In the end I hope everyone finds happiness except Nanase

Straight guy depression fantasy: this teenage girl broke into my house and made me a five course meal?!? Maybe our shoulders will touch while I show her how to play counter-strike…
Lesbian depression fantasy: what if the girl from high school lost custody

lol that cycle reminds me of that oneshot where the girl spends the whole chapter time thinking about potentially getting an indirect kiss from drinking out of the same straw and then the ending is a repeat of the cycle with the next step

You mean Wanna Sip by nmi? This one is not as unhinged, though I get what you mean, fretters gonna fret.

That one also won a prize in Yuri Hume, didn’t it? Neurotic yuri winning the worldwide lesbian culture war. This is toxic yuri. Yuri about being on the damn phone a lot. If they wore makeup, they’d call em bi for clout, bi for clout, e-thots with BPD, landmines. These useless lesbians are more pernicious. They will have you working in a call center

I’m very late to this party, having discovered the series when the official adaptation was published. But since then it’s grown into easily my favorite current book––not only for what’s there on the page, or what's there in the author’s intentions (which I’ll speculate heavily on in a bit), but for what reading the book has illuminated for me about the way I process other manga, and, indeed, other comics in general. This has allowed me to see the alleged “trashiness” a lot of people here seem to complain about as potentially a very deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the author, a confrontational ploy that is meant to engage us in a deeper class analysis which the text is proposing. I’ve seen people complain that the situation of the story hasn’t advanced, and while I don’t really agree with that even on a textual basis, I want to point out that the subtextual reading I’ve been able to enjoy in this comic is very lively, and it works, for me, at least, to develop the book as a piece of art. In fact, I think there is a considerable difference between My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today and pretty much any other Yuri book I’ve ever read. It’s a difference tthat so far continues to make for remarkable reading. I’m going to attempt to explain what I mean, but for haters, I suppose it goes without saying that I obviously have no inherent objection to the subject matter, the cheating or the “trashy” aesthetic––and while I’ve been very hurt by cheating in my own relationships in the past, not only do I not hold it against anyone now, but my current understanding of the violent, changeable state in which we live––the knife’s edge of existence we all tiptoe across––makes it really impossible for me to condemn anyone for finding a new relationship that helps them learn more about themselves, a new, intimate interaction which can extend some of our most vital feelings into the world. As far as the cheating in the story is concerned, I think it has far more to do with socioeconomic class than anyone I’ve seen writing about the series has reckoned with yet. As for the trashiness, trash has never hurt me, and in this case especially, it tastes delicious. But I guess you have to get down in the dirt to know? You can get something from the trashy book you might never encounter in the classy one.

It occurred to me as I have read My Girlfriend's Not Here Today that virtually all other Yuri I’ve read has been written under the sign of capitalist realism. In fact, I’d say most American and Japanese comics I’ve read have this idea that capitalism is some sort of natural state of existence––as old as the cave people, I guess––buried in the bedrock assumptions of what the book is communicating to us. The Frederic Jameson/Slavoj Zizek quote is especially relevant here: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” because this isn’t necessarily a conscious decision on any author’s part, adopting the dominant economic model most of them have lived their whole lives under as a given in their storytelling. Breaking out of that mold to look for truths beyond those assumptions is something that would really set a book apart from the rest. And My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today distinguishes itself first and foremost by not really making that assumption of capitalist realism at all. In fact, the thematic payload of the book so far has largely been an extended illustration of class difference as the essential, defining conflict behind the frustrated romances in the story. It isn’t that Fuuko wants Yuni to cheat on Nanase with her: it’s that the upper-class Fuuko desires the working-class Yuni to be hers and leave middle-class Nanase. In this conflict, it becomes apparent that the author sees a kind of potential magical transfer of wealth and cultural capital a la Cinderella––taking Yuni out of the working class to become part of Fuuko's more rarified world––being held back by middle-class social mores which exist for the precise purpose of keeping such socioeconomic mobility (or socioeconomic friction) from happening. This is the undercurrent that plays throughout the book, providing principal character motivations and the subconscious triggers of conflict.

