Now we just need Arashi to have a crush on Mao and the triangle will be complete! (This would actually be my preferred pairing since I adore this type of dynamic)

The first panel here kind of implies that she does develop a crush on Mao, but it is a pretty understated reaction so your mileage may vary on the validity of this interpretation.

I hated Mao. Passionately. Exactly the type of pushy possessive asshole I can not stand. Also, is it my imagination, or is it kind of implied that Yuki's "unapproachable" reputation is the result of having a possessive freak such as Mao as her best friend?

On the one hand, Yuki is fairly sociable and outgoing with Arashi from the get-go, and also expresses her wish for Mao to have friends other than her (which would make it reasonable that she wants the same for herself, especially in light of how fast she befriended Arashi). On the other hand, she is perfectly aware that Mao does not want her to befriend other people, and Mao is very important to her. So my guess is that she keeps herself away from socialising with other people in order to placate Mao.

That would explain the apparent disconnect between Yuki's public image and how she acted with Arashi. There is also the fact that anyone who would potentially get close to Yuki would face the exact same vehement hatred and rudeness from Mao since basically the first second, and I imagine most people would immediately give up after that.

And even when Yuki invited Arashi to have lunch with them, she did it in part because she wanted Mao and Arashi to become friends, for Mao's benefit. All of which makes me believe that Yuki is entirely too mindful of Mao and is likely sacrificing her own social life in order to keep the nutjob happy.

I want a sequel.

Keqing is just struggling because Ganyu is heavy.

I can't agree with a lot of this.

I will go a step further, I do not agree with pretty much anything SadDoctor wrote, as it is just pointedly wrong.

This also makes no sense to me when some people in the West have tried to argue for years that "Yuri is sexual content", and "Shoujo Ai is Fluffy". People have pushed against this saying Yuri in Japan embraces sexual, fluffy, and everything else. Yuri is a Japanese term and the definition is created by Japanese people, Westerners should not be able to define it for them.

The "shoujo ai" stuff is definitely nonsense, but in fairness you will find Japanese fans who are the exact equivalent of the western "shoujo ai" crowd and these Japanese fans do treat the term "yuri" the way SadDoctor suggested (using "rezu" for sexually explicit material). The thing is, they encountered the same kind of pushback as the westerners peddling "shoujo ai" have and you will find very, very few authors who ascribe to their ideas.

So terms like women's love are used mostly by queer female writers who want to write stories that are explicitly queer without that layer of "j/k it's just close friendship bro" that yuri so often has. Saying it's not yuri in that context isn't a nettaigyo situation, it's basically the exact opposite, "it's not about close friendship it's about lesbians."

Except the only instance of Agu using "women's love" comes from a machine translation. For a nuanced and prone-to-vagueness language as the Japanese, machine translations can at best be treated as rough pointers. The actual translators who know the language, including the current scanlator working on this series, translated the "women's love" part as either "affection between girls" or "friendship between two girls".

But at this point we are all just going in circles, it really might be best to drop it for now. Time will tell, though I do agree with one of the previous posters who said they get sceptical the moment authors get all "philosophical" on this topic, as there is almost never any actual need for any of this to be "philosophical" and more often than not these "philosophical" excursions end with ambiguous results.

last edited at Jun 28, 2022 6:29AM

I'm not sure why y'all are arguing about the artists intent in the interview. I went back through the whole manga, and it is really hard to read this story as anything other than a romance. You have to ignore a whole lot of awkward looks and blushing to see this as a close friendship.

Exactly the same reason why people dismissed the scanlator of Nettaigyo when he posted about Hagino saying she does not consider it yuri. "Lololol what are you on about, do you see the amount of blushing and handholding and etc., of course it is romance, it can not be anything else lolololol." Cue Nettaigyo ending. Cue people in the comments complaining how they were baited. I think it is reasonable to temper expectations here. Given that statement from Agu I personally doubt we will see anything more than subtext at best. I would not mind being proven wrong, though.

Oh dang I didn't know that got removed, it was fun. Any idea if the creator is going to work with a publisher or something to have it released in a way where we can support them? I intend to respect the author's wishes, it can just be a little frustrating in my opinion when an author wants support but refuses to find a way to release their work in other languages, especially when the demand is there. Which is something I've seen.

