Asexuality in Manga 3: I Married My Best Friend to Shut my Parents Up, Dom & Mor, and More!

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple and this is one of the rare fleeting episodes where I do not know what we’re talking about today. This is a Royce led episode. So Royce, what are we talking about today?

Royce: Well this episode is going to be a bit of a smattering of ace rep in manga and web comics of other varieties.

Courtney: Love a good smattering.

Royce: It has been a while since we’ve done one of these. I guess, if you remove the one that was basically just One Piece, it hasn’t been since late 2023.

Courtney: Oh, it has been a while.

Royce: We did two pretty close together in late 2023, and then I gathered up some recommendations from people, from lists that we found online, from commenters, and dug into some series a little bit. And then stopped.

Courtney: Yeah, I mean, we have no shortage of pieces of media of varying types on our, like, to-consume-list. It’s ever expanding, but I feel like you especially just go through kicks where you’re like, “Okay, I’m on a manga kick right now. I’m gonna read a whole bunch in a short period of time.”

Royce: It usually depends on if we have some downtime where we’re doing something together, but maybe with a TV show on, that’s just kind of on in the background, and I need something to do. Or anytime I get sick. Oftentimes, if I’m sick for a day or two, there isn’t a whole lot that I can actually comfortably do. So sometimes finding something to read is the temporary answer.

Courtney: Could you imagine how much manga you’d get through if you were sick as often as I am? So we had another one of those fun situations where I got sick first, was sick for a while, you got sick for a tiny bit of time, and then I was still sick well after you got better. That is, that’s the pattern.

Royce: Yeah, I had a cold on Christmas day and that was it.

Courtney: Merry Christmas. Read some manga.

Royce: But rather recently, I don’t even remember how, like, either I was going through some bookmarks or I– someone mentioned something in a comment section. But I did start reading a new series or two and while going through it, just saw the big list of other things that I hadn’t talked about and felt like, well, it’s probably time for an episode. So I brushed over the old series, made some notes. The difference between this episode and some other ones is that a lot of these are either ongoing or I didn’t read the entire thing or a combination of the two. So it’s going to be a lot more introductions, first impressions, that sort of thing.

Courtney: Well, all right, then lay it on me.

Royce: For anyone who would want to read these themselves before getting spoiled in some capacity, the titles I want to discuss are: And Another Lovely Day, Aromantic (Love) Story – that is aromantic, not a romantic love story – Clinic of Horrors, Dom & Mor, I Married My Best Friend To Shut My Parents Up, which I picked up just for the title.

Courtney: I can’t wait for that one.

Royce: There is an update to I Want to Be a Wall. That is a manga we talked about in episode 111 back in November of 2023. That’s the conclusion of that story. It is a– it is three volumes long. We had talked about it after the end of the second volume before the third one had been translated to English. There’s also My Astilbe and She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat. Which is one that I have heard mentioned a lot. We might not actually get through all of these. It might be a two-parter. We’re going to see how this goes.

Courtney: Yeah, I was going to say, if it was me leading these episodes, each of those would be its own episode.

Royce: That’s not going to happen. I don’t have that many notes or that many things to say on many of these. But I did at least want to introduce them, give some first impressions, that sort of thing. But I guess a good place to start is the one that we have already talked about. In the past episodes I Want to Be a Wall was probably my favorite ace rep manga that I’ve read. I thought it was, like, fairly dense, fairly eventful, it was funny. And I mean dense in that I feel like some of these pieces of media, where it’s manga or a TV show or something else like that, that has ace rep in it are often kind of fluffy and maybe a little boring for my tastes. This one felt like there was a lot going on, I thought it was written well.

Royce: After some time, the third volume– The series is in total 16 chapters long with maybe a couple of, like, bonus half chapters in there, here and there. The chapters themselves are long, but the series itself is not that bad to pull off. Just to sort of recap a little bit, there are three main characters here: Yuriko, Gaku, and Sousuke. The main two characters: Yuriko is aroace, really into BL manga. I believe there was a quote at the beginning of the whole series that she’s like, “My only interest in romance is 2D.”

Courtney: Yeah, I know that’s very relatable to many in our audience.

Royce: Yeah, I pulled up the transcript from the last episode. I believe you mentioned that she sounded very like Aego. I don’t believe that that came out. But under pressure from her family and Gaku’s family, the two of them decide to get married. Gaku is a closeted gay man who has been in love with a childhood friend of his, Sousuke, for a long time, but has not come out and feels that he is at the point where it is too late, where he’s old enough that this is just going to be his life; he loves this one person, and feels that it is always going to be unrequited, and has just basically settled with that idea.

Royce: This is somewhat complicated because Gaku comes from a wealthy enough family that they have like an old traditional style Japanese house, like a very large one, and Sousuke as an adult is like the hired handyman, so they bump into each other a lot. Sousuke himself is presumably straight, conventionally attractive, tends to have a lot of women around him. And volume two ended with a woman coming up to Yuriko asking about Sousuke, saying that– implying that Yuriko was cheating on– Sousuke was cheating on her with Yuriko. And that is where the last volume ended. This one opens up with Yuriko thinking, “Oh, god of BL, please save me.”