We can see a lot about this from copious textual clues, which goes to great lengths early on to explicate Fuuko’s relative wealth, in a coded form. Her family owns their home, and even if she doesn’t live in a mansion, her family is the type to take posed group photos, the type to treat an upper level of social and economic achievement as a baseline of success, and we get the sense from her scenes with her family that they would never look upon Fuuko’s choice to date a poor girl as an acceptable use of Fuuko’s energy and resources. We don’t get this made explicit, but it seems heavily implied that Fuuko is meant to be carrying on a name and a lineage or at least the semblance of one (I’m going a little harder on this than the text quite implies––my theory is that the author couldn’t justify too stratified a difference between the characters to make them genuinely, fully separated into the different socioeconomic groups they stand for, because then the girls wouldn’t all realistically be attending the same high school, since there tend to be differences between the school settings for rich, poor, and middle-class students. But within the boundaries of their school you’ll see each of the three main characters standing for a socio-economic class position apart from the others, and they'll illustrate this through their articulated attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, most of which represent the class they are assigned). The stress of conforming to the demands of her coded class seems to push Fuuko to a sort of alienation from her class roots. That alienation might contribute at least a little bit to her wanting to date Yuni, but I think the ways we see that alienation expressed most fully are in Fuuko’s intense romantic interiority, her orientation towards reading and doing well in school (part pressure, but also fantastic ways of socially absenting oneself from pressurized familial situations), and my favorite aspect of her personality: her penchant for theatrical self-reinvention and disguise. Twice now Fuuko has given herself new identities that she self-consciously name-checks. She’ll be Yuni’s Sugar-daddy when Yuni needs cash to continue dating Nanase, and when she wins Yuni back, she’ll be her Mother-figure. Each new identity brings with it delightful dramatic and visual accoutrements, from a wonderfully tacky wardrobe replacement as Yuni’s sugar-daddy to a whole new way of speaking to and treating Yuni as her replacement mother figure. She even has a Vent account personality as a fragile romantic which is a good deal more popular and successful than Yuni’s more flip, cool Vent persona. These transformations turn Fuuko into new versions of herself, and they show us the endless resources wealth can provide (here Fuuko's personal wealth, as compared to other students her age, is crucial to the way she is representing upper-class value-structures), but these theatrical disguises and illusions also make Fuuko into a magical figure in the book; a fairy godmother, who can actualize Yuni’s desires in an almost uncanny way––only it’s a fairy godmother that wants to f*ck in return. And throughout we get little flitters of other alternate characters Fuuko might play for one scene or another––like the meek-seeming lover in the second part of her travel date (after her ear starts bleeding), or the mischievous seducer, or the allegedly cold and reserved member of the health committee. Fuuko is easily the most complex character in the trio; her magical freedom to act seems a result of her class outlook, with its emphasis on impunity. She simply doesn’t perceive any horizons, as long as she continues to magically reinvent herself––and that reinvention is possible in a harsh, capitalist economy through hoarding of and capitalizing endless resources (even though she appears to be upper-middle class rather than a keiretsu-chairman’s daughter or something like that, Fuuko is conspicuously associated with money, and with that accompanying freedom of mobility). But Fuuko’s desire to move outside of her class––to date below her station, to play games and flirt with losing name and money, to utilize extreme intellectual and creative resources to get what she can’t exactly lay claim to with money alone––comes from her alienation from the rest of her cadre. Perhaps one of the reasons for her relentless passion for Yuni is the way Yuni exists so far outside of the ideology of Fuuko’s class background.

