I hesitate to call the phone call a break or psychosis or ascribe it to some sort of mental illness requiring a therapist. Adachi was not socially awkward, she was actively disinterested in social interaction. She had never been hurt that she would acknowledge before. She had no friends, her mom couldn't care less about her and she, also, simply didn't care. Then, all of a sudden she cared. Deeply, earnestly, awkwardly cared, only to have that thrown back in her face it would hurt. If you look back on the chapters Shimamura may have been thinking about Adachi often and enjoyed the thoughts but never let on she was. Adachi always had to make the first move. Always had to fight against her own nature to gain any closeness to Shimamura and thus, to see Shimamura seemingly put effort into getting closer to someone else would more than sting, it would be a punch to the gut. I'm not saying Shimamura's a bad person, but she is insensitive and clueless.I think, honestly, Adachi needed Shimamura to hang up on her. Adachi needs distance.

I don't think her mom doesn't care. I think she just doesn't know how to deal with Addachi.
Addachi has mentioned being taken to things like the park (and maybe the zoo?)as a child. So it seems she did try. Mom even made an effort to spend time with Addachi after Shima insisted she do so.

Wonder where the dads are. I'm so use to anime/manga giving parents non roles that this is all the more surprising it's suddenly part of the discussion.

Shimamura seems like she gets on well enough with her dad, tbh - not super close but I don't think she's gonna go and blurt out MY DAD HATES ME like Adachi did with her mom.

As for Adachi's dad, I'm not sure we've seen him even once. With no other info to go on, I'd just assume he's a busy salaryman?

So, to make their relationship works, who needs to change, Adachi or Shimamura?

Both? Adachi could obviously stand to not have her whole entire mental fabric be so dependent on one single fallible person, but at the same time it's not really fair for Shimamura not to even attempt to match the same level of emotional investment that other people place in her - Taru, Adachi, or anyone else for that matter.

Sigh...why do I always end up rooting for the best/childhood friend...(RIP Touko x Sayaka)

Touko x Sayaka is a legend ship. Will never be forgotten. RIP.

Thank you, and yes. The legacy, and what could have been, will live on in our hearts...

She met a lovely girl in college, it all ended happily, god blessed...

I feel bad for Adachi. I really do. But this chapter was too much, even for her. I am not in any position to tell her how she feels but in my opinion, I mean, the way I see it, her feelings for Shimamura was more of an obssession than love. Rather than wanting Shimamura to be happy, she wanted Shimamura to be with her and only her, without taking Shimamura's feelings into consideration. I would not be surprised if Adachi turned into Joe-like person from You series and just put Shimamura in a cage once she get tired of Adachi. LOL, but kidding aside, all the things she said in the call are truly terrifying, so insane. Shimamura's response is understandable.

Tarumi's affection is so different from Adachi's. She is not possessive, and seems to really want Shimamura to be happy. She is the safest choice, not too bothersome. Knowing Shimamura's personality, it was natural to believe that she'd choose her over Adachi as the latter is too high maintenance. But we all know that she will go for Adachi so I'm really excited to see why and how it happened.

Thanks again team for this. Looking forward to next chapter hundred times than usual. So wanna see how their relationship will be after this.

In fairness, we only barely know Tarumi compared to Adachi, so saying she's clearly the healthier option might be tempting fate a bit, lol.

Yeah, if it were just Yashiro I could have shrugged it off because hey weird alien, but Adachi was already very clearly established as never having met Shimamura back when they were kids.

Adachi was definitely being selfish, but it’s the selfishness of someone who’s never had true agency in some regard, and that makes her more tragic than anything

I just wonder how much of it was actually clear and concise and completely understandable, given the state of mind she was in and the fact that she was pretty much sobbing/blubbering about. I'm hoping that some of the more cringe things were at least incomprehensible, and Shimamura just sat there spacing out while Adachi word-vomited everywhere. I will feel slightly less annoyed with Shima's "what a pain" and hangup on an obviously distressed friend if she basically only heard the equivalent of "adpoireupalkboiueopqiruepliajsdflkja;elrjqperijqpwerjadlkj".

Oh yeah, huh. I hadn’t even really considered that possibility.

....maaaan I really wanna get back inside Shimamura’s head...

Yeah I really like how organically all of Adachi’s disparate frustrations and fears - from her disconnect from her family to her fears about her feelings for Shimamura to her overall sense of alienation- burst out to the surface here after festering and boiling for so long

Holy... and Shimamura listened the WHOLE Adachi things. Now, I want the studio to adapt this phone call in the anime FAITHFULLY.

Lol, I’ll be shocked if it gets this far, unfortunately

I am really curious as to how this is gonna work out, though. I phrased it like a joke earlier, but Adachi genuinely needs a good therapist at this point because I don’t see how Shima is remotely emotionally equipped to parse any of what just happened. But I rather doubt that’s how this is gonna go, and we know from the series’ reputation and the fact that it has 3 more books featuring our girls looking relaxed and happy together on the covers that this doesn’t go TOO disastrously...

I feel like Adachi’s meltdown isn’t even really about Tarumi so much as it’s about having these romantic feelings she hasn’t been able to talk to literally anyone about or even entirely acknowledge in her own head for the better part of a year

You know, I almost can't blame Shimamura for her reaction. That rant would've been hard to unpack even if she were an actual professional and not an ordinary, rather lazy teenager who definitely mentally BSOD'd about two sentences in.

