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I ended up being way too tired yesterday to post, and I’m still tired today, ugh. Anyway:
I read やんだと! a series of よつばと! DJs by Hideyoshico. Sensei’s art style is so nice for よつばと! It suits it so well. The story has the same soft, almost somewhat detached feel as their other work I’ve read, イケメン君とさえない君. I really enjoy it. My favorite parts may well be when Yotsuba and Yanda actually get along for once, shortly before they’re back to their usual mode of getting along lol. Also, their dreams are so great.
I also found it on Bookmeter, though I didn’t see the reprinted 上/下 version that I have, only the original individual 1-7. So it kinda looks like I’ve read more books than I have, but it’s still the same content, so. Looking at the covers though, I wish I coulda gotten the individual volumes, but it woulda been so much more expensive…
Some good panels and a sort-of summary:
Very first panel, and what a good Yotsuba face
Look at her little arms, she’s so babie!
(Yanda pinched her cheeks and then poked her nose, and she does not wake up from that, but she does know it’s him and mumbles, やんだめ… it’s so cute. She dreams about Yanda being a like a demon king and kidnapping her dad, and she’s a Hero whose sword is a very tall soft serve ice cream. She saves tou-chan by eating her sword and not letting Yanda have any even when he begs for a bite lmao. Yanda ends up laying down next to her and falling asleep, and Yotsuba half wakes up, assumes it’s her tou-chan, and crawls onto him and falls back asleep, and Yanda dreams that that weight on him is Yoh-san sitting on him while he does his work. When Yotsuba wakes up later and realizes she was sleeping on top of Yanda, she freaks out and ends up kicking him in the face lmao)
I know it’s due to the length of the original DJs that the reprinting got divided up as it did: 1-4 becomes 上 and 5-7 下. The first 4 are overall shorter than the last 3, so with these groupings you end up with two volumes that are roughly the same length, though 下’s still about 1.5x longer lol. And then there’s the そのあとで, which is a separate volume.
But it also means that 上 ends in the perfect place. Part 4 is the one where Yanda’s wondering what he should do about these feelings, and he ends up following Yoh-san around on his errands after happening upon him, even buying a tub of ice cream which just ends up melting when Yoh-san buys himself a popsicle, even following him up the long flight of stairs to that shrine, at which point he starts regretting his life choices lmao it’s way too hot for this. I don’t know how long Yoh-san’s known Yanda’s been following him, but toward the top of the stairs he turns around to face him, and after he asks Yanda what he’s doing and stuff, Yanda vaguely thinks again about what he should do about these feelings, and then:
Man.
In part 3, Yanda had gotten drunk at a work function and Jumbo somehow ended up picking him up and bringing him to Yoh-san’s place. Yanda’s pretty much just passed out, but he does half wake up at some point and drape himself over Yoh-san before passing out again, and Yoh-san and Jumbo are like, “Huh? He mistaking you for someone? He mistaking you for his girlfriend? I never heard anything about him having a girlfriend.” Yanda mumbles, “Koiwai-san,” quietly enough that only Yoh-san hears him, and that’s probably when he starts to suspect, or at least that’s what we think, because… It’s later revealed that after Jumbo left, while Yoh-san was trying to transport Yanda upstairs to sleep there so Yotsuba won’t see him when she wakes up and be loud first thing in the morning, Yanda kissed him, and Yoh-san was like, “Huh? It’s me?” But since he’s weak to alcohol, Yanda remembers absolutely none of this.
Yanda’s definitely aware of his feelings throughout this whole series, he’s liked Yoh-san since they met in college and it’s implied that he’s probably gay, it’s more that he can’t quite admit them to himself yet. Even Yotsuba figures out that he likes her tou-chan, and when she says as much in part 7, Yanda freaks out and runs out, and Yoh-san goes after him, and that’s when Yanda finally admits it.
So there was a part where Yanda came over but Yoh-san was asleep so Yotsuba tried to get him to go home so he wouldn’t be loud and wake her tou-chan up. He refuses to leave, so Yotsuba sticks next to him and keeps her eye on him instead. He manages to shake her when he goes to the restroom, and since she’s not there when he gets out, he goes and checks on Yoh-san, and he kneels next to him and starts to lean down to kiss him, and that’s when Yotsuba appears in the doorway. Yanda holds his finger to his lips and then holds his hands up to show he wasn’t doing anything, and Yotsuba pulls her water gun on him. They end up making a commotion out in the hallway (and, yes, Yanda gets squirted with the gun) and waking Yoh-san up and getting scolded by him. Anyway, Yotsuba knows what a kiss is, it’s a thing that a man and a woman do together, so she knows Yanda had been about to do something bad. Later there’s a little scene where Jumbo’s babysitting her and they’re watching TV. When the couple on screen start making out, she asks Jumbo what they’re doing, and he answers, 魂を吸っている. So it woulda been hilarious if Yotsuba’d seen Yanda and Yoh-san kissing and flew at Yanda to get him to stop stealing her tou-chan’s soul. I don’t think there’s anything else in the series aside from the そのあとで, so I guess I’ll have to write it myself.
I then read the other two of Hideyoshico’s よつばと! DJs that I have, やんだとそのあとで and S&S’s.
Some vocab of note:
居留守を使う (いるすをつかう) [expression, ア五] to pretend to be out