Is this what they call, "vanilla"?

Sex is about having a good time, whatever that entails for the people involved. It's all well and good to watch something designed to be aesthetically pleasing, but when someone's had their head in your crotch for 30 minutes, I'm not sure how that's supposed to be sexy or serious. It's healthy to be able to laugh and joke around about how ridiculous that actually is.

I don't get why people treat it as this huge serious thing, especially in a relationship. It's an enjoyable activity between two people who care about each other, and if someone wants to grab my boob and make honking noises on occasion, that's fine by me.

Who the hell transcend their sexual desires in real life? Are you alluding that Ran and Keiko are saints? They are far from that.

If you have unresolved sexual desires in real life, you masturbate. Maybe Ran and Keiko do that, but I don't think Shou is going to show it to us.

People in relationships aren't just having sex all the time like frenzied rabbits. In fact, in my experience, sex is often ridiculously unsexy, and once you've reached that point with someone you're in a relationship with, you don't really have much sexual tension going on. Sex is just a fun activity that neither takes too seriously.

That naked backside...
If you draw too much loli you'll forget what grown up women look like, don't do it kids.

Keiko's got a booty, tho, iirc.

I'm going to ragequit if I don't get a "you're so tasty, Donut" line. Seriously.

I added this note because 7-11 is very popular in Asia countries. I know there are also in North America but in Europe there are only in few countries. So yeah, if some European people are reading this, they could not know what it is ;)

I've never known anybody in Europe to not know what a 7-11 is. I live in the U.K., but I've been to visit my university friends in their home countries too, and it's a pretty common thing, idk.

Unfortunately a lack of communication is far too common irl too.

That's true, but not to this extent. Like another poster before me said, they've been sleeping in the same bed alongside each other for about a month (I think?) and they've not even discussed what their actions mean? Usually, in real life, people would snap and get frustrated and shout their real feelings or vent their frustrations, so at least there's some indication of intent or roughly where their head is at.

The characters mostly seem very... passive, just sitting around waiting for the plot to happen to them, rather than doing anything themselves. They have no agency or desires, and they react to things in a very superficial and shallow way.

One of the thing that does confuse me in this manga is the absolute lack of communication. They seem to keep doing things and then never actually having a frank conversation with each other about what they want, and it makes a lot of the drama feel a bit arbitrary and unnecessary.

I get why it's hard to do that, but no wonder you're both being annoying if neither of you are willing to sit it out and talk, or even make an attempt to make sure you're on the right page instead of just constant inconvenient misunderstandings.

At this point I'm only reading it to see how much of a clusterfuck it manages to become.

Ah, Ran, let Keiko comfort you upon her bosom.

Well, that was adorable.

....but Sachi sleeping with Remi was the symptom and not the cause. Frankly, I kind of don't see why people think Sachi sleeping with Remi for a month is all that important, except as a sign of the rot in her and Ruki's relationship.

Symptom of what? Cause of what?

And Sachi and Ruki were in an implied relationship (and tbh if your long-standing friend confesses to you and you go ahead and have sex with them, I think it's safe to assume that counts as agreeing to a relationship without one of them having to explicitly say "from this point on we are in an exclusive romantic relationship" and considering Sachi said she wants to cheat, it's clear that she considers it a relationship as well), so it's obvious why people think that's an important plot point. The author does, clearly, since that's a large part of the current chapters.

Ruki isn't avoidant because she doesn't accuse Sachi of cheating on her; she's avoidant because she throws herself into work to keep from having to confront that Sachi's not very much into her. That's pretty explicit. They have no kind of relationship at all, and Ruki's half of why that limbo is being perpetuated.

I don't really understand why that's "avoidant", tbh. She thinks Sachi needs space after her ex, and she's trying to give it to her, while working doing other things. No doubt trying to keep her mind off of negative thoughts is a part of it, since she shows hesitance about mailing her about getting the license, but there seems to be more of a genuine desire to prove how she's not like her asshole boyfriend more than "I'm going to deliberately not talk to her bc I don't want to think about her".

Again, I don't see how Remi's been central to every piece of drama. She's not even central to this one, though she certainly is a catalyst for what comes next. She MAYBE can be partly credited with Ruki aditting her feelings for Sachi, but other than that, I don't get where this idea that she's the driver of the entire plot is coming from.

Unless you think the plot here begins and ends with "Sachi cheats on Ruki," which it doesn't.

