Never read Girl's Ride before - Cotton Candy is kinda a funny suggestion, because it's pretty angsty, but I happen to agree, it leaves a good taste in my mouth (haha I can do the metaphors like it can too).

I guess Cotton Candy is a little angsty...I suppose I feel that the angst doesn't rise above a certain level, and it's all ameliorated very quickly. There's a few productive tears and then a happy ending. That still seems light to me? It's not like Hoshikawa Ginza District 4 or even Bloom Into You in terms of angst, and it's nowhere near as intense as Lonely Wolf, Lonely Sheep in terms of background psychology––though I still think of that one primarily as a very sweet story.

As far as I remember, Girl's Ride has no angst, and a neat art style with rapturous drawings of motorcycles. Lots of mellow moods. I recall the characters mostly driving to different places and eating at restaurants and going to hot springs. It's one of those stories about girls getting really interested in a hobby and pursuing it together. Kind of like a less comic Car Graffiti, but with some actual Yuri content.

This is probably my favorite serialization going right now. And it was a very nice chapter. I'm impressed they got through Izumi's whole back-story in the space of a few pages.

But what threw me at the end was on page 26, in the bottom left corner. Is that a calendar? I can't read Japanese, but it looks like that is a Useless Princess calendar. I want that thing so badly.

The Flower and The Star
Cotton Candy, by Ringo Hamano
Girl's Ride

Those are probably my favorites that are light and complete.

I can't get the links to work, but they're all on Dynasty Scans.

I get how you feel, but I think they can fix their relationship. To be fair, Shizuka had been jilted by the pickup artist of the piece, Kaoru. Seeing Kaoru change in response to her feelings for Mask makes me feel like Shizuka and Mio can work things out. Knowing how Mio feels, though, I think she's happy to be able to have Shizuka return her affection again, and doesn't want to rock the boat too hard. I'm sure the author can devise a way to revisit this subject later, in more detail.

But this part of the story was so fraught and emotional I thought for sure the author was building up for a conclusion to the series. Instead, this seems to be only the first sign of relationship strife in the series, like maybe an initial benchmark?

For myself, every time Miyoshi tells Ayano they'll get boyfriends one day, I feel what I imagine is the same frustration and anxiety Ayano feels. That's the relationship that hits me the hardest. If Miyoshi and Ayano have a relationship as fraught as Shizuka and Mio, I don't know if I can stand it.

Thank you for the recs! 1 quick note, but diptych is used only for ancient materials placed on two hinged sections, usually art but sometimes writing. Either way, manga wouldn't qualify. It'd be more of a duology. (Diptych is an awesome word, I'm not correcting you just to correct you, I think that word is super cool, I knew it already and just want to make sure it's used properly because like... what a weird word. It actually comes from words meaning "folded in two" so it's only for things that connect in that way). Anyway, I've read Game before but it was nice to read it again, and I'm gonna try the other two now.

Edit: oh Kila Kila and Rin Rin were delightful, excellent, thank you.

Ooh, thank you for setting me straight on my vocabulary. I'll have to get used to using duology. Diptych shows up in a lot of film criticism, which is where I grabbed it from. Someone should tell them.

Glad you liked the stories! Kila Kila might have been the 1st Takemiya Jin I read, and it put me in a great mood for her other stories. Everything harsher that followed was easier to take, I suppose because I knew she had such a great range. My favorite series of hers is probably Fragments of Love––I found it particularly moving. I think I'd just read the Amano Shuninta series The Feelings We All Must Endure, and so Fragments of Love left me feeling so much better.

This is a bland psychosexual thriller trying to pass itself off as romance.

Not meaning to be snippy or combative, but when I read the story it seemed like the reverse: a romance about growing communication between two people, passing itself off as a psychosexual thriller. Maybe even a bland one. But I really like both the bland thriller and the romance elements so far.

