yeahkeen posted:

i tried digging the author's pixiv and twt and i think there was a continuation of this. it's "The OL is curious about the otaku"

hope it gets translated

Please, if you still remember, share the link.

Edit: Found it. It’s just a Twitter post with the picture. No idea where the rest is. https://twitter.com/akiyamabc/status/1403672763647156227?s=21

Just checked out the anthology and the last chapter is the continuation.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0962Z126S
Here's a summary for anyone interested:
Seems to happen relatively soon after the ending scene of the first part.

It's winter time. Gyaru's kinda mad/sulky after Otaku says she's not continuing that one original yuri manga, and swears off checking her account (which she'd been religiously keeping up with up to that point.)

Suddenly she's met with posters advertising Otaku's latest work, an incredibly popular shoujo manga which is getting a big screen adaptation. Seems like at some point after the first story Otaku just completely stopped drawing yuri.

The two have a chance meeting in a cake shop. It's a bit awkward, with Otaku barely remembering Gyaru without her iconic twintails, and Gyaru going "your latest manga was really good!!" which gets a kinda nice surprised reaction out of Otaku before she backpedals a bit with "-is what a coworker told me."

Otaku says that if she's cool with it, Gyaru should read it too.

Gyaru stumbles over herself with all the things she wants to say. That actually, she's been following her since her Yuri days. That she's bought all her doujin. That she's gotten all the magazines she's been featured in. That she knows how much better she's gotten at drawing. That she wishes she would still draw yuri. Remembering their first meeting, she tries to apologize, before being interrupted by Otaku's (male) assistant/editor.

They part ways, and Gyaru sulks as she's on her way back home. What, exactly, it is that she wanted? She started hating Otaku all by herself, became regretful all by herself, and got frustrated all by herself. She ends up berating herself for thinking that maybe they'd start getting along just because they had a chance encounter.

We skip to spring time now. There's an ad of the same shoujo manga, this time being turned into a TV drama. We see Gyaru, with a haircut, as she notices the poster. Thinking about Otaku still makes her feel annoyed and regretful, but at the same time, she thinks to herself that she doesn't want to stay this way. This hopeless. She gets home and opens Otaku's twitter, and there, at the top of her timeline, there's a new drawing. The two yuri characters from that one manga she drew in high school, all those years ago, captioned: "Some nostalgic characters"

And then it ends, lol. Not quite fulfilling for those who wanted to see them together, but definitely a bit more hopeful than the first ending :p

last edited at Dec 6, 2021 1:22AM

I hate Touma's harem antics, too, and the yuri being played for laughs is annoying, but I'll play devil's advocate here and mention that it doesn't seem to be limited to yuri. Straight couples also fall victim to this.

Whenever a character has a crush on another, their whole personality is thrown out the window and replaced with a shallow, cartoony cardboard cutout that obsessively and one-sidedly obsesses over the object of their affections. I don't think I haven ever seen a character (that didn't start in an established relationship) whose crush is taken seriously at all as of yet.

The only "pair" that doesn't fall victim to this is Last Order/Accelerator, and that's mostly because they're less of a romantic pair and more of a big brother/little sister pair, so they're never subjected to romcom antics.

For example, Misaka is a cool but slightly childish ace with a strong sense of justice, but when Touma's around, she devolves into helpless tsundere #127456. Kuroko is a diligent and straight-laced ally of justice. She's also smart and talented in her approach to crime-solving. But whenever Misaka Mikoto is around, bam, she devolves into an incredibly dumb psycho lesbian. Index is a kindhearted, incredibly friendly girl whose smile can melt hearts, effectively working as the heart of any group of friends she's on, but around Touma she's helpless tsundere #5243426. Mugino is a freaking cold-hearted villain who starts growing a heart after going through some messed up crap. She's selfish and uncaring most of the time, but around Shiage, she mellows down to the point that she's nothing more than some maiden in love.

tl;dr: The Raildex author is incredibly bad at writing romantic interactions/feelings overall, not just the yuri kind. He really should just keep romance out of his works and focus on friendship and camaraderie, IMO.

Right? I really wish we could get more of this.

I hope I'm not the only one that thinks that the yuri tag almost always mean a sub-par manga when it's not plain awful. That's why you have to dig so much to find anything worthwhile within this genre. With my post before I was trying to say that this manga is barrel bottom in about every aspect: art, story, development and characters wise.

You say that this manga fails on every category, art, story, development and characters, but you don't give any evidence to justify such an extreme point of view.

