Chapters in this manga actually end a couple of pages before where you might expect from casually flipping through, so to help people avoid overshooting, here’s the final panel of this week’s reading:
So, Twin Spica isn’t as heavily based in a real location as Bocchi was, but that’s not to say that there’s nothing. Mostly because manga writers sometimes like to crib their backgrounds from real photos.
Asumi’s hometown of Yuigahama is… partially fictional, but the station she’s shown leaving on page 6 is Gokurakuji Station on the Enoden line. There is a Yuigahama Station a few stations down the same line, but it’s written with different kanji - 由比ヶ浜 rather than 唯ヶ浜.
But oof, that full-armed slap that father dear delivers to his daughter on page 21. Perhaps a minor spoiler, but this ain’t the last time in this series that we’ll see a girl getting slapped across the face by their father - it’s not even the last time we’ll see it happen to Asumi - and the fact that noone even comments on it in-universe rather suggests a lot about Yaginuma-sensei’s upbringing…
Enjoyed chapter one. I did find the quality of the scans a minor issue when reading some of the more complicated kanji, but not insurmountable. The vocab spreadsheet was excellent and saved me a some look ups making the reading more enjoyable. I’m not sure how it was created but was grateful to whoever did the work on this.
As ever in manga, the words that tripped me up the most turned out to be character names, especially in the last panel of page 15!
I could do with one of those back massages but unfortunately don’t have an Asumi sized person in my household…
Thoughts on chapter one - 2024 must have felt very futuristic when this was written in 2001, it’s already last year! I like the lion character, I don’t think we know yet if he is an imaginary friend, a ghost or something else. He has a cool look with those trousers and lion head. I wondered if the boy she met when catching the buses was the same child who corrected her that the person who flies a spaceship is a pilot not a driver earlier in the story. The dad was mean, but we also felt sorry for him - it feels like he’s changed a lot from his younger self, perhaps related to his wife’s death.
I used a script to OCR all the text, then it was essentially manual after that.
Ah, I forgot I was going to make a list of characters in the OP, since I decided to omit character names from the vocab sheet. Or maybe I should do a separate tab on the vocab sheet…
Yeah…somehow this normalization of domestic violence was what stuck out most to me about Asumi’s dad. It’s a shame because I have a feeling he’s supposed to be a more nuanced and mostly likeable character, someone who’s fallen on hard times, lost his wife and his job and become abrasive, because his mental health has taken a hit, but he still loves his daughter.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Mr. Lion given that the first thing we see him do is grope a middle school girl and then he hangs out with her while wearing a weird costume, but the realization that he’s a ghost somehow makes him less weird and more interesting.
I had no idea what to expect from this manga but I’m pleasantly surprised so far. I like that it’s moving fast too, I could imagine other authors spending several chapters in backstory building before getting to the interesting part.
Yeah it was important to notice that 獅子 means ライオン
ライオンさん
I don’t think he’s a ghost, he seems more to be an imaginary friend that she developed as a coping mechanism. It feels more like a Calvin and Hobbes situation to me.
She was 1 when the accident happened, I can imagine a young child hearing all this talk about lions while growing up and interpreting is literally. Like how I was shocked to discover that there’s no pink panther in The Pink Panther.
Funnily enough, this one did too, kinda. The series was preceded by a number of one-shot chapters, all set in 2015 - those are the chapters with names rather than numbers that appear at the end of this volume and the next two.
Haha I guess it’s pretty important to know that this manga was first published in 2001. For a bit I was confused, since it seems to be set in 2024 and was relating events from 2010, I thought it was strange I had never heard of that incident!
Noticed that too, that was a fun detail haha
Liking it so far! except the slap from the dad but hey… 2001 I guess…
So the short version is I enjoyed it, but I definitely felt triggered by sections.
Thoughts on Chapter
While reading the middle third I kept telling myself that this dad is just having some mental health difficulties, he’s not intentionally being a bad parent. I was already feeling uncomfortable with how parentified Asumi seemed, and the teacher guilt-tripping her that her dad will be all alone if she lives life how she wants to.
Then I come back to read the rest this morning, and turn the page to see that slap? Not happy.
If anyone had acknowledged this as being bad, it would feel better to me. But with Lion-san telling her it was her own fault for not being honest? Heck no. Then the dad is like “here’s all my savings, also I’ll sell all my stuff and my house if you want me to” and that feels so manipulative. I’m supposed to think it’s genuine? This is going to be the one part of the series that I just won’t be able to deal with. I hope it doesn’t ruin the parts I’m enjoying.
On Lion-san, before noticing the blurb my assumption was also that he’s an imaginary friend. Though, the one scene after the slap, where he’s off doing his own thing and sees Asumi reading, it does feel like he’s his own person there.
Pink Panther
???
I had to google to double check but like this guy definitely exists.
The first film in the series derives its title from a pink diamond that has enormous size and value. The diamond is called the “Pink Panther” because the flaw at its center, when viewed closely, is said to resemble a leaping pink panther.
[…]
The first film in the series had an animated opening sequence, created by DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, featuring “The Pink Panther Theme” by Mancini, as well as the Pink Panther character. Designed by Hawley Pratt and Friz Freleng, the animated Pink Panther character was subsequently featured in a series of theatrical cartoons, starting with The Pink Phink in 1964.
The Pink Panther character was just a gimmick in the opening credits and doesn’t feature at all in the movie where the “Pink Panther” is the name given to a diamond.