Courtney: [laughs] Does the god save her?

Royce: Well, it becomes apparent very quickly that this woman is a stalker of some kind. She shows photos of Sousuke talking to a woman that is not Yuriko. She’s just been following people around and seeing, you know, who he’s been around. Sousuke arrives and defuses the situation, gets her to leave, and then says that apparently this happens to him a lot. He’s been chased down with marriage licenses and sent long romance novels with him written as the main character.

Courtney: Yeah, I’ve been there.

Royce: By different people throughout his life.

Courtney: I’ve been there!

Royce: We do get a little bit more information about him. He says that for a long time now, he has been afraid of being alone. He’s been in a lot of relationships, but they don’t pan out. He says that he always likes the women that he’s with, but feels that he can’t return the same feelings that they have for him. And that’s when the relationship inevitably falls out. He sort of extrapolates on that, saying that one of his bigger fears, or one of the things that makes him uncomfortable, is that the idea of being pitied for being alone, like, makes him feel really uncomfortable. And that’s how he finds himself in a lot of relationships. And he tells Yuriko that what he really wants at the end of the day is just peace of mind from caring about someone and having them reciprocate those feelings.

Royce: Yuriko asks him if that is something that could be achieved outside of dating or marriage through, like, family or friends or something outside of a conventional relationship. She says that some people find that sense of belonging or purpose in life through places, objects, work, or hobbies instead of people. And then she lets it slip that there’s someone who has cared about him for Sousuke’s entire life and is already by their side. And Gaku comes home and overhears this. Isn’t happy about it. They get into a little fight after Sousuke leaves. I bring that up because it shows the third person in this story, the other major character, is also not heteronormative in some way. His orientation still has a bit of discovery to go, but it shows relationships through yet another lens.

Courtney: And even if he is straight and just maybe struggles in some way with traditional notions of relationships, I think that’s still a really good way to show that there is a wide expansive variety of people who can still learn a lot from asexual and aromantic life experiences and feelings and theories. And understanding the concepts that we talk about within our community so often really can help everybody, or at least provide more choices and more options.

Royce: Well, after that conversation, as the two protagonists are fighting and then trying to sort of awkwardly resolve that, they begin their married life’s first greatest crisis: visit from the grandmother. There was one character from– that I mentioned the first time we talked about this who is not present, is not in the same area right now, but video calls them regularly for advice. He ends up acting as sort of a relationship coach/judge arbiter. This was the person who first sort of explained asexuality to Yuriko. He’s a– he’s either gay or bi, I can’t remember, in a relationship with another man, but served as the sort of queer elder even though they’re roughly the same age, the more knowledgeable person to kind of break the protagonist into all of that. But is able to sort of settle things out right before a visit from Gaku’s grandmother. And the first big bump is when they are visiting them, they go to visit his family graves, and his grandmother talks about suddenly having peace of mind that the two of them are married and that she’s not ready to go quite yet. She’s going to keep fighting until she can see her great-grandchildren.

Courtney: Ah, she’s gonna live forever.

Royce: [chuckles] They do break away from that, have some conversations between the two of them, and go back to tell her the situation that children are not on the table. It’s a rough conversation, and it doesn’t completely get resolved, but there’s this thing that I think is relatable where they keep visiting, they keep talking to each other, but there’s just this hint of tension in the air, and they just don’t talk about it after that.

Courtney: It would be really morbidly funny if they told her we’re not ever having kids and she just died on the spot. [laughs]

Royce: Well, no reason– No reason to keep going! Next up, after this is Yuriko’s parents, who are also excited about children. Goku’s grandmother actually called them to talk about children before all of this happened. So now her mom is, like, really excited about the prospect. So she gets home and they immediately start talking about wedding plans and dresses, for a second one, because the first wedding was just, like, quick ceremony. You know, took a picture, signed a certificate sort of thing. So her mom, her parents want them to do the whole thing in a big elaborate fashion, which neither of them are into. And she does make a couple of comments that I have heard friends of ours mention that, you know, the moment you get home, it’s strangely suffocating. Like, you kind of revert back to your past self.

Royce: She has a bit of that just being at home with her parents again after a long time. And the family conflict goes about the same way there. They do tell her parents that they’re not going to have children. But Yuriko’s parents do one of these things where they– they’re not happy about it and they kind of drop it, but they’re still hoping that maybe they’ll change their mind in the future, that kind of thing. But after they leave, Yuriko and Gaku have a bit of a conversation about society in general and expectations and how different their lives could have been if they grew up in a more progressive time or place than the one that they grew up in. A part of that is just where they’re at in Japan at this point in time, where gay marriage or gay rights just aren’t as accepted as it is– as it is in some other places. And how limiting that is, how Gaku could have lived a very different life were he able to be open from childhood.

