For manga they have to end on a chapter that rounds out a complete volume for example, if they go over, if they're allowed to go over, they need to go over for an entire extra volume, like what happened with Dorohedoro.

I have quite a few series on my bookshelf where the last volume is notably thicker than the others because the ending chapter(s) doesn't fit neatly into a normal volume, there's no way this is a given practice.

It can happen but it's more expensive for the publisher. I don't really know the mechanics I've just read enough author end notes talking about page counts and printing limits and such lol. There's set standard page counts for book printing and going outside those standards makes the book cost more to print. This is also why you frequently see "wasted" pages in volumes where they just print the logo or something, or authors talking about how much or how little space they have at the end of the book for an author's note. I've definitely seen authors talk about how they had to rush the final chapter so that the story's conclusion would fit on one volume.

To me the "I don't like girls, I just happen to like [name] because she is [name]" trope is just a big red flag that the writer is approaching the story from the angle of yuri as a romantic fantasy rather than homosexuality as a reality.
It's not that they're necessarily trying to be homophobic, but...

I agree with this, super annoyed by that line. Nobody in the entire human population is literally only attracted to one single person, people think stray thoughts about celebrities and beautiful strangers all the time. Our MC apparently lacking these doesn't make her any specific kind of queer person, it makes her seem hollow. She had enough self awareness in chapter two to test her feelings for Yuzu by imagining having sex with her, which was a great and very realistic feeling choice compared to the standard "how do I feel about this person compared to my other friends". And yet she's been asked out by multiple guys and never considered the difference here? It feels ridiculous, a dumb yuri trope jammed awkwardly in the script where actual personality should be.

I don't mind the kohai at all, except that it seems like we should have seen her before if she's managed to fall in love with our exclusive perspective character lol.

last edited at Aug 18, 2023 3:11AM

Everyone's always jumping to "axed" when they don't like an ending, even though this ending was basically locked in four chapters prior. Pacing an ending and ending a long form piece of media is just a difficult task lol. For manga they have to end on a chapter that rounds out a complete volume for example, if they go over, if they're allowed to go over, they need to go over for an entire extra volume, like what happened with Dorohedoro.
Given how things did feel a bit deflated by the end, I would guess this ending is the author going "I don't have enough good ideas to keep this story going but I might one day".

I just realized, the way the student council president stages deaths is very similar to the way Tokiko staged her father's death in the author's previous manga, Walk In Death (although she didn't have any sort of supernatural vision to guide it). If there really is any sort of external force causing additional fated deaths it's probably tied to him, not Satsuki or anyone she's saved.

last edited at Aug 15, 2023 4:18AM

Maybe Benika will open next chapter by shooting the head of Babylon. "One less problem, Rose-san! Let's go get that bishop next!"
Basically the manga turns into Liberta. I certainly wouldn't complain.

The story is called "I wanna quit" another translation of the title is "I wanna be fired" the way the story sets this up is about Rose leaving her job to have a relationship with Benika. What does Rose owe Babylon at this point?

The assassination of the archbishop and any church officials who had the information on the rosary. That was their original deal, iirc. Presumably Shirafune has been crossed off that target list but who knows what Rose might be paying for that. I expect the next chapters to be about confronting the church. With violence.

last edited at Aug 12, 2023 7:30PM

Anyway the world is well and truly unfair. This manga deserves a better publication than Comic Valkyrie, what the hell

What's wrong with Comic Valkyrie? I know it's not a high class magazine but afaik they're a common avenue for yuri mangaka who otherwise wouldn't get published to get paid. Odoro Dorothy was just posting comics on Pixiv and twitter before this.

I would predict that scene with Komachi, the "secret meeting," is meant to look sinister but will turn out to not be. I really do believe Seo's a good person now.

Good God what a chapter! With how Dorothy-sensei is drawing connections between things, I wouldn't be surprised to learn
A) the ghost little girl heard crying at the beginning of the chapter was the same one that Michi saw as a child
B) The hand that grabbed senpai's ankle on the mountain was the same that grabbed Michi's in the storage shed

That little ghost girl was missing her eyes. The storage shed ghost had way too many eyes. When the image of Aizawa got corrupted when Michi called out to her, her eyes have been particularly separated from her face, one pulled to the top right and the other to the bottom left. Michi and senpai can both see ghosts and share a special fuzzy eye design nobody else has. There's definitely something very specific in the plot going on wrt eyes and/or eyeballs. I would guess the too many eyes ghost and not enough eyes ghost are directly related.

last edited at Aug 11, 2023 8:32AM

This manga is great, I love unique narratives like this and it's executed extremely well. Hot take, but I don't think there's actually any cheating in this manga. Not even Mitsuki kissing Nanami before breaking up with Jun, because as soon as she does one thing she immediately goes and does the other. She never tries to "cheat" Jun: when her feelings become undeniable, she makes a choice. She does not try to have her cake and eat it too as you might see in, for example, "Indigo Blue".
It's fascinating to me that some people loved this ending and others hated it, some think it's a happy ending and others a miserable one. I think it's great, with one important thing missing: a continued friendship between our main characters. It's the thing "How Do We Relationship?" has that makes it feel the most like real life queer experiences than any other manga. In my experience queer people are way more likely to be friends with exes than straight people and it's something that makes me happy. Wish it was here, but great manga otherwise.

