Holy shit, peak is back!!

Misa's ability to make every problem seem surmountable by funneling it into a Scenario is really inspiring

The genderbent MC acts exactly how a typical (shoujo manga) guy would. All protective, princess carry included.

MC is pretty much a guy inside, so it's pseudo-yuri.

It seems as if, upon learning that the character shaped like a girl had a dick and a pair of balls in the first 12 pages of the story, some yuri fans will discard all of the lessons about the arbitrary nature of gender roles that one might encounter through such a hobby, all of the 'girl princes', all of the hype moments of girls standing up for and protecting each other. Or the fact that this site, one that is known for curating yuri manga, has a dedicated tag for the Princess carry. Incredible work.

Note also the context of this supposed moment of masculine excellence. Previously in their relationship, it was Kyouko who was known to chase away bullies, so the idea that girls are inherently meek and helpless creatures has already been rejected in this story. And Yuuri was only able to step in as Kyouko's prince, to act just as cool for the girl he loves as she once did for him, after he was turned into a girl. After his balls were swallowed by the spirit world, or whatever it is that happened to them.

I have encountered (in my opinion quite boring) gender-bender stories where the main character being "still a guy on the inside" while inhabiting a female body and persona goes completely unchallenged by the narrative, but this story is just getting started; Yuuri's understanding of their own identity may change yet. So I think it would be too early to dismiss this series as "pseudo-yuri", even without knowing that the creator designated this story as just "yuri".

Given Remu is a teenager, I don't take her claim of "only dolls" any more seriously than the stereotypical yuri protagonist claiming they could never like a girl. Romance manga like to use ironic framing, like her saying this to her future love interest, early on in the story, while a teenager like Remu can be expected to still be figuring herself out.

the rest of your post aside, because it's all splitting hairs and i'll agree to disagree... being a teenager is not too early for that, at all. when you're talking about fetishes, they start uncomfortably early -- childhood, very often. i have an exclusive fetish like this and i've had it since i was probably 8 or 9. it shaped all my early development for several years to come and into adulthood, and my experience here isn't unique.

sure, her sexuality absolutely will develop and may broaden with time and experience. i hope it does, for her sake, and ultimately it's the author's call. but in my eyes, they're deliberately setting up her experience and feelings as "other", so narratively it would be pretty terrible to just drop that for a nice neat resolution ("actually, she's healthy and normal!").

the yuri example is also irrelevant. if a girl in a yuri claims she's straight, it's 99.9% of the time a form of comphet, or just ignorance. straight is default(tm) so she just never thought too hard about it, and it's intimidating to go against the societal grain. but remu is already aware she doesn't fit and she isn't default. that ship sailed! why would she be wrong?

The funny thing is that straight romance does this too. The heroine has an independent spirit, or "does not understand romance", or she's a modern career woman married to her job, or woefully disillusioned with men after a bad breakup. But then she meets that one guy... The typical straight female lead also starts out believing she wants one thing and then over time realizes what she "really needed the whole time" was something else.

But this is not limited to the romance genre either; a protagonist's understanding of their own wants and needs is subject to change in all sorts of stories. Sometimes this is used to impart a moral lesson, but certainly not every such change is about bringing the character closer to what's considered normal, proper, or healthy by mainstream society. Remu becoming interested in flesh and blood women would not necessarily "fix" her. She could still feel like an Other, make bad decisions, and have a thing for dolls.

The wine splash and slap combo was hot af

last edited at Jun 29, 2025 7:42PM

... well she can't know for sure if miasma wasn't something of a catalyst, can she? :P

I mean, there's no miasma around is there? And it doesn't look like she's NOT feelin' the same way.

The fact that Luliam remembers everything and was not straight up controlled by the miasma doesn't mean that the miasma did not affect her judgment at all. She complained about her head being fuzzy before they started the purification, and I find it hard to believe that she was lying about that. The miasma may have had an inhibition-dampening effect similar to alcohol.

ah yes, the "voluptuous" build that's still pretty thin.

"Y'all got any voluptuous builds?"

"We got thin with slightly bigger boobs."

last edited at Jun 22, 2025 3:39PM

Cute ending, but feels like it chickened out of its premise.

i feel the same way. the oneshot and subsequent first chapter seemed to be setting up a totally different vibe. like the mangaka wanted to create toxic yuri but didn't have it in them so we just got like, teasing/comfort for 8 chapters.

