me, reading this completely sfw series: wait a second this is some real pervert stuff?

the way this artist draws hands is spectacular

last edited at Jun 21, 2023 8:16PM

that ad hominem about only liking people u wanna fuck is hilarious. note to that other guy, you gotta write “she doesn’t LIKE like” or “she doesnt like her THAT WAY” so people dont think youre being too mean to the fictional character getting rejected

okay to make up for my info-dump, a topically relevant comment: i feel like zhang guo has literally never thought of liking girls as an option before or has never been exposed to lesbians LOL. it sounds like she noticed dai yi is weirdly preoccupied with her and heard her say “I wanna know if she bats for my team” but has no idea it’s a gay euphemism so she keeps manufacturing ways for their paths to cross in hopes that dai yi might eventually spill what her deal is.

dai yi refuses.

Lol, for sure. You definitely see longstrip artists using 3D assets wayyy more than manga artists do.

Interesting. Why would long strip artists be more prone to that?

That is...a good question haha. If you look at manhwa, they're in almost all of em, especially the rofan ones. Some creative teams even have a dedicated role for blender users, I believe? I think some combination of the tight one-week update schedule and just the precedent of using 3D assets always being there in longstrip. Whereas if you tried to introduce 3D assets in manga, I think people would riot lol.

busting the door open on a months old convo — yeah the simplest answer is time restraints. Most webtoons operate on a weekly update schedule and the expectation is fully colored. If i was a webtoon artist and i had to storyboard, ink, and color a chapter every week, while drawing perspectively accurate BGs, i would immediately seek out a less physically intensive career like. idk. coal mining. many artists use blender or 3d models as a workflow shortcut to help them meet the content creation schedule the market demands, or to save time to prioritize other aspects of the creative process, or to leave time for wellness, which i totally respect. also, CSP, which is commonly used in Asia as opposed to photoshop, makes incorporating 3D models soooooo easy. See: https://mobile.twitter.com/prima_0804/status/1483754455292334086, https://twitter.com/shio_mid/status/1502192603495747586

there are manga artists who use 3D! inio asano had a whole ep on manben showing how he uses unreal engine, of all things, to model his bgs or other assets in 3d. depends on the individual artist, but some rely pretty heavily on photo reference too, over actually modeling. another example: https://www.otaquest.com/the-elusive-samurai-3d-models-yusei-matsui/. if readers haven’t noticed, thats a testament to how well it’s integrated into their work, or else how little the average reader thinks about it lol. i suppose i see less reoccurring reused assets in manga compared to webtoon tho.

does lead to some funny situations, ie:
https://twitter.com/conradluvr69/status/986747588765474816
https://www.reddit.com/r/OtomeIsekai/wiki/castle-nim

any response to tongtong’s mom outside of ‘omg milf’ is…… not wrong, per say, but i don’t endorse it

i’m mostly kidding lol but she is great

me, completely focusing on the wrong thing: why she sleepin with her accessories on

tbh the absolute ZERO sense of internet safety on that girl triggers me more than anything else in this story. ok like her gf is depressingly repressed but on the opposite end of the spectrum she is literally livetweeting her entire inner monologue like a zoomer james joyce. have some discretion................................................ fuuko said imma give you a wake-up call free of charge you're welcome. you want anything else with that? juice? handholding? a whole nother gf? call me.

a really lovely series with characters that felt relatably human. i loved the sense of humor and i appreciated how maekawa and shimizu communicate - even in the last ch the, "i don't feel like sexy times i just want to chat and cuddle" stands out to me as a really sweet moment, in a series with quite a few... i'll miss this... watching out for whatever Akashi does next; definitely a favorite.

thanks as well to sexy akiba detectives, whose translations have always been smoothly done and engaging. literally the only hesitation i'd have re:buying this in english is missing out on their particular translation.

it's no surprise Akira struggles with getting close to people when her first instinct to being confided in is to either get knee-jerk judgmental or privately consider you weak.

i also think she's misunderstanding the situation... Rin wants to be teaching the "non-school stuff." Akira can frame it as helping Rin out of an ethically weird situation but her solution is just an attempt to displace the mayuki/rin relationship and mitigate her own jealousy. Neither of the other two girls fit the boxes Akira has placed them in. She seems to think they're both clueless, vulnerable, and unable to make sensible choices on their own, so she needs to step in as a voice of reason, when her own actions are also teenager-typical levels of irrational.

Interested to see if/how her attitude changes. my guess is that mayuki will surprise her.

