After all my frustration and mild discomfort reading the story, this "joke" by the author made it all worse.

Yeah it's crazy to have an afterword fully cement that, oh, the author just likes teenagers for real and assumes everyone is on the same page. Okay.
I've seen student x teacher serve interesting story grounds and this wasn't it. Even beyond the ick there was so much that was just glossed over about every aspect between the two characters, from their off-screen initiation to what their relationship was actually like to what they even thought about each other. The story couldn't decide whether it was just a tool to make our main characters see each other more or if it had the same weight as the main relationship itself. Frustrating read.

I didn't quite get the significance of the letter in Shiratori's pocket -- anyone's got an idea?

I was racking my brain for a while but I thiiiiiiink from what I've heard, sunflowers are a common love confession flower (and the sticker is definitely a sunflower, being the centerpiece of a pivotal moment between the two). So Maju's interpretation here is probably it.

ngl Takumi-kun kinda got her good

If you want it you should take it before it's gone
If you want it you should take it before it's gone
If you want it you should take it before it's gone

Well, we have Height gap, Age gap, Social gap, and even Language gap, maybe we just need Uselessness gap to round them off?

I like it.

Ema blaming Ayame for the break up because she "did too much" was insane tho
And then Ayame agrees and goes "yeah blabla my ego"

What kind of backwards thinking is this, boyfriend was a pos that left all the housework on her shoulders(like many men do) and its somehow her fault it didn't work out??? What was the mangaka thinking with this bs

Old comment but yeah Ema definitely wasn't just saying "You are a bad person and bad at relationships because of all this," she's mostly saying "Stop using so much energy on these shitty dudes." Even though yeah it did put off those guys, but doing so much was also making her a magnet for shitty guys.

I also don't personally think Ayame reads as straight as people are saying. None of her reasons for wanting a relationship had anything to do with men. As she said, all she wants is to be happy, and she's been feeling the societal pressure that says "happy = married with kids" because she is kind of a clueless person. It doesn't sound like she's ever been particularly excited about men, but just hasn't considered other possibilities.

I feel like there does need to be an Idiot tag for when it's not the whole couple. It's always fun.

The doors are opening indeed....

Feels like kind of an artblock-buster, with how she's just kind of experimenting with things she's always liked the idea of. Pretty cute, both the story and the author's mindset.

"Why didn't Tsubaki react very strongly?" She had already assumed the husband was abusive ever since she saw Yuki show up to a café alone on her birthday. This was not a surprise in her mind. She is written to be a bit of a wacko, which is most of the driving force of the story.

If you were told by someone that they have been locked in their home by their abuser, wouldn't you have some kind of reaction? Even if you know they're being abused, it's still shocking.

Yes, I would. I am not Tsubaki, a strange and off-kilter character written for this story.

last edited at Jul 9, 2026 10:52AM

sugar.'s kind of a genius so even if this is the beginning of the end I'm kind of excited to see what she puts out next. After being interested to see where this arc goes of course. Maybe something with a premise that's easier to stick to.

Completely insane thread

"How did she get locked up with nobody noticing?" Abusers often cut people off from their loved ones or target people who have no loved ones.

"Why did she just casually reveal that she got locked up?" She was at her wit's end and has no one to turn to except a 16-year-old who she only knows as a waitress.

"Why didn't Tsubaki react very strongly?" She had already assumed the husband was abusive ever since she saw Yuki show up to a café alone on her birthday. This was not a surprise in her mind. She is written to be a bit of a wacko, which is most of the driving force of the story.

"Why didn't Tsubaki do anything about it?" What is a high-schooler supposed to do about someone's abusive marriage? Don't say cops

"Why didn't she just leave?" Do you like... know what abuse is?

"This was cool but why did she have to be leading a bad life?" Do you know what a story is?

"How is this a bad ending?" A lot can happen in two years. Aren't you afraid for her...?

"She should have killed Yuki" What?

Ts garbage

what

See it's funny, because for the longest I was used to prejudice representing itself as people ignoring the existence of queer people in fiction even when there was no heterosexual explanation for characters' behavior. Now, we're in a brave new age of transmisics being among the first to propose a queer interpretation of any given text. I'm not sure I like this overcorrection, but if there's a culture war, they've definitely lost it already.

I think you are misreading "ts" as "transsexual" instead of "this shit".

ily Yuni

Autistic woman swag. You love to see it.

How can you be 30 minutes early to a meetup you've planned to have in 20 minutes?

That's... a really good point. Odd goof.

Wow, I've been waiting forever for Sal Jiang's contribution to this collection. Other people already said it, but I wasn't expecting hers to be the least toxic one of the bunch... As much as I would've liked to see something truly revulsive, I liked this on its own merit. It's cute.