Holy fuck

Please get Adachi a therapist

Rather than dense, I think Shimamura's actually really perceptive. She picks up on a lot of stuff and understand most of the fine details of social interactions, but what actually might be the issue is whenever the behaviour Shimamura picks up are directed towards her. I think Shimamura is her own blind spot.

In general, she doesn't particularly perceive others nor herself as special, and just goes with the flow of these relationships being naturally created because the time and space allowed them to, and then the same relationships naturally fading away when people separate when they're no longer convenient.
Adachi and Taru don't fall into these categories of a natural flow, however.
She kinda gets that Taru and Adachi are gravitating towards her for some reason, but she doesn't know and wouldn't understand those reasons. I feel like she has a hard time pinpointing what her gut feelings and her intuition are telling her exactly because she doesn't relate to them, and finds those actions/desires strange. At best, she dissects the behaviour she observes and leaves them at that, without attributing a meaning to them if it's beyond her understanding of it.

The closest she can relate most of Adachi's actions to is her sister, and after meeting Adachi's mother, she's come to the conclusion that Adachi lacks affection and wants to be treated like a younger sister because she comes from an emotionally distant/broken home. Ever since she's settled on this explanation, I think it's further hindered her understanding of Adachi's actions, because she attributes most of her suspicious behaviour to this reason and generally falls back on it.
Other than that, when it escapes her understanding and she can't use any other experiences to explain it, in a very Shimamura-like fashion, she just accepts that Adachi/Taru are doing this and that, and just lets those things happen. Because even without understanding the specificities, it doesn't particularly bother her anyway, so there's no point in going against the flow.
"Well, whatever."

This was a good read IMO

I feel like Nettaigyo has enough of a following to warrant a feature: https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/nettaigyo_wa_yuki_ni_kogareru_ch25

Also, I fail to see the point of bringing up "Bloom Into You", that was explicitly a series about romance, it called it such since the beginning, and the whole point was that the main couple went beyond mere friends

Have you ever considered judging a work by what actually happens within the text of the work rather than whether or not a scanlator places an explicit label on it to tell you how you're supposed to feel about it

Hagino calls the story "girlship" and prefers not to label it a yuri work because, to her, the story is about the feelings that exist between our two lead girls, and she doesn't want to confine those feelings by putting specific labels or expectations on them. That's all she's said on the matter as far as I'm aware. Maybe that means they won't ever come out and kiss, maybe it means that they will but that they don't want to be simplified to just that, maybe it means any number of things. Mostly it means we should judge the text by what the text itself does rather than obsessively parsing the occasional author's tweet or bookstore genre label to tell us what we're supposed to think about the story.

It's gotten really tedious to see every thread on this story go back and forth in a frenzy of "BUT SHE SAID ITS NOT" instead of ever actually discussing the actual manga IMO

last edited at Dec 30, 2019 3:07PM

The author also confirmed this will be more of a deep friendship thing rather than romance

Except that's not what she said, but go off. All she said was that she didn't want to put a label on what Konatsu and Koyuki have because she thought it would be confining. The same idea comes up almost verbatim near the end of Bloom Into You, and I don't think anyone could seriously argue that that those characters' feelings aren't romantic.

last edited at Dec 30, 2019 12:28PM

I believe in Koyuki.

I like how messy everyone's hair is in the PV.

Isn't this the first time we see how Hino and Nagafuki look?? https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/adachi_and_shimamura_novel_ch05_3#84

Outside of the manga, I think so.

I want Taru to show Shima the GAY. She needs help getting there.

I don't specifically need it to be Taru, but the deeper we get into this thing especially knowing that they do eventually start dating the more curious I find myself getting about how Shimamura - with her attachment to the low-energy status quo and low-energy nature - is going to react when somebody inevitably comes right out and asks more of her.

You might say....that A Tropical Fish is Yearning For Snow

Edit: in all seriousness I do appreciate how, after the early volumes had Koyuki pining much more overtly and consistently for Konatsu than the other way around, we’ve finally come around to living up to the title and having Konatsu need Koyuki more than she can even process

last edited at Oct 28, 2019 2:57PM

What a good bunch of kids. Thanks again, Sneik

Yeah I wanna add to the chorus of appreciation for what the story did with Tarumi. I was expecting at least a minor love triangle, but the way it made Shimamura reflect both on her own way of interacting with other people and how she feels about Adachi vs other people was really poignant, easily the best material the story's given her yet.

The kids are alright, IMO

Yeah I'm surprisingly much less anti-Yashiro now that she mostly sticks to Shima's little sis. Which is doubly surprising as I am staunchly anti-kid in general.

I was mostly talking about Adachi and Shimamura themselves, lol, but you're not wrong either.

I feel like I've got a much better understanding of who Shimamura is now - not so much someone who's dealing with bad memories so much as she's someone who has ambivalent, complex feelings about her memories and how her relation to them changes as she naturally gets farther away from them and changes herself. It's charming.

I really can't wait until she and Adachi kiss

Thanks again to you and Sneik, I've grown very fond of this series and I wouldn't know about it all if not for y'all.

last edited at Oct 18, 2019 11:16PM

The kids are alright, IMO