NO, nonono don't twist my words, I don't hate people who sleeps around, I hate people who plays with other person's feelings... She hurt the girl that rainy day, she made up some lie about having a girlfriend to get rid of her, she was playing around WITH HER.

Huh, we know literally nothing about that situation. She says they had sex once, and when she turned her down afterwards, that Rainy Girl didn't believe her. How's that playing with her feelings? She's made up the girlfriend to be clearer that there's no chance for her ... playing with her would have been stringing her along for a while in the hope of sleeping with her again or something.

Of course, we don't know anything about what ultimately lead to them having sex in the first place, which is the crucial part.

So, IMO seems weird to judge her for that.

Do we even are sure it is light novel? (...) Either way, light novel are not meant to be trash.

Light novel categorization is fairly arbitrary. Twelve Kingdom isn't. Haruhi or Spice & Wolf are. Whatever. It's how it is; and this one is one, I'm fairly sure.

And you are right, they aren't supposed to be trash. They usually aren't written to win literature prizes either, though (well, except for light novel prizes ^^). Gotta adjust expectations, esp. if it's smut.

It introduced and developed its main character nice and it flowed well for the most part. It had few flaws I mentioned already, but overall it did a good job at doing what it set out to do. And if we consider it being part smut, it did good job on 1 out of 2 sex scenes.

Well, I disagree. I don't think it did a particular good job at any of this. A barely passable one, maybe ;)

That is more what I meant before, there is no 1 set way to judge whatever something is good or bad. It's all subjective and will work differently depending on person.

IMO that's too often an excuse for bad fiction. "It's all subjective!" Well, it is, but so's everything else. "Killing is bad!" is subjective.

There's plenty of reasonable criteria you can use to judge a book. And separate a good one from a bad one (not saying that I'm an expert on it, because I'm not. But still ...).

Also, that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy bad fiction. I certainly do often enough. But it's like eating candy; I can still acknowledge that it's bad food and if that I only ever eat candy I'll get sick and starve and die ...

I'm curious which LN tropes you meant exactly, as I failed to notice self insert otaku ...

Heh. Well, that'd be all the new isekai harem trash. You wouldn't get me to read one of those if you put a gun on my head (well, you might, depends on how stubborn I am that day and whether the gun is loaded).
But it's still - like the Tree of Origin. Human-elf racism. The princess. Pseudo-medieval-fantasy setting. Bla. The one thing that gets a pass I'd say is the curse. Not that that's not done before too, but it's not such a completely overused aspect.

Besides, while the otaku isn't self-inserted, I feel fairly safe in claiming that this was nonetheless targeted at a male otaku readership. Their role this time is just voyeurism instead of self-insertion (not saying that's anything bad, just sayin').

I agree that there are a lot of debatable plot points if closely examined, but if taken as just a light read I thought it was pretty fun.

Except when you didn't even bother to check quality, because you assumed all books are the same and not worth your time.

And if you are going to argue, book is not just its first line, but entire thing, so if you judge it based on 1 sentence it is the same as basing it on its cover.

Both true. But that doesn't cover more people than those that are praising it, so I'm still not buying the "everyone these days is just too lazy to read!" statement; at least among those that bothered to comment it seems people are pretty fine with reading and enjoying it ;)

It makes for a good read if you take it for what lightnovels are: light reading

Yeah, and that's why I wasn't sure how critical I wanted to be - the translation at least is clearly not at fault (compared to some others). But I have read a lot of light/web novels. And there's still a large difference between something that at least makes up for simple prose and run-away pace by being original, by being tense, by taking surprising twists and turns ...

This is just a bit of porn with a bunch of classic LN tropes. And even for porn there's better. Well. Minus the cute illustrations, maybe.

So as I thought. Just too lazy to read a book. People nowadays really are spoiled rotten.

When people read something that basically starts with "Look at them trees, being all green and shit." and praise it for it's quality I wouldn't exactly call them spoiled. More like ... generous. Undemanding. Charitable.

last edited at Jul 25, 2018 11:06AM

They are both getting married to a guy and just coincidentally ran into each other at the registry office; regretting that they missed their chances and ruined their life.

That's my interpretation and I'll stick with it.

Don't remember all the details from the first part, but this was a fitting snack to accompany my morning coffee. Same bittersweetness. Good stuff.

And wth is a thief if not for people taking stuff without paying or permission? A elf doesn't change crap. U steal stuff, ur a thief. End of story.

Best scene. "I'm breaking into this house to steal food. Hopefully I won't get caught." gets caught "I'm not a thief! How dare you accuse me of thievery!"

I wonder whether it's some language thing. Like some thief <-> robber <-> criminal sort of thing, where the connotations (/ precise meanings might be different.

Guys, if you're that bothered by it, imagine you're reading long, descriptive speech bubbles?

I typically don't. If a manga needs to resort to infodumping panel-bursting speech bubbles it's doing something wrong. All manga should be like, say, Emma (or Shirley, which is more gay), and convey 90% of their meaning without even having any text at all.

(e: but to clarify, that's got no relevance to LNs. I've read dozens of yuri ones. Never mind "proper" novels .. more than I can count. But that is that and this is this ^^)

last edited at Jul 23, 2018 4:29AM

I'm expecting a second page where there's some insane speech about embarrassment and nudity and Ryuuko just rips off her entire tux to power up.

