All boobs are pretty great.

Even hairy fat man boobs.

By god, I think you've chanced upon the appeal of the 'Ugly Bastard' genre.

Man these two are just too intense for friendship, if they liked each other romantically then this series makes sense otherwise it's just kinda weird

I haven't read this for a while because the subtext got to be too much for me (stretch was painful) but after coming back and they're still doing the sam e sort of thing like I just can't see how this can be seen as friendship because that friendship is just Too Much

To be fair, the girls here are probably just as frustrated and confused as everyone in the forum. Therefore, the author intends for you to experience this sense of unfilfillment.

I guess Nettaigyo really is the Dark Souls of the {I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Yuri (Or Maybe It is) [It's Complicated]} genre.

…and also does this anthology have anything to do with Konbu Wakame, by any chance?

Generally, anthologies like this that aren't based on existing series are created when authors in a particular genre get together and decide to collaborate based upon a common theme. I'm guessing that their publishers work out the logistics and handle recruitment, but in this case, the fundamental idea seems to have come from Konbu herself. It's the same as how Taiyaki gauged interest in a mamacon-themed Yuri anthology recently. You figure out if there's a market, get some professionals together, and use their collective popularity to advertise the anthology. Konbu's a big name, even if she doesn't exclusively do Yuri, so I'd like to think she literally rang up some of her compatriots and went, "Bitches, I'm in the mood for writing tales about tits. You game?"

What is it with anime villains and the Hobbesean ideal of our state of nature? I mean, it's like every other bad guy in action anime is motivated by nothing more than "true nature of man is evil, and so society is just a thin layer over it, so let's strip it away with magic and turn everyone evil", completely oblivious to the fact that antisocial behavior only emerges when it is imposed upon from above. I mean, it's a good Aesop, but it's also kind of a "Baby's First Villain Motivation" here -- when you cannot come up with an interesting villain, make them spout Hobbes instead. :-\

The best villains work as foils to your protagonist and help them develop, particularly in a long-running series that doesn't fit into a neat three-act structure. The Freudian approach of, "Oh, my parents smacked me around when I was a kid and now I want to kill every adult," used to be even more popular, but it was pretty hard to execute right, since audiences would either 1) feel legitimately terrible for the villain and realize how privileged a hero with relatively stable parental figures would be, 2) groan at the cliché and point out that bad parents don't make bad people, since half of all heroes in fiction also have terrible childhoods, or 3) go to sleep while the author is busy putting the plot on vacation to talk about the villain's family situation. As the previous poster pointed out, black-and-white ethics don't fare much better unless you're talented enough to double down on the hero-villain moral opposition and make each of them genuinely compelling in their own right, and not everyone can write villains as entertaining in their awfulness as, say, Dio from JJBA.

Having your villains indulge in complex philosophical debate with the heroes isn't always the best strategy, because the surface fascination of things like nihilism and utilitarianism tends to evaporate once you get into the nitty-gritties and start debating logic, metaphysics and the nature of knowledge, perceptions and reality. Philosophy, unlike subjects like history, has a large collection of concepts that are very easy to Google and summarize, so you don't need to do a PhD course in it to get the basics. From thereon out, you put a token moral dilemma to evoke token grey morality and make the audience nod thoughtfully for three seconds before some-or-the-other plot device magically resolves the conflict. Hobbesian philosophy is one of those variants that perfectly contrast the superhero-genre's assumptions of fundamental human virtue, while still being incredibly easy to contradict by going, "Uh, nope, you're just an edgelord, now watch as I channel the power of all the random old ladies I helped cross the street." Basically, it allows you to simulate the semblance of logic so that both the authors and the readers can pretend that thinking was done, which is sufficient enough to tick off the checkboxes of 'three-dimensional antagonist' and 'philosophical conflict' that you'd expect to find in a 21st century action story aimed at young adults.

