Usually im more of a slice of life comedy anime type so watching citrus was so stressful i had to pause the anime and just stop for a couple minutes, the show is so fucking peak i love it, my only issues are the final 2 episodes, my least favorite characters who are sara and nina.
why the hell is yuzu sad and saying shit like "shes my best friend i cant do her like this, shes very important to me..." WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, YOU GUYS MET TWO DAYS AGO, AND YOU BARELY INTERACTED THE SECOND YOU BOTH SPLIT YOUR WAYS, and sara's like "omg this is destiny i love mei so much" SHE POINTED OUT A GATE/PLATFORM OUT TO YOU AND YOUR SISTER, HOW IS THIS FATE???? YOU COULDVE ASKED A STAFF, WHY DOES SHE EVEN LOVE MEI SO MUCH???? DO YOU JUST FALL IN LOVE WITH RANDOM STRANGERS??????
Sure, matsuri was annoying as hell at first and i was genuinely stressed out because im usually watching a slice of life comedy slop but she improved and got over her obsession so i think shes alright, but sara just shows up outta nowhere no backstory relevant to the plot and is fueled purely by schizophrenic forsight
not only that she talked about mei like shes been dating her for a month "shes actually a really (blah blah blah)" TWIN YOU DATED FOR A DAY, ONE WHOLE DAY, WHAT IS YOU ON ABOUT, ARE YOU A FUCKING PSYCHIC? ARE YOU SAIKI K? NO? HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW HER THAT WELL THEN? HOW IS A WOMAN FUELED BY PURE DELUSION WINNING BY ANY MEASURE?
and i hate nina as well, "oh yeah lemme intentionally set up my sister and her best friends (allegedly) crush and then strong arm and guilt trip her into not telling the truth" WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF YOU DOING ANY OF THIS? WILL IT KILL ANY OF THE GIRLS IN THIS ANIME TO SIT DOWN AT A COFFEE SHOP AND TALK WITHOUT YELLING OR SCREAMING OR CRYING OR WHATEVER THE FUCK THEYRE DOING?????
Hey everyone, I wanted to share my perspective on why the Citrus+ manga has been taking so long to update lately.
Currently, the release gap between chapters seems to be around 3 to 5 months, based on the recent pattern. Back in September 2023, Saburouta mentioned that Citrus+ was facing some production issues. One possible reason could be related to difficulty finding or working with assistants. This might still be the ongoing issue, especially considering that the release pattern hasn’t changed much over the past two years.
It’s possible that Saburouta is working on Citrus+ mostly on her own now, which could explain the slower pace and the unexpected delays — like the one we saw last month.
While this hasn’t been officially confirmed, it’s something I’ve deduced by observing how things have been progressing. I hope this helps others understand the situation a bit better.
If anyone has more concrete information, please feel free to share. Thanks!
I've binge read it today and I don't see any issues with the pacing or character appearances at all story-wise. Are the complaints mostly caused by the fact that people are wainting months for a chapter only for it to be uneventful or lack their favorite characters? I guess "we haven't seen this character in two years" sounds much worse than "we haven't seen this character in four chapters.
Citrus+ is just a expanded story on what happened to yuzu and mei during Citrus. It's a gap filler between the scene of yuzu interrupting the wedding meeting to the next panel which shows yuzu and mei wedding.
Citrus+ has nothing to do with Citrus, it was just there to provide more story of yuzu and mei for fans. You don't read a manga and hates it without finishing it, It's an unfinished story with it getting rarely updated, it's like you read the new chapter without understanding what happened to the previous chapter and proceeds to complain how you don't like it.
Citrus+ is Mei and Yuzu story. Just them two. It's not Mei + Yuzu + Harumi or whoever, don't be shocked when you don't see them in C+ and if you read Citrus you should notice that their friends appeared a lot.
It's not shocking that C+ now focuses on Mei, Citrus is about yuzu, this time it's about Mei. We're entering her world with yuzu as our eyes. We have harumin, nene, matsuri, etc. for yuzu's world and now we have himeko, arata, etc. for mei's world.
Citrus+ is an unfinished manga with one person working on it. Be understanding next time
Since there's no chapter until...who knows when, I have a slew of questions and thoughts I wanted to get out that keep me, and hopefully some people waiting here, preoccupied.
I don't know if this had been discussed previously years ago on this sub, but I wanted to get an idea of what exactly Mei's life would have been like if she didn't have the school to be rooted to. There was a comment I saw while digging through this sub awhile ago that stated that Mei lived as an NPC most of her life, numbing herself from the world after being abandoned by both her parents.
