The concept of a 16yo girl falling for a 38yo scruffy old man is iffy in my book. I'll pass on this one.

you don't need to announce you're not reading something to the world, especially in this pointlessly judgmental way. it's a fact of life that millions of teen girls have crushed on an older man, it's not in any way problematic to write stories about things that are completely normal irl lol. things happen, it's not a moral endorsement to write stories about things that happen. like, imagine reading an action manga where someone is killed by the villain and then saying "i'm not reading this trash, murder is wrong", that'd be totally ridiculous

personally this one's super relatable because it happened to me, crushing on a girl who crushed on an older man when i was in high school. hope it ends better for her

It also sounded like this was her first attempt at prostitution

I don't have the raws to check for nuance, but as translated, I definitely didn't get the impression this was her first attempt.

"Maika~ wanna crash at my place again?"
A hint towards homelessness, that's not a typical greeting. And if she's relying on her friends, she'll have a place to shower and keep her clothes clean.

"Weekends hit you hard, huh?"
Hinting at hardships. Maybe another explanation would be if she partied too hard on weekends or something, but that's not the impression given in this case lol

"Age: 20
Finally turned 18!"
Looks like she's been at it for at least two years going by her app profile.

"You mean you got cold feet just before he was gonna do you?"
"After all this time? lmao"
A confirmation that this isn't a new thing, but rather something that's been going on for a long time.

Also, another hint to her situation is how desperate she is. Prostitution for 2+ years, but is so sick of it that she runs away from a client. Then turns to robbing houses after she gets banned from her source of income. She shows concern for Uta and saves her brother's life, so she's probably not a completely rotten person, but is doing this out of necessity.

It's just that Maika's logic for why Uta should also run away was so flimsy

...why shouldn't she run away? Uta's the murderer, and her DNA is presumably all over the scene of the crime given how messy it was, not to mention her blood-stained clothes. Although she could try framing Maika, that thought probably didn't even occur to her. She was hoping Maika would kill her, self-preservation was not on her mind at all.

last edited at Feb 14, 2025 4:50PM

I'm still a tad confused about the ending, because it either means they're kidnapping her younger brother, taking him with them and lying about their circumstances after the sister has already proven she's willing to murder him in cold blood OR they leave him behind to validate the idea that it was a burglary gone wrong but also dumping the motherload of all traumas on him when he wakes up alone (or in police custody) and finds out what's happened.

Both implications have serious issues that go entirely unaddressed.
Scenario 1: The little brother should have serious questions about why they're suddenly running away, where their parents are, why none of the other siblings are with them, why they can't go back home, why they suddenly need to avoid the police, don't have a home or school etc etc.

Scenario 2: The little brother saw the the sister's "new friend" and will be able to identify her to the police, even if he doesn't connect that she's supposed to be the "robber" who broke in; the police will ask him what happened and he'll tell them about the "friend" and she'll become suspect number 1 regardless of his ignorance.

They definitely aren't kidnapping him.

For identification, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference. Since Uta is missing, police will be looking for her under the assumption that she's a kidnapping victim, if not a suspect herself. So they already have a huge lead regardless of what information the brother gives about Maika, if he even remembers enough after being drugged to enable them to identify her.

Both scenarios pretty much have the robber girl decide to become complicit in murder for not much reason (and potentially framed for it in place of the actual murderer rather than simply being complicit)

From an ordinary person's self-preservation standpoint, it might not have been the most rational, but from a human connection standpoint, there was plenty of reason. "She's gonna cry... I wish I could make her happy". Given that Maika's own parents abandoned her (she's homeless and was relying on prostitution to survive), she would naturally find Uta to be a sort of kindred soul. Having a companion would give her something to live for, and her life was already so bleak that it could hardly get any worse, if anything prison would probably be an upgrade for her since it means food and shelter without selling herself. (And if Uta wanted to frame her, that would have happened anyways, since she broke in, committed robbery, and then gave her real name)

Since Maika is used to street life already, I think they'll have a decent chance of surviving as fugitives. Plenty of unfortunate people in this world manage to live outside the law.

I still can't really make sense of Maika's reasoning for why Uta should run away and it's not a translation issue. And if she's gonna play the robber and let Maika stay, why offer to run away in the first place?

My interpretation was that, because Uta was hesitating indecisively, Maika gave her a push by playfully acting as a robber, at which point Uta laughed and played along. Since the idea was to run away while leaving her brother thinking a robber committed the murders, I believed that was just an act and they would run away together after all. But I started to doubt my interpretation after seeing other people interpret it as taking the fall. Maika's facial expression and their relative positions and poses on the last page makes it very unclear to me what's actually happening.

last edited at Feb 13, 2025 7:25PM

since LR isn't officially a yuri (it could have been, but Adachi Ada-chickened out).

