so if your point was about industry practices rather than ground-level demographics, then I'd have to agree.

While it was primarily the former, uh, did you actually read what you linked? Because the very opening sentence of the article is rather at odds with what you seem to be trying to say here...

Shockingly, articles tend to contain more than their opening sentences. As evidenced by the second, the third, and, y'know, the rest of the article.

I'm half Black Caribbean half Causasian myself and I thought I was finally getting some representation :(

Yeeeeaaaaahhh Japanese mangos would be a pretty bad place to look for it in general. Just sayin'.

The Japanese Miss Worlds 2015 and 2016 were both multiracial (half-AA and half-Indian respectively), and the place is far more diverse than anime and manga initially suggest. Of course, Japanese media are kinda terrible at representing people with even half-Japanese ancestry, let alone settled foreigners beyond European/Western stereotypes, so if your point was about industry practices rather than ground-level demographics, then I'd have to agree.

last edited at Jan 4, 2021 11:51AM

"Nakamura, how well do you think you're obeying the Ten Commandments?"
"I'm coveting my neighbour's wife, but I'm also honouring the shit out of your mother, so 50/50."

I wanted to add 1 more thing about that. I'm pretty sure there's still plenty of stories that have typical person in power abusing their power over other person to make them do what they want, but I also feel like the subversion of it with supposedly subordinate being actually dominating in relationship is very common subversion. But if it was like you said and everyone was subverting it, because that's the only acceptable way to show that kind of power dynamic, is it really a subversion anymore? Wouldn't you say then, taking that power dynamic and actually make person with power, being dominating again, actually subversive?

The subversion in a servant dominating the master comes from the reversal of a socioeconomic relationship- the master still has technical control and privilege, and could easily overturn any mutinies from the servant if they so wished. It's not subversive on a visual level, like a femme dominating a butch in opposition to the way we imagine this dynamic- master x servant is fundamentally rooted in a certain amount of real-world socioeconomic context. The author didn't conjure it or place it in a world with markedly different dynamics- it's a trope that's quite close to reality, lending it great subversive value, because the maid dominating the master will be transgressive so long as hierarchies exist. You could take a purely trope-driven perspective and argue that the subversion has grown common in the manga industry and is therefore 'stale', but it hasn't lost its fundamental relevance. The only way it'll ever grow stale is if the working classes enslave the upper ones, which by definition would make them the upper classes, so basically, never.

It's the same as why 'war is bad' will never be a bad message- you could write a subversive story where a certain war is portrayed as necessary to prevent worldwide destruction or a fascist regime, but that would still be an indictment of those that started the war rather than a celebration of war itself. You can't really say, "Oh, everyone portrays war crimes as evil, so I'mma shake the industry up by having the victims orgasm as they're genocided." Tropes aren't created in a vacuum- they fundamentally stem from reality, and subversions are more often than not even closer to reality than tropes, because the fantastical nature of certain tropes breed expectations that subversive media can then shatter. To refer back to one of the earlier examples I made, you could take the old shoujo romance model in which the boyfriend is often a rapist, which is often avoided or subverted today because of how traumatic rape can be. If you write a story that presents the rapist as a 'chad' who triumphs over a soft, caring partner, or a story in which the victim is actually into rape, then you're not subverting anything- just circling back to the original trope that was phased out for a very good reason.

Nuanced, compromise-driven takes can still exist, of course- you could write a story in which the rapist goes through repentance because they were young and stupid and spends their entire life regretting the act and making it up to a victim. A Silent Voice is a brilliant example of a story that features a vicious bully repenting and rehabilitating himself before falling in love with his former victim. But that requires a certain degree of nuance, subtlety and tact which I maintain that this four page oneshot was either uninterested in or incapable of providing.

That is my personal opinion. You may differ on it. That is fine. If you enjoyed it, good for you. Happy New Year.

GendoIkari posted:

I don't really like the idea of loli as a tag since it seems like it would get overused for things that just have lolis present; eg. 3gatsu no lion, yuru yuru, etc; instead of indicating that they're involved in the romance as the one with the crush or something similar; this, the structural formula of first love.

I mean dynasty also tags works that have loli falling in love/dating other loli, so I think Loli as a tag has its uses too. And well dynasty already tags any work that have loli, regardless if they're involved in romance or not as Lolicon confusing people reading those works even more. I had to explain to people multiple times that on dynasty lolicon can just mean "A loli is present", when they asked confused about the tag.

