The visitation

^^Oh, holy shit

Bread

Rin is thinking too much of others’ feelings, making their happiness hers

I think this specifically is gonna be a really important thing they need to address. Rin’s trauma around being poly is making her think it’s dangerous for her to want and so she’s distorting around it. It’s making her be weird with Mayuki, she’s putting up a strange emotional distance between them even when they’re getting intimate, and it’s preventing her from communicating.

Also, I went back and read the section where Rin leaves when Akira externalizes her insecurity at her, and it’s clear on re-read that Rin isn’t intentionally setting boundaries by disengaging after getting some gross stuff put on her, but rather running away because she’s afraid she’ll lose Akira’s interest or make her hate her. In other words, Akira and Rin are both afraid of loosing each other, which makes a really interesting dynamic, and you can see how they might come together.

At this point I’m not sure if Rin has a really minor crush on Akira that she’s suppressing which is causing her to lead Akira on, or if Akira is just jumping at normal things because this is her first crush, but I hope we’ll see.

Also people are talking a lot about how the kisses in this story are really intense despite not involving anything explicitly sexual, etc.—if I had time I’d go close-read the passages and make a comment from that, but I don’t, so suffice it to say it’s because 1) each scene is really strongly grounded in an emotional context both through the background we have about the characters and immediate setup right before it, 2) the artist really understands the physical acts of making out, how it feels, how it happens, and what it looks like, and can accurately depict this and 3) they have a really solid understanding of desire, and especially different versions of giving desire (Rin’s “I can’t help my self, I need to spoil you” attitude during thr adult kissing scene, Mayuki putting everything into doing her best to please Akira) which is itself naturally compelling and emotionally resonant.
All this is to say that Canno creates scenarios that are emotionally charged and grounded, and depicts them in a very expressive, verisimilitudinous way. I think this story is uncommonly good, and I usually hold off judgements until I’ve read to the end but this is shaping up to be one of the best yuri manga out there, period.

(Ch. 7) and yeah, as people are saying, all of Mayuki’s passion, dedicated work, and sheer drive coming out such that she devours Akira and totally ruins her, despite being the “earnest, naïve kouhai” is, uh, really really hot.

(Ch. 7) But anyway, speaking to this chapter—I really like Akira actually, she has a lot of dark emotions and demons running about that she never seems to have faced. I bet we get to see more into those, and watch her work through them, as they’ve started to do here.

This chapter is one of the most satisfying “bridging the gap” moments I’ve read in manga so far—I absolutely love how Akira is able to put her ego and bad frameworks aside when she hears what Mayuki did. She could have just gotten jealous and angry hearing that Rin cried with Mayuki, but she stopped, reflected, and realized what was going on, and where her failings were—I love the image of her being emotionally and personally way behind Mayuki. I think she’s now dealing with a lot of cognitive dissonance, because on the one hand she’s awed by Mayuki, but on the other she seems to have leaned heavily on the idea of her academic and sports prowess setting her above others as a coping mechanism, and it seems her past kindness toward and relationship with Mayuki is deeply tangled in that morass, hence the nasty things she’s thinking as her beliefs are challenged. She’s starting to realize that being good at sports and academic just makes her good at sports and academics, and doesn’t make her a better person—she was confused that she couldn’t get Rin because of how strongly her frameworks turn around prowess, with Rin seemingly being the only time she’s wanted someone more than they’ve wanted her. At the same time, she’s been really isolated, and I totally get the pain of feeling like you can’t hold on to the people you really do want close to you, that despite all the things you’ve done to try and make yourself likable and desirable you can’t find the stability and assurance you believe is promised to you when someone doesn’t choose you—it exposes the fact that the frameworks you’re using don’t reflect reality. And Mayuki is poised to smash into these frameworks by her foundational place in them, her kindness, and of course her “adult kissing” abilities. Whew, I can’t wait.

Also, I think people are giving Rin a bit too much credit here. I think her relationship with Mayuki is similarly maladaptive, but people are giving her a free pass because it’s not showing up in ugly thoughts about someone else. She’s really been putting Mayuki on a pedestal as a solution to all her problems, and she’s really not being open or honest with her about her feelings. As touching as some of their scenes together are, Rin really isn’t treating Mayuki as an equal either—it’s just not showing up ugly through jealousy and a superiority complex.

last edited at Sep 18, 2020 1:23AM

(Ch. 7) I don’t understand people holding YagaKimi so highly, clearly I’ve gotta check it out again. It felt really abstracted from the emotions it addressed, like it was explaining them or talking about them as ideas. I feel like Canno really understand the characters in this story but more importantly has a really strong grasp on how emotions work and how to portray them, and the setup is a lot more human and less... “this is a plot point”-y. Anyway, yeah, gotta read YagaKimi again start to finish to remind myself what folks are talking about.

(Ch. 62) Lmao, poor Hino-san wanted to basically make love to Koguma’s foot and turn her into a blushing melty mess, but instead she started laughing! Disappointed much?

Kogutop.

Based.

No! Nonono! No.

nods Yes.