Early on in the narrative, Yuni seems very much like other schoolgirls her age, and her integration into several school groups makes it seem she is no different from her classmates. But then there is a sequence of key scenes, in which Yuni’s facade is dispelled for the reader, and we can get a fix on where Yuni stands on the ladder of success––along with the more tenuous grasp on survival that mark’s Yuni’s participation in the narrative. When Yuni's mother appears, we begin to see Yuni in a much more challenging space than most of her classmates would be used to. Yuni is not desperate; but there is instability and need all around, emphasized by the way, when Yuni’s mother comes home from her work as a bar girl, Yuni is the only one available to care for her. We get the sense this has been the uncomfortable status quo for a long time, this exchange of roles and responsibilities––and we see how Yuni struggles to be both a teen who blends in with the rank superficiality of high school life and also a partner with her mother in a very stringent, straightened economic program which far from ensures their chances of survival. We get the sense that no one at school knows that Yuni comes from this sort of relative underclass; no one knows her mother is a bar-girl, or that Yuni lives alone with her single mother––and it’s obvious from the college tour that Yuni is determined no one at school see her as she truly is. None of her friends probably imagines that Yuni cooks and cleans for her mother, and nurses her nominal caretaker through the aftermath of most grueling workdays. This set of scenes also very effectively establishes just what it is that makes Fuuko so very irresistible to Yuni; we see right away that Yuni’s mother is almost exactly the same kind of personality as Fuuko––sympathetic to a degree which outwardly rankles the more buttoned-up, pent-up Yuni, but which is a kind of flirtatious, fantastical expression of love Yuni secretly craves. And Yuni’s mother does for a living what Fuuko does for a hobby, playing dress-up and make-believe, and re-inventing herself to snare a would-be paramour with a fantasy, and sell him drinks and peanuts (forget that last part in Fuuko's case). A lot of people criticize the weakness they see in Yuni, giving in to this very ideal seducer, who so uncannily echoes Yuni’s loving mother’s beguiling charm––but in this scene with her mother I find her very admirable, too; for we see that Yuni has no real ambition in life but to eventually do right by her lone parent, her raconteur, her charmer, her original paramour. She doesn’t want her mother to cry. In a way, Yuni’s chasing of a girlfriend outside of her own class––while not seeming to be a conscious strategy on her part––kind of indicates that she’s hoping to eventually relieve her mother of her financial burden in the only way she can conceive of––transferring that burden onto someone else, maybe someone who can better afford it, like, say, a middle-class striver. “Don’t worry about money, okay?” Her mother assures her, and in Yuni’s assent we can tell she can hardly help but worry. What all this characterization goes to amplify is the scene of the college visit, where Nanase’s position vis-a-vis the other two cranks its way into focus.

So if Fuuko stands for the upper-class socio-economic strata of her society, and Yuni for the working underclass, where does Nanase sit in this equation? People seem to really hate Nanase here on the board. Hell, I hate her too, no argument there. But a lot of the criticism of Nanase tends to start and stop at personal behaviors, the ways in which she makes Yuni feel first neglected, and second small, and petty, for feeling hurt about it. Nanase is the police of the story, swooping in to break up the fun and games. The truncheon she wields is indicative of the values of her class; guilt, shame, striving, merit, delayed gratification, and, most deadly to the other characters in the narrative, entitlement. In a way, Nanase is the paramour as trope of a lot of Japanese fiction––suggestive of romance because of the character’s intense dedication to an ideology. In her pursuit of volleyball perfection, she is redolent of the glasses-wearing, too-serious, misogynist boy geniuses of many high school romance manga, redolent too of the samurai in her unwavering focus, and this is the source of a lot of Yuni’s obvious pain and suffering (notably, the samurai often served as a buffer between the rich and poor in an era before the middle-class existed, both the middle-class defenders of orthodoxy and quasi-police authoritatians, and they were largely supplanted by the merchant class, which eventually became the middle-class Nanase stands in for today). It’s clear that Yuni feels enormous pressure to value Nanase more as a girlfriend because of her unsmiling drive for merit, even as this is the principal element that excludes Yuni from Nanase’s world. I think it’s because Nanase’s dedication is such a universally-recognized, almost self-sufficient-seeming value in Japanese society that this needs no significant explication in the story. Focused dedication to an ideal is so common a value that it’s the defacto theme in a huge majority of Japanese popular fiction (how many manga and anime devolve a protagonist's purpose into exactly that need for seriousness and dedication to...tennis? Student council? Saving the world? Being a "good" cop?), and buried under it is the cultural assumption central to its middle-class origin: the idea that we live in a meritocracy.

