Cool series.

OMG I RELATE WHOLEHEARTEDLY TO THIS MANGA ON EVERY LEVEL!!!! T^T

I'M THE ONLY GIRL IN MY NERDY GIRL FRIEND GROUP THAT LIKES YURI!!! they mainly like yaoi and regular hetero ships.... i fake liking yaoi too when i'm around them just to feel included :(

I don't have anyone in real life i can passionately be open about my love for yuri with... sigh... maybe someday!

I think a looooot of girls talk about Yuri online only... Who knows, maybe your whole group is pretending too hehe.
There's just too much to risk and "I only like it as a genre" won't help most of the times... So yeah, is hard.
Maybe we need a secret codeword or wear a specific item to identify our kind like "cough*youchika*cough" and wait to see if there's any reaction.

That's the biggest issue if you are a female yuri fan. It basically outs you when it comes to your real world preferences which makes it the sort of thing you aren't likely to just bring up with casual acquaintances and coworkers. Even if you are the exception that doesn't swing that way, it will be very hard to convince people of that after mentioning you have a enough Japanese lesbian romance comics to fill a bookshelf.

I still remember the embarrassment of having a friend I was staying with for the weekend come up to me after thumbing through a "Bloom Into You" volume I foolishly hadn't put back in my bag from the night before and start asking me about why I was reading a weird backwards lesbian comic book. They were super confused by both the format and the contents. It's hard enough just having to explain what manga is at my age let alone one about a romantic relationship between two female teenagers.

Wasn't there suppose to be two immortal chics? And, what's the deal with the skull?

When the first girl woke the other, that skull was her friend that they gained "eternity" with. Then however many years later the skull you see is of that girl. They have pretty much swapped roles. Now these new people who have just found her will probably be the next to sleep there for a couple hundred years and keep they cycle going.

Seeing a lot of comments on a lot of things recently of "crappy story" or "cliche" and so forth, when did the comments start becoming so high and mighty. just enjoy the yuri, jesus.

Any time a story is a bit sad or shows characters in a darker or more realistic light you will see those sorts of generic nebulous complaints. It's the whole "that story made me feel bad so it must be bad" mentality.

In this particular case this isn't an amazing manga in my opinion, but due to its story being an unhappy one it will get way more flack than it deserves.

last edited at Oct 29, 2018 10:59AM

I'm so glad I got to read this one before the horrible spoiler tags got added.

aw, I was hoping for a more over-the-top reaction :(

It wasn't bad, but considering she fell on the ground after seeing Adonis talking to a cat, I thought the grand reveal would be, uhh, grander

Well it did make her head explode...

I would hate to be the janitor at that pool.

I'm confused. Which page has the kiss? (O_o)

last edited at Oct 27, 2018 6:46PM

^ Whatever her true motivations, what Asami has not done is be truthful with Minato, and however it shakes out, she’s being quite cruel to a person she had previously led to believe she cared for, a person who had risked all her established relationships to be with her.

You’re right—maybe my limited imagination simply fails to see any possibilities beyond Asami being a fuckhead to Minato with bad intentions or Asami being a fuckhead to Minato with what she deems to be good intentions.

If the author can somehow write her way out of Asami being a fuckhead in this chapter, I will be truly impressed.

There is no way Asami is walking away from this looking like a good person. I'm thinking more like a sympathetically flawed bitch. There has been a bit of foreshadowing that she may be fulfilling some sort of promise to her dead teacher or at least that some of her actions are driven by her memory of him. That along with her behavior and relationship with Minato suggest her motives are at least more complex than the one dimensional face of evil she projected in order to break things off. I guess only time will tell.

This talk about spoilers in tags got me thinking. It would be great if we can rate the "spoiler-ness" of a tag. Then people can choose whether they want to see the tags that are spoilers or not.
Basically, similar to the tagging system of vndb.org.

Cool idea but it would require some pretty serious work to add it and retrofit all the tags in the library up to this point.

I know I promised you a rant about my least favorite romantic trope, so here it is:

There are two possibilities:

1) Everything is as Asami says—she’s been manipulative and deceitful all along, and she’s just fucked over Minato’s entire life for financial gain and career success. With two chapters left, for reasons that I assume are obvious, it’s doubtful that’s the whole story.

2) She’s lying about her feelings and this is what in Korean dramas is called Noble Idiocy (the person doesn’t actually have to be “noble,” but they often are, or think they are).

