Porn or sexual content is definitely not what I am looking for. 
The webcomic came after. Hazbin hotel has been licensed and is currently under production, so no further videos on youtube. On the other hand, Helluva boss is set in the same universe but not licensed, so publication is going on.
Yes, i know, i was just trying to say that hopefully over the top adult ln exit since ln covers a wide range…
What am I even saying…
Right. That being said, I haven’t seen anything like the situation I mentioned earlier in LN form. Also, it doesn’t really fit in any of the categories that exist in there. Stolace x Blitzo would be yaoi (I guess?) but Loona x what’shisname is (straight) romcom.
Edit: also Charlie x Vaggie would be yuri.
And Alastor is supposed to be asexual.
I guess I just want something that covers a lot of the spectrum.
In case anyone’s interested, following Sayaka Murata’s books are 50% points back for Kindle:
I indeed finished 伯爵と妖精 5. I very much enjoyed it, but certain characters need some sense, boundaries, and ethics drilled into their beautiful heads.
1 あいつは優雅な大悪党: mythical sword and merpeople
2 あまい罠には気をつけて: fog man and kidnappings
3 プロポーズはお手やわらかに: proposals, kelpie, moonstone
4 恋人は幽霊: spirits/possession, medium, selkies
5 呪いのダイヤに愛をこめて: diamonds and goblins
6 取り換えられたプリンセス: ??
same for Hiroshi Mori, is there a good way of looking for those?
These quotes are about Bookwalker, but I feel the same about Amazon promos. Sometimes there is some ad leading to the promo page, and there is also Deals category:
But quite often I have no idea why the deal is happening ._.
With the price drops, you can add books to wishlist and you can see the changes in their price (you get a small text that book X got 20% cheaper since you added it to your list).
With the points, I often discover it very randomly.
It’s been three months into the year already, but I’ll come back to set some goals/track my progress once I receive the books I ordered : )
Well, based on that, I just finished reading 裏世界ピクニック 1 and it was pretty fun!
I loved the mix of internet horror lore and the 風の古道 vibe. The way the main character deals with some of the situations also made me think of SCP… but that’s also part of the Internet lore, I guess 
I was also impressed that the author cites posts from 2 chan in the references section.
I’m probably going to keep reading this series as well… so many books to read, so little time.
There’s a new book club in town!
A bunch of us were really enjoying the コンビニ人間 Repeat Book Club and we wanted to read more by Sayaka Murata, so we had a poll and settled on 殺人出産, which I am sure will be a gripping read! 
The pace is on the relaxed side of ‘Intermediate’ and the ebook is currently 50% points back on Amazon. What’s not to like?
today’s deal is for sales, it doesn’t include point campaigns orz
I finished reading 放浪息子 !
It’s hard to separate this series from the context in which I first encountered it – my sister pulled it off of her shelf and recommended it to me the summer she came out as trans, the summer I was staying with her and interning at the company she would be fired from by the time I left. It was a chaotic summer. Wandering Son’s role in it was, albeit in nice Fantagraphics hardcover format, more or less a blip – a “I hope these cute trans kids get to be happy” and an “oh cool, there’s manga about that!” before getting lost in the static because we didn’t really have the bandwidth to keep up with a long meandering coming of age story, that requires you to slow down and really keep track of all the characters, even if all the volumes had made it over here.
Now, years later, everything about that context is completely different for me. My day-to-day is luckily chaos-free. My own gender situation, while not actually any more nailed down than it was then, is a lot less fraught because I live alone and can basically do whatever I want. I’ve fallen regrettably out of touch with my sister. And most unexpectedly, I can read Japanese.
I’m lapsing into wistful self-reflection because the series ends with wistful self-reflection, but my takeaway from those two experiences with the series is that it’s an awfully good, realistically messy and methodical story about individual kids growing up and exploring gender along the way. Which is a great thing! It was really fun to get to know these characters, and spending a lot of time with them felt like, say, reading a long-running newspaper strip over the years and seeing how the characters age and eventually saying goodbye. Always a meaningful and emotional experience, and Shimura’s great at drawing out that wistfulness and that rhythm and little moments of life pretty much constantly throughout.
