Manga

I am going to only talk about two series this week. One of them I mentioned last week as well, so I will start with that one.

• Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord

Last week I recommended this series when I was only 5 chapters in. This week, I just finished volume 4 (chapter 24). My recommendation from last week holds up 100%. I have been really enjoying this series. It is such a nice, comfy, adult romance. In addition to the main pair, there is an interesting cast of side characters that I genuinely am invested in their stories as well.

One of the things I have really appreciated about this series is that, even though the main couple are in a lesbian relationship, it has literally never been a point of drama, or even commented on by any character in the series. It just feels perfectly natural and is accepted by everybody else in-universe, including older characters like parents and grandparents. I just really appreciate that the author didn't try to inject drama into an otherwise chill series in that way.

• (NSFW) Mato Seihei no Slave / Chained Soldier

This has been on my to-read ever since the first season of the anime wrapped up. I finally dove in this past week and started working through it. I just finished up the second volume and have been enjoying it so far. Even just reading this far, I definitely sympathize with the complaints that @[email protected] and others had in the discussion threads for the anime. The artwork is really good, and that was not really translated to the animation at all.

Story-wise, the adaptation was pretty faithful so far. I have just gotten to the tournament arc in the story where the cast of characters begins to expand quite a bit though, so I am expecting that there might be more exposition that was cut for time in the anime through this section.

Completed

Instant Regret - extremely short, at just a few chapters long (and just a few pages per chapter); well-received by this community too; highly recommend you to binge this if you haven't already done so

Picked-up

Monster Mira's Second Form Is Way Too Cute

Pretty much most readers' reaction:

Meta:

Looks like Photon has started recognizing words in square brackets as tags, so I'm now inclined to use them.

My only complaint is with the way some tags are spelt.

Presumably, DISC is short for discussion. If this is the case, can we just use the full spelling? The Week 38 tag takes up 8 characters, which is not far off discussion's 10 characters.

Arguments supporting my complaint: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/72593

I caught up with both Nan Hao & Shang Feng and The Saga of Tanya the Evil.

There's not much to write about the former, it's fun and I'm waiting for more. As for the latter, I have some more thoughts about the series. I like Tanya over all - it's not perfect but the issues I have aren't serious enough to affect my enjoyment in any significant way. They still exist though.

Writing wise it's pretty good. The fact story is happening in a discount version of the real world started to bother me a bit but more in a "this feels a bit lazy" kind of way (even if it makes sense). The more serious problem is the amount of plot armor encasing the main cast - there were multiple instance of important characters surviving attacks that pretty much pulverize anyone else. Things like that are fine in small doses but there's a too much of it here.

I also really like the historical chapters - parts set 40 years after the war, shown from a perspective of journalists trying to figure out the less known parts of the war, specifically things related to our main character and her exploits. Seeing them stumble over military secrets, people unwilling to talk in detail and dealing with the fog of history is super interesting.

Art is great! There are some fantastic spreads of chaos and destruction and a great back and forth between the normal art and "animal cartoon" segments. This makes it all the more jarring whenever backgrounds (or even whole panels) consist of photos with some filters thrown on top of them - these parts throw any art cohesion out of the window and just look bad compared to everything else. I understand why, I'm just not a fan of how they're used.

All in all, despite some minor issues I look forward to the rest of the story. It's a fun if uneven ride and I think I prefer the anime version a little more (Aoi Yuki helps a lot in that regard).

Sorry for the wall of text, I needed to dump this stuff out of my head to function properly.

Notable out of all I have read, I would say:

• Seijo ja nakatta no de, Oukyuu de nonbiri Gohan wo Tsukuru koto ni shimashita

• Isekai de Café wo Kaiten Shimashita

Nothing fancy, really. The premise is almost the same: girl isekai'd and showing off her cooking skills. The first one is way more comedy than the second, but I probably appreciate it a little less since the second one is more serious.

Regardless, some of the panels are pure comedy gold: