life is better than it used to be in order to justify consuming more of the manga. They think that there must always be something more, something further up the ladder, like those weird rituals about wedding anniversaries that ask you to buy gifts of silver and gold and platinum to mark the progress of matrimony.

But this mindset fails to take into account the joys of stability, of domesticity, and of simply coexisting. Life isn't a rat race to the next level of romance or sex, it's a swirling, insane whirlwind of unpredictable bullshit that's likely to either crush you with monotony or tear you out of your comfort zone on a dime. In such a world, there's an incredible, heartwarming appeal to stories about stability and peace, about subtle affection that doesn't need to be over-the-top or escalating to justify it's existence. It's about people who don't need to explicitly say that they love each other, just as normal people might not thank their sidewalks for not collapsing into a yawning abyss, because that's to be expected. That's the golden, glittering status quo.

I'm not saying that such stories are realistic- having your first love transform into a lifelong romance is every bit as farfetched as cultivating a harem at the age of sixteen. But to audiences, particularly in Japan, that got shunted out of soul-crushingly competitive school lives and into a mind-numbingly oppressive job environment, these series provide the sustenance of a rose-tinted adolesence that they never got to enjoy, an adolesence where they never had to prove anything, but could just be themselves, sequestered from spacetime in a cozy corner of the world.

There's no need for filling out a mandated sex quota to keep the spark going, no need to do something unpredictable or new, no need to introduce scandalous and sensational twists, because for the target demographic of such stories, tomorrow being the exact same as yesterday isn't a tragedy- it's the most wonderful promise you could ever make. And unless people take that into account, they probably won't be able to enjoy A Room for Two.