Love is not about what you deserve. It's about what you feel for another person and what they feel for you. You don't need to "earn" the right to be in love and express that love. It's sort of a central theme of the entire manga lol. And god what an incredibly good manga it is.

wrt the trans theories, I think it's intentionally written as ambiguous on the part of the author, and personally the trans explanation for Maya's motivations and changes makes the most sense. She was very butch presenting in high school, and over time as we see her in different points of her life in the various short little flashback snippets we see, she gets more and more feminine. If she was a cis woman, this change in appearance would perfectly align with her boxing herself up and molding herself for social expectations to avoid being hurt, rather than her personal desires for how she wants to be. However, if that were the case, she'd be back to being butch in the epilogue, where she's decided to be who she wants to be rather than what society expects she should be. Instead she's more femme than ever. Maya being trans just fits so well with the things she experiences, the things she feels, and the framing of a bunch of things in her life that are left far more vague than Michiru's past is.
Also a bunch of smaller details rather than overarching character analysis: 1) She's flat chested in high school and in the story's present has the biggest bust out of any character in the manga 2) That extremely important high school memory with the Prez is about playing Viola from 12th Night, a girl who has to pretend to be a boy but gets to transform into her true self as a girl at the end. That's a super clear metaphor lol. 3) In between when we last see her as flat chested and a few years later when she's not, she was "overseas" for some time, during which time her parents disowned her by removing her name (the one those parents gave her) from the family registry.
All of this is potentially deniable. But I don't know why anyone would be particularly motivated to bother when it's a better story when all these pieces fit together rather than just being random haphazard details. :P

The woman at the start of the chapter is definitely a teacher, they even frame the scene with a panel showing the "staff room" sign at the start. Maybe there's a title for a teacher similar to a student council president, like a related kanji or something. Maybe we'll all learn something thanks to this! Fun! :)

The only reference to Mitsuki's family I can find is a photo from the first page of Rhythm B, where she's posing with a man in glasses who might be a dad (or maybe Joe just used to wear glasses). As she's leaving somebody yells at her to "leave the headphones here!" but there's no hint at who said it. She's leaving a house with the family name outside.

Maybe Im reading this part wrong "Joe just used to wear glasses" since english is not my native language but Joe, since the start of the manga, was using glasses; it's now from an illustration first and this chapter that we can see him without it.
And the Kanji that we see in the first page of Rhythm B says "Elemetary School" (I think this is what is called in english, if not, the last kanji is the one for "school").

Just saying this to say that indeed we don't really have strong evidence of what are Koga´s parents situation, just Koga in chapter 8 when arrives to her home, we can see from her attitude that "no one cares that she is in home"; but it doesn't gives us anymore info from what we know now

Ah, thanks for the info on that label, it just looked to me of the family name plates I sometimes see by the gates of homes in anime, but I can't read it and I made an assumption without realizing.
I haven't checked everything but as far as I can see Joe sometimes wears sunglasses, they don't look like what's in the photo in Rhythm B. The guy in the photo also has much shorter, neater hair than we've ever seen from Joe. Possible he tried to go square at some point but the guy in the photo just has dad vibes to me and looks like he could easily be Joe's brother.

last edited at Jun 27, 2023 9:56AM

The only reference to Mitsuki's family I can find is a photo from the first page of Rhythm B, where she's posing with a man in glasses who might be a dad (or maybe Joe just used to wear glasses). As she's leaving somebody yells at her to "leave the headphones here!" but there's no hint at who said it. She's leaving a house with the family name outside.
In the comic's present though she's definitely living above the record shop now, not at that house. Whatever happened to her bio parents or her relationship to them, it seems pretty thoroughly over. I would suspect they're alive but shitty. This would give Joe a reason to not leave her, while making it hypothetically possible for him to leave for the question to be on the table.
If she was orphaned and in his care I don't think it would even be treated as a possibility for him to deny.

I'm not even sure where you'd get the idea that Narita is straight. His interactions with girls were entirely about him exploiting their attraction to him to get stuff from them. This did not include any hint of sex or romance, just like ... homework answers and favors. He changes from this selfish approach only after realizing two girls in his class are probably gay and he wants to encourage that. I'd way sooner assume this boy is himself gay than straight. "Guy who flirts with women only to get stuff from them but is really into homosexuality instead" is a pretty common BL character archetype even.

Also, I don't think Koga's behavior is nearly as "accidental" as it may seem. Remember that she heard Aya repeatedly talk about how much she likes a guy, even if she was mistaken in that gender assessment. And Koga's already a very low self esteem person, although she's getting better. She's probably still operating under the impression Aya is straight and so Koga gets close to her in little ways that are plausibly deniable. This is a pretty common GL trope lol

last edited at Jun 11, 2023 8:58PM

The president's claim about more and more people dying and intervening mostly being bad flies in the face of an earlier plot point as part of his introduction, that this school used to be terrible and full of bullying but then pres came and a lot of people went missing and suddenly everything's peaceful. There's a lot of causes we don't have a full picture on yet before we can start estimating what contributed to what effect, lol.