Nanase is middle-class; I’ve hardly seen so dead-center, straightforwardly middle-class a figure in fiction. She personifies the belief in a meritocracy which underpins a middle-class value structure. It’s crucial, I think, to realize here that neither Yuni nor Fuuko are really convinced by this world-view. Both of them value passion over unwavering dedication, inspiration over fairness, fantasy over fact––in contradistinction with Nanase, whose principal value is earnest striving towards a reward fixed in the future. For Fuuko and Yuni, their affair is an awakening, a realization of their dreams for right now. Yuni has the passion and the attention she craves in Fuuko, Fuuko has the excitement of a kindred outcast from another world. But Yuni can’t be happy with her affair, because she feels such extraordinary guilt for it. That’s because the affair, for Nanase, is just a crime. It’s a violation of Nanase’s trust, of her earnest striving––and, quintessentially, it’s a violation of Nanase’s sacrifice, the delayed gratification she has committed to (without telling Yuni, who must be on board, right?), which puts the fullness of her romance off until later, after she has made something of herself in sports. Also, as the college tour chapter tells us, after she and her girlfriend go to colleges where they study things for careers. And after they go into careers, well, then, in the time they’re not striving after merit at work, then I guess they can romance one another. Is it really even necessary (there is a kind of sadomasochistic aspect to Nanase that seems to stealthily resent having to participate in this relationship with her girlfriend)? The belief that her achievement in track is connected to her life success, is connected to her romance is a big part of the way Nanase embodies middle-class values, and a part of the way she serves as an endless buffer against the poor girl and the rich girl, who are actually quite a lot more compatible; a buffer to keep them from getting together. Nanase’s belief that her society will reward the merit she works for spurs her to repeatedly neglect Yuni. Nanase isn’t trying to put Yuni through the wringer (or is she? Is part of the middle-class outlook Nanase embodies a kind of lacerating self-hatred, directed outward at those closest to her?); the college tour episode makes it clear that Nanase believes there is no difference between her circumstances and Yuni’s––and in that assumption, wouldn’t it follow that Yuni must feel the same as Nanase, and recognize the sacrifice Nanase is making by neglecting her––all in order to be a really good volleyball player? What could be more admirable and important than that? This is about their futures, after all. And what Nanase doesn’t realize is that the world doesn’t work this way for Yuni at all. There is no real way Yuni sees out of her socioeconomic class; and thus no benefit to bearing any such delayed gratification. When Yuni attends the college tour, we hear the bleakness in her distress––she simply doesn’t see a future for herself in the way Nanase does. The poor are often better-served with generous helpings of cynicism; it has a bitter taste, but you've got to put something in your stomach. It doesn’t matter that Yuni’s attending school now; it won’t lead her to success, a poor girl in a world dictated by values she can't easily replicate. Yet Nanase assumes a level of success in her future comparable to that in her current life, and strives to achieve it. But Yuni knows from her mother’s experience; hard work doesn’t make you comfortable, or happy. No one helps the poor person up when they’re striving, the way they might with Nanase. And in Fuuko’s position, value is assigned at birth; some are destined for success, others marked out for failure. For Yuni, there’s no future. For Nanase, the sky’s the limit, if you earn it. For Fuuko, there isn’t anywhere to go but down. The three girls sit in highly differentiated spaces, regarding one another with alien fascination. Both romantic impulses, Yuni and Nanase and Yuni and Fuuko, are based on this exotic connection between people from different worlds.