Yeah, the works under lolicon simultaneously include the most wholesome and the most paedophilic stuff on this site, so creating a Not Lolicon tag would really help the people looking for the former and also cut down from the drama from betrayed expectations. I personally feel like I'm stepping on an old landmine every time I click a work with the tag, so I'd like not to turn a morning scroll through Dynasty into a gamble where the stakes for losing are a faceful of kiddie porn.

Seeing everyone refer to reddit as a monolyth is mildly disgruntling.

I've noticed that users of one social media platform or forum always tend to generalize the millions of people who might be using another platform. It's particularly funny when it comes from a place like Dynasty, which is much likelier to have a smaller and more polarized pool of opinions owing to the general nature of its content and the relatively tiny userbase. While subreddits and Twitter's content filtration provide a good degree of diversity within the platforms as a whole, discussions on Dynasty either tend to devolve into users dunking on a series without looking at the tags, or flip the other way and punish critical thinking of any sort. Without the mods and the tags, this forum would either be a slaughterhouse or just eerily empty of comments beyond 'nice tiddies'. Though for all the tussles, I still have to say that the mods don't fall into the issues of laissez-faire or thought policing that I've seen on other forums. It's gotta be a pretty tough job without automatic, algorithmic aid, so kudos to 'em for that.

^ It's the Lupin III approach to thrilling storytelling- if you make one character a Holmes-esque mastermind and all the others except for the villain dumb or average, the story tends to lose the potential for twists and interesting side characters. The same goes for making one or two characters psychopaths and the rest largely ordinary, which is a staple of Western police procedurals. On paper, it's a good idea, because the functional human beings work as foils to the savants/psychos, but thanks to extreme repetition, side characters often just become pawns in a long series of mindgames between the protagonist and the antagonist, used mostly for relationship drama and exposition (this is evident in stories that range from Death Note to Hannibal).

Making nearly every supporting character into a genius/psycho/badass is risky, because you'll run into Narita-esque muddles and an extremely convoluted story that wavers under its own weight, but if the writers can swing it, then readers are in for a heart-pounding, unpredictable story where backstabbings, coups, murders and insights can come from any direction, turning what would normally be a mindgame match into a battle royale driven by reflexes, improvisation and quick thinking. This story handles it quite well, methinks.

We're not sisters, we're a lesbian couple

Kodama Naoko- "Why not both?"

Don't you mean Saburouta?

Oh, yeah. I keep getting the two mixed up, for some reason. When I first got into yuri, I heard that NTR and Citrus were somewhat infamous, and weirdly assumed that they'd been written by the same person, who was also Yuri Public Enemy No. 1. It's been a while since then, but the overlap still exists in my head. I'll keep the original posts as is for context, though. :p

We're not sisters, we're a lesbian couple

Kodama Naoko- "Why not both?"

I wonder what kind of tag would serve as an alternative to lolicon here. Maybe Childhood Crush? Or just Not Lolicon (like Not Lizard).

Can't wait for the daughter to hit her rebellious phase and join the tokus.

last edited at Jan 3, 2021 1:04AM

From Wikipedia:

The zodiacal ox may be construed as male, female, neuter, and either singular or plural.

And if that isn't a cue to go and read some gender-bender selfcest manga, I don't know what is.

Recs, please. Only one I've been able to find is a manhua called I Am My Wife.

Note that I put "progressive" in quotes here because what you westerners consider progressive and what the Japanese think is progressive are very different. This work is created by a Japanese person for a Japanese audience, so it's part of someone who's not familiar with how Japanese hierarchical culture works to do their due diligence to get a better understanding of the nuances involved in works like these. As some comments already pointed out, ONLY HERE in Dynasty do you get so many mean-spirited comments towards the work or even the author herself. In Japan, or heck, most of Asia, minor power play like this is often seen as a turn-on by a lot of people due to this hierarchical societal structure, hence the "Top Energy" part. You see this trope everywhere - manga, K-Dramas and even telenovelas in my own country. You demanding that I provide context for you to understand a story that you are responsible for reacting to is honestly insulting, but here you go.

As an Asian, the 'you Westerner!' really makes me chuckle. You're not particularly good at providing substantiative evidence of any sort, but declaring that an entire continent is into 'minor power play' is such a sweeping generalization that I can't even get offended. To try to position yourself as a glorious defender of a culture while stereotyping everyone who disagrees is one of the finest examples of irony I've found in recent memory. You've honestly entertained me more than the actual manga in question, so thanks for that. As for your arguments, they're dead in the water, so I'm not going to waste any more time levelling with someone swinging a Persecution Complex bat around instead of making critically sound points.

