It... it kind of seems like a lot of people here somehow can't tell that Kaoru saying she wants to have a baby is supposed to be desperate, sad, and alarming? Like, there might as well be neon lights flashing that this is a bad choice, the way it's written? It couldn't possibly be clearer?

I'm just like absolutely baffled anyone is reading this and thinking it's the story of Straight Couple Drama when 1. the relationship should end immediately for many reasons the author has spelled out very well, and 2. Kaoru questioning her sexuality is a big part of what's going on here.

If I could tell any of the characters apart from one another, I'm sure I would find this very cute.

I have to admit something.

I hate Miwa's earrings.

I'm sorry.

MacySan posted:

I like this manga but...why do they never kiss?

Because that'd be too gay.

Sadly, this is legit the answer.

I want the off-brand Luna the cat to walk up and explain the ethics of consent within BDSM relationships. Like, in detail, for pages, while off-brand Sailor Mars is just sitting there taking notes.

Without that, this manga is really running the risk of being a real-life version of that bat thing.

I just realize something. We haven't been told "it's a secret from everybody" since the first beach chapter.

In fact, I'm pretty sure the author never uses it again.

Maybe this means something, maybe she just finally got sick of it.

I don’t know what anybody’s problem with that was—lots of series have taglines that become unnecessary for regular readers. (Like Yamada’s “Kase-san is cool and kind of boyish . . .”)

But they’re, you know—taglines.

I think partly because it's much more boring to see them keeping a secret forever than seeing their friends actually react to the relationship.

Also maybe it ties in to the whole "if it's a secret special pure innocent love between us then it's a delicate yuri flower!" which is just tired.

I still don't understand, if the author really really wanted us to think it's great that one girl had a make-over, why'd she draw her to look better before the makeover?

I'm distracted by Izumi's dainty little wristwatch. It's doggedly part of her character design. Maybe it's to help her keep from looking too tomboyish? I dunno.

End as a whole is hilarious. His speaking font, his look, his NAME... I gotta believe he's a parody of Evil Romance Story Villain.

Also, it's kinda weird that this couple, who are shown repeatedly communicating well and working through their issues, is doomed, but in a trillion stories on this site, the characters fight over easily avoided nonsense and are True Love.

I don't blame Chidori for her confusion. To these two, dating appears to just involve thinking "we're dating!" and then very occasionally making eye contact while blushing.

Are... are we still supposed to be rooting for these two to get together? Because borderline seems like a pretty accurate diagnosis for Maekawa, and so I find it kinda hard wanting Shimizu to get with her. Kid needs a lot of therapy before she's gonna be a good girlfriend.

Proposed: Nanami is the most crushworthy protagonist in Yuri media in the past few years.

I uh kinda want Nanami to end up with the obnoxious work lady and not her roommate.

I like the way the author played that scene. I thiiiiink it was supposed to be clear that Nanami knew she was being asked out and mentioned Nae as an excuse... but also realizing she meant it, too.

I'm confused about these most recent chapters. Who are these girls? Do they have some sort of secret where, even though they're girls, they're dating? I need this explained to me.

That isn't to say people who define themselves by their identity that way don't exist nor am I saying they're necessarily bad people or anything, but I don't really want to read about them.

Fair! Hope you didn't think I was trying to say you should have to.

My original complaint was that yuri manga has a tendency to not want anyone to speak out loud about the gay part of a gay relationship, even within the own characters' heads.

For me, it's like that oneshot that was posted a while back, Rainbow. Not taken to that extreme of a level where I see myself asking my partner when we're 80 "HM ARE WE GAY," but I understood the sentiment being preached by the author. I teach and I have kids that ask me "When did you find out your were gay?" and I always tell them I never really just woke up one day and found out, I just happened to fall in love with someone and they happened to be the same sex.

If you define your relationship on the basis of your identity first and partner second that's fine and all, but some people (like me) prefer to define it by our partner first and identity second.

Fine, but you live in a context where "gay" exists and is weird. This is of course not to say that you don't get to insist people respect your ways of wanting to be identified (e.g. they are dicks if they call you gay and you don't think of yourself as gay) but simultaneously everything you know of sexuality came from somewhere, and the heteronormative culture you live in provides context regardless of how you identify (specifically: all else held equal, it's harder to just happen to fall in love with another sex than with the same sex... not having an explicitly not-straight identity is a recipe for almost everyone being in straight relationships, because that's where society's inertia pushes us all).