Royce: They start discussing what marriage is really and come to the conclusion that it’s just a system or framework to tie people together. That having kids doesn’t have to be the purpose for everyone, that people marry for a wide variety of reasons, including something that she actually said to her parents during the conversation that they had, that all she really wanted was someone to sit and eat a warm meal with. And that brings us to about the end of the second to last chapter. Gaku gets a call from Sousuke. Sousuke needed to go into Gaku’s room to hang something. Gaku’s grandmother had a charm that just said ‘children are treasures’ and asked the handyman to go hang it in their room. And he finds a list that’s like left out on a table.

Royce: That was them planning the trip to see both of their families. And it was a list of what things were safe for them to talk about in front of them and what things were not so that they wouldn’t slip up anything about, you know, the details of their marriage. And he immediately realizes what’s going on. He calls Gaku– he calls Gaku, questions the validity of their marriage, accuses them of lying to everyone. He’s really upset about it. When Gaku is trying to explain things, Sousuke gets kind of angry and responds with a surprisingly conservative view of how all of this is supposed to work. Like, you know, very heteronormative, conventional things. And then at the end of that chapter, the stalker lady shows up – from before – shows up and runs at him with a box cutter. And the chapter ends with Gaku hearing someone shout for police in an ambulance over the phone.

Courtney: Interesting. Well, that sounds no fun at all. Luckily, I have not had a stalker run at me with a blade. My stalkers just mail me knives.

Royce: The final full chapter of this series does back up a little bit. It shows Sousuke dating this woman in particular. He says that, thinking about their relationship, he liked her, but over time he started to feel like her smile was demanding something of him, something that he’s never really been able to find. This goes back to him feeling like he likes the people that he’s around, but doesn’t love them in the way that they love him, and how that’s been a recurring issue in his relationships. Gaku and Yuriko drive to the hospital to meet him. He’s mostly fine. He has some shallow cuts on his hands and arms, but basically the woman, after slashing at him with the box cutter, just sort of froze up and collapsed to the ground as soon as the blood started flowing. Then people showed up, he got whisked away to the hospital. The three of them have a conversation, they sort of patch things up.

Courtney: Wait, wait, wait. So she ran at him with a box cutter, and then just, like, passed out seeing the blood?

Royce: She slashed him once or twice, and then, like, just, like, collapsed to her knees, just, like, sort of shaking, eyes wide, just stopped.

Courtney: Okay. I was picturing like, “I saw the blood and I fainted.” And I’m like, Girl…

Royce: No, no.

Courtney: Girl, you cannot run after someone with a box cutter if you’re squeamish about blood. That’s not how this works.

Royce: Not well thought out, but decided, I guess, once she actually harmed someone that that was too much. It was my impression. We don’t get things from her perspective.

Courtney: As we shouldn’t.

Royce: Anyway, the main trio patch things up. Sousuke does put it together from the thing that Yuriko said earlier that Gaku is the one who loves him. They get back to a closer, more consistent friendship like they used to have when they were kids. And the story ends with their friendship sort of repaired and Gaku and Yuriko walking to their car to go home discussing what to have for dinner while holding hands, which goes back to that comment about what Yuriko saw as a relationship, what she wanted out of marriage, was just someone consistent to eat a warm meal with.

Courtney: It’s cute.

Royce: There is a bonus chapter after that. It’s an epilogue. A few years have passed. The grandmother– mother has died at this point. No kids.

Courtney: So that’s not the secret to immortality after all.

Royce: No. Gaku and Yuriko have decided to leave the old family home. It’s too big, there are too many memories there. They decide to turn it into a lodge or a group living space for people who are working remote or traveling through or whatever who can stay for a time. She says it’s a good option for people who are scared of living alone but don’t think marriage or romance is right for them, and says that there should be more ways in our society other than relationships and marriage and other romantic avenues to connect to other people around you.

Courtney: She’s not wrong!

Royce: The two of them end up moving out to a smaller, more manageable place of their own that doesn’t have all of those negative memories from childhood, family, and all of that. And that’s where the story ends.

Courtney: Adorable. I love it.

Royce: I thought it was good. And I think that is the only one on the list that I’m actually going to go through in that amount of detail.

Courtney: Is it safe to say that the more you like a piece of media, the more you will have to say about it?

Royce: Not necessarily, and I’ll bring that up. I just think that that is something that we already talked about in depth, and I did make notes that were more in depth. And part of that was there were specific conversations that I thought were worth highlighting. And I think that that series in particular had a lot of those. But I guess, counter to that, there is a webcomic that I’ve been reading for quite a while that I do like that is very, very light ace rep. So there isn’t a whole lot to say about it, but that is Clinic of Horrors by Merryweather. It’s been running for quite a while. I will say that the format of the first few chapters is a bit off. It’s as if the creator was just making a couple of one-off posts to establish a character or a setting before actually figuring out what to do with it.

