But wait--they're both girls . . .?!?

You know how people talk about “food porn,” etc.? I swear this series is Body Language Porn.

Those panels of Akebi stepping out the window—now I need a cigarette. And I don’t smoke.

Jesus, get a room, you two.

ohh~ pretty and stylish nice. i'm down :D
also what's an audio yuri drama? never heard of it before.

Its like a podcast? Idk imagine watching anime but with audio only. Thats audio drama for ya!
Im guessing this series is similar to "Listening to the Stars"

So freaking similar that it sounds (oops) like “Listening to the Stars” in glam costume instead of university jeans and t-shirts.

But I’m sure it will take gorgeous-reserved-yuri-audio-actress x carefree-pretty-younger-yuri-audio-actress in entirely new narrative directions.

But even if not, fine—another pioneer in the burgeoning yuri-audio-actress yuri genre.

last edited at Jan 17, 2025 11:26AM

Pin this as a Handholding FAQ.

It's just pure speculating because we don't get enough chs nowadays... Is there any news about the new chapter or Kabocha?

She slowed down the release rate because of personal issues.

I think we now get about 1/3 of a chapter every month; and since I translate full chapters, you'll have to wait.

Thanks for your work on this—it’s one of the more intriguing series to come along in quite a while

and going by the authors prior work, if there is a hint of romance involved, it's going to be so subtle you'll have to read between every line several times over, in order to come to that conclusion.

I’l grant that “going by an author’s prior work” is rather more solid grounds for predictions than “teenagers are like that,” and also that Fukaumi Kon’s Haru and Midori and the one-shot were not primarily about romance between the MCs.

But H&M wasn’t exactly yuri-free, either—Midori absolutely had been in love with Haru’s dead mom. In that story there never was much of a chance of an age-gap romance between the two title characters—that one was clearly about love growing between two very different people as they make a found family. Anyone who expected otherwise clearly wasn’t reading very carefully.

And the citation of Her Mountain, Her Ocean as a supposedly similar romance-free story makes me wonder what the minimum requirement for “romance” might be.

last edited at Jan 9, 2025 7:15PM

im currently 60 chapters in into another manwha that has pretty much same vibes as this but there is no indication of romance, just an insane amount of closeness and lots of blushing. if you're curious what manwha im referring to, it's Her Mountain, Her Ocean.

That's not the best example, for your point. Those two are not just friends. I'd keep reading. Still, I'm not sure how you'd characterize their relationship like that. The series isn't subtle about their feelings even by chapter 60. "No indication of romance?" is definitely not true. If that's the case, I think you're not reading romantic clues well. Good series though.

i'll admit, the way that they look at each other sometimes can appear to be an indication of something more than friendship, but people who are socially awkward and or inexperienced tend to do stuff like that, especially teenagers.

But appealing to real life is not the most immediately relevant evidence when talking about genre fiction tropes, and I read those tropes in both of these series as strongly signaling an endgame that is considerably more than “socially awkward teens discover friendship.”

Granted, we have yet to see the kind of events that yuri-skeptic readers often demand—kisses, hearts in eyes, sexual fantasies—so it’s theoretically possible that this series could end up being solely about “friendship.” But I, among others here, strongly doubt it.

hmmm, so romance probably wouldnt be fitting for this one. it seems more like a budding friendship between two (one's slightly bashful, the other's entirely stoic) teenage girls. even going by the undertones (best friends also talk daily and seek each other out in a crowd of people), it doesnt seem like this will develop into some sort romance, sadly.

great way to end the volume, im definitely interested in buying the next one and continuing to support the author.

I'm thinking the love hasn't bloomed yet, but we'll see.

An awful lot of blushing just for “budding friendship,” I’d say.

Sakura blushes quite a bit, even when she's conversing with people she's hardly familiar with, like Hinata, for instance. and i feel Takamine blushes when she gets embarrassed, which happens quite often as her relationship with Sakura has revealed, even to herself, that she's inexperienced with many social cues and interactions, which isn't hard to believe coming from teenagers, because again, they're teenagers.

if it weren't for the one-shot (where Takamine lit up like a christmas tree), id write this off as another 'best friend' manga. im currently 60 chapters in into another manwha that has pretty much same vibes as this but there is no indication of romance, just an insane amount of closeness and lots of blushing. if you're curious what manwha im referring to, it's Her Mountain, Her Ocean.

