I bet the umbrella is Wanko's way of saying "It's going to rain today and I didn't bring my umbrella. Come meet me at the station again!"

Wither that or the person who stole Sakuma's umbrella somehow managed to run return it to her.

Putting an "if lost, please return to" tag on it wouldn't be the worst idea in a world of communal umbrella bins. Doubt that's what actually happened but it'd be a kinda funny anticlimax.

From the people who brought you Soap-brand soap and Beans-brand beans, yuri manga titled Yuri Manga.

Lady in the middle wondering where she missed the discovery of cloning.

Again, it wasn't really meant to be social commentary. It was just a reaction to real-life shit. If that's not enough for you, that's your problem.

Is a story written in reaction to real-life events and problems in society not the literal definition of social commentary? It being social commentary isn't a bad thing, so this feels like an odd defense of something that it doesn't need to be defended over in the first place.

In any case it seems like good fun so far. Whatever all the fuss is about doesn't exist yet as far as I'm concerned, because I'd have to actually read a book to see it. I can't read books, there's not enough pictures in them!

i feel like the central fantasy for the intended reader is for someone to forcibly break their repression? certainly there are more angles but that one seems obvious to me. so people who have spent some amount of time living in fear and uncertainty, feeling like they are nothing, until they finally dare to give in and the world just comes into focus for the first time probably get more out of it than the rest of us. sometimes people just wish they had gotten a kick in the ass.

That's definitely part of it. I think it's the same idea you see in romance novels a lot, from the Victorian era to the modern day. The protagonist is absolutely 100% not interested in the swarthy handsome kinda racist foreign man's advances and doesn't consent at all to what he does to her because she's a Good Christian Englishwoman and Sex Is Icky, except that's clearly a paper thin veneer and she's enjoying every minute of it.

It's an extremely common setup because it taps into a lot of different appeals at once. It allows you to textually uphold prudish social norms while every page drips with subtext about how great sex is, and the reader can latch on to the protagonist's token resistance to pretend they're still a pure and virtuous woman who would never succumb even as they get off to the protagonist succumbing. You get the fantasy of the repressed woman whisked away from that environment, for those readers who'd rather pretend they can be horny more freely than pretend that they're not. You have a tension around whether she'll give in or keep resisting, and different sorts of readers can root for either outcome. And you tap into the rather common rape/domination fetish, but also because it's so subtextually clear she's into it you don't put off many people who don't have that fetish.

This story is playing for most of the same appeals, but also plays it for comedy by admitting right there in the title that Marika is full of shit and clearly in denial about how much she's enjoying everything. So instead of that veneer that lets the reader pretend they're totally scandalized by what's happening even as they're reading with one hand we're just laughing at her and waiting to see when she finally admits it.