It wasn't that they were chicken, they were willing to include a canon gay male couple. Takina/Chisato was just bait from the start.

The publishing information on one of the books implies zun wrote erotica for aya.

nah, it's just crediting ZUN for his setting and characters

Lapis has shown less than zero romantic interest in Diana, viewing her strictly as a tool. Ergo, there's nothing poly about this, you just want to see a harem ending

If Natori ends up with Lapis and Diana, that's poly, even if Lapis and Diana don't touch each other.

the F it is. The modern, sex-positive conception of poly requires equality. If you're going to be with multiple people, those people also have the right to be with multiple people. One person having multiple wives who are monogamous to them is not progressive. It's abusive, and extremely regressive, like, "Islamic harem" regressive, and absolutely disgusting and vile. In the most literal sense, you might be correct being that Islamic harems are called polygamy so it is ""poly"", but the casual sense of poly used by fans of sexual liberation should not be conflated with that antiquated, gross practice.

Nobody goes around describing garbage harem anime with male leads as "poly", but for some reason it's okay if a lesbian does the same thing??? Nahhh, miss me with that.

Funny timing too, because just yesterday there was this article about a study on harem-style polygamy. Predictably, women who had to share their spouse were more anxious, depressed, and less sexually satisfied than women in monogamous marriages. Almost like such a selfish arrangement is a completely ****ed thing to do to someone, and we shouldn't be celebrating or promoting it as a good thing when a queer does it. Really shouldn't need a study to tell you something that obvious, though.

last edited at Mar 3, 2024 4:31AM

I mean, anyone who has read manga before can probably realize that the real point of that was to have a cute girl fall for the MC for no reason ... Which is stupid and degrading, classic anime and manga trope.

This is a really shallow and cynical view of a story that has had nothing but excellent writing. Her love for Natori serves a specific purpose in the plot: get her on Natori's, and by extension, Lapis' side against the commoners. This has already resulted in the first opportunity Natori has had to divert Lapis' fate, although in the end she doesn't wish for Diana to meet that same fate either and is now attempting to chase two hares.

Moreover, if you want to talk about stupid and degrading, we can talk about the conflation of "poly" with "harem". In what way, exactly, is giving Natori a harem ending "more mature"? Diana has shown minimal interest in Lapis, and Lapis has shown less than zero romantic interest in Diana, viewing her strictly as a tool. Ergo, there's nothing poly about this, you just want to see a harem ending... which is exactly the kind of degrading thing you accuse the story of by having two characters fall for the MC.

Maybe it's just me, but there's just so many of these "villainess" stories lately that it's hard to find the entertainment in them anymore. This one does seem to subvert the trope a bit more than the majority of them, so I'll probably give it a shot, but seriously, this genre has become way too over oversaturated.

Personally, I love the setting, but it does irk me that it's always, always an otome game isekai. If I had to pick between 10 contemporary stories set in school or office life and 10 with feudal nobility... give me the nobility!!! Pretty dresses, fantasy politics, royal drama! Maybe even some magic and dragons to spice things up? But I've never once felt like game elements or the protagonist knowing the future contributed to my enjoyment of the story, and in a few cases the game elements sent the story so far off the deep end of making any sense that I completely lost interest.

i think lately, more and more authors have been realising that their stories should have yandere girls, and i appreciate that.

yandere is justice

i love how in ch1 yuzi tries to pull the "oh, you love me? i'm so glad to have a friend tehe" and rika is having NONE of that. author is clearly as tired of that dumb trope as i am lol

as a needy girl with an amazing lover who tries to reassure rather than shame me for being 'deranged' as one person here put it (lol), relating so hard to this and looking forward to more!!

Read 10 chapters or so, thinking "why on Earth didn't I read this before" the entire time, before noticing the subtext tag. What a feeling of utter betrayal.

one of which instantly ends the story of this comic, so we can basically assume the correct answer (it's not a fluke, they'll keep looping) without spending so much page time on the test

Not a fan of journeys, are you? If the only thing you care about is the destination, I think most stories could reach their logical conclusion in about 1/4th as many pages as they're typically told in. But there's more to a story than a beginning and an end, you know? I don't really see a problem with the second chapter. In the first 10 pages, we learn that beneath her cool exterior, Kinka is manicly desperate to die, while Kazura doesn't really want to die. The next 9 pages aren't even about "the test", they're about Kazura's relationship with Otome. Kazura stands up for herself for the first time in her life, while Otome hints at a possessive side that will probably lead to conflict with Kinka later. Finally, the last few pages are... for lack of a better word, "suicide porn". It's not necessary to the plot at all, and you could communicate their second suicide in one panel if you wanted to be efficient, but there's no emotion or feeling in doing that, is there?

tl;dr chapter 2 has character development, drama, and at least attempts some kind of emotional impact. Sure, you could sum it up in one page by having them say, "hey, we're manga characters so the story isn't going to end if we try again right away, let's figure something else out", but there's more to a story than advancing the plot as quickly as possible.

