I enjoyed this first chapter. It's so rare for a romance manga to start with a confession, and then have the conflict arise from both parties trying to navigate what to do while already in a relationship. That in and of itself is enough to make me want to read it, and the characters and artstyle are all very cute.

God Flowerchild was cooking with white-hot flames when writing these chapters. This is some of the hottest content I've ever seen. Misa and Io are so effectively characterized with a bare minimum of exposition, and their respective massive character flaws match up so well together. Normally I would worry after we already got watersports in chapter 3 but I trust Flowerchild to be able to continually top herself in each subsequent chapter. Really, really looking forward to more!

Still one of the best oneshots/twoshots I've ever read

It's curious how it changes from a colored long-format format to a black-and-white page format. Why the heck is that?

A unique way of indicating it's a flashback.

I don't quite understand the conflict here. If the blind girl doesn't know what the brother likes she could just say anything. Just tell her your favorite foods.

The conflict is that Hana hates herself because she thinks she's the reason her brother died. Recall she was a second away from literally committing suicide in chapter 1 before Lily (inadvertently?) stopped her. She's not just doing this "become Kaoru" plan for Lily's sake, she's doing it as a form of suicide. By symbolically killing off "Hana" she can atone for her (self-perceived) sin by reviving "Kaoru." That's why she can't lie.

Anyway, I thought this chapter was good. It's not a perfect manga; it gets a little repetitive/slow in places and it leans too heavily on exposition sometimes, and Lily is a pretty flat character so far. I'm definitely curious to see where the current cliffhanger will lead, hopefully it won't just be a return to the status quo. I also am harboring a pet theory that Lily already knew or guessed Kaoru was dead from the beginning -- we already know he told her he was sick, after all -- and started treating Hana as him as a way to take revenge for Kaoru's death before genuinely coming to care for her as they interacted. It seems unlikely at this point but it would at least make her a much more interesting character.

Even if it is one person torn between two, those two are also connected as love rivals, thus forming a triangle.

rivalry is the purest form of love after all

I'm not sure what the hell just happened. I get that Collin's dad is one hell of a pervert pedophile bastard. But what I don't get is what's going on between Mary and Collin. Is Collin inadvertently continuing the cycle of abuse with Mary? Is Mary just feeling Isolated by keeping Collin's dark secret? Or am I misunderstanding the plot completely.

Yeah, as previous posters especially @YamYammi has pointed out, I think she's basically treating Mary the same way her father treated her, minus the rape of course. Colin, like her father, is coping with her intense loneliness and depression by lovebombing and emotionally entrapping the one single person they've decided to form a codependent relationship with. We can't blame Colin for doing this, of course, since she's a young child and has gone through unimaginable trauma (which is still ongoing!), but that's what's happening. Mary feels so lonely because this isn't actually what she wants. She wants to go to school, make friends, have a real relationship with her mother, and attain a normal life. Instead she feels like she has no choice but to isolate herself from everything, skulk around her town out of sight, and act like everything's fine when she knows very well what Colin is going through and that the current status quo cannot last, because if she doesn't do those things she'll lose the only person whom (she thinks) is actually willing to interact with her.

It's really really fucked up!!!

(Fantastic manga though, it's the rare work of fiction about an extremely dark subject that's actually earning the right to discuss that subject.)

Even if she's making out with the guy, from the 5 chapters we've seen, she's ALWAYS thinking of the other girl. Like they're always thinking about each other (and music). Even in this chapter she's thinking of the other girl as she's kissing the guy...

I really don't get why people are so impatient with this series when imo this is very clearly yuri. Even people who have read ahead is assuring us it's yuri so I just don't understand the complaints. Seriously guys we're only 5 chapters out of over 100 and I know people have been far more patient with series that drag on slower than this one >_>

Honestly, it's because there's a guy prominently involved. Any bisexual love triangle where the guy is presented as a serious option gets this reaction here, whether it's this manga, the new Murasakino manga, Lemonade, or even Run Away With Me, Girl. A certain subset of yuri fans is ideologically opposed to the presence of men in their yuri as anything but an obvious antagonist or a "yuri danshi" type, even in cases where it's super obvious from the beginning it won't end het -- and I agree with you, even without hearing spoilers (or, you know, reading the title lol) the manga has been laying heavy hints that Aikawa cares for Katagiri much moreso than the guy.