And of course, considering the amount of people who unironically believe that characters like the Joker or Thanos are tragic villains who did nothing wrong, I'd argue that these massy, pseudo-intellectual philosophies can still come off as legitimately mindblowing to large demographics. So if publishers and the market are willing to support such works, then why would an author ever want to push themselves to do anything legitimately complex or new? Case in point, SHY has a relatable female protagonist, an interesting premise involving national heroes, cute enough character designs and traits to make the cast pop, and enough shades of queerness to stand out in the already-rare genre of Western-influenced superhero manga. It won't be the next OPM or MHA, but it gets decent attention and feels reasonably unique, which is reason enough to give audiences more of what they want (simplistic moral conflicts ending with hugs, tears and an affirmation that Everyone is Capable of Good Things) as opposed to reinventing the wheel.

Terrible. Just the worst possible concept.

You're right, the only way to remedy this is a thighs or ass anthology.

My greatest dream is just a two-girls-cuddling-on-a-couch-and-talking-about-pandas anthology.

Tfw you want to clean the base of the chair, but the mistress won't move.

Junna in a banana-colored dress is Nana's greatest fetish.

Alice: Yo, check out my latest doll.
Sanae: Hey, I've found another miracle.
Reimu and Marisa: It's 4 am, why are you in our house.

Small Brain: Bigger is better
Big Brain: All Boobs are Equal
Galaxy Brain: All Boobs are tiny when compared to the vastness of space.
Emotional Skyscraper, Cosmic Mind: All Boobs are huge when they're right up in your face.

Sadly we won't have a chapter with an Insane Amounts of Sex tag.

Don't be so sure. Taiyaki might be acclimating us to each new level of lewd before plunging ever deeper into the depths of forbidden desires and fetishes.

So the final chapter will just be unbirth, representing how the mamacon relationship has become an Ouroboros that goes back to the moment of the daughter's creation? Nice. I, for one, cannot wait for The End of Mamangelion.

In the most obvious twist of all time, the loli will actually be a century old, meaning that Shannon will have to deal with both an annoying kid and a batty old lady, which is... a pretty accurate description of the people you end up interacting with during volunteer duty for local churches. Huh. This manga's pretty realistic after all.

She's definitely sus. But IDK, this story is not afraid of cliche stuff but also not that predictable. It seems to be focusing a lot on relatively young people who are carrying huge amounts of twisted feelings/frameworks and weight, so I could see her either being the age she looks or just "young for her age" like Nui from KLK. She's deffo gonna be pretty scary though.

Fair point. At this point, it feels like the whole 'loli who's older than she looks' trope has transcended the realm of plot-twisty character archetypes and become a sort of narrative shorthand, allowing authors to explicitly package mandatory doses of moe and exposition into a certain space without having to bother with explaining why there's a prepubescent child running around battlefields. Old, veteran ladies would be wellsprings of information, but cut down on the amount of demographics an author could pander to (GILF-lovers sadly aren't enough of a market), while little kids could be cute, but have little to offer in terms of plot relevance (unless they're walking McGuffins). The ancient loli manages to be a history teacher, precocious pre-schooler, and signifier of in-universe concepts such as immortality, sealed godlike beings or ageless races all in one. From a writer's perspective, they're a veritable Swiss Army Knife of storytelling options, and I'm sure that this particular author will put the kid to some interesting uses.

I guess the manga was axed?

I mean, one of the most important plot points in the story was the thing with Ookuma's parents, who were super conservative and super strict and forced all sorts of stupid rules on her -- like not allowing her to date anyone unless they explicitly give the relationship their okay! And for that the dating candidate would have to submit a résumé, have an interview with them, convince them that there were serious feelings involved, etc. etc.

There's no way the author would leave those issues unaddressed, unless the publishing company told her to end the series now.

Yeah, and Kanda's brother also seemed to suggest that this series was planning to branch out from the main couple into wider themes of romance between people who didn't conform to gender norms, which would've been pretty interesting. The fact that Mochi Au Lait's a veteran author makes it all the more mystifying as to why this was cancelled.