Thanks for the scanlation, though. Now I'm going to head over to a diplomatic embassy and see if I can convince someone from a first-world country that I'm actually a 'Westerner'.

Kawauchi is one of the most "progressive" Japanese yuri authors out there at the moment. There are still some works from her that we haven't got around to translating, but I only have respect for her work knowing that she has the ability to take what people would usually call "trite" tropes in yuri and subverting them. You can say that you dislike her work and you find the themes she used disagreeable, but to say that she "did not think about the implications" is very callous of you, to be honest. Japan is a very different country from the US and others, and I'd appreciate it if people stop demanding that Japanese people adhere to their own personal beliefs. That is all.

As much as I admire your impassioned defense of the author, I'd advise you to look through the comments here once again. There are comments that call it a trainwreck, comments that say it's badly written, and comments that call it a gag manga that you aren't supposed to take seriously. Not one of them has mentioned anything 'progressive' about the story. So unless we're all idiots here, I'd say the author's progressive tendencies haven't made their way into this particular work. Perhaps there'll come a story by Kawauchi in the future that makes me revere her as a genius, and in that case, I'll sing her praises from the rooftops. But this definitely won't be it.

Your point about the Japanese way of life is also hilariously shallow, because you haven't provided any context that would recontextualize this story from a Japanese perspective and rid us of our stereotypes. Instead, you've made a blanket statement that typecasts everyone who dislikes the story as an insensitive foreigner forcing their ideas onto a local work. If you were to provide something more than the broadest of strokes, I'd defer to your expertise as the scanlator. But all I'm finding right now are unfounded generalizations.

Without evidence to the contrary, I think we should be giving the author the benefit of the doubt that they didn't write this comic about an awful rich girl exploiting someone but instead wrote a fun gag about a sub fantasy. If you disagree with my default assumptions -- if your default assumption is that the author is a terrible person who wrote about a terrible character, indulging themselves in a power fantasy of dominating a servant, and that you'll need strong evidence to the contrary to challenge that assumption, I suppose that would explain the controversial nature of this comic and I doubt anyone will be able to come to an agreement.

I mean, there is the possibility for a middle ground between 'I like the author and think they're innocent' and 'I hate the author and think they're terrible'. Like I said before, this story lacks self-awareness- it uses the themes of coercion and blackmail from employers to comedic and romantic effect, framing them as 'top energy' (God, I'm starting to hate that term). It's the same as manga from the 90s that had male protagonists flip a girl's skirt for 'comedy' and to indicate that he was interested in her, or manga that features parents smashing saucepans into the heads of chibi versions of their kids. It's obvious that the authors there were not blatant harassers or abusers- they simply framed problematic behavior as comedic and expected audiences to laugh along instead of taking it 'seriously'.

But to people who've been in these situations or people who want to empathize with the characters, it's extremely hard to read through such content. They can't draw a line between the 'comedic' version of a person who acts like a harasser and the 'romantic' version that's actually a loving partner, because reality doesn't work that way, and actions have weight and consequences. They can't see a happy ending and reinterpret everything that led up to it as positive. If the manga was a complete comedy about a maid getting bullied by her mistress, then some might laugh at it. If it was a serious romance that fully explored its themes, then people might connect with it. But the problem most people have is that the story is trying to have its maid and blackmail it too, and that gap can't be resolved in their minds.

TL;DR: The author thought up a fun premise for a 4 page story and developed it without thinking about the implications. So they're not a terrible person or an angel- at best, I'd say they're like a yaoi manga author doing the 'I fell in love with an asshole rapist seme' plotline in 2020.

last edited at Jan 2, 2021 5:49AM

^ That's not exactly true. Yachyo and Fumi were apparently good friends back when Fumi was at Siegfeld, and Yachiyo's concern for Shiori is derived in part from how much she knows she's hurting from Fumi's departure. You can see this in the recent Valentine's event, where Yachiyo comes to Fumi's apartment and they reminisce about where they've ended up. Yachiyo likes Fumi because of how much she's grown, and Fumi likes Yachyo because she was one of the few people at Siegfeld who empathized with her.

