Consumers demanding that Valve show editorial judgement and curate their store is what led to all these games being blocked in the first place. And somehow the solution is to... demand that Valve show editorial judgement and curate their collection? That just doesn't make any sense.

There's a spectrum of responsibility between a credit card company and a local butcher. Using your credit card, you can buy all sorts of shit. You could buy products that are dangerous, that don't work, etc. You can get scammed into buying something that is never provided to you. None of these things are important to the credit company. They just facilitate transactions. On the other hand, a butcher is responsible for the meat you buy. It doesn't matter where they source the meat, they can't just say, "Oh, you should've known that the meat from E Coli Ranch was bad. That's on you, and none of my responsibility."

Steam is far closer to the credit card company than to the butcher. They're far closer to a credit card company than they are to a dollar store—the dollar store chooses what products to buy and then sells those products. They make a profit off the difference in what they pay and what they charge. A dollar store is a curated collection of goods. Steam doesn't buy games and then sell them, they simply provide you with an interface that allows you to buy games. They make a profit from a fee charged on transactions, because their business model is not selling games, it's facilitating transactions.

I'd be much happier in a world where it's your own damn fault if you buy a broken janky game on Steam than in a world where Valve feels the responsibility to cull the games that they think aren't worth buying.

Edit: I realize my logic is kind of circular here. Steam could be a curated collection of games if they wanted to be. But they aren't inherently responsible for the games sold on their platform any more than Amazon is. Basically, I do not like trusting corporations to make decisions for me when those decisions are inherently subjective, like what qualifies as an acceptable game. Sometimes a market must be regulated for the good of society, and sometimes it's better to just let people do what they want. It's very easy for people to do research beforehand and see if the game they're thinking of buying is something they'd hate, or broken. If they do end up buying a game that's bad or that doesn't work, there's no real harm done. There's just really no reason for such a market to be subjected to inherently arbitrary restrictions from some people who have no business making decisions for other people.

last edited at Jun 8, 2018 1:39AM

It's a similar situation to itch.io. Sure, there are a few hidden gems on that store front if you have a few hours to kill searching for them. But that doesn't negate the fact that 99% of the games on that store are awful. Granted, I don't blame itch.io for that because it's a smaller company that is by design intended to be a DeviantArt style platform except for games. So it's to be expected with the territory. Steam, on the other hand, is one of the biggest digital storefronts in the world, run by one of the most reputable game publishers that doesn't make games anymore in the world. I personally expect just a little more from them. At the very least, I expect that if they want to operate like a public entity, they should also have to take on the legal and social responsibilities of being a public entity.

I honestly don't see what responsibility Valve has to curate the Steam marketplace (except in that they must remove content that is illegal). If you buy some shitty game on Steam, then that's not their fault. They don't make any guarantee of quality. It's like blaming a shopping mall for the fact that one of the restaurants in the food court sells super shitty overpriced food. Maybe that's a problem for the health inspectors, but if they don't get involved, the mall has no responsibility to cancel the lease. Maybe there's a case to be made that they should remove games that literally don't even work, or at least post warnings if they get complaints, but even that is really optional.

When it comes to the legal status of cartoon child pornography in the US, it differs by state and by district. For example, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held up a conviction for possession of lolicon material, and several state courts have done the same.

However, it seems that they rely not on child pornography statutes but on obscenity statutes, which generally vary much more from state to state and are more vague and difficult to define, but are also used far more rarely. This also means that even within each region, some material depicting minors having sex will be legal and some won't be, depending on whether it's determined to have "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

So it is possible that even in the US with its relatively strong protections for speech, some of the games on Steam might be illegal in certain regions, and Steam could be held legally liable for selling/transferring obscene material.

Also, do pharmacies really used to sell cigarettes in USA? That's weird.

Pharmacies still sell cigarettes in the US. Pharmacies here often act as general stores with various household supplies, foods, cosmetics, and alcohol in addition to medications. Of course, there are some pharmacies that only sell medications, but the big national pharmacy chains sell much more than that.

last edited at Jun 7, 2018 5:28PM

God bless America.

Interestingly, countries that enact laws requiring paid parental leave often see increased wage inequality and more women getting stuck in low level jobs. See http://www.nber.org/papers/w18702.

In theory these laws are gender-neutral, but in practice women are far more likely to take advantage of parental leave than men, and companies conclude that female employees are simply less productive on average, since more of them will take time off or draw wages without working. So even if the laws increase the number of women in the workforce by making it easier for mothers to keep their jobs, they reduce the number of women getting promoted to positions of responsibility and lead to a reduction in starting wages for women compared to men. Because of existing prejudice and unequal social structures, even laws intended to promote equality can backfire.

This is one of the reasons that countries with generous parental leave policies have higher rates of workforce participation among women, but also have lower rates of women in full-time, managerial, or professional positions. This manga provides an illustration of how that works: even though Japan offers a year of paid parental leave to men and women after the birth of a child, basically no fathers take advantage of this policy while a significant number of mothers do. Thus promoting a woman of child-bearing age is a big risk compared with promoting a man, since she will be far more likely to leave the company for a long period of time, or simply quit and never come back.

