Delightful!

Just have a little patience and wait for the translated chapters to come out.

Anyway, I liked this chapter a lot too. We're finally learning some more about Koto. What I found most notable was how when Aya wasn't moving while sleeping, Koto's immediate assumption was that she was dead or something. It really demonstrates how much Aya's disappearance affected her, and still affects her even now that Aya's returned. Thank you for the translation!

Thank you @HayaH, your point is much clearer now. I'm sympathetic to your argument, although I think comparing disliking characters like Meiko to fascism is a bit much.

I'm going to be honest, @HayaH, I legitimately have no idea what you're talking about.

Eri literally did nothing wrong and deserves happiness

That said, I do think it's fair to criticize the pacing for being choppy and the structure of events to be more like a dumb soap opera than a realistic character drama, which is disappointing when Kodama is trying to tackle such heavy subjects. As a result, while I think this premise had potential to be her best work, it ends up clearly inferior to Segull Villa Days and Fake a Marriage With my Junior. But it is interesting enough to be worth reading if you can handle dark subject matter and mutually toxic relationships.

While this sort of story isn't my main cup of tea, it certainly is interesting as change of pace from the run-of-the-mill yuri story.

But I think it's pretty clear that a lot of readers don't have much (like any) patience with stories about "mutually toxic relationships." In fact, a lot of readers seem to be dead-set on identifying "the good one" (as opposed to "the least messed-up one") in a story no matter how much of a trainwreck all the characters might be. It's remarkable how often people will go to the mat for "[X] did nothing wrong!" when it's pretty obvious that, while X might not have been the worst of the worst, X still did plenty of things wrong.

To be frank, I think a lot of people can't handle a female character specifically who's significantly flawed but still treated as sympathetic. If you look at het romances, male love interests (or even protagonists) are often far worse than even Meiko here -- and for not nearly as good reasons -- and yet are given way more leeway by readers than Meiko was. People, even a lot of yuri fans, just have way higher standards for female characters in general.

Seagull: Ashima, the dark-hair sister? She wasn't that bad, considering circumstances. "Terrible personality" is the MC's 'friend', the one the MC was getting away from. Tall glass of utter toxicity there.

Well, like I said, there's levels to it. Ashima's personality is totally understandable given her circumstances, but she does have a tendency to intersocial manipulation; same with Hana from Married My Junior, though Hana truly doesn't do anything wrong. My point though is that you can classify them as "tame" versions of a character archetype that also includes Meiko from World Without Freedom and Hotaru from NTR Trap. The MC's "friend" from Seagull, on the other hand was not depicted as remotely sympathetic so she doesn't belong to this character archetype of Kodama's, she's just a villain.

It's not that her manga are particularly "dark" (her darkest is World Without Freedom and I've read much darker yuri) or "realistic" (Kodama's manga are largely soap operas), but that they invite the reader to root for and be invested in manipulative women who deliberately use their beauty, feminine charms, and interpersonal skills to their own advantage, and that is a personality type most people have been socialized to despise on sight.

In fact, in the afterword to “I Married My Best Friend” Kodama draws herself as two avatars, “light Kodama” and “dark Kodama,” (the familiar “good angel/bad angel” images), with “Gentle Romance,” “Silly Humor” and “Boobs” listed for the light version and “Soap Opera,” “Jealousy,” and “Heavy” for the dark, with a footnote saying “Dark Kodama draws boobs, too.”

I’m not sure that completely tracks with Kodama’s body of work (except for the boobs), but that’s how they present it, anyway.

It kinda tracks, though I'd say it's more a spectrum than a strict binary. But even in her "light Kodama" works the love interest tends to be of the "manipulative beauty" archetype, just in an extremely toned-down form. The only notable exception is Seagull Villa Days, and that's only because she made Ashima from the sidecouple that archetype instead. There are a couple oneshots where this isn't the case, but those are definitely the exception. Personally this is what I like the best about her oeuvre because it's so rare to find this type of female character treated sympathetically, but I do think it's also the major reason why so many yuri fans don't like her.

I would say the one element that continually recurs throughout almost all of Kodama Naoko's work, both oneshots and serialization, is -- to use her own words -- "beautiful women with terrible personalities." Now, just how terrible they are varies widely from work to work, from "mostly just mischievous" like in I Faked my Marriage to a full-on emotional abuser like in A World Without Freedom (Hotaru from NTR Trap is somewhere in the middle); note that in Seagull Villa Days this role is taken up by one of the girls in the sidecouple. What I think renders her work so controversial is that she never sugarcoats or downplays the actions of these girls, but nevertheless still writes them as sympathetic and, frankly, desirable. It's a character archetype that you commonly see in male leads in romance stories but you rarely see for female characters, and I think that throws a lot of people for a loop. It's not that her manga are particularly "dark" (her darkest is World Without Freedom and I've read much darker yuri) or "realistic" (Kodama's manga are largely soap operas), but that they invite the reader to root for and be invested in manipulative women who deliberately use their beauty, feminine charms, and interpersonal skills to their own advantage, and that is a personality type most people have been socialized to despise on sight.

Definitely the darkest/most fucked up of Kodama Naoko's works, despite not having any cheating in it. Overall I think this was a very interesting idea that needed to be about twice as long to really be effective; with how complicated all three major characters are, and how much plot there is, one volume just isn't enough to adequately delve into the complexities and as a result it feels kind of surface level. In particular, there's lots of interesting stuff going on with Reo, from her suppressed jealousy of Meiko when they were in high school to her addiction to the dramatic lifestyle Meiko gives her in college, but Kodama doesn't really draw these threads together into a single coherent personality and as a result she feels more like a pinball protagonist that does whatever Kodama needs her to to move the plot forward.

That said, Meiko is a good enough character to basically make the manga worth reading by herself; she's almost too good for the manga, frankly. I think what a lot of people miss is that her behavior isn't solely due to her trauma from being assaulted and raped (although that is a large part of it). There's implications she's always been socially awkward and doesn't really know how to get along with people, and that plus her beauty means Reo was her first real friend, as other girls were jealous of her and the guys only pretended to be nice so they could get into her pants. The lesson she took from her rape was in this sense just reinforcing something she already believed: that she was a worthless good-for-nothing whose only value was in her looks. From all that, it makes sense why she would do whatever she could to tie down Reo, the only one she'd ever met who saw value in her as a person.

It hasn't escaped my notice either that so many people in this thread pulled out every misogynistic trope in the book to insult her, up to and including straight-up victim blaming with one person saying the rape must not have been so bad because she decided to use it to tie Reo to her, even though the manga hammers home over and over again via its flashbacks to high school that the rape was so traumatic it permanently warped Meiko's personality and her relationship with Reo. Meiko is both a victim and a victimizer, a terrible person who is terrible not because she was "born bad" but because her life experiences taught her to become that way, and while both she and Reo have made progress by the end neither of them is ever going to truly get over it. Which I find to be a lot more realistic and compelling than the "everyone goes to therapy which magically makes them healthy" ending that some people here were hoping for.

That said, I do think it's fair to criticize the pacing for being choppy and the structure of events to be more like a dumb soap opera than a realistic character drama, which is disappointing when Kodama is trying to tackle such heavy subjects. As a result, while I think this premise had potential to be her best work, it ends up clearly inferior to Segull Villa Days and Fake a Marriage With my Junior. But it is interesting enough to be worth reading if you can handle dark subject matter and mutually toxic relationships.

Is it me or there's a lot of double suicide going on? Also: Supernatural tag?

Lovers' suicides have been a common theme in Japanese media for centuries.

DIdn't though they would go all the way. That's a twist i didn't see coming.Also what can i say. Otome is a bitch who find a simpletonin Kazura and Kazura is an idiot who can't see she was getting played like a damn fiddle. So already on a great start in terms of characters. Don't know enough of Yoshiba to judge her.