Anyway, my defense of this manga isn't "it's only beginning" but that even just the five chapters translated at the moment are extremely high-quality. Katagiri and Aikawa are both interesting, complex characters, and their personalities have been communicated through their actions and not exposition. Aikawa in particular I find very compelling; her natural love of music ground down by the expectations of her family and the restrictions placed upon her playing, she now finds herself without passion or interest and is desperately looking for something she can earnestly devote herself to. I particularly like how Katagiri and Aikiwa's love for each other is combining with their mutual inferiority complexes to ironically create tension in their relationship; they both put the other on a pedestal and so neither feels like they can be honest with the other. This manga is accomplishing a rare feat of tying together each of their individual character development with their relationship, so that both can only grow as people inasmuch as they come to understand the other and so grow closer. Really looking forward to future chapters!

But it's an arc that really needed to take place over multiple chapters; in a normally paced story Lillian would be the antagonist of the entire first volume, not just this single chapter.

I'm wondering if we're speedrunning tropes and story beats because the story needs to fit in only one volume or something.

Possible, but unlikely I think. Chapter 3 is too early for the manga to be axed, and if it was originally planned to be only one volume, I don't think they would've done such a plot-heavy premise. If I had to guess, the mangaka has a vision for how they want to end volume 1 and they need Lillian to be an ally for it to work, so they had to speedrun Lillian's "redemption arc" to get her character where it needs to be in time.

It is a shame because, again, I think this arc could've worked very well with more time spent on it and a couple more editing passes. Show us Lillian and Evris's friendship so we can actually feel the weight of both Lillian's "betrayal" and her reasons for doing so. Reveal that Lillian deliberately manipulated Evris and Ciel into meeting for the first time, to deal with a previous poster's complaint that Lillian's plan relied on a huge coincidence. Establish some real stakes so that Ciel has a reason for following Lillian's demands other than...actually I'm honestly not sure why she felt the need to prove herself to Lillian lol. Maybe set Lillian up as more overtly antagonist at first so her true motivation comes as a twist at the end. Hell, bring Mark along too so that we can (a) learn how exactly he knows that Ciel is a woman and (b) show us that Lillian has him on a leash instead of just being told that in exposition. I can imagine in my head a version of this arc that's legitimately very good, unfortunately I just don't think that's the version we got.

Really enjoyed this oneshot. While the premise (A is so good at sex it makes B fall for them) is quite well-worn, somehow this manga executes it well enough to make it believable and compelling to me. The combination of art and dialogue worked together to emphasize that it wasn't just the doctor lady's sex skills that made the succubus fall for her, but also the genuine kindness and respect she showed even after learning the succubus is a literal demon. Of course the art just being fantastic in general helped a lot too.

Best part of course was the smol succubus's eyeball hair accessories, best character design element I've seen in a while unironically.

last edited at Sep 9, 2023 10:34PM

Extremely charming and delightful, this manga has a real flow and energy to it that kept me engaged the entire way through, which is pretty rare even for a oneshot. Really looking forward to the mangaka's future work.

(And the black-haired girl absolutely knew exactly what she was doing lol.)

University Arc chapter is insanely good, it almost feels like the rest of the manhua was just setting up this flashback

I find it kind of funny that this is the chapter that caused a bunch of Dynasty commenters to turn on the manga when I think it's very much in line with chapter 1, which was also a relatively mediocre trope-fest that relied on the reader's knowledge of the villainess genre to paper over the rough edges. So far chapter 2 is the outlier, unfortunately (though of course with only three chapters there's still plenty of time for it to return to the quality of chapter 2).