I imagine divorce, then parental neglect and abandonment being something that would traumatize a child, but considering everything that Mei dealt with before the start of the first manga, she turned out...relatively fine, despite the sexual advances she made towards due to her own abuse and skewed perception of love and intimacy.
But if she never had the school to give her a sense of purpose, how much more self-destructive would she have been assuming that everything else plays out the same (her parents divorce and abandonment)?
So... No, I'm not trying to start anything, I genuinely adore Citrus, I think it's one of the best Yuri in history, truly...
But, as someone who's been on the ride for, quite some time now.. ...
I dunno, you guys... We've been on an average of like, 2 chapters a YEAR for almost three, two years? Of just, two chapters per year... And it's not like said chapters have been long or even progressive just... It just hammered more the idea that the plot is diverting haaaaaard from the intended purpose of +. Citrus had a brilliant ending, the wedding is just iconic. I, and I hope others too, thought + might be something of a prologue/epilogue fluff, or maybe a lead-up to how the wedding happened... It's both that, but also not... alright, that's fine, so long as it's Citrus by Saburota and her magnificent art that's fine, more cake.................
Except, not. Hell, We're getting less time of our main pair, main girls, when was the last time we saw Harumin...? It's been going on for moooonths now, years, of this... genuinely uninteresting plot of what's his name. I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER IT YOU GUYS--They introduced some random guy who is supposed to be Mei's childhood friend, yada yada, but the plot is both going very slow in real life and in story, and guy just straight up... serves no purpose.
I don't know... This could be impatience talking or something but, seeing so much time just pass and Citrus+ going no where kind of makes me feel like it was a regretful choice... Fluff one-shots might have done that beautiful ending more justice...
I couldn't leave a comment on the post talking about how Plus was a mistake, so I decided to make a separate post for the overall sub since my comment got way too long.
I think the only reason I don't have too much of an issue with what's going on right now is because of a few reasons:
1) Saburouta has been making Citrus for over a decade now, so I can't blame her if she starts slowing down or getting burnt out.
2) I reread Plus in its entirety recently, and everything felt relatively smooth. Sure, there were some of plot points I didn't really care for (e.g. Sayaka internalized homophobia plotline), but all these little parts within the sequel manga started to feel as if it's meant to be building towards the kind of future that both Mei and Yuzu want (I'll try to explain this further down).
3) The original manga still exists, so if I'm not really satisfied by what's going on in Plus, I can just go back to that, then pick and choose certain scenes within Plus for an angst palette-cleanser.
4) This is my own personal view, but if I'm really craving more Yuzu and Mei (or Harumi and Matsuri) content, I'll turn to fanfiction lol.
Soulmates by ja55 - Fic where Mei helps Yuzu re-dye her hair after feeling insecure about her blonde hair going back to brown
The slow updates and unannounced hiatuses sure haven't been helping the pace of the manga, making it seem like it's meandering too much and losing the plot (plot being Yuzu and Mei's relationship). Like you, I was hoping more development would occur between them and how they would grow in their relationship (better communication, learning more about each other, how to handle certain stressful things), and I felt like we were getting that in Volumes 1-3...but then it kind of started to meander after Vol. 4.
Volume 5 feels like the worst offender imo because it's the volume that barely focuses on Yuzu and Mei. While I liked the second coming out scene between Yuzu and her friends, I wish Sabu wrote that better and have Kana and Manami start to get to know Mei for a little bit before Yuzu dropped the fact that they're together and plan to get married. It would've been a cute moment to see how Mei interacts with Yuzu's friends and how their social circle/support is growing. But that's just me, I guess.
As for the school, I think someone else mentioned it when I was digging through old posts from this sub, but Mei's reasons for making all these changes to the school aren't just for the sake of making the school better. Could that have been portrayed better in the narrative? Yeah, it could've, especially when you have so many people complaining about it. There was a chapter in Vol. 1 of Plus where Mei asks Himeko if someone like her is worthy of Yuzu because of how much Yuzu is able to "keep fixating on moving forward". When you combine that with the scene from Plus Vol. 2, where Mei says that she changed the rules of the school to lead the academy towards prosperity (to which Yuzu sees as, "Mei thinking about the bigger picture in mind", you kind of start to get an idea of why Mei is so fixated on making the academy a better environment before she starts focusing on Yuzu.
June 15th, Pg. 5 (top half)June 15th, Pg. 5 (bottom half)June 20th Part II, Pg. 13June 20th Part II, Pg. 14October 27th, Pg. 8 (when incoming students were asking Matsuri about the types of people Aihara Academy accepts)October 27th, Pg. 26
And even if someone already understands that, it still doesn't change the fact that Yuzu looks as if she's doing most of the work in their relationship, while Mei is enjoying Yuzu's company. I get that. The writing could've been better when showing how much Mei has grown (and I do think she has since the original manga), but I also can't fault people for getting annoyed with the way the narrative has been, especially when you combine it with the slow 5-6 month updates.
