Rudy Recs 2 for 1 Deal: The Blue Flowers and the Ceramic Forest/School Back (Patreon)

I have some more manga I want to recommend to everyone! These two don't really have anything in common but they're things I've started reading recently that really grabbed me for different reasons and I figured it was time to do another one of these posts.

First up is this really gentle romance story called The Blue Flowers and the Ceramic Forest, or Ao no Hana Utsuwa no Mori by Kodama Yuki.

This one is about a woman named Aoko who works at a ceramics house in Japan that loves to paint ornate designs on her products who butts heads with a very skilled craftsman, Tatsuki, who moves back to the country to practice his skills with no desire to get close to any of his coworkers. The two get partnered up on a project and he wants nothing to do with any kind of art on his works, thinking plain white is best. Despite feeling like he wants nothing to do with her, Aoko is really drawn to his pottery skills and learns that Tatsuki has a more complicated past that made him act the way he does and the two start to get closer.

The art doesn't do too much for me but the strength of this manga is in the character dynamics. It's a very mature and mellow romance story that I think really benefits from the unique scenario of two employees that work in ceramics. It's artsy people in a field that I really don't know much about but seeing them talk shop and have their artistic inclinations mixing with their need to do their job makes these characters feel like real adults dealing with a lot on their plates.

It ends up even MORE complicated than the basic premise when we learn that Aoko has been through her own ordeal that really shut her down from doing her work for a long time and just as things with Tatsuki start to get better, Aoko's past comes in to throw a wrench into things.

I don't want to talk too heavily on it since it's a better read than it sounds, but I think this is a fun romance story! Really unique and I always love the ones that deal with adults with more serious and relatable problems than those of high school students, generally.

The second manga is a very new one that only has 3 chapters so far (and only 2 are scanlated). It's called School Back by Onodera Kokoro, which is about the daily lives of high schoolers and their emotional struggles and how one young and pretty janitor named Fushimi is paying more attention to them and their troubles than they realize.

Conceptually, it's not too different from something like Great Teacher Onizuka where someone who is a fish out of water is actually not too bad at guiding younger people through the perils of life in unexpected ways. The tone is way less horny than GTO though, and the style is really playing with exaggerated proportions and graphic shapes that give this manga a really unique look.

The kids are really going through some shit though, like this first girl gets assaulted on the train and instead of just making it a typical tropey thing we see the way the rest of the world talks to them about the incident and how none of the adults really seem to be on her side, worrying about being sued or just being strong despite what took place. Another boy is extremely sensitive to other kids joking about dying or telling each other to kill themselves because he deals with a grandmother at home with dementia that plays the victim all the time and tells her family that they wish she was dead. It's really heavy stuff but Fushimi always seems to pick up the vibe as she does her daily duties and listens to the kids and their conversations.

The real draw of the story is the mystery of who Fushimi is. She seems to have been a student at this school in the past and she's much younger than the rest of the staff. Her way of helping students is really unorthodox and unexpected, since she really is just a janitor, but it feels like she must have been through something troubling that gives her a really strong emotional intelligence, even though she doesn't have the clearest methods of helping the kids out. I'm really interested in learning more about what her story is, I even drew a fanart that the author liked! haha

That's what I've got for you today, hope you pick these up and see if they're to your liking!