So I actually saw it as pretty happy story.

I agree in general, but when you say the only threat to their relationship is Shuuko's insecurity, I think that's actually a rather major threat. Her childish behavior is kind of cute in a high school romance, but would just be really irritating in any kind of long-term relationship.

Obviously, things could change, but if Shuuko insists on acting so dependent, then it's reasonable to think Kiku might dump her at some point. Not for the reasons Shuuko fears, but because of the attitude Shuuko adopts in reaction to those fears.

All this good grounding only to after in the last panel completely disregard all of it and end with the usual cheap plotwist, and sasy bad girl is bad. I don't understand you Kodama.

There was a plot twist? I think Shuuko's behavior was pretty consistent throughout. Nothing really changed on the last page. We just learned more about how deep Shuuko's insecurities go.

wait, they give out condoms at school!?

This is the harm mitigation strategy to dealing with teenage pregnancy and STDs: you can't stop teenagers from fucking, but maybe you can encourage them to fuck safely. I don't know about the rest of the world, but it's pretty common where I live.

Mmm i get the feeling that the doctor or whatever leave a tracker on the small Bowman, she is a girl of science, i dont think she will let the chance to save humanity go away just like that.

Huh? Shiiko doesn't need to track them, she's in the same RV as them, going to the same place.

What kind of heathen doesn't like biting?

Yeah, I agree. I guess that's what I was trying to say. What Jinno wants and what's good for her are two different things. And the morality of Kousaka's behavior is completely separate from those as well.

But I think it's generally a bad idea to dismiss someone's personal beliefs about their own views as somehow wrong or mistaken. For example, if you know someone who had sex with an adult at age 14, and even years or decades later they neither think they were taken advantage of nor do they regret that decision, then it'd be fucked up to insist to them that they were raped.

Obviously this is a story, so the whole morality of pushing one's views on another person isn't relevant. But we as readers see into Jinno's head, and we can see that she wants to be with Kousaka. We can accept that this is what the character desires and still think it's a bad idea, and also think that Kousaka shouldn't be getting involved with a young girl.

Yeah. The adult seduced a virgin girl into her house and raped her, then slapped her, had sex and run away again. Even the author tried to make it look like romantical unforbidden love, in my opinion I can see only a pedophile and girl with stockholm syndrome. If the woman are man instead, the ending might be a girl get pregnant. This manga will be a shitty hentai.

Everything else aside, blaming Jinno's behavior on "Stockholm Syndrome" is pretty bizarre. She had sex with the woman once, and then neither saw her or spoke to her for days or weeks afterwards, yet continued to long for her. That's not Stockholm Syndrome. It's so far from Stockholm Syndrome that I don't even know why you'd bring that into the conversation. Was she held captive for an extended period of time? No. Did her survival depend solely on the good will of her captor? No. Did her captor offer her "rewards" (such as not being beaten) in exchange for good behavior? No. Might as well say that Jinno's behavior is due to Munchhausen syndrome by proxy for all the relevance it has.

Even calling what happened "rape" is somewhat questionable, except in that it would obviously be statutory rape as defined in many jurisdictions. Rape occurs when someone is subjected to sex against their will and without their consent. From what we saw, Jinno didn't consent (plus it's questionable whether she was even capable of giving consent, based on her age). But it seemed to be something that she did willingly, based on the fact that she was trying to get closer to Kousaka beforehand and afterwards she sought to do it again (though since we got only a few panels of the act itself, it's impossible to say for certain what her mindset was at the time).

Clearly what Kousaka did was both illegal and wrong. But when it comes to Jinno's mindset, we as readers can see into her mind and it's very obvious that she's genuinely attracted to Kousaka and desires to be with her.

last edited at May 29, 2018 10:55PM

So she fucked her and ran away? A hit and run? WHAT AN ADULT.

I guess Jinno learned what it means to be an adult from Kousaka after all, if not in the way she expected.

Maybe because I didn't check the tags earlier, I was thinking, "those fucking cunts are going to get away with it, aren't they?" But then I was pleasantly surprised by the ending. What a lovely story.

Of course I don't mean to say I'm okay with it always happening, far from it. It's only that I keep my expectations pretty low going into these, and for the most part my expectations are met dead-on. It's a shame that Adult Life stories suffer from this trope as often as any other setting.

In school scenarios, they can't communicate because of their youthful innocence and embarrassment, and in adult stories they can't communicate because of their fear of commitment or of being hurt.

Seriously, although my only evidence is this otherwise inexplicable pattern, I’ve come to believe that noble idiocy > time skip > reunion is Lezhin editorial policy for yuri series rather than simply poor authorial choice. It’s not uncommon for a serial narrative to botch its ending (kdramas do it just like this all the time), but when yuri plots from one particular publisher falter in exactly the way over and over it starts to look like more than coincidence.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was motivated by a business policy, like how much time authors are given to wrap things up, but it's not exactly uncommon outside of Lezhin also. Some stories that immediately come to mind are Netsuzou Trap and Cross Heart but I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.

