Still not sure what's up with this story. From the title I was promised chorizo and even in a chapter with a focus on cooking food there wasn't any

Absolutely beautiful translation credits page. Love it

I agree it was very mean of Akashi to have added those tags to the scanlation. She should apologize. In English. So that we'll know she's truly contrite

I liked it, it probably wasn't intentional but Takimiya's story being so underbaked makes it even funnier, that last "fuck you" for her at the end is a very Akashi kind of humour.

I kind of love it. "Just my luck, my coworker has come to be this assertive, desirable, professional lady and she's into other girls...and she decides to move in with this spoiled rich brat."

It's a weird series, and I think is the sort of thing that would work a little better as an anime miniseries because I think it would get the wonky, madcap tone across more. Like, it's a very goofy series but it definitely has some smart moments of earnestness I enjoyed. I feel like I'd have to re-read basically the whole thing to really appreciate it. I still don't totally love her ending up with Kazuha like that, because it feels less like she's living for herself in that moment over clinging to someone else she has good memories with like a security blanket, and I think in that sense feels at-odds with the wider theme of the story.

However, I'm always up for shenanigans in which people pull one over on some classist, misogynist, eugenicist asshole like these guys' patriarch. In that sense, good end.

Is she tricking her though? That feels more ambiguous to me. In chapter 16 she told Asumi how she feels and that she wants to go out with her and Asumi said no. Then a few chapters later she says yes to being friends with benefits, but she asks Nanao if she's ok with that. Asumi knows Nanao's feelings.

From my perspective, if there's anyone who's not being honest about her intentions it's Asumi. She talks to the effect of saying she doesn't want a romantic relationship because she wants to pay to be with her childhood friend. However, I can't think of anyone who would then decide to go on a practice date in order to be sure that she treated the girl who just confessed to her, that she totally isn't interested in, well enough to have a good time. It's such a strange though process that I struggle to express it coherently in words!

If her thoughts on Mai really were "I have a lot of fondness for you, but my heart belongs to another. I'd still love to hang out (and even have sex...)" then she wouldn't agonize about leaving such a strong impression with an ideal date night out. They'd just...hang out. Asumi was definitely overthinking how she wanted to spend time with Nanao; while I wouldn't call that a romantic thing to do, it's an inevitable result of trying to rationalize away her own romantically-inclined feelings toward Nanao. If she could get over herself (which, to be honest, seems to be what's happening), I think they'd be very happy together. As nice as reconnecting with Mai might be, she is, in the words of Don Fagen, "A concept, more or less".

Another day of pretending I understand this game :3

One could make a vague approximation to playing cards. As a gross oversimplification Mahjong is like a more complex round of Go Fish or smth.

Think of the different tiles (Pins, Bamboo, etc.) as the suits (Heart, Spades, etc). And yaku you need to win a round with are like the hands in poker, some higher value than others.

Everyone draws and discards a card in order, keeping the size of their hand the same. Players can fish the discards of others to help complete hands and everyone is trying to get a combinations of cards they can win the most points with.

A round ends either when someone completes a hand and wins with it or when the deck runs out of cards for a draw.

At its most basic, that's it really.

True, but I think I'd say that it's probably a bit comparable to rummy, in which case the main rule distinctions (and admittedly there are many distinctions) tend to have to deal with how you manage the discard pile and actually declare a hand. Or for those who really like card games and prefer a deeper cut, Five Crowns, since that has a few more restrictions on how your hands end and something akin to the prevailing wind concept in its wild cards.

This really is a game that is easy enough to understand the basic ideas of how to have a winning or losing hand, but enough technical details beyond that to make it clear that it can take a lifetime to master.

Anyway I dabbled in playing online for a week or two just to see what it was like. It was, uh, cartoon slapstick noises

[strike]OH YEAH IT IS. I'M SLAPPIN M-[/strike]
clears throat
wipes brow
voice cracking slightly uh anyway good chapter

last edited at Jan 29, 2024 12:52PM

Ah, that'd do it

Somehow I got irked by the first textbox alone. There is nothing illogical about humans living together. "Humans have everything they need to live alone"... except they can't reproduce asexually, and on top of that younglings can't fend for themselves for ~15 years, so from an evolutionary perspective, of course humans are biologically inclined to form associations with other humans. It would be illogical if they didn't. And this doesn't even begin to touch on the benefits cooperation has for survival. Our social nature is the very thing that allowed us to achieve world domination. You're telling me an alien capable of space travel couldn't reason this out themselves? I guess even alien schools suffer from budgetary deficits if this is the extent of their education.