But coming at it in terms of that hunger for representation and looking to this cute manga as a potential comforting balm in the midst of gender confusion in real life… I think there’s something vaguely frustrating about it. Like I guess it’s that there aren’t a lot of moments of out-and-out joy or catharsis? It’s pretty much emotionally fraught situation after emotionally fraught situation and all of them have a mixture of pleasure and awkwardness and shame in them and like……… That is true to adolescence and gender in my experience!!! BUT maybe too true, since it can get kind of exhausting. It’s easy to get wrapped up in these characters and want the best for them (and even better if “the best for them” happens to mean the specific gender solution you’ve settled on yourself, right?), and so I found it consequently easy to get kind of worn out by none of them ever having any easy wins. I’m very glad for the very very last moment that I think is the closest to that “home run, hell yeah, we figured out gender!” moment the series makes me so hungry for throughout, if only because the book ends there before life can get awkward again. There’s enough small victories that it’s not miserable by any means, but still…
A good, less directly gendery example of what I mean is the relationship between the Nitori siblings. Their constant bickering while also worrying about each other is super evocative and realistic to me of a real sibling relationship, so I can’t really fault it! … But I sure wouldn’t have minded a big sappy moment or two in there where their love for each other shines through. There’s kind of some in there, but the ratio of that to “Maho comes into the shared room at an awkward time and yells at Shuu” is waaaaaaaay lop-sided towards the latter.
I think honestly the biggest thing that keeps it from working in that way is that no community ever really develops. You’ve got all these questioning kids and a handful of role models, but anytime a group of even 2 or 3 starts to develop some fraught adolescence business breaks it up or puts it on hold, so you never really get to see the equivalent of like, the house in しまなみ誰そ彼 or the cafe in 不可解なぼくのすべてを, so there’s never quite a sense of enough of a supportive bulwark to feel at ease. You’re sort of left the impression that life and gender are a giant mess to navigate, but luckily you might meet people who understand you enough to help, it’s just that navigating your relationships with them will itself be a total mess…
Which, I mean, is true!!
And so that’s my personal take – I think the series is great, but great specifically if you want this kind of coming of age story that realistically mirrors the pace and complexities and individualities of life. I think as a story specifically about transness or general gender questioning, especially a load-bearing one (i.e. if you don’t know about other options and are questioning yourself), I think it’s still good but maybe more flawed than from the other perspective.
Other thoughts:
I remember seeing once a comment from somebody expressing surprise that Americans watch so much school anime, because they can’t possibly understand the connotations of the many touchstones that inform those stories since the school systems are so different. I see where that comment was coming from (and hey, this series is a good way to get familiar with a ton of those touchstones as it goes along), but honestly, at the end of the day… I can relate to anxieties around doing a mandatory group performance in school, even if when I did it it wasn’t for a culture festival, you know? The many all-too familiar ways growing up is confusing and miserable makes up for the unfamiliar specifics, I think! The one area that I really did find jarring compared to my own experience, is just the kids walking everywhere. When I was in school I always lived either in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of suburban sprawl and uncrossable highways, or an hour and a half away from school. If you were going to fictionalize my school life in this style you’d have to set at least a third of the scenes on a bus. I got pretty jealous of how lackadaisically the characters just… walk over to friends’ houses, easy as that.
Last note isn’t directly about the series, but about my backlog system – it involves groups of 5 (that I randomize the order of and treat like individual queues I pick from), and this actually finishes off one of those groups, centered around LGBT manga. Since anyone reading this is presumably interested in the subject, I’ll talk briefly about the whole. The group was: 弟の夫, 女どうしで子どもを産むことにしました, ストップ!! ひばりくん!, 不可解なぼくのすべてを, and of course 放浪息子.
I’d recommend any of these!