... How on earth did I miss the uploading of Chapter 5 a few months ago??? Also, what's with chapters 5 and 6's respective numberings not starting from 1?

hey! the raws came with the pages numbered that way. as the editor (for ch 6 not 5) i can say this is probably a holdover from the story’s pagecount in the magazine it’s originally printed in. idk about the other editor but i just didnt bother to change the page numbers; there’s no special meaning.

this plotline feels the most compelling (since its drama city in an otherwise sort of goofy, horny, feel-good story) but i also dunno if i could take all this drama without all of the other fluff going on haha. at the same tho that slows down the progression quite a bit -- shizuka and kaoru won't cross paths again for another 40ish chapters. not really spoilers but to be safe the last few have been mio's POV but i'm hoping after 198 we get more chapters of this pair from shizuka's POV. really wanna know what that girl is thinking about this relationship. it's hard to trust her from mio's POV because she's always been shown as the sort of mysterious sempai who always knows just what to say and do, and very rarely appears vulnerable.

actually i totally understand why mio was like, "i don't wanna hear about that other girl," but it probably would be a good idea for them to have a conversation about that other girl. at some point.

anyway i'm rooting for these stupid kids. always surprised that a goofy, horny, feel-good story also generally does a good job at feeling emotionally honest.

last edited at Sep 26, 2019 9:14PM by OrangePekoe

spent a while trying to nail down what the artstyle reminds me of. A little bit Yotsuba&!, with Fuyu-chan looking a little like the girl from Blue Flame, Fragrant Clay, maybe? really love the background work; creates a good sense of atmosphere. The art for this in general is lovely. I keep stopping to admire it...

^ Two very good posts above. But simplistic thinker that I am in such matters, pending further concrete evidence to the contrary my money’s still on asshole.

A pretty safe place to put your money haha

That’s an interesting reading that would make for a more sympathetic character. All of those reasons are very solid and realistic. But just because your behavior is understandable in this light or given that justification doesn’t necessitate the benefit of the doubt or the forgiveness of others. Especially if that’s something you can’t even bring yourself to ask for. There are circumstances in which we allow people to hurt us out of clumsiness or a lack of finesse, but we’re never obligated to do so. If someone does something rude to me, I have to be motivated to reframe or justify that — if it’s someone I don’t care for then it’s easier to just say they’re an asshole and move on.

I like that you’re framing her words as someone awkwardly trying to get around to “hey I’m okay with the label girlfriend now. See I’m saying we were (ex) girlfriends!” It is kind of charming. Still, none of this positively hints that she’s improved in the communication department haha

Tbh I can relate to inadvertently rejecting someone in a harsh way because I was too caught up in my own embarrassment to make space for a more sensitive/empathetic response.. it’s something I regret but it’s also something I realize is too late to apologize for, and to a degree that apology would be only to the benefit of my own guilty conscience. That person is doing well regardless.

Anyway my bet is on this arc ending with N&C finally coming out to someone? Maybe?

I'm calling them bizarre because they appear to expect absurdly overwrought over-emoting

I went and reread the last two discussion pages cuz your response made me think I was missing something lmao. Where are the telenovela dreams? The Saturday morning cartoon demands on morality? Not seeing it. Should I go back 3 pages? Can I get a quote?

...I’m starting to feel like I’m white knighting tho, so I should also probably back off / get off my high horse lol.

Uh, isn’t it kind of cute that both Chidori and Nanoha changed their long-standing hairstyles in high school? It makes me wanna see a flashback chapter of Nanoha with short hair. I also kinda want a “Beginning of Their Friendship” set of chapters now too ngl

That being said, read chapter 45 and signs are pointing towards her being an asshole, or at least still being really vague and manipulative so there’s that.

Speculations all well and good, but why get so aggressive/righteous about your guess lol? Like, it’s not that I disagree with what you’re saying but... it’s speculation. Why throw around such strong language like “bizarre, questioning your grasp of elementary [concepts], [insert hyperbole about someone else’s claims ie “penitently crawling around in sackcloth” lol].” Since you’re both just trying to call numbers on a roulette spin, it’s impossible to definitely say who’s right until the ball actually drops. Therefore, even “bizarre claims” have some level of probability, and Lilliwyt’s claim isn’t even that bizzare. Whatever a person’s true feelings are, when they act obliquely and hold their cards close to their chest, it’s difficult to trust them. That’s also normal. Narrative predictions also place more weight on author framing than human behavior, although both typically play a part in good writing, because whether a character acts in a believable, “human” way is dependent on the purpose the author wants them to carry out.

nanoha is such a good girlfriend, wow. im writing notes LMAO

i must have been rlly out from the manga life bc to me the whole WHY WOULD I WANT TO HUG MY FRIEND WITHOUT A REASON drama just made me laugh ajsjskqld

i mean sure we all know shes in love but hahahah that was such a funny reason. isnt skinship a thing in their world cmon she’s a gyaru, she probably did that a lot of times. and i know izumi’s probably creepy but what she said wasnt... wrong... at all

lol this was my reaction. Weird cognitive dissonance when the art and framing all signal something questionable is happening and the questionable thing just amounts to someone saying, “Yeah friends totally hold hands and hug and stuff nbd.”