This has been your regular unnecessary overanalysis of a throwaway line that doesn't actually matter in any way to a cute comic about bread. Until next time.

Sounds like you need some warm and fresh out of the oven bread lmao

They are completely correct about how stupid that line was.

And still might need fresh bread, though

I think there are ways you could make it feel more organic to the setting, but without more detail it's pretty silly. Like, we don't actually know how this species is raised, and are free to come up with basically anything. Like, imagine if they're sort of vat-raised and then receive all the education they need not from a social setting but through access to educational archives like video lectures and wikipedia kind of stuff. Even if our alien creature might understand human biology or even sociology they might not have internalized the idea that these things are biologically necessary nor spiritually fulfilling because their own society has been so far removed from it. Where they might think "oh yeah humans need this" and not think "oh, yeah, humans need this".

And it would be easy to compare that to how people learn to cook, with recipes and video programs, and think, "oh, that's very similar to how our society works for, well, just about anything. we have our colonies and communities but we do not have these romantic, spiritual, affectionate communities. given the ways in which emotions are unreliable as a system of information delivery or messy in other ways, this seems like a weakness" and of course there are many stories that cover this aspect! And then of course the focus of the work would be in celebrating and communicating the joy, the spirituality of sharing meals with others.

Which is all to say, hey, who's got the fresh baked bread cuz daddy's hungry

EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT, SEE POSTS BELOW

I don't usually put too much attention into those little banner narrations but since you've mentioned it, I presume it to be short for TOkyo School of the Arts, since that seems to be where she's looking to apply as well

last edited at Jan 28, 2024 3:36PM

Also, I just ate but now I want some bruschetta. damn you paderapollo

last edited at Jan 27, 2024 8:46PM

Hm. I wonder what he could be interested in asking this new girl to do. So many possibilities, the mind boggles...

This 100% feels like a chapter one, not a oneshot. Just because of the alien part

It does have that air of a series pilot chapter doesn't it? I sure hope it gets a continuation.

I was confused because it looks like mc visits a lesbian bar at first? You would think a cute regular dying so young would be a huge topic.

I mean, I figured that was the subtext of the bar being set in Ni-choume, after all

This rose to the top of the popularity block quickly. The readers yearn for the ikemen ladies

Yodokawa giving us cinderella girls art is the gift I didn't realize I needed until I got it

Learing, from part 2 of that interview, that Tamamusi is into Shuji Terayama means a lot of what she's done make a lot more sense to me now. The play they put on in this series struck me as a little weird but, like, I guess if you're looking to something like Labyrinth of Grass for inspiration it makes more sense?

last edited at Jan 26, 2024 3:10PM

I'm sure I speak for absolutely everyone here when I say I'd definitely buy a book that was nothing but these two being naked and cuddly, probably two of them even

Cornonthekopp posted:

profile picture matches how I imagine the tone of this message is.

Funnily enough, I'm getting the same vibe from every profile picture on this page

last edited at Jan 24, 2024 1:31AM

kopeko-chan, 'cause you're really peckish

Bra**vo**, friends

last edited at Jan 21, 2024 6:49PM

Movies, sure, but I'm thinking more in terms of short stories and interactive fiction (sorry for not being more clear about this) where there isn't much need for a large budget. It's much more feasible to be financially stable seeking an audience of mostly trans people. I agree that when we're talking about stuff that's working more mainstream you get the issues of stuff like misery/inspiration porn like that. (It's a certain kind of funny to consider that after The Danish Girl that Eddie Redmayne gets cast in the Harry Potter spinoff series and Rowling starts getting public about terfy opinions).

I think Eddie isn't too problematic in that sense? I remember hearing that he admitted, some time later, that he shouldn't have auditioned for the part in Danish Girl and that it should have gone to a trans person instead. He was also one of the people from the HP franchise who spoke out in support of trans folks when JKR started her public crusade against us.

