fen

shamelessly stealing the moon archive segment name for this series of posts, at least in part because we covered this for our latest yuri teatime. formatting: brief setup then spoilers/my thoughts after the break. previous entry can be found here.

kino himari just started high school and she couldn't be more excited; she's once again in the same class as her best friend and the opening ceremony even has a live performance from a student band! himari ends up falling head over heals for the lead singer, asanagi yori, of the unfortunately named ss girls, and later, when himari catches up to yori as she's leaving school yori falls head over heals for himari. but what himari and what yori mean when they say love is different and leads to a lot of anxiety for both of them as they grow closer together and as the history of ss girls comes to light.

i keep a personal journal of stuff i've read/watched/played and figured i might as well write stuff up here as well. posts (chosts?) will be infrequent, though i might just write up a couple of things i've already finished while i get a vibe for what i want to say. future entries will probably also have screenshots, i couldn't find any for this one.

i suck at setup but here goes: sakurai ayaka is a (stop me if you've heard this one before) high school student with excellent grades, but she cracks under pressure so it's going to take a miracle (or a letter of recommendation) to get her into the college she wants to go to. Luckily for ayaka, her teacher shows up offering exactly that if she can get the delinquent honda sora to come to school. ayaka goes to sora's house to check on her and finds sora willing to come to school, on one condition: every day ayaka will do any one thing sora asks her to, a 'request'.

it's a fun premise! i really like contractual/paid/blackmail relationships in fiction, and this manga is a fun take on that. even though it discards the power dynamic relatively quickly (less than a third of 32 chapters is spent before they get together) it uses it pretty well, and 'request's continue to be a cute way the two of them have to ask for things they want or need from each other. i almost wish it stuck with the premise longer, there's more there to explore, but it works well as a way to get ayaka and sora together.

genre is fake, but also, it's always fun to see a manga find itself. lonely girl starts off drama filled, first sora pushing ayaka to do things she may not want to, then sora's mom showing up to take sora away. but after the mid-point (and honestly earlier, probably) it settles down into a comfy hangout manga. ayaka and sora are dating, they have their friend group, and it adopts more slice of life pacing. i'd be interested to know how much of this was planned vs it was popular enough to keep going, but either way it leads to kind of a weird read? i enjoyed both parts of the manga, and reading it monthly means it's been part of my life for 2ish years at this point, but i never really got over that transition.

closing thoughts: this is kind of a mess, but that's what you're here for (or why you scrolled right past this). i like this manga a lot, but writing about it is hard! if it kept up the premise longer i could write about where it went with that, but instead it's a manga that has pretty art and always made me feel kinda warm and cozy reading it and it's hard to convey that feeling.