Regrettably, the series in question seems to fall into the category you described at the end here. The author was angry about the scanlation and demanded it be pulled down ("I want you to stop reading for free" was the phrasing they used, though they later deleted that tweet), but we have no indications that an English release of any kind is in the making.

Which story?

I'm Not Cut Out to Be a Princess, so I'll Elope with the Villainess.

How about one of you curious folks just dm/respond to one of their tweets, asking for clarification, instead of doing the old back and forth about "is this yuri or not"?

If anyone actually does this, make sure you do not mention you are reading the series in English. Agu has stated in the past that she is not fond of scanlation piracy. The latest villainess story that was pulled from Dynasty ended up like that because the author found out about it and demanded it be taken down. Be smart, folks.

last edited at Jun 27, 2022 12:21PM

yall seriously i think she just means it straight up because for a bunch of people yuri = porn/ecchi/horny stuff and she wanted to write something more wholesome and relaxed. How people divide it or not is not relevant.

More Adachi and Shimamura than Dragon Maid

And as was said before, in Japan authors and most of the fanbase do not make such distinctions. And even those Japanese fans who do make these distinctions use the term "yuri" for non-horny stuff.

In Japan: "rezu" = porn/ecchi/horny; "yuri" = wholesome/relaxed. The author is Japanese. Your reasoning makes absolutely no sense. If she was saying what you think she was saying, she would have said "I do not think my work is rezu."

And again, the above mentioned division in terms is only used by a fringe group of Japanese yuri fans who want to make the distinction between "pure" stuff and "horny" stuff (and are using an offensive term for the "horny" material); the industry as a whole simply refers to the genre as "yuri", regardless of the levels of horniness.

Dating someone doesn't have to be a sexual relationship, romance doesn't have to be sexual. Yuri can be a whole lot of everything, including platonic. "Nettaigyo wa Yuki ni Kogareru" is listed as Subtext on here, but I've seen a good amount of people and other websites classify it as Yuri.

While your statement is true in general, I disagree with using Nettaigyo as an example, simply because the author there went on record saying she does not label it as yuri, stating it is more about close bonds and friendships between girls (basically the same line of reasoning Agu used here). She did say that she does not mind if people head-canon Nettaigyo as yuri, but that is not the same as saying it is yuri.

Yuri can be romance and sexual, it can be romance but not sexual, or it can be sexual but not romance. Close friendship is not yuri, and Nettaigyo is about close friendships and the struggle with loneliness. The amount of subtext and the author being fine with people interpreting it as yuri makes the romance goggles perfectly acceptable, but at the same time if you want to see it as just friendship nothing is stopping you either and this is the angle the author herself took. I do think that in this case what the author said outweighs what some random websites use in their tags, especially since overt romance is simply not depicted on-screen.

last edited at Jun 27, 2022 8:57AM

@wlftchtr82: The problem with using machine translations, though, is that they tend to be imprecise as hell when it comes to Japanese. In the Discord discussion the following translations were put forth by experienced translators in the scanlating community (one of whom is the scanlator working on this series):

"I wouldn't call this manga yuri (ie, romance between girls), but more affection between girls"

"I don't know if the manga I'm drawing now would be what people call [yuri]. It's more of a story of friendship between two girls."

The main point of discussion was not the yuri remark itself, but whether Agu meant it to refer to this whole story in general, or just to the parts already written (meaning that she might possibly add the yuri label in the future). To me personally it seemed more plausible that she was talking about the story as a whole, but the two translators who were discussing it differed in opinion on this particular point; one arguing that it was a general remark while the other presented the view that she was talking only about the content published so far.

last edited at Jun 25, 2022 1:12PM

Honestly, I can kind of understand why an author might not want to label their work as yuri, even if it technically would fall into that category. Yuri as a genre often feels somehow detached from wlw in real life...? (I can't explain it very well, but I think there are probably other people here who get what I mean). So it could be a way to free your work from readers' expectations. That said, I don't speak Japanese, so I have no idea what Agu actually said here, this was more of a general comment on the matter.

Could very well be. My personal opinion is that the author said that because she will likely go for the "ambiguous relationship" approach.

To illustrate what I mean by this, basically what happened with Nettaigyo. There the author was very clear from the start that she will not label it as yuri and that it is more about close bonds, friendship, and affection between girls (so basically the same line Agu used here). Hagino, the author of Nettaigyo, also stated that she does not mind if the readers interpret it as yuri.

