Fuzoroi no Renri, Volume 4 (不揃いの連理) by Mikan Uji, is both a whimsical look at several Yuri odd couples and a profouns story about about found family and making a space for one’s self. In this volume, the whimsy is set aside a little more than usual so we can talk about what happens with young people who are rejected by their families.

To do this, we spend a little extra time with Minami, which is finding herself becoming introspective about her relationship with Iori, and her fellow orphan Shizuka, who is being asked by Saori to admit her feelings for her defacto sister.  There’s some really emotional scenes here, as both Minami and Shizuka have to take stock of what they were to one another and what they fear giving up if they give themselves wholly to another. I am pulling for Minami and Iori, well Minami, really. Iori needs to stop drinking so much. Shizuka and Saori face a couple of high hurdles, not least of which that that they are both very young and forever is a long time.

Accompanying this is a few melancholy pages with the gym teacher who ends up confiding in a student who work in a maid cafe, next to the lesbian bar she doesn’t have the confidence to step into.

All of this makes for an unusually serious volume of this mostly-light-hearted manga. It does leave little room for the manga artist and her editor who are falling for each other online, if only because in comparison, their story seems dopey. But the other effect is that I am more invested in these characters than I was when they were just gags as they were in the previous three volumes.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – 4 A little bit more than usual
Yuri – 10

Overall – 9

Mikan Uji-sensei’s author notes are one more in a long series that reference how lonely manga artists are in lockdown. A study could be done on how manga artists, specifically, are doing working alone, or almost alone, in their rooms these days. It might be a coincidence, but an awful lot of the comedy manga I read has become more serious in recent months. I wonder if there is a correlation.