To be fair, there are the bones of an interesting concept in this chapter, of Lillian being in love with Evris but so caught up in comphet that instead of helping Evris herself she arranges a scenario for Evris to be "rescued" by a prince who then proceeds to take care of her every need, only to learn not only that (a) there's more possibilities than compulsory heterosexuality but also (b) true love is between equals who help each other out. But it's an arc that really needed to take place over multiple chapters; in a normally paced story Lillian would be the antagonist of the entire first volume, not just this single chapter. Not sure what caused the decision to stuff it all in this chapter instead, but hopefully it means we'll get to explore the Evris/Ciel dynamic more in subsequent chapters, which is the biggest strength of the manga.

but I really appreciated how unflinchingly it depicted what the real results would be of someone being flung forward in time seven years.

don't you think that in these supernatural type stories, the most realistic thing would be the police and government getting involved? people always seem to accept the supernatural, instead of doing science. some sort of paranormal stuff is going on. imagine if that happened in your town right now. that person would be experimented on by the military within a week of the local authorities finding out about it.

i'd like to see that type of story once in a while.

look forward to my new gender bender romantic comedy manga coming out soon:
i suddenly woke up as a girl one day and now the government is trying to experiment on me

Well, I was more talking about the personal, psychological consequences. Exploring the global consequences of supernatural events being proven to be true also makes for an interesting story, just a much different one lol.

Gives us a few pieces of the puzzle. Aya was last seen the day of the Tanabata Festival, but Aya remembers it being the day before the festival when she ends up in the future. Erika supposedly had a conversation of some kind with Aya on the day of the Tanabata Festival, and may be the last person who saw her before she disappeared. But, Erika is also curious about what Aya did after leaving said conversation, so it's unlikely (but NOT disproven) Erika was directly involved.

Good catch. Given the Tanabata theme, it could be a wish Erika wrote and hung up on the bamboo. She must have been tormented with guilt ever since, in that case.

This reappeared Aya seems to be fully functional and capable of independent feeling and thinking, and also corporeal enough for a check up at hospital, so I think we can rule out the "ghost" and "Koto's and Erika's projection" theories.

Of all the theories posted so far, this is the one I like the best. Erika literally murdering Aya, as a previous poster suggested, seems just a bit too dark/edgy for this sort of manga, but Erika making a Tanabata wish for Aya to "go away" or similar seems like a much more plausible thing for a heartbroken and jealous 14-year-old to do. Another piece of supporting evidence is that Erika believed Aya was alive this whole time, even though the normal assumption after a young girl has been missing for years would be that she's dead. It would also help explain her somewhat contradictory actions in this chapter: she goes out of her way to help out Aya and observes how, with the benefit of hindsight, Aya wasn't really an untouchable existence like she seemed at the time but a fragile teenager just like her; at the same time, however, she continues to display some jealousy and resentment, unnecessarily bringing up Aya's dead grandfather and lying that she doesn't know how Koto feels about Aya.

(And yeah, I highly doubt Aya is a ghost or projection: we see her taking a shower, changing clothes, etc. Maybe there'll be some huge twist but right now all signs point to time travel.)

Now, moving on from Erika speculations, I'll say that the thing I liked the most about this chapter is how seriously it's treating its ridiculous premise. It's so common for manga to just play stuff like this for comedy, but I really appreciated how unflinchingly it depicted what the real results would be of someone being flung forward in time seven years. Aya has been forcibly removed from everything she once knew; her friends have grown up, her home's no longer there, and her grandfather died without her even being there. It's an incredible trauma that she can't even really grieve because she wasn't around for it all to happen to her. Erika asks why Aya thought now was the right time to say she was dating Koto, but I think it was because Aya is desperately trying to retain whatever scraps she can of the world she used to exist in. While she continues to be a mysterious character in many ways, all this does a great job of making her compelling to me. In that sense, the biggest weakness of the manga so far is Koto, who is far less interesting than both Aya and Erika, but hopefully the next chapter will give her more of a spotlight so we can have a better sense of what Adult Koto is like.

