Really liked this one. Artwork, paneling and use of symbols are absolutely top tier, and the whole thing just radiates that late-2000s urban thriller edge. As ZUN eloquently puts it, you can't have a maid without rock, and this entire series was pure metal- loud, intense and captivating, if not always the most coherent. Still no idea what the plot is, but it was one hell of a ride.

A little concerning that there so much death teenage lesbians, unless they just have been ghost for a long time, but still weird. Better to not think about it too much.

Interestingly, lovers' suicide was quite common during Japanese high-school girls at one point in Japan's history, since many of them fell in love with their classmates in all-girls' schools and couldn't deal with being whisked away at graduation to be pushed into obligatory het marriages. All those melodramatic, depressing Class S manga from the 80s and 90s were based, to an extent, in reality. I recommend watching Zeria's video series on the history of the yuri genre for more info.

Interesting doujin. I like the idea of Mahiru giving up her ideal ending even in an alternate dimension because she knows that it isn't natural or fair to anyone. She's supposed to be a 'star that shines for everyone' as opposed to a 'star destined for someone', so if she does get into a relationship, it won't be because she pursues a specific target, but because there'll come along a person who recognizes her kindness and loves her for it.
So basically, just Suzu. Can't wait for Mahiru's tall, bubbly, buster-sword wielding cheerleader GF to be added to ReLive.

You've heard of paranormal activity, now prepare for lesbian activity.

Be hilarious if all the girls that Toudou drugged consciously realized that they were gay and started dating each other. StuCo Prez and Shy Delinquent would make a great ship.

Ritsu and suits is the best combination since chocolate and smores.

...Oppaidon?

I laughed.... then imagined some one slamming their boob into the wall instead of a hand.... I'm still laughing

https://imgur.com/gallery/1FmXM4r
Relevant

Its also interesting that both Marisa and Alice actually have actual family out there- but they have left them and rarely ever or never see them. Alice is one of the very few characters who we've met a parent of. Marisa has family in the village but never sees them right? Or is that just speculation? As for Reimu, I dont think we know a thing about how she came to the shrine or her family right?

Marisa seems to have bad blood with her folks, but CoLA states that she doesn't talk much about them because she considers it a 'private matter'. I suppose a standard family in the human village raised to follow norms and fear yokai would be pretty angry if their kid randomly decided to start living in a dangerous forest, though at least she had Rinnosuke to look out for her. As for Reimu, Marisa explicitly calls her an orphan in CoLA, and the fact that she knows jack shit about the god she's supposed to serve suggests that she lost her family pretty early, and was presumably educated by anonymous priests or maybe even someone like Yukari (though this seems like one of those things ZUN will be content to leave up in the air till the end of time, since he doesn't feel a compulsive need to explain every character's past when he just plop them into stories and give them a basic motive, with the fans being free to invent the rest).

Actually there are also quite a few sisters out there in the various groups- that seems to be a real family connection Touhou likes rather than parental- I guess because they will be a similar age and can appear in a new story together and both fight etc, whereas a parent would be a wierd dynamic for the games? But you could certainly introduce them in canon manga if they wanted to, but I guess zun doesnt want that?

There's characters who have pseudo-parents, like Sanae with Kanako and Suwako, or arguably even Kaguya with Eirin, but ZUN by and large doesn't use family stereotypes to define his relationships- characters that stick together do so either because of official positions (Youmu as the the Hakugyokurou gardener, Ran as Yukari's shikigami), or due to shared locations and occupations (Okuu and Orin serving Satori), or because of literal, mind-bending subordination (Satono and Mai with Okina, Yoshika with Seiga). However, the Watatsuki sisters are also married, and we hear absolutely nothing about their husbands or relations and are simply told that they're relative social outcasts on the moon and spend much of their time at a military base, family be damned. So it's more like ZUN gets a character idea, throws in any and all details that he thinks are interesting, and at the end of his planning process, sorts the characters into your standard seven-boss hierarchy. If he thinks two characters will have interesting interactions, he'll put them together in a story, but considerations of tropes like, "Reimu, I am your father," definitely don't apply. Hence, the prevalence of 'found families'- ZUN just puts characters in relationships based on situations and ideas, and the fans come up with labels for them to reduce the ambiguity.