Kazura knew very well she was getting played, she even admits it at the start. She just put up with it because it at least meant that someone valued her in some way, until Otome made it undeniably clear she didn't care about her at all.

I honestly really like Kodama Naoko's works, and this chapter was a great start. I was surprised by how overtly political it got too; I definitely hadn't expected Kodama to be the first yuri mangaka to explicitly call out Japan's political establishment dragging its feet on gay marriage despite massive public support. Really looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

The "Makino somehow manages to win at life" chapter lol.

Feels like we're approaching the end of the manga once this final challenge of Makino's mother is overcome. It's bittersweet, I've quite enjoyed this dumb and silly manga, but I don't want it to last too long and overstay its welcome. I'll be following it to the end!

incredible chapter

And I agree with you, butch women and men are different things. But Aya didn't think that Mitsuki were a butch woman. She thought she was a man. When she realized that she is a girl she stopped considering a relationship, nothing changed about Mitsuki appearance or behavior.

Well, in one sense it's true that Aya stopped considering a relationship because she hasn't come to terms with her sexuality. But I think it's absurd to suggest she's no longer attracted to Mitsuki. She constantly blushes and gets flustered around her, in practically every chapter. She got extremely jealous and insecure when Kanna showed up, and is visibly relieved after being told Kanna isn't Mitsuki's ex. She hesitates to call Mitsuki a "friend". And this isn't even mentioning the flash-forward where they're living together. I could go on, but you get the idea. She may not explicitly think to herself "I'm in love with Mitsuki," but there's every indication that she is in love, and almost no indication that her feelings are just platonic.

CH62 and Aya still deny she being her boyfriend to others by saying that she is a girl to people that thinks that Mitsuki is man. Mistake that she did, and many others do too.

"Someone tells the two leads they look like a couple and the leads loudly deny it while blushing" is one of the most common romcom cliches there is. If anything, it's further evidence that their relationship is romantic.

I'd been thinking Koto is the most mysterious character despite being the protagonist of chapter 1, and, yup. Those last few pages were quite creepy, but I don't think it's setting up Koto to be a total manipulative yandere. There's something else going on with her.

"Oh, but the blushing!". The fact that Aya knows that Mitsuki is a girl, doesn't change that she still looks like a hot guy. Her brain knows that she is a girl, but her eyes see a hot guy. It's like watching a horror movie. We know its fake, but our eyes see otherwise, so we feel afraid anyway.

Once you start pulling out the "being attracted to a girl doesn't make you not straight as long as that girl is kinda androgynous" take, I think that's a sign that it isn't subtext after all. Everything else you describe is standard romantic tropes (a misunderstanding leads to a feeling of betrayal and estrangement before a dramatic gesture reconciles the leads; the tsundere character insists that the other lead is "not by boy/girlfriend").

About Mitsuki... we have no idea what she's into. No posters nor magazines or anything that indicates what she is attracted to. The times that she looks hot are completely unintentional, she's not trying to seduce anyone.

Mitsuki deliberately flirts with Aya in chapter three.

Have you ever looked up a trope called "stupid sexy Flanders"? Basically, it's a thing, usually in comedy, where a character feels inexplicably attracted to someone outside of their normal orientation. These relationships don't usually end up going anywhere, even when played serious. The name comes from a scene in the Simpsons where Homer Simpson is bothered by his strange sexual attraction to Ned Flanders

While I don't, personally, think Aya and Mitsuki are straight, I was mostly pointing out why it is not unreasonable for people to feel like this story wasn't going down the yuri route if they don't know the author's previous career. Stories have done the "straight the whole time" thing before

Except we have zero indication that either Mitsuki or Aya is straight, unlike say Homer who is married to a woman. The sole male character (aside from Mitsuki's uncle) is never presented as a romantic option and in fact supports the yuri ship. Furthermore, them being attracted to each other is not a one-off joke like the "Stupid Sexy Flanders" scene but is a consistent theme running through the whole manga.

