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Alright, time to log out until the next volume drops, cy'all in 14 moths ✌🦋
If prev is specifically about anyone, it's about the one redditor in r/yurimemes who constantly misinterprets these characters. Damn you redditor and your poorly understood yuri memes.
I'm not really sure how I feel about the post-volume-8 structure. Volumes 1-5 had a very monster of the week feel to them, where every file was a self-contained story with a mystery to solve and a monster to beat. 6 was the big experiment in style, a full volume dedicated to one file, but that file had the same monster-of-the-week feel. Then 7 & 8 are both multi-file stories, but they change significantly to where those files are no longer self contained. Instead, they're act 1/2/3 in a larger story, in two enormous climaxes to the two biggest plot threads of this story - Toriko moving on from her ex, and Sorawo & Toriko getting together. And obviously 7/8 are the two best books in the entire series, so I have no complaints there.
9 & 10 have carried on the 7/8 structure, with the individual files being less self-contained and there being an overarching narrative, but now they are no longer backed by story climaxes. It's given 9 & 10 a very meandering feel - Sorawo and Toriko aren't really progressing "towards" anything, their story isn't "going" anywhere, there's no monster to find and kill. Ostensibly Runa getting let out was the climax of volume 9, but it was... understated. I'm not even really sure what volume 10 is leading towards. Kozakura taking in Kasumi is a big change, but it's not been one with a lot of drama, just a lot of domestic moments and ominous portents.
Maybe domestic is the right word here. It feels very much like people just living their lives, in a space that isn't exactly "normal," but is normal to them. The world is expanding beyond just Sorawo & Toriko's story to give other characters space to develop and grow. But it's not in a dramatic, grand way, 9 & 10 hasn't really heightened that to enormous proportions the way the other volumes did for Soratori's qpp.
Toriko & Benimori meeting this week was really just those two meeting. There wasn't a dark twist, there wasn't any cognitive fuckery, it just happened. In every other volume, including in volume 8, Sorawo hanging out with Benimori has resulted in one or both of them losing memories or waking up somewhere unexpected or a classmate going missing. But this week it seems like they really did just go out for tea and have some love talk, and that's it.
It's interesting, because. The story got more normal as soon as Soratori got together. The Nue is built on a particular kind of relationship, one that is outside of the bounds of romance, one that is intimately involved in exploring the Otherside.
They got together and now the Otherside is less a part of their story.
On a meta level, is this progress in their relationship, or is this Soratori getting pulled in to the gravitational well of domestic romance?
What is Sorawo going to do when she realizes it's happening?
I kinda think from a meta perspective vol 9-10 is Sorawo realizing that she's getting pulled in to a romantic gravity well but still trying to put her finger on why that's freaking her out. (I suspect her whole thing about labels comes back to "family"; something along the lines of family getting away with abuse simply because it happens within the family unit). That probably ties into the whole thing about frequencies and broadcasting ideas unintentionally, and Tsuji's advice about needing to have a firm idea of what you want to avoid getting swallowed by others.
I think a neat thing vol 10 is doing is subtly pulling the reader into the structure of ghost stories. The first file was pretty neat because Kasumi's little contribution is more of a direct communication with the reader about what Sorawo's dream meant. The structure of the second sort of mimics the structure of hypnotic induction; Tsuji describes how the puzzle box induces a hypnotic state while Sorawo's narration kind of mimics that technique, only for Tsuji to abruptly break the trance at the end.
The main story has been a bit mid since vol 8 but the meta is extremely fascinating, and hopefully the story will start hooking into it a little more aggressively.
Yeah, Sorawo is constantly declaring and asserting that their relationship isn't romantic, that it's something unique to them. No one in-story is challenging that either, with the exception of maybe Kozakura when they announce they're together?
But the structure of the story itself has something to say about it. How the story progresses, the things it uses for drama and conflict are romantically coded. It's asking the question, "How is the Nue different from lovers?"
Sorawo bristles at that because she's insecure & ignorant about being aro the same way she's insecure & ignorant about being a lesbian. And also because she's awful at introspection and doesn't understand herself - I think you're right about her distaste for "family" is a contributing factor here, and Sorawo will never realize that on her own.
Idk if I'd go so far as to say that it "objectively is." Inasmuch as there is a singular way of defining romance, Sorawo's relationship goals are missing several of the important features for the platonic ideals of romance.
I can't find the exact post I'm thinking of (or I'm hallucinating several posts & ideas together), but I once read an essay discussing & dissecting the ideas of what, exactly, a romantic relationship is, and what separates it from other concepts, with the goal of using that to provide a coherent definition of romantic attraction. I think it was by rotten-zucchinis? Or possibly by asexualagenda, this post of his is a reaction to that discussion and links a lot of stuff I remember around then.