Royce: So if you do read it from the beginning, the format changes. It does develop actual characterization or– and a plot to go along with it, but it is kind of packaged altogether. But this series is full of body horror, cosmic horror. It’s this sort of dystopian future where there are mutations all over the place. The main city that this takes place in is sort of isolated from the outside world, and it is dominated by a hypercapitalist mega corporation called the Yellow Corporation, who is fronted by someone that they just refer to as Mr. Yellow, which is very Lovecraftian. But the main character, Bianca, is a nurse. She works with a doctor who is a sort of father figure to her.

Royce: The two of them are responsible for working on experimental ways to help people who have been infected by the varieties of mutations that exist in this world, whereas the government, the police force, the corporation that sort of oversees the city is much more inclined to just dispose of or experiment on people. So they’re like this little bit of chaotic good in an evil place, basically. But this is a situation where Bianca, our ace character, probably aroace, is not really mentioned on screen. From her characterization, you can kind of get the vibes, but there isn’t a whole lot of romance related things in this series. But we do have a case of her being shown waving an Ace Flag during a Happy Pride Month drawing. Which I wanted to call attention to here because it’s, like, just a hair above the word of god, like, social media confirmations.

Courtney: Yeah. We’ve talked about this before because this is something that is very unique to this kind of medium. Because anybody who is reading this webcomic is going to see this at the end. It’s–

Royce: It’s packaged with the chapter. You’ll scroll by it right next to the credits before you hit the next chapter button.

Courtney: Yeah. And so it’s not even like the creator making a post on Twitter on what is about normally a TV show or, you know, a character in a book who isn’t stated to be ace rep, but then the author goes on a Twitch live stream and says this character is ace. Like, those are so far away from each other that the average viewer is not going to know or see that. And that is a big part of our criticism about these things. And I do feel like this is better in terms of the obviousness of representation, but it’s very tailored to the medium. I can’t think of other mediums that have something like this where you can make it obvious to everyone who’s consuming this piece of media that this is my intention for the character without actually putting it in the text itself.

Royce: Yeah, and it’s almost like how shows will sometimes have a post-credits scene, but the post-credits scene are still in character.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: This is a complete aside outside of the story.

Courtney: It very much is that. It’s the web comic version of a post-credits scene, which is interesting because usually the post-credits scene, sometimes it’s unrelated to what’s going on, sometimes it’s a continuation of a B-plot. It’s never something that, like, you have to see to get the full story. But it is a little teeny added snippet of content that is supposed to be enjoyable.

Royce: That was most of what I had to say. I don’t really have many ace anecdotes. I will say that Bianca as a figure– the times when we see her most emotional are with family and friends. She’s normally a very cold or quiet person, but a lot of the– again, there are mystery science mutations going on. Sometimes that means that a person has become mutated in some way. Sometimes it means a creature of some kind has gained sentience. Like, there are mutations that were just mutations, like blobs of ooze and things that now can talk and reason and things like that. And then there are people that have just changed in some way. She’s very supportive of a lot of people, is again– I mentioned sort of chaotic good aligned trying to benefit people in the– in the community and does form some very good friendships with people, but all of her relationships are platonic in nature. And there is an early scene that isn’t explained as ace, but sort of it kind of reads that way or it can be recognizable. Because there’s this mutation, he’s a sentient, like blob tentacle creature. Looks– I’ll show you a picture here, Courtney.

Courtney: Yeah, that’s– That is a sentient blob tentacle creature. You’re absolutely right.

Royce: But something about his mutation causes him to change his perception. So he looks like a conventionally attractive teenager. And as Bianca is around all the people around her age at school, all of these girls are fawning over this guy. And because she works with a doctor and is, like, at the forefront of medical science, she has been vaccinated against the effects of most mutations. And so everyone around her is like, “Isn’t this guy so hot? Isn’t he so attractive?” And she’s like, “I don’t see it.”

Courtney: Oh, that’s so funny. And that’s our– That’s our ace character?

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: That’s hilarious. I love that. I actually really, really love that. Because you’re taking a common ace experience of not experiencing attraction the way other people do it, and making a really creative fictionalization, like, reasoning behind that. I adore that. That’s really clever, actually. Also, seeing the picture of sentient blob tentacle creature and the conventionally attractive teenager version of him, there’s something that’s, like, very Hatoful Boyfriend about it. Like they have their bird form and their boy form.

Royce: Yeah. [Courtney laughs] Now that series has been going on for long enough that I did not try to scrape through the whole thing and see if I could find any more little ace anecdotes. I remembered that one, but I think I’ve read up to chapter 142 at this point. And I didn’t skim through all those. They are fairly short. It’s easy to pick up. Like I said, the beginning is a little bumpy before they actually start getting into an ongoing plot, but that’s easy to skip through. For entertainment, I think it’s a good series. For ace rep, it’s a bit meh. As we said, it’s a hair above the off-screen word of god.