Wow, this is amazing. It's been a while since I've felt genuine excitement while reading a manga. The art is sooooo good, and the characters, dialogue are perfect. Loving yandere Sakuya. I need mooore

Why is everyone jumping to murder? That wouldn't solve her lingering attachment at all. Poor girl doesn't need revenge, she needs to be loved. And so, rather than murder, the only solution for our protagonists is to do gay.

Somehow I got irked by the first textbox alone. There is nothing illogical about humans living together. "Humans have everything they need to live alone"... except they can't reproduce asexually, and on top of that younglings can't fend for themselves for ~15 years, so from an evolutionary perspective, of course humans are biologically inclined to form associations with other humans. It would be illogical if they didn't. And this doesn't even begin to touch on the benefits cooperation has for survival. Our social nature is the very thing that allowed us to achieve world domination. You're telling me an alien capable of space travel couldn't reason this out themselves? I guess even alien schools suffer from budgetary deficits if this is the extent of their education.

This has been your regular unnecessary overanalysis of a throwaway line that doesn't actually matter in any way to a cute comic about bread. Until next time.

last edited at Jan 27, 2024 9:33PM

Great, but I wish she didn’t have to ditch the glasses to “become cute”.

I mean, it's just being real. I don't think glasses can be said to make any girl more fashionable, so if you go to someone for fashion advice, of course they'll tell you to ditch 'em.

"I'm writing a story about time travel, what should I name the female character from the future? Hmm, "Future" has a nice ring to it" - approximately every mangaka who has ever written about time travel

This is a cute concept. I'm wondering if the original Kosaka "went missing" because she invented time travel and left her own time unannounced, which could set her up to visit later for Shenanigans.

The only time there can possibly be an issue is if the rules introduced by the author in that particular story are contradicted. And even then, there's a ton of wiggle room if the circumstances are even a bit unusual.

Like, if you don't think it's interesting for the protagonist to be hyper competent, that's fair, that's a reasonable opinion, so just say that instead of trying to imply that they've violated some inviolable logical principle with their imaginary story about people who can cast ice spells.

I think the critique is valid.

The author literally did just establish that you aren't supposed to be able to copy magic by looking at it. She went out of her way to establish that it does in fact contradict this universe's rules, because contradicting universal rules is what makes the protagonist so Special and Cool and Unique.

Beyond that, even if rules tend to vary between fantasy settings, there's still a general central concept. You would feel deceived if The Hobbit spent the entire book talking up Smaug, a legendary dragon, and when they finally visited his lair, they discovered a rabid Chihauhau. You generally expect dragons to be large, powerful, reptilian, breathe fire, etcetera, etcetera. Individual traits can be broken and still remain recognisable as a dragon as long as the rest remain faithful, but if you forego too many iconic traits then your readers will feel like the thing you're telling them is a dragon is not a dragon, even though you say it is a dragon and it's your universe so Chihauhaus can be called legendary dragons if you want them to.

...that was really long-winded and kind of tangential to my point, but anyways, one of the things I'm getting at here is that the central concept of magic is that it's not physical. Regardless of story, it's the opposite of physical. You cannot see the process behind it, that is quite literally what makes it magic. Magic is virtually always associated with intelligence or spirit, things that are invisible to the naked eye. So no wonder it tickles somebody's suspension of disbelief wrong... how are you supposed to copy something by observation when you are incapable of observing somebody's mind or soul? If the setting's rule of magic was that ice magic depended on how well you yelled out the word "Freeze!", that would be one thing, very silly in its own way but at least observable. As it is this just looks like a nonsensical cheat skill to my eye.

(I want to go on record and state that the length of this reply is not proportional to how much I care to argue about this particular thing, but rather, suspension of disbelief and worldbuilding are very dear subjects to me and I simply enjoy thinking about them.)

...........why would you choose to overdose on caffeine wtf

i'm becoming too jaded to mary sues, even the gayness is somehow not satisfying when capital-L Ladies are throwing themselves all over the protagonist at first sight

Why is everyone in this comments section just going on about the dangers of smoking lmao. Absolutely no chill.

That's what happens when you make a romantic story about a concept that is extremely not romantic. It was very cute, of course, but I was left with the impression that the author has never been around a smoker and is just idolising the fact that they look cool, considering "you smell so nice" is not a thing anybody would say while inhaling a mouthful of smoke.

It's kinda cute, but this girl really does come across like "Man, red flags sure are pretty, so attention-grabbing!" given how little she had to go on. Maybe she's a Kodama Naoko fan.

This is a truly great comment.