Pushed her down
Asked if they can do it
She says no
Immediately stops and apologises

Yes, it is literally a tale as old as time. People in relationships get physical with each other when they crave intimacy. That's normal. You don't need a written contract before touching your girlfriend's shoulder. She came on strong, to be sure, but literally the first time she was told "no" she stopped. Rape is a serious crime, and I wish we'd stop trivializing it by saying touching any part of your partner's body without asking first makes you a rapist. If only it were so easy to stop real rapists by telling them "no".

last edited at Jun 14, 2022 2:24PM

Well I cant say it isnt realistic but I seriously wasnt expecting rape. Like what the hell?

It's not rape. Takagai firmly says no, and Shiina comes to her senses and apologizes, but things are awkward between them for the next chapter and a half.

If you're curious as to what happens and can't wait for the scanlators to upload Chapter 5, check out Renta. The chapter preview for Chapter 5 shows the resolution to this cliffhanger, but not to Takagai and Shiina's relationship problems.

Oh it is just attempted rape. Much better.

It is not even attempted rape. Being pushy but ultimately stopping when someone says no is, like, the opposite of rape. Can we stop misusing the word? We don't need to go around branding people who stop when told to stop as rapists.

Hell, my biggest gripe with the story is that Kanako's character bio states that she "likes rape"... No she doesn't. She likes rape fantasies. And yes, that's me being petty.

The real crime is that the "messed up sexual tastes" are "yuri" and "rape", as if yuri was a degeneracy and not both perfectly normal & the way things should be. Unacceptable

oh my god this is gay

Oh yeah, that's some quality angst. The good stuff. Inject the suffering straight into my veins

pomf

Hayama has been acting in the exact same cartoonishly ridiculous way since Ch1, not sure how people are just now finding a problem with it after reading 18 chapters of the same schtick again and again lol

I want to get kidnapped and taken stargazing by a gay girl

What I don't understand is that 7SE is a small, passion-based outfit. It was founded in 2004 by a manga geek, still only had 10 employees in 2018, and only recently expanded up to 40 employees over the last few years. Everyone must know everyone, and surely they all share the same love for the hobby. In other words, this isn't a megacorp ran by faceless suits. How in God's name can you think, that at a 40-person hobby business, spending the budget on a union-busting firm is better than properly compensating your coworkers?

Not to mention that it seems completely futile. The solidarity of 30 employees who all know each other personally is going to be a lot harder to break than the more-difficult-to-organise thousands that these firms are normally brought in to disrupt by national corporations. And not only is it pointless, it's completely destroying their own PR with a sledgehammer. Who on Earth would want to buy manga from them knowing that their money is going not towards paying employees but instead this nonsense? Union-busting is always stupid, but this particular effort is truly unfathomable.

last edited at May 31, 2022 4:28PM

This happened to me with my first crush when I was 12, I confided in my friends and before I knew it my crush knew too. At which point I was pressured into awkwardly asking her out. And got rejected. The moral of this story is that real life sucks and that's why we all read yuri.

I don't have any clue what I just read, literally not one iota of an idea, but the only thing I know is that I want more.

I'm reserving judgment until we see how this actually pans out, but contrary to everyone else I don't really understand the point of this plan so far. If I were in Yvonne's position I would 100% think the most natural conclusion, by far, was that Elsa was lying to blow Garth off, by using Yvonne as her "beard".

Also I feel like there might be something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense about Garth being a mega yuri fan in this otome game world

I can buy that, since gacha games have a wide variety of personalities so at least one will appeal to someone's tastes, but Yvonne should really know about his yuri-obsession with her meta-knowledge.

this is great and all but I can't get over the wedding bell sfx being "ding dong", like it's just a door bell lmao

As to the comments about not liking the side characters taking over, it was 2 chapters for the twins that were used directly to push the plot along.

I feel like this is missing the complaint pretty badly. Every chapter has been about a side couple for quite a while now, not just the twins. Which is, I guess, the whole theme of the manga - the main character just wants to watch other yuri couples, so we get to watch other yuri couples. But they're so bland that I literally can't distinguish half of them, and making your main character into a mob who doesn't participate in her own story is... a bold gambit. It reminds me of Kindred Spirits on the Roof, actually, but that did a much better job of executing on the concept, IMO.

but it's not focusing on the side characters to the detriment of the main couple

I'd argue it pretty much is. I'm not going to go count but it feels like Watanabe and Yoshioka tend to only get 3 or 4 pages of focus per chapter, and I find myself rapidly clicking next page through every chapter until they interact in some form.