It’s safe to say, though, that Nanase doesn’t recognize the difference between herself and Yuni. She makes assumptions that prove this, like when she guilts Yuni into attending the away game she can’t afford––and she often belittles Yuni when Yuni’s expression of her values proves different from the middle-class mores Nanase confidently assumes are just the way things are. The guilt that torments Yuni throughout the series is effectively communicated by Nanase as a common cultural value––and yet, nothing in Yuni’s world teaches her to value the rigorous, boring constant settling for less that Nanase’s volleyball striving demands of Yuni. Most disturbing of all is the way in which Nanase consistently isolates Yuni, putting her in the position of secret girlfriend, a permanent tagalong, hiding from everyone but her alleged "lover." For Nanase, this is all a typically middle-class show of devotion––a variation on the lonely homemaker wife, who prepares any extravagant meal for a husband and his spontaneous dinner guests, invisibly, and without complaint. That's how that little lady loves her man, after all, and it's a model inherent to Nanase's worldview, compatible with her theory of striving and delayed gratification leading to eventual success. Nanase assumes Yuni will tolerate this because from her viewpoint, Yuni must internalize the same cultural values that she does. At the same time, the isolation of Yuni has a kind of sadism in it that is part and parcel of the value-package communicated by all this middle-class striving. Pointlessly delayed gratification, isolation of power that must be contained, (here Yuni is representing what might be considered the feminine agency that must be controlled in a sadomasochistic, inherently misogynist worldview (like a capitalist worldview, for instance)––and Nanase does seem to view Yuni’s release of feminine energy and enthusiasm as shameful and embarrassing enough that she wants it locked up for no one else to see. Nanase also has an amplifier for her meritocratic world-view––her friend Yuki, who reflects the same depressing outlook she has and doubles its impact with her support. In the college tour chapter, every assumed value Nanase places upon Yuni is echoed by Yuki, who further isolates Yuni using these assumed hegemonic values as the lever of her harassment. In the world of college, and, by extension, of the girls’ high school, middle class values confer a kind of cultural capital, and how close you come to embodying those values gives you, really, the most capital. This is why Fuuko and Yuni, neither of whom have much of this cultural capital, can be bullied by the exceptionally dull Nanase and her coarse toady, Yuki (we know Yuki’s interest in Nanase is ultimately romantic, and based on shared attitudes, but for the purposes of this reading, Yuki’s value is in reinforcing the values of the middle-class as the principal structure of this rigid society).

The most oppressive use Nanase has for her cultural capital is in the way she uses it to reclaim her girlfriend from Fuuko. Fuuko’s case that she should be Yuni’s legit girlfriend is supported by an upper-class reading of the situation: Fuuko really deserves Yuni, doesn't she? She has been receptive to Yuni’s feelings, and they mirror her own. Love excites them both, and that excitement should be the reward for those talented and inspired enough to grab it (her hatred of Nanase seems to spring largely from Nanase's flat, uninspired way of "loving"––what Fuuko values––brilliance, inspiration, fortuosity––is aligned with her class values, also––the shininess of gold! the magic of one's lucky birth) Nanase’s initial breakdown over this criticism pathetic, and fun to watch, because it's all true, and she really has no answer for it. But she eventually comes back with a killing blow. Because middle-class meritocracy is essentially hegemonic (insofar as it serves to placate the suffering lower classes and divide them into smaller, more vulnerable ideological groupings, preventing an uprising against the rich), Nanase can leverage instant acceptance of her worldview on the part of her competitors Fuuko and Yuni––both of which see this worldview as baked in all around them, and both of whom view their own differing value structures as personal faults or aberrations, rather than expressions of their varied life experiences. Nanase can’t justify neglecting her girlfriend as she has, and so she just ignores it, and makes the ultimate in meritocratic pitches. Why can’t she just have it all, if she works hard enough? If Nanase is just a better girlfriend, taking it more seriously, surely she can still strive for volleyball (never mind that the situation will never devolve that way, and volleyball will always be her preference)? It is telling that neither Fuuko nor Yuni has an argument in the face of this––it is, essentially, what they all believe that everyone believes––the argument they all feel they must capitulate to. And this argument conjures up Yuni’s guilt and uses it to imprison her once again in an unhappy relationship that is essentially unchanged. Nanase is free to keep her devotion to volleyball paramount, and Yuni’s punishment will mean continued isolation, along with added helpings of guilt, and the feeling she has to earn back Nanase’s trust. There’s another meritocratic assumption undergirding Yuni’s guilt which isn’t quite expressed on the page, but which is likely an element of Yuni’s surrender to Nanase’s flat, stupid assertion that she can just have everything, and that’s the common cultural believe that there is merit in mating for life with your first partner, incompatibility be damned. This folk-belief is as oppressive as any other to people from the middle and lower classes––though the rich have always had their workarounds for this absurd assertion of "morality." Yuni seems to have a knee-jerk preference not to trade up her relationship, and this baseless meritocratic assumption that there’s value in being first in line is helping to cage Yuni alone with her unhappiness, isolated by herself with a girlfriend who wants her only insofar as having Yuni means winning and earning, somehow. Fuuko, meanwhile, offers Yuni ultimate freedom, with no fixed, required way of being, and no authority greater than passion––but Fuuko, like Tinkerbell, runs off her audience’s belief in her magic, and she almost literally shrinks away when Yuni accedes to Nanase’s unromantic, possessive bellowing and steps away from the brink of real love. Who knows what these girls from opposite sides of the tracks, with so much need and fantasy in common could make of one another, were they free to? But Nanase’s dull, paralyzing world view holds these volatile representatives of competing classes apart. It wouldn’t be all right for Fuuko to deny her own birthright and love a commoner; and Yuni might be able to advance into the middle-class rather than the upper (in some isolated, means-tested cases, this has always been acceptable), but only if she completely transforms herself into one of them (rather than perpetuating the smokescreen she puts up for her classmates). Until that happens, Nanase will continue to isolate and belittle her––heck, Nanase might keep doing this whether Yuni meets her demands or not. Either way, the buffer will keep the exploitative relationships of the capitalist system in place, and inequities will be masked behind the illusion of a merit-based system.