Essentially the idea is that, while there's no 1 definition of romance that is perfectly coherent and universal to all things people call "romantic," there are several key concepts that are being gestured at by the term. No romantic relationship fits all of them, but when people talk about romance, those are the ideas they're communicating.
One of those is the escalator relationship. Romance is a relationship that "progresses" from friendship to dating to sex to marriage to children. The Nue is explicitly not that, that's the one that's most been discussed within the story. Sorawo's not following that path, and Toriko is no longer doing so as well.
Another is the nebulous idea of a shared life. Things like cohabitation, shared finances, "in sickness and in health." The Nue is, obviously, still a fairly young relationship, not at a point where those are serious considerations, but you can't tell me that you can look at the way Sorawo reacts to the idea of "family" and say she'd describe that as what the Nue is to her. As yuriskies says, that's probably the exact thing that Sorawo is running away from, whether she's articulating it to the audience or not.
The potential definition I remember most prominently from that essay was the idea that romance was a relationship that had the "potential to be sexual." Regardless of the couple's actual sexual status, a romantic relationship is one where, interpersonally and societally, sex is a real consideration. This is the only definition where the Nue maybe fits. Like, they settled on the name and the idea because of their first sexual experience together. Obviously, that first experience was much more supernatural than most sex, but it remains that the difference between Accomplices and the Nue is, partly, the sexual component.
9 & 10 are playing with that tension - Soratori are in a space where it's easy to read them as romantic, despite Sorawo's protestations. The reader can easily push them into that gravity well. But don't mistake that tension as "objective." Just because you've encountered a bear wearing a human face does not mean it's not a bear.
When people describe early-volumes Sorawo as "dense," this feels like a very similar thing. Sorawo isn't blind to Toriko's attraction, she is constantly reacting to it and tiptoeing around to avoid it. She's in denial about it, but denial is not ignorance. That's not communicated to the audience because Sorawo isn't a reliable narrator. She segments off things she doesn't want to think about from the rest of her brain, and then just doesn't think about them. Thus when the audience sits in her head and watches her thoughts and she never explicitly acknowledges Toriko's feelings, that can feel like ignorance, but it's not.
Realizing Toriko's not sociable and Sorawo's not dense is, like, the #1 reading comprehension check for this series, and it's one I see people fail constantly. It's really impressive the way that Miyazawa manages the twist, manages to build these character traits up so well and then make you realize they're not true, and they only seem true because of the filter of Sorawo's perspective.
Which is part of what makes the meta-story interesting. Miyazawa's done this before, built up the story in a way that the audience is projecting their expectations & ideas onto it, only to reveal something that changes the foundational idea and invalidates those expectations.
Otherside Picnic is a yuri. Yuris are lesbian romances*. The expectation for a lesbian romance is it ending with a relationship-boundary marker (a kiss, or dating, or sex, or cohabitation, or marriage, or...), one that you understand is indicative of that boundary by living in society and experiencing romance as a social force. But the Nue isn't romance, it doesn't have relationship-boundary markers like that, so what is the end of this story? How can we know, when all we can do is project our expectations on to it, and those expectations are objectively romantic?
I'm not really sure how I feel about the post-volume-8 structure. Volumes 1-5 had a very monster of the week feel to them, where every file was a self-contained story with a mystery to solve and a monster to beat. 6 was the big experiment in style, a full volume dedicated to one file, but that file had the same monster-of-the-week feel. Then 7 & 8 are both multi-file stories, but they change significantly to where those files are no longer self contained. Instead, they're act 1/2/3 in a larger story, in two enormous climaxes to the two biggest plot threads of this story - Toriko moving on from her ex, and Sorawo & Toriko getting together. And obviously 7/8 are the two best books in the entire series, so I have no complaints there.
9 & 10 have carried on the 7/8 structure, with the individual files being less self-contained and there being an overarching narrative, but now they are no longer backed by story climaxes. It's given 9 & 10 a very meandering feel - Sorawo and Toriko aren't really progressing "towards" anything, their story isn't "going" anywhere, there's no monster to find and kill. Ostensibly Runa getting let out was the climax of volume 9, but it was... understated. I'm not even really sure what volume 10 is leading towards. Kozakura taking in Kasumi is a big change, but it's not been one with a lot of drama, just a lot of domestic moments and ominous portents.