Ah, yes—“lifelong roommates who always long to be together when apart isn’t romance.” Duly noted.

hmmm, so romance probably wouldnt be fitting for this one. it seems more like a budding friendship between two (one's slightly bashful, the other's entirely stoic) teenage girls. even going by the undertones (best friends also talk daily and seek each other out in a crowd of people), it doesnt seem like this will develop into some sort romance, sadly.

great way to end the volume, im definitely interested in buying the next one and continuing to support the author.

I'm thinking the love hasn't bloomed yet, but we'll see.

An awful lot of blushing just for “budding friendship,” I’d say.

I try not to post very often just to say things like, “Damn, this is so freaking cute/sweet.”

So now I’ve got nothin’.

Cant enjoy till pedo teacher gets guillotine. Groomer/miss-use of position of power/manipulation/pedophile/cheater and we’re supposed to overlook that. Last page shoulda been him dead or in jail or dead

Can’t disagree with the evaluation of the teacher and his crimes, but I don’t get the “we’re supposed to overlook that” part.

Are you saying that if every bad action in a story isn’t directly punished the author is ignoring (or even promoting) it?

Same apply to @Blastaar.
You know what? I think you are really annoying and not even worth wasting my brain cells to talk. However, the thought of wishing you disappear have never cross my mind even though you are just a stranger on the internet to me. You should feel ashamed of your malice.

LOL

EDIT: I do agree that my joke would have been an example of malice, if I thought we lived in a world where my wishes could whisk a person away to Never-Never Land. But the entire point of my post was that, like every other rational person, I do not believe we live in such a world.

(If it is any consolation to you, I did not “officially” wish that you would disappear; I just made a joke about doing so. So you can rest easy on that score. Google “use-mention distinction” to clarify the difference.)

last edited at Dec 31, 2024 7:08AM

the only 'terrible thing' erika did in the past was make a wish that someone they are jealous of/angry at disappears lol. What angsty teen hasn't wished someone would disappear.

Yeah. Typical "What angsty teen hasn't done or said something" defense lol.
I can understand as a immature teen couldn't help her thought like"My life would have been much better without that fucker". But actually act on it, especially when "that fucker" is one of your best friends, for the stupidest reason ever like "oh, she steal my crush who l like first even though she has no way of knowing it cause my cowardice", is a totally different story.

Please be explicit. What do you mean by act on it? Beyond making a wish at Tanabata which no one would reasonably expect to be literally actualized, what did she do?

Well, well, well. Another Erika's defender showing up yelling "She has done nothing wrong" is indeed one of my enjoyment now lol.

Look. She not only has the thought of wishing someone disappear, she actually writes it on tanzaku and hangs it up on bamboo. The hint in https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/how_to_break_a_triangle_ch17#34 is very obvious. She also apparently had a fight with poor Aya, who sincerely takes Erika as her best friend and has no way of knowing Erika's secret love. Considering Aya's good character, it must have been Erika's one side argument. Like hysterically screaming at Aya "l like her first", "Koto would eventually love me back if not for you", "You are just a stone between us", "l never consider you as my friend", "Why wouldn't you disappear?".
Yeah. What did she do? Ofc goddess Erika did nothing wrong ┑(￣Д ￣)┍

Like I said, this person is writing fanfic—the same fanfic over, and over, and over (although now with imaginary dialogue). Normal logic has nothing to do with the argument.

“Normal” would be understanding that lots of people wish for someone to disappear all the time without ever expecting that the person will actually disappear.

Like me. Right now.

But actually act on it

Do you think Tanabata wishes normally come true?

“Normal” is not an applicable concept in relation to this particular argument.

WHERE IS THE TABLECLOTH?

Are you assuming a poor family on hard times would have a tablecloth?

Are you saying the mom is hallucinating the tablecloth she asks Yvonne to put on the table?

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/please_bully_me_miss_villainess_ch104#2

WHERE IS THE TABLECLOTH?

My very question.

