I know this might sound random and possibly out of place, but I feel that Temp simply wanted to express their thoughts openly about the whole concept of S-class yuri, along with some related topics, in their essay. They probably feel content with what they said now, especially since it seems like they've asked to have their account deleted. I noticed this when I tried to click on their username to read their essay on this forum, and I also came across a comment from them on another forum requesting to delete their account. :)

Well, they chose to do it in a weird accusatory way. I hope my comments had nothing to do with them deleting because I don't want that. But you can't just show up, start acting all superior and arrogant. Aggressively push back against anyone who dares disagree, including a ton of straw men and insults. Then get surprised when people start getting frustrated.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying, the way they approached it definitely came off as confrontational. I doubt your comments were the reason they deleted, though.

As I mentioned earlier, I think pitching the whole original wall-o-text as primarily an intervention against an amorphous group of “wrong” (Western, aggressively LGBTQ, amateur) critics rather than focusing on the OP’s analytical take on the history of the Class-S genre and its contemporary manifestations, including Dear Flowers, was a rhetorical mistake, which led to a predictable series of pushbacks by commenters and then counterproductive counter-pushback by the OP.

In academia (the discourse of which the OP’s post at least emulated), if you’re going to take on a school of critics, the default strategy is to name names and quote or paraphrase the opponents’ specific arguments rather than making sweeping characterizations about past and present readers, bloggers, forum commenters, etc.

Ultimately the core of that analytical take made me think about the Class-S genre in new and, to me, interesting ways, and I’m sorry that the OP won’t be around to follow up on their ideas about that genre. (For instance, I would have welcomed hearing Temp’s take on my favorite hot-mess Class-S yuri series, Strawberry Panic! lol)

@Temp, I like your essay about this series and the contemporary Class S genre a lot, but I don't think you need to set up your insightful analytical points by means of shadowboxing with those unnamed "vulgar realist" yuri critics, which comes off as close to straw manning those arguments. I do know the kind of critical arguments you're talking about, and I may even know the names of a couple of the people who tend to make them, but you do such a good job of talking about what the Class S genre is and can be that invoking those "bad guy" critics ends up distracting from your core ideas.

So, “Sumi-chan,” where exactly did it tickle when “sempai” stripped you of your ribbon?

A fictional work that does not claim to educate on the topic of BDSM has no obligation to fulfill that function; it's not the responsibility of artists and creatives if the sex education people receive is often severely lacking. And the charge that a fictional work is misleading about BDSM requires a stronger case than just calling its story vaguely "toxic".

You know what fiction is really misleading about? Serial killers.

Serial killers in fiction are generally twisted super-geniuses with extravagant MOs that consist of leaving erudite clues in 11th-dimensional mind games with their pursuers, climaxing in the serial killers entrapping the MC detective or one of their loved ones in a torture-chamber secret base where there’s no cell-phone reception.

But the default real-life serial killer is mostly a nondescript schlubby guy (almost always a guy) who picks up marginalized people in society off the streets, kills them quickly, and dumps their bodies in remote areas.

So the connection with this story is . . . wait a minute, I was going somewhere with this . . .

last edited at Aug 3, 2025 9:00AM

Heartwarming

The cute is off the charts here.

And hero TL work.

This has been my comfort yuri for the last couple of days - it's so fluffy and cute!!! Literally NOTHING goes wrong and - even though I enjoy my fair share of toxic/doomed yuri, it felt so nice to have a series I can just fall back on and not be anxious about any drama at all while reading. I feel like this could've continued forever, way past their real marriage, but oh well. It was a really good read while it lasted

Not to even mention the relatively rare Public Transportation professional worker protagonist.

Too, too cute.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I’m getting a slight Nagori Yu hit off this one—that dynamic of the tall, knowing but benign (and slightly amused) older woman and the blushing, naive, and eager-to-please (and be pleased) younger girl.

I guess the centipede tattoo > snake goddess thing too . . .

I hate smoking. It stinks up everything, it’s dirty, and it’s incredibly toxic.

I love everything about this story. (Including the TL notes.)

And she's trusting Yuzu with her plans for the academy?

I think it’s hilarious that people are using this as an example of the opening of Mei’s character and the growing bond between the couple, since Mei only shared those plans when Yuzu accidentally found out that Mei hadn’t been telling her about those plans, even though the merger project is what was keeping Mei so busy she couldn’t celebrate Yuzu’s birthday properly.