Looking at the dates, I guess this is a rather early work for all of them. Long before Black & White for sure.

last edited at Feb 28, 2026 4:49PM

Ngl this is kinda unserious with how suddenly we got to this.
Also apparently they fucked and it happened offscreen after building up to it for like 10 chapters ?? If this isnt some axe shenanigans then idk whats happening

That's my biggest point of confusion here... like that's been The major arc of the story and it's brushed off with an "Oh yeah remember how that happened?". I had to check 3 times to make sure I hadn't accidentally skipped a chapter. I really hope the Planned Real Ending is worth suddenly stuffing all this exposition in. We didn't even get any imoni....

So - there is that moment when Ouma's hair changes color, and she suddenly forgets what she had been doing. Right after that she suddenly start noticing that Toudou is haunted. I assume that means that Ouma had been haunted by the entity up till that moment, and that it jumped to the next host at this point.

It pretty clearly looks like some sort of time-based personality swap to me, with only the dark-haired one being able to see ghosts.

It also recently occurred to me that when I imagine pairings of characters, I never really include Yatsude. I guess I just can't bring myself to imagine good things happening to her.

I've reread this manga more times than I can count, but only just really registered that the Pixiv Extras and Volume Promos chapter has multiple drawings of the stuco president + the idol, and one of Fuji + the one-chapter kuudere (in shrine miko outfits no less?)... You're killing me Ningyau I just want more

This does lend some interesting context to At the Bottom of the Water, just in terms of the kinds of things the author thinks about

Would not have gotten at all that the death glare from Admin-chan meant that she was the mole without the note at the side (is there a word for that?). Not sure whether to consider that a failing of the manga, a failing of my own, or the editor overstepping a bit on the note.

Was Riko introduced before last chapter? Is that what the extra page is saying? Or was that the introduction it's talking about?

My thinking is that the double-date offer is to show (prove?) something or other to Sakuragawa, although I'm not quite sure what. It's rather hard to know exactly what she's thinking at this point. Sayori is shown to be someone who prioritizes her choice of college and the approval of her parents over Mizuki, and there isn't exactly anything solidly tying her to Mizuki, whether physical, social, or emotional (besides S), so it's hard to imagine that she's trapped against her will in an abusive relationship with someone who lives off in an apartment somewhere and has no excuse to see Sayori, someone who lives with her parents. So something else happened. Sayori's also a rather crafty person. I think she has something to say that words can't convey.

On my second reread right now I remmebered how in my first read of the chapter, I read "All that could make the flowers more beautiful is if senpai were laying here" as something incredibly yandere, aka her saying "if senpai's senpais corpse was laying in the flowers" here, before understanding what she actually meant...or maybe was my initial read correct? I also didn't realize how possessive the following pages actually were until now.

Nnnnno... The very next panel shows her mental image of Mizuki laying in the flowers in a completely normal, playful, and notably alive way. I don't really see anything more possessive than what this manga has shown an S relationship to be, although I'll give you that something can be said about how obsessive that is in general. I wouldn't say yandere but there's somewhat of a creeping saccharine darkness over the whole story.

last edited at Aug 30, 2025 9:21AM

Ah, my bad. I meant Dahlia and Violet.

But if they were just school friend, why call her "older sister"? However close people get with friends, I have never seen anyone call them older/younger siblings before. "Like an older/younger sibling," yes, but I don't know if it's just the translation.

It's a whole Thing in high-society (mostly all-girls) schools in Japan (at least in the world of manga, I don't know enough to say how true-to-life it is) where an upperclassman and a freshman will take a sisterly vow or whatever, and take care of each other as (high-society) sisters would. You're going to see it a lot of you continue using this site and reading random yuri.

Unrelated question out of random curiosity, is there a consistent word Frost is saying that's being translated as "Yeah."? Is it just "hai", or "nn", or what?

Sal Jiang... We salute you!!

(I wish the people that dislike the lolicon genre regardless would just blacklist the tag already, instead of wasting time and forum space for pointless discussion on morals in a clearly tagged comedy series)

I specifically want to know why they're even here. If someone doesn't like a tag, why are they reading this or commenting on it? They need to leave people alone and take their moral grandstanding to the dead bird app. That applies to snarky little comments about the author too.

If you look, most of the annoyed comments are from fans of nmi, a known author with several very popular one-shots on this site, who decided to check to see if they like it because of the author even if it's a genre they don't like. Then they left comments that can be useful for other people doing the same thing. It's really like, the most reasonable use for a comment section.

And to do just that: The kid's funny, and I'm always a fan of a weird pathetic protagonist. Still feels kinda bad to read in an "actual POCD nightmare put to paper" way. Probably gonna give it a couple more chapters to let nmi cook. Could be like Happy Sugar Life in that it has enough interesting going on to surpass oneeloli being a fundamentally stupid premise.