Courtney: But since there is something that even outside of the story, but obvious to all the viewers, I’m more inclined to accept the allegory of the “Everyone else sees a hot teenage boy and I just see a tentacle monster and I don’t understand.” Because that is so funny to me. I love that. Because that’s a type of thing that in the context of an ace character, it is so unique to an ace or aro experience that you couldn’t really transpose it to other orientations. Because sometimes we get the sort of ace rep that’s just like, “People don’t understand me, I’m struggling to come out,” or, “I just came out,” or, “I’m discovering myself.” You can do that story with a variety of orientations, and they’ll have their little individual nuances, of course, but that’s a broadly queer story that you can reskin in whatever orientation you’re trying to tell a story about.

Courtney: But this is so ace and aro specific. And I love that. And I guess I don’t know what it is about horror as a medium. Maybe it’s just a genre that is so under explored in terms of ace rep that there’s an abundance of creativity that can come from that. Because I was just thinking how there really isn’t that much genre fiction compared to the sort of teenage young adult finding yourself coming out story that we tend to see. Especially on TV shows, is where we see that a lot. And YA novels, we see it quite a bit there as well. But we read Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle, that was a horror book, and the ace character in it, the representation was very obvious. It was stated, it was important to the plot in a way that is very cool and refreshing. But the way that story was told, it had to be an ace. It could– it could have been an aromantic story. It had to be one of these really under representated– Representated? Underrepresented orientations.

Courtney: Because that was the story it was telling. It couldn’t have just been, okay, this gay character could be substituted in for this ace one. The aceness was important and unique. And I think there’s a very specific sort of attention to detail there that can be very difficult to pull off. So it would be really cool, I think, if in the text it was maybe a little more obvious that this was an ace character. But I’m glad we at least have that out of the story obvious confirmation. Because I would still be more upset about it if it was just, you know, a Pride tweet or a piece of Pride artwork that was put on the artist’s Tumblr account. Because I don’t want to have to go out of my way to learn more about characters. I don’t. I think if it’s important to the story, it should be in the story.

Royce: Speaking of genres too, I mentioned that the beginning of that series is a little rough. It does go a little more horror-comedy early on, I think. In the next chapter right after that, you see Bianca very calmly call up the doctor saying, “Hey, there’s a mutation brainwashing my classmates. What do I do?” [Courtney laughs] And then you see her chasing after him with a needle, being like, “Wait, I just need to get a sample.” Presumably to try to make a vaccine.

Courtney: Okay, from an ace lens that’s still hilarious, calling attraction the mutation.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: Like, “Oh no, we are now of an age that everyone around me is starting to be attracted to boys. How can I stop this?” It’s the dangerous mutation that we call puberty. [chuckles]

Royce: I do think that the series does change form a little bit from more of a short comedy horror, like the chapters are not very long, it’s usually just a few panels, to a more traditional body horror, cosmic horror. What’s the name for, like, futuristic technology horror? There is definitely some plot lines that are very Black Mirror.

Courtney: Sci-fi horror?

Royce: Sci-fi horror. That would work. That’s the reason that I’ve stuck with it, is because the chapters got longer, the plot lines got deeper, the characters got more involved. Next up, I Married My Best Friend To Shut My Parents Up. This one is short. It’s only three chapters.

Courtney: I feel like the title almost tells me everything I need to know about it, and I adore. I adore it.

Royce: So the main character, Machi, is in an arranged marriage sort of situation. Her parents are trying to set her up with people with lucrative careers. There– They consider her an embarrassment because she– Or she feels like she’s an embarrassment to her parents because she’s still single. And she feels like her parents specifically want her to marry someone that they can go and brag to their friends about. And she is talking with her friend, Hana, and she just says, “Why can’t they be happy with me marrying someone who doesn’t meet their expectations?” And Hana just says, “Well, what about me?” So they get married immediately, go visit Machi’s parents to tell them and get kicked out.

Courtney: Oh, no, that it backfired!

Royce: They start talking about the local politics. And they say that at least in the setting, the time period where this is at, that gay marriage is only legal within some wards inside of Tokyo. And one of them lives in one currently, and the other one lives, I guess, across the ward boundary somewhere else. So Hana ends up moving in with Machi because of the legality of it. It is mentioned that Hana is a lesbian. Machi is not explicitly stated. Her orientation isn’t explicitly mentioned, but she is the ace vibes character, at least up to this point.

Courtney: It’s a little ace-ish, yeah.

Royce: Hana is a lesbian. The two of them met when she confessed to Machi when they were in school. And after being rejected, they stayed friends. When they move in together, Hana says it’s a bit of a relief because her apartment’s currently being worked on anyway, and they would have had to find a place to stay and are kind of struggling to make ends meet. So she decides that she will help out, do the housekeeping until they’re able to move out. They don’t plan on staying there forever. But they do play up the sort of housewife role, I guess. Like just jokingly saying some of the– these sort of tropey comments when, you know, someone comes home from the office. Which, speaking of the office, over in Machi’s life, she’s been working in an office location for a while now and deals with a lot of sexism at the office. She hates work.