Maybe domestic is the right word here. It feels very much like people just living their lives, in a space that isn't exactly "normal," but is normal to them. The world is expanding beyond just Sorawo & Toriko's story to give other characters space to develop and grow. But it's not in a dramatic, grand way, 9 & 10 hasn't really heightened that to enormous proportions the way the other volumes did for Soratori's qpp.
Toriko & Benimori meeting this week was really just those two meeting. There wasn't a dark twist, there wasn't any cognitive fuckery, it just happened. In every other volume, including in volume 8, Sorawo hanging out with Benimori has resulted in one or both of them losing memories or waking up somewhere unexpected or a classmate going missing. But this week it seems like they really did just go out for tea and have some love talk, and that's it.
It's interesting, because. The story got more normal as soon as Soratori got together. The Nue is built on a particular kind of relationship, one that is outside of the bounds of romance, one that is intimately involved in exploring the Otherside.
They got together and now the Otherside is less a part of their story.
On a meta level, is this progress in their relationship, or is this Soratori getting pulled in to the gravitational well of domestic romance?
What is Sorawo going to do when she realizes it's happening?
I kinda think from a meta perspective vol 9-10 is Sorawo realizing that she's getting pulled in to a romantic gravity well but still trying to put her finger on why that's freaking her out. (I suspect her whole thing about labels comes back to "family"; something along the lines of family getting away with abuse simply because it happens within the family unit). That probably ties into the whole thing about frequencies and broadcasting ideas unintentionally, and Tsuji's advice about needing to have a firm idea of what you want to avoid getting swallowed by others.
I think a neat thing vol 10 is doing is subtly pulling the reader into the structure of ghost stories. The first file was pretty neat because Kasumi's little contribution is more of a direct communication with the reader about what Sorawo's dream meant. The structure of the second sort of mimics the structure of hypnotic induction; Tsuji describes how the puzzle box induces a hypnotic state while Sorawo's narration kind of mimics that technique, only for Tsuji to abruptly break the trance at the end.
The main story has been a bit mid since vol 8 but the meta is extremely fascinating, and hopefully the story will start hooking into it a little more aggressively.
Yeah, Sorawo is constantly declaring and asserting that their relationship isn't romantic, that it's something unique to them. No one in-story is challenging that either, with the exception of maybe Kozakura when they announce they're together?
But the structure of the story itself has something to say about it. How the story progresses, the things it uses for drama and conflict are romantically coded. It's asking the question, "How is the Nue different from lovers?"
Sorawo bristles at that because she's insecure & ignorant about being aro the same way she's insecure & ignorant about being a lesbian. And also because she's awful at introspection and doesn't understand herself - I think you're right about her distaste for "family" is a contributing factor here, and Sorawo will never realize that on her own.
Idk if I'd go so far as to say that it "objectively is." Inasmuch as there is a singular way of defining romance, Sorawo's relationship goals are missing several of the important features for the platonic ideals of romance.
I can't find the exact post I'm thinking of (or I'm hallucinating several posts & ideas together), but I once read an essay discussing & dissecting the ideas of what, exactly, a romantic relationship is, and what separates it from other concepts, with the goal of using that to provide a coherent definition of romantic attraction. I think it was by rotten-zucchinis? Or possibly by asexualagenda, this post of his is a reaction to that discussion and links a lot of stuff I remember around then.
Essentially the idea is that, while there's no 1 definition of romance that is perfectly coherent and universal to all things people call "romantic," there are several key concepts that are being gestured at by the term. No romantic relationship fits all of them, but when people talk about romance, those are the ideas they're communicating.
One of those is the escalator relationship. Romance is a relationship that "progresses" from friendship to dating to sex to marriage to children. The Nue is explicitly not that, that's the one that's most been discussed within the story. Sorawo's not following that path, and Toriko is no longer doing so as well.
Another is the nebulous idea of a shared life. Things like cohabitation, shared finances, "in sickness and in health." The Nue is, obviously, still a fairly young relationship, not at a point where those are serious considerations, but you can't tell me that you can look at the way Sorawo reacts to the idea of "family" and say she'd describe that as what the Nue is to her. As yuriskies says, that's probably the exact thing that Sorawo is running away from, whether she's articulating it to the audience or not.
The potential definition I remember most prominently from that essay was the idea that romance was a relationship that had the "potential to be sexual." Regardless of the couple's actual sexual status, a romantic relationship is one where, interpersonally and societally, sex is a real consideration. This is the only definition where the Nue maybe fits. Like, they settled on the name and the idea because of their first sexual experience together. Obviously, that first experience was much more supernatural than most sex, but it remains that the difference between Accomplices and the Nue is, partly, the sexual component.