Basically, one person in an established romantic pairing suddenly breaks off with the other one, supposedly for the good of the person being left. It’s very often (I’d say “almost always”) just a tedious way to inject drama into the final act and stretch out the plot, especially when it’s obvious that the OTP is going to ultimately end up together—it’s a guaranteed couple of episodes/chapters of the main characters moping around until the inevitable reconciliation/reunion.

(Noble idiocy can also be paired with a random time-skip ending, where all the supposedly intractable plot complications that are keeping the two people apart can be handwaved away. If you took that as a reference to the other Momono Moto chapter of the day, you might not be wrong. )

For a variety of plot reasons the Noble Idiot commonly gives a false reason for the breakup, and the absolutely most toxic version is this one—the “I’m Faking Hateful Agression Because I Love You So Much And Don’t Deserve You” gambit: “I never loved you, everything was a fake, I was using you, you were so easy to fool, etc.” i.e., by treating the former lover like absolute shit the person leaving is actually doing them a favor by forcing them to give up on the (supposedly doomed) relationship and move on. (Or so the Noble Idiot’s thinking goes.)

In this particular case, any reconciliation plot would also need to explain away the somewhat separate issue of Asami’s apparent plagiarism of the dad’s music, which no doubt can be done, but it most likely makes a non-handwaving solution even less plausible. (And Asami’s been enough of an asshole all along that there’s actually not much reason to want them to get back together.)

I didn’t think it would be possible to have a more unlikable shitbag for a romantic lead than the one in this author’s Liberty, but I’ll be damned if Momono Moto hasn’t pulled it off.

I totally expect a rehabilitation of Asami’s character and an ultimate reconciliation between these two, but for me any resolution is going to need to be world-class interesting to make up for the use of the worst version of one of the cheesiest, and often laziest, of romance tropes.

Although both of these avenues are possibilities its a false dichotomy to assume they are the only ones and it's still too soon to berate the mangaka for writing sins she has yet to commit. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt since up until now the story has been pretty well written. My personal guess is we will not get such a black or white ending and Asami's reasons for doing what she has done will be neither pure villainy nor noble stupidity. I think her motivations will be much more grey and mixed, but who knows maybe she will ride off cackling on a broomstick after kicking some orphans and puppies in the face and pooping in Minato’s Cheerios.

last edited at Oct 26, 2018 2:06AM

this needs a tragedy tag

also thats a fucking shit existence, to relive your shitty times like that forever. like dam that would suck.

The problem with tagging a story like this with tragedy type tags is they end up being huge spoilers. There was another one shot ghost story on here that I can't remember the name of which I had spoiled for me thanks to the tags.

The sequences to the story are actually pretty clear: pages and partial pages with a white background to the gutters are the "present," where Chiharu is dead (and stuck in a memory/experience loop) and Hiro is continuing her work as a model. Pages with a black background to the gutters are flashbacks to Chiharu's lived past, including the dream she had the night after she saw Hiro and Mao.

When she woke up from that dream and started getting ready for what she believed to be a date with Hiro, and no doubt addled by the sleeping pills and her disrupted sleep patterns, she lost consciousness and drowned in the bathtub. She keeps trying to fulfill that date with Hiro by the ocean, but only when she gets there does she realize that she's dead.

You can track the transitions from the black-guttered past to the white-guttered present on pages like p. 66 (in her dead-present she's in her school uniform with no socks) and page 74.

I say the sequences are "clear," but there's actually a clever use of contrasts between gutters and panel interiors, of bleed panels, and of panels with no gutters so that the time-shift signals can seem ambiguous and not very schematic at first.

And I don't think Hiro has forgotten Chiharu at all--every time Chiharu gets to the ocean and cries, her tears turn to rain; every time it rains, Hiro flashes back to a vision of her dead friend and cries. Hiro's tears then become the drop that awakens Chiharu in the bathtub again.

Exactly.

I saw a lot of people having trouble interpreting one or more elements of this story and was about to make a post summarizing the story to help clear things up, but you beat me to the punch and have done so in a much more succinct manner than I likely would have.

It would have hit harder if Hiro hadn't been such a dick, and if it was actually possible to drown by falling asleep in a bath.

You can definitely die by passing out on sleeping pills in the bath or even just really drunk for that matter. For those thinking this is a suicide it is much more so implied this was an accident caused by passing out in the bath tub from a combination of sleep deprivation and prescription sleeping pills. Her last thoughts are about how she is going to go meet her girlfriend after a bath. Most people don't make plans for after their suicide.

last edited at Oct 25, 2018 11:28PM

An unfinishable hell... I hope it's gonna end when Hiro-chan comes back to the hometown and she's told that Chiharu died...

