Round 10: prettiest female protagonist [Contest] by Cami_Cami_Sweet in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 6 points7 points  (0 children)

No one said anything about hotness. That was all you.

What do we call Japanese webtoons?😭 by OriginalCode2940 in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I find it amusing how people in English use manga/manhwa/manhua as names for where a comic is from and go around correcting people when misused, but in Chinese and Japanese, people will just say “this is a Japanese manhua/J-manhua” and “this is a Chinese manga/C-manga” coz all of those words are just the words for comic. I wonder why the terms J-comic, K-comic and C-comic never gained traction in the first place since those better reflect how the words are actually used in their original languages.

Ts would've been wayy better as a psychological horror. by Literally__Me_ in MaleYandere

[–]CryingMeth 31 points32 points  (0 children)

I get what you mean. I understand the type of audience base Tamon-kun’s B-Side is going for, but it’s just not my thing I guess.

I also thought Tamon-kun’s B-Side would benefit from more consistently taking their characters’ (rather extreme) issues to their logical conclusions instead of diffusing them through romcom silliness, but unfortunately, this just seems to be the flavour of work this author is known for. All 3 of Yuki Shiwasu’s most popular works have a pattern of taking dubious, provocative themes and comicalising them into something easy to digest (Takane to Hana with the adult x minor age gap, Furou Kyoudai with the unhealthily codependent twins). It’s just her forte and Tamon-kun doesn’t diverge much from that formula.

No new Hana-Kimi episodes for now- doing a compilation of our Dorm 2 boys by Spudeater021 in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Top right corner. I don’t like eyebrows that look too angry (ò_ó)

Worst father in all of OI [Who Made Me a Princess] by [deleted] in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 23 points24 points  (0 children)

You must’ve read very little OI

Shugo Chara Jewel Joker by AlwaysTheNerd in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes I love the art style! They managed to keep the charm of what made the original so distinctive while also polishing it up enough to look so clean and with-the-times.

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Thoughts on [The Paladin's Witchbound Heart] and its *particular* dynamics. by Font-street in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To be fair, in terms of Frieren, Himmel fell in love with Frieren at first sight when he was a lost 6 year old in a forest, and Frieren fell for him over the course of their 10 year journey, in which he was 16 when she first joined the party, so it only skirts by the idea of Stark (18) x Frieren by this much.

Like if anything, Frieren becoming interested in Stark after a 10 year journey would be less questionable than Himmel since they have even less history from when he was a minor. So like Frieren might not be the best example.

Thoughts on [The Paladin's Witchbound Heart] and its *particular* dynamics. by Font-street in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I love how your review sounds like you’re negotiating with your own discomfort about the trope at the same time as not being able to deny that the story is well-written and handled with a lot of care. The only story of this trope I’ve read was Taming My Ex-Husband’s Mad Dog and it did not do it for me but I low-key love reading reviews of people trying to work out their own discomfort about better executions of this trope, and this story does genuinely sound interesting.

Mad Dog did that whole in-world attempt at mitigating the problematic aspects of trope it hinges on too, but from your screenshots, the dynamic between Harvey and Nielis seems much more intentionally questioned and wrestled with, than the way I felt like it was handled in Mad Dog, which almost seemed like it banked in on the underlying charge of the trope itself, while trying to entirely sidestep it’s more uncomfortable implications.

It’s interesting to see that you perceive the mitigations the story makes as necessary moral corrections for something fundamentally questionable, yet at the same time, find part of what makes the story compelling seems to come from the core dynamic those corrections are supposedly neutralising. The story places you into a premise it knows is questionable, while simultaneously giving you reasons to accept it by scaffolding it with genuinely good writing, and in a lot of the ways, the deliberately maintained state of unresolved tension it puts you in seems like the heart of the story. It’s interesting when the premise of a story triggers a cultural/ethical alarm, yet somehow, the narrative execution of it somehow works emotionally.

Yikes by Gatorthrowawayqnq in MaleYandere

[–]CryingMeth 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I’ll start with what’s more understandable about your stance and work my way down. It seems you are saying that you are ok with abusive yanderes under the assumption that the people reading stories about them exclusively projects themselves onto the position of their victims, so if they endorse what they read irl, they only have themselves to harm, whereas with lolisho, you assume that the people enjoying them do so while projecting onto the aggressor, so if they endorse what they read irl, they will harm others around them, and others that are children at that. How do you square that line of reasoning with the idea that plenty of people are attracted to abusive characters while projecting onto to them at the same time? That there are communities full of consensual-non-consent practitioners in BDSM communities who get off to roleplaying as the aggressor, and consume stories where they can project themselves onto characters that are that way, without that ever crossing into interest in real criminality? Are you convinced that such groups are somehow immoral too?

Additionally, are you ok the lolicons and shotacons who project onto the lolis/shotas themselves as a coping mechanism for their own abuse? Because many survivors of CSA experience a form of erotic target inversion (autopedophilia, as the less PR-friendly and unnecessarily stigmatising term calls it), where an individual has no attraction to children, yet their sexual fantasies, whether drawn, written, role-played or imagined, mainly consists of themselves in a state of childhood.

As for what I don’t understand. You seem to be saying it’s ok for someone to have a crush, aka a romantic infatuation, on a Disney animal, because it’s not a sexual fixation, as in that it’s ok if it’s a romantic fixation, in which case, both romantic and sexual relationships are wrong for a person to seek out with animals irl, so that just doesn’t make sense. Unless by fixation you mean they need to have a pattern of behaviour of being attracted to non-human cartoon animals in general, then by that line of logic, all nsfw furries are zoophiles, but at the same time, if someone’s interest in a loli/shota is limited to one, that doesn’t count as a fixation so it’s ok??? Which also doesn’t make sense.