Meh. Feels misplaced here. I guess if it's the start of yuri webnovel and lightnovel translation it'll stop feeling out of place at some point, but right now it's weird.

And then the text is just there as pictures so if you have trouble reading with normal fonts you are essentially screwed. So if this is done then I think an alternative way of posting these things should be looked into ^^;

All of the things above, plus there's a wide range from "I don't really like this all that much right now" to "I hate this so badly I'd literally rather die than read it". It's like 5 minutes wasted per chapter if it doesn't work.

And, I mean, I get it can be annoying if people keep nagging and you just want to enjoy something, but at the same time discussion threads that are an endless collection of "ha ha this is so great" "wooa awesome" "I totally ship them!" and bla are frankly equally pointless. At least here are opinions divided and there's a little bit to discuss ^^;

Or maybe different people have different tastes and this simply doesn't appeal to some readers?

Oh yes.

But not for the yuri. Just for the lulz.

I feel somewhat uncomfortable with characters that have their eyes closed most of the time, because I feel as if they're impossible to see through and that they're cunning.....

That type exists - like Xellos, or Hayami in Minami-ke - but a lot of those characters are surprisingly benign. Like Yachiyo in Working or the Kazuho in Biyori. So it's more like ... they are either cunning or very harmless.

I'd say it's clear where the teacher belong. Hm. Well. Kind of. I suppose she's dangerous in one specific way ;)

Well, as long as she's just giving her something nice, not taking something from her ...

Frankly, that's pretty much what's saving it. It gets literally everything wrong, presumably not even trying, so you can just go "well, must be on purpose, basically." If it got 90% right but made those other stupid errors it'd just be bad. This way it's trashy fun ^^

I was wondering if anyone could help me with a manga i read a long time ago and wanted to reread.
I believe it was a 4-koma manga, one of the main characters loved dogs, and was very cat like while the other loved cats and was very dog like. I believe their names featured Inu and Neko in some way as well.

Probably Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san.

And yet, Oshikko Sensei has only 51 comments. Go figure.

She's a medical professional. She knows what she's doing.

Laika, Pavlov, Pochihachikou and The Real Her can both meet your needs.
Look with your special eyes!

SM is not the same as being mentally ill ^^;

Well LPP though ... right. True. Doesn't mean there can't be another manga like that ;)

Amazing. This chapter made all around even less sense than the first, and it's also now proven that everyone involved is certifiably insane.

Well, somehow still kinda fun.

"Goddamnit, I just never fit anywhere with those ears!"

Also perplexed by this idea that having normal, friendly social relations with the opposite sex somehow inherently lessens the yuri, as if it was something too fragile to survive outside grossly artificial hothouse contexts like all-girls boarding schools or something...

Well, it's a question of balance and tight plotting; the way I see it. As random example, in quite nice Cross Game we've got a baseball anime, right, and it's "a bit" about the relationship between the protagonist and the heroine, of course, but even though both go to school and generally also do other things the only scenes we ever see is them playing baseball, practicing baseball, talking to each other, or talking to other people when there's some relevance to baseball or potentially to the "main" relationship. And that series got a whole 50 episodes, so it's not even short.

This is not because baseball cannot survive outside training fields, and their perfectly normal heterosexual relationship cannot bear the strain of being thrown in between other relationships ... it's merely to tighten the narrative, to show the scenes relevant to the plot (ie winning baseball games and getting the girl). That which doesn't add anything gets cut, that's just good editing, not, I don't know, narrow-mindedness.

Now, obviously your suggestion doesn't come from nowhere and often reactions or how yuri relationships are portrayed indeed come across like "no men allowed here!" It's a problem. It's also a problem that something is in almost all cases either about a lesbian relationship or simply doesn't feature lesbians. It mostly can't, for example, be about softball and only very marginally about lesbians. It'd inevitably be a yuri manga that also features some softball. That's clearly a real issue.

And, certainly, with Rin here we have one of the few examples of a manga that at least tries striking out a tiny bit from this narrow cage. So that's praiseworthy.

But it's still primarily, in any way I read it anyways, some sort of flirtatious yuri story. The relationship between Rin doesn't feel like it'll go anywhere much. And (with the series canceled) that means it feels a bit wasted as there isn't much development - the first few pages about the "people flirt with her / he helps her out / she's too go for any confusion" would have sufficed, imo; there other half of the chapter could have been used for more than a fairly cheap cliffhanger.

Incidentally, there's this vampire series by Melody Taylor, some indie thing, which features (you'll be surprised to learn) a lesbian vampire heroine and her male mentor. It's also about getting her a girlfriend and their relationship, of course, but the "mentoring" relationship is the first one the series tackles; it's very central. However, in that case the guy helps her coming to terms with being a vampire, while she helps him reminding him that even with some tragic past life's not always all rubbish (yeah, it's a bit of a trope-ish thing; I didn't say it was an awesome series ;) ) - so giving space to this made sense as it contributes to the central narrative of the story.

Which this chapter only did in a way that could have been done more effectively, I think. So that's the critique, not there being a guy.

Mh, well, that turned into quite the wall of text. Oh well. Good thing there's so much space on the Internet ...

... now I want it to go down a messed up codependency route were they are weirdly obsessed with each other and constantly reinforcing every bad trait they have.

last edited at Jul 18, 2018 3:38PM

Teppu ... sigh