(no subject)

[esmenet]

Has anyone else read The Sleepy Residents of Birdcage Manor? Because I am kind of loving it a lot right now. :D It's about a girl who becomes an artist's model, and she brings up lots and lots of issues for all the characters (including herself) that they haven't dealt with, or are starting to deal with, and the romance aspect is pretty interesting as well. I ship Kizuna/Yuki SO HARD, even though there's really no chance it'll be the endgame pairing. (I was going to say "I hate the First Guy Wins trope," but then I realized that Yuki is the one who goes to her with the job offer. First straight cis guy wins?) They can go clothes-shopping and have crazy playdates forEVER as far as I'm concerned. And Yuki = quite genderqueer, y/y?

The art is super pretty, too. It's by the artist who did Seven Days (which I haven't read).

I have Thoughts on the latest chapter,

I am not very D: about Yuki being creepy, because he is no shorter of Issues than anyone else. Very, very D: at the car accident, though. Not scared for Kizuna, because she's our main, but I will not stand for the death of our only queer character.

(Small nitpick: it's stated that Yuki isn't wearing his seatbelt, and we do see the hole in the windshield in front of his seat. But in one panel he is shown to be wearing it. Oops.)

Hopefully v. 3 will come out soon, and this will be laid to rest one way or the other.

Comments

[littlebutfierce]

I started reading it a while ago & dropped it, although your excitement makes me think I should pick it up again!

[esmenet]

Any particular reason? *curious*

I would recommend reading more of it just for the shopping-and-aquarium-and-splashing-in-the-sea date between Kizuna and Yuki. ADORABLENESS AHOY.

But apart from that, I enjoy this manga because it's got a kind of art that I particularly like, paired with two character-types I really like (Kizuna and Yuki—sorry, artist-dude, you're pretty okay but your Dead Girlfriend manpain is just not doing it for me), and a Dealing With Personal Issues story. Those are not things I often get together, so it's pretty happy-making for me. If you don't get much enjoyment from characters Dealing With Personal Issues, I don't know if you'll enjoy the rest of it.

[littlebutfierce]

I think it was cute, but I feared it getting faily & also it was just slightly not enticing enough to make me keep the tab open. Possibly I started reading lots of other manga at the same time? I did Delicious it, so I thought I might go back to it at some point.

If you don't get much enjoyment from characters Dealing With Personal Issues,

So I saw this & I was like, "WHAT ELSE IS NATSUME YUUJINCHOU BUT THIS KIND OF STORY" but perhaps you mean something slightly different???

[esmenet]

It manages not to get too faily, I think. There's a bit of acefail of the "not staring at model's boobs = not having a pulse" variety, but nothing too bad. (A phrase which, depending on the upcoming chapters, I may retract so fast you'll wonder if I ever actually said it. Please be okay, only queer character!)

I was actually thinking of Natsume Yuujinchou as I typed that! But SRoBM is a rather different kind of Dealing With Personal Issues story, less on the 'opening up to people' angle and a whole lot more of the 'characters doing quite problematic things due to Issues they're only just now really realizing they need to deal with' one. I'd compare it to After School Nightmare, actually, so if you like that one at all this manga is probably a great big YES DO WANT.

[littlebutfierce]

Ha, I'm actually nearly done w/After School Nightmare--I'm reading it for a WisCon panel I'm on. There's a lot I find interesting about it, but equally I'm not comfortable w/a lot of what it says about intersex individuals & also holy crap, gender essentialism. :/

[esmenet]

. . . yyyyeah, I was kind of afraid it would keep going in that direction. Thank goodness I never went back to it!

[pseudo_tsuga]

I do read it, but I haven't checked on it in a while. To manga sites!