The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

This Love Is Futile (18+)

What's It About? 

Nanami is in love with Honoka. She knows Honoka has a boyfriend, but when she finds her even more bruised than usual, she knows that something's not right…

This Love Is Futile has a story by soy, with English translation by Kai Sadler. This volume was lettered by Tim. Published by Irodori (September 15, 2024).

Contect Warning: Contains explicit domestic abuse

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Is It Worth Reading?

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

I've never had a story start with a disclaimer about how it will have an unsatisfying conclusion. On the one hand, they're right, the conclusion is very abrupt and unsatisfying. On the other hand, I respect the creator for being upfront about what we were getting into right out of the gate. This Love Is Futile is a very short, condensed, and simple story from a creator who admits this is their first original story. There isn't a lot of a plot and the story is more like a series of moments that eventually culminate in an ending that, while shocking and made sense, was very unsatisfying. This doesn't mean that anything presented here was bad, but a part of me wonders, how much more interesting things could've been if the writer was given more real estate to work with because I could easily see this turning into a story double the length of what we had.

This is a tragic story of abuse. It's about being infatuated with somebody that you can never have and even worse, you get to be their anchor while they go through a shitty situation that they don't seem to want to get out of. It's simple, but as someone who has had friends in these situations, I appreciate that the story doesn't hold anything back. The violence is visceral and the art style is very captivating in a mature way. It would've been nice to see how the relationship between the two main characters started or even some insight into why one of them chooses to stay in an abusive relationship. The biggest tragedy about the story is that it didn't have more legroom to justify itself because as it stands, it is a very quick story that doesn't do anything besides make you feel bad by the end. That makes it very hard to recommend but I'd say maybe keep an eye out for the writer's next work. I have a feeling this won't be the last time we hear from them.

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Christopher Farris
Rating:

This Love Is Futile very much comes off as art created in pursuit of eliciting emotion, I suspect from the author as much as the reader. It has many of the earmarks of being a "vent comic", described as it is by the author, soy, as being an outlet for frustrations with day-to-day life and the censorship of certain kinds of stories by commercial publishers. There's a lot of rage on this page, the opening describing the harrowing scenario the characters Nanami and Honoka occupy, cutting to snippets of scenes setting the extremely graphic stage as soy imagines it. This isn't a direct story at first, it's a fucked-up vibe the reader is being invited to wallow in.

This manga tells you at the start that this is a messy, unhappy story that ends on a downer. So it's actually to the comic's credit that in its short run-time after that portent, it manages to draw the reader in to think and believe that there's a subversive chance for salvation. Like Nanami and Honoka enjoying their brief, bright spot of connection in the eye of their doomed storm, those reading This Love Is Futile find themselves thinking there might be hope despite being explicitly told it's futile. It's an extremely neat trick to pull off in this book's brisk page count and means that the follow-through on the promised unhappily-ever-after still lands making its point, if not delivering the fully vicious sense of reverse-catharsis I think it was going for.

All that means that This Love Is Futile can't be dismissed as pure misery porn because the suffering of the characters in the story is secondary to the emotions that placed them on that page. It's a story very much designed around interpreting those emotions, as well as your own emotions in response to it—again, something explicitly noted by soy in the book. Nothing about this manga is a good time, but if all that sounds like an interesting time to you, this release is worth a look. It's not something you see often, especially in yuri.

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Jean-Karlo Lemus
Rating:

You can't blame the artist for not telling you ahead of time: the title is not an exaggeration, the story is a general mess with an unsatisfying conclusion, and this romance is not fulfilled in the slightest. Still, it works: this is a tragedy through and through. This Love is Futile feels like taking a bunch of doodles an artist has made of their original characters and arranging them into a little zine; we even have a few sketches of relationship maps and gender-swapped versions of the cast that pepper all of the vignettes. There is some sexual content, but never between Nanami and Honoka—this story isn't happy enough for that.

This story is trashy and edgy, but I think it works for the same reason stuff like Metamorphosis works: sometimes, you need some catharsis in the form of a tragic ending. Provided, the storytelling is very disjointed: we mostly see Nanami and Honoka interacting sporadically over a vague time before the tragic ending where everything hits the fan at once. Is it a satisfying ending? No, and it was never meant to be. It doesn't justify the hollow feeling you get from reading this, but you can't say you weren't warned. I recommend this because it succeeded at what it set out to do. It might not be for everyone, but it might be the thing someone needs.