9 & 10 are playing with that tension - Soratori are in a space where it's easy to read them as romantic, despite Sorawo's protestations. The reader can easily push them into that gravity well. But don't mistake that tension as "objective." Just because you've encountered a bear wearing a human face does not mean it's not a bear.
I legitimately woke up at 4 am so angry about the finale that I couldn't fall back asleep, like wtf
The biggest laughs in the theater were at Jax being in a dress, because man in a dress jokes are still funny in 2026. How many of the people around me walked away without knowing she's transfemme? How many people thought her humiliation was funny for being absurdist, instead of ironic because of the tragedy of this being Jax's only access to femininity and it being used as a cudgel to hurt her. Judging by the comments of the soundtrack video for Isn't She Lovely? Probably most of them, and it's upsetting.
My appreciation for this series was wholly predicated on transfem Jax because that coding is the only reason I didn't immediately drop the series at the maid outfit. And they walked the line exactly into the superposition, where *I* know it wasn't a transphobic joke, but the general audience thinks it was and they thought that transphobia was hilarious.
How am I supposed to feel about it in the wake of that? How am I supposed to enjoy this brilliantly executed transfeminine story, in which the transfemme gets to be messy and ugly and mean and big and still be seen as worth something, when the rest of the world sees how funny it is to be a man in a dress?
I legitimately woke up at 4 am so angry about the finale that I couldn't fall back asleep, like wtf
The biggest laughs in the theater were at Jax being in a dress, because man in a dress jokes are still funny in 2026. How many of the people around me walked away without knowing she's transfemme? How many people thought her humiliation was funny for being absurdist, instead of ironic because of the tragedy of this being Jax's only access to femininity and it being used as a cudgel to hurt her. Judging by the comments of the soundtrack video for Isn't She Lovely? Probably most of them, and it's upsetting.
My appreciation for this series was wholly predicated on transfem Jax because that coding is the only reason I didn't immediately drop the series at the maid outfit. And they walked the line exactly into the superposition, where *I* know it wasn't a transphobic joke, but the general audience thinks it was and they thought that transphobia was hilarious.
I legitimately woke up at 4 am so angry about the finale that I couldn't fall back asleep, like wtf
The biggest laughs in the theater were at Jax being in a dress, because man in a dress jokes are still funny in 2026. How many of the people around me walked away without knowing she's transfemme? How many people thought her humiliation was funny for being absurdist, instead of ironic because of the tragedy of this being Jax's only access to femininity and it being used as a cudgel to hurt her. Judging by the comments of the soundtrack video for Isn't She Lovely? Probably most of them, and it's upsetting.
I legitimately woke up at 4 am so angry about the finale that I couldn't fall back asleep, like wtf
I'm not really sure how I feel about the post-volume-8 structure. Volumes 1-5 had a very monster of the week feel to them, where every file was a self-contained story with a mystery to solve and a monster to beat. 6 was the big experiment in style, a full volume dedicated to one file, but that file had the same monster-of-the-week feel. Then 7 & 8 are both multi-file stories, but they change significantly to where those files are no longer self contained. Instead, they're act 1/2/3 in a larger story, in two enormous climaxes to the two biggest plot threads of this story - Toriko moving on from her ex, and Sorawo & Toriko getting together. And obviously 7/8 are the two best books in the entire series, so I have no complaints there.
9 & 10 have carried on the 7/8 structure, with the individual files being less self-contained and there being an overarching narrative, but now they are no longer backed by story climaxes. It's given 9 & 10 a very meandering feel - Sorawo and Toriko aren't really progressing "towards" anything, their story isn't "going" anywhere, there's no monster to find and kill. Ostensibly Runa getting let out was the climax of volume 9, but it was... understated. I'm not even really sure what volume 10 is leading towards. Kozakura taking in Kasumi is a big change, but it's not been one with a lot of drama, just a lot of domestic moments and ominous portents.
Maybe domestic is the right word here. It feels very much like people just living their lives, in a space that isn't exactly "normal," but is normal to them. The world is expanding beyond just Sorawo & Toriko's story to give other characters space to develop and grow. But it's not in a dramatic, grand way, 9 & 10 hasn't really heightened that to enormous proportions the way the other volumes did for Soratori's qpp.
Toriko & Benimori meeting this week was really just those two meeting. There wasn't a dark twist, there wasn't any cognitive fuckery, it just happened. In every other volume, including in volume 8, Sorawo hanging out with Benimori has resulted in one or both of them losing memories or waking up somewhere unexpected or a classmate going missing. But this week it seems like they really did just go out for tea and have some love talk, and that's it.