I will give credit, though, it's amazing how hard Yoshioka manages to carry this. It seems like almost everyone commenting is still reading just for her, myself included.

last edited at May 28, 2022 9:58AM

Wow, somehow I completely overlooked this manga until now. I guess the weird title didn't entice me? Friggin' anemones. I've been seriously missing out, but I'm grateful I got to binge it right as they became a Thing. This is S-tier diabetes. And the art is so good. 100/10

This was bothering me so much I had go back and break down exactly why the drama got on my nerves so badly.

Vol4 Ch3 - Haruka starts her "special relationship" with Sumi.
Vol5 Ch3 - A volume later, Mitsuki discovers that Haruka is "going behind Yuu's back"
Vol5 Ch4 - Mitsuki tells Yuu that something is going on between Haruka and Sumi. Yuu gets jealous.
Vol5 Ch9 - After five chapters of status quo with Yuu not acting jealous at all, she finally remembers she's supposed to be upset right now and confronts Haruka: "you're hiding something from me, aren't you?". They're conveniently interrupted. Cue end-of-volume cliffhanger.
Vol6 Ch1 - Rather than continuing where the cliffhanger left off, the previous conversation is forgotten as though it never happened, and it's a new day. After 10 pages of acting upset, without any context whatsoever, Yuu tells Haruka: "I... I'll wait until you're ready to tell me your secret." Yuu kisses her, and the subject is then dropped and never mentioned again.

So, like, Haruka was worried she was being unfaithful, but she convinced herself Yuu would do the same thing to help out a friend. It was never something she had intentionally decided to hide from Yuu. And then, several chapters after finding out, Yuu finally confronts her, only... Yuu never mentions Sumi, at any point. Haruka has no idea what she's talking about, and the second time that Yuu brings up her "secret" Haruka never responds. They aren't even interrupted this time, there's literally just three panels of no text afterwards before cutting away. We never see Haruka's thoughts on any of this after the first time Sumi propositioned her.

I know "manga characters are aliens that are incapable of human communication" is the bog-standard, go-to way to artificially draw out drama in romance manga of all flavours, but this is headdesk-inducing, one of the most frustrating examples I've ever seen. And this kind of thing just keeps happening again and again throughout the manga... I loved all the sweet moments and self-contained chapters where some small insecurity about their relationship popped up and was properly resolved by the end of the chapter, but the bigger drama arcs between Haruka and Yuu were so poorly handled. I remember being annoyed by this when reading along with the releases but I originally put it down to the the usual pain of having months between chapters, but no, it was actually just written that badly.

last edited at May 25, 2022 9:19PM

This is probably sacrilege but I reread this this week and gosh does Sakura Trick make my head hurt. It feels like by the second half of the manga Yuu and Haruka never talk to each other about literally anything. Something will happen to make one or the other upset and then it never goes resolved, just returns to status quo unaddressed. Haruka's "special relationship" with Sumi, Kotone staying with Yuu, the "kissing friends" comment, Yuu changing her mind about going to university, Haruka deciding to follow her without actually consulting her.

Tachi has this infuriating habit of dropping some kind of bombshell at the end of a chapter, setting up a cliffhanger, and then skipping forward next chapter to keep you waiting for the resolution to the cliffhanger. But, like, it skips forward, and the issue gets mentioned again for a few panels 5 entire chapters later, and still doesn't get resolved. Then the last volume is like, haha whoops guess I better tie up the 50 loose ends that the entire manga now consists of all at once.

And the "kissing friends" thing, ugh. By that point they had already told each other they loved each other so many times. Yuu was mentioning multiple times that she was confirming that she loved Haruka the way her sister had meant when she confessed. Yuu agreed to a freaking wedding!! It's possible to gradually fall into a relationship without explicitly saying the words "will you go out with me", without putting a label on it, and it felt like that was happening the entire manga, which is a super refreshing thing to see in a yuri manga, only for it to regress at the very end for the sake of setting up a confession that had basically already happened through actions rather than words. And, like, it wasn't even necessary to the drama??? The drama still would have worked fine with Haruka and Yuu figuring out their future together when Yuu decided not to go to university with Haruka.

I don't think I've ever had such a love-hate relationship with a manga.

