Why no Loli tag though? Would have liked to avoid what looks like a kindergartener making out with a high schooler/adult. Is Age Gap the new little kid tag?

Well, it’s a good AFD joke, but...was it a joke from the translators or the original mangaka???

Yep. Not yuri, just crazy stalker bitch.

Pretty sure it's not even about the money. Being featured in a hobby magazine is already a big win for amateur hobbyists. No one would do photography if their sole purpose was to make money

Exactly. Being selected for publication is a big deal. Her “friends” were a bunch of jerks. Riko was the biggest jerk of all with that dismissal and immediate subject change too. I mean, the half-ass friends were more excited than she was.

Never thought I’d say this here, but I’m really hoping it doesn’t go the yuri route because those bitches are not people worth being in a romantic relationship with.

First best friend declines your feelings, now fellow club member is stalking you. Jesus.
50 dollars. Better than nothing I guess.

Third place prize in a niche magazine contest. $50 is more than you’d get in some American magazine photo contests. Heck, some of the ones I’m aware of only give a prize to the single grand prize winner with everyone else just getting published in the magazine.

Tokyo has around 7 million households, so the probability of unwittingly moving in next to the exact individual you were looking for is roughly 1/7000000

My senior year of high school while on exchange to Germany, I ended up staying with third cousins twice removed from my father's mother's side of the family. They lived in East Germany and it was the first time anyone from my side of the family had connected with their side in almost five generations. Our closest shared ancestor had come to America in the late 1800s with his daughter (my 5x g-grandmother) and the two WWs had pretty much destroyed the connections via post. The relationship between us was figured out almost a week into my stay with them and we'd been randomly assigned to our host families, so it wasn't like a deliberate match up.

If something like that can happen in real life, something like happening to get an apartment next door to your idol in a manga doesn't faze me at all.

When I made that statement, I wasn’t talking about the people saying they like this sort of lolicon stuff.

Right—that’s why I explicitly said in the clearest terms I possibly could that I was making a different point than you were.

Totally cool. I saw folks running with your discussion point and just wanted to clarify my stance in case there was some misunderstanding on what I was trying to say. Folks enjoy loli? As long as no real life kids are involved, cool, y’all do y’all. But like any of the more extreme niches of interest, you can’t expect or really even insist that it be accepted by the mainstream, so folks shouldn’t be surprised or outraged when it’s not published in a volume that’ll be available in a mainstream bookstore.

I mean, hell, can you imagine the fallout if some stereotypical soccer mom catches her precious baby looking at something like this in a bookstore? Those sorts of idiots go on ragefests over Starbucks having a holiday cup that might depict two women doing something as outrageously lewd as holding hands. Or convince store managers that hemp milk leads to smoking marijuana to get the product taken off the shelves. I don’t even want to imagine what they’d do if they got a sniff of something like Itou Hachi.

Reading about something is not "literally saying you're okay" with whatever behavior is depicted in the fiction. (That's not really what the original poster was saying, I know, which is why I'm not using an auto-quote.)

When I made that statement, I wasn’t talking about the people saying they like this sort of lolicon stuff. I was referring to the people making comments like “if you don’t like this, you’re against yuri”, regarding the German (and likely US) decision to not publish this piece in the localized anthology. The decision to not openly publish even fictionalized loli is a pretty obvious one. Especially in countries where even fictional depictions of pedophilia are counted the same as real life pedophilia. Idiots going around insisting that loli should be as wildly accepted in the mainstream as yuri and that finding loli - and especially explicit loli like this - distasteful means you’re also against yuri are the ones that give the assholes lumping real life pedos in with LGBT+ ammo.

There are certain genres that naturally have more critics than others. Stuff involving children involved in sexual relationships is always going to be one of them. There’s just no getting around that.

I, personally, missed the tag because I wasn’t paying sufficient attention. Usually, I just skip anything tagged lolicon. That’s on me. Like I said, I’m not saying this should be taken down, just that I’m mentally making a note to give Itou Hachi a hard pass going forward. People can like whatever they want and if reading/writing/drawing/etc stuff like this quenches the urge to go out and do something to an actual child, then I’m all for it. I’m simply very opposed to people insisting you have to accept and like stuff like this in order to like yuri. Refusing to publish it and not wanting to read it doesn’t make you anti-yuri.

Have to say, there is a pretty big difference between soft loli where the affection originates from the kid and the adult just kind of goes along with it (and is uncomfortable with actually sexual actions) and this. This is just straight up pedo and it’s gross. I was uncomfortable with it when we found out the affection originated from the adult and that the adult initiated the “lovers” part on an unassuming child, but as soon as the whole “picking your lover’s first bra” and talking about how a freaking 9 or 10 year old was sexually attractive, it was an instant close the window. This isn’t yuri. This is just straight up pedo and it absolutely makes sense that it’s being banned in various countries.

Now, I’m not going to say it should be taken down from here, though I’m definitely making a mental note to hard avoid Itou Hachi going forward. But all y’all trying to make the argument that people who don’t like this type of thing don’t like yuri need to be taking a hard look at yourself. You’re literally saying it’s okay for an adult to not only feel sexual attraction to a literal child that hasn’t even begun to enter puberty but also act on it and then insisting that it should be not only included but also accepted by people who only want sexual attraction and action between adult lesbians and/or bisexual women. You ARE the reason people keep thinking LGBT+ includes and supports pedophiles.

Ok, I actually broke down and made an account just to talk about this. This last chapter makes this manga a horror story, not a comedy. I wouldn't drop a 20 year champion of the retail wars on the counter during a Day One rush on their first day in the store, let alone someone with massive anxiety issues that has been out of the workforce for at least a year or more. It's a recipe for absolute disaster.

Not to mention how completely sketchy and BS it is to sign someone else up for work without their knowledge or consent. What the hell is her mom trying to do here? Push her into suicide or something?