I love the visual language of shoujo manga and am distressed that yuri with this aesthetic is pretty much confined to oneshots.
Well, it's nostalgic, though. Good old quarterly Yuri Hime days.

Morinaga Milk uses an ultra-shoujo style for all her yuri works

I'm annoyed that Mashiro hasn't shown us her scumbag side at all yet. Instead the main character just becomes more ignoble. Like come on Mashiro. Mashiro must have the worst self esteem going for the protagonist, instead of all those other women that she sleeps with, and they're probably also in love with her too.

honestly, extremely nice and self-sacrificing people like Mashiro could use a scumbag like Makino to fight for their self-interest when they need it.

which is why i'm not worried about Junichi. nobody can out-scum Makino. she is the queen scum!

I like how the title is a plot twist: you think the "cute girl" is the popular girl but in the end it turns out to be the introvert

Isn't it both?

That works too!

I like how the title is a plot twist: you think the "cute girl" is the popular girl but in the end it turns out to be the introvert

this remains one of the best ongoing manga period

I wanted to like this, but I just don't feel this one.

Calling this original would be a stretch, there are quite a few manga out there where the protagonist meets a past version of his/her love (Ashita Dorobou would be one), and this one feels very rushed, and the time travel just feels forced.

Fam already decided its time travel, rushed, forced and inferior to other mangas from a single chapter lmfao

It's very possible for a single chapter to be rushed/forced, I just don't see how that criticism applies to this chapter. It spent a great deal of time establishing the characters and their relationships. The time travel (or ghost or whatever it is) was revealed at the very end because that's the cliffhanger/plot twist/hook.

So I actually found a couple websites where you can purchase all the remaining chapters of this manga (33 in total) electronically:

https://mechacomic.jp/books/45804

https://sp.handycomic.jp/product/index/title_id/100010820

Both sites would cost 1100 yen (~11 dollars) to read all remaining chapters. The quality of the free chapter I accessed was pretty bad, but they are there.

I don't mind paying this myself, but I was thinking ideally someone could provide raws for a scanlation group so we can finally get the rest of this manga in English, and I've never provided raws before. I would be willing to translate the remaining chapters if any scanlator/group would be willing to do everything else. If you're interested, send me a friend request on Discord (I'm cogito3). Thanks!

Kurumi is such a troll lmao

i find it funny that mc didnt want to wingman lil sis marrying her sister bc she herself likes lil sis and not bc shes opposed to incest or anything
when you combine that with the fact that lil sis started avoiding her sister bc shes self conscious around her and not bc shes like "oh shit incest thats not cash money" leads me to believe that incest is a non issue in this world

i'm not sure if you can conclude from "these two batshit yanderes don't care about incest" that "incest is a non-issue in this world." though if the sister too is also a batshit yandere (50/50 chance) then it won't really matter either way lol.

Ooh, interesting. I quite liked The Girl Through the Viewfinder from this author, and this is a really intriguing start. I was genuinely surprised at several points -- the revelation that Koto had already confessed to Aya two months ago, that Aya didn't intentionally ditch Koto but rather disappeared, and of course the page at the end. I think Koto's timidity, Erika's jealous inferiority complex, and Aya's mysterious aloofness with a hint of sadness were all very well depicted too, with barely any exposition which is always nice. It's a unique premise and setup and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Middle school x university student is a bit too much for me if this where it's going

Kabocha hasn't done age gap in the past so it's a little hard for me to believe that'll be the ending. Then again, the explicit comparison of Koto and Aya to Orihime and Hikoboshi (not to mention to the president and her ex-boyfriend turned fiance) suggests that it will. Maybe we'll get some more time travel shenanigans to resolve this? On the other hand, the title of the manga is How to Break a Triangle, so Erika will presumably play a large role in the story as well, as something more than just "the friend with a crush on the MC who loses." Impossible to say right now, the manga is deliberately avoiding common storytelling conventions.