The thing that needs to be addressed is, your description of your own sexuality appears aware of complexities... even if I don't understand how you can disregard things you're choosing to disregard, I sense you've CONSIDERED them before deciding they're not for you. That's similar to what I'm pleased to see that I'm wrong about regarding this manga. They're acknowledging the world. Akari is saying "It's my lot in life to be on the periphery (both because I'm a lesbian and because I'm an unmarried middle aged woman), so I'll do what you want. But you should really just go back to your husband, because that's easier."

Thing is, lots of yuri manga has undefined characters in part because a lot of the audience thinks it's gauche and rude when a woman says something like that out loud about herself. The purity is the point. And I'm never gonna get behind that... good to see this author isn't doing it.

The gay rights movement in Japan is decades younger than the one in the US.

You see, this is what you're doing wrong: you're looking at Japan through the eyes of the gay rights movement, and getting your data from gay movement activists. That won't do.

The gay rights movement in the US has been around for decades. And it has an extensive program, a program that has been finely tailored to suit the needs of the gay people in the US.

The gay rights movement in Japan is much younger. In fact, it was mostly organized by American activists who traveled to Japan to promote their ideas and theories. And it has an extensive program, a program that has been finely tailored to suit the needs of the gay people in the US.

Now, I wonder, do you see where the problem is?

Academic research shows that most homosexual men and women in Japan don't care for the gay rights movement. They don't feel the sort of alienation and discrimination American gays tend to experience, and they have their own social networks to deal with whatever concern they may meet. When they listen to gay movement people making speeches, it sounds so alien to them it's like those people are talking about a different country... which in fact is the case.

Nene is right. Japan has a completely different culture than the West when it comes to homosexuality. The "one size fits all" approach of American-style gay movement activists falls flat in face of this.

I don't doubt that there's problems with Western gay rights activists imposing their cultural assumptions onto Japan! I'm sure there are things that don't translate well both ways, and a better job needs to be done to have the movement led by people within the Japanese LGBT community.

I absolutely do NOT accept the absolutely ludicrous claim that things are hunky-dory in Japan for gay people without any sort of gay rights movement. I'm legit shocked that anyone could think this is true. If all you're saying is "the discrimination and alienation the Japanese LGBT community experiences is of a different kind than what Western LGBT people go through" then fine... though there are plenty of similarities, and if you read the paper I posted, which was just interviews with Japanese lesbians talking about some of their very familiar problems and dismiss it as some sort of Western imposition that contains no useful information, then I don't know what you would accept. But if you're saying "the discrimination and alienation of the Japanese LGBT community is minimal," then I have no earthly idea what you're talking about.

Can someone please restate how this "gay in Japan" debate affects the interpretation of this story/its characters?

My original complaint was that yuri manga has a tendency to not want anyone to speak out loud about the gay part of a gay relationship, even within the own characters' heads. This is very silly, because having non-normative desires, especially the same kinds repeatedly, is very likely to be psychologically important to a Japanese person! Even IF you don't merge your identity with your sexuality (which, blame westerners if you want, but most Japanese people WOULD in 2019), it's still something you'd think about. The response, and I still feel like I must be misinterpreting it somehow, was "No one has to repress their gayness in Japan, because they're not christian."

It came to my mind for this manga not because it's especially bad in this regard, but because it apparently has a main character driven by normative pressure to marry, but who is attracted to women (or at least is attracted to one now)... and there's no textual acknowledgement on her part of the non-normativeness of that! It's like, the pressure to have a normal life is her driving psychological force, but meanwhile she has a "love is love; sometimes gender doesn't matter!" orientation toward gayness at the same time, and it's baffling.

The author could still surprise me and bring it up later. Like I said, it doesn't have to be THE major thing... the specific pressure to get married could still be the main issue. If it comes up SOME, that'd be fine. But when even a manga packaged as a complex adult story about complex adult emotions is coy about addressing it, there's something really weird about the medium. There's this desire to keep from ruining the innocent purity of youthful girl's love (in a story about grown-ups).