This is surely way better than the other one Eku-sensei has...

If you're referring to There's No Way I Can Have a Lover!, I don't think Eku's actually writing that one. They just did the character designs. The plot was adapted from a light novel, afaik.

The sheer elegance of Touhou's character design elevates the yuri even further.

^Implying that watching bored rich ladies have sex isn't the only thing that makes her job as a gardener bearable.

Leadership is all about heart, after all.

This is apparently the cover for a boobs-centered Yuri anthology. Can't wait.

ShamiMomo have a brilliant ability to simultaneously exist in a state of constant gay panic and marital bliss.

Scuba diving overcomes all boundaries.

This chapter was way better than it had any right to be. A really well-drawn fight scene, various characters coordinating their talents, your whole big shonen affirmation of identity, a tragic villain, some neat hacking warfare, and a couple of very nifty parallels between characters and reflections upon the main theme. I gotta hand it to the author for wrapping stuff up so elegantly, though it just makes me wish more than ever that this was a longer series that could really delve into the implications of it's world and society whilst fleshing out the antagonists. There is so much promise and potential to be found here, a virtual ocean of fun concepts coupled with great, subtle execution, so the fact that the next chapter is the last really breaks my heart.

I've always felt like this series was the Yin to Yuzumori-san's Yang- one of them does the onee-loli relationship as a super sweet highschool comedy while still engaging with the darker implications of its own premise in a relative mature way, and the other takes the everyone is a heartless arsehole route, but makes our leading pair just likeable and vulnerable enough to make you kindasorta root for them.

Just waiting for Sayaka to escalate to just plain eating Yuki out (while, of course, attempting to pass it off as some sort of perfectly legitimate motherly thing to do).

"Oh, I dropped my wedding ring in my daughter's vagina and need to get it out."

I'm liking this new arc. Always felt like this series lacked its own identity, considering that it's about an orange-haired girl who can't understand love being confessed to by her dark-haired, cool senpai who's secretly a disaster lesbian (where have we seen that before?). But now that it's leaning into the 'love song' part of the premise, bringing in interesting new characters, fleshing out the existing cast and delving into our main couple's dating life, I'm pretty excited to see where this goes. Oh, and the character designs are top-tier as always- Eku excels at creating shiny people.

Heidi's a pretty interesting addition to the cast, to say the least. I'm still not quite sure whether they're trans or a male crossdresser, though the translator on Twitter mentioned that it was the latter (apparently, Nozomi refers to them with 'she' pronouns because professional crossdressers prefer to be addressed as the gender they're currently attired as, since it adds to the atmosphere of the workplace). The fact that Nozomi continues to use 'she' pronouns in her mental narration as opposed to when she's just addressing Heidi at the bar muddles this up a bit, but for now, I'd go with the translator's version. Regardless, I feel like the contrast between their occupation and their background could make for some interesting drama, while also helping Nozomi decide whether she wants to get back into the dating game, and also how Shion would deal with all this.

I'm certain Wakame fills SekaOppa with useless lesbians precisely so she can offload all the dithering and write stuff about giga-chads like this.

Are all Manga Club members secretly pretty? (Not that they are ugly otherwise, it just reminds me of that one romance movie trope)
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/virgins_empire_ch147#5

I find the whole 'everyone is pretty' trope very interesting, because it applies to both live-action and anime/manga, but for completely different reasons. In live-action movies, Hollywood strives to cast attractive actors, and the bar of (conventional) physical attractiveness is so high that even an average supporting character in a film would look extremely attractive compared to random people on the street (this is partly because of eye-candy and partly because someone with glaringly 'unattractive' features could detract attention from the main actors and ruin the general mood of a scene- just imagine Jason Voorhees standing around in the background of a chick-flick while the leads talk about their love lives).

