M is living her best life, reading manga in a onesie, and I'm here for it.

This was what I'd have expected from a 2013 manga, but in the Reiwa era one expects to see actual relationships depicted in their romcoms.

laughs in literally every other popular teasing romcom like Takagi-san, Uzaki-chan and Nagatoro

Takagi-san is literally a 2013 manga, though. And it literally got an entire sequel dedicated to their life as a married couple, which has been running for 6 years. I don't think you could pick a worse counterpoint to my statement!

last edited at May 15, 2023 10:50PM

Put me in the mild disappointment camp. This was one of my favourite ongoing manga for the first 15ish chapters or so. After that, it had kind of worn out its welcome with me with absolutely zero progression for a hundred chapters. And now that there was finally progress, it ended. I didn't hate it, but I would've liked this a lot more if they started going out much earlier. Especially with the central theme being teasing and making her do embarrassing things, that would have still worked perfectly fine with them as a couple the entire time. I feel like this manga was released in the wrong era. This was what I'd have expected from a 2013 manga, but in the Reiwa era one expects to see actual relationships depicted in their romcoms.

I like how the author told us to think of this as a "friendship" story xD

Where the fuck do I get friends like this

Have you tried living in a gay manga?

Wouldn't be an Isekai without a love triangle where one girl is inevitably going to get hurt. Especially since most of these writers never have the balls to go with the polyamory ending

More writers have the balls to go poly than to have a clear-cut ending where one love interest is picked and the rest are cleanly kept away without wishy washy ambiguity.

Please tell me where this supposed trove of poly stories is, because I'd love to read that.

Though based on you saying wishy washy ambiguity, I think you're talking about something completely different.

They're talking about harem endings. And they're correct. If you count harem as poly, which we seem to be considering we're calling one girl having two girlfriends who have absolutely zero interest in one another "poly", harems are far more common in the isekai genre and adjacent genres than monogamous relationships. The "wishy-washy ambiguity" part comes from the fact that the protagonist doesn't usually officially end up with any of the countless characters in love with them, so that the reader self-inserting can fantasise about the protagonist ending up with their particular favourite love interest.

And that's why this is such a point of contention. I think poly-enjoyers might have the wrong idea that poly itself is hated, but in this thread harems and poly are being fully conflated. Harems are, narratively speaking, disgusting. They're Mary Sue bullshit, bad writing that objectifies women for the purpose of fulfilling people's gross self-insert fantasies. I get that there's a market for self-insert fiction, a massive one at that, but harem fantasies in particular reduce women to being property. Every girl in a harem story exists for the sole purpose of falling heads over heels for the self-insert, usually as soon as they meet and for no discernible reason other than "they were nice to me once". I loathe it. Absolutely, positively hate it. It is literally the single biggest problem with the ACG fiction bubble. But it fucking sells. It sells incredibly well, and for bigger series it sells figurines and merch as people chase their waifus. So it just continues proliferating and my hatred of it continues growing.

All of that to say, this is why I desperately hope this manga doesn't go down that path. I'm not opposed to reading about open relationships. But you will never see any of the non-MC characters in these stories having their own relationships. Not with each other, and not with third parties who aren't involved with the MC either. In my eyes, that is absolutely not poly. Because all of the characters exist only to serve the MC's desires, and have no desires of their own. There's nothing romantic about that, and it's certainly not a progressive depiction of relationships.

I feel like this is more than moderate

Inflation is out of control. A few years ago, 10 pages of lewds would get you a Lots of Sex, but these days even 20 pages isn't enough. Cute gay sex just isn't worth what it used to be in today's economy.

As a person that enjoys both works I feel like the creator, in my opinion, did a fine job setting the mood in both. The relationship between Chisato and Takina feels intimate to me, and the sex works well. Of course if people disagree with me that's fine as well, just for me at least there's a romantic and intimate mood in both that works well.

Oh, I 100% agree. I didn't chime in on the discussion about whether it did or not myself because I didn't think I had much to add to the conversation, but I personally found both of these to be quite lovely.

last edited at Mar 11, 2023 2:12PM

Guys it's just porn it ain't that deep

There are 15 pages leading up to the smut, I think it's perfectly fair for people to discuss the content of the first 2/3rds of the book. And, like, for men who have a tendency to just jam it in at the first opportunity those pages probably don't matter, sure, but for most women setting a proper mood first is as an important part of making something appealing as the actual sex, I think. Not that I don't enjoy plain porn, but a good doujin can be so much better than that.

last edited at Mar 11, 2023 12:01PM

The love bite was a great touch. It's cute seeing the always calm and composed Takina lose herself while making love enough to do something like that without even realising it.

More generally, I appreciate how this artist draws sensual doujin without drawing 50 close-ups of their bits.

you can't just draw this and then not give us the lyrics

before it was raised to 16 last year out of misguided moral outrage

I've seen a lot of garbage on this forum, but unironically advocating for 30-year-olds to be able to groom and sleep with 13-year-olds really takes the cake. What the fuck is wrong with you.

exactly at the time most young people actually start having sex

With each other. Not with adults. Jesus fucking christ.

^^While I very strongly recommend Raven... it's entirely straight, if anything at all. Maybe if you have some incredibly strong, prescription-only yuri goggles you can see something I don't, but I would really not go into it with that kind of expectation. There is a cute friendship but zero romantic tension or anything at all there, IMO.