I can't argue with you on the art category, since I'm not an artist and I'm pretty sure that what you consider good art differs from what I consider good art. I'm just gonna point out that this manga's art is very, very simple, and yet, despite that, it doesn't feel amateurish at all. Almost like it's a stylistic choice rather than lack of skill. I personally find it very charming.

Now, I wish you'd explain yourself on why you'd say it fails in the story, development and character departments.

To be completely honest, I feel that some important aspects of this manga are flying over a lot of people's heads, who are too busy lamenting the lack of yuri or hating on the guy. I feel that the main problem is that we were expecting a romance, when this manga isn't even tagged as such. I don't think this story's central theme is the girls' love for each other at all. This manga is about the protagonist's feelings and growth as a character.

It baffles me how you can say there's no character development in this manga, when in my eyes Youko's character development is amazing. This manga starts with the protagonist hating on the guy because he called her Imoko, and we're introduced to her dislike of being in her sister's shadow. But as it progresses, she realizes that she doesn't hate him /only/ because of that. What makes her hate for him so intense is that she feels like he's going to steal her best friend/crush from her. Of course, she takes a bit to realize that that's the reason she feels so hurt. It's obvious to the reader, too, especially when you compare her initial "Ugh, that dude is so annoying," reaction, in which she's angered by him but it's not like it's the end of the world, with the post-friend-having-a-crush heartbroken reaction, in which she is tormented by his existence.

So then we have the little arc of her ignoring her friend as punishment for liking the guy she hated. Now, regardless of whether you feel that her friend is a terrible person or not for liking the guy who calls Youko "Imoko" doesn't come into the equation here. What that arc was about was that Youko was playing it tough and giving her the cold shoulder on purpose out of spite, and she KNEW that. It's not "hmph, bitch deserved that." It's "crap, I'm hurting the girl I'm supposed to love, and yet I can't seem to stop because I'm too angry." That's what Youko is feeling during that arc, and I think it's amazing because it's such a human thing to do. I don't think I'm the only one who has ended up saying/doing hurtful things to the people who care about me because of my petty anger/frustration/jealousy. She's such a human character, and I love how in this manga it's not like she has a sudden realization that she's hurting her friend and suddenly gets over it and goes into full "I want my beloved to be happy" mode, but instead has to keep struggling with her negative feelings.

Now, even though I don't really like Keita as a person, I think that he, as a character, is a perfect foil to Youko. He is shown to be a dumbfuck who doesn't realize how what he says affects other people. He's annoying, rude, and gets in Youko's way. But he doesn't have bad intentions at all, and is shown to care enough about his Kouhai to go out of his way to apologize for something he didn't see as bad, just to get them to reconcile. I'm not saying he's a good person, nor am I saying he's a bad person either. He's a human, too, just like Youko, with good and bad points. I believe that Youko learning to deal with him as a person and accepting his good points as well as his shortcomings is a big part of her character development. She was demonizing him from the beginning, while later in the story she's shown to see him a bit more as his own person rather than just an asshole. She still hates him, but she also starts to understand him a bit, and if you don't think that shows how great her character development is, then I don't think you and I have the same definition of character development.

I can't really say much about Youko's crush, since I find her duller than a high school football player's mind, but I'm also biased because her crush on Keita and blindness to Youko's feelings frustrates me to no end. But that doesn't mean she's in the wrong or anything, and I like how little scenes that show her insecurity about her feelings lets us see that she's not the eternally smiling goofball that she seems to be on the outside. I do agree with a lot of people that since quite a while her whole character has revolved around her crush, and it's starting to get old.

What I'm trying to get at is that, yeah, I understand the guys who are complaining because they were expecting yuri romance; I also like my yuri stories to have proper romance between girls (though I agree with Sol Falling that the tag might be justified due to it dealing with the protagonist's frustration revolving around her attraction for a female friend). I also understand disliking it because it uses the typical het crush to get in the way of the best friend protagonist, it also annoys me a great deal. But saying it's the worst of the worst and not backing it up feels just like an excuse to bash something you don't like.

Ugh. I'm sorry for this tl;dr. This isn't my favorite manga either, but credit should be given where credit's due, and although I don't think this manga is a good yuri story in what I would expect from one, I do believe it's an amazing story about Youko's growth as a character.

last edited at Jun 2, 2014 8:23PM

Does anyone know when the next chapter is coming up? Do we have any raws for the next chapter? Man, I'm in withdrawal.