Royce: There’s one particular co-worker who is trying to date, a guy who’s looking for a girlfriend and is like, “I just want to be married. I want to come home to my wife, like, say, you know, welcome home,” and all these things. And meanwhile, Machi is now in this situation where her friend is doing that to her in the background. Some of the things that tend to really frustrate Machi is she’s getting passed up for promotions and things like that, because people at the office are like, “Well, this is a young woman in her 20s.” Why take the time to train her to do things when she’s just going to get pregnant and have to, you know, go stay at home and no longer work in her career field?

Courtney: Boo…

Royce: And things of that nature. But after this, having all these negative feelings around work, comes home and sees Hana, who is an illustrator who loves her job and is doing a variety of creative things at home, under– like, her own design without being stuck in this sort of oppressive workspace. And seeing that Machi starts to change a bit. She starts to stand up for herself a bit more, particularly her controlling family. Her mother was a very oppressive force in her life, her whole life up to this point. And we sort of just see her benefiting from this relationship, growing a bit, the two of them grow a bit together. By the time it ends, her orientation is left a little ambiguous. Some people might read into it differently than others. The pair do stay with each other and they do like each other, but where the line is between ace qpr, if Machi may be homo-romantic or something along that lines is not really stated. They do kiss at one point near the end. Machi seems to be pretty touch averse. But it’s one of these manga where the story ends before the characters really explore those things. So it’s kind of– it’s left ambiguous as to what the author’s intent really was.

Courtney: Which I don’t think is inherently always a bad thing. I mean, there’s a mark against it for the obviousness of rep, and I don’t think I can consider it obvious ace rep because we just don’t know if that is who the character is or not. But on the other hand, it seems like there’s an abundance of evidence to very comfortably, in my eyes, label this a queerplatonic relationship.

Royce: Yes, I would agree.

Courtney: So it is still good queerplatonic representation, which is still vitally important and is going to be very potentially relatable, potentially aspirational to a lot of people who are on the ace and aro spectrums. And just like we were talking about in the last manga, is also important just for a wider variety of people to see what different relationships can look like. Because whether or not this character is ace, whether or not you read her to be ace, seeing that representation of a different relationship structure, something that is out of the norm, something that might be pursued in higher percentages within our communities, is going to be a net positive for our communities. Regardless of the specific individual identity level. So that’s what I do really love about that. It’s just like we were talking about with Kevin Can F**k Himself. Great TV show. Love it. There is not in my eyes an ace character in it, but it is a fabulous exploration of what ultimately I see to be a queerplatonic relationship. And that’s still important for changing hearts and minds and expanding worldviews. Which is why representation is so important to begin with.

Royce: Yeah, I think that this series did work well for that. The ending made me question if the author’s intent was to say that the next step in their relationship was for it to become romantic instead of platonic, but again, that’s somewhat ambiguous.

Royce: Well, next up, I want to talk about Dom & Mor, which is a webcomic that has a bit of a different format. It is not a single plot line. It is a series of snapshots basically in a couple’s daily life. I’ve only read about half of this. This is ongoing. I think the last one that I saw– It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and read this one too. I just had to go back in and reference a few things but I believe I’ve read 44 out of 95 chapters. They’re pretty short so it’s easy to get into. So our two characters here, Mor – short for Morgan – is a lesbian, Dom – short for Dominique – is ace. Mentioned as graysexual in, I believe, the first chapter.

Courtney: Right off the bat, no ambiguity.

Royce: Yeah. This series is very explicit in their characterizations. Again, it’s a snapshot of an existing couple living together. There’s no secrets or building or discovery there. It’s just– This is– This is a relationship, a mixed orientation relationship. The intro mentions that Dom doesn’t really feel attraction, but she can’t stop looking at Morgan, and also that she is oblivious to most romantic advances. The series itself is a lot more explicit, like sexually explicit, than most ace content we’ve covered. I’ll get into that in a little bit. Well, I guess there was Shades of A, but could that be considered lost media at this point? I think I have an audio file for that, actually. I forget why this happened. Maybe we recorded something that was too long, but I walked you through the entire plot of that webcomic. And it– I think it didn’t fit into the existing episode. And it was also– I don’t know, I felt like it was kind of long-winded and maybe a little uneventful, but maybe we fit that into part two, because I’m not going to be able to get through all these series. But no, it’s like a 35 minute rundown of that web comic.

Courtney: You talked about a web comic for 35 minutes and then didn’t release it to our adoring fans?

Royce: Yep. [sighs]

Courtney: How dare you?!

Royce: So, yeah, I can already tell that there’s a couple of series that we’re not going to get to today, and that’s probably for the best. Because there are two of them in particular that I’m not very far into, and I– It would probably be good for me to read a couple more chapters, but we’ll call that episode two.

Royce: Oh, yeah. This recording says September of 2023, so it would have been around the time when I was prepping for those early two episodes. Okay, well, lost media will be found again, and hopefully it’s not boring.

