Real talk though, this has been broken since before the midpoint, and I suspect the editor didn't like the yuri under/overtones so that's when the depression arc started. Ever since the manga weirdly split off from their fun on the island, it's been incredibly weird. This is blessedly going to end now. The depression arc threw me for such a huge loop. It still doesn't make any sense to me and one would likely have to go back to read and reread it to get it.
These were such good characters but I don't understand what the central conflict of this entire story was? One girl was lonely? While the other stopped talking to her all of a sudden because?
It's cool that people want to read in this ambiguous masterclass in undertone drama, guess I missed it. I don't really care for most of the replies on here, I just had to vent about how poorly this turned out after starting out so amazing. I hate that they pulled out the yuri roots and left nothing but two girls who kind of know/talk to each other sometimes when they're not busy.
This is much the same way I feel about it as well. There did seem to be a large tonal shift somewhere in the middle of the story, and then after that I found the plot and character development very hard to track. I kept having to step back 2 or 3 chapters every time a new one came out, to get caught up on what tentative threads of story I was supposed to be watching evolve from chapter to chapter. The salamander and frog imagery was frustrating to have to keep tracking in that way, and I don't feel like it delivered a very meaningful metaphor in the end. I don't personally care if the story turns out Yuri or not. But I found it increasingly hard to suss out what Koyuki's problems were, or what I was supposed to be making of all her dizzy staring into space. There is a point in there, I think, where the subtlety of the story stopped being impressive and started becoming tiresome. At the end now I find it really grating. In the middle of the story somewhere––probably around the arc the previous poster is talking about––the narrative stopped having any forward momentum, and the manga became mostly characters staring at each other with embarrassed looks on their faces, hoping for minute reactions from other characters, and reading an absurd amount of meaning into those faint acknowledgements. Honestly? It just got boring, and harder to appreciate as the author struggled to keep the story precious and delicate, and paced at the same ploddingly "realistic" cadence. I'm still reading for the characters, and essentially trying to pay off my initial investment in the series, but I feel like the series has run very long now on not much steam left. And I think the relationship between the two lead characters has very little of its' early vigor remaining. I guess that's life, or something. But I would have liked for the later part of the story to have more interest in it, and for it to be clearer in its' plotting and easier to follow. Just a little didacticism would have gone a long way. When the author started committing precious page time to Koyuki's brother, I really started feeling the drag of this thing. It's definitely a book that felt, for me, at least, sharper earlier on, funnier and more lively, and then increasingly listless as it progressed. One thing I have to say I grew to hate was the repetitive chapter headings. Holy cow, was that a clear marker of a plodding pace, and the kind of listless sleepwalking the story did late in the game.
And while I really do not mind one way or another whether it's a yuri story, it certainly seemed to be leading towards one early on, and I'm inclined to believe the idea in the quoted post that there was the beginning of a yuri story, and it got removed, or it just never quite materialized. I realize the author and made these statements about always wanting to do it this way, or that way, but authors make those kind of statements all the time, papering over their own uncertainty––or sometimes outright failure to bring about what they intend––and making it seem like this is what they planned from the beginning. I'm no more inclined to believe an author's statement of intent than I am a reader's theory on how things went. Author's statements these days are pure public relations exercises lots of the time, and it sounds to me just as likely that the author had to assuage some frustrated fans. Unless the author stated before starting the series that it was never going to be yuri. But I didn't think that was what was said. Well, whatever. In the end I just didn't get much from the storytelling aesthetics of the second half of the narrative. I feel like the pace of Hana ni Arashi has accelerated to a brisker clip than this story did, and I don't see any noble point in keeping things so turgid and low-key in the later part of the story. And like another couple of commenters on here, I just don't find myself of the same mind as the readers who have found so much continued quality in the story. I don't want to say that it "wasn't for me," because the first half of the story was very much my bag. Maybe next chapter will wrap it all up in a way that retroactively changes everything for me. But I doubt that.
I agree with everything being said here. This series lost me somewhere in the middle. It felt like reading a whole different story like the author just abruptly changed her mind and decided to aim for a different end.