So sure, it’s more heartwarming than a “Now that you’ve discovered my plan I must have my henchmen throw you off a cliff” response, but not exactly a sparkling example of proactive trust on Mei’s part.

Mei telling Yuzu about her plans to take over the Aihara Academy in the first place was one of the first things Mei ever shared with Yuzu that she hadn’t told anyone else. Now she doesn’t tell Yuzu what’s going on with her ambitions until Yuzu confronts her about it.

last edited at Jul 25, 2025 5:22AM

doesn't ask permission to take a photo, doesn't ask permission to submit that photo to an exhibition, the diagnostic: a creep, but one with a poor thing skin, somebody give this girl a reality check, please

Errr...she does asked permission to take the photo. However, she forgot to ask permission (or have her sign a release form) that allows her to use her photo for exhibition or event or advertising use.

The story makes an explicit point that they didn’t even have each others’ contact information, and she didn’t know the show was going to use the photo for the poster. So, yes, a procedural slip up by submitting the photo without a clearance, but “creep” . . .?

Solid manga.

Predictably disappointing comment section. ^^

A bit judge-y, ya think? Lol

From my side, adorable.

(“In comics, no one can smell your smoke.”)

kind of a shame this seems to have been dropped I was reminded of it today like so many other series that kind of just stopped getting translations.

I hope the group who used to scanlate it is at least doing well. Just sad I haven't seen more of this.

It’s finished over at MD.

From what I remember of reading the discussion on here isn't the translation on MD generally lacking? Even after all this time I've been sticking to this translation and hoping it would get updated due to hearing that.

It’s been a while, but I don’t recall the translation as being especially bad. The appeal was mostly in the visuals for me, so as long as I got the sense of what was going on, it seemed OK.

kind of a shame this seems to have been dropped I was reminded of it today like so many other series that kind of just stopped getting translations.

I hope the group who used to scanlate it is at least doing well. Just sad I haven't seen more of this.

It’s finished over at MD.

I really wish things could be simpler for these two :( It's not easy going against an entire social structure in order to live the life you want.

That comes with the territory for historical yuri (unless it’s fantasy past like in “A Love Letter for the Marching Puppy”). At least with stories set in contemporary times there’s a chance that some or all of the people around a character might either be OK with same-sex love or can be brought around to acceptance. But in period pieces, as you suggest, there’s barely a need for the concept of “comphet” because hardly anyone can even conceive of anything else.

^@ TifalovesAerith

Lord knows I’ve been as hard on the trajectory of this series as anyone, but I personally don’t get the feeling from the story that the author has lost interest or is just going through the motions, exactly. If I had to speculate (and rank speculation is all it would be), I would say that some of the author’s tendencies that have been there all along have simply metastasized. That is, Citrus became popular even though the series always had a tendency to wander, there was relatively little attention to detail and to consistent characterization, and major plot developments seemed to come out of nowhere.

You see it all the time in fantasy/science-fiction literature: a series can get “too popular to be edited,” as the books on the shelf get fatter and fatter, the plots get more convoluted, and new characters proliferate and old ones get lost or forgotten.

I do think it’s notable that for Citrus + the extras and store giveaways, etc. have a good deal more zip and overall fun to them than the regular episodes, though.

last edited at Jul 22, 2025 2:09PM

Mei’s last line strikes me as rather strange: “I want you to write me a letter.”

This comes about when Mei checks her desk to get out her calendar (the acting headmistress of one fairly large school and aspiring head of a second doesn’t keep her schedule in digital form, of course), and then gasps when she see the relic from OG Citrus, Yuzu’s homemade “lovey-dovey strategy” notebook.

I assume that we’re supposed to infer that the notebook reminds her of all the cute things they intended to do together that didn’t get done back then, so the letter is an example of such a thing.

But, given that a letter is an example of interpersonal communication, something that has been notably, let’s say “reserved” rather than “lacking,” between the two of them, wouldn’t it make more sense for Mei to write a letter to Yuzu instead of the other way around?

I’m trying not to be snarky (believe me, there are “Mei-bot OCR subroutine”-type gags scattered all over the place here), but one of the frustrating things about the series (the second one, anyway) is that Yuzu is always talking to Mei (at least burbling along in a friendly way, as she does in this chapter), but Mei has trouble communicating directly with Yuzu. So why not have Mei be the one to write to Yuzu?