The author’s probably trying to push the gaslighting angle but somehow the dialogue misses that for me. I think I get what they’re trying to get at tho (aka the notable thing isn’t actually hugging but the emotional weight she’s putting on hugging, which is what is being dismissed out of hand).

I feel like yonurime’s art improved a lot, and I’m super impressed. The lines feel a lot more deliberate and “finished” to me..it made me happy to see how good they’ve gotten so I liked this story very much.

i wonder if this was amano's first shot at a long(er) running series that wasn't a set of loosely associated vignettes? i think a lot of what people dislike about this story could have been avoided if the pacing was better, or at least slower. Spontaneous epiphanies and sudden character actions are pretty decently received in short stories, because there's a lot less space to work with, so readers will just take it at face value. Flat characters are also easier to swallow in a oneshot lol. I think it mightve been that the mangaka was trying to juggle too much (esp cast-wise) and everything got a bit shortchanged. Anyway, realistic is circumstantial and pretty vague of a label to paste on anything, tho I note that it mostly gets stuck on darker or unhappier stories (because happiness is in some way unrealistic?? interesting that a more lighthearted story has more hoops to navigate in order to fit that label but anything remotely depressing gets a free pass). I think I'd like this story more if it was clearer to me how we were supposed to take the last few chapters, because right now I'm not sure what the mangaka's opinion is.

meh. amano's hit and miss with me. at least the artstyle is always nice to look at.

really honestly i had assumed that most of the people demanding less men in yuri, were men. lol. like, the general overtones of purity and infantilization that you see in yuri is not something actual queer women would apply to themselves. and i thought that dudes were the ones that would get most threatened by other dudes (within the content they consume, esp straight guys who move from het to primarily yuri, like...really...what do you think they're here for..). esp because with queer girls you get so used to being disappointed by the content marketed as yuri that you start looking for subtext in normal media, which is saturated with dudes, so u get to create the narrative that will satisfy you the most. like, people find yuri in haikyuu, free, literally everywhere - if you want it you get used to working around guys, they are not that scary. its not so much that i want men to be love interests, or that im particularly interested in love triangle related drama, because wow that is so tired, but that any male character is seen as a romantic threat (because ofc ~why would she be attracted to that other girl if theres a viable male right there~) is annoying lol. and reading comments from people freaking out is annoying. also it seems like ssamba is setting up a sexuality debate w/in the story, because kim gyeong-woo and kim no-rae are obvious mirrors of each other - they even have the same last name - so i wouldn't be surprised if there was a brief plot where seol-a decides to date him (being the 'male ver') b4 realizing shes thirsty for no-rae exclusively, and if it happens there will be capslock everywhere lol. i guess another reason why im not too concerned is that i just get the feeling ssamba is pretty trustworthy.

the debate on realism is pretty baffling to me, because as long as the characters are behaving in a believably human, realistic way, in all other parts of the narrative realism depends on context. i dont think it would be possible to impose universality on it one way or the other, because invariably you end up delegitimatizing someone else's experiences. its pretty interesting to think about, though.

lol christ. the comments on this are wild. well no matter what, this series doesn't move nearly as slowly as other long running series like stretch and honestly i would read a well written comic, devoid of male gaze-y crap, or other terrible tropey pitfalls the yuri genre tends to succumb to, no matter what the ending was. Tropey stuff universal to the romance genre as a whole, though? hell yeah. Anyway the author has set up enough plot points to indicate this is gonna be hella long, so you're not going to know the ending any time soon. If male characters threaten you that much, tho, you might want to save yourself the trouble and drop it for now. Also, the korean version has only reached ch 18, as of this post. whoever said 22 was wrong.

anyone fell that this is has a similar vibe with 'cheese in the trap'? but with the love interest is a girl? or maybe i just overthinking coz both are koren webtoon

no-rae looks vaguely similar to the protag, so i had the same thought... seol-a is a lot nicer than the dude from cheese in the trap tho; naive and a bit hot tempered, but not at all manipulative (my impression from reading on).