The end result was a manga with the subtext so heavy you could slice it with a knife, but which nonetheless never ended with explicit romance. The amount of subtext and the fact the author was fine with people head-canoning it as yuri makes the romance a perfectly acceptable interpretation, but you will still not see it explicitly on-screen, so to speak.

last edited at Jun 25, 2022 12:26PM

Or if it does, yuri is on the softer side of it, see for example Minase Ruruu's thoughts on this.

I would treat this example as more of an outlier, plus the fact it was written in 2011 might be the reason why it was worded like that. Because "lez" was almost certainly a translation of "rezu" (and even if Minase Ruruu outright used the "lez" version herself, the two are literally different spellings of the same word - "rezubian" in full, "lesbian" - so there is next to no chance a Japanese author would use one without being aware of the other).

The reason this is problematic is because rezu is sometimes (rarely, I might add) used to refer to pornographic material, but it is also used as a derogatory term for real-life lesbians in Japan. This is why Japanese lesbians will sometimes resort to using the second half of the word ("bian") instead. Thus yuri authors have mostly avoided using the term.

Some Japanese yuri fans did indeed push for using "rezu/lez" as a term for porn material, with "yuri" being the "non sexual stuff" in a similar way to some of the western fans who coined the term "shoujo ai" (not realising it was an already existing term with paedophilic connotations in Japan). But because of the derogatory nature of "rezu/lez" in everyday language this never really took off, although you will find occasional examples of authors using it.

I should have specified that "does not exist in Japan" was referring to the accepted practices in the industry, so to speak. Because yeah, you will very definitely find some Japanese yuri fans who are obsessed with "purity" as much as the western shoujo ai-pushing crowd is, and they did indeed try to introduce different terms for explicit material, but this was simply never accepted by the industry or the community at large.

All of which is basically rendered moot anyway because even the Japanese fans who pushed for this used "yuri" for, as you pointed out, non-explicit works, lol. Further making it impossible that Agu meant "this will be a non-horny yuri manga" when she rejected the label for the series.

last edited at Jun 25, 2022 12:07PM

Yeah I think it's more that its more gay but not horny gay which is different

That is almost certainly not the reason. You are talking about the difference between "yuri" (having horny/sexual content) and "shoujo ai" (pure stuff, not horny). The only problem is that this is a division entirely made up by the western fans. In Japan, "yuri" is used for both horny and non-horny works without any difference whatsoever (and "shoujo ai" in Japan refers to lolicon material, just for reference).

If a Japanese author does not want to use the yuri label, that decision has nothing to do with the levels of horniness in their work. The whole idea that there are separate terms for "horny" and "non horny" material within the same genre does not exist in Japan.

last edited at Jun 25, 2022 2:49AM

Just so you guys know, the author recently did an interview about this series. They posted about it today.

There was a discussion on it in the Discord server yesterday, one line in particular drew attention. The author said she would not call this manga "yuri", stating it is more a story about "affection/ friendship between girls". That said, there was some debate on whether she was talking about the story as a whole (including the parts not yet written) or if was she simply referring to the story so far and was expressing doubt as to where she would take it eventually.

A girl is fascinated by another's forehead and asks to smack it. After getting permission, she goes to town on it. I think there was a third girl present, mostly as a spectator. The word "forehead" is not in the title and we lack a Forehead tag, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Come on, they were face-to-face and she did not yet pull her mask up! Come on, manga! Are you telling me Aya is blind...
Also, all the talk we had about visual cues, but what about Mitsuki's voice? Does she alter her voice when she is working? Why would Aya not recognise the voice?

Comment by Masina with un tagged spoilers: https://dynasty-scans.com/forum/topics/18627-my-girlfriend-s-not-here-today-discussion?page=24#forum_post_787995

Looks like they've already edited in spoiler tags themself.

I mean, I might be blind, but I do not see any spoiler tags there. And there is discussion of chapters not currently on Dynasty (the two extras and chapter 8 - we are currently at chapter 6 on this site).

Adding lines to a quoted post that the original user never actually wrote. Using a sock (such bravery). Accusing a well established regular (who is also a woman, and gay) to be a homophobe. Nice going there, person lacking in common sense. You do know that the staff can track down your IP and connect it to your main account, right?

