Yup! From 2 October 2021.

Setsuna and secret identity shenanigans are my jam.

Plus, you know once she looks back at this, she'll get super hyped that she got to act out this particular superhero cliché.

It helps that they're clearly in a love hotel.

I'm just surprised that the adventures of Yuki and Setsuna only occupy eight volumes. I'd expected at least 14.

Wow, I missed this. Nice!

(So Nana is dating VP but hasn't exposed her secret Identity? That's how you get Lois Lane shenanigans, you know. On second thought, knowing Setsuna, that might actually be why...)

There are certainly moments when you're very much reminded that Kyoko is a PK (preacher's kid).

From the other chapters, I'd say its... overly sensitive, I guess?

(It's always a little weird to me to see toys considered — by characters or, more often, by readers — as some sort of gross intrusion into their "purity". But I can get behind Kyoko's initial reaction here — that looks like the kind of thing you need to work up to.)

Boy, that last note of sequential "Oh, I love this person on my lap" and "I can't feel my legs anymore, get off me" is one of familiarity.

It is cute, but yeah, a misunderstanding of the distance to stars and their age. The stars visible to the unaided eye are all within 4000 light years, and you'd generally get one of them dying every 10000 years — so maybe one or two are dead, at most.

(The biggest are the most likely to be dead, because they both have the shortest lifespan and are the farthest away.)

^^Presumably the openness in the second chapter is down to the girls' closeness after the mentioned-but-not-elaborated-upon incident at the school festival, though you'd expect a bit more discretion at the big school-wide announcement scene.

(I mean, there at least probably should be more from Takako and Rena, but given their actual meeting it might be a lost cause.)

Setsuna is awfully smooth, isn't she?

It's almost completely a different topic, but I finally figured out who Tae's design reminded me of — Yamai Ren, the yandere from Komi Can't Communicate.

I always wonder about these holiday stories — are Western holidays like Christmas or Halloween, where Japan celebrates them to varying extents but is a little vague as to why, weirder for Fate than more native Japanese traditions like New Year's or Obon? I mean, they're all equally alien, and I'm not sure Fate (pre-adoption) even got to celebrate Midchildan holidays, unless she has some of Alicia's memories of doing so.

What I guess I'm actually wondering is how confused she'd be at Linus's monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas, and if it's more or less confused than your average Japanese person.

Fuuka better not let Vivio and Einhart hear about how she ended the stuck transformation spell, or there's going to be some afterschool debugging going on.

(I'd speculate further about the mechanics of the spell ending, but since the book doesn't have a Watersports tag...)

I'd argue that without at least understanding "Endless Eight", you miss the whole point of Disappearance.

Hm, not sure I'd seen anything with Nico's idol ambitions previous to her abortive school idol group in high school. It makes sense that she'd be pursuing it from a young age, and that her failures in School Idoldom were just the last in a long string of attempts, but I don't think I've ever seen it.

(I'm half getting the urge to commit fanfiction, and having an 11-year-old Nico clawing her way into 346Pro's Third Entertainment Division in the Cinderella Girls U149 manga, just to see her bouncing off Arisu, Risa, and Momoko, but a) I'm not sure how much Nico she'd really be without the bitterness from years of failure, and b) I'd have to actually write things down.)

Reminds me of the RinMaki book where Maki is griping to Nozomi about Rin never letting her get any rest, and Nozomi wondering if she's complaining or bragging. There's something compelling about one person being so devoted to making their lover climax over and over again.

Only just noticed Rina's flask of suspicious blue fluid in the first frame. Rina, you gotta stop with these Special Drinks that turn your friends into the undead.

^^Except that — in the actual Oomuro-ke manga — Sakurako doesn't seem to notice her sisters thinking she's an idiot nine times out of ten.

I'd actually lay odds that there were two things that soured their relationship — Himawari's boobs. No, really. Himawari developed early, making Sakurako jealous — and then complained about it, which exacerbated the situation. It's the single topic that sets Sakurako off the most in the series — not Himawari's size, but Sakurako's lack of development comparing herself to her; every time Himawari points out the drawbacks it feels like ungratefulness and mockery to her, especially when she phrases it like, "You're lucky you don't have to deal with this".

That said, Sakurako and Himawari still do everything together and make each other the centers of their lives. They just squabble.

I like to think that all the standard Kitaku illustrations are in the same continuity.

(The storyline ones wouldn't, as they sometimes contradict this — "Takasaki Yu Is Interested In Lesbian Brothels!" is the obvious example — and, of course, the Emma-as-a-succubus-puppeting-Ayumu one here wouldn't work, but...)

last edited at Nov 20, 2021 4:16AM

I've read a couple of authors who considered science-fictional slime girls; one had them be, effectively, macro-scale amoebas with fine control over their cellular wall, and another had them be a hive-mind of colony creatures, where the individual microscopic creatures weren't sapient and would be shed quite frequently — much like a real slime mold but with more cohesion. Neither would probably pass muster as real evolved creatures, but we are, after all, talking about fiction.

Except she doesn't? She's using a pen, and it's probably Homura's.

On the one hand, it's a little wild to come across a Kierkegaard reference in a Madoka doujinshi. On the other hand, it makes nothing but sense.

(The title, The Sickness Unto Death, is also the title of a book by Søren Kierkegaard; it's a work of 19th century Christian philosophy, so it's decidedly heavy reading, but the "sickness unto death" of the title is despair — specifically despair considered as a rejection of love and the Infinite.)

When only women are involved all toxic things become noble.

I'm not sure why it's happening, but truly, comparing same thing looking through het prism, and looking through lesbian prism, its not the same "aura".

Does anyone have some idea why?

There are two things at play here.

First is the tendency and trend of hetero porn towards raunch and degradation for their own sakes. It's by no means universal, but the mainstream has had something of a race to the bottom, because when you desperately need to stand out from your competitors to be noticed but have no budget, making the sex dirtier and meaner is an easy solution. This then washes back into media in general, and young people's of heterosexuality.

The other is, sadly, misogyny, both externalized and internalized. "If both parties are women, then this toxic relationship can't really be bad, because women can't really hurt anybody." "The madam has a heart of gold, because, after all, she's a woman." "They're both girls, it can't really be rape." It's the same thing as, "He wasn't really raped, his assailant was a woman." Female sexuality, and female violence, are seen as inherently softer, and thus no threat to either men or other women, because women are soft and pure and can't hurt anybody, not in a real way.

(This is all very cisnormative, but of course that's part of the point. To be anything but a man is to be lesser, and to be a woman is the worst thing, so trans women are at once lesser, traitors, and attacking — trying to fool people that they have that special woman purity — and trans men are pretending to an undeserved greatness, while the nonbinary have broken the social compact and are doing both things wrong.)

To be clear, I like this piece, and I think the depiction here of love between a sex worker and her promoter is very sweet. But you'd never see the same story were the pimp male, and that's not primarily because of misandry.

last edited at Nov 15, 2021 6:50PM

I mean, I think it's pretty clear that Sacchan's dad is abusing her, and that he's hinting at roping Mizuki into it; the "this is daddy's penis" bit is Sacchan dealing with things by replicating her abuse.

The final wish is Mizuki's confused summary of the situation — she doesn't want Sacchan's dad involved, she just wants Sacchan, but Sacchan seems to think a penis is necessary, so if there's gonna be one, it should be Sacchan's.