this pairing is too damn cute~! law and order!

I'm genuinely conflicted because Law and Order and PhaMercy are both amazing ship names.

I don't watch Sunshine, so can someone explain the Zura/Hanamaru nomenclature?

If you're this far in, you really have to have realized the focus of the series is exploring various facets of otaku culture. The romance is just a (painfully immobile and unchanging) fixture of the background.

It's frustrating that the latter was played up so much at the start of the series then gradually relegated to the backburner. But to be fair, the series does a pretty good job with the former.

For those unfamiliar: the history of vibrators.

In 1902, the American company Hamilton Beach patented the first electric vibrator available for consumer retail sale as opposed to medical usage, making the vibrator the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle, and toaster, and about a decade before the vacuum cleaner and electric iron. The home versions soon became extremely popular, with advertisements in periodicals such as Needlecraft, Woman's Home Companion, Modern Priscilla, and the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

last edited at Oct 17, 2016 11:30PM

It's not a facial tool, silly.

It's a curling iron.

Well darn, the series continues to tread water.

It could be worse, I guess.

Uh....who is Nanoha?

You best be trollin'.

In the off chance that you are not in fact trolling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Girl_Lyrical_Nanoha

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Franchise/LyricalNanoha (Of particular note: this page)

http://dynasty-scans.com/doujins/nanoha

last edited at Oct 17, 2016 6:31AM

And to put the icing on the cake Morishima Akiko has this "Guys who like Yuri will have trouble with woman" POV

Actually that depends upon appearance and confident. If a guy is confident and good looking, he will get women regardless of his personal preferences.

She's making fun of the stereotype that people who enjoy reading manga have poor social skills, not that enjoying a particular genre somehow makes you sexually repellent.

At risk of being misunderstood, she does have a point that being interested in seeing the female perspective as a guy (not limited to the highly fictionalized perspective presented in most yuri mangas) does make it harder to "get women" - if only because you end up seeing a woman you like as a sentient being with her own life and goals, which considerably impedes your efforts to "get" her. Not being mindful of such trivialities does make dating so much easier (on the guy, at least).

That's odd. I usually have more success in pursuing romantic and sexual interactions with women when I treat them as, you know, human beings.

Guess I'm doing something wrong.

last edited at Oct 17, 2016 6:21AM

My family is Filipino, and we do a lot of hugging. This is somewhat paradoxical, as I'm very anxious in social situations. I never initiate a hug with anyone outside of my family, and even when I do it's mostly out of an unspoken social obligation. But at the same time I'm comfortable with and usually enjoy being hugged by almost anyone I have a neutral or positive disposition towards, regardless of their level of familiarity.

I live on the east coast of the US in a fairly multi-cultural area, so the social acceptability and "rules of engagement" regarding hugging varies a lot depending on where exactly you are and whose company you're in.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 11:12PM

P.S.- I won't mind if those two girls falls for him instead. It would gold comedy yet interesting.

As a reader, I'd flip tables
I imagine that Keisuke would too, if he were to realise that he shipwreck'd his own ship

I think that's the main reason we want to see it happen.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 10:38PM

Maybe it was included as an extra in the volume or something.

Unprompted hostility against an opposing opinion. Charming.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 7:19PM

Oh, right. The protagonist is being a giant creeper asshole in this chapter. No argument there.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 4:54PM

I pretty much hate how he basically tries to say that the only girls who can be yuri are those who were born women. I know plenty of trans women lesbians and they're totally yuri.

I'd argue that there's no direct indication that Hiromi is transgender, we only know that he's a transvestite. His girlfriend refers to him as "he" and "my boyfriend" and he doesn't seem to object. We also don't know whether he's crossdressing because he wants to and feels its part of his sexual/gender identity in some way, or if he's doing it for pragmatic/circumstantial reasons (e.g. he just wants to be with his girlfriend). No concrete confirmation or denial, however.