Loved your comment @Omega Deuse, totally agree with the second part.

All that aside I get really happy when I see the story gets on the top reads section every new chapter. A part of me hopes the author gets to see how many international fans this story is getting.

You better hope otherwise. Most authors are not fond of scanlation and this author mentioned stuff like that in the past. I know that sometimes people here get carried away and forget that this site is meant to be a home for illegal pirated material, but be smart, please. There was a villainess story pulled from this site just the other week because the author discovered the translation.

stocxt posted:

calling it now, the tattoo on her wrist is what will give her away. or it'll cause a misunderstanding where Aya thinks she's dating her male self and they have matching tattoos

She's already getting the sense that they have the same air/look alike so perhaps she would think they're siblings instead.... but it would be pretty bad imo if she's like "Can I see your brother?!" and it turns into a really big and complicated lie with no end in sight

I always disliked the "oh they must be siblings" gimmick... it's completely unrealistic. If you see someone who looks just like a person you know in drag/disguise, "it must be that person in drag/disguise" is the first thing anyone would think.

Even in Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes, which is from 1615, when Doña Juana has no choice but to appear in society as a woman, Doña Inés and Doña Clara immediately start suspecting that Don Gil (the bewitching man they've both fallen in love with) was actually always Doña Juana in a man's guise... and they're 100% right, lol. It was already considered an obvious reaction centuries ago!

It was kind of funny seeing her freak out about a tiny spot of nail polish, because there are far bigger clues. Like that conspicuous mole under her eye, the length and shape of her bangs, or the fact her ear has holes in exactly the same places that the "guy" from the music store has piercings in. Aya even immediately flashes in her mind to the "guy's" face the first time she actually has a good look at Mitsuki in school (note how prominently the mole and the pierced ear are displayed there).

I will actually be mildly frustrated if Aya does not connect the dots on her own, there is plenty to go on here. There is also stuff like the shape and colour of the eyes, shape of eyebrows and such. Like, if this was someone she saw masked but only in passing and then does not recognise the same person without the mask, I could buy her not realising. But with how much she stared at the masked version and given that the unmasked version is literally sitting next to her, I am beginning to think it more and more unrealistic that she is not going "wait a moment, this is the same person". Especially since she does get flashes of the "guy's" face when she looks at Mitsuki.

That memory of Makiyo being bedridden in a hospital room, hooked up on IV's, thinking "I always wanted to be free", that is quite a hefty emotional punch for a single panel. It also adds in retrospect so much weight to this, "I just want to keep living, that's all..."

I liked this a lot.

I'm a mostly new reader, I haven't read Liberty regularly since its first few chapters. I don't think this series sucks nearly as much as it's hyped up to. That said, the last 6-7 chapters are a hysterically bad ride, and I'm honestly amazed at just how unashamedly the "shocking" twists and convenient cliffhangers are abused in every single new chapter. Keep going, Izumi. You're awesome.

I suspect the reason people (myself included, of course), panned this series for ages is because we were reading it as it was coming out. Again, the unapologetic crappy dorama is something that I now enjoy with this work, and if the series started out like that, I doubt many people would have complained. The issue arose precisely because of those first few chapters, which read markedly differently than the rest of the content and which set decidedly different expectations.

I imagine said expectations are far less pronounced if the reader binges the whole thing, even more so because at this point the series has something of a reputation so even new consumers are fairly likely to be aware of what to expect. But when you read it periodically, following the release schedule, with all that time in between that solidifies your expectations (plus, you have no idea of the swerve that is in your path), it can be pretty jarring.

Yeah people are definitely mischaracterizing her here. They’re acting like she went “I know , I’ll threaten my sister and get her to give me money!” rather than what actually happened, which was the sister making up both sides of the scenario in her head and then just taking the money her sister offered her.

"Please don't tell Mom! I'll do anything!"
"*Anything?* Eh...? Alright, there is one thing I'd like from you..."

This is literally what's on the page. There's not much room for interpretation.

For the record, I, at least, am not suddenly in a position of, "Wow, I now hate this story and character." If anything I find it funny just how low she's gone. But I must acknowledge that it is horrible of her.

