I technically don't have enough information to tell if it's any good, but it has a lively feel.

Well, it feels like as I suspected the teen romance is drifting away into the mist, but--TRILOBITES! OK, for trilobites I can forgive.

Oh, my!

So, as far as I can tell:
1. Back in the day, miss great-aunt was sweethearts with a girl she went to school with. They weren't coming out and saying it directly, but it seemed pretty romantic (and doomed, because of marriages and stuff).
2. Then she died (in a kind of silly way).
3. The other girl must at some point have also died
4. And been reincarnated as the current-time live girl who can see her,
5. And who has dreams about the past life, and still/again loves her
6. And who really wants her to stick around as a ghost so they can be kind of together instead of going to heaven, so she doesn't want her to remember the past stuff and get anything resolved.
7. I don't really understand what the ghost marriage part is about. Since none of the characters do either, I'm assuming that's OK and will be explained to some extent in due course.

Anyway, it's pretty cool. Interesting balance of sorrow with a bit of comedy and flippancy.

Cute art, but it all feels kind of abrupt.

Oh, right, this series runs on porn logic.

YAAAAPPP! i mean, i didn’t enjoy this chapter at all :/ maybe because i though we will FINALY have some Romance progress and was thinking the damn porn star robot will finaly show some human understanding of romance and was thinking the chapter was about that until we got garbage hentai for supposed romance

I don't think this series is for you. I mean, the whole premise of this is a collision between two fairly nice well-intentioned people, one of whom thinks relatively normally while the other is a sex robot who uses hentai logic. That drives the comedy, the characterization, the sexiness, and most of the plot. If you're not into it, you're going to be constantly annoyed by the series.
Honestly, I would have been disappointed if Nadeshiko had suddenly turned into a different character who made sense by normal standards. She's in love, she's even broadening her outlook a bit, but she's still a sex robot and her understanding of romance is going to be operating through that lens. It's funny, but at this point it's also consistent characterization.

Thank you for your service, Sir David Attenborough

That was hilarious.

All in all, while the art is quite nice, and there's a conveyance of emotion, I don't like this much. There's no point in this ambiguity--it's fairly clear that there is some actual state of affairs that all the characters come to be aware of, so why should the audience be the only ones in the dark?

Saw on the source website that there's another compilation of short stories similar to this one that was published under the name "Another story 2"
And it seems like it's NSFW :o

Whoa! That could be quite something. Honestly, these two get steamier just kissing than a lot of things I see here with the tag "Lots of Sex" or whatever.

Trying to win us back with disgusting amounts of fluff, are you, mangaka? Well it won't - dang, that's cute.

Yup.

The Bowden (loose) cable for brakes apparently was invented at the end of the 19th century already, but the levers are for rod brakes. If the author is drawing from reference photos of an old bicycle, maybe the mystery box in the middle of the handlebar is some converter for retrofitting a newer brake at a lower cost.

That's some impressive bicycle lore.

That wasn't even just product placement, really--that last page was frankly an ad.

OK, meanwhile, Youzi.exe has crashed . . . she really is us, isn't she? :D

Jeeze, WHOSE love is stifling, old lady? How can she sit there looking so severe and offer to give her a house?!

Oof, ouch, owie.

That coincidence was pretty ridiculous though.

I mean, I don't think the mangaka was worrying about the probabilities, BUT . . . it's a small community, ballroom dance I mean. There wouldn't really have been all that many people it could have been.

Is it just me, or is that bad guy teacher really annoying?

OK, it might be about what people have been saying, but, sorry to throw cold water, it might also be about chi-related pressure points that may not be anywhere obviously sexy at all. I mean, if someone's impotent, then obviously their energies aren't flowing properly and/or their yin and yang are out of balance. Press right HERE on the left ankle and presto!

Meanwhile, gotta hand it to our empress, standing up to the dowager for her, um, man. That was actually a REALLY romantic declaration, too.

last edited at Jan 15, 2024 3:01AM

Cute.

They're trying to move forward, and they're very fond of each other, but their relationship is still really tense and stiff.

Opening lines seem to be channeling Dickens. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."

Yup, adorable is definitely the word. Some top notch old school yuri there. Like stuff I used to read from Tsubomi and like that.

It was pretty good. I thought the twist was reaching a bit--like, to pull it off they had to kind of stretch the credibility of the first part. I think it's actually hard to do a good unreliable narrator in manga. I mean, to me the thing that makes unreliable narrators work is that they have an implied audience that they have some kind of awareness of--they're telling the story, and they colour it in some way to fit what they want you to think. In manga, you've got a viewpoint character, but normally they're not telling you the story--they're unaware of the fourth wall. And so if a character's thoughts turn out to have misrepresented how things are, particularly if they misrepresent how the character is perfectly well aware things are (ie it's not that the character has delusions), to me that comes off just implausible, or borderline cheating, or at best just kind of clunky.

This twist was pulled off mostly by having the character not think about certain aspects of the interactions until it's time for the reveal, and it pretty much works . . . but it's a bit clunky to me, because frankly it would be really weird for someone's stream of consciousness recollecting events to be structured in that way, where thoughts about certain aspects of their relationship get delayed even though clearly as events happened they were mixed in.

So I'm not as wildly impressed as many here, but I still liked it.

I'm having a little trouble pinning down what the relationship between these two is meant to be. They're beating the hell out of each other and used to be fighting a war against each other, but they're also talking like friends and getting all blushy talking about how pretty the other is.

Well, they were presumably at war with each other out of duty. Fighting wars for their fiefdom is what warriors do. Doesn't mean they didn't LIKE each other.
So now in their future, they have no fiefdoms to defend, no duty to oppose each other. Why not get a little closer?

I mean, I'm not saying any of this makes sense--the whole story is silly. But that particular issue is a non-issue for me.

Well, the premise is great, in that slightly over the top way that makes me think of the manga club in Virgins' Empire. Fun so far, looking forward to more.
On the translators' note--I like the translation "memory holder". Sometimes using a slightly less familiar term jogs your mind to appreciate what it really means, where with something you know really well you just kind of gloss over the implications. Reminds me of something Tolkien used to do . . . not quite the same, but he would "rescue" old cliche sayings, by quoting older, more complete versions (or versions he made up that LOOKED like older, more complete versions) so your mind actually looked at what the old cliche was really saying, and you'd remember or realize the wisdom that got it repeated enough to become a cliche in the first place.

Huh. I have a feeling those girls aren't supernatural at all! They just heard somehow that she's a good mixologist.

Same author of Octave.... Hard pass.

Oh! Didn't recognize. I'm in.
Mind you, I didn't like Brides of Iberis. But these characters seem nicer; I get the feeling more of the conflict is coming from outside them, rather than from them being selfish jerks, so I might like it.

last edited at Dec 28, 2023 12:01PM