Being a catalyst is definitely pretty central. Without the catalyst, the reaction would never happen, and she's been a catalyst in pretty much a lot of the drama that's going on. This seems to be concurred by other posters on the thread, too, since I've seen Remi's status as a plot device given as a reason for why people like her, as well.

And finally... all I can say is, Remi's been kind of mean, but wanting her Villainized and cast out would be the OPPOSITE of having more realistic and nuanced storytelling. She's got her bad parts, but she also has good parts that her friends appreciate, not even to mention social inertia. Frankly, it'd be hard for me to suspend my disbelief if she did get confronted the way people want.

I don't get the impression that people want her villianised. I think they just want to see some actual response to what she's doing. Even when Ruki is confronting her about cheating, she basically gives up halfway through and says "ok then" and leaves it at that, and then Remi is even shown to be justified in what she did in that Sachi says it was necessary for her to learn to ~protect~ Ruki. A giant hammer coming down and punting her ass into the ocean would be satisfying for some, I'm sure, but it would be no less hamfisted than what's going on now.

That's what people have an issue with. That everything she does is either ignored by the people in-universe and/or is actually shown to be the right course of action, even though her motivation and actions have pretty much been pure dickishness. It's the sheer allowance that Shuninta has given her actions that make a her badly written plot device, and that's why I feel like she's a character that should've been handled better.

Edit: Sorry for the bad grammar guys it's past midnight here.

last edited at Feb 6, 2015 7:12PM

...but Remi DIDN'T instigate the problems between Ruki and Sacchan. Remi's been pretty absent from the plot, until this point. Those problems completely spring out of those characters, and they're consistent with the way the characters have been drawn: Sacchan's passivity and Ruki's avoidance. Yes, and given those, it makes total sense that some outside shock is what leads them to do something one way or another.
I don't think this past chapter has been awesome, amazing writing, or anything, but it's definitely character-driven and earned. The only way you can think it's not is if you think Remi sleeping with Sacchan is the only problem in Sacchan and Ruki's relationship up to this point, when the fact is, they've never had anything approaching a relationship to start with.

It stretches credulity that people's REAL problem is with some kind of plot artificiality, when the thing that people keep going back to is "I hate this character and she's not getting her comeuppance like I want!!!"

There were underlying issues beforehand, yes, but I doubt Sachi would've gone out and slept with a woman consistently for a month if Remi hadn't made the first move, and Remi herself said she got into it specifically because she wanted to see Ruki get screwed over from being so earnest.

Plus, I don't necessarily think it's "avoidance" for her to see a mark on Sachi and not want to seem like she's being controlling/pushy like Sachi's ex, either. She's trying to be considerate where her ex wasn't, and doesn't want to be paranoid by freaking out over something that might be nothing. Bearing in mind that when she did get more concrete proof that Sachi had been fooling around, her first action was to confront the issue and talk to Remi about it.

I've already said that I find Sachi worse than Remi in this particular instance, though, but that doesn't remove the fact that Remi has been central to nearly every single piece of drama in this work, and the writing has moved to accommodate her continued involvement in the friend group, despite all of the shit she's persistently putting everyone through. You expect the readers to believe that nobody would get sick of it and confront her? That tests my ability to suspend disbelief, especially after what happened to Meru.

In regards to your final point, I think the comeuppance of a character is certainly part of plot credulity. When one person has been instrumental in so much shit for nearly every single relationship, it does strain believability when it turns out that she either a) avoids all culpability for her actions or b) turns out to actually be right in the end. Someone who is above reproach in-universe is absolutely a fault with the writing, because that's not how real interpersonal relationships and dynamics actually work in real life.

People defending Remi seem to focus on her aggressive sexuality, and completely ignore how much of an asshole she is. Like, yeah, it was Sachi's choice to fuck around for an entire goddamn month and ignore Ruki completely, but Remi went after her explicitly because she wanted to dirty up their innocent little romance. Like, she literally says that. She thought it was adorable that they were trying to make something work, so she aggressively went after Sachi because she REALLY liked the idea of taking this cute girl with a bad history and a burgeoning love and wrecking that shit, moulding her in her own image, while the girl who's actually in love toils away in ignorance. And then, she doesn't simply tell Ruki about it, she goes on a fucking parade with it. Specifically so she can watch Ruki's face as she's crushed. This isn't a sexually uninhibited hedonist in it for fun, this is someone who actively tries to hurt people for her own twisted pleasure. And happens to be the fucking hero of the manga.