弟の夫 is the sweetest of the bunch, and a very pleasant read, 女どうしで子どもを産むことにしました is an non-fiction essay about a lesbian couple navigating the process of having a child, which is interesting and provides some good vocabulary but is otherwise dry compared to the rest of these, 不可解なぼくのすべてをpresumably you know from the book club… and then honestly? I think ストップ!! ひばりくん! was maybe my favorite of the bunch. It’s the most, um, 80s, with some very heavily dated sensibilities, but it’s basically a comic about trans girl who’s great at everything and even though everyone else in the comic is from the 1980s and comically disapproves there’s nothing anyone can do about it because, again, she’s great at everything she does so she does her thing through sheer force of will, in the midst of a Akira Toriyamaish madcap comedy. It’s kind of the opposite effect of what I was talking about with 放浪息子 in a way – instead of realistic and well-meaning, it’s nonsensical and crass but somehow ends up feeling kind of affirming anyway.
The next manga thing I drew is １４歳 by 楳図かずお and hoo boy I’m looking forward to it.
I have absolutely no idea what it’s about except that it involves a chicken man (??), I just saw it mentioned once and it looked absolutely buck wild and weird, and I already like Umezz so I knew I had to get it immediately. It could be great, it could be completely awful, I’m just ready for the rollercoaster!
That said - I was reading Drifting Classroom in English and didn’t quite finish, so I might decide to read the remaining volumes in Japanese first just to make sure I don’t have any Umezz loose ends. If I do that, I guess I’ll be sticking with school-age kids navigating awkward social situations and society’s troubles… just in a slightly different kind of way!
Some thoughts on 放浪息子:
I really love this series, but I did feel like the ending was a bit rushed. I remember the second to last chapter (I think it was second the last) being really sad and emotional, and then the final chapter was positive and uplifting. And while I was happy with the ending for Shuu and Anna in particular, I felt like a lot of the story was incomplete. Almost like it needed another 2-3 volumes, but the mangaka was tired of writing the series. She ended her other long running manga (青い花) around the same time, so I actually wonder if she was going through something at the time.
Oh, and I also definitely wanted more out of the relationship between Shuu and Maho. Maho showed occasional signs of wanting to be a good big sister, but I feel like it never actually happened. Which is just another example of why I felt the last few volumes were lacking overall.
But even though I felt the last few volumes were rushed (and occasionally hard to follow if I’m being honest), I did really like the ending. Shuu and Anna are one of my favorite couples in all of manga and anime, so it was really great to see Anna come around and that things worked out for them. I just wish there was a “flash forward” chapter showing their lives when they were older!
放浪息子 ending discussion:
I agree, the last bit with Anna and the final stinger making good on the title at last with ぼくは おんあのこ I think are really exceptional moments!
But you’re right those are lopsided in favor of Shuu… I was talking with my friend who’s transmasc last night and they were very disappointed with the ending because Takatsuki never gets anything like that and ends up not being trans after all, without any other transmasc characters to make up for it.
I think the isolated character arcs are all generally individually fine, it’s just a series that’s 15 volumes of relentless gender anxiety feels like it needs a way bigger payoff for everyone, since everyone’s gonna be the most identifiable character for someone. And it’s too bad especially that of the two set up as twin protagonists, Shuu definitely ends up more in the spotlight.
I still enjoyed it a lot, to be clear! And I’m definitely game to read Shimura’s other work! I saw she did a short wrestling manga which I’m very curious about, but all her work’s definitely on my list! (and I’m sure they’ll end up on my book walker shelf shortly…)
Thanks for the heads up about this!
I tried to buy マウス but got the following message:
please contact us or change your country to complete your purchase.
It’s strange, I’ve never had this issue before and checked back in my account settings and it’s definitely set to Japan.
Anyone had the same issue before?
Ooops! I used my VPN to change my location to Japan and it worked fine! Should have tried that before posting, sorry. But in case anyone has the same issue, a VPN should do the trick.
I will always love 放浪息子, I think almost everything about it is amazingly well done and I read most if it in a period of my life where it was really cathartic, but I’ve found (when @seanblue started up the thread for it a couple years ago) that my current turbulent relationship with my own gender makes it unreadable for me now. It just cuts too deep.
There may be a day when that’s not the case anymore. I hope so!
I don’t think that’s irrelevant! It goes along with my main impression - that the series is very good, but doesn’t do a lot to mitigate how stressful so many of the situations are going to be for the people who most identify with the content.
I was glad my context changed to be less on edge about it so I could get closure on the series. I hope you get to have the same at some point!
I perceive a theme
Only for 60% of them!
