Call me hater or whatever but I quit this the moment it became het...I'm a lesbian but keiko isn't doing anything more but disappointing the hell out of me...I'm sorry I've seen too mess up.shiz in my life and don't want to ger depress with this...drop.

I don't get why someone would drop this now? yeah there is het, but that is all in the past, aren't you forgetting about keiko's current situation? she is living with ran, what we are seeing now is all backstory, and like some others have mentioned, there are more serious yuri elements in this than the rest of the manga!

It's true that there is het, but at the same time, for some odd reason, the yuri levels are really going up as well too, perhaps even more than the het. In 22A we learnt that Keiko started going out with guys not really because she liked them, but because she felt obliged to. In 22B, upon meeting Ran, she thinks that she's 'cute', making that I think the first time she has actually expressed attraction to anybody, and mentions that she can't 'couldn't get her out of my mind for some weird reason', which suggests a repressed attraction. And then the cynical, more delinquent-like Keiko suddenly changes into a woman who gets into a good university and works hard at her job - just because she was inspired to Ran's optimistic faith in the world. On the night she tells her boyfriend of her pregnancy, she thinks of Ran, and how she 'really liked' her. And after her collapse and separation with her fiancé, she seems to be fairly depressed, quite different from the way she is now; the implication is that it is Ran who held out a helping hand, and was able to save her from her predicament. I'd say that the yuri implications are much stronger than the het ones - it's just that they are based on emotions and feelings rather than factual who-slept-with-who's.

Most importantly, I think it is significant that while these flashbacks are coming after her ex-fiancé's comments in Ch. 21, which creates the expectation that they would centre on Keiko's past and her relationship with him, they are actually very much about how she thinks of Ran instead. That, I think, is a very definite clue that the Higashiyama is not intending the story to go in the direction of Keiko getting back together with her ex, but rather continue to depict the developing relationship between her and Ran. I never actually thought that the yuri in this series would go past wishful thinking and subtle hinting, but after this chapter, I think it might.

Whew! Sorry for the long post.

Edit: Most of the points have already been made by others (I kept the reply window open for some time before the discussion took off)...

last edited at Jun 20, 2014 8:22AM

I like girly girls, but I like boyish ones too! They're female as long as they identify themselves as such, in my opinion.

On another note, the interactions between them are really interesting. Kisaragi is confident that she can develop a relationship with the tomboyish girl (does she have a name?), but the tomboyish girl just wants to stay aloof and not get affected by anybody. The needling feels less like teasing and more like a struggle for dominance/assertion of personality on both sides, which I don't remember seeing in other romance works. It's nice that it's still getting scanlated/has finished being scanlated.

...By the way, does anybody else think that Kisaragi looks a bit like Irisviel from Fate/Zero or is it just me?

In case anybody was wondering about the name, the page in Japanese explains that it's 'a homage to "John and Yoko's Ballad", in which John Lennon and Ono Yoko say each other's names continuously'.

I feel bad for Katou...! Hopefully things will get better.

Hahaha! I've seen this before, but it's still hilarious.

It's so cute~~ Have we been getting more Kill la Kill slumber party/literally sleeping together stories lately? And I wish there were more Satsuki x Nonon doujin out there (though this only hints at it), it's a lovely pairing... ;_;

Peerless usage of the song's title.

Definitely agreed.
I don't quite understand what happened at the end, though, could somebody please explain?

Kind of an abrupt ending there. Was there buildup to this? I mean I'm happy how things turned out but I feel like I missed out on an adventure.

It skipped a year. So...no there wasn't a buildup.

Nope. I definitely agree with the people who say that Youko should've gone out with the other girl instead. At least there's more potential in that relationship than the Maki/Youko one. I mean, the series is being marketed as yuri on the site, so why wasn't there more in it? To think that the last chapter didn't even exist originally! And even at the end, Maki, though she claims to love Youko, says she wants to go Keita's school! I don't get it at all. I wash my hands of this... lemonade. /shot

Quality and update-wise, though, it was very good, so thanks YP for providing such an excellent scanlation!

I didn't like them that much at first, but Eirin x Kaguya is growing on me. Or maybe just Eirin --> Kaguya.
Eirin always had this kind of dark air, so I feel that the mood of this doujin was perfect for her, though perhaps unexpectedly uplifting - that Kaguya found humanity in her inhumanity seems beautifully ironic.

Thanks for the heads-up!
Having read the other two chapters on Pixiv (the story is complete), it seems that nobody was actually killed (the "body" was a doll), the one who set up everything was Sakuya, who leapt back in time twice, and the mastermind behind it all was Remilia, because she wanted to eat pudding. Don't ask me why. I don't get the joke either.

Hahaha... Gotta love Hayashiya-sensei's sense of humour!

Guess my thoughts on the latest chapter and whether forced drama has a purpose other than shedding the tears of insecure man children.
I'm not mad at all.
Bad writing ahoy, I wonder what'll be next?
Tragedy or misunderstandings perhaps?

This chapter is not really forcing drama upon us. Just flashbacks showing what happened in the past. I don't see it shoving tears and QQ faces up my ass while screaming "FEEL EMOTIONS, FEEL THE ANGST".