Courtney: [chuckles] So wait, are you tacking that onto this episode or next?

Royce: Uh, no, next.

Courtney: I had no idea that you did that or didn’t do that.

Royce: Oh, really?

Courtney: Yes!

Royce: I mean, we talked about it back then and just said, oh, well, we’ll put it in a part of whatever the next manga chapter is, and then I burned out on manga and didn’t read any for a long time.

Courtney: Oh, so you fully intended to tack it onto a different episode–

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: –later and then just didn’t.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: Oh, okay.

Royce: Okay, but back to Dom & Mor. The series is supposed to be pretty cute and relatable, at least for some people.

Courtney: Cute and more sexually explicit than any other media we’ve talked about is not, like, computing.

Royce: Yeah. [Courtney laughs] But it is, it is. There are scenes out of a relationship, they are very physical, both in a sexual manner and not. Like very– they’re very touchy. Like not all chapters are explicitly sexual, but they do get in– they do get into experimenting, switching, discussing needs, comfort, preferences, things of that nature. Oftentimes when they do actually sit down to talk about things, they’re both embarrassed about actually the actual conversation, saying certain words, things of that instance. There are cases where they are around each other and Morgan is getting into it, and Dom is just, like, completely oblivious that anything sexual in nature is happening. But outside of that, I believe, you know, different aspects of the relationship are discussed or involved. I believe there’s some scenes with, you know, past trauma, family, those sorts of things. It’s a mixture. I thought it was interesting mostly because when we’ve been looking at ace content, we haven’t seen a whole lot of, you know, this aspect of, like, inter-orientation relationships being discussed. Obviously not for everyone because of the explicit nature, but I did think it was unique in that regard.

Courtney: Yeah, we’ve gotten a little bit in terms of mixed orientation relationships and even ace characters who become sexually active with their allo partner, but there’s not usually an overabundance of the communication that goes into making a relationship like that safe and comfortable for all parties involved.

Royce: Yeah. And a lot of the way that this series works – as would be expected from a gray-ace and lesbian relationship – Dom is usually the one topping, doing things, is not entirely touch averse, but a bit. Clearly, like, when sex is happening, it is for a purpose. It is for Morgan. There are scenes where Dom is, like, literally grabbing a notepad and taking notes of, like, “This is something I should try next time. This worked. I just didn’t.” That sort of thing.

Courtney: That’s kind of funny. But also, you’re telling me the top is named Dom?

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: Dom is the top.

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: I kind of think you didn’t need to tell me that. I think [laughs] I might have had a really safe guess.

Royce: Well, resolving ambiguity is a focus of some of the conversations present here.

Courtney: You know, honestly, it’s a little dull, a little expected. Give us someone named Dom who’s the bottom. Give us a sub name Dom. [chuckles] You cowards! Now all the power bottoms are gonna be all up in our comments screaming about how not every bottom is a sub. I know! I know guys.

Royce: Well this might end up being part one of three manga episodes considering the lost media. I think I’m going to skip And Another Lovely Day and Aromantic (Love) Story for the time being just because I’m not terribly far into either of them, and I want to read a little bit more to see where the trajectory is. But why don’t we end this episode with She Loves To Cook, She Loves To Eat?

Courtney: I’ve been looking forward to hearing about this one. I’ve heard a lot of very good things about this one for a while.

Royce: This one did get some notoriety. I believe it was adapted into a live action TV drama.

Courtney: Was it really?

Royce: I don’t believe it had an anime. I think it was a TV drama, yeah.

Courtney: I don’t think I knew that.

Royce: I have it marked that I made it to chapter 22 out of 45. Is it still ongoing? It is still ongoing. Okay. The television drama has ended, though. It looks like it has 30 episodes. I may have to read into it a little bit more, or we could watch the TV drama at some point to get some more details. I have some notes on it, but this story fixates mainly on two people: one who loves to cook but has no one to cook for, and one person who regularly eats, like, above average portions. They’re neighbors, or close enough to neighbors. They live in the same sort of– an apartment complex, close enough to each other, and they start bonding with each other over meals.

Courtney: Perfect match.

Royce: And a budding lesbian romance begins there. I believe the author has confirmed that the characters are demi. I think one of them may be demi-romantic, the other demi-sexual. I would need to look into that specifically to, like, find a quote or a reference.

Courtney: But you say the author confirmed, is that an off page kind of a deal again?

Royce: I believe so. Again, I haven’t read the entire series and I didn’t make clear enough notes when I was going through the beginning of it, but I believe that was an off page sort of thing. I didn’t write down any explicit confirmation from either of those. There were some vibes there.

Courtney: Like, do you think you would have picked up those vibes with you and your, you know, enormous experience in the Ace Community and understanding demi ways of existing? Or was it kind of only because you knew going in that this was propped up as ace rep?