He and his girlfriend aren't terribly fleshed out and I don't get the feeling the series will revisit them at any point. So a lot of this will probably remain speculation.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 4:52PM

Aside from the gag about Wildrose mostly I just read this chapter wanting to strangle the guy D:

Same. In the previous chapters he was a little annoying and creepy, but not so much that I couldn't find the stories amusing. But sexually assaulting a transvestite boy isn't something I can bring myself to laugh at. The protagonist gets his cliched, slapstick beating at the hands of a bunch of girls as a form of retribution, but I'm tired of that particular trope and it doesn't really make me feel any better. He does learn a relevant and worthwhile lesson in entitlement, but promptly forgets it before the end of the chapter.

I'm definitely agreeing with a lot of the criticisms leveled at this series earlier in the thread.

Yeah, I agree 100% with this dude. Cross-dressing guys falling in love with girls should not be called Yuri at all, And whomever does call it Yuri needs to have sense slapped into them.

Right. Except in this particular situation, nobody was calling it yuri except the protagonist, so it was just him invasively creeping in on a completely unfamiliar couple's relationship and setting himself up for disappointment. That was the "joke."

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 4:53PM

subtext and wishful thinking sound fine.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 2:45PM

Japanese culture has very stringent mores and taboos regarding displays of affection or intimacy in public. It's not that Japanese people are unfeeling, their society simply conditions them to reserve those things for private, personal contexts. Notice that one of the first things the prostitute tries to do is establish a sense of privacy in their meeting, which in theory should allow her client to relax, open up, and * ahem * get down to business.

But this is Nagata.

A prominent source of emotional intimacy is with immediate family, particularly parents. Nagata's relationship with her mother is distant at best. She's never been in an intimate romantic or sexual relationship, either. So no point of reference for her there, either. Nagata not only doesn't know how to open up her heart to others. When someone gets close to her - physically or emotionally - she has no idea what to do with any part of herself.

This is one of the reasons administering a blanket application love and attention doesn't magically "fix" a depressed or socially anxious person all by itself. They're either unable or even never knew how to accept or process those things; that ability is - to a certain degree - learned. That probably sounds crazy to a lot of people, but that's because most people were taught subtly and subconsciously by their family, friends, and society in general. Others, like Nagata, were missing one or more of those sources during their social and psychological development and... well... this manga does a pretty good job of illustrating the result.

Even if a person has learned how to process and express love and intimacy, their ability to apply that knowledge can be disrupted or even lost via psychological trauma.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 4:05AM

Damn, school's so fancy it has its own dedicated lesbian fuck pad.

Most all-girls schools have to have the nurse's office pull double duty.

last edited at Oct 15, 2016 10:11PM

That is depressing but Not that sad Im at the beginning but I hope it gets a nice ending I wanna hug that Girl so badly ;(

This entire chapter was about how nerve-wrackingly anxious she gets when thrust into a physically intimate situation with a complete stranger...

@Homura E.N.D.

Russia has a proud and storied history of turning adorable children into effin' tanks.

last edited at Oct 16, 2016 4:08AM

Mercy why are you hitting on Korr- oh.

last edited at Oct 15, 2016 5:03AM

No, the blue bubbles are Homura's texts and the green bubble is Madoka.

Depression can really do a number on one's sexual drive. (from personal experience I know this)

Yup. They say the mind is the greatest aphrodisiac; it works the other way, too.

last edited at Oct 15, 2016 4:52AM

I was far too amused by the conflicting body language going on in the first panel on page nine.

While themusicman's explanation makes sense, I'm still a bit bewildered by how dense Yagi is... I mean, she's acting like her and Mado aren't dating when she says in the first chapter that they're "together both online and in real life." They also kissed in the prequel, but, well, it seems like some parts of the prequel aren't canon to the main story, so that might be a bit different. I guess it's possible that she meant "together" as in "TOGETHER AS FRIENDS," but it still seems more than a bit odd to me.

Yagi seems like the kind of person that has difficulty with social situational awareness. The fact that Mado's streaming personality differs so much from her everyday behavior may be compounding that and making it hard for Yagi to characterize their relationship.

Also it's very clear Yagi has never had any close friends in her high school life, let alone a girlfriend. Both of those things have spontaneously dropped into her lap and now she has no idea how to balance them against each other. Not only that, she has no idea what to do with herself. She's never had a support system before, and now that she suddenly has one she's overly eager to use it and ends up leaning on it entirely too hard.

Also also, Alice is bae.

last edited at Oct 13, 2016 6:54PM