I feel that the atmosphere of the series has changed. If this is going to be a long running series then the author will undoubtedly resort to further dramafication (tasteful or not), in order to keep the series interesting.

From what I've found, it's more common for the series extended with the use of drama to hold back after bombs like the one dropped last chapter (Ch. 21) and stuff in filler before putting in more drama. We've been waiting so long for more information, I think it's actually less annoying that we're getting the flashbacks now. And since, as many people have pointed out earlier, the drama was hardly suddenly introduced - it's been foreshadowed for ages.

While the chance for yuri end seems high now, it's possible Nakamura and Keiko could end up together again, with Ran's intervention.

Agreed on both counts. Ran seems to be the only person Keiko actually has a constructive relationship with so far, and it's definitely building up so some kind of resolution will be needed. However, the fact that it's running in a josei (?) (web) publication means that a het ending is more likely. And I can totally imagine that sort of thing being in a TV series - woman with a somewhat wild, unhappy past finally finding a "happy end" in the form of the shotgun-engagement guy from years back. Even though it's completely stupid since "Stretch" is about Ran and Keiko rather than Keiko and Nakamura, it would be completely typical for that aspect to be ignored... I just pray that Keiko will get together with Ran.

Also, stepping back a bit, does anybody find it hilarious how this series' audience (on Dynasty, at least) are all just reading this stretching manga in the hope that there will be yuri?

Reimu looks surprisingly good dressed as Marisa... The afterword illustration of Marisa also looked really nice! ^^

The recently uploaded Haibane Renmei artbook has a typo in its name - the accepted spelling of the town is "Glie, not Gile".

http://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/haibane_of_old_home_anime_artbook_in_the_town_of_gile_in_the_garden_of_haibane

last edited at Jun 6, 2014 12:54AM

Great to see this stuff; I think this is the first time the different doujin have been sort of collected together under the name of Haibane Renmei (including the first one, which strictly speaking is unconnected and the last, the artbook) on an online reader!

Whoa, an old favourite of mine got added! celebrates
I love Aria~

I like the art! It's very simple, but nice and clean. It'd be nice if Shaomin did more RenMerry stuff!

Just re-read this, and... whoa. I had somehow missed the implications of page 17 and remembered it as a fluffy story... I'm not sure I'm glad that I decided to re-read it. bitter laughter

I think he is referring to the "Add notified chapters to To Read list". I should just make the notifications check against the white/blacklist as well, currently they only affect the homepage/recently added page..

Yeah, that's right. Ahh, okay. I get the whole white/blacklist thing now - didn't realise what exactly it was affecting. I tend to log in only after checking the recently added list, so I didn't see the difference. That'll help a lot, thank you!

Copy/pasted from one of the topics, since it's more appropriate here:

I was wondering whether there was any way to blacklist tags. I can't stand het, but because I favourited the "Romance" tag my To Read list is filled with het romance in addition to the yuri. This is normally not too bad, since I tend to just remove them from the list, but because of the recent uploading of Kodomo no Jikan, my reading list shot up to over 100 chapters of a series that I had absolutely no interest in, so I was wondering whether there was any way to fix that. I did notice that the profile settings have a section for blacklisted and whitelisted tags, but I'm not really sure what they do - they don't seem to have made any impact on the reading lists.
Or is there at least any way to have a "select all" option for the lists instead of selecting all the boxes manually?

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try using it in the meantime! I think I did mention it in the sticky, but didn't get much of a reply, so I might just try again.

I'm sorry if this has been brought up before, but I was wondering whether there was any way to blacklist tags. I can't stand het, but because I favourited the "Romance" tag my To Read list is filled with het romance in addition to the yuri. This is normally not too bad, since I tend to just remove them from the list, but because of the recent uploading of Kodomo no Jikan, my reading list shot up to over 100 chapters of a series that I had absolutely no interest in, so I was wondering whether there was any way to fix that.

Or at least, is there any way to have a "select all" option for the lists instead of selecting all the boxes manually? I did notice that the profile settings have a section for blacklisted and whitelisted tags, but I'm not really sure what they do - they don't seem to have made any impact on the reading lists. Have I missed anything obvious? ^^;;

Ahahaha... Loved this! The ending was predictable (in a good way) and really nice~

The fact that nobody has said "thanks for translatating" is starting to eat me inside, people are working hard on this but we complain (we can't avoid it!) and yet they go on, so thank you for your hard work in this very unique manga.

Thank you for reminding me; I forgot my manners. Thanks for the high-quality scanlations and quick updates, people!

But I have to say it is a fascinating series - after each and every chapter I find myself wondering if I maybe have masochistic tendencies. I just can't keep my hands off whenever a new one is released. It's like watching a severe car accident - not being able to look away.

LOL I also wonder why the hell I am still reading this..

Having seen the raws up to chapter 23 I have such an evil grin on my face reading this.

I think for me, it's more like I'm hoping against hope that everything will be satisfactorily resolved at the end... Chapter 23 had better be good...

This was impossibly cute! ReiMari banzai!