Raven elaboration, details about the vibe of the show but no major spoilers:
I wouldn't even call it straight, really, at least as far as was adapted. The Emperor is fond of Jusetsu but she has agency and firmly rebuffs his advances without it just being a tsundere routine, which is refreshing to see in an anime. There are indications that she will probably grow to like him later in the story, but in what was adapted thus far it was less a romance of any kind and more a tale of two people isolated by their positions becoming genuine friends.

no need to take it seriously guys

I'll have you know yuri is very serious business.

As much as I love this comic, I find it deeply concerning how Hiyama's friends appear to have severe anterograde amnesia.

The full-length version of Ano Bando is actually so good. I keep coming back to it almost daily...

That's not a healthy relationship.

thatsthepoint

Have people never seen a yandere before? I'm surprised by how many people are taking this seriously.

this is just terrifying tbh

what would have happened if she hadn't remembered it on time?

Something other than the cakes would get divided into two or more slices

This artist has drawn a whole series of images of these two fapping together, for people who want more.

She sobered up.

Lies. As if such a thing were possible.

Yeah, but where's your avatar picture from?

Woing

I think the "but we're both girls" trope is a lot more realistic than pretending being gay is the default in the story. Like the person above me said a girl might be worried about losing her friend and she doesn't even bother to think if said friend is into girls without having asked. At some point I just can't even suspend my disbelief. And then all the side characters turn out to be gay too?
Sure, it's a bit tiring to have to go through that denial phase in every story but given the high school setting I think that's the normal thing to go through. I went through it and a lot of people living in more homophobic environments did as well...

For me, and I think a lot of people, we already had enough of the homophobia experience IRL. I really don't care if it's realistic, I have absolutely zero, zilch, nada interest in reading about it in fiction. I certainly don't feel like it breaks suspension of disbelief in any way; the key to suspension is internal consistency. As long as a story is internally consistent, there's nothing to disbelieve; stories don't have to take place in our homophobic timeline. In the same way there are fantasy worlds with magic -- including ones with contemporary settings -- there are 'fantasy' worlds where being gay is normal, and to me that's just lovely.

That's not to say that it's a bad thing to write stories that are true to our own timeline, as I'm sure a great many people also appreciate having stories to relate to their experiences of discrimination, but just as many people read fiction for escapism from the more unpleasant aspects of our reality and it's perfectly valid to write that kind of story.

Do they just keep mistakenly calling her Tada-san and she's too meek to correct them? She said her name was Tano.

I don't have access to the raws so I can't check but probably a translation oversight, kanji can be read multiple ways.

The core of the issue then, is that there's a fundamental lack of characterization in these later chapters. Everything Adachi thinks and is shown to do is so heavily centered around Shimmura that Adachi themselves has become hollow in nature. Who even IS Adachi outside Shimmura? I don't even fucking know anymore. It's all like a shitty version of the co-dependence trope without the "co" part. I have the impression that to some people this might be a realistic interpretation of their crushes as a dumbass, moody teenager, but from a narrative perspective I feel that this is a serious decline in quality compared to its more humble beginnings.

I'm not sure I understand your point. You concede that it is realistically feasible for a teenager to behave like this, but then attack it for "lack of characterization" anyways? It's fine if you don't like Adachi's characterization, and as a result have lost interest in the story, but to say that this isn't characterization is just bizarre. Are authors not allowed to write about certain types of people because you don't find them to be interesting...?

Adachi is what drew me into this series, because I was literally Adachi as a teen. A disaster gay who had no interest in anything in life but love. I got a job when I was 16 just to buy things for the girl I loved, my only hobbies were the same as hers so I could spend as much time with her as possible, and eventually I had a full Adachi mental breakdown too. I was certainly not an interesting character, that much is true. It probably had a lot to do with why my feelings were never reciprocated - I didn't have a personality outside of being obsessively in love. It's perfectly understandable not to like such a character, but I was glad that an author out there wrote a story I could relate to so strongly. If you can't relate to Adachi, it's easy to see why the story wouldn't be for you, but that's not a flaw in the quality of writing at all.

Thaaat being said, this following chapter was where I kind of lost interest myself. After last chapter's bombshell, the drama is swept under the rug as though it never happened, which I did not find to be very narratively satisfying. Granted, while my take was that last chapter's Shimamura felt uncharacteristically callous to me, given that it happened already this chapter felt like a very Shimamura thing to do, but it became harder for me to relate to Adachi at this point. Here Adachi has a much stronger will than I did as a kid, because I would have continued breaking down until the relationship was ruined if I didn't find some kind of resolution to my emotions rather than just pretending it never happened. That panel where Adachi is ranting in her head but says the diplomatically correct thing to not make her own life even worse? Absolutely not me.

last edited at Dec 24, 2022 10:49PM

Though I think the essence of this trope is that, as demonstrated by different commenters, people starts having clear recollection at different points of their life, but don't realize this is the case unless they compare.

Ironically, I think the existence of this trope actually reinforced my belief that everyone remembers their early childhood, since the forgetful person is typically portrayed as having wronged the forgotten person, implying that it's abnormal. Before having ever directly asked real people (you are all real people, right?) about their experience, it seemed like stories conveyed that other people do remember friends from age 4~5... except when forgetting them would be a convenient plot point.

Interesting to hear other people's perspectives, I guess not remembering your childhood is more common than I thought.

Same opinion here. The premise may have struck a dissonant chord for some, but I don't doubt that it'll be top-shelf fluff in a matter of chapters.

Right, I can understand not liking this trope but I think some of the commenters here have clearly never read Hachiko. I'm convinced she can't go a day in her life without drawing girls making out, so regardless of the premise I trust Hachiko will deliver the fluffy goods, and probably sooner than later.