I thought the caring feelings evolving between the two main characters were a pretty clear subtext. These two are both severely isolated people, who need to be broken out of their shells. The teacher needs a future to live for and Aya needs to learn the kind of looseness, the generosity of spirit that is needed in order to function well as an adult. The teacher might be a little pervy but she's incredibly lonely too, boxed in and reaching out on the internet for a companion. And Aya is the one who keeps stepping further into the relationship, coming back for more of what she claims is abuse. What makes for a romantic obstacle are Aya's own hangups, her insecurity about herself. And maybe Kuro–sensei's own possibly deep–seated feelings of rejection.

I guess both characters have a strongly negative self–image. Perhaps that's why both characters have a romantic double, a character who would readily be their romantic interest if either heroine had eyes to see them there: Haruki the neighbor is that character for Aya and Mochida the student is that rival for Kuro-sensei. But by the logic of the story, Haruki isn't right for Aya and Mochida isn't right for Kuro–sensei, because each of them goes at their respected romantic interest head–on, trying to confront their insecurities in a kind of one-on-one showdown (the ugliness of these confrontations is I think part of what people are responding to when they say they have no use for Haruki––her possessiveness towards Aya is clearly colored by jealousy). Haruki wants Aya to get over her hangups, but Kuro–sensei is "right" for Aya, in the logic of the manga, because she can actually "show" Aya a way to get over those hangups––to get more explicit, she could "reward" Aya for getting over her hangups, with love, and maybe with an introduction to the more adult world that Aya seems to long for and yet also chafe at.

Similar to Haruki, Mochida wants to get to Kuro–sensei essentially by negging her into submission, not realizing that Kuro–sensei doesn't need to be hurt any more, but rather she needs to be built up with the more consistent caring Aya can perhaps offer if she feels she is being treated like an adult (I'm assuming that Kuro–sensei's confession of her foiled first–love is true, personally being ignorant of what might happen in later chapters). I suppose I'm downplaying the teacher/student power imbalance of the relationship, but I think the author has been very conscientious about that problem. Aya has had tons of chances to step away from this relationship. If she chose to freeze-out Kuro–sensei, the teacher could hardly find her and stalk her. The second chapter especially devotes a lot of time to Aya torn between dropping Kuro–sensei's contact info and not, clearly knowing that if the relationship deepens Kuro–sensei is going to want sex from her. I don't think it could be any clearer that it's Aya's decision to move things forward. Of course, the author might push further to justify this premise by getting into Kuro–sensei's presumably sad life, showing her wanting to have a relationship and get over her previous sense of rejection, but revealing how hemmed–in she is socially; how hard it is for her as a teacher to pursue any kind of romantic interest, aside from a male fellow teacher or some kind of matchmaking service. There is that implication I think, lightly colored in by the bars the author draws on the windows of Kuro–sensei's apartment (maybe I'm wrong? they look like bars to me), suggesting the imprisonment of a cell. And yet this is Kuro–sensei's life, with no friends or lovers we can see, and no opportunities for any such offers that seem really genuine. I think one of the bolder suggestions of the story is that at that edge, in that isolation (I'm referring to Kuro–sensei's isolation and Aya's as well), the lines between what's an appropriate relationship and what's not might begin to blur.

So far the story works really well for me. I find it a lot more psychologically complex than Naoko Kodama's work usually gets, even though it is in the same space, genre-wise. Maybe it's because Flowerchild's art is so much more expressive, but I think also there is a playful sense of kink to the story that Kodama's manga is often starved of, at least by the end. "Hungry for You: Endo Yasuko Stalks the Night" was fun, but the pacing was all over the place and the action seemed more important than the romantic elements. Here it feels like Flowerchild has developed much better pacing, and has taken her very kinky sense of interpersonal dynamics between characters and enriched it with a more realistic situation––to much more satisfying results. Flowerchild even uses her settings to amplify themes and to further that sense of wry humor in the dramatic setup, as when Kuro–sensei and Aya have a very adult talk about boundaries in a children's playground. Not many authors in the Yuri manga space are able to pull off a visual effect like that, where the backgrounds on the page undercut the drama with a thematic irony. I also love the title spread, where the teacher and the schoolgirl each teasingly reveal their ID cards to the reader, as if the author is telling us exactly which tone she'll reserve for dealing with the central dramatic concerns of this story. It seems to me a manga that is poised to challenge some people's assumptions about the binary boundaries we make for ourselves––between adult and child, legal and illegal, wrong and right. To me it feels very inspired. It seemed to me like "Hungry for You" got wrapped up in a terrible hurry, like it was cancelled? I hope this story goes can play out in full.

Would anyone be willing to hook me up with some Takemiya Jin stories that are more lighthearted, or at least have happy endings? I quite enjoyed the ones from Love Stories Log (also still interested in any good yuri involving trans women or polyamory, as always)

The three–part story Game is very lighthearted.

Another I adore, with a light and frothy tone, is the diptych of stories, Kila Kila and Rin Rin. Delicate fantasy-fulfillment in this one, gentle humor and very appealing lead characters.

I see what you mean. Personally, I always felt the acuity of my perception was extra–unreliable in those situations, but I suppose that communication is equally ambiguous in so many other settings.

And thank you, Blastaar! I've been reading for a few years now, but this is my first time posting. I am planning to be more sociable here in the future.

Is no one going to talk about how great the mangaka put the perspective of the MC? I keep on reading these comments of just cliche arguments, etc. How about we talk about how the artist shows the views and certain things we can relate to. Well some things. The way the MC truly loved that girl even though she’s married she’s very aware that she can’t exactly do anything about it. Like some of us or maybe most idk, we in some situations have to face things but don’t do anything about it when we should have. Another thing is the way this is realistic. Instead of it being a little bit too dramatic they have conversations that aren’t over the top or just everything is sad life sucks.

I just love the fact that whenever her ex or crush acts in the panels we don’t know what she’s thinking. It’s hard to understand her just like the MC is having a hard time understanding her too. We can understand her position.

These are the things I like about this manga also. There is a real ambiguity as to how much of what we are seeing is Maki's unreliable read on her situation. There are a lot of unusual panel compositions in this manga where we see Maki from a low-angle, moving through rooms––implying a sense of vertigo, or a skewed perspective. And yet, when Midori isn't in a scene, our perspective on the scene seems to flatten out into more traditional head-on compositions. There are also other more experimental panel compositions and design motifs when Midori is present in front of Maki, like the ovular sparkles that rip across the page when Midori and Maki are walking hand in hand. This stylized design, present only when the MC is in the presence of the woman she loves, seems to suggest that you can't quite trust Maki's point of view when Midori appears within it. It makes it seem as if these sequences are in some way heightened––enhanced by Maki's repressed and overwrought romantic imagination. So even though the husband writes himself off as a villain in his first appearance, I wondered to myself whether or not what he said was in reality somewhat different than what Maki heard him say. Not to say that he wasn't a jerk, but maybe he wasn't quite such a jerk as appeared to Maki. In the times I've been in love, I often found myself interpreting things people said differently than they intended them, and sometimes seeming to hear things people said a little differently than they actually said them. I'm not saying that's definitely how to read this manga, but I feel like the writer is giving us a perspective laced with swooning shifts of perspective, from rational to pie-in-the-sky-romantic. As a result, when I read it I don't know how much I can trust Maki's point of view––she sees situations through rose-tinted glasses, and she frequently dips into flashback. And so when Maki's around Midori it's hard to know exactly what's going on in Midori's mind, how much indecision she's grappling with, and what her motives might be. Is her appearance in front of Maki in the first chapter a lucky accident, or is it something she did on purpose? Does she want Maki around because maki might just run away with her, and help her escape her problems? Sometimes she seems dense and weak-willed, but sometimes she has a little bit of the air of a manipulator, like a femme fatale.

As far as the cliches in the manga go, I think that they have so far been employed to good effect. The story is moving at a brisk clip, and that's one of the really good uses for storytelling tropes––to take us through more commonplace or expected aspects of the story quickly, in order to set up something hopefully heartfelt or stirringly well-crafted or unexpected and delightful enough to move us. Of course, if that next leg of the journey leads to yet another cliche, it can get a little tiresome. I find myself very accepting of most cliches in storytelling, and willing to let them lead me to something I hope is more cumulative in its effect than the cliches in the story. So far I find the emotions Maki feels in the story seem very genuinely rendered, and the art is very special.