I'm going to quote myself from the Batoto comments section here, because oh my god, my mind is blown, and people need to know:

Holy shit, chapter 13 is actually a really good Japanese poetry joke? It took me a while to get it, but there are specific words and images that are associated with seasons in Japanese, called kigo, kind of like in classical western art where skulls can symbolise death and an hourglass can symbolise time, that kind of thing. Common kigo for summer include the summer sea, swimming, cicadas, and... lilies.

The idol girl doesn't get it because she's not particularly literary-minded, but the manager is exactly the sort of nerd who references kigo to make a dumb joke about lesbians, just like I was about to do. I feel so called out.

I feel like I could almost like this, but I would need to have any insight at all into what Mayu was even thinking this entire time. Like, if Mayu had some halfway sympathetic reason for acting so insensitive and fickle, then maybe I could get behind it, but the story just gives me nothing to work with, so... I don't know. You can call it realistic if you like, but having a character go through all this bullshit and then asking zero questions about why any of it happened (or asking those questions offscreen, after the story's already over and we don't get to see it) isn't any sort of realism I find interesting or compelling. It's actually anti-interesting, if anything, because all the parts I would have to stop and consider are literally the parts the author cut from the story, so all they've left me with is a shitty thing happening to a girl who doesn't deserve it, and there's really nothing else to think about beyond that.

I can't believe Yui7 made a follow up to A Room Without Shiori and managed to make everything more confusingly ambiguous than before. Like, okay, so Touko felt like she saw Shiori's disappearance coming somehow, and was trying (and failing, unfortunately) not to fall for her too hard. That's kind of tragic when she seemingly turns out to be right, but it doesn't tell us much. Is Shiori's smile as she walks away supposed to be foreboding? Is that her thinking "oho, she says I'm a bad liar, but little does she know, etc etc", or is she just happy about having had great sex with her older girlfriend? I mean, is it as innocent as Shiori getting into a good college somewhere and they decided (mutually or not) to break up when she left town? Hell, with how deliberately and obstinately vague the author is about the ending, is it a sure thing that they broke up at all, or is Touko just super lonely about her new long-distance relationship? I have no idea about anything at this point.

Not stigmatizing chiaki's cut marks, I mean if she's gone through some shit its a plausible reason. But adding the fact that she's into menhera....if she really is harming herself physically just for the sake of fitting into that trend then yo you need some help girl

Or maybe she's into menhera because she's been through some shit? Could easily go either way. I've always thought the line people draw between body modification and scars was a bit odd, but if you have the scars to begin with, then you're pretty much blocked off from a lot of styles. Seems pretty easy to be drawn towards menhera when it's one of the few aesthetics that 100% works with the body you've got, and most of the others require you to cover them up or pretend they aren't there.

last edited at Oct 19, 2017 6:48AM

Why dude again? It was fine for a one time attempt at being funny but now it's just annoying.

The character ends her sentences with -ssu, which is a kind of brash and boyish way of saying desu. It's supposed to be a weird and funny affectation she has, but to context-free westerners, it just sounds like a cute noise, so apparently the translators decided to localise it by making her talk like a surfer. That it also makes her feel like a certain penguin-like mascot character is ostensibly entirely incidental.

I mean, theoretically, I actually think it's a pretty smart localisation solution. It's just that, in practise, it means that I can't take any of these doujins seriously or remember anything about them other than the dudepocalypse, which kind of undermines the entire purpose localising them to begin with.

last edited at Sep 26, 2017 3:16AM

Oh right, isn't this the same way the Disgaea games localised the Prinnies saying -ssu all the time? Did the translator get the idea from there? If that's the case, maybe we should be grateful that they didn't go full Prinny and make her say "dood".

It's kinda... Like, at this point, there's no other word for it except polyamory, is there? In prior chapters, Suzuki seemed more annoying and intrusive, but now both of them are so comfortably and casually intimate with Suzuki of their own accord, so... I don't know, I feel like when they get older, Fumi and Noa are going to be notorious among their gay friends as that lifelong lesbian couple who seem super cute and innocently vanilla on the surface, but are constantly flirting with unsuspecting single women and luring them into kinky threesomes.

The fact that it's not a completely hopeless crush doesn't really change the fact that it fits right into Nakatani's favourite theme, that being quiet one-sided longing. It's not tragic, but it's still bittersweet; it's a thirst that wants to be quenched, but at the same time, there is something oddly pleasant about having a little secret crush on someone and being able to privately admire them from the sidelines.

Still, I'm not going to blame people for being disappointed with a story where the focus is 100% on the tension of longing, with no intent to release it. For plenty of people, the idea of leaving a story with an unresolved tension that will, by all signs, continue to build with no sure sign of relief is itself a mark of a sad ending, and their overall experience of the story will be coloured by that impression. I don't think that's an unreasonable reading to take from it, either.

I like Nakatani Nio, I really genuinely do, but the minute I recognised the art, I knew this story wasn't going to go where I wanted it to. Nakatani is excellent at crafting that aching emptiness of bittersweet longing, but I just wish someone would remind them that there are, in fact, other emotions that people can feel.