Using Google translate to get the romanji says "Romansu janai aijō". While I don't know what connotation the English loan word "romance" has in a Japanese context I know that word it's contrasted with there, "ai," is a pretty serious and unambiguous romantic love. Not a word you'd use for friends with subtext lol.

Um, hang on a moment. Evie's currently rescuing Elsa from imminent death from exposure. Which, the previous version wouldn't have done, would she? Would she have even been on the scene? So, why was Elsa alive in the original timeline?

I know, I know, don't sweat the small time paradoxes.

There's been a hint already that baby Elsa isn't acting like she would be if the time travel didn't happen, with that scene of her looking out the window saying "it feels like someone's calling my name". She also cast that eye gouging spell and for Evie the only reason she was using real magic at this age was due to her future memories of education coming back in time with her.

I think we can safely assume on the timeline portrayed in the game, Elsa did not pick a fight with the slaver and lived for them all to make it to the orphanage some other way. This Elsa we're seeing is externally influenced in some way that breaks from that plot.

This was such a fascinating manga. Someone in this thread compared it to Junji Ito and that feels apt because it all makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a horror manga. And framed as a horror manga, this ending was actually a good one. Riko's feelings and behavior towards Sae were practically a curse and in the end Sae realizes it and breaks the curse. Hopefully she'll move on and find much better people to be around, far, far away from Tomie Jr. over here.

The people putting labels or moral judgements on Rose's relationship to Benika feel like they're extremely jumping the gun. We don't really know much about Rose or her history but it's likely she's young and even less mentally mature in relationship matters than Benika is due to her personal history. They basically got a Bronya and Seele thing going on, except Bronya and Seele actually kiss and these two just hold hands in the park. How scandalous lmao

last edited at May 14, 2023 4:55AM

I seriously doubt Senpai's supposed ignorant act. She'd be able to tell other people can't see what she sees at some point, she put her hand on Aizawa's shoulder, and she definitely stopped Michi from asking more questions that might lead to Kasumi realizing she was not herself for a moment there with the possession. She'd have to be a very good actor for her poker face this chapter to hold up but I find that more plausible than her just thinking everything she sees is mundane.

Edit: the thing about Kasumi and Michi having a first meeting that Michi doesn't remember means that at their "first" conversation, Kasumi calling Michi "Michi-chan" was foreshadowing this whole time. This manga is so good lol. This would also imply that whatever was possessing Michi at the time was posing as her and could talk, unlike Aizawa.

last edited at May 14, 2023 3:40AM

Miho bullies Komachi but stopped 1 year ago. Seo was Miho's partner in crime and probably bullied Komachi too. Something happened between Miho and Seo that led to Seo wanting to kill Miho, and also seemingly may have given Seo suicidal tendencies. There's reasonable room to think this little devil-horn-hairclipped weirdo was involved. It could give us some backstory, and also answer if Komachi was ever accomplice to Prez's murders.

Why would Komachi pursue revenge against Seo when she doesn't for Miho? Komachi doesn't seem to think she deserves to not be bullied.
Also this is a completely biased reason but I find it very difficult to believe this cutey is actively malicious.
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/liar_satsuki_can_see_death_ch09#2

Yep, that settles it, Komachi has the makings of a psychopath.

I don't think that's true. She's passively suicidal and doesn't understand people, but she's not evil. She isn't what the word "psychopath" implies, and I don't think she lacks empathy entirely.

Yeah she's obviously not uncaring, just coming from a real dark place. She's far from a psychopath, her care for others is actually the only thing keeping her alive by the sounds of it, and she's repeatedly shown care for Satsuki, Akira, and the class president girl. But clearly whatever is eating her is getting worse and I think there is a clear hint what in this chapter: she thinks a child or teenager dying causes less suffering than an adult dying due to having "a family and a job". That's an extremely abnormal perspective because for most people it's obvious the grieving of parents is no less than any other relations... But it would be understandable coming from someone who personally has reason to think their parents wouldn't care if they died, right?

"the story will not be yuri"
Yeah, uh-huh.

There's a lot of people, Japanese lesbians especially, who have problems with "yuri" as a genre and the term's all encompassing use and the trope baggage it carries. There's a lot of people who feel the same way about calling any m/m story "yaoi". I don't think there was ever any chance this story wasn't gay, considering the author and everything about their twitter profile ("I love the love of women" in the description, almost all the art is of two women kissing or otherwise being romantic, etc), not to mention everything that's been happening in the story at every turn lol. It's just not being told within the predefined box of a specific genre.

She's also fought with that teacher over her "bad behavior" in the past, Akira's introduction to the manga is her storming out of his class and kicking the door down on her way out.