Sex is literally the most special, intimate thing you can do with someone. It seems like fantasy to pretend that it can be equated to something as mundane as flipping burgers, and I say this as a former chaturbate model. I know that's not exactly the same kind of sex work, but even when it was my job to masturbate for people I absolutely got off on it. And that was despite hating doing it for work, being told what to do by entitled freeloaders and listening to gross sexist men, etc. I mean, this very story reinforces this fact fully: the entire relationship is formed between a sex worker and a client entirely while she's on the job. And yet it would be bigoted for the CEO to not want to date a sex worker who falls in love with the people she's having sex with, if she kept doing it?

And even if you really did manage to not have any feelings about having sex whatsoever, I'd expect that it would vastly decrease the specialness of doing it with your partner as well. I can't imagine wanting to do sex work while in a relationship. There's a point, I think, where excessive sex-positivity can harm your own enjoyment of sex. If you start thinking of sex as an entirely physical affair, that it's fine to just do it as casually as you want because it feels good so why not, you devalue what it really means emotionally, and in doing so decrease the degree of intimacy obtained from doing it with a partner. Maybe this doesn't apply to everyone, each person is their own individual, but that's exactly why you can't coat the whole world with this universal standard that everyone must be okay with themselves/their partners having casual sex inside a relationship while calling people bigots for disagreeing.

Lastly, supposing everything I just said was wrong and you were 100% right, even then, saying that having insecurities = being bigoted is lunacy. People are allowed to have insecurities, and to try to find a partner with boundaries that are compatible with theirs.

last edited at May 25, 2022 9:40PM

Damn monogamy is bigoted now? didn't realise I was a piece of shit

Woooo here comes the contrivance that convinces the sex worker to give up her stable income for a thin promise because obviously sex workers are undateable and we as readers couldn't bear to see an adult protagonist choose to enter a lasting relationship with such a person.

I'm not sure I would call that a contrivance. That's just like... normal? It's fine if you like polyamory, but you can't really be trying to shun people for being monogamous, can you? Nobody is obligated to date somebody who has sex with other people

I like this manga, but this might be one of the worst manga chapters I've ever read. It wasn't just the lazily constructed cliffhanger at the end by obscuring a text bubble - from the very start of the chapter, she demanded twice that Noa quit, without providing any context or reasoning whatsoever. That's... that's not how adults communicate, and certainly not a professional secretary. In other words, the entire chapter was constructed to be an arbitrary cliffhanger, from start to finish. What's the point of the chapter if, from the very start, you're delaying the thing that the chapter was meant to address? It was basically just filler, and if we were going to get filler, I would have rather we just cut, unprompted, to an entire chapter about that bunny than... whatever this was.

sukoya hit her with the c: and my girl's face just melted into a puddle lmaoo

"I mean, my bro's an SSR!"

I love this so much. I think it would have been very easy for this chapter to be annoying, but I thought it was executed well. Yvonne has a good reason to keep Elsa away from her, but she really cares about her and wants to make sure Elsa can still find happiness. Certainly, it is helpful that he immediately picked up on Elsa's visual cues instead of being completely oblivious, and won't exist just to be a roadblock to yuri despite Yvonne's best intentions.

That's the problem. That's almost unheard of these days. Interest rates are way lower now.

Not a savings account, investment. That's a completely normal return for investing in government bonds or something like the S&P 500, which are both very safe investments over the long term and will be for the foreseeable future, probably until the collapse of capitalism (in which case you might have other things to worry about than not getting your annual 5% return on investment).

Also, yes converting to USD is perfectly fine for a baseline of understanding how much that is in general

I wouldn't go further than establishing an approximate understanding that 1 yen = ~1 cent, in terms of domestic spending. My problem with using Current Moment exchange rates is how it seriously undervalues how far the yen will go in Japan; the yen fell by 20% against the dollar in the past year, but domestic prices most certainly have not increased by 20%, so it's pretty misrepresentative to convert to a number that's 20 or 30% lower. That's just always been a pet peeve of mine, that people treat yen like it's literally stapled to dollar bills and convert the price of daily expenses in Japan to a completely different number every month as it fluctuates. Especially when scanlators do it, putting an unnecessarily 'accurate' conversion for readers to see that will be especially inaccurate for people not reading the day it was uploaded.

You'd have to live like a normal person

For sure, it's nowhere near opulence money. But living like a normal person that doesn't have to work is a pretty dang sweet deal, I'd say!

Mariya does not look like a person who makes good long-term financial decisions
this girl is gonna go broke in a few years at this rate

This is probably true.