Look up "sukeban". Wearing a really long skirt like that was a delinquent thing, but now it's anachronistic.

Especially when the school doesn't even have a uniform. If she was just wearing a long-skirt version of the school's own sailor suit, then that'd be one thing, but when everyone else is in casual dress... Yeah, it's basically cosplay.

You have to get her permission to essentially NTR her? Like, this whole thing doesn't work when she's basically a small human.

I... wanna say it's metaphorical? The humans don't really respond to her words, she climbs places small humans would have difficulty climbing, and she eats actual cat treats, so I'm going to go with her not actually being a cat-person, but just a personified cat. So it's okay. But then, I get weirded out by settings with sapient animal-people as pets at the best of times, so maybe I'm just reading it the way I want to read it?

I don't know, I read a yaoi recently where a dog came back to life in human form and had sex with his owner, and I felt like that was pretty weird too, so I think I just prefer in general when stories keep a pretty firm divide between their human and animal relationships. I've read too many reddit posts by dudes wanting to clone women and replace their brains with dog brains so they can fuck their dog in a human body to find the whole "my pet is my lover" fantasy particularly appealing.

Wow, alright. Jesus. Okay, so Aoi misses Ichigo, but they stay in regular contact, so it's okay, if a little strained. Ichigo eventually stops responding to Aoi, who misses her so much she starts confusing other people for Ichigo, and eventually starts full-blown hallucinating Ichigo's presence, including when she's masturbating, where she thinks Ichigo is right there having sex with her. Fortunately, she snaps out of it pretty easily, although it's not clear if she understands she hallucinated, if she thinks she just "forgot" Ichigo wasn't there, or if she blanks out those episodes entirely.

Eventually, she gets so bad that she wakes up in the night, doesn't understand why Ichigo isn't next to her, and goes looking for her, eventually finding a very concerned Ran. Aoi, still in the middle of a hallucinatory episode, believes that Ran is Ichigo, and then... It's not clear, because we only see Aoi's hallucination of events, but in reality, it seems that Ran has sex with Aoi while she's being mistaken for Ichigo. Whether Ran actively took advantage of Aoi, pretended to be Ichigo in order to make the frenzied Aoi feel better, or did not resist her confused advances, is not made clear. In the end, Aoi rationalises it the same way she rationalises the rest of her hallucinations, and doesn't realise that Ran was involved this time.

Ran, feeling guilty, keeps it a secret, but confesses everything to Ichigo when she comes back. Ichigo, apparently completely unconcerned that she'd driven her girlfriend into a mental breakdown through neglect, or the fact that another girl had sex with her while she was having one of those breakdowns, cheerfully thanks Ran for taking care of Aoi while she was away, invites her to a threesome sometime, and walks off.

Is that right? Is that seriously what happened here? Is Ichigo supposed to seem like that much of a monster? I'm very confused.

last edited at May 31, 2017 5:25PM

To me, this whole manga is like a giant metaphor of growing up. The adventurers are children who play around believing they can be anything they want and not realizing that there will be consequences to everything.

Sure, that could be a theme, and if the main human character was, say, the knight girl from chapter 5, then sure, I'd even find it pretty convincing. But the first introduced and most frequently recurring human adventurer character is literally a child herself, who has no choice but to become an adventurer if she ever wants to go back home and see her family and friends again, and is certainly not treating this like a trivial game. She even points out that, even if she revives after death, she's still left with the vivid memory of being violently killed, and that's a pretty serious consequence in itself. If someone stabs you repeatedly with a knife, but you survive and make a full recovery, it's not like nothing happened at all. You were still brutally attacked, and that's pretty traumatic in itself. And it's not like Goblin takes the permanent death of monsters any more seriously than the temporary death of adventurers.

I don't know, I can see how you could get a "metaphor for adulthood" reading from the setting in general, but I'm not really convinced that the characters and story as written actually support it. It just seems like a dark comedy parody of old RPG mechanics.

last edited at May 31, 2017 9:11AM

This is kinda... It looked fun at first, but when it lingers so long on the torturous death scenes and the isekai girl's utter despair at being trapped in this world where she's forced to fight and die endlessly for the chance to go home again... I don't know, it's not really funny anymore? Or at least, I stop being in the mood for jokes when cute girls are desperately trying to run for their lives and being brutally stabbed to death for the trouble. I really thought I'd be into this, but it just makes me feel weird and depressed whenever I try to give it another shot, so I'm probably just going to give up.

Did you really feel like this didn't wrap things up with the three main girls? It is very clear what's going to happen: Kotooka and Washio end up together when they grow up, and Tsukasa is straight and dates boys, and they all still are friends.

I mean, you admit yourself that it doesn't wrap the entire story up, because the boys get nothing nearly as conclusive as Tsukasa channeling the author in prophetic soliloquy (except for the bonus chapter, which... appears to kill off any chance of a relationship between them at all?) but that's not quite what I was talking about.