I never saw a strong indication that this would get more messy than something like Can't Defy the Loney Girl.

Compare chapter 1 of this to chapter 1 of e.g. 'Zenbu Kowashite Jigoku de Ai Shite', and the difference should be night and day. The squishy nature of the term "toxic yuri" may make it impossible to say that one belongs in the category and one doesn't, but I don't think the toxic designation is warranted by a BDSM-coded relationship or an otherwise mild power imbalance by itself. If it's hard to think of any content warnings that may apply, it's probably not that 'toxic'.

last edited at Jun 21, 2025 5:49PM

Bettelheim is actually a jewish surname of hungarian origin; baring evidence to the contrary, i don't believe Teren Mikami intended such Eindeutung. Statistically, foreign authors are more likely to accidentially create asemantic abominations instead.

I didn't think about her name deeper but if it's the name of a Hungarian-Jewish noble family, that makes it kind of ordinary for a vampire, since Elizabeth Báthory and Count Dracula are also from that region

last edited at Jun 15, 2025 10:00AM

To be fair, Oliver actually referred to the prince as a women when they first went to meet her, so it's unlikely she was revealing anything that was actually a secret to the other people in the room.

It's not about whether it was new information to other people present. It just makes me feel gross to see information about someone's sex be wielded as a weapon against them. Sure, in this case it was only used to catch the prince off-balance, and the prince had almost killed Himeka, but this is still a pretty specific thing the creator chose to put in the story.

On which page did Oliver accidentally give away the prince being actually a girl?

She really is the platonic ideal of a Yuri-ota character. It would probably be dangerous for a human to be this committed, but fortunately she's an extraterrestrial that doesn't need to eat or sleep. Though apparently she still drinks coffee from a tiny mug...

I will cut her slack because the prince had tried to suffocate her earlier, but clocking a crossdressing person still feels like a lame way to win a fight. Even if the prince is just a cis girl.

Still, from this mangaka, it's kind of interesting to see a less wholesome pairing as a main couple.

On the bright side, this anecdote will go crazy in a lesbian bar

"[If] Misa-san is a lesbian [...] her [male] clients will walk, seeing as men aren't her target market"

I don't know about this. I assume her relationship with Io being exposed will put her position as #1 in jeopardy but... Not because the clients will respect her lack of attraction to men as a lesbian, or even accept it as a fact. At least I would not expect that to be the case in real life. Or is it too harsh to assume at least some of these men would feel "tricked", or pursue her even more persistently?

last edited at Jun 7, 2025 12:17AM

I'm just glad the girlies finally talked in this chapter. I will gladly take the hopium.

One major problem with trying to determine if you like girls by agreeing to an intense fake-dating scenario for 7 days (assuming that anybody would do something like this in real life, and I mean, real life is often stranger than fiction) is that it may be hard to be confident about a positive result unless you end up liking the specific girl you are fake-dating. So the romance wasn't just an inevitability because this is a yuri manga, but the concept of the test stands on shaky legs because the outcome that Nagi wanted to avoid by insisting on strictly 7 days was likely to occur on Manatsu's side in case of a positive result. Maybe even guaranteed since the test concluded in a weekend of comfy domesticity with lovemaking.

Maybe I would not think about this so deeply if Manatsu did not at least on some level seem convinced that the test was 'real' and not only an excuse for fooling around or for something else. Early on she handily dismissed suspicions of Nagi having motivations any deeper than her own curiosity.

As for Nagi's motivations, I suspect she already realized Manatsu was exactly her type before she made the proposal, and that's why she was so concerned with things "getting complicated". I'm intrigued by the subtle ways in which the two of them are not on the same page about this operation and I really want to see a POV chapter with her...

I'm thinking about Pohi bending the rules to cover for Terra despite not being unhappy with her own marriage. Unlike Eda and Diode's mother, she's not the type I would expect to be an ally, and yet... Maybe from the relative security and autonomy of her position, one where her husband is convinced of her loyalty, she can act on her intuitions as a fellow woman and decompa, as well as some of the values she may have carried with her from her home clan.

Just one sentence from this part that might need clarification:

and whether Terra really was discussing boarding a man’s boat after barely a week later despite no prior connection

"after barely a week later": "after" and "later" provide the same meaning. I suggest removing "after", adding a comma after "week", and adding "with him" to the end. It would go: "and whether Terra really was discussing boarding a man’s boat barely a week later [i.e. her split from Diode], despite no prior connection with him"

last edited at May 29, 2025 1:45PM

It's kind of cute to see this kind of casual and self-indulgent short story from the creator of that somber Taisho era yuri

I'm normally not a huge fan of the extremely pushy/stalker type of love interest but I trust Battan to make it interesting. Definitely looking forward to more!