This realization on the author’s part of how middle-class meritocratic values serve to hide inequality, stymie the social mobility of volatile members of other classes, and enforce the deliberate striation and isolation of people within class structures so far seem to be the dynamic underpinning the book's melodrama. There are so many moments when these structures, and the way the characters fit into and don’t fit into them, are underlined––and the quintessential conflict is one in which both Fuuko and Yuni are trying to shatter the status quo, and Nanase, with her status-quo value structure and her larger helping of social capital, is essentially holding them back from doing. People seem to feel that the story does not advance, but in a sense, this is a tale of class-based detente, in which two people trying to transcend their inherited value structure are repeatedly stymied from doing so––both by the people around them and by their inherited senses of inadequacy and unworthiness (which they have primarily inherited from a middle-class worldview that doesn’t map to their own life experiences and offers them no truth). Yuni stands a chance of happiness with Fuuko that she doesn’t with Nanase; but so long as Yuni remains prisoner of an assumed set of values that don’t serve her and aren’t hers to begin with, Yuni will remain stuck. The structures that impede Yuni from accepting the love she wants from Fuuko, the structures that cause Yuni to read Fuuko as the “wrong person,” are there to preserve a socioeconomic status quo which serves neither Yuni nor Fuuko. Nanase, as the exponent of these values, thinks of herself as a beneficiary of them, but in reality she is the thug enforcing those values, stopping the other two girls from finding happiness together, in a world more open to vast flux and socioeconomic change. And from this depiction of the stagnation of passions, the author creates a proxy exposition of the way a capitalist social structure preserves its own sclerotic structure at the expense of the people trapped in its system.

Is this the author’s formulation of themes, or is it just my interpretation? I’m not positive. It is credible for the author to have simply internalized––or more consciously externalized––the kind of anti-capitalist critique common to a lot of Japanese artists of the previous century. Peter Yacavone reads a lot of similar critiques in the midcentury action films and melodramas of Seijun Suzuki, so why not a Yuri author in an era where these concerns dominate our politics more than they have in a very long time? My hunch is that this is all conscious thematic construction on the author’s part, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the story kind of leaves this setup behind as it tries to drill down on a resolution––similar to the way in which Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk offers us an inspiring Hulk that wages war on the capitalist establishment, before abandoning that greatest-ever Hulk storyline in favor of a story which pulls familiar characters together into a kind of psychological showdown. The political storyline––which expounds helpfully on the way nostalgia, for instance, is weaponized by capitalists in order to disrupt organized resistance––cedes the stage, and the need for the Hulk to rebuild his own shattered psyche takes over as the main plot line. Here, it’s quite conceivable that we’ve seen the last of this anti-capitalist critique as part of the overt text, and that the story will become more focused on the plot going forward (it seems as if they’re preparing a second conflict between the three main characters, in which perhaps Fuuko wins out––not sure if that’s an intended conclusion or just the next leg of the conflict––but I think the author is being very clear in setting up the ways in which we empathize with Fuuko and with Yuni––and the ways in which we tend to empathize much less with Nanase (who has an ideal girlfriend waiting in the wings). But I think the situating the author has done, positioning these characters according to their sociopolitical social roles, will continue to inform the relationship conflict going forwards, and that the book will continue to be exciting because of it. There are not, so far as I’ve seen, Yuri manga that undergird their romance with a dynamic class reading like this; capitalist realism is an assumed stance in even the more sophisticated Yuri I’ve enjoyed, from Octave and The Brides of Iberia to Run Away with Me, Girl, to Whispered Words (a rare book that is cognizant of class differences between characters, but which does not explore them in depth or offer a reading that challenges any of our assumptions), to any of the Takemiya Jin stories. This sociopolitical valence to the conflict adds enormous complexity to the book, and makes each chapter feel fresh and entertaining, so far. And that’s a significant part of the really high esteem I continue to have for the story. It keeps impressing me, and it keeps relentlessly engaging me. It’s the comic I most look forward to reading in the right this very minute immediate now.