I appreciate the spoilers. It kind of confirms for me the most disturbing thing about Remi and her role in the story: she's really supposed to be right. After all the shit she pulls, she doesn't just escape any kind of personal consequence or repercussions, the shit she leaves behind doesn't even stink. She completely alienates Meru over the porn video at a point when she needed support from her friends, but it's okay because she rapes the girl who probably started some rumours, so everything is magically fixed. She gouges a fucking hole in Ruki and Sachi's relationship, but what do you know, turned out it was incredibly valuable and necessary for Sachi's development as a person, and now their relationship is totally great and even better than it was before.

Nothing she does is allowed to go wrong, nobody she hurts is allowed to dislike her, she fucks anyone she feels like fucking without fail, and the author refuses to ruffle a single hair on her head. The real problem with Remi isn't that she's promiscuous, or even that she's a horrible, horrible person. The problem with Remi is that the whole fucking world twists itself into impossible shapes to fit her whims, ensuring that everything she does is awesome, that nobody ever meaningfully questions what she's doing or why she's doing it. She's literally at Edward Cullen or Christian Grey-levels of fucking awful person treated as untouchably perfect by author fiat, and she makes everyone around her more disgusting and more hateful just from their unwillingness to go against her. It's trashy writing from an author I really, really liked, and I feel like it's poisoning my opinion of the stuff she's written that I used to enjoy. Ugh.

Edit: Apparently I don't understand how spoiler tags work. Should be fine now. Christ, I'm so worked up about this, what am I even doing with my life.

Just saw this. Pretty excellent summation of my issues with what's gone on in the manga. A lot of people hate on Citrus for having artificially created drama, and yet seem to have no issue with Remi performing the exact same function here, what with summoning up interpersonal issues on a whim and then the fact that she was the one who instigated them being completely glossed over by the other characters around her.

Man, I'm kinda disappointed. I liked the rest of the manga, and I like the other stuff Shuninta wrote, but the ball was aggressively thrown in the trash when it came to the narrative, towards the end especially. "Remi does shitty things but nobody holds her responsible!", the musical.

Lazy, lazy writing. Not what I expected from Shuninta.

Gotta say that I kind of agree that Sachi is worse than Remi. At least Remi is open with her lack of commitments, whereas Sachi knowingly slept with someone else for about a month and didn't even have the decency to apologise for it. I guess you could argue that Remi had an obligation as a friend to Ruki to turn Sachi down, but Sachi was clearly the one with the intent.

I also don't think having two totally unrepentant characters, one of which seems to exist purely to piss everyone off, is an example of "realism", honestly. As one of the posters above me said, there's no way the friend group would collectively put up with this kind of consistent behaviour for so long. Sure, absolute justice doesn't exist in the real world, but there are still social consequences for your actions, and Remi seems pretty immune to both of them. That's not realistic, that's lazy writing.

Seems to me Shuninta got bored of this series and couldn't be bothered resolving it properly. Maybe it was cancelled. I dunno.

last edited at Feb 6, 2015 5:47AM

having an affair or sex in general is a foreign thing to most people i guess

It's not the fact that Remi is having sex, it's that she's being a huge immoral bitch while doing so. A lot of my friends are what others would describe as promiscuous, but the difference is that they respect their partners as basic human beings, which Remi doesn't seem to do.

Thought this was going to go in a creepy direction, but turns out that she was awake. Thank God, 'cause I really love the art.

She touched the boob.

Nice art. Might Pixiv them.

OH. So he's the regular they were throwing that party for? Oh jeez. He's definitely got a thing for Ran. This is just so awkward now.

Hope this is just Shou getting us all relaxed and anxious until he releases the next Kraken upon us.

Surprise yuri sex.

On Fue: I do think she's depressed, rather than asexual. If she just didn't feel sexual desire on its own, I'd agree that she's asexual, but the fact that she finds everything a chore rather than just sex suggests to me that it's deeper than that.

On the latest chapter: Asuna scouting out the yuri in two kindergarteners? I'm not even surprised.

Next chapter: Mei uses a new character who has a crush on the older twin girl! Love octagon abounds!

Title just made me think of "winter of discontent".

Not a fan of slice of life, really, but I love the art.

Hah! GAAAAAAY!

Disregard that I suck cocks.

http://www.hahgay.com/