This is reminding me of the recent race arc in Kase-san, in that it's one of my favorite series taking an abrupt nosedive in quality due to a dumb drama arc that makes very little sense. At least Nagisa finally told off the glasses girl this time, though it's kind of ridiculous that Nagisa immediately starts pressing Mashiro to answer her own question after brushing off Mashiro's question. Not a good look.

So far, this series has been really good at keeping up a brisk pace, so I'm still holding onto hope that this will be resolved swiftly and won't drag on for more than a couple chapters after this. Maybe the creator can stick the landing, but so far it's hard for me to see this arc as anything other than a misstep.

I made the same connection, the commonality being that there's a demand or set of expectations coming from a character who is, or should be, in no position to say anything at all about what the MC does, and then the whole previously established characterization getting thrown off-kilter as a result.

In both cases the response should have been, "Who the hell are you to even bring this up?" > end of storyline. And in Kase-san the final outcome was exactly what we knew it would be (indeed what it had to be), and if anything ends up being different here I'll be beyond shocked.

Oh no—this conflict between our cutie-pie MCs is so searingly profound that there’s no way it can ever be repaired!

Lol

Needs World Without Yuri Manga tag.

And I know this isn't the first "divorcing parents split up twins" story I've read--is it just a story trope or another cultural weirdness thing?

I think it's neither, really. I think twin love is one of the more fascinating philosophically introspective topics in romance, and within the GL or BL realm in particular it takes on a nuance that is sorta a "double negative", given the core logical argument against incest is often the real problem and consequences of inbreeding..which sorta takes on a significant amount of water with homosexual love, whose own """wrongness""" comes from not furthering the bloodline or whatever bullshit.

And sometimes it's just people who really love incest in their fiction and honestly all the power to 'em lmao.

I totally get the twincest thing, and I agree with your analysis of its appeal in stories, but I was specifically asking about the splitting up of twins (or any group of siblings) in a divorce. A quick search suggests that “split custody” (one parent getting one or more of the kids and the other parent the rest) is fairly rare in the US. Says one source, “unless there are extenuating circumstances, the court rarely separates siblings in divorce.”

I was wondering if that’s considerably different in Japan, or just in manga, which seem to revel in all sorts of family-configuration complications, like “children of the Dad’s dead mistress,” etc.

OK, another quick search reveals that only since this very May has Japan even allowed joint custody (where both parents have parental authority over the children)—in 90% of the cases custody of children went to the mother. Seems like a story-land thing, then.

And as my “world without yuri stories” crack was intended to imply, there’s a curiously old-fashioned tone about this one, with “but we’re both sisters” taking the place of “but we’re both girls.”

last edited at Jul 22, 2024 9:46AM

Waaah! Now I want to hear the sister's story!
(stamps feet, pouts)

Needs World Without Yuri Manga tag.

And I know this isn't the first "divorcing parents split up twins" story I've read--is it just a story trope or another cultural weirdness thing?

Six years of living together and fucking is one hell of a long con to carry out just to steal the savings of a factory worker. Was this just impulsive and opportunistic when she realized how long she'd been stuck with the same sugar momma?

From the evidence we have, she was just sponging and then for some reason, which we may or not eventually discover, she decided to cash out. I guess “someday I’ll bail” is technically a “long con,” but not much of one.

@lukhas: The chapter title “Former Part” suggests that there will be other parts.

Author-san, that’s not exactly how driver’s licenses work . . .

The author's updates on her life may still be my favorite part of this manga

Oh indeed, even though I like the manga itself quite well. The notes are incredibly charming.

But just noting that the most crash, scratch, and bump-prone drivers I have ever known were all fully licensed.

This is just the cutest. Love the art, and the dialect, too. (I can see where it would be challenging to get the tone right.)

Great pacing, too:

“Don’t worry—my husband’s dead.”
[Half-smile]

That’s yuri gold right there.

Author-san, that’s not exactly how driver’s licenses work . . .

Mama bear.

Wow, so romance stories sometimes constitute unrealistic wish-fulfillment—who knew?

(in the format of a souls message) why is it always school girls?

And Aweida's manga are unrepentantly horny and also are structured like jokes (exposition to a sudden subversive punchline) like please you could have just drawn a standalone picture at that point

Twitter manga getting more and more popular as a medium sucks. Even the green manga is just stuck in a status quo loop

I know, right? All this free stuff is so not worth the money.

Oh, a lot of us would want to see them fuck! It's just not the root of the complaints and criticism of Citrus+. Or put another way, we'd like to see it but it's not a "demand". The demand is "some sign of affection? Any? Please?" Which the wordless special delivered better than the entire rest of the series.

