It is cliché but I actually dropped it because it is the opposite of predictable. I just don't get what kind of mood the author is trying to create. In chapter 2, Mishio goes, within a few pages, from collapsing on the floor, to kissing and making bedroom eyes to the MC, to being all blasé, to kissing her again, to having a laughing fit. Her behavior is too erratic and the manga doesn't establish any kind of mood so it's all just a pointless mess to me.

You might be right about inconsistency. Just trying to think about Mishio's behavior in this scene, I guess I'd explain it like this:

She actually is very feverish, and she is incredibly self-destructive. Due to strong emotion and inhibited rational thought, she deliberately acts in a pretty odd manner, and then eventually Ena's reactions surprise her so much that she can no longer keep up the act. To a certain extent, the rest of the series explains the emotional basis for her behavior.

I agree that the series is a little confused, or maybe just confusing, in at least one aspect. It does all come together, but while reading it was very easy to guess wrong about where it was going. I'm not sure if it was deliberately surprising through undermining expectations, or if the misdirection somehow crept in by mistake.

Dropped this after chapter 2. The writing felt awful.

If you dropped because it felt cliche and predictable, then I'd recommend continuing. That's what I thought, but it very much surprised me.

last edited at Feb 8, 2018 11:51PM

Ya. Cheaters are cheaters. Don't see how it would have been so much better if that teacher had been dating an adult woman.

That might actually make the situation worse. The unexpected pregnancy was Riko's reason for choosing the boyfriend over Mishio, so if she'd been dating a woman and chose her over Mishio, she wouldn't have had that excuse and Mishio could only think that Riko simply liked her less.

last edited at Feb 5, 2018 12:10AM

The kind of weird thing is the chronology. Shuri didn't find out about Rina and Ayumi's relationship until after the voting had started. So was she the one who asked the teacher to start the vote in the first place? Or did she have nothing to do with starting the vote, and just adopted it for her scheme part-way through?

If she did pressure Eriko to start the vote before even knowing about Rina and Ayumi, then for what purpose? She said she was the source of the rumors about a lesbian couple in the swim club—was she just trying to get Saki kicked out? I feel like this story would've made a lot more sense if the vote had only started after Shuri found out about Rina and Ayumi. The way it's presented now, it looks like she just randomly tried to get any two people kicked out of the club for no real reason, and then only decided during the vote that those two people should be Saki and Ayumi.

I still feel bad for Rina. I hope she will find someone faithful ans sane.

Rina is a selfish bitch. The way she acted during their voting bullshit was just awful. She doesn't deserve happiness.

Something I thought about in this chapter is that if someone I cared about did to me what Mishio did to Ena, then as soon as I found out I would walk away and never speak to them again.

However, as a narrative, I really like that Rika-sensei hadn't killed herself, and that Mishio was lying. This is the second time the story really surprised me (the first time was when Tachibana-sensei revealed she wasn't Mishio's ex after those very unsubtle hints), and this one really puts everything we knew about Mishio in a new light. It reinforces the impression that her "cool" or "dark" exterior is just an impression (perhaps one she cultivates deliberately), and really she's just very scared and lonely.

Maybe in chapter 6, when they go to the beach, Mishio was deciding what to say to Ena the whole time, and her overly dramatic lines ("We could die tomorrow") were intentional, to sort of build up to the lie she was going to tell. And it backfired on her, since (for a day at least) it made Ena far more cautious around her.

And I like that a story with so many references to suicide (starting from the first page), the actual suicide turns out to be made-up.

last edited at Feb 2, 2018 7:40PM

This isn't even yuri. This woman is just a selfish asshole who uses her neighbor's bath month after month and also steals her clothes while she's there.

I'd like a manga actually drawing them as appearing from nowhere, with some light- and soundeffects. Then the protagonist would "But they didn't even exist a moment ago! They literally appeared from nowhere!"-tsukkomi.

I too would admire that kind of narrative honesty.

What a cliche development. As soon as there is any kind of development in the main relationship, a mysterious rival appears out of nowhere.

The artstyle helps detaching this from reality, so I don't feel really bad enjoying it. Sometimes I even forget Kaede is 12-13.

I always assumed she was 9-10

She's 4th grade, right? That's 9-10

Namori is such a tease.

I would like to read the next chapters, but I think I know where this story is headed. I saw the latest spoiler posted on this thread (I don't normally do that; I tend to avoid them as much as possible) and I got surprised by not being remotely surprised. I think things would just get quite interesting from here.

Having read to the end, I can say that the next developments sort of surprised me, but the ending felt rushed and somewhat cliche. Overall, I think the second volume is weaker than the first, but overall it's still a good story.

It's pretty common for Japanese authors and publishers to screw up spelling or grammar when using English for titles and stuff. I think it's especially common when they include a "translated" subtitle (as in the Japanese title translated to English). My favorite example is "The J.K. of the vampirelady".