Royce: Well, this series has a lot of commentary on society, expectations and gender norms, and things like that. And both of these characters are clearly– with their lives and their experiences, don’t fit within their expected norms. But I think that sometimes after reading a few of these series, it often isn’t clear enough without something being more explicitly stated what the author is intending. Because a lot of manga romances are sort of slow burn where very little happens until you get way into it.

Courtney: That’s a good point.

Royce: How do you tell the difference between someone slowly figuring themselves out or figuring out a relationship to their actual orientation when it isn’t in your face? There is something that came up right around the place where I stopped reading it. One of the main characters is trying to understand why they can’t exactly relate to other lesbian experiences. Like they’ve read about other lesbian people or talked to people about their experiences. And this person is ace explicitly. This friend. So it’s a minor background character who is ace.

Courtney: Look at that.

Royce: And I did screenshot something here. She pulls something up, sends her an image, and it has the asexual, demisexual, and graysexual flags on it under the banner asexual spectrum. And there’s a little Venn diagram of asexual, aromantic, and with aroace in the middle.

Courtney: Oh, that’s extremely explicit. Okay, cool.

Royce: This person is ace. And they say, “Even within asexuality, there’s a whole spectrum. Some experience absolutely zero sexual attraction. Some do experience attraction, but only sometimes. And some can only be attracted to those they’ve got an emotional bond with.” It was a pretty short scene. And again, I haven’t read much other than that. That was just a bit, a little bit of Ace 101, a bit mid series.

Courtney: Well, the fact that there is an ace character who is showing and explaining this to a main character…

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: Like, there’s a reason for that. There’s not–

Royce: Right, right.

Courtney: Just, like, no reason.

Royce: And the fact that she has mentioned trying to understand or listening to other people who are lesbians and not feeling like she’s fitting in there.

Courtney: Yeah, because then the reader is going to have asexuality as a spectrum in mind now–

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: –While they’re seeing this character figure herself out. And there is a very real homo-romantic asexual experience. I know lots of folks like this who just for a long time just feel like they’re a bad gay. So I like seeing one example of a depiction of this in media.

Royce: There’s a frustrated comment by the ace friend here where she just says, “As if being gay is solely about what goes down in the bedroom.”

Courtney: Whoa! So many truths. Just spitting facts like that, huh?

Royce: Now some of this, my memory is a bit fuzzy. I originally read the first half of this series a couple years ago now and then had to go back and make some notes. I do remember dropping off because it was really the food content. Like, I thought that the social commentary was good, the like, figuring themselves out, the past trauma, all of that was interesting. But the bonding over meals, preparing and the eating of the food, I just don’t experience any visceral comfort or enjoyment out of that. So for me, it felt like I was sort of flipping through filler or fan service for someone else because the food isn’t doing it for me. That’s not like making me feel, you know, like warm and fuzzy or comfortable. Or anything like that.

Courtney: Yeah, which that is something that would be very cozy to, you know, a certain type of reader. So this might be the perfect ace rep for someone like that. Especially if someone is, you know, in a homo-romantic side of things, in a demi side of things, and also does love the coziness of food based media. Like I know exactly the kind of reader who would – dare I say – eat this up.

Royce: I did see, when I was trying to go through some old chapters make a couple notes, I did see that Sarah Moon did a short episode talking about this.

Courtney: Sarah Moon! Oh, we’ve got to go watch that. I love her. We’ve got to have her on someday.

Royce: Yeah, that might be another one I look into a little bit more, maybe talk about in our now sprawling series of manga episodes.

Courtney: I need everybody who is listening to this on a platform where you can comment to tell Royce to stop holding out on us. [laughs]

Royce: Well, most of this, I did the work, like, two years ago and then didn’t write anything about it.

Courtney: Like I said, holding out on us.

Royce: Well, I think that’s about all I have. We’ll talk about Aromantic (Love) Story and And Another Lovely Day on another lovely day.

Courtney: And whatever the lost media was.

Royce: Shades of A? Yeah.

Courtney: Shades of A. So to round out this lovely day, as per the usual, I would like to send you off with a great big shout out to today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: KikiMegami, where you can find colorful handmade crafts and jewelry by a biromantic, asexual, Jamaican girl. And you can bet that I got some Pride merch from this shop. There are very cute little Pride things. You can get some little various Queer Flag, like, glittery sand bottles. There are some nice little hand-painted keychains and necklaces with a variety of Pride colors. But we’ve also got some nice fandom stuff.

Courtney: We’ve got some handmade pins with a variety of eeveelutions for all of our Pokémon lovers out there. We’ve got a ton of Ace Attorney stickers. And for all of our K-pop and J-pop fans out there, there is a bunch of idol merch here as well. Please check out this awesome shop. As always, links are going to be in the show notes on our website as well as the description box on Youtube. Or of course you can always head on over to theacecouple.com/marketplace, pop in KikiMegami right in that search bar, and you will find it. As always, everyone, thank you all so much for being here. We’ll be back before too terribly long with even more ace manga. And believe you me, we have so many more topics coming up on the horizon, so stay tuned. And we will talk to you all next time.