You can usually tell the latter is the case when one of the girls go "Wow her eyelashes are so long/pretty/any kind of obscure description of eyelashes lol. One thing thing that I find so interesting and novel about this manga is the lack of these rather tropey predictable physical descriptions. The most we get out of this manga is one calling the other "cute" and the other (Most of the time Koyuki) completely fizzing out. It's kind of a nod towards how "underdeveloped" or " innocent" their minds are in that aspect, where evaluation of physical characteristics are never in an sexual or creepily detailed way If you've read Urasekai Picnic you would know that about 30 percent of the text is spent on how beautiful Toriko's " " is

Looking at how these two characters started with zero earnest social skills or friendship knowledge, it'll probably be 20 more chapters before Koyuki realizes that Konatsu's ponytail hits different than Kaede's.

Now that I think about it, Nettaigyo works quite well as a demisexual romance. The girls think of each other as special, but don't experience overwhelming, clear-cut sexual urges (even the moments where they get flustered are sporadic and situational). They feel a sense of longing, but it isn't easy to classify- the more they think about it, the harder it gets to figure out, and the less they think about it, the more it builds up. To top it off, they're both rather cynical and don't believe in love at first sight, so it's doubly confusing when one out of one out of a hundred sights stirs something inside them, but the next ninety-nine don't. The closest terminology to describe this would be a squish- not quite a full-blown, giddy, fantasy-filled crush, but definitely not apathy either. Koyuki and Konatsu fundamentally just want to hug each other and go, "This is my person!", but it sounds so odd that they can't even say it out loud. Basically, it's like Bloom Into You if both parties were Yuu, gravitating towards each other precisely because they both feel excluded and different from society, and then getting even more confused when they start developing feelings for each other. Even the spoilers from 31 tie into this- the attraction that Koyuki feels is so ambiguous and unclear that a literal vision from her subconscious is required for her to understand it. At this point, I'm not sure if knowing that her angst is explicitly of the gay kind would give Koyuki a clearer idea of what to do, or if it'd just spark a new cycle of agonizing uncertainty, but I definitely can't wait to find out.

In the most obvious twist of all time, the loli will actually be a century old, meaning that Shannon will have to deal with both an annoying kid and a batty old lady, which is... a pretty accurate description of the people you end up interacting with during volunteer duty for local churches. Huh. This manga's pretty realistic after all.

But the story was very sweet, and would have actually worked on SOME cases. Just not ALL.

I think that's the best take here. I personally read the story as Natsuka being depressed because she wasn't confident enough to express her feelings for Miyu, which combined with Other Stuff to snowball into an absolute nightmare. On the other hand, Miyu probably reciprocated her feelings, but felt guilty or uncomfortable about putting her on the spot when she was clearly depressed, and decided to take her time. When Natsuka expresses suicidal tendencies, Miyu sort of rolls with it, which suggests that she's either used to it or has been vaguely expecting that this would happen, and makes a rational plan to give Natsuka time to think and cope whilst setting up external safeguards (which is a generally good strategy). I don't think she planned to come onto Natsuka at night, since that would involve ridiculous amounts of foresight, but she saw that her friend had shifted from the determination phase to the doubt phase, and now really wanted someone to talk her out of killing herself. One thing led to another and Miyu basically just went in with everything and managed to resolve at least one segment of Natsuka's worries. I think the issue comes from the last lines, where Natsuka declares that she's invincible now, which makes Miyu's actions look like a perfect solution instead of a series of half-clever, half-lucky guesses. It's the same Incredibly Lucky Lesbian trope that we've seen in the story where the S randomly smacks her friend who was an M, or in that other oneshot where a lesbian randomly kisses her homophobic coworker who just turns out to be secretly gay. Reality is dull and depressing, and though certain authors try to deal with real-world issues for drama, it's often much more fulfilling to give these gloomy issues a neat and heartwarming conclusion, no matter how overtly convenient it might sometimes seem.

BTW, actually voting for a don't try this at hometag.