I also remember hearing that the director for the Danish Girl auditioned a bunch of trans people but didn't feel that they had what he wanted, and that he only found it when Eddie auditioned. I suppose what he wanted was the stereotypes.

Agreed -- What I mean is that the stereotypes seems to be what people like Rowling must have taken away from it. A real indication for the doubters in the room that these bad stories can lead to real, negative consequences.

Anybody else vibrating intensely waiting for the next volume to come out

there is actually a pretty large niche industry for writing transgender transformation stories like these. The vast, vast majority of the audience for these (or at least the only people I've ever seen open about engaging with that sort of content) are closeted and early or pre-transition trans people.

In my experience, the vast majority of the audience for transition movies is gay and pro-lgbt cis people. I mean, trans people are 0,3% of the population, we're rarely the target audience for anything. (even the drug industry doesn't manufacture drugs for trans people specifically, because we're rare and generally poor, so they ignore us).

That's part of the reason why most movies and stuff about trans people are so stereotyped and out of whack, because they're made by cis people for cis people, and these people don't really know what trans people are like outside of stereotypes (hence we get terrible stereotypes like the trans women in Transamerica and Danish Girl, to name a few).

Movies, sure, but I'm thinking more in terms of short stories and interactive fiction (sorry for not being more clear about this) where there isn't much need for a large budget. It's much more feasible to be financially stable seeking an audience of mostly trans people. I agree that when we're talking about stuff that's working more mainstream you get the issues of stuff like misery/inspiration porn like that. (It's a certain kind of funny to consider that after The Danish Girl that Eddie Redmayne gets cast in the Harry Potter spinoff series and Rowling starts getting public about terfy opinions)

Actual men would not take this bargain.
If you think you're a man and would take this bargain, you should discuss this with your therapist and start thinking deeply about your gender identity, because there might be some stuff about yourself you haven't realized before lol.

Please don't belittle struggles of people you don't know and question their identities, even as a joke.
Chances to hurt someone AND yourself are equal, just trust me I know what I'm speaking.

I don't think that it's reasonable to interpret the comment you've quoted the way you have. I don't think it's belittling. The thing to keep in mind is that there is actually a pretty large niche industry for writing transgender transformation stories like these. The vast, vast majority of the audience for these (or at least the only people I've ever seen open about engaging with that sort of content) are closeted and early or pre-transition trans people. That is, works like that were something they came upon earlier in their lives and it sparked a major realization leading to their interest in transition, though they may not read as much of it later on (some still do).

I've not engaged much with them personally because the majority of them seemed to have coercive components to the story that I found hard to enjoy. But I think for a lot of closeted people that's part of the appeal, in much the same way that a lot of cis women reading het romance stories find coersion part of the charm, as it gives them a way out of taking full responsibility for their horniness; just swap out a set of internalized misoogyny those cis women are working through while reading those books with internalized transphobia for the tg-tf audience.

But, at least for the purposes of this discussion, I'm a cis dude, so those stories never had much fulfillment for me in the first place. They're just kinda there, and leave a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste because of the way the fantasized coercion component play out. Not my bag.

The point is not that if you're finding the story compelling, you're obviously trans and should seek transition. It's that if the story speaks to you in certain ways it's worth figuring out what those reasons are, and working with people to help you on any journeys of discovery that might come along with it. The goal is not transition but a deeper understanding of what your own self-conception actually is, and that can't be done without exploring some ideas that might otherwise remain covered up in a bigoted society.

That said, it may not surprise you to hear that I'm in this one for other reasons. I find the narrative compelling because I think the idea of a romance where the leads have chemistry and one person is risking a lot, potentially making large sacrifices for the person he cares about, is interesting. What if he falls out of love -- how would his life change in regard to these sacrifices? What if that happens and he finds that the sacrifices aren't sacrifices at all, and for that matter isn't a "he" either? Will he only pursue the romance if there's a way to end the curse?

Like one potential reading of this story so far is that it's taking the sort of jokes made against those dumb chauvinist types -- the guys inspiring the rejoinders like "fellas, is it gay to have empathy toward and be romantically involved with a woman" on social media -- and taking it seriously, asking what love might be like if that's actually how it worked.

As the saying goes, to be loved is to be changed

Of course the penultimate chapter has the title drop places finger to ear ..what, that was the previous series they scanlated? Huh, really?