Sweet Blue Flowers was a very distinctive and weird example, because there's some (subtextual but clearly deliberate) addressing of this with the teacher, but there's so much coy subtlety, I reached the end of the story truly unsure if the main character's primary love interest is attracted to women or not.

last edited at Jun 15, 2019 3:07PM

Am I misunderstanding you somehow?

Living in a society where, for ten or fifteen centuries, homosexuality was considered a crime and a mortal sin, where those suspected of it were stoned or burned at the stake, where, even today, people read and worship holy books that claim that, if you tolerate homosexuals living next to you, your city may be destroyed by heavenly fire...

... and living in a society where, for ten or fifteen centuries, homosexuality was considered okay, and sometimes even encouraged, where the religious and legal books don't say a word against homosexuality, where the greatest literary classics (like the Genji Monogatari or the Diary of Murasaki Shikibu) have main characters who are openly bisexual or homosexual and tell us of their happy same-sex encounters in a natural way and a positive light...

... is completely different. There's an abyss of difference.

If you need more reading on the subject, I can recommend some Japanese authors.

What you're saying here is very strange considering what I know of the actual life of actual gay Japanese people. I just did a quick google-search to re-update myself, and... yeah, coming to terms with your gayness in spite of repression is a thing. Telling your parents you're gay is a HUGE thing, and getting rejected is not super uncommon (and has awful emotional implications that don't translate super well to the way we think of things in the west). Being Gay is a huge deal there, because it could be seen of making a show of your weirdness. I kinda don't know why you keep talking about religion when Helen Keller could look at Japanese society and discern some problem stuff in there that would lead to repression.

I'm not a literature student, so I couldn't tell you much about the influence of the classics on modern culture in the two countries. But... like, Stonewall? The gay rights movement in Japan is decades younger than the one in the US. If you're talking about the specific notion of sin, then fine (though the Christian tradition certainly doesn't look at gayness as an identity, but rather as a thing you're tempted to do)... that wouldn't be in Japan, and that would affect things. But if you're somehow saying, like, "It's not realistic to portray Japanese people having psychological issues and anxieties in regards to their gayness, because there's no bible there," then you're just... wrong.

EDIT: This paper is old and not from a discipline I'm familiar with, but it has first-hand accounts of the kind of thing I'm talking about. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Saori_Kamano/publication/26837143_Entering_the_Lesbian_World_in_Japan/links/58e64b83a6fdcc6800b459f2/Entering-the-Lesbian-World-in-Japan.pdf
(what's changed in the last decade, in my understanding, is the commonness of queerness in media and entertainment, which makes it much less likely people will just not be aware it's a thing that exists)

last edited at Jun 14, 2019 8:08PM

The story really has not made a single mention of her not understanding her feelings for a woman. She doesn't understand this excitement and feeling of love in general. Her uncertainty and confusion doesn't stem from the fact that she cheated with a woman, but rather that she has never felt this way about anyone.

And isn't that, given the manga's general tone of being about adult complexities and not shying away from unpleasant truths, kind of silly? It doesn't have to be the focus, but to have her experiencing this ennui in the face of societal expectations for marriage... and then to cheat with a woman and the woman's gender isn't looming particularly large on her mind... a pretty glaring bit of weirdness?

Yup, and that's because Japan is not a Christian (or even Abrahamic) country and nobody believes that homosexuality is a sin. Shintoism and Buddhism have no beef with homosexuality. Heck, in Samurai culture, men were even encouraged to do it -- at least up to a certain age. Today, there are scores of clubs with crossdressing hosts or hostesses, catering to a heterosexual clientele who wants to indulge in queer kinkiness... and these are mainstream places frequented even by married people or by people in company outings.

The pressure to marry and have children in modern Japan exists at a family level, not a religious level. As for social pressure, well, it does exist, but it works mostly in indirect ways... like, a typical sarariman will have a much bigger chance to be promoted if he is married with children (because it makes him look more like a responsible adult).

The reason why it's rare to find a yuri story about Occidental-style repression of lesbianism is that such repression does not exist in Japan.

I am legit baffled, because you say there's not repression, but then you describe a bunch of stuff that would very reasonably cause repression (like social/family/economic pressure to have a "normal" life, or the association between queerness and irresponsibility).