I’m glad you commented. Most comments judge the characters based on their morality as individuals, as if they are real people. This is understandable. Many people come here to cry and masturbate, as I often do. Like you, probably, I have found clarity in the emotional maelstrom by calling upon the immortal science of dialectical materialism. And psychoanalysis. I am no longer using the good book to cast stones onto my ex kind of girlfriend. I hope she rides that stupid man and stops to hit her juul and savors every moment free of strife. I will savor mine. I won’t cite Fisher, but I’ll quote the theme of another work about new labor, repression, and bourgeois neuroses and now also a Taco Bell commercial, “I’m not sick but I’m not well… And it’s a sin to live this well.”

So maybe that is why I have also become quite enamored with this manga and I’d prefer to appreciate its merits as a literary work and locate a kind of societal critique or class conflict in the text. First, I think your reading of Nanase and Yuki are on the money. They represent the hegemonic ideal, smart, ambitious, athletic girls from regular middle class nuclear families. Acceptable despite their sexualities. They participate in mainstream society and contribute to capitalist economy. While the author might not put it in your words, it’s clear they intended Nanase to be a bit basic, sheltered, and shallow.

However, while raised by a single parent and not having quite the same kind of financial stability, I would not say Yuni is exactly proletarian. Their apartment is large and quite nice. This is not disqualifying on its own, and it is manga so there’s gonna be a cool design, but she personally doesn’t have to work, her mother owns a business, and she will pay for her university tuition. The real contrast in their backgrounds is that the mother is in mizushobai, the water trade, or nightlife. The work is stigmatized and it’s a volatile market. The mama must maintain appearances while absorbing all the emotions mainstream society suppresses. Yuni’s identity rests in that boom and bust, with all the uncertainty, emotional manipulation, abandonment, and loss it entails. Nanase, not so much.

Yuni and Nanase are clearly incompatible, but does Yuni desire Nanase because she represents the societal ideal? Are Yuni and Fuuko driven apart by what society demands of their class? I don’t think this is the case. Remember that the characters are all teenage lesbians in Japan. They are closeted. They cannot marry. Family might not disown a lesbian kid, but likely won’t love the idea. Conservative government wants higher birth rates. Society demands they don’t love at all. Fuuko is all but disinherited by her parents. Yuni lusts with the expectation she will eventually be left behind when they get older. Looking at the chapter where Yuni and Nanase first speak, you can see they make their initial connection because Yuni likes Nanase’s gay haircut lmao. That’s their bond. “You’re hot and you’re the first other lesbian I’ve met.” That said, Yuni feels an additional pressure in their relationship because besides her queerness, Nanase is a popular jock with no major trauma. She just can’t really get Yuni, like capitalism can’t really get the crazy deviants who don’t act to merely boost shareholder value and play with dog on the weekend. Additionally, she’d be okay if Yuni was out of her life for good. Yuni doesn’t have many other people to rely on.

