Oh god that phone call with Rin is everything…
Somehow I missed their previous chapter together and just caught it going back through things, and it’s like peak romance?? Somehow, some of the best yuri I’ve ever read?? It’s just so… sweet and honest and intimate. The emotional history together they were working through was really touching and kind of painful. It’s a peak bully/bullied relationship dynamic, and the way that Itsumi was so honest about being unsure in her feelings was so genuine. I love the way they navigated through that. And the fact that she has a thing about being wanted bc of her emotional neglect, and a thing about being bullied during sex that most likely tracks back to their history together, and the trauma that she experienced… to be able to re-frame that with Rin making her feel wanted, Rin as the traumatizer rewiring the bullying, physically, into something loving and sexual and explicitly consensual…
It’s genuinely beautiful.
I’ve been noticing more and more that this story delivers some really strong, resonant emotional beats. I think part of that comes from the characteristic rawness of Mochi’s work, but I also can’t help but think of a video essay I watched once called Art, Furries, God, about how silliness, baseness, can serve as a sort of self-disarming on the part of the author, removing any sense of pretentiousness or the idea that a work should be received distantly as Art, and thereby allow people to drop their guard and engage with it more closely, and feel its message more strongly, more honestly.
There’s a certain quality in this work and in Watamote, which it reminds me of, where the comedic framing makes the emotional moments more emotional, more real, more impactful. The gay hindbrain food trash setup disarms the story so that when it delivers an emotional moment and comes back to being gay, it feels so sweet and earnest.
There’s something to be said as well about the way this started as a gimmick gag manga and has expanded from there: it evokes the shape of a genre, a shell and a scaffolding and a set of expectations, and then slowly chips away until it shatters it and repurposes the pieces into something new. It created this sense of something new, something unconstrained editorially where anything can happen if it works for the story, for the fiction, and that it won’t run up against the glass wall of genre.
It feels like leaving your comfort zone, like stepping into something new—eager and earnest and daunted by possibility. It feels vulnerable—it feels, in fact, much like you do when you’re just figuring out your way in your first relationship, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.
I think this story is incredible. And I think it has the potential to be even more. Much like the characters, I’m both nervous and excited to see what happens next.
You nailed why I enjoy comedies with serious elements so much. I partially blame my Creative Writing degree for causing me to over-analyze and be overly critical of so many works -- but with something like this manga, you know immediately that it's not ASKING to be taken as seriously, and that somehow just makes it so much easier to disregard my inner critic... and of course, once I'm hooked, that gives room for writers to worm their way into my emotions.