It's kinda funny to me in all the talk of potential moral flaws and good person vs bad person and theorizing why Aya disappeared, nobody ever really mentions that scene from the end of volume 1 where Koto appears to be writing How To Break A Triangle as a script, planning what Aya does before she does it. And I think honestly it's understandable to shelf that because it's still so wildly inconsistent feeling with every other scene of the manga so far. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if we found out that was retconned out and replaced with something nowhere near as sinister looking for the volume lol. It's so disconnected tonally and thematically from everything else, and it clashes so hard with Koto being a) mostly passive and b) getting dumped by Aya anyway, that even if I want to analyze it all I can really do is throw some wild curveballs and hope I get lucky with my guesses rather than actually build a theory based on the story.

That’s pretty much it—I think about that scene a good bit, but the more I do the less I know what to say about it.

Since we’ve mentioned principles of interpretation, the simplest way to think about the process is “pattern recognition + so what?” That is, perceiving patterns of repetition and variation, then considering the question, “what is the significance of the pattern?”

In this case, as you say, there aren’t very many other examples of purely symbolic/figurative representation, and the scene doesn’t really fit with other aspects of Koto’s character development. It clearly relates to the theatre/stage/acting theme in the series, but other than that, I got nothin’.

I've been wondering about the whole spirited away element.
So apparently, there's been multiple people who have been spirited away at this point. But at some point, wouldn't there be some kind of major news or something surrounding this phenomenon, if a significant enough individual disappears? It could be that this is a rare phenomenon, but if that's the case then it seems odd that suddenly there's a bunch of people who've experienced it all in the same place (if they have, indeed, also been spirited away).
Alternatively, the phenomenon only occurs in this town...but if that's the case, you would think that a trend of people disappearing on tanabata would be noticed by someone.
Hmm.

Kamagaya's question to Aya is the first indication that anybody in this entire storyworld besides the people who know Aya's exact situation believes in the supernatural "spirited away" phenomenon at all. (And even Aya's outer circle of friends are more like "Hmm, weird" rather than positively believing in the supernatural.) So the upshot of her question remains to be seen (besides the strong hint that it also happened to her brother).

I do agree that it's been rather an odd (but as others have said, not completely inexplicable) note up to this point that nobody seems too amazed by what happened with Aya (no journalistic interest in her return, say) while at the same time there's no evidence that such Tanabata disappearances are a known and accepted thing.

last edited at Dec 29, 2024 11:24AM

Idiot Couple

Since this thread is clearly never going to stop being the Erika Argument thread, for better or worse, I'm going to try to get at the Erika Argument from a different direction.

I certainly agree their relationship is different, with Aya needing more material support than the other two (but Erika/Koto being much more in need of emotional support). That's true despite it being the same level of support Aya needed before. She nonetheless is solving these issues very quickly and not dependent on any one person, merely accepting assistance from various people who are also getting something out of it.

Eukene, just like Erika I know you mean well, but just like Erika you fundamentally misunderstand Aya. Aya needs at least as much emotional support as Erika and Koto do. Others in this thread have done a great job outlining how Aya's maturity and self-assurance is a facade. She is a broken girl with deep-set abandonment issues who (in the past) literally -- albeit semi-unconsciously -- tested Koto on whether or not she would continue to love her despite being rejected, and fell in love with her only because she became convinced that Koto will love her no matter what. She is a 14-year-old who was forced to mature way faster than she should have due to the failures of the adults in her life, but that doesn't mean she's actually mature, it means she pathologically hides her vulnerabilities and weaknesses because she fundamentally lacks faith that anyone could possibly love the real her.

I'm going into so much detail about this because Erika's fatal flaw isn't that she secretly wants her friends to break up, or that she (I think very obviously at this point) made a Tanabata wish 7 years ago for Aya to disappear. Those are both understandable. It's that, even now at age 21, she over-idealizes Aya to such an extent that she dehumanizes her. When Koto asked her out as high schoolers, Erika refused her because she didn't want to be Aya's stand-in. Despite her extra 7 years of experience on her, Aya acting together with her again has caused Erika's acting to regress. She made the wish to reverse Aya's disappearance not for Aya's sake, but for her own "Unless Aya comes back, I can't face Koto". I want to emphasize this: even as a 21-year-old, she's still competing with the ghost of a 14-year-old, she can't be honest with Koto about her decade-long crush because she's more concerned with beating Aya!