[And from a different comment]

But on the other, she's just so grossly unprofessional that i can't believe she didn't get reported to company
I legit feel so uncomfortable in the way "how this girl even allow to act like this on the job, this is professional setting"

Well yeah, pushy and stalkerish is an understatement. This woman isn't just creepy or a 'red flag'; there are actual man-eating monsters in yuri series (WataTabe, Futsuu to Bakemono) that are better at posing as 'normal' humans than she is. The double page spread in particular is so weird it would feel at home in a horror series.

She's also different from the typical yandere in that she shows little to no deference to the object of her obsession or seeks her approval at all. She's convinced of her own superiority and invincibility, assured in her ability to win over the main character through sheer force, like a classic vampire.

It doesn't count as our first kiss because we're both girls but at the same time we can't show the photos of us kissing to anyone

The creepy lady reminds me of an old school vampire. Very cool

This was a satisfactory ending :)

Edit: wanted to see a non-angsty kiss tho

Yeah it's the ending I wanted basically. Maybe the volume 2 extras show a bit more flirting?

I feel so bad for Toriko but her expressions in this chapter are kind of hot

I'm not saying the chapter was handled well, but I don't think Aya was doing malicious rape. They're basically a couple of 16 year olds re-inventing power-exchange BDSM with no guidance and not enough communication. Aya thinks she's "bought" Marika (CNC) and they have no safeword.

Well, I'm not that invested in calling it that (notice how I've avoided the word so far). My criticism has been about how the scene interacts with the surrounding narrative, so I'm not here to prosecute Aya Fuwa.

Also, not to be too woke or anything, but wouldn't "malicious rape" imply the existence of "benign rape"? I assume you just meant Aya was not acting out of malice, which is fair enough, but that is quite the unfortunate phrasing...

Ch 8 is why that's a bad idea. Fortunately Marika ends up more into it than hurt, but it could have turned out very badly.

I don't think chapter 8 shows it to be a bad idea. Marika would have to be affected in some way, or the story would have to comment on it in some other way, in order to say something about it. ...Not that I would fault a lesbian bodice ripper (shout-out to Me-A Scans for planting "lesbian bodice ripper" in my brain) romcom for not being didactic about the dangers of bodice ripping.

last edited at May 22, 2025 5:58PM

The main character is cute, sure, but the personality mangaka seem to give male characters by default is about as pleasant to me as nails being scraped on blackboard. I mean the male classmate that insists on yelling on every panel, not the crossdressing kid, obviously.

last edited at May 22, 2025 4:57PM

Okay, after rereading a bit, I think I understand the crux of my issue with chapter 8. Marika is feeling really vulnerable in that chapter because she had just seen Aya with another girl, while she's growing more conscious of her own feelings. She meets with Aya anyway, but for the first time she makes it clear that she's not in the mood for the usual stuff.

So I feel like this could have been the time where Aya backs off for once, and asks if Marika is okay. An awkward moment where Marika can't tell her anything without losing their bet then could have been followed by the encounter with Asta and so on. The explanation about Aya's relationship with Asta and Marika figuring out that Aya likes her happens in chapter 9 anyway, so I think their first time as a couple in chapter 10 could have had a bigger impact if their usual routine had been interrupted in chapter 8, leaving the girls and the reader hanging. If Aya, who had liked Marika for a long time, had shown a bit more sensitivity when it mattered.

An alternative is that chapter 8 proceeds the same, but then after the encounter with Asta, Marika could be a little bit more visibly hurt. I mean, right after she convinced herself that it was actually fine that Aya had her way with her as usual despite Marika feeling insecure and clearly saying she wasn't in the mood, a girl shows up calling herself Aya's sex friend. It makes sense that she still won't admit why exactly it hurts to see Aya with someone else, but not even a little choked up, no almost-cry?

Well, people can disagree, and maybe Teren Mikami knows something I don't. I do stand by my take that this plot point was not treated with enough weight, given that while yes, Marika technically protests through all of their previous encounters, the way she refuses in chapter 8 is more serious, so the end result feels like the narrative taking a brief dip into noncon at least.

last edited at May 21, 2025 7:22PM