It's interesting, because. The story got more normal as soon as Soratori got together. The Nue is built on a particular kind of relationship, one that is outside of the bounds of romance, one that is intimately involved in exploring the Otherside.
They got together and now the Otherside is less a part of their story.
On a meta level, is this progress in their relationship, or is this Soratori getting pulled in to the gravitational well of domestic romance?
What is Sorawo going to do when she realizes it's happening?
I kinda think from a meta perspective vol 9-10 is Sorawo realizing that she's getting pulled in to a romantic gravity well but still trying to put her finger on why that's freaking her out. (I suspect her whole thing about labels comes back to "family"; something along the lines of family getting away with abuse simply because it happens within the family unit). That probably ties into the whole thing about frequencies and broadcasting ideas unintentionally, and Tsuji's advice about needing to have a firm idea of what you want to avoid getting swallowed by others.
I think a neat thing vol 10 is doing is subtly pulling the reader into the structure of ghost stories. The first file was pretty neat because Kasumi's little contribution is more of a direct communication with the reader about what Sorawo's dream meant. The structure of the second sort of mimics the structure of hypnotic induction; Tsuji describes how the puzzle box induces a hypnotic state while Sorawo's narration kind of mimics that technique, only for Tsuji to abruptly break the trance at the end.
The main story has been a bit mid since vol 8 but the meta is extremely fascinating, and hopefully the story will start hooking into it a little more aggressively.
Yeah, Sorawo is constantly declaring and asserting that their relationship isn't romantic, that it's something unique to them. No one in-story is challenging that either, with the exception of maybe Kozakura when they announce they're together?
But the structure of the story itself has something to say about it. How the story progresses, the things it uses for drama and conflict are romantically coded. It's asking the question, "How is the Nue different from lovers?"
Sorawo bristles at that because she's insecure & ignorant about being aro the same way she's insecure & ignorant about being a lesbian. And also because she's awful at introspection and doesn't understand herself - I think you're right about her distaste for "family" is a contributing factor here, and Sorawo will never realize that on her own.
"If transfem Jax is canon then it will only be a twist for cis people" Pretty sure the trans woman 2 seats down did not see it coming, based on how much she was sobbing at the end lol
That said using this song at the resolution of that arc fucked so hard, I'm in awe. 10/10 tbh, no notes on this one
Why are trans women not allowed to exist in the same way as every they/them.
This feels like I'm bitching about there being more WLW media than MLM media, but when I'm watching a show and the lesbians get to fuck on screen and the (not-transfemme) they/them is never misgendered and the trans woman is relegated to subtext? All within the same show?
Like, I know the agenders aren't looking at these cisgender they/thems and thinking "wow what a good trans story!" It's tokenism at best. But why do trans women not even get that token?
Jax had a better trans story than Zooble. Zooble's transness was not a journey, its impact started & ended with their body shape, which while not insubstantial, is not "the closet makes you cruel, and the depths you go to keep your secret will ruin your life and your friendships." Zooble's pronouns are a quirk, Jax's are an arc.
So why end by denying that arc? Why decide to keep your character's story as plausibly deniable? Why leave it up to viewer interpretation, when you gave the they/them no doubt, no argument?
You made everyone use he/him. You denied her transition in the real world. The only character who knows studiously avoids using pronouns at every point past her finding out. You set up that reveal as the culmination of her arc, of the arc of the story, and then left it up to reader interpretation.
I can read it, but I'm exhausted at the implication that my gender (your gender, Gooseworx) is so taboo that we can never say it for real.
Why are trans women not allowed to exist in the same way as every they/them.
This feels like I'm bitching about there being more WLW media than MLM media, but when I'm watching a show and the lesbians get to fuck on screen and the (not-transfemme) they/them is never misgendered and the trans woman is relegated to subtext? All within the same show?
Like, I know the agenders aren't looking at these cisgender they/thems and thinking "wow what a good trans story!" It's tokenism at best. But why do trans women not even get that token?
Why are trans women not allowed to exist in the same way as every they/them.
This feels like I'm bitching about there being more WLW media than MLM media, but when I'm watching a show and the lesbians get to fuck on screen and the (not-transfemme) they/them is never misgendered and the trans woman is relegated to subtext? All within the same show?
Why are trans women not allowed to exist in the same way as every they/them.
"I had to reverse come out to my parents" and then they kicked you out of the house and never spoke to you again because you turned out to be attracted to the "opposite" gender? Oh, no, you just read as a little fruity and you had to explain they were wrong okay. You're not even butch you jackass.