The Erika Defenders (tm) often say something like "Erika's thoughts may be selfish but her actions aren't." However, this isn't true, and again Eukene's post (sorry but it really is a perfect example of my point) shows us why. Despite realizing during the first day that Aya is not an untouchable existence, she's a young child, Erika -- like Eukene -- subconsciously sees her as needing essentially no emotional support or comfort. This is a girl who's been forced to skip 7 years of her life, who has no family left, who has to rebuild it starting from scratch. The closest thing she's had to family since her reappearance was Koto, and that relationship ended up turning abusive. Erika knows this, knows that Aya is an expert at hiding her pain, both in the past and now, but even though she is literally the only person left in Aya's life who can provide her meaningful emotional support, she refuses to. Why? Her guilt, of course. As I've argued before, Erika's self-hatred is actually making her a worse person in reality. She over-idealizes Aya so much that she feels herself unworthy of even being Aya's friend, and as a result she abandons Aya to face her despair and loneliness alone.

In the meantime, she theoretically is hyping herself up to finally confess her love to Koto. But is she really? Both in the past and now, Erika is an expert in finding excuses not to be honest with Koto, her oldest friend. She can't be honest with Koto because Koto's still in love with Aya slash it would be unfair to Aya slash she would just be Aya's stand-in. Aya's back now, but she can't be honest with Koto because she has to wait for them to break up so Koto can move on. They broke up, but she still has to wait because Koto has to come to terms with the breakup. Koto is starting to come to terms with the breakup but she still has to wait because Koto's drunk. At this point her excuses become so obvious that even Erika recognizes they're excuses, but as we've continually seen with her, this intellectual realization doesn't change her behavior because she immediately comes up with a brand-new excuse: "If I can stand on stage with Aya and move past that." The truth, of course, is that Erika can't be honest with Koto because that would fundamentally change their relationship -- "There's no going back to the way I was, a childhood friend and a best friend" -- and she's terrified of that, the exact same way she was at 14, she's just using Aya as a prop to avoid having to face her own fear, just like she uses her self-loathing as a prop to avoid having to face her own guilt for what she did to Aya 7 years ago.

And no, that guilt is not "I am literally a witch who deliberately spirited Aya away mwahaha." I think that guilt is "I blew up at Aya for dating Koto and made a Tanabata wish for her to disappear, and then she did." As we've seen, Erika is an extremely emotional person whose conscious thoughts have a hard time influencing her emotional reactions and behavior. Even if she "knows," intellectually, her Tanabata wish couldn't possibly be connected to Aya's disappearance, she would still feel like it's connected, like it's her fault. But instead of facing up to this guilt she hides it, represses it. Then 7 years later, when she makes another Tanabata wish for Aya to come back and Aya indeed comes back -- which seems to actually confirm that her actions did indeed somehow at least partially cause Aya's disappearance in the first place -- she still runs away from it, refuses to face up to it, letting it fester and cause her to be emotionally distant from Aya and dishonest with Koto. Indeed, it is this inability of Erika to be honest, with Koto, Aya, and especially with herself, that is her fatal flaw. And as long as she's still in this "I have to beat Aya in order to move forward" mindset she will never get better.

I don’t disagree with the main character-analysis points you make, but I don’t see the necessity, or even the utility, of putting those ideas in terms of “attacking or defending Erika” (or any of the other characters).

I once knew a therapist whose litany when people would voice their view of a situation, often in an aggrieved tone, would be to say, “Try that again without the judgement.” Readers here often seem to assume that it’s a given how someone should behave ethically in a situation where a close friend is spirited away in adolescence and then returns unchanged when the rest of their cohort has become adults. But, as I have been saying, one substantial point of the whole supernatural element here seems to be to put these characters into an ambiguous relation to one another that is both familiar and unprecedented. So much of this business about how the characters “should” feel or act seems to ignore the very founding premise of the story.

Neither Koto nor Erika are Aya’s parents or blood relations (as a legally 21-year-old person, she doesn’t even require an official guardian), but by default they’ve been thrown into a quasi-caretaker status with her that each of them are ill-equipped to fulfill, because the nature of the MCs’ past relationships makes it almost impossible for any of them to see the others in consistent terms—for instance, Aya is simultaneously both a traumatized “child” in need of special emotional care and the idealized/idolized love object/rival whose presence or absence has dominated Koto and Erika’s emotional lives.