Hiro-chan knows she is dead. It's the reason she is crying at the end, haunted by the memory of her dead lover when ever she is caught out in the rain.

last edited at Oct 25, 2018 9:51PM

This was well done, the way everything felt a bit off from the start and slowly drifted into more surreal territory for the big reveal.

This is a neat way of showing that theory as to why certain ghosts can't move on because of something happening to them. I wonder if that house of hers is haunted

It's not a place she is haunting but rather a person.

last edited at Oct 25, 2018 9:45PM

I really like this story up to this point but let's see if it sticks the landing. It is obvious there is more to music girl's motives than she lets on. She is trying to make as brutally clean a break as she can before running from her lover, her past and her conscience.

last edited at Oct 25, 2018 7:48PM

Looks like the mangaka got maybe one or two chapters of warning that her series was getting the axe. All in all not too bad an ending for such a massive rush job. I like that the teacher went the mature route and reported the abuse rather than shacking up with a middle schooler.

last edited at Oct 25, 2018 7:56PM

Ouch.

I thought the indirect kiss scene was a good example of the differences between comics (static sequential storytelling) and animation. Each depicted (in very general terms) the “same” series of events, and in broad thematic terms accomplished the “same” thing—we see the contrast between Yuu’s indifference to drinking from the same bottle (she’s been on sports teams and no doubt has done it all the time) and Touko’s sudden realization of the implications. A nice little scene reminding us of how differently each one regards the relationship at this point in the story.

But since in comics we don’t experience each “shot” in isolation AND we also infer what happens between panels, the scene in the manga is presented AS a sequence—a form of process analysis.

Panel 1: Touko offers the drink, with Yuu in the panel.
Panel 2: Dialogue balloons lead to Yuu alone, drinking.

Lower tier, sequence of three panels, identical perspectives:
Yuu hands back the bottle and Touko takes it (both expressions neutral).
Touko looks at the bottle, suddenly aware of the indirect kiss possibility.
Touko drinks, with the tiniest suggestion of a blush.

Anime:
Touko offers the drink and we watch as she never takes her eyes off Yuu.
Yuu hands the bottle back and Touko gazes at it.
Touko drinks (cut).

I have no interest in saying which is “better,” because that’s a nonsensical conversation. But several major things are different.

Ordinarily, in a drink-sharing situation, there’s no reason to keep watching the other person drink (unless there’s a “You can have a sip but don’t take too much!” deal, as between siblings), so actually seeing Touko watch Yuu drink suggests that she’s intentionally setting up the indirect kiss (as we’ve seen many times in yuri manga). But then her “realization” take doesn’t quite make sense—it should be something like satisfaction. In the manga, she’s also been watching, but then we’ve switched to her implicit POV—we don’t see her doing it, we are her (or we are at least in the same spot she is while) doing it. That’s specific to the execution, not to the medium—the anime could have done that by cutting from the two-shot to the POV, but that would be much more expensive for a fairly minor point.

But because comics images don’t move, and sequences unfold in space rather than in time, we see multiple panels simultaneously and can look at them as long as we like. So that three-panel sequence emphasizes the events as a process and also allows for that tiny blush of Touko’s reaction—if you made it big enough and held the shot long enough in the anime to register with the audience, it would blow the scene and Touko’s reaction way out of proportion.

So it’s the “same scene” in the broadest terms, but is actually depicted quite differently. (Only if you think a “story” is its paraphrasable content are they the same.)

Yuu and Touko share a drink from a bottle, and Touko suddenly realizes that it’s an indirect kiss, and Yuu doesn’t.

In many important respects that sentence is as much, and as little, the “same” scene compared to the manga and the anime as they are compared to each other.

Very true. My example of Touko's heart broken friend lingering a moment to look at the romance movie poster is another good example of a nuanced scene from the manga getting changed but the meaning still being captured in the anime. That scene is completely different in the manga where we are hinted how Touko's friend feels by a panel at the actual movie showing her slightly sad contemplative face as the couple embraces on the screen. It's the same subtle character development but delivered using different ques.

Bloom Into You employs a lot of subtle visual and symbolic story telling in its original form. It really is a very well crafted manga which is why I seriously worried the anime adaption would just completely butcher it. So far I think the adaption really has done quite well outside of my personal dislike of the color pallet which I think is too bright and flowery for a story that is at its heart quite somber in the beginning, Yuu's perspective in particular feels like it shouldn't be so bright and lovey dovey from the start.