I'll try to clarify: I think the author should have been able to tell this entire story, without a rushed axe ending, in half as many chapters as it got. Nothing about this story convinces me that it needed to be as long as it is, and certainly not longer, as was apparently the intention. I think 23 double-sized chapters should have been plenty of time for this series to live out a full and natural lifespan and come to a satisfying conclusion, but instead, it had to be cut short and rushed into an abrupt and incomplete ending.

Again, I fully admit: I did not read all of this story. Any assessment I make (aside from the obvious "I did not find it compelling enough to keep reading" ) is therefore quite incomplete, and can comfortably be disregarded. With that in mind, I still think this story had an incredibly unique and fascinatingly bittersweet core concept that's ultimately ruined by a bloat of self-indulgent navel-gazing. And that's a real shame.

This chapter shows that, once again, this mangaka is an immensely talented writer who just couldn't quite get their story told in less chapters than they had planned.

I mean, sure, but part of being a good writer is knowing how to plan your story so that it's presented concisely and effectively. The fact that they couldn't wrap things up within 23 (huge, 50 page) chapters doesn't exactly speak well of their talent, to be honest. Like, how long did they want this story to be, exactly? Especially given that I got tired and felt like the story was going in circles back in chapter eight, and I'm still not sure that things have significantly changed since then.

Maybe the author had some notion that they were going to write a 30-volume saga on the scale of Kimi ni Todoke or Skip Beat or whatever, but I just can't see that ever happening with this story as it's been written, axe or no axe.

Okay, what was going on with that toilet? Was that the author's best attempt at drawing a bidet's water spray? Because it looked like the lady just summoned a water elemental to masturbate with.

I saw this tagged as an "Ayaka and Yurine" chapter on Batoto, and immediately thought about making a "Not MORE new characters!" joke, and acting like I'd forgotten about these two again. But then I actually read the chapter, and... Well, at least it's about Yurine, I guess?

I did like the chapter, but it kinda reinforces my view that Canno gets more excited about coming up with new story ideas than they do about actually writing and developing those stories, so when it comes time to continue a long-running character arc like Yurine's, naturally they resorted back to introducing a new character with new troubles and a new angle on the situation.

Even if I'm right, it's probably not a bad way to go about things. It just gets a little overwhelming when I'm already bad at keeping track of normal-sized casts and characters as it is.

last edited at May 8, 2017 5:47PM

Honestly, even with the cancellation, the author didn't need actually need to give any of them a boyfriend unless that was the intention the whole time. Unless that was also a (bizarrely specific and counterintuitive) form of editorial meddling, which... I guess it could be? If we're trying to absolve the author of everything we possibly can? I just think that, regardless of what the author was trying to do, if they hypothetically wanted to put middle fingers up and say "fuck you" to everyone who'd gotten invested in the story, a pretty effective way to do that would be to resolve none of the romance plots and then say that at least one of the girls is thinking about marrying a boy instead.

I'm just really glad I stopped caring about this story back in chapter 8. I kept an eye on it afterwards, kinda hoping that the plot would go somewhere and I'd get drawn back in, but... No chance of that anymore, I guess.

Funnily enough, I remember watching a documentary about witch myths where they legitimately suggested this very same thing as a possible explanation for where the flying on broomsticks idea came from.

well, that was a waste of time

Honestly, I agree, but my expectations fell so low when I saw who the author was, I actually ended up feeling pleasantly surprised that the story and characters were only mildly unlikable, and even had some aspects to them I kind of enjoyed. It sounds like an insult (and I guess it basically is) but at this point, if I can come out of a Kodama Naoko story feeling ambivalent and unimpressed, I'll happily count it as a win.

last edited at Apr 18, 2017 7:13PM

pg 3, "He's in charge of too many idols for just one man, is the issue" wording would be better as "that is the issue"?

Not really? "[Statement], is the issue" is a pretty common, if informal, sentence structure. I guess it's just a colloquialism you're unfamiliar with?

...

Meh, I still think that they should go for the turkey srynge

I mean, you were close

I can only conclude that You is "something else" and we don't know what they identify as, but it's common in that world.

Interesting that you think it's perfectly logical to assume that the setting is one where intersex people are commonplace and unremarkable, but you think it's a weird and baseless reach to suggest that the setting is just like the real world and that one faceless woman happened to be particularly accepting of trans people. Like, you might even be completely right, and the author really was picturing a world with a third futanari gender, or whatever - I just always find it fascinating to see what strikes people as unacceptably unrealistic, and what they'll just accept as part of the story.

And if transgender people in Dynasty want to find stories to relate to, I'm sure there's more than enough here already.

lol

last edited at Apr 15, 2017 9:50AM

Arguments about tagging aside, I definitely like this world where tipsy women are randomly flirting with cute girls on the street and the only objection raised is "she looks a bit young, doesn't she?" The fact that she apparently has a dick being less noteworthy than her killer abs is also A++