I understand that a lot of yuri fans feel a certain paranoia; there's often this constant fear that the characters will be revealed as "just friends" and "actually straight all along" unless there's some sort of extremely obviously explicit indication otherwise. We even saw this with G-Witch, another show people often accused of being "subtext" and "bait" despite Suletta and Miorine getting literally, non-metaphorically engaged to be married in episode 1. While I don't think this fear is grounded in reality -- the last time this happened was, what, Amanchu over 6 years ago? -- and often causes people to dismiss slow burns and ambiguous feelings as valid ways to depict sapphic relationships at all, I recognize that it's coming from a place of real pain. But that doesn't excuse this website from using the subtext tag when they should very well know Arai Sumiko's history.

It's actually a subject of much debate due to several ambiguous statements the author has made over whether this series should be considered yuri. It also hinges on where people daw the line between yuri and sexually confusing friendship

I don't want to redo an argument I already had in this thread dozens of pages ago, but in that interview Arai basically said the Japanese equivalent of "I don't write yuri, I write wlw." This was then taken out of context by people who hyper-focused on the one word without knowing the history and implications the term 'yuri' has in Japanese that it doesn't in English. Regardless, Arai's Twitter profile literally says "I like love between women," and everything that she has ever written without exception contains explicitly sapphic protagonists. I don't think it's hard to guess where this comic will end up.

Also, I don't understand what you mean by "sexually confusing friendship." Like, if a man and a woman have a "sexually confusing friendship," we just call that "sexual tension." I don't see the utility in yuri fans holding a F/F relationship to such a higher standard than a het relationship before we accept it as legitimate.

Honestly, I think it's absurd to call this manga "subtext." The beginning is an obvious romance setup, the girls frequently blush around each other, they care deeply about each other, other characters observe they act like a couple, etc. That some people might theoretically interpret them as "just friends" is immaterial; some people interpret Suletta and Miorine as "just friends" and they're literally married at the end of the show. People frequently dismiss F/F relationships as "just friends" due to homo- and lesbophobia, but yuri fans shouldn't add to that phenomenon. If Mitsuki were male, literally not a single person on Earth would think their relationship is "subtext" and they're "just friends."

It looks like I'm locked out of recommending tag removal for this series (edit: nevermind I was dumb), but fwiw, I heavily encourage swapping back from "subtext" to "yuri." People have been really weird about this series from almost the very beginning, presumably because it's popular, but Arai Sumiko has repeatedly shown in her previous work that she doesn't hesitate to depict lesbian relationships and I see no good reason to expect that to change in this manga.

last edited at Oct 24, 2023 7:23PM

The solution to mutual jealousy is yuri. An inspiring message

While we know from elsewhere that Ao-chan eventually does build a happy life for herself, one can't help but wonder

Care to elaborate? What "elsewhere" is this?

We see a brief glimpse of her as a television personality in another Arcadia chapter, but also I strongly suspect that she's the mother of Yuu in Ami-chan's Diary for reasons I expound on in this comment.

Ultimately, this chapter is the part of Yatosaki Haru's Arcadia series that sticks with me the most. While I like happy endings too, this short story of a girl's weakness and selfishness causing her to permanently destroy her relationship with the one she loves is quite rare in fiction despite how depressingly common it often is in real life. While we know from elsewhere that Ao-chan eventually does build a happy life for herself, one can't help but wonder if she might've been happier had she managed to hold onto Tsutsuji (of course, who knows what would've happened to Kotoko in that case). It's a very bittersweet story that only becomes all the more poignant due to Yatosaki's signature dreamlike style. I love it!

Lol at "boku girl boyish-chan" not being tagged tomboy. Big cultural difference in perceptions on display here I guess.

I suggested the tag be added especially for you :D