Essentially this. It is interesting how many people have come out of the woodwork to actually defend and outright try to excuse the main character. "Oh, the sister set up 90% of the blackmail herself", as if that is not an utterly insane position to have. Or concocting fanfiction scenarios where the sister is not bothered and is almost depicted as happy to be giving money to her "cute baby sister". (Amusingly, although there is at least one poster here who usually has issues with such fanfictional interpretations, they apparently do not have a problem if the particular fanfics are feeding into their own narrative.)

But as usual, these pious lectures always ignore the fact that in stories context matters—generic context (the expectations for a given genre), tonal context (the tone set up by a given story, including the art style as well as the writing), authorial context (how a given author usually tells stories), etc. The idea that readers of this story might be led to think that real-life blackmail is “good” is quite ludicrous.

Tonal context is the issue here, and is almost definitely the reason some people reacted strongly to this chapter. The main character was not shown doing anything as scummy as this before. Her victims were also presented rather unsympathetically (the parents), giving people even less reason to be upset. And all of this was presented in a light-hearted comedic tone. And now suddenly she is blackmailing her sister in order to get money to pay for a gay prostitute, and what is she blackmailing her sibling for? Oh, right. For being gay. Presented in the same light-hearted comedic tone.

Her actions are telling us that what she has done is repugnant, but what the tone and the cutesy art are telling us is "lololol, look how scummy she is, she like, booked a hooker immediately, how funny is that, lololol".

yeah, though to clarify, i'm like honestly happy that she's doing something scummy because it's like, finally I am getting what this story promised me. haha

My issue is that 16 chapters in is far, faaaaar too late for the story to do that. I actually expected something like this would happen when I picked up this series, because, you know, the title. But then it went on and on and on and I was never really sold on the main character being scum because that element was barely there at all.

If the author wrote her to be as scummy as she is now from the get-go, even with the comedic tone, it would have been fine. That would be the whole point of the series, and people would know what to expect and could enjoy it for what it was. Very few people would be surprised or outraged, as all of us literally signed up for this exact premise.

But then the author spent 15 whole chapters establishing the main character to not really be all that scummy, and only now swerving into what the manga was supposed to deliver from the beginning. And again, even such a swerve could have been handled better if the comedic tone that laced everything up until this point was dropped, at least for this particular scene. But nope, the author decided to have their cake and eat it too.

The combination of the main character's previous antics being less severe and the fact the tone remained the same creates the impression that the author considers this blackmail to be just as innocuous as the aforementioned previous antics. To draw a comparison with a series that otherwise has very little in common with this manga, in Liberty the love interest is a horrible and deeply unstable person without any redeeming qualities, but the way the author writes her is as though we are supposed to sympathise with her. There is a dichotomy between what we are presented with and the way the author presents it.

Essentially, it is bad writing.

the art is really nice, not too moe but not too old-school.

It actually is old-school, just not yuri old-school. The author is a yaoi artist, and it shows, lol. Long arms, large hands with long fingers, long faces with sharp features, particularly the sharp chins, it gives a rather stereotypically masculine appearance (in terms of manga looks) to the characters. Mind you, I dig this, it is good stuff.

last edited at Feb 3, 2022 5:40PM

@NexiKuro
Three big inaccuracies here. Firstly, ATLA was not cancelled early. It was not cancelled in any way. It was a critical and commercial success, and a major one at that.

Secondly, Azula's abusive upbringing was very much explored in-depth, in the comics, and how the combination of both her father and her mother's influences (although that was never her mother's intention) warped her mind.

And thirdly, TLoK never had to fear of not getting renewed. All four books of the series were approved and bought up by the network before the first episode even aired, giving massive benefits to the creators in terms of what they could now do with the story, given that the airing was secured no matter what.

In fact, it was because TLoK was bought up in advance by Nickelodeon that the show was not cancelled. TLoK's viewership declined significantly after book one and it continued to plummet all the way to the end of the series. In fact, with the third book the series received such poor ratings that mid-season it was removed from Nickelodeon's broadcast and relegated to online distribution. Under normal circumstances such a series would have likely been cancelled, but since TLoK was already approved and payed for under contract in its entirety, that was not an option.

^ Krul is a vampire and is well over a 1000 years old. Shinoa is 16.

^^^^ Hylarn said that it is not a pillow, though... I do not get what is so confusing here, her hand is beneath her head, hence why it is not seen. Because of all the hair...