That ending has me feeling kinda numb. It’s like oh, okay, that happened. I guess we’re not gonna do the stuff you were setting up.

Can we get this story re-categorized to subtext? The only “yuri” chapters are with that other Noman, and I think I would have been less disappointed if my expectations weren’t fooled.

(Ch. 62) Lmao, poor Hino-san wanted to basically make love to Koguma’s foot and turn her into a blushing melty mess, but instead she started laughing! Disappointed much?

Oh my god I'm so fucking pumped!!! I didn't even know this had a manga, I'm excited she's getting recognition!

lmao @ getting your color up about this shit on a backwater yuri internet forum.

There's examples of good community-based policing focused on helping and providing services for people, but not in the US. ACAB.

THEY ARE SO SOFT AND GOOD FOR EACH OTHER HNNNNG

healing from comphet and gendered expectations through the power of lesbian crushes, what a truly excellent manga. I feel refreshed.

There’s no way I can have a lover! Or maybe there is?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. What is a lover?...-ly story like this doing in my inbox? In fact, what is my inbox? How do I know it even exists? I can’t put papers in it, I can’t touch it, so how do I know that it’s real? Is it a place? Where is it? Well, it’s in my mind—I’m reading it, so my brain puts the pixels into words, and the words into a message—but it‘s also somewhere out there on a server. But if I’m imagining it on a server, it’s also on a server... in my mind. In fact, you might even say I can’t really think of the server it’s on at all, if

last edited at Sep 8, 2020 3:10AM

Ange’s voice literally destroys me. She could narrate a story of how she emptied my bank account and I would just smile and nod.

Everyone arguing this way around. Well, what of the opposite direction? This is a prequel, and Nikaido is the child of those two. Which is why she's so freakishly strong.

Oh shit ur right

Ur a hero

Tadokoro-san is the author, it was autobiographical the whole time

Damn I love how the more things are revealed the more context and understanding we get for the character dynamics. I loved how volume 2 explored feelings and relationships more, it’s always incredible when a gag manga has a real moment and starts to progress a bit, it’s a cerntain special feeling that’s hard to describe—like with handsome girl and sheltered girl. Is it just me, or do y’all feel that too?

I understand sooo much what you are saying

Okay yeah, it's not just me. Maybe this is a weird comparison, but it's kind of like how part of what makes Kill la Kill exciting is that it smashes genre expectations? Like we get jaded to a certain style of doing things, and by completely changing it, it's like the first time you read a yuri manga again.

Or maybe not even that--remember the era when (almost) all of yuri was this super platonic "will-they-won't-they," the whole time, or it was a relationship where they never got past maybe kissing, or it was just straight up porn? I feel like recently we've been seeing new yuri where it's like, "will they won't they, messing around with their feelings and wistful glances--and then they figure it out, and they fuck, and now they're in a relationship and it keeps going--or during their flirting they get like massively turned on, and it always feels like, whoa, you can do this? I'm thinking of "it was just once but I regret it" as well; basically, we expect a yuri story is gonna be a certain way, and then it's like, no, the author actually has an actionable artistic vision beyond iterations on this one scenario. Shit really happens, and it's fresh, and exciting, and it feels like real life, like being a teenager and discovering your sexuality, or your orientation, and being like, "oh shit, the scrolls permit this? it can happen?"

Idk, but yeah. I'm loving it.

Okay I'm not able to piece it all together but here's what I was able to find:

The management dude above them gave them something important to work on that was above what they were capable of. It seems like Kuroda is calling in favors and is snooping into what's going on politically behind that decision, or something like that--at this stage, maybe it's blackmail? I don't know enough about Japanese officeworker culture to figure it out exactly. But I'm confident he intended for them to fail for some reason that I'm sure we'll find out more about.

Anyway, Shirakawa notices that Kuroda is doing things on the sly and gets suspicious about her. I think she's also feeling slighted because, though they have the same amount of time in the company and are being compared/implicitly put against one another, Shirakawa is supposed to be the senpai--and yet that position isn't being respected, both by the immediate assignment of difficult work and Kuroda doing things she hasn't been taught. It seems like she thinks Kuroda is doing sketchy/suspicious stuff and maybe trying to get others to do the work for her, or secure her position through office politics so everyone else will take the fall instead of her.

I don't know what feelings are going on with them, but I know internalized misogyny and repressed lesbianism mixing within high-strung, high-achieving prideful women is a really common driving factor in Sal Jiang's work, so there's a number of directions this could be going. I feel like the snipes back and forth they make after getting told off are important, but I can't figure out all the emotional context.

I can't tell if Sal Jiang was just focusing on the twisted feelings here and didn't intend for us to understand the politics at all, if they're mishandled, or if we'll find out more later, but I look forward to finding out!

Sal Jiang is my goddess. I'm so glad we're getting a series.

I'll see if I can't figure out what happened.

Bottom Gudako is real. Also this artist is fucking amazing

I think it seems like they ended up with their top/bottom dynamic like out of obligation or something, somehow not “the right way.” They had a rigid sexual dynamic, and the designated top was too tired to top, so they found a new solution, which I think is great.