Would that come automatically packaged with guro, lolicon, rape, etc, or do we assume that people have basic common sense and only use it for stories with ambiguous moral implications and questionable aesops? I can't wait for the Would This Work in Real Life? debates if the tag actually comes into use.

By the way, maybe it's been mentioned here before, but I happened across a parallel series just completed on Mangadex, Yuugai Shitei Doukyuusei, with a diligent class prez trying to lead a sex-fiend classmate down a "better path."

Very different tone than this one (definitely ecchi, although not outrageously so), but still pretty funny.

Hey, I read that one as well! The author had a previous work that involved four princesses from medieval fairytales (Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and Kaguya-hime) as quirky highschool lesbians, and I'm eternally salty that it never got past four chapters, because that premise is pure gold.

Can anyone recommend a manga with a high t:u ratio?

Am I an idiot for not getting what this means? Is it cause I haven't read enough yuri?

t= thirsty and u=useless, so I'm guessing they want manga about lesbians who are both incredibly useless and incredibly thirsty at the same time.

The wording implies a high degree of thirst relative to the uselessness quotient tho?

I guess it'd be something like this:

High ratio of thirst to uselessness- Bright and Cherry Amnesia, since the protagonist gets lightheaded every time she's thirsty, but still strives to get as much canoodling in as possible.

High ratio of uselessness to thirst- Adachi and Shimamura, full stop.

Equal balance- Bloom Into You, since Touko gets horny and makes demands whenever they pop into her mind, but is also rather tentative when non-horny and becomes useless when it comes to the emotional intimacy part (It's complicated).

Absolute uselessness, zero thirst- Most Class S stuff, which fixates on ambiguously platonic affection and doesn't even get close to sexual attraction (obviously, exceptions exist).

Absolute thirst- It starts with P, ends with Y, and it ain't Poppin' Party (Unless you're on certain websites, in which case, you already know what you're looking for).

This would probably be better expressed with one of those yin-yang memes that are getting popular on Twitter lately, but I'm too lazy to make one.

Can anyone recommend a manga with a high t:u ratio?

Ayame 14. Ending's a bit rushed, but holy shit, is it a ride.

Really loved this story. I think ZUN once said that he avoids writing stories from Reimu's perspective because even he doesn't understand what goes on in her head, but still needs to feature her as a vital part of Touhou's world. There's been hundreds of character profiles about her, official and unofficial, but she still feels enigmatic and fluid, impossible to get a grip on beyond her official capacity and surface traits. Reimu herself is also rarely introspective, because she simply follows her natural instincts and official mandates, but this just creates a greater potential for dilemmas when she runs into conundrums that can't be resolved by danmaku. And Yukari plays off this brilliantly, since she's a foil to Reimu in every way- purple is the opposite side of the spectrum from red, the gap youkai is the polar opposite of a boundary-maintaining miko, and Yukari's surface mysteriousness often conceals interesting hints of humanity, whilst Reimu's seeming simplicity veils just how alien her thought process can be. When you take all these elements and merge them into a wonderfully poignant series of interactions, you get one of the best Touhou doujins I've come across in recent memory.

I don't have an issue with people feeling like some of the content in the manga feels like bait, that line from Koyuki is probably the most blatant example. It's just that I've seen some people on mangadex complaining about the series not being yuri because they were led to believe so by the tags, as even before this change, I think it had the shoujo ai tag. That's being misled and it in turn leads to not giving the manga a fair chance because you go into it expecting something else.

Yeah, I definitely feel like this is one of those series that is actively ruined if you go into it with any grand expectations of progress or shows of affection or just simple, clear-cut character arcs in general. Nettaigyo is muddy, jumbled-up, messy, ambiguous and frequently self-contradictory and unsure, because it portrays a pair of girls who have absolutely no idea about what they're trying to be or achieve.