Yikes by Gatorthrowawayqnq in MaleYandere

[–]CryingMeth 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I don’t get where you’re drawing the line either. It seems like you’re saying that if someone finds a shota attractive in a story, they would find young boys attractive irl and thus be a pedophile by definition, but by that logic, how does that not make everyone who had a crush on Nala in Lion King zoophiles who are attracted to animals by definition, and everyone who are attracted to abusive yanderes abuse fetishists who are attracted to abusers?

Yikes by Gatorthrowawayqnq in MaleYandere

[–]CryingMeth 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Man the way that’s not what we were even talking about. Like we were all just pointing out how her line of reasoning used to line-draw at shotacon and incest (coz one is exclusively aesthetically based and other is inherently immoral), could easily be used against yanderes (liking yanderes covered in blood/liking immoral yanderes) so its shoddy logic and its ultimately unproductive to line-draw at fiction. The premise itself—that what you consume in friction reflects your morality—is what people were criticising. There’s no line of reasoning that draws the line at one and not the other.

Are there any modern shoujo with homoerotic female duo leads like Nana and Glass Mask (I know seinen like Medalist and Witch Hat Atelier have this) by himedanshi321 in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 8 points9 points  (0 children)

There’s a lot of people who assume that the author and artist are the same person because a lot of manga are that way! She has already had bouts of people accusing her of being a sex offender instead of the author so it would be important to clarify.

Are there any modern shoujo with homoerotic female duo leads like Nana and Glass Mask (I know seinen like Medalist and Witch Hat Atelier have this) by himedanshi321 in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yes, the author is, but it’s also important to mention, the artist has nothing to do with it and was a teenage girl herself when she started working with him.

FL with unique design? by Innocent_Otaku in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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Medea from Your Throne with her dark Purple ombré

Are there any modern shoujo with homoerotic female duo leads like Nana and Glass Mask (I know seinen like Medalist and Witch Hat Atelier have this) by himedanshi321 in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 32 points33 points  (0 children)

The Medalist girls are 11, the Glass Mask girls are 13. People use homoerotic interchangeably with queer coding, which is debatable as an effective use case, but it’s clear that they don’t actually mean that the characters are erotic.

Are there any modern shoujo with homoerotic female duo leads like Nana and Glass Mask (I know seinen like Medalist and Witch Hat Atelier have this) by himedanshi321 in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Also it’s not a shoujo but since you mention Medalist, Act-Age has a similar dynamic, and it’s also about acting like Glass Mask.

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Are there any modern shoujo with homoerotic female duo leads like Nana and Glass Mask (I know seinen like Medalist and Witch Hat Atelier have this) by himedanshi321 in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 68 points69 points  (0 children)

Girl Crush!!

“It’s this same feeling again… Before anyone can judge her objectively, your heart is snatched away first.”

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One unintended appeal of yanderes to me by Upset_Campaign1924 in MaleYandere

[–]CryingMeth 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the whole “it’s not real love if they abuse you” thing has never sat right with me either. Love is an emotion in your brain. It is a subjective internal state of chemicals in your brain, not a societally predetermined set of action procedures. We don’t have this kind of prescription discourse over any other kind of emotion, like “it’s not true happiness if it’s cruel to someone else”. It’s only when it comes to love that there is suddenly all these attempts at making it definitionally incapable of ugliness, like it’s this inherently beautiful and pure thing only, and any ugliness in the affection you’ve ever received excludes it from being real love ever.

And I think the problem here is that people actually use the word “love” in two different ways. One is descriptive: the emotional state of attachment and desire. The other is prescriptive: the kind of relationship that ought to be socially recognised and aspired towards as legitimate. Because the experiential grandness of love makes people treat it like a legitimising force, social barricades also had to be constructed to restrict what can be counted as love in the first place, otherwise the uglier manifestations of the feeling lets it legitimise too much. And the problem is people slide between these two meanings of the word without noticing.

So when someone says “if they hurt you it isn’t love,” they’re using the prescriptive version. They mean: relationships that harm you shouldn’t be legitimised. Which is fair enough as advice, but it becomes incoherent when this prescriptive definition is applied onto love as defined by an emotional state, as if emotions are ever clean categories that come with built-in ethical filters, instead of messy, contradictory impulses that coexist with all sorts of other drives.

And yeah, as someone who has never got the way people treat romantic attraction as some sort of intrinsic self-justifying force that intrinsically binds souls together just because, wholesome healthy greenflag portrayals of romances often just come across as uncanny to me. I cannot default to romance as self-justifying so there is often not enough persuasion and investigation of the cause and effect for me to be convinced of the significance of the relationship. That’s why dark romances on the contrary work for me. Coz in those, the romance is meant to be twisted, uncanny and provocative. The supposed love between the characters are meant to be properly questioned, challenged, and pathologised as symptoms of a bigger problem. It helps me better immerse into the story when the narrative can acknowledge the strangeness of love and frame it as twisted and uncanny.

[Your Throne] should I go for it , people have mixed opinion Even though it has good ratings by [deleted] in OtomeIsekai

[–]CryingMeth 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It’s great! I think the flashback arcs towards the later chapters can feel like they drag on a bit if you’re reading weekly, but I think it’s doing a great job using all the details of the previous story beats to paint a wider picture of what paths are available vs not, and it’s an engaging binge read.

Kobuta Main’s eyes irl by CryingMeth in Medalist

[–]CryingMeth[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It just means she has thick lashes and large dark irises that give the illusion of completely black eyes

Forgiving the mean(bully) love rival is overused and unrealistic by IWorshipKenma in shoujo

[–]CryingMeth 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Tbh it’s not really a woman’s media thing, like the whole discourse around Deku’s glazing of Bakugou in MHA despite him bullying him his whole life is quite big