Lets just say, if you think Satou deserves a happy ending, then you miss the point entirely.

I think even asking the question "does Satou deserve a happy ending?" is completely missing the point. This is not a story about good people being rewarded or evil people being punished. It's not a story of morality or justice. It's a story about broken people trapped in cycles of abuse.

last edited at Jan 25, 2018 7:01PM

I actually really enjoy that everything I've seen of this author is either the sheer silliness of 2D Nonsense or the utter insanity of Scandal. I've only seen two of each type so far, but I do hope they keep it up.

ehh.. you think we can start tagging self harm stuff? I don't want to see triggering stuff like that

Probably not the place for that discussion. Try the suggestions thread.

I really like almost all of her works. In the afterwords of several of her manga, Kodama Naoko says she loves writing stories of twisted relationships in a very melodramatic style. And her self-description seems to be accurate, since even her most "normal" works, like Renai Manga, still wallow in character drama, and tend to present love as a situation of complete and utter dependency. The characters are somehow always enslaved by their love - it's never just fondness or admiration, it's always some kind of obsession. Characters rarely think things through and make decisions, they always impulsively react to their overpowering emotion. If they do think things through, the solutions they come up with are often manipulative, underhanded, and in complete disregard of their partner's feelings.

Netsuzou Trap epitomizes this style, and takes things a bit far for my taste, since so much about it is just so trashy (especially the way every chapter ends in a cliff-hanger, which is always resolved or walked-back immediately in the next chapter, which then also ends in a cliff-hanger. Some of the sudden reveals were even recycled from chapter to chapter several times). But it was still enjoyable, in its trashy way.

no, it wasn't. Chapter 7 has Yuzumori explain that she plays with kids in class sometimes but doesn't think it's any fun. That happened before they were together, and Mimika conveniently forgot that the whole conversation even happened. Absolutely nothing has changed.

You might be right, perhaps I don't remember the earlier chapters so well. I recall getting the impression of a greater distance, but maybe it just wasn't really shown.

In the earlier chapter where Ririka was super pissed that Yuzumori was having fun with her classmates instead of being lonely and depressed, I think at that point it was already hinting heavily that Ririka wanted to monopolize her, or at least wanted Yuzumori to have no one else. It's consistent with all her earlier behavior too, so the author did a fine job setting this up.

I don't really see Ririka as a villain here. For one thing, look how spectacularly easy it was for her to break up Yuzumori and Mimika. Yuzumori started acting distant as soon as she saw Ririka and Mimika together, before she'd even said or done anything, and in the end she really didn't do much since their relationship was already so fragile in the first place.

The other reason is that Ririka's bullshit reason for Mimika to stay away was actually true—Yuzumori got closer to her classmates and started to make friends. I actually really liked that bit, since it plays up the inherent contradiction in this series. On the one hand, it's a story about a romance between a 10 year-old girl and a high school student, but it also has to acknowledge that, pure-hearted though it might be, such a relationship is generally unhealthy and detrimental.

Another victim.

Also why does this manga have to end on a cliffhanger every bloody...

It's a tradition.

Am I just paranoid, or is the whole "School nurse casually remarks that love between girls is just a phase" thing turning into a legit yuri trope? Seriously, I feel like I've seen SO many nurse characters in yuri stories throw this shit around. If it was just coming from teacher characters, I'd get it, but friggin' medical professionals should know better!

I've also seen that a few times. I think a couple of them it turned out that the female school nurse was herself gay and repressed, or had been bitten in love and was jaded, and thus just pushing her own emotional insecurities onto her students (so it's just part of the plot of the story, nothing to do with nurses in general).

But even if they're just honestly attempting to counsel students, it might make sense. Even in the US or other places where gay marriage is legal, there are hold-outs who believe for whatever reason that homosexuality is a choice. Medical professionals are still human and subject to their societies' norms. Even if the medical guidelines are updated (they're often not), individuals still have their own prejudices and schools.

If it's the school nurse's role to counsel students, then perhaps it is realistic that it would often be the school nurse who tells students that homosexuality is just a phase, and that they'd believe that doing so was part of their job and in students' best interests.

by the way, that's not what's going on in this particular story

Having finished reading this now, I have to say I gave this story too little credit. I expected it to be very cliche, but I was pleasantly surprised. There are cliches, and coincidences, but they're more incidental than anything, not what drives the plot. It's not a wildly original or complex story, but the characters give it a lot of depth, and some of the developments were unpredictable, while still fitting in well with established themes.

It looks like most of Nishio Uko's works have that tag, so it makes sense for consistency. Also, characters have more realistic proportions in terms of their head/body ratio, eyes, and other facial features.

I agree, the anime was top tier.