I’m guessing that the next chapter (assuming that appears in my lifetime) isn’t going to start with Yuzu saying, “Sure, Mei, what do you want me to say? And why can’t I just say it by, you know, talking?” and Mei responding, “Oh, that part doesn’t matter, just make sure you dot your ‘i’s with little hearts and put drawings of puppies and kitty-cats in the margins.” But “please write me a letter” just seems odd.

Of course, wasn’t the last letter Mei wrote to Yuzu the “I’m sorry I broke your heart, but my responsibility to the Aihara Academy takes precedence” letter in OG Citrus Chapter 36? So maybe Mei-to-Yuzu is not the best place to start up a lovey-dovey pen-pal correspondence.

And unless I missed something, Kasumi herself doesn’t make any reference to her at all.

I feel like even if she doesn't mention her directly a lot of her thought processes and the emotional charge of some of the monologues is driven by the loss of that person.

https://imgur.com/a/aGUmwJx

Oh, absolutely, and that’s a great visual/textual example. But without that scene where the parents spell things out, we would have no idea that there was any such thing on Kasumi’s mind.

After a re-read of the whole story so far, it strikes me that the series is rather ambiguous as to how dark it is, or is likely to become. The very first thing we learn about Kasumi is that she puts a lot of pressure on herself to achieve academically, but we later learn that the pressure seems to be mainly self-imposed rather than coming from her parents. (I take it her grade slip of “5/192” means that she’s fifth in a class of 192, which to me, and to her dad, seems pretty high, but she calls it “barely high enough.” But we don’t know exactly “high enough” for what—the implication is that it’s about losing her scholarship, but if fifth in the class is barely good enough, that sounds like incredibly high academic standards for her second-choice school.)

She also indulges in a good bit of generalized negative self-talk: she says she’s only good for studying, and calls herself “pathetic,” and “selfish,” says she doesn’t want things to be “tainted” with her “ugliness,” and considers herself a “heartless” person. We know all that’s not true, and it’s not too far off from the standard angst of a 15-year-old high schooler, but that kind of thing is repeated so often and insisted upon so intensely that it definitely seems to amount to more than just average teenage low self-esteem.

And then there’s the dead friend. We don’t know anything about that situation except what the parents mention, and that girl was “only” a cram-school classmate rather than someone she had gone to school with for a long time. And unless I missed something, Kasumi herself doesn’t make any reference to her at all. But the cut from the reveal about the suicide to the panel of Kasumi looking at her uniform hanging on a blank background was pretty chilling, as were the hanging brooch intro panel and the “Let’s end this” closer to Chapter 4.

On the other hand, Kasumi has got a solid group of friends (Momo in particular looks like a steady rock so far), a loving and supportive family, and the interactions with her pen-pal “onee-sama” are mostly pretty cute and actually low-stakes if it weren’t for the emotional investment Kasumi puts into them.

Tl;dr: This has too much dark subtext to be entirely fluff, but overall it feels too fluffy to end up in any kind of extremely dark place.

last edited at Jul 21, 2025 3:21PM

where is height gap tag

They’ve only been standing next to each other for like two panels. Give it a minute.

It’s remarkable how commenters here care so much more about the boyfriend than the story does.

I mean, the story itself keeps bringing him up. It could have had her dump him several chapters ago; many of us thought she had given the line about her friends trying to get them back together. Instead it's being strung along for some reason. Maybe just for "ooh, cheating!" frisson, maybe something else.

No, you’re right about that. I just mean the discussion about the “proper” and ethical way to treat a character who was introduced as a scumbag and kept offstage ever since.

It’s remarkable how commenters here care so much more about the boyfriend than the story does.

Another chapter of utter nothingness in a chapter that's only 12 pages long. Wow a family dinner, one more proof that Mei is a robot and a promise of a letter. Exactly what you expect from a couple about to get married (not).

Hey! Hey! The author remembered that there’s a grandfather! That’s progress, of a kind. Well, technically it’s regression . . . But maybe someday we’ll see the Tachibana sisters again! * sob * We actually won’t, will we? Nina and Sara are probably gone forever . . .

This has been so idiotically cute the entire time that I’m actually looking forward to some kind of twist between the confession > kiss > lovey-dovey dating. Because I’m sure it will be all right in the end.