I don't doubt there's plenty of ways the particular form of a society's homophobia trickles down onto the psychology of the individual queer people within that culture, so I imagine it takes a different form than in the US... a few years ago I read a thing about how Japanese lesbians have enormous difficulty STARTING relationships, because of the strong norm against women initiating romantic encounters. That of a specific kind we don't see nearly as much in the US. But I am just not following your logic of "they're not christian; instead they have other hangups, so there's not repression." In fact, from what I know of the daily life of a typical gay person in Japan, that's a bizarre and risible claim. Am I misunderstanding you somehow?

last edited at Jun 14, 2019 6:26PM

There are plenty of people in places where they know what gay people are that don't put one and one together until well into adulthood. Not everyone has access to the same resources and socialisation. If you're told all your life that marrying a man is a kind of chore and that everything else is sin then you very well might not reflect upon whether what you feel is real love.

Yeah, and that's a story about repression and social stigma. I am pretty certain this manga is not telling that story, and it's very rare to find a yuri story that IS about that.

I've seen plenty of stories from the US with characters who'd find it unthinkable that they're not straight and then realize it's true. But, like... the creators of these works don't try to place these characters in worlds where no one has ever heard of a gay person, and that's kinda what it feels like this wife character lives in. The other character at least does seem to think of herself as gay, but the wife has a kind of obliviousness that I am pessimistic will ever really be discussed as part of this story.

Point is, lots of these manga want to make, like, queeress nothing but subtext (that is, the state of being queer, not the state of being attracted to or loving another woman). And this often makes the characters look hopelessly naive or stupid, in 2019.

last edited at Jun 14, 2019 5:36PM

This really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. If you’re a reader of crime thrillers but you absolutely object to, say, rape themes, you’re probably going to have a problem sorting through the crime thrillers.

But you asked who cares about the author and I was explaining why it's important to?

You know the saddest part about this ill thought out passive-aggressive personal attack? You actually think you're being clever lol
You're lucky that I'm not the type you can get a rise out of with that nonsense. Otherwise I'd probably have bothered the mods by now. Take it easy, cuz not everyone is as nice as me~

(psst you prob shouldn't accuse people of being passive-aggressive and then immediately say you'd report them to the mods if you weren't such a nice person)

^ I’m not saying they have the same moral status, I’m talking about genre content. Who cares what it “says about the author”?

The themes of the story carry weight, because they're the persuasive part. When I take in entertainment or art, I'm trusting the creator with my transportation. If the creator is sneaking in bad messages, it could have a bad effect on people... or on me!

Reading about a story that simply contains a person behaving immorally is not necessarily the same thing, because the themes communicated might be orthogonal or even against the message that the immoral behavior is justified.

Of course people find plenty of things unpleasant and are free to not read things they think are unpleasant for their own entertainment (does anyone in the world disagree with this?). But there IS a difference between stuff we have to be vigilant about and stuff we don't.

OK seriously, people in Japan know what a gay person is, I promise. Why do we still get all these manga where a character's like "whooaaa I felt something I'd never felt before what could it beeeee" all coy and subtexty and indirect? If it's not an outright coming-out story, and you're not addressing things like repression and social stigma, then the characters just come off as displaying an irritating and unnecessary lack of introspection, in 2019.

Also, it's really common in manga for people to get married without, like, knowing one another at all and no one really bats an eyelid. Often characters are surprised to learn that, like, their best friends have gotten married. Is this really how it is?

It's sort of like being a reader of stories about the American West. It's perfectly reasonable to object to stereotypical treatments of Native American peoples in such stories, and to find any examples of that a deal-breaker as a reader.

I don't get this analogy, because there's a difference between portraying someone doing something immoral and creating a work that endorses socially negative themes. A negative or stereotypical portrayal of native americans says something about the attitudes of the author. Including a character who cheats on her husband doesn't, necessarily.

What an interesting and intriguing set of stories. I don't think I've ever seen yuri stories that focus on ALLIES rather than the queer girls themselves, but all three of these are about that... the first teases the "oh no my gay friend wants to do me!" trope but it turns out she was just supporting her friend the whole time. The second is about a straight person who sensibly deals with her friend's relationship issues. And the third goes all the way and has the characters actually taking an overt stand.

It's really refreshing to read this.