In manga, on the other hand, artists are generally taught to draw faces based on symmetry, often by drawing ovals and bisecting them with lines to get the position of eyes, noses and mouths. This means that your average manga character would have features that look perfectly symmetrical and correspond to the golden mean, and since people consider symmetrical features to be more attractive on average, everyone in a manga looks pretty (or rather, they aren't drawn with enough detailed features like wrinkles, crooked teeth or stubby noses, which might seem 'ugly' to observers). This makes it hilarious when one girl is described as super-attractive even though the faces of average bystanders behind her are drawn in the exact same way, or if her best friend looks like her identical twin, but with glasses and a ponytail. It's easier for your average manga artist to make a character attractive than to make them unattractive, which is why so many artists draw background characters without faces or with dotted eyes, simply to make a generically drawn lead stand out more. (Imagine trying to visually depict someone like Helen of Troy as the most beautiful woman of all time in a game like FGO, where every lady (and dude) is designed to be ridiculously attractive to induce otaku into whaling).

Torajirou is actually pretty good at averting this, since he gives characters a unique visual identity and has diverse body types and physical features. All his character designs radiate individuality without being necessarily pandering, and beauty, rather than a pre-established quality, is presented as the result of simply getting to know someone better and understanding their 'appeal' (to wit, the only two characters described as explicitly gorgeous upon their debut were Kaoru and Shizuka, both of whom are perfect examples of how external beauty doesn't equal moral virtue, and is likely to make you into either a self-assured predator or a victim for said predators).

I guess Alice, Marisa & Reimu, more than all the others, flit around visiting each other and all the other 'families' so they might lack distinct families themselves but have more friends and aquaintances than everyone else.

Yeah, the protagonists need to be fundamentally aloof in order to justify the video game structure of 'one person flies out and takes on a group of enemies', since Reimu getting a Bat-family would simultaneously make her stronger in terms of available allies, as well as more vulnerable in terms of personal connections that could be exploited by cunning enemies for hostage situations. ZUN also seems to use individual characters as per their function in a story instead of just having them show up in big groups, which is why he prefers to use Aya, Mamizou, Komachi and Akyuu much more than, say Byakuren or Miko, at least in the official manga (the fighting games have the opposite rationale, for gameplay reasons).

Interestingly, there's also personal, character-driven reasons for their lack of families- Reimu's identity is based around the fact that she's absolutely neutral and equally alien to both yokai and humans, with ZUN explicitly stating that she's always alone in her heart (much like how someone like Philip Marlowe or Sherlock Holmes would be equidistant from the police and the criminal underground). Marisa is much more social on the surface, but HSiFS implies that she's afraid to abandon her current lifestyle, which, combined with the other flightly, erratic aspects of her personality, seems to hint that she has commitment issues and doesn't like people getting too close (how often have we seen anyone invited to Marisa's house?)

This does seem to be changing with the entry of Kasen as Reimu's effective foster Mom, and of Aunn as her effective pet, but seeing as the most recent manga also just relegate them to cameos, I don't think ZUN's gonna stop having our heroes operate solo anytime soon. I do feel like this is for the best, though, since it keeps the amount of fixed characters in the cast of any given story to a minimum and allows ZUN to cycle through Touhou's ever-growing galaxy of characters instead of relegating them to ancient history like three-star special event characters in a gacha game.

This was great. Always fun to see works where Sakuya drops the perfect maid act and gets emotional, and even more so to see Remilia act mature and supportive. Gensokyo is a paradise for found families, it seems.

The author will begin a new manga named Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita (Trying Out Marriage to My Female Friend) from January 2021.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2020-10-17/donuts-under-a-crescent-moon-shio-usui-launches-new-manga-in-november/.165322

Sounds great. I've read pretty much all of Shio's stuff on this site, and every single one of her works has been absolute gold. While lots of yuri authors write mostly disconnected oneshots or only have genre specific specializations (like incest or age gaps), Shio's one of those rare authors who has visible, consistent themes running through her work. That's one of the reasons I appreciated Crescent Moon and Doughnuts so much on my second read- I'd gone through some of her older oneshots, and you can really see how she took her ideas about performativity and social pressures and built upon them in more nuanced ways. That soft, introspective style works really well in longer series, so I'm pretty hyped for this one.