The covers too. A number of the covers suggest a . . . rather different relationship than is depicted on the inside pages.

How does that work? Does she hate it or is she just apathetic?

Yeah... that's the thing. It doesn't work.

She cares for her, but she doesn't love her. It's an entirely doomed one sided relationship. Areo Ace people can deeply care about and love people, but they can't ever be IN love with them. That's the aromantic part of aro-ace.

Functionally, she might as well be straight.

Ok so, this is a take I see a lot on stories about aro and/or ace people, and it's not always wrong, but it definitely isn't always right.

I think there's two issues people struggle to understand.

The first issue is misunderstanding what it means to be aro and/or ace, and the answer to what those words mean is... "it's complicated". Like, really complicated. Imagine trying to describe "falling in love". How do you get someone to understand what love feels like using only your words? Then add on to that the fact that even among ace/aro people it's not always the same. They're referred to as spectrums for a reason.

So yeah, it's complicated.

The second issue I see people having trouble with is understanding the area between "friends" and "lovers", which is, ironically, exactly what this manga is about. That's where a lot of the details lie for aro/ace people. Some don't want anything past "friends" at all, but many still desire companionship. A lot of the time, like in this story, that kind of companionship is really tricky to nail down with a label.

These things combined obviously lead to a lot of misunderstandings, which is really tough because god knows it's confusing enough already for the people it even matters to. And all this is barely scratching the surface.

At the end of the day, I at least would really just prefer if people didn't try and decide for others how a relationship "should" work or what it "should" look like. I think that we can all agree that even if it's well intentioned it's not really anyone else's business.

TL;DR if their relationship works for them, it's fine, isn't it? if it changes course then that's fine too. people change in many ways as they grow.

I agree with all this, and after doing a fair bit of reading and listening on the topic, I personally feel like the only people whose descriptions of such relationships matter are people who consider themselves part of that spectrum.

As far as stories about such relationships, it's still the early days of authors exploring the narrative possibilities and of general readers becoming more familiar with the underlying concepts.

OK, I did a little re-reading, and the key passage on the “bullying” issue occurs back in Chap. 37.5, “Rhythm B.” Earlier than that, in a one-page character description, we’re told that Mitsuki has only one “childhood friend” in another class. In Chapter 37,5, we see young Koga and that friend, Sakiko, chatting about clothes and Mitsuki realizing that her own tastes are really different from everybody else’s, that she has “a different beat.”

Then a group of “popular girls” pressure “everybody” to wear skirts the next day, and Sakiko begs Mitsuki to play along so they don’t “get targeted,” but Mitsuki doesn’t have a skirt and doesn’t want one, so when she wears pants the next day, it’s Sakiko who gets bullied when the girls spill ink on her clothes. That breaks up Sakiko and Mitsuki, and makes Mitsuki determined to stick to herself and try her hardest not to stand out at school in any way going forward.

On the other hand, even before she meets Aya, Mitsuki clearly says that she doesn’t mind going to school, as long as she can go her own way. In other words, it seems like that past incident of indirect bullying reinforced her extreme introversion, but it didn’t cause it. And in general school is not depicted as primarily a scene of trauma for her, but it is the place where she wants to keep her “different beat” under wraps.

last edited at Jul 15, 2024 9:51PM

I have no idea what posses someone to turn into a anime villian like this and arbitrarily decides to ruin the life of someone they don’t know and had zero prior interactions with like that just seems like completely psycho shit to me, but bullying is just sorta like that I guess

They might not mean it that way. It's already been brought up, but I doubt the last page is literally happening, she's just upset that they're judging and putting labels on her metaphorically and it's causing a panic attack. Whether or not they're being intentionally mean or just careless is hard to say without a larger pattern of behavior. They wrote the lyrics on the board, was that to shame or embarass her, or was it just because they were working on translating a song in a language they don't understand fluently? They're needling her with commentary, is that because they want to put her down or are they just being thoughtless? Doesn't really matter to her trauma, though. I do hope Aya comes to the rescue, but this is something Koga needs to learn to deal with if she's going to keep putting herself out there as an artist.

Yeah, the full implications of all this are pretty ambiguous at this point. Has it been established that Koga has previously been bullied? Or is her personality just inherently introverted and highly self-conscious? (Not that there’s anything wrong . . .)

To me the really ominous part of this is Koga’s apparent takeaway that her new group of friends don’t really understand her—the general population is just proving to be the threat they’ve always been assumed to be, but here she’s on the verge of taking a huge step back, socialization-wise.