I like your reading, but I see Fuuko and Yuni more as comrades, the freaks rejected by rainbow capitalism. I want to write more about Fuuko, Marx, and Freud, but I must pick this up tomorrow. Thank you for your comment! It tickled me

at this point I’m just reading only the comments to get the gist of the story, because this i invested to much time and emotional energy to completely drop this garbage glorifying cheaters story, it gives me the impression Yuni will never suffer any consequences given she was fist found to cheat only to get more cheaters porn with some dap of nut job fetish “age play” from lunatic Fuuko

I used to be extremely normal until I read this sexual Japanese lesbian comic. I have built my moral universe around everything these high schoolers do. I’m in a relationship with a power imbalance (height gap) and I tell the hot cashier my girlfriend is my adopted son when they get lost at the grocery store

We knew this, but people don’t actually want toxic yuri. The minute you start writing BL drama in a manga for lesbians, here comes the Class S rep to tell you about decency. God forbid you’re a dyke and you want your girlfriend to call you a filthy whore

if there's no sequel i'll just have to assume that the curb your enthusiasm theme started playing as it cuts to the credit

Imagine.

Susie: LARRY DAVID ARE YOU HAVING LESBIAN SEX WITH YOUR SISTER

Jeff: Well she’s not legally her sister.

Larry: My name’s not on her register.

Susie: Your name’s on some fucking register you sick fuck asshole

Larry: Ever look at yourself in the mirror in the middle of coitus and think geez I’m really starting to look like my mother? Dig deeper. It’s Freudian. All sex is really incest yuri. Do you respect Freud Susie

Ever since it happened I really wanted to know what the Citrus girls were doing during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Nothing as usual

Wow didn’t expect a Giuliani arc. The president a dumb gooner right. Are the student council members forced to eat the pee out of her while she’s on the phone being scammed by the failchildren of petrostate oligarchs and giving her assessment on the penises of various ethnicities

Fuyuki-chan: it’s the way I’m in love with a straight girl who also happens to be my best friend…………

The Dog Who’s Named Opera: https://youtu.be/tVLlmL9qsww

last edited at May 18, 2024 6:08PM

Stupid. She’s tough so she’s not a girl but she loves sweets so she actually is a girl. This is the logic of the deranged and neurotic. I love food and cooking as much as anyone but personally I’ve had enough dessert. When the manga girls are eating headcheese and offal, I’ll be interested. Conservative censorship, otaku fordism, and gacha mindsets have created a vacuum of creative intrigue. The artists with an appreciation for the eroticism of liberated young women railing lines and having affairs no longer find an outlet in manga. We desperately need our delinquents back. 90% of new releases are the fantasy of people who both fear and shun the DoorDash courier and all the world they cannot see from their gaming chair. And oh, she’s a violent gang leader who secretly eats pastries all day and mostly just accosts street artists minding their own business? She’s a cop

The best thing about this manga is that they’re teenagers who feel like such inscrutable outcasts because they like the most middling mainstream rock music imaginable. which is pretty real but they’re also Japanese teenagers and I’m hungover stupid so I don’t know maybe they are actually on the cutting edge. surely it takes balls to sing a song in another language at karaoke. But it’d still be funny if they got found listening to I don’t know fucking clocks or something and everybody in the class was like “sweet. Love Coldplay”

Prez should’ve popped a quick H on that box so everyone would know what’s inside

Personally, the fact that japanese authors could, and have, written something like this completely straight without the slightest socioeconomical consciousness is... ...
here, modern Japan, the political-technological elites, called the "backbone" of the country, send their daughters to a private school where they act and dress like idealized 1600's european noblewomen, in order to become "noble ladies", and the mc even says she was a fucking "commoner".
This kind of stuff makes me just about as angry as boys in manga make people in comment sections of het tags, and I hope that these girls smash more than just their private music sessions together, show how fucked up these premises are, but they probably won't.

If this comic book about lesbian guitar foreplay got into real issues like historical materialism and the use value of a broadcloth maybe then Japan could have a dictatorship of the proletariat

last edited at Aug 8, 2023 2:09PM

I’m glad the maid stopped being a class traitor

Kaoru is best girl, so she’ll probably lose the MCbowl, but no worries… She has already won in my heart

Sayaka singing Lemon by Yonezu Kenshi. This girl really loves her citrus