As you pointed out anime and manga are very different mediums and the source material for this particular story is not an easy one to adapt. What has impressed me is that the director seems to understand the source material and is going out of their way to catch even some of the more subtle character interactions and story ques even if it means having to change them to make them work in the new format. As with any manga adaption where there is a ton of dialog in the source material, the script has been streamlined quite a bit, but I think they have done so relatively carefully.

last edited at Oct 24, 2018 6:48PM

For another good example of where they managed to pull off the same subtlety, just look at the indirect kiss scene where Touko gets to drink from Yuu's bottle. It's subtly apparent in both manga and anime that Touko definitely wanted it because it was an indirect kiss and tries to play it cool, while Yuu doesn't even care.
Visual. Storytelling.
Love it.

Yeah, I thought the indirect kiss was nicely done as well. Another scene I thought conveyed a lot a lot just using subtle body language was where Touko whispers into Yuu's ear after winning the election. You can see Sayaka's displeasure at Touko getting so close to Yuu and there is even a moment where the guy who eventually figures out that Yuu and Touko are in a relationship glances over his shoulder to look thoughtfully at Yuu as he walks off. You can see the wheel's of suspicion are already beginning to turn in his head.

I'm quite impressed with the anime adaption so far, particularly with all the nuanced body language and attention to detail. It's these small details and visual story telling that make the manga so good and which I feared would get lost in the transition to the animated medium. I love small details like the way Yuu's heart broken friend spends a moment lingering behind to look at the movie promotional poster depicting the young couple. I was seriously concerned they would butcher the more subtle aspects of Nakatani's story telling and so far they have been quite good at preserving it.

The one place I think there is a marked difference is of course the color pallet and the way Nakatani uses light and dark to create atmosphere and mood, but all in all most of my fears about this adaption were unfounded. It's apparent the director understood and is trying to respect the source material.

last edited at Oct 24, 2018 3:20AM

I want to enjoy the humor, and the boobs, but the level of objectification coupled with the emotional manipulation ... I probably shouldn't have read a book about abusive relationships just before looking at this. Because it just fits too fucking well ^^;

I wouldn't really call this abusive. Weird and a bit dysfunctional, yes, but actual abuse is a way uglier scene than this.

If you want an interesting story exploring a codependent abusive relationship this is a good example below.

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

trucest anime??
https://myanimelist.net/anime/36632

2 incest(blood related) anime on the same day, so where is my yuri incest anime?

wut the other one?

Is it just me or is there some sort of real fad in Japan right now for incest stories? I'm by no means prude and believe people are free to be into what ever gets them off, but it seems like such a bizarrely niche fetish to have such a huge pop culture impact. It would be a bit like if all of a sudden there were two or three anime a season about necrophilia or bestiality.

Anime is niche.
These incest anime never break out of their otaku bubble.
In fact, because it is niche, some studios try to get that public that's not being targeted enough yet. Two shows with incest in the same season would probably make only one of them sell (if any), but since only one is the main point, it makes sense.
Like with lolicon, which isn't well received in Japanese culture. And yet lolicon content sells.

That's a good point. People being into teenagers is relatively mainstream, but actual lolicon involving little kids is definitely very niche and taboo, yet it is so common in anime these days that I didn't even stop to think how rare a fetish it really is in mainstream society. Pedophilia and incest really are about equally taboo although incest often comes with the double whammy of being lolicon at the same time.

last edited at Oct 22, 2018 12:03AM

This one was neat. I don't think it's a concept that works well as too long a story, but I wish we got just one more chapter showing the aftermath of their world going further off the rails due to "suddenly a yuri couple appears."

You know, this release made me realize something: Chitose doesn't have any personality beyond being perfect. She's perfectly cute, perfectly sweet, perfectly selfless, perfectly devoted to the one she loves, and her only reaction when someone hurts her is to cry and suffer in silence. She's the Japanese version of Mary Sue. No wonder people complain that this story rubs them up the wrong way.

Her flaw is she is socially withdrawn, emotionally fragile and friendless aside for her one childhood buddy and a dead girl.

So what did everyone make of Kagami's line about "not caring about maidens or anything like that?"

It came off as a bit of strange thing to say, but I took it to mean something along the lines of Kagami basically saying I'm not a lesbian but I'm not going to let anybody steal you away?

Or something perhaps along the lines of I'm normally not into girls, but I am into you?

Well from previous chapters, "Maidens" comes off as a local school social phenomenon. Where an older student takes a younger one as their own. I'm not entirely sure how to put it adequately. I'd say it's less saying that she's not normally into girls, but more she doesn't care about what dumb school social status thing exists.

Ah, thanks for the heads up. It had been a while since I read the last chapter and I totally forgot about the prior mention of the whole maiden thing. I just went back and reread that part and it makes much more sense now.