Maybe it's just a convenient way to setup an ending in advance that you know you can quickly wrap up when needed. Or just a way to raise the stakes at the very end when there's no other obvious source of drama. Since I haven't read too many Lezhin series, and of them this was the only one that ended like this, I won't speculate too much about, but if all the ones you mentioned did end in the same manner, that's definitely suspicious.

Finally finished this, and it was definitely exploitative, but still fairly interesting as a narrative. It was pretty clear early on that Yeonhwa was not quite right, but seeing the bullies get attacked, and especially seeing Dahye get tormented felt so righteous that it was easy overlook her misdeeds. I started to dislike her more when she abandoned Yoonseo, but even after that she still seemed somewhat sympathetic. Until the reason her sister ran away was revealed.

By the end I was wondering who was worse, her or Dahye, and I still can't really decide. Dahye is a more conventional sort of bully while Yeonhwa is a psychopath. Yeonhwa seems more animalistic, driven by passion, while Dahye is more calculating. Dahye has some restraint, meaning that her actions are less extreme but also that she can go under the radar and thus to continue her bullying for a long time. Yeonhwa's inability to hold back means that she does truly vicious things to people but also that she will cross the line and attract unwanted attention, limiting the amount of damage she can do over the long term.

On the other hand, the other bullies, Yoonseo, and especially Ayeon didn't have much going on as characters. The bullies bullied because they were bullies. Yoonseo was a punching bag who desperately craved affection. Ayeon... was just there. She didn't do anything or say anything important the whole time. It's hard for me to even guess why she existed in this story, much less why she was presented as the main character in the beginning.

The ending felt right. Yeonhwa was an aberration who broke the rhythm of the school. For a time she changed some things, but she was inevitably caught and removed, and everything returned to normal. Including the normal amount of violence and victimization.

I'm still disappointed enough by the end of Lily Love that I don't know if I care to even start the sequel. Rereading it, her sudden trip abroad didn't quite come out of nowhere, but it was an incredibly cliched and unsatisfying way to end the story. Might as well have just printed a page saying "Oh, we ran out of chapters for this. She goes away for a year then comes back and then they live happily ever after".

was having the hardest time getting into this story or caring about these characters. And after that. Eh. I still can't say I care for this story but if you are enjoying this then good for you!

I think that's the problem. If we had more reason to care about the characters, then their behavior wouldn't seem so bizarre, or even if it did, it'd be easier to forgive. But there just hasn't been much development for either of them.

The way the characters acted in say, Kimi Koi Limit was as weird as this or perhaps weirder, but I actually felt like I knew the characters and liked them, so it was fine. When characters feel like flawed human beings who are driven by their emotions it's interesting when they make mistakes. When characters feel like damaged automatons stuck in a routine due to some error, it's not interesting.

Of course, I'm still going to read this. It's not terrible, there is still promise that it will improve.

A basic synopsis would be this:
Shio's mother is pregnant. She is forced into marriage with her abusive boyfriend. She breaks down. It's implied she was raped by him again after giving birth to Asahi.

So yeah, it's pretty miserable.

And Suu is Satou's friend from way way back when it's revealed she's a yandere for Satou. Satou had to seduce her to keep her from prying into her personal life and it breaks Satou.

I'd correct and expand your synopsis like this: Shio's mother is raped by a stranger while in high school. She gets pregnant. Eventually she tells her parents, and they confront the guy and his father. At the urging of his father, her parents pressure her into getting married to him. Her parents and father-in-law want to avoid any scandal, and the father-in-law, who is wealthy, pays for her to live by herself. Her parents barely talk to her for years. It gets worse after that.

Also, seducing Suu wasn't what "broke" Satou. Saying "I love you" to Suu upset her enough that she felt the need to wash her mouth out afterwards ("such a filthy lie"), but what "broke" her was that when she got home, Shio was in a bad condition. Satou, being Satou, thought that this was divine punishment for her telling Suu she loved her, though it was actually a result of something completely unrelated.

That was good. It's nice to see a story about a relationship failing. That's what happens more often than not, especially when you start dating on a whim while drunk, but there just aren't many stories where that's what happens.

I have not read the manga, but do people actually like this? Just a small summary of it rose 101 red flags for me

It's something you need to experience for yourself. Just reading the first chapter is a better introduction than anything anyone could tell you. I personally really like it, but I don't think I could tell you why. It's so bizarre it's impossible to take seriously, but I still find myself emotionally invested in the characters for some reason.

This was silly. In a good way.

Not only was it earring-related trauma, but they were they exact same earrings! What's the chance of that? Honjou is pretty damn unlucky. I mean, it was bad luck meeting this madwoman in the first place, but the earrings thing is such a huge coincidence. Plus, how important are the earrings really? She reacted negatively twice already, and the first time it was literally just from having her ear touched!

Also, it's pretty incredibly that Liz has gotten this far in life with that attitude. How is she even able to be in a band? I'd expect her to have attacked one of her bandmates for the crime of giving her the same brand of soda that Sempai used to.

I don't think she's a terrible person. Clearly that event hurt her a lot, and she's probably suffering from some kind of mental illness. But why would anyone else choose to put up with someone like that?

last edited at May 22, 2018 9:17PM