It's one of the most pronounced cases of emotive storytelling I've seen in a manga, where extensive amounts of space are devoted to exploring minute changes in emotional states and attitudes, to the point where it feels more like an observation diary for neurotic girls who simultaneously overthink and overfeel everything. The swing between rationalisations and indescribable moods, the comfort and terror of banal conversations, the stagnancy of routine life versus the terror of marching time, and that aching, bizarre dilemma of wanting to change whilst dreading new things- Nettaigyo depicts all of these with painstaking detail.

The issue is that emotions are often fleeting, immediate things that sweep you up in moments, and the best uses of emotive storytelling in manga often feature the creation of these moments through strategic plotting, pacing and structure- think of a standard confession scene, which builds anticipation into a giddy cocktail of emotions and brings the plot to an emotional climax, often to the point where there's this one panel that confirms acception/rejection and seals the deal.

Nettaigyo doesn't do this- it focuses more on emotions as overarching moods that mix and blend into atmospheres, requiring both readers and characters to 'read the room'. If you're not receptive to these subtle, shifting moods and can't instantly empathize with the characters, you'll simply be left peering at a theatre of nonsense and mixed messages. Therefore, the best way to read Nettaigyo is to binge it, so you can understand the mood as it evolves from chapter to chapter, empathising with the wordless, indefinable longing that our leads feel for each other, struggling to vocalise and define their own feelings across the massive distances of a cordial relationship that might or might not change at the drop of a hat.

If you read the manga as it releases in monthly installments, you'll disconnect from the plot and the mood, and wonder what the 'point' of each chapter is, looking for concrete signs of 'progress' in order to confirm that the time you've put into reading this series is worth it. Of course, this is a flaw in the manga's storytelling, because writers have to take into account the durations and gaps involved in their release schedules and structure their plots accordingly. I'm not saying that Nettaigyo becomes a masterpiece if you read it at a stretch- if anything, the sense of the plot stagnating even as you plow through dozens of chapters can be immensely depressing. But it rarely feels like filler, because the author genuinely puts so much emotion into every chapter- not easily understandable emotions, but genuine ones all the same.

All in all, this manga feels like it's written by someone in an emotional state similar to the protagonists- entirely unsure of what they want to do or achieve, contemplating potential routes without taking more than a step in any direction, dithering and introspecting over the smallest things and running off on random tangents. It reminds me of shows or movies I've seen that were made by people who were explicitly grappling with anxiety or depression whilst working on their projects, and poured those feelings into their work, creating stories that weren't coherent or neat in any sense, but felt raw and genuine regardless. Ultimately, you can't stick labels on Nettaigyo, because it's about a pair of girls who're terrified of labeling anything, written by an author who seemingly dislikes confining themselves to categorisations and genre tags like 'Yuri'. It'd be much more at home in a bookstore with nothing to speak for it but the title and cover art, as opposed to manga websites that compulsively tag everything to give readers some semblance of order amidst a sea of titles. Whether you think this a failing on Nettaigyo's part to compete with better titles, or whether you simply think it's a victim of an industry obsessed with demographics and classification is, like everything else about the series, a matter of deeply subjective opinion.

Our MC busting out the pro-gamer moves here.

L O R E
I love how Yatsude and Rei's interactions basically boil down to-
"So, whaddaya think about girls?"
"Sweetie, you're not my type."

And so it ends- not with a bang, but with a resurrected android reminding us that this is a yuri series. All in all, this was wrapped up much more elegantly than you'd expect, and I had a good time reading it. Hope to see more from this author in the future.

A story about having sex with a little Oni? I guess you could call this a Shuten-Doujin.

This was nice. I loved how moody the shading and backgrounds were, and the way they just evaporated when our two leads hugged each other. Really nice use of environmental storytelling to express states of mind. I like how the story ties together Natsuka's feelings for Mayu with her depression, but doesn't just default to the manic pixie dream girl trope or to the tragic lesbian one. There's a comfortable sense of ambiguity throughout, and it's great how this author conveys supportiveness as a flexible, attentive attitude rather than a five-page, hyper-rational argument about why Life is Precious and Suicide is Bad, which so many stories fall into. All in all, a fairly feel-good story that never gets too preachy or overstays its welcome.