I think it’s quite unfortunate that the discussion of this story (as so often happens in Dynasty forum threads) has revolved around painting one or another character as “the good or bad one.” Partly that seems to have happened because any attempts to understand a character has been derided, often in virulent terms, as readers “loving,” “or “excusing,” or “defending” that character. But I think what the author is doing here is far more interesting than any of that.

@Blastaar

This is your usual bullshit—unless middle-school Erika was aware that she had the supernatural power to send Aya into limbo with a Tanabata wish.

I think we can say she didn't know. She finds the idea that Aya would come back with a Tanabata wish to be strange and then is surprised when Aya really returns. It's possible her grandma told her "by the way you have magic spirit powers" and Erika didn't take it seriously, but Erika herself didn't expect it to work this way.

She was also probably trying to convince herself what happened to Koto wasn't her fault because Tanabata doesn't work that way. Maybe this is why she didn't try sooner, since attempting it would be acknowledging the possibility it was her fault. With Aya's return, the seeming confirmation of Erika having caused the disappearance would have pushed her guilt to a new level, which is mental state we have been seeing in the chapters.

I don’t mean this dismissively, but I have always thought that we can take everything you say here for granted. As I have said before, it’s theoretically possible that this story will later morph into a Qualia the Purple-type “Erika alters the fabric of the entire universe with her Tanabata-wish powers” fantasy, but there’s absolutely no indication at this point that the author has any interest in doing that.

This is all your speculation not the actual content in the text. The guilt could be very much coming from she actually stabbed Aya to death seven years ago lol.

Thank you for providing the ultimate proof that no one needs to pay any attention to what you say about this series ever again.

I suspect that I’m not the only one who will find it a considerable relief.

last edited at Dec 28, 2024 11:54PM

Erika’s distraught expression in the last panel suggests that she’s telling Aya that she loves Koto, not that she’s attacking Aya.

I need actual evidence in the text, not your personal speculation.
Sounds familiar, cause it is lol.
It could very much be she hysterically screaming at Aya that Koto would love her back if not for her existence.
Plus the Tanabata wish she wrote and the guilt which has tormented her so far… looks like my speculation is more concrete than you.

This is your usual bullshit—unless middle-school Erika was aware that she had the supernatural power to send Aya into limbo with a Tanabata wish.

Calling that facial expression/body language of Erika’s as her “hysterically screaming at Aya” is a prime example of what a ridiculously poor reader of texts your bias renders you.

Then please please please explain (with evidence from the text ofc lol) where exactly does her guilt come from.
The fact she doesn't even think she has the right to confess her feelings to Koto is telling.

Look, you’ve said over and over that absolutely nothing anything anyone says will ever change your opinion of Erika, so you might as well stop trolling and pretending that you give a flying f*ck about anything resembling “textual evidence.”

But in the spirit of fair play, I’ll repeat one last time what I and others have said any number of times before and which you’ve ignored: Erika’s guilt can be easily explained by the fact that when she was young (“a child,” just like Aya at the time) she wished for something to happen to Aya, and then Aya disappeared. Just like any number of people in real life have said something in anger to someone and then regretted it when something happened to that person.

You’ve never yet had the actual courage of your convictions enough to come right out and say, “Erika is an evil witch who possesses the supernatural power to send people she dislikes to Spirited Away Land via Tanabata wishes,” perhaps because you realize how stupid that would sound. You just keep beating around the bush and implying it.

last edited at Dec 28, 2024 11:33PM

Erika’s distraught expression in the last panel suggests that she’s telling Aya that she loves Koto, not that she’s attacking Aya.

I need actual evidence in the text, not your personal speculation.
Sounds familiar, cause it is lol.
It could very much be she hysterically screaming at Aya that Koto would love her back if not for her existence.
Plus the Tanabata wish she wrote and the guilt which has tormented her so far… looks like my speculation is more concrete than you.

This is your usual bullshit—unless middle-school Erika was aware that she had the supernatural power to send Aya into limbo with a Tanabata wish.

Looking at that facial expression/body language of Erika’s and calling it her “hysterically screaming at Aya” is a prime example of what a ridiculously poor reader of texts your bias renders you.

last edited at Dec 28, 2024 11:15PM