Yachiyo also isn't Shiori exclusive- she has the honor of flirting with every girl in the game she's interacted with, ranging from Mei Fan to Tsukasa, whom she explicitly mentions she fell in love with during the Arise All You Sons event and keeps bringing up all the time. If anything, she's more morherly or sisterly towards Shiori, since the rest of Siegfeld is not too great at supporting their kohai.

Not saying that some ships are better than others, of course, but Re Live isn't like the original anime- the lack of fixed couples to parallel a frame narrative and Re Live's structure as a long running gacha game allows it to deploy omnidirectional gayness of every permutation. You don't really have 'Partner-sexual' girls like one might find in older stuff- Re Live is packed to the wings with lesbians who are very excited to do theater with other lesbians, and are very vocal about this.

The longer the game runs, the less crack ships there'll be as the 27-character cast interacts with each other, which I personally think is great.

last edited at Jan 2, 2021 4:24AM

^^ Reisen is actually infamous for just how much porn she shows up in, to the point where, "Useless bunny, only good for sex" is something of a meme in the (straight, male, unwashed) Touhou fandom. Heck, it's even indirectly referenced in-universe- one of the dialogues in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody during a Reisen vs. Aya match has Aya saying that she can't write about Reisen in her newspaper, because it would bring down the standards and dignity of her publication (which is meant to be a veiled Playboy Bunny joke).

I personally find it kinda sad, because Bun is a wonderfully complex character and one of the few 2hus who could be in a loving relationship without glaring issues of insanity, hunger, duty, species issues, immortality or yokai-logic getting in the way.

@Kirin Sure, maybe? But why does that involve them getting into a bath strewn with flowers, fully clothed, together?

One darker take could be that this is a lover's suicide via drowning, which was quite common for lesbian couples back when Japanese society was even more conservative and homophobic. It would certainly explain the bandages (abusive parents or self-harm) and the tears. However, that's a bit too dark and I didn't want to be a complete killjoy, which was why I didn't mention it the first time around.

p.s Its a rather nice pic- and and it doesn't NEED to make sense or tell some story imo.

That's fair. My general perspective while analyzing art is to think that every element serves a purpose, but that purpose could also just be simple moe and aesthetic appeal as opposed to hinting at a greater narrative. And there's no denying that it's a wonderfully crafted art piece.

Isn't it comedy? I thought it was pretty funny till I read the comments

From what I can tell, the story is trying to be comedic by inverting the traditional gentle mistress x assertive maid dynamic that's common in yuri stories by having the mistress act like a 'top', which in this case is basically abusing her authority to get what she wants. You could derive some schadenfreude from it, but the maid's reaction and the ending suggests that we're supposed to read this as romantic. Many people find it rather abusive and manipulative instead, especially since the mistress x maid dynamic in general is already fraught with somewhat dicey dynamics that require nuanced writing to address. Most folks, bottoms or not, definitely wouldn't want to get coerced by their employers, which inhibits their ability to laugh at a situation they consider painful, as well as their willingness to find any romance within what is essentially blackmail. Many have brought up the 'It's Just Fiction' defense, but if the issue is that is scenario is almost uncomfortably realistic, and pulls readers out of their elegant Victorian fantasies of mistress x maid and into the horrors of labour under abusive employers.

As a parallel example, teacher x student stories are quite popular with yuri readers, but most of these stories feature an assertive student vs. a shy teacher, creating a subversion that's entertaining and not overtly problematic. You could try to reverse the dynamic and have the teacher be aggressive and predatory while the student is unwilling, but that would obviously set many people off. Even if the student 'submits' to the 'top energy' of the teacher in the end, it'd be seen as an effect of grooming rather than a successful, fulfilling romantic arc.

Personally, I like content that subverts dynamics, but only if the writers have the competence, subtlety and space to address these subversions and portray them accurately. This four-page story, however, either suffers from a lack of self-awareness or is actively trying to fetishize a clearly unequal dynamic. Some like it, others (myself included), don't. Ergo, comment section warfare.

Meiling: The existence of lesbians fills me with determination.

I'll never get sick of these two!

"It's going to be a fun night."
"It's going to be a long night."

Nanoha using 'befriending' as an umbrella term to describe her lesbian activities would actually make much more sense in a conservative medieval setting.

Bunnies gotta burrow.

The bandages on the girl on the left suggest that there's more to this story than meets the eye. Perhaps she had an accident, but wasn't too hurt, and they're both crying tears of relief? That's the most optimistic scenario I can imagine, at least.