I needed some adorable this morning.

And yeah, a dreamy girl who likes to read isn’t exactly a rare personality type nor an imaginative stretch for a young writer to come up with.

The “varied facial expressions that will register with a theatre audience” may be a considerably heavier lift for Takamine than “relating to a dreamy reader,” though.

Sweet story but yeah this is one of those stories where the gender, age and physical appearance of the characters changes things. It's also the energy, mutual attraction of the characters, and how they come across to each other, under any other context this would have been so creepy lol.

Well, that’s the point of context—it doesn’t mean much to say that if the story were different, it would be different. The events and actions don’t exist in isolation where they can be judged “objectively.”

There’s a whole series of jokes/memes that consist of brutally simplistic paraphrases of famous works:

• Two teenagers disobey their parents and then kill themselves. (Romeo & Juliet)

• A poor girl agrees to marry a rich man after he goes blind. (Jane Eyre)

• A kid goes into outer space and finds his long-lost dad, who cuts off his arm. (Star Wars)

Well, yes to all. But there’s more to it than that . . .

last edited at Jul 9, 2024 8:49PM

Thanks to everyone for the clarifying information. Personally, at this point I’m mostly just here for the lovey-dovey fluff and the remarkable art, and will wait for more information to see how things resolve themselves.

But it seems clear that there’s still a good bit of information to come about some complexly intertwined relationships.

Like I said. ^

Plenty to chew on here, but I really just wanted to grab the 1001st post.

You are my wife.
Good bye, city life.
Green Acres we are there.

Cute. All problems in life can be solved by the cute.

Oh shit is this twat going to steal/destroy her notebook? WHY, even?

Look at the title: “Catalyst.” That implies that he’s an agent for change, and not necessarily a bad one.

I've never prayed this hard to the yuri gods that we don't get burned. Erika you're killing me here

The two of them have already had enough blush-sex it’s a wonder one or the both of them aren’t pregnant.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/akebi_chans_sailor_uniform_ch69#8

I was going to go for the “just gals being pals—no yuri to see here” snark route, but after that I just don’t have the heart for it.

I don’t usually have much time for “too good to be true MC” stories. But I’m all-in on this one.

• Teens formerly depicted as horny
• Literally engaged to be married
• Literally sharing a bed together

I don't need to see fingers in holes pussy on screen, but I would like some indication of physicality and passion.

Mei indicated something about backing off and trying to do a relationship properly; it'd be nice to see that.

Yeah, that “We’re going to put off your birthday celebration, but it turns out that on the alternate date I really need to be doing paperwork in the next room instead, so please be quiet. But I did go out of my way to consult with your friend on a nice present for you” business was a real WTF moment.

On some kind of “reality” basis, sure, things come up and plans get changed, but as a narrative/characterization beat chosen by the author, what exactly was it supposed to tell us about the MC’s relationship?

Jokes and memes aside, it is really weird how some people are so fixated on Yuzu and Mei fucking

I think because Citrus has/had this rep of this steamy taboo romance. So I think people believe it should have happened by now, a lot of the early expectation as far as I remember was basically what FlowerChild's works ended up being, where their manga focus on a messy highly sexual toxic relationship.

Plus various other long running Yuri manga have had some kind of sexual encounter, even if it happens off page, it's something that has definitely happened. Citrus for having this spicy rep surprisingly hasn't gone very far with it.

I understand that for sure and it's not a big deal anyway, but Citrus hasn't ever really been a spicy series has it? It was only so superficially for a bit. It had "spicy" scenes mostly earlier on but the tone and direction wasn't that way and it's been years since then so it's interesting that the expectation still lingers. Citrus seemed to be making a point earlier on about its characters' mental states and that was it. It's really been an "innocent" series even when those scenes were present.

The issue isn’t for me about “fucking” per se but about the trajectory of the characters, especially Mei. As has recently been pointed out, OG Mei was a Proper Japanese Lady masking a smoldering volcano of emotion—sexual desire, yes, but also, among other things, grief over the “loss” of her father. Her resistance to going all-in sexually with Yuzu was more about struggling to keep herself under control rather than about fending off Yuzu’s advances.

It’s easy to forget that the start of the benighted “Second Arranged Marriage” arc interrupted a Mei-Yuzu makeout session that both had been longing for. Ever since then Mei has consistently been transformed from a firecracker (h/t to Altair for the phrase) into a damp mop.

Had readers still been getting regular doses of those Mei-Yuzu hickey-leaving competitions of the past I’m pretty sure there would have been fewer laments about “when will they fuck?”.