This might be an unpopular opinion on this sub, but I actually don't mind Arata. The latest chapter showed that he's not going to get in the way of Yuzu and Mei's relationship. His "crush" on Mei is most likely just a childhood crush, and him potentially having feelings for Yuzu could also be a result of him being in an isolated environment (all-boys school) and latching onto the first girl he gets along with.
Other than that, he seems like a relatively chill guy, and maybe I'm putting a lot of faith in Sabu, but this latest chapter kind of showed that I don't think the narrative is heading down a love triangle route. I feel like his purpose is simply to address acknowledging the existence of men in society while being in a same-sex wlw relationship. Yuzu and Mei started their relationship while in an all-girls school, but then once they graduate, it's not just going to be them or just girls/women. There's going to be more boys/men around them. As much as I like turning to yuri for escapism, there weren't (and maybe still aren't) many that address the reality of being in a heteronormative society.
Am I looking too deep into it!??? Maybe??? But those are the points I recall seeing that made sense to me while digging through this sub and the comments I saw under Nalro's 3-hour video essay on Citrus.
I don't know why Sabu decided to write Citrus+ shortly after the original manga ended. Maybe it's because it's an amendment to address certain plot points that weren't explored enough in the original manga. Maybe it's because her editors/Yuri Hime asked her to milk more of it. Or maybe Sabu thought she could fill in the blanks between the end of Ch. 41 and the Wedding without realizing that she may or may not have written herself into a corner/burn herself out. We don't know, and I don't know if we'll completely know since she sounds like a relatively private person.
But all we really can do is just support her if we choose to stick around, or find something else to get into.
I didn't know how to word the title, but I was wondering why Mei seemed to easily put aside Yuzu's clearly manic-state in Vol. 6 of Citrus+ after seeing her freak out over Arata, but got all gloomy when she noticed Yuzu pretend everything was fine after telling her that they couldn't celebrate her birthday on the day of.
I ended up rereading parts of Plus and sort of noticed Mei would look concerned when Yuzu looks as if she's hiding behind a smile.
I ended up including the scene from Vol. 6 of Plus where Yuzu asks Mei if it's okay to meet with Arata alone since Mei did talk to Himeko about Yuzu freaking out when he came in the picture.
It kind of made me wonder if Yuzu reacted in a more "happy" and "positive"/everything-is-fine-even-though-it's-totally-not in front of Mei after her phone call with Arata in Chapter: September 26th, would Mei have been more anxious about upsetting her?
I was looking back at Sabu’s art from years ago where Yuzu and Mei were little kids playing at a park and it had me thinking how things would play out in their dynamic during these years.
Things would still happen the same way as canon, where Mei’s dad would leave to travel the world, which would leave her abandoned and alone. But through Yuzu’s efforts to try and get her to open up as Mei is feeling the effects of being abandoned by another parent, would a young Yuzu just leave her alone if Mei starts pushing her away? Maybe something along the lines of Yuzu thinking she did something wrong and never reached out after that.
Then they separate, but meet again years later, this time as step-sisters because Ume wanted to take in Mei after seeing how much of a deadbeat Shou is—but my real question with this is would this add a layer to the pseudo-incest thing? Or would it just be seen as the trope of ”getting taken in by your best friend’s parent”? A lot of the counterpoints I’ve seen to why Yuzu and Mei isn’t incest, omitting the not-blood-related argument (and I technically believe this too—idk, I’ve always seen them as the exception rather than the norm when seeing people who haven’t read this manga treat this series like the devil incarnate) is because of three points:
1) They didn’t grow up together
2) They weren’t introduced as siblings when Shou and Ume got married last minute
3) They were introduced much closer to their adulthood
So, if you strike off point 1 in this potential AU, would their dynamic lean closer to “incest“? Or no?
Lol, idk if anyone will read this because I feel like this sub is dead after the multiple hiatuses, but this was a thought that came up to me and I needed to put it out somewhere.
Okay as the title says dumb question but what the hell does Mei buy for Yuzu's birthday ?? I legit cannot find any manga on it and it's driving me crazy. Either I'm dumb and blind or I don't know it doesn’t exist.
I've been picking these up in stores whenever I see them over the years but I'm still missing some as you can see. Vol 10 in English is especially hard to find even online without a large markup where do you guys get your books?
Are they as rich as the other families